Valorant patch 4.01 official notes: Ares nerfs, Melee changes, Social updates, and more

Valorant patch 4.01 will be officially dropping in a few hours, and the new update will be looking to introduce some minor changes to the shooter.

The highlight of the patch is the Ares nerfs that Riot Games is looking to introduce, as the LMG had become quite overpowered after the recent buffs that it got in 4.00.

4.01 will be looking to tone its effectiveness down significantly and introduce the melee changes that were expected to go live in the previous update but were not able to make it to the live servers.

Valorant fans looking for a detailed patch description can look up Riot’s official website.

However, for a brief overview, here are all the major highlights.

---

Valorant patch 4.01 official notes

1) Social Updates

• Muted Words List added to the settings
• Muted Word List is a new section you will find in your settings where you can type in variations of words/phrases that you, personally, would not like to see appear in-game
• For example: Let’s say “Riot” is a bad word. Our detection may catch the word “Riot” as one that should be blocked and penalized, but there’s a variety of different ways to spell Riot that we may not be catching: R!ot, R!0t, Ri0t, etc.
• And no, you won’t get “League of Legends” banned from chat
• We’re hoping that we can leverage the lists that you and others create to make the chat less toxic by comparing them across regions and using the data we collect to improve our own detections of bad words.

2) Weapon Updates

Ares

• Price increased from 1550 >>> 1600
• Pitch recoil increased
• Spread changed from .8 >>> .7 after 10 bullets to 1.0 >>> .7 after 13 bullets
• Crouch benefits spread and recoil reduced from 40% >>> 25%

Melee

• The melee’s been too tricky to aim with, making it tough to rely on. So we’ve updated both left and right-click melee attacks for more reliable Agent-whacking action.
• 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 an instant feedback when slicing up walls (predicted on the client side)

3) Bugs

Weapons

• Fixed a bug where the Origin collection idle animations weren’t playing for some levels and variants in Spectator mode

Esports Features

• Fixed an issue where observer player hotkeys would change after side-swap.

Performance

• Fixed an issue where performance charts that require NVIDIA Reflex were displayed and could not be hidden