Everything about Neon and VALORANT Act 4.0

Don’t know what’s changed in Valorant’s newest update? Let’s break down every change in Patch 4.0.

Neon

Introducing Neon – the unofficial counter to Jett. These are her abilities.

(E) High Gear: Activating high gear basically means that Neon goes super speed. There is a bar, similar to Viper’s, that recharges when not using it and that bar is how much speed you have. 

• INSTANTLY channel Neon’s power for increased speed. When charged, ALT FIRE to trigger an electric slide. Slide charge resets every two kills.

(Q) Relay Bolt: Throw a projectile that stuns nearby characters. Similar to breach stun. 

• INSTANTLY throw an energy bolt that bounces once. Upon hitting each surface, the bolt electrifies the ground below with a concussive blast.

(C) Fast Lane: Puts up two parallel walls, very similar to those of Phoneix. If enemies are caught in the wall, they take damage. 

• FIRE two energy lines forward on the ground that extend a short distance or until they hit a surface. The lines rise into walls of static electricity that block vision and damage enemies passing through them.

(X) Overdrive: Imagine Jett knives, but instead of knives, there’s an energy ray that kills enemies instantly. That’s what this ultimate is. 

• Unleash Neon’s full power and speed for a short duration. FIRE to channel the power into a deadly lightning beam with high movement accuracy. The duration resets on each kill.

From the abilities, Neon abilities seem to be combind with those of Jett and Phoneix. She has the ability to move extremely fast for a long duration, put up parallel Phoneix walls, throw a Phoneix Molotov that stuns players and shoot out energy rays with her ultimate. 

Weapon Changes

Melee 

Valorant, unlike Counter-Strike, is as game where knifing opponents is very hard to do. Sometimes, you’re lined up perfectly but the right click doesn’t go through and misses slightly. This change will, hopefully be fixed with these following changes being made.

• Right click hitboxes are now 1.5x larger. Left click hitboxes are now larger than a right
  click and have a slightly longer range too.
• Targets closer to the center of your knife attacks will get hit first, so you still have
  precision if you need it.
• Bonus: Knifing walls now have instant feedback when slicing up walls (predicted on the
  client side)

Spectre

In ranked matches, I must not be the only one who has been triple-dinked by a spectre user running across the map from me. It must have just happened to a Riot developer because at last, the recoil for the SMG is getting changed.

• Firing error occurs at earlier bullet stages
  • For example, instead of errors occurring at bullets 4, 7, 10 (in terms of firing
    order) they will instead happen at bullets 3, 6, 8
• Increased pitch and yaw (vertical and horizontal) recoil multipliers when
  running/jumping/on ascender from 1.25 >>> 1.5
• Protected bullet count from yaw (horizontal) switching while spraying, decreased 8 >>>
  5 bullets
• Lowering time to switch yaw from .24 >>> .18 seconds
  • While spraying, the time you have until you could switch yaws (horizontal
    movement) again is lower, meaning it can happen more often

Ares

While the Ares and Spectre are the same price, almost no players use the LMG over the SMG. So, Riot slightly buffed the weapon to hopefully improve its pick rate in competitive.

• Removed spin up
• Firing rate increased from 10 >>> 13

Guardian

Some players you see in competitive are amazing with the Guardian and can one tap anyone out of this universe *cough* Shroud. But, for us mortals, most couldn’t pull off the clean one taps and ended up spamming the gun. To give mortals more chances to land that clean head tap, Riot buffed the gun slightly. 

• Removed firing rate penalty on ADS (Aiming Down Sight)
• Added an extra bullet before it enters a recovery curve

Bulldog

While the bulldog is really good at long range when you burst, the gun occasionally gets taken down by a normal Vandal or Phantom because the second burst isn’t fully accurate. That all changes now with the following changes being made to the gun.

• Hip fire rate increased 9.5 >>> 10
• Recovery on burst fire improved from .4 >>> .35
  • Inaccuracy is accrued any time the weapon is re-fired prior to a complete
    duration of a weapon’s respective Gun Recovery Time. Lower recovery time
    should improve burst fire efficiency.

Competitive

To further deal with smurf accounts, and improve the lower ranks in competitive, the developers have changed the requirement to play ranked. Previously, you only needed a certain number of unranked matches. However, players now need to reach level 20 in-game to be able to play ranked. Accounts that were able to play ranked before can still play the mode, even if they aren’t level 20.