ValorantPATCH NOTESVALORANT Patch 13.04 swaps Breeze for Abyss in Competitive and Deathmatch. Here are the Agent fixes and the new Premier format.
Abyss returns to Competitive and Deathmatch as Breeze rotates out. Credit: Riot Games
Act 5 opens quietly. VALORANT Patch 13.04 brings no Agent buffs, no nerfs and no weapon changes. What it does bring is a map swap that will reshape how a lot of people play ranked: Breeze is out of Competitive and Deathmatch, and Abyss is back in.
Patch author Emily called it “a few fixes to keep your ranked grind consistent” before pointing at September, where she teased a Dev Update and other reveals Riot is sitting on. Read that as a signal. The quiet patch usually comes before the loud one.
One swap, two queues:
The real change here is economic. Breeze’s long sightlines made the Operator worth its price on almost every round, and mid gave snipers a free angle to hold with minimal risk. Take Breeze out and you take away one of the few maps where buying a 4,700-credit gun is close to automatic.
Abyss pulls in the opposite direction. It is built around vertical fights, close angles and the one mechanic no other map has: no walls at the edges, so you can fall off and die. Operators are worth far less there. Duelists who like tight space are worth more.
So expect the ranked meta to shift toward closer fights over the next two weeks. Also expect a run of accidental deaths while people relearn where the drops sit, particularly around ramps and jump spots.
Unrated players see no change. The swap covers Competitive and Deathmatch only.
Four fixes landed:
Three of those are cosmetic. The Clove one is not. A freeze that ends in a disconnect costs you the round, sometimes the game, and possibly your rank. Anyone who has been playing Clove regularly since Act 4 will have felt it.
Riot fixed a bug where transforming melee weapons refused to transform during their inspect animation. Kuronami 2.0 and Nocturnum got named in the notes, but the fix covers every transforming knife in the game.
The timing is worth noticing. The Aeris bundle dropped days earlier with a transforming melee as its headline piece, and a transforming melee that does not transform on inspect is a broken selling point. Riot cleared it before people started spending.
One caveat: this fix is PC only. Console players still have the bug.
Premier comes back on 18 August with a five-week stage instead of the usual seven.
Qualification splits by division:
Contender and Invite teams also get a two-day bracket. Round one runs 19 September, and teams that survive come back on 20 September for the finals.
Two fewer weeks means two fewer chances to fix a bad start. If your team usually spends the first fortnight finding a roster and a map pool, that habit will cost you a Playoffs spot this time. Teams hovering near 450 have almost no runway.
Riot shipped nothing on Agents or weapons in this patch, which is standard for an Act opener. A map rotation moves pick rates on its own, and tuning Agents on top of that makes it impossible to tell which change did what. Balance work should turn up in a later Act 5 patch, once Abyss data comes in.
Riot published the complete list on the official VALORANT site.
For more on the collection that made the melee fix matter, read our breakdown of the Aeris skinline. More VALORANT coverage lands on our VALORANT news hub.
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