VALORANT Patch 12.09 marks an important balance update, with Riot Games focusing heavily on Neon and the current strength of shotguns during high-mobility situations. After being temporarily disabled on PC because of a Fast Lane exploit linked to specific NVIDIA graphics settings, Neon has now returned to the game. However, her comeback entails significant changes designed to reduce how easily she can break timing, create pressure, and escape fights, while still preserving her identity as a fast-paced Duelist.

The biggest change affects High Gear, as jumping while sprinting no longer gives Neon an airborne speed bonus. Instead, her air speed while using High Gear will now match melee speed, making her movement easier to track and punish. Her fuel will also only regenerate from kills when her ultimate is active, although passive regeneration remains unchanged. Riot also improved the visual effects of her slide to make its direction and origin clearer, giving opponents more readable counterplay amid chaotic situations.

Alongside the Neon changes, Riot is also reducing shotguns’ effectiveness while moving, jumping, or using ropes. The goal is to push shotguns back toward their intended role: holding tight angles, defending close-range spaces, and clearing corners with deliberate positioning. All shotguns are now less accurate while moving, with run, walk, crouch-walk, and jump accuracy standardized across the weapon class. Crouching now provides a 15% accuracy multiplier, matching rifles, while shotgun spread has been heavily increased on ropes.

The Bucky shotgun received some of the most direct nerfs, with reduced close-range pellet damage and increased spread across several movement states. The Judge also had its minimum spread increased on PC, with the same console change set to arrive in Patch 12.11, while the Shorty saw its fire rate reduced from 3.33 to 3.0. Beyond weapon balance, Patch 12.09 also includes several bug fixes for agents such as Chamber, Jett, Sage, Tejo, Viper, and Vyse, as well as improvements to Riot’s text evaluation system in multiple languages and PC support for AMD Anti-Lag 2.

Neon

Jumping with High Gear active no longer provides any speed bonus while Neon is airborne. Instead, Neon’s air speed while sprinting will match melee speed.

Fuel will only regenerate with a kill when Neon's ultimate is active

Improved VFX to more clearly communicate the direction and origin of her slide

We've improved our Riot Text Evaluation system to better detect and apply penalties for text comms abuse in the following languages: Arabic, German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Chinese.

All shotguns:

Bucky:

Judge:

Shorty: