Valorant: The new Phoenix ‘Curveball’ bug has made the Agent unplayable

Valorant Patch 1.06 sought to bring in some much needed visual clarity for Agents who use blinding abilities. Hence, Phoenix’s Curveball and Breach’s Flashpoint got some changes that will make them easily detectable for the enemy team.

However, that being said, the changes themselves brought with themselves a bug, which made Phoenix’s Curveball behave, “differently than intended,” and this is literally making the Agent unplayable at the moment.

But it seems that the Valorant devs are aware of the issue and they will be coming up with a hotfix as soon as possible.

We're aware of a bug in patch 1.06 with Phoenix's Curveball behaving... differently than intended. We're going to hotfix this as soon as possible.

— VALORANT (@PlayVALORANT) August 20, 2020

So how did the bug make Valorant’s Phoenix Unplayable?

Unintentional bug. Will fix

— Morello (@RiotMorello) August 20, 2020

In a recent tweet, a disgruntled Phoenix player types, “Phoenix is ruined now. Like in order to flash through doors effectively, you have to stand 10 feet away and can’t hug the wall, or else you’ll flash yourself or the whole team. Or even your flash goes behind the enemy on the other side. Pls think about reverting.”

Phoenix Curveball bug (Image Credits: Click Heads)

In all honesty, this is a huge problem that Valorant’s Phoenix is facing at the moment. The Curveball swings out and hits much further away than intended, which will either push the player to stand apart from the wall, giving Phoenix less time to follow up or completely miss the enemy by activating behind them.

This more or less kills his potential as an entry fragger and makes Phoenix play a more supportive role, where he will have to check corners with another teammate. This is not how the duelist is intended to be played, and Valorant’s lead of Character Design, Morello, even replied to the tweet by saying that it was an unintentional bug.

Valorant Patch 1.06 fixes the shotgun oppression

Shotguns like the Bucky and the Judge were quite overpowered in Valorant, and they hardly had next to nothing spray spread, even when the character model was jumping and moving while firing.

By increasing the movement error spray deviation, the Valorant devs are making these weapons much more balanced, and not as oppressive as they used to be in the hands of duelists like Jett, Raze, and Reyna.