Season 28 has gone live for Quake Champions, introducing new vanity content, resetting ranked skill ratings in all modes, and delivering a wide set of balance changes to movement, champions, weapons, items, and maps.


New Vanity Content

The patch adds two new Season 28 cosmetics:
  • Quake 4 NAPALM LAUNCHER Tri-bolt, available in the Store and Battle Pass
  • Volkerh BLACK MAGIC podium, available in the Battle Pass

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Quake 4 NAPALM LAUNCHER Tri-bolt and Volkerh BLACK MAGIC podium

Ranked & Movement Updates

  • Ranked leaderboards and Skill Ratings have been reset for all game modes, marking a fresh start to the season.
  • Champion movement has been reworked across all weight classes:
    • Light champions:
      • Athena: max ground speed reduced from 1000 to 750 ups
      • Nyx: max ground speed reduced from 2000 to 750 ups
    • Medium champions:
      • Base movement speed increased to 320 ups
      • Max ground speed reduced to 650 ups
    • Heavy champions:
      • Base movement speed increased to 320 ups
      • Max ground speed reduced to 600 ups

Champion Changes

Several champions receive additional adjustments on top of the movement pass:
  • BJ Blazkowicz
    • Now gains a small ammo top-up when activating Dual Wield (25 bullets, 3 shells, 3 rockets, 25 cells, 3 slugs, 25 nails, 3 bolts)
  • Clutch
    • Adds single-tap Dodge on a dedicated special movement key
    • New GROUND DODGE passive alongside his Air-Dodge
    • New stamina system allowing three consecutive dodges which then regenerate
    • Forward acceleration removed
    • Increased air speed clamp deceleration to bring him back to max speed more quickly
  • Death Knight
    • New Tempered Steel passive that converts half of fire damage dealt into armor
    • Fire DoT from Flame Strike and Charring Gauntlet increased from 3 to 6 damage per tick
    • Fire Trail damage ticks less frequently (every 250 ms instead of 100 ms)
  • DOOM Slayer
    • Blood Punch health bubbles can now be picked up immediately
    • Fixes to the placement of the DOOMGUY COLLECTIBLE vanity item
  • Galena
    • Unholy totems now apply a life steal effect: half of damage dealt is converted to HP for Galena
    • Damage from an empowered totem (three totems placed) reduced from 75 to 50
  • Keel
    • Fixes to ability cooldown and grenade count updates for spectators and teammate HUDs
  • Strogg
    • Stroyent now drops from Peeker kills instead of Strogg deaths
    • Stroyent now also grants ammo (same values as BJ’s Dual Wield ammo boost)
    • Peeker health reduced from 90 to 80 HP
  • Visor
    • New Piercing Shot passive: Railgun now deals 90 damage when zoomed during his ability

Main Menu & Special Movement Settings

  • The main menu and practice flow receive quality-of-life changes:
    • Players can queue for any Practice Mode from Level 1, instead of being forced into TDM until Level 2
    • Contact list width has been increased to help with text scaling in some languages
    • A small gap in the lower navigation menu has been fixed
  • New special movement settings have been added for champions like Clutch:
    • SPECIAL MOVEMENT key for champion-specific moves
    • Options to use classic double-tap, single-tap special, or both for Air-Dodge and Ground-Dodge
    • SPECIAL DIAGONAL DODGE setting to choose between forward/back or strafe behaviour when pressing two directions
    • DODGE DOUBLE-TAP TIME slider to define the double-tap window

Weapon Balance

Several core weapons see rate-of-fire and knockback adjustments:
  • Starting Shotgun
    • Rate of fire improved (from 1000 ms to 850 ms per shot)
    • Ground knockback adjusted to create more vertical lift
  • Super Shotgun
    • Ground knockback adjusted for more vertical lift
  • Lightning Gun
    • Rate of fire slowed (from one shot every 42 ms to every 48 ms)
    • In-air knockback reduced from 208 ups to 175 ups
    • Ground knockback adjusted to lift targets more vertically
  • Railgun
    • Damage reduced from 90 to 80
    • Ground knockback adjusted for more vertical lift

Items, Power-Ups, and Status Effects

Item and power-up handling has been refined:
  • If multiple players are inside an item’s pickup radius, the closest player now receives the item
  • Quad Damage and Protection now extend their remaining duration by 30 seconds when you pick up a duplicate, instead of resetting to 30 seconds
  • Status effect UI timers now refresh correctly when a DoT effect is reapplied
  • Quad Damage can now apply up to 3x knockback, capped at a maximum knockback force of 160u
  • Adds an explicit max knockback scale (3.0x) and force threshold (160u)

Spawn Code and Clan Arena

Spawning logic and Clan Arena loadouts are adjusted:
  • In Ranked modes, respawn logic now chooses between the two best spawn points to increase variety
  • In Team modes, you will respawn near teammates more often
  • In Clan Arena, ammo counts are increased:
    • Starting Shotgun: 25 → 50
    • Rocket Launcher: 25 → 50

Map Updates

Several arenas receive layout and item changes:
  • Crucible
    • Railgun moved to the lava pit
    • Shotgun moved to the Heavy Armor Rocket Launcher location
    • HMG moved to the old Shotgun spot
    • LG-side Light Armor moved to the old Railgun position
    • Upper Light Armor removed
    • Three cooldown pickups near the old Mega Health moved to the old upper LA spot
    • Spawns updated
  • Cursed Soul
    • Performance improvements and geometry cleanup
    • Item layout updated: the map now has one Rocket Launcher and one Lightning Gun pickup
  • Insomnia
    • Railgun and Lightning Gun positions swapped
    • One rail ammo swapped with a lightning ammo pack

Audio and Miscellaneous

The update also includes a set of audio and general fixes:
  • Audio fixes for Anarki’s board sounds, turrets in 7.1, and certain teammate weapon volumes
  • Adjustments to water Railgun sound effects and HMG volume over distance
  • Higher-difficulty bots (Hard, Expert, Nightmare) will now pick up items even if humans are nearby, to improve their contribution and K/D
  • Shader cache has been updated

The original changelog was published as a PDF on the official icon_discord Quake Discord server and is attached to this news post.