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Valorant 4: Thoughts While I’m On Break
I’ve been traveling for the past two weeks and haven’t been able to play any Valorant, but today I was thinking about some of the things I wanna try.
I saw this amazing video by scream (a professional EU valorant player known for his aim).
Some major takeaways:
- Warm up wrists
- Practice jett knives in practice range
- Practice not only one tapping but also burst spraying
- Should take longer with Vandal, spray burst with phantom
- Crosshair placement is key for getting kills, be ready for a wide swing or a small jiggle depending on the situation
- Always look to play off of your team, solo carrying is VERY hard even for pros, Valorant is a combo game
Other things I’ve been thinking to try:
- I need to get used to all sorts of movement, play around with it like I do with dance
- I should aim with movement a lot more
In general, I feel like I need to apply what I learned from dance – keep feeling out the things that feel uncomfortable. Try different ways to do the same thing. Look for something that feels good. Understand my body as well as just the ingame mechanics.
Valorant 12: The Movement Gun
I realized recently that having really insane movement is better for certain types of guns. Specifically the phantom.
I tested this theory today, by playing phantom and I think the results speak for themselves.
A couple of notes:
- The Vandal will require a different mindset to play (the catch them on the crosshair, holding angles type of mindest)
- Movement is really good but need to peek tighter angles still
Overall, I need to pick the weapon best suiting my mood and the map. Vandal for slower smoother headshots, phantom for more energetic aggressive plays.
Valorant 25: Blunder Chess
So today, my girlfriend and I were discussing how to make better decisions in Valorant and it made me think that we are playing low level blunder chess. Blunder chess at 200-800 elo is simply playing chess with these main ideas:
- Check for blunders (hanging queen, bishop, knight or rook)
- Check for checks on king
- Look only one move ahead
- If no clear threats, work on positioning
The idea behind blunder chess is simply that people at low elo will make a lot of mistakes and you can simple wait for them to make a mistake.
I strongly believe my elo (below diamond) that “blunder chess” is highly effective since a lot of simple mistakes are made.
I wonder if I can do the same simple ideas in Valorant where I don’t strategize too much, but check for very simple positioning and big mistakes:
- If I pull my util or knife out, can I be shot?
- Am I under time pressure?
- Positional advantage:
- Taking space or map control
- In order of lowest to highest risk
- Utility/teammates
- Shoulder peak
- Jump peak
- Jiggle peak
- Wide swing
- In order of lowest to highest risk
- Defending map control
- In order of lowest to highest risk
- Utility/teammates
- Hold and fall off method
- Spraying
- Jiggle peak
- In order of lowest to highest risk
- Taking space or map control
- Treat teammates as utility
Valorant 31: Class in Session – Unit 1 Day 1
UNIT 1: VOD Review | Day 1 – TenZ
Exercise: Imitate Tenz and imagine I am him
Lessons learned:
- I’m exhausted – fell asleep for a long time after watching and imitating for a short period of time
- Knife to gun transition – keeping knife out until dangerous angles, then switch to gun or do a jump peak while switching if no room
- Hold for peeks – clear where they might peek, not where they might be, continue to hold it or switch to another angle they can push you from
- Set graphics to low
- Don’t push smokes unless with flashes or off of someone else’s contact
- Spray with good spray control – pulling down
- Fall after spraying to reload
- Jiggle if holding close to an angle
- Warm up at the start of each round by flicking onto teammate heads
In game what I did very successfully:
- Spamming through smokes – I got many headshots through the smoke
- Holding peekable angles – I felt I got a lot more intentional to where I was staring
- Holding off angles when watching for the flank (specifically I utilized the place Tenz hid on Pearl in the first round to get kills
- Being more intentional of when the knife is out, I rarely got caught out with my knife. I figured out how much time it takes to pull out the gun, and I always timed it so that I pulled out my gun before peeking anything.
What I can improve on:
- Pulling out the knife more often when I know no one is close
- Spam more boxes
- Utilizing jump peeking more
- Making sure my peeks are still tight and clean and fast
- Being much more focused on holding specific peeks when slowly scaling up
Valorant 7: Embracing Death (and Improving Movement)
I’ve been thinking about what small exercise I can do right now to level up my gameplay and progress in Valorant since I haven’t had much time to play or practice recently.
After meditating on it a little bit, I settled on something that I know has held me back in Valorant since I first started playing the game – the fear of death.
The fear of dying in the game:
- Makes me stressed out, and not think clearly
- Makes me shoot too fast without aiming
- Makes me frustrated when I lose
- Makes me exhausted after playing for a few games
I’ve decided to learn how to accept death in the game, and to understand it better overall.
For example, understanding the “time to death” from an intuitive sense (and knowing how to extend that time) could be a GAMECHANGER.
It will intuitively let me know:
- When to peek
- If I whiff, whether I should peek back, crouch down, or keep spraying
- How much time do I have to aim before I get killed by the enemy
- Stay focused even after dying a frustrating number of times
So I hopped into a couple of deathmatches and gave it a shot!
I started out just trying to predict when I would die, but dying stresses me out too much to tap into my intuition (you need to be relatively clear-headed to feel things intuitively). I focused then on saying “die” aloud every time I died or predicting when I died. This is taken from a sports exercise of intentionality (you vocalize what will happen, for example, if you are playing badminton, you say “hit” when you hit the birdie, and “miss” if you miss). This exercise is supposed to train your intuition and powers of prediction and anticipation.
Some takeaways:
- Crouching can make most people miss if they are shooting at you.
- The direction you run and bunny hop is very important, need to figure out the most evasive ways. Sometimes running directly at them has zero chance of success. I need to work on sometimes facing the side not just forward to be more evasive.
- The timing of peeking is important, how they have been spraying bullets is important.
- When you are running behind a wall, before you peek, you don’t need to bunnyhop, just run normally, feel out intuitively, the moment you should peek out
- I should start just by shouting out dead, every time I actually die, then try to predict
- I need to aim higher to knife to the head, I keep knifing the body.
- What I should try next is to stay alive for as long as I can.
- I should also focus on letting the shock and frustration from dying play out before going again so quickly.
My intuition also tells me that I should focus on what I’m missing or losing when I’m dying and focus on those feelings right after dying.
Knowing When You Are in Danger
What was really striking about this commentary is about how amateurs play chess vs grandmasters, and how grandmasters play vs computers.
This is interesting because Hans Neiman was accused and proven multiple times of being a chess cheater, someone who uses chess engines to play certain critical moves.
If he actually is, his gameplay is more similar to an AI moving rather than a human.
What is interesting about that is that human seem to react a lot to emotional threats, when they are not actually in danger, thus putting themselves in greater danger.
I can relate to this a lot in Valorant, and I wonder if understanding the greater picture better in Valorant will help me understand how much danger I am in, and not unnecessarily put myself in more danger by peeking just because I feel threatened.