Valorant's patch 5.10 makes several major changes to Cypher and Fade, as well as adding real-time chat moderation.
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Valorant’s latest update is here, and it brings a number of minor nerfs to popular agent Fade, as well as key buffs for old favorite Cypher. Patch 5.10 also brings real-time text evaluation in order to clamp down on disrupting players, along with revamped menus that support universal navigation.
Cypher, formerly considered one of Valorant’s most useful agents, has fallen off in terms of influence and pick rate in recent months. In order to remedy this, developer Riot Games has increased the range on Cypher’s Trapwire, buffed his ult Neutral Theft to work twice as effectively as before, and revamped some of the visual language around his key abilities.
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Powerful agent Fade has proven to be a bit too disruptive for Riot’s liking, so her signature Prowlers have been nerfed. They now last slightly shorter and have a longer delay on bite. Additionally, the cost of her Nightfall ability has increased. New agent Harbor has also been buffed, as they can now buy two Cascade charges instead of just one.
Other than these character changes, Riot has introduced real-time text evaluation to prevent toxic or disruptive players, though the feature is currently only active for North America. The patch also fixed a number of bugs and revamped Valorant’s menu system to be more intuitive to new players.
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.
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.
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.
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