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Valorant 24: Looking Forward
I’m thinking ahead to my next goal in Valorant. I think the next step is getting to Ascendant. It is going to take a lot of work just getting back to plat. Here is a VOD review where I got 1 kill the entire game. I reviewed the VOD with my brother’s friend who is a big brained diamond player.
It’s actually interesting, I think I need people who are higher elo but not too much higher because I need someone who can explain a few things, not everything all at once.
Some of the main takeaways from the VOD review on areas I can work on:
- Playing off of teammates (using the analogy of treating them as a sky dog / sova drone / skye cabbage)
- Follow them in
- Use them as a distraction and to gather information
- If they die, no biggie, they aren’t worth anything to me dead
- If I cannot trade, I can just fall off
- Gather notes on what the enemy patterns are
- Think about how they play worked for them in the past rounds
- Peek and clear more confidently
- Don’t be afraid to make noise and util to clear a site, even if they know I’m there, it’s better than planting with no knowledge of where they are
- Use skye binds to peek, don’t waste the util
- Any information on someone in the vicinity or at the areas of no control (at the start of the round, or when we give up control) should be treated with extreme caution
Valorant 27: Confidence
I’ve been thinking more about confidence in Valorant and it actually made me think a lot more about what makes confidence. I originally was interested in how to multitask because I thought that was what would make me stronger in Valorant, but I wasn’t able to find any useful information on it.
I ended up searching multitasking in sports, and I was specifically in interested in the basketball videos when they talked about confidence.
The first video was this:
Ideas:
- Confidence is not about positive or negative thinking
- There are two ways of thinking
- Logically and analytically
- Intuitively
- Confidence is about trusting the second type of thinking
- Timing cannot be thought
Ideas:
- People often rely on outside sources of confidence
- Success
- External Validation
- Comparing ourselves with others
- These outside sources of validation are not reliable
- Confidence comes from being able to trust yourself
- Trustworthiness is from people who follow a code
- Ex: Warrior code “no man left behind” (inspires confidence in your unit because other people won’t leave you behind)
- Ex: Courage over success, valuing courage over failure or success validation
- Code must be specific and have specific actions you take to fulfill it
- Mantras can be helpful
So as they say in the video to do, I am writing down the things I use for confidence in Valorant:
- Success – high KDA, increasing elo
- Comparison – high KDA compared to others, higher rank
- Knowledge and practice – learning techniques and practicing them
- Performance – being able to predict moves, hitting my shots
What I admire in other players:
- Clarity in thinking
- Creative plays
- Fast reactions
- Precise mechanics
- Boldness/confidence
I’ll take each of these a step further to draft out my code. I’m going to see if I can break down what I make each of these things mean:
- I make success mean that I’m smart that I’m special
- I make comparison mean that I’m special, that I’m a valuable or worthy person
- I make knowledge and practice mean I’m smart and that I deserve to be heard
- I make performance mean that I’m special and I’m capable
For the second list:
- I make clarity mean that someone is smart
- I make creativity mean intelligence, specialness, worthy of love and admiration
- I make fast reactions means someone is attractive
- Precise mechanics I make it mean someone is capable, valuable and worth a lot
- Boldness and confidence I make it mean someone is valuable and special
To think about it further my code might need to address:
- Inner value – what is valuable about myself
- Inner specialness – what do I think is special about myself
- Inner love and admiration – what do I love and admire about myself
- Inner capability – what makes myself capable
I don’t really know what my code can be but one aspect that keeps coming up for all of these things are valuing feelings and focusing on radical permission.
Those are two things that I feel make me unique, I value myself and are a way to find freedom and give myself love and admiration.
I suppose I can also focus on the challenge in life, the idea of courage or challenge over success is something else that I admire about value about myself. Deep thinking, letting the answer of hard questions come to me as well.
The ways that I could act out this code in Valorant:
- Check in to how I’m feeling
- Vocalize my feelings
- Check in to how others are feeling
- Let the energy carry action
- Let the plan form in my mind
- Create a challenge at the start of every round
Aim Training Myths
Some really interesting ideas I saw when watching this video about aim training:
My main takeaways:
- Aim training is not the main practice but rather isolates specific techniques such as hitting A D targets (people strafing from left to right) or flicking.
- Sens and muscle memory doesn’t matter.
- Sensitivity just changes what muscle groups you use and to be a good aimer you need to be able to use all muscle groups. Low sens is using the arm and wrist, high sens is using the wrist and fingers. When you know how to use all muscles groups by changing your sens around, when you stick to one sens you will have superior mouse control to use that sens in all situations.
- Muscle memory doesn’t exist since you cannot memorize a specific shot, it is always changing depending on the game you are in.
- Keep warmups really short. 5-10 minutes max for strictly a warmup and 10-15 minutes for a warmup + some longterm aim group/training.
- If you warmup for an hour its a training session not a warmup. It causes you to be tired out and overthink the aiming.
- Higher DPI mean lower input delay. 800-1600 is desired but it isn’t that important.
- Raw reaction time doesn’t matter as much as awareness. If you don’t expect something, raw reaction time matters much more. 190-180 milliseconds is normal.
- Higher sens is technically better because it is faster, but it is harder to be consistent and be in control
- Voltaic guides are good aim guides
Valorant Challenge 40: The Trifecta
I’ve since taken a different approach to Valorant. I think I had a lot of good ideas in the past but I realized the value of simplicity.
Having too many things to worry about in Valorant makes it hard to focus on the game.
So I narrowed things down to just three:
- Piano hands: Keep your arm at a 90 degree angle, let gravity pull your arm down and use the force of gravity in all arm and wrist movements. This allows for the most relaxed posture.
- Imagine success: The most simple and straightforward way to have a good mental is just to visualize yourself killing everyone and winning the round.
- Stay clean: Instead of wildly aiming and shooting, stay calm, precise, and efficient. Peek cleanly using just the A and D keys.
An example of staying clean is Curry:
Watching his gameplay makes me realize how much I panic and do so much extraneous movement.
After applying these three tactics, I started doing very well in my games.
Valorant 13: Advice From My Brother
Today I had a strategy session with my brother who is almost at the rank I want to be (Plat) about major mindset shifts I need to do to get out of Bronze and Silver.
Here are the main areas we came up with:
- Learn to play off of contact better:
- Swing when you see teammates swinging
- If you see someone holding, pre-aim and get ready to trade
- Crosshair placement and preaiming
- Holding for wide swing vs close
- Methodical clearing
- Ability usage
- Have gameplan for ability usage for the beginning of every attack and defending round
- Map awareness
- Look at minimap more
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