If you’ve been staring down the barrel of the same two rifles for six years, VALORANT Patch 13.06 finally hands you a third option. Riot Games’ newest numbered update adds the Warden, a scoped rifle priced at 2,900 credits, alongside a full overhaul of how competitive performance gets tracked – Performance Score, Accolades, and Rank Legacy all launch this patch, and you can finally warm up in the Range while you’re stuck in queue.
This isn’t a routine balance pass. Riot’s own patch notes span weapons, modes, competitive systems, client navigation, and player progression all in one drop, with Home and Lobby merged into a single hub and the End of Game screen rebuilt to surface rewards, match details, and standout moments in one view. It’s a much bigger swing than the bug fixes covered in Patch 13.02 or the competitive tweaks in Patch 12.10.
Warden Joins The 2,900-Credit Club
The headline addition slots the Warden alongside the Vandal and Phantom at 2,900 credits, giving buy-round strategy a scoped, long-range option that isn’t the Operator. Per Riot’s official patch notes, the gun’s numbers look like this:
- Price: 2,900 credits, the same bracket as the Vandal and Phantom.
- Magazine: 18 bullets per mag with 36 rounds in reserve.
- Damage: 50 to the body at all ranges, 200 to the head, 42 to the legs.
- Fire rate: 6.5 rounds per second, equipped with a 2x scope.
- Reload/Equip: 2.5-second reload, with equip times from 1.0 seconds normal down to 0.2 seconds instant.
Gauntlet: Glitched Throws Eight Duos Into a Blender
The patch also introduces Gauntlet: Glitched, a limited-time mode built around eight duos fighting round-robin 2v2 battles across four remixed arenas. Losing rounds drains your team’s shared health pool until it hits zero, but the real hook is ability drafting – pull randomized abilities from different Agents between rounds and upgrade them from Level 1 to Level 3, with a chance for glitched, haywire versions to pop up along the way. Riot’s notes flag Raze’s Boom Bot getting manual detonation and Gekko’s Wingman getting supersized as two examples of what that looks like in practice.
The Scoreboard Gets a Full Rebuild
Average Combat Score is gone, replaced by Performance Score, a 0-500 measure Riot says is meant to capture more than just kills and damage. It now determines MVP and scoreboard position across Competitive, Unrated, Swiftplay, and Premier, and Riot has said it’ll keep tuning the system based on player feedback.
Sitting alongside it are Accolades, which track personal bests for the current Act and across your lifetime play starting from this patch, and Rank Legacy, a running counter of every rank you’ve hit across your Competitive career – though the same rank can only bump the counter once every three Acts. Then there’s Agent Mastery, giving every Agent their own Act levels, Lifetime levels, Reward Track, and Agent ID, with everyone starting fresh at zero.
What This Means For Your Queue
Range access during queue is a small quality-of-life fix with an outsized impact – you can now enter the Range straight from matchmaking, though it may vanish temporarily if the queue looks short, and it isn’t supported in Premier, Deathmatch, or other modes without Agent Select. Combined with the new scoreboard math, the accomplishment tracking, and a third premium rifle in the mix, 13.06 changes both how you prepare for a match and how that match gets recorded once it’s over.
Riot isn’t done tinkering, either – Map Rating is confirmed for Patch 13.08, with Competitive Flex and Radiant-specific updates slated for Patch 14.00. Whether the Warden actually dents the Vandal/Phantom duopoly the way earlier weapon shakeups reshaped the pro meta is a question only ranked ladders and scrim blocks can answer now.
