New Valorant Patch 5.10 Buffs Cypher & Harbor

Sentinels rejoice, the changes to Cypher that were being trialed on its Public Beta Environment server over the past couple of weeks are going live today. Patch 5.10 notes released today have revealed the sleuth is getting some much-needed attention, while Fade is also being rebalanced to reduce some of her impact on the game. But the big surprise is that Harbor is actually getting a buff, too, which wasn’t part of the PBE testing at all.

Here’s the full Patch 5.10 overview, which features comments from Riot Games’ Valorant community manager Jo-Ellen Aragon:

Agent Updates

Cypher

“As the game has evolved, we’ve seen Cypher’s presence and relative impact on the roster fall off. While we attribute part of this to Chamber coming to dominate the Sentinel slot more than we think is healthy, we also have found that overtime Cypher’s Trapwire setups have become too predictable and easy to counter and that his Ultimate has felt lacking both in restrictions required to pull it off and the reward for doing so. The increase in Trapwire distance should open up a lot of new potential setups for Cypher and allow him to mix up his play patterns in a way that forces his enemies to slow down and move carefully through the map if they want to spot them without being caught.

Removing the time restriction on enemy corpses should make his Ultimate more accessible than it has been in the past and allow for Cypher to feel more agency when he initiates Neural Theft, while adding a second ping should create a clearer period of time where Cypher is pulling the strings, taking in the information on the enemies initial location and setting up strategic moves based on the pressure of the second. We hope that these updates get Cypher mains out there coming up with new setups for their information webs and that, when paired with upcoming updates to Chamber, help him reclaim a compelling spot amongst his peers.“

• Trapwire – Maximum Trapwire length increased 1000 >>> 1500
• Neural Theft – Now reveals enemies two times. There is a four second delay between the reveals
  • Time restriction to cast on enemy corpses has been removed
  • Maximum cast distance increased 1200 >>> 1800
• Quality of Life – Updated the yellow silhouette used for Cypher’s reveal on Spycam and Neural Theft.
  • Yellow silhouette now disappears if the revealed enemy becomes visible to you to help reduce confusion of seeing two representations of the enemy in different places.
    • Yellow silhouette now starts dimmer and fades faster to make it more distinguishable from an actual enemy.
    • Cypher’s placed utility is no longer destroyed by allies’ AOE damage.

Fade

“Fade’s Prowlers have been a versatile and difficult-to-play-against ability that we’re looking to sharpen with these changes. The duration changes encourage Fade to be more deliberate in the areas that she chooses to sweep, while the other tweaks to the ability are meant to help enemies on the counterplay side of things.

The Nightfall cost is increasing in price, as we’ve found the baseline value of the Ultimate to be on the higher end compared to other Ultimates in the game.“

• Prowlers – Duration reduced from 3 >>> 2.5 seconds. (Time the prowler is alive without a trail).
  • Delay on bite after reaching target increased .4 >>> .6 seconds.
  • Hitbox improvements.
  • Nearsight duration on hit reduced 3.5 >>> 2.75 seconds.
  • Prowlers now fizzle out and no longer debuff instead of debuffing its target if they teleported away before it finished its animation.
• Nightfall – Cost increased 7 >>> 8.

Harbor

“Harbor abilities all make a healthy round impact, but we saw some players new to Harbor not using their abilities enough and feeling too constrained. We hope these changes make it easier for players to hit the ground running with Harbor and for skilled Harbor players to achieve more flexibility when controlling the map.“

• Cascade – Number of purchasable charges 1 >>> 2

Gameplay System Updates

Real Time Text Evaluation (USA-only to Start)

• In addition to our existing interventions, we are launching a new feature to begin muting players in chat who send disruptive text messages in game. Interventions for disruptive text will now be applied sooner rather than later as we continue updating our systems to evaluate more types of text communication.
• These improvements will be added to North America first and expanded to more regions in the near future.
  • With the implementation of more immediate text evaluation, we hope to detect and reduce disruptive situations while players are still in game and help you feel safer to engage in VALORANT.

Social Updates

• Fixed an issue that caused the “Auto-Reject Friend Requests: On” notification to be misaligned in the Social Panel for some languages.

Bugs

Agents

Astra

• Fixed a bug where Astra could cast a fake Nebula right at the start of a round before her Star charged up.

Chamber

• Fixed a bug where Chamber would fail to equip a gun at the start of a new round.

Harbor

• Fixed Harbor’s Cascade being visible on Minimap for enemies with vision of it.
• Fixed a bug where Harbor’s Cascade would sometimes spawn under the map.
• Fixed a bug where Harbor’s Cascade targeter on the minimap would shorten when aiming up or down even though the Cascade would travel the same distance.
• Fixed a bug where Harbor’s Cascade targeter on the minimap was slightly shorter than the actual distance it would travel.

Neon

• Fixed a bug where Neon’s Slide could be used to boost upwards in specific map locations.