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Play Valorant Like A Pro

Byjack

I feel compelled to do another Valorant challenge, and I feel this video is the most excellent way to learn how to treat Valorant like a pro:

Similar Posts

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Valorant 34: Deathmatch

Byjack

My initial attempt at deathmatch:

Watching Tenz’s deathmatch

Some reflections:

  • I’m not back at deathmatch at all
  • I need to get better at flicking
  • Tenz tries to micro adjust to one tap, strafes for 1-3 shots then crouch sprays
  • Takes more time on the people who arent looking at him

My second attempt:

Its much better, but I do feel more pain in my finger from the pressing the mouse and it my biceps.

Some more thoughts:

  • Add more movement into the aiming to make it more smooth
  • Flick faster
  • Work on using less force when pressing the shoot button

Some thoughts:

  • I definitely have a really good feel for DM and my mechanics are fairly good
  • I can use DM to practice thinking about angle advantage
  • Tenz is calmer, moves a little slower and intentionally moves crosshair to hold specific angles instead of swinging everything
  • I need to keep a focused crosshair on one area unless I’m swinging
  • Think of everything as holding angles, even swinging, you are swinging to hold another angle
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Valorant 17: Choosing My Own Path

Byjack

I’ve looked at multiple things recently:

  • My lesson with a CS Go / Valorant coach
  • A excellent video of someone reaching radiant from silver
  • A video of how to aim well by Scream a team liquid professional valorant player

What I realized is that there are many ways to improve and win valorant games and climb to plat. There are somethings that will make it easier but you don’t need to do all of them.

Valorant, like life, is a game with specific rules, but how you play it is up to you.

A few different examples:

  • You can play only solo queue (deciding to team up with random people)
  • You can play only with people you know
  • You can play the game to gain rank
  • You can play the game to try out the different agents
  • You can play the game for the high reaction time and mechanical skill like aiming
  • You can play the game for the strategy required

I decided to make a list of how I want to play Valorant in the context of this challenge.

  1. I want to play with people who are fun to hang out with
  2. I want to make the entire game comfortable to play for me
  3. I want to focus on the actual objective, killing all the enemies and winning each round

Step 1: Finding people to play with

The most efficient way is just to focus on playing with people I already like playing with and try to meet new people by adding new people from games I play. I should also focus on unadding people I don’t like playing with.

Step 2: Making the game comfortable for me

The areas I need to focus on being more comfortable:

  • Minimap
    • Being able to visualize where everyone is just looking at the map
  • Aiming
    • Being able to comfortably get the physical mechanics of aim and crosshair placement down
  • Movement
    • Knowing the different ways and distances to peek comfortably
  • Abilities
    • Knowing lineups and ability planning
  • Clearing
    • Knowing how to path through a site properly
  • Switching weapons
    • Knowing the physical coordination of switching knife, pistol and main weapon

Step 3: Focusing on winning rounds

Usually, I am laser-focused on two things:

  • Abilities
  • Killing people and not getting killed

I want to reframe Valorant for me.

Generally, you want to either play for a plant/defuse or try to kill every member of the enemy team. 

As a result, I want to think about Valorant in the following plays:

  1. Brute force brawl with team, if team is pushing site together
  2. Try to get the enemy to trip up and make a mistake by confusing them and holding weird angles or lurking
  3. Try to set myself up for an ace by having my abilites and pathing planned out

Overall I think Valorant meets the following needs for me:

Growth: Getting better over time

Significance: The chance to practice my learning techniques in a measurable area

Love and connection: Playing with people who I like hanging out with

Here is what I think my routine should generally be:

  1. Warmup physically, and stretch, get pumped up with music
  2. Warmup in deathmatch, get a feeling for the mouse
  3. Warmup in the range and spike rush and defuse
  4. Meditate
  5. Play a game, focus on winning rounds
  6. Vod review, focus on the minimap awareness
  7. Practice in custom game lineup and setups to win next time or win by more
  8. Meditate, reflect and write blog post

 

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Valorant 43: The End and More

Byjack

I decided today that I need to close out the Valorant challenge for a couple of reasons:

Firstly, most importantly, the challenge is over! I think it is important to have specific success/end criteria for every challenge because then it gives a distinct goal to focus on and allows for new challenges to take its place. My original goal for Valorant was to get to Plat in a month. It instead took maybe over a year, but there is no doubt that I completed the challenge. I have been solidly in Plat 1 for months now and just recently solo-queued up to Plat 2. Before there was a reason to keep the challenge going because I kept dropping back down to Gold, but now I think this challenge is well and truly finished.

Secondly, I noticed that I started posting shorter and less thought-out posts about Valorant. Since the challenge is essentially over and my goal has been achieved, it has completely lost focus…which is why it is important for old challenges to end and new challenges to start. Since my posts about Valorant have evolved into less focused thoughts along my journey in Valorant, I can remove the label of “challenge” and continue making posts of observations and thoughts in my overall Valorant journey. I will always challenge myself in Valorant and it will continue to be a long-term goal to learn from the game and grow as a player and as a person. I don’t need a challenge to denote that ambition because this entire blog is that ambitious. Challenges are meant to be smaller focused time and goal bound tools and structures.

Finally, I have new challenges I want to focus on. I have my art and creative challenge coming up, my jiujitsu challenge, and my sleep challenge. All of those challenges require time and effort and the less distractions and pressure I have, the easier it will be to complete those challenges. I will almost certainly start a new Valorant challenge in the future and I need to set a precedent for that now by closing out old and dead/completed challenges like cobwebs in the mental attic.

P.S. For old times sake, here are my latest strategies in Valorant that got me to Plat 2.

  1. Have a purpose/gameplan every round
  2. Look for multikills, not just killing and running – this gives you awareness even if you end up getting one kill and dipping
  3. Focus on what mindset works for you

To expand on number 3, the main mindsets I like to use:

  1. Flicking mindset (good for if you are feeling lots of energy and quite relaxed). Keep your mouse hand loose and imagine flicking on the enemies. Visualize centering all of the enemies on your screen.
  2. Cart of rails mindset (good for very careful and deliberate clean peeks). Imagine you are sitting in a cart on rails and you want to do a driveby shooting. Your railway car can move left and right but not up or down, and will stop the second your crosshair covers the head of an enemy. Anticipate to see them opposite the direction you peek (moving to the right, anticipate on the left).
  3. Adjust crosshair mindest (good if your micro adjustments are off). After seeing the enemy, focus on the space between your crosshair and their head and use intuitive movement to close that gap, whether it is strafing or moving the mouse.

So it is goodbye for now for the Valorant challenge, but we will probably be back at some point to compile data about this whole challenge and do a couple of retrospectives.

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Valorant 32: Washed

Byjack

Yesterday I returned to Valorant and I wanted to learn a few things since being washed before I get back fully into the Valorant grind.

  1. I want to learn how to have comfortable hand positioning
  2. I want to have greater certainty of where all the enemies are at any point in time and a clearer understanding of the game

Class One: Hand positioning (90 minutes)

UNIT ONE: Figure out why

UNIT TWO: Explore Movements

UNIT THREE: Explore aids and relief

Class Two: Greater certainty (3 hrs)

UNIT ONE: Document VOD areas of stress and find equivalent situations in ranked

UNIT TWO: Try to predict decision making

UNIT THREE: Document another VOD

Class One: Hand positioning (90 minutes)

UNIT ONE: Figure out why

I’d say I have a little golfers elbow along with just muscle fatigue. No carpal tunnel syndrome or trigger finger syndrome thankfully.

UNIT TWO: Explore Movements

My perfect position seems to be legs balanced on the floor, chest forwards, armrest angled outwards and level with the desk and pushed backward so I can sit farther forwards.

The results on my sheriff-only account:

I feel mild soreness in my hand and forearm. My whole body feels a bit cramped as well. Overall, massive improvement.

I used a new aiming mentality, which I call the “Zoom In” Method where you pretend you are zooming into where your crosshair is and on the target, sort of getting mental blinders on. It seems to help especially with aiming for very far shots.

Then I played a rank match:

My “greater certainly” class was me looking up at how Som played vs me.

I was really helpful to see the util usage. I ended up using a lot of this information in future matches.

However, I spiraled after playing ranked because I was so frustrated with how I was performing. I ended up playing non-stop from Friday until Sunday sleeping not as much as I would like and always livid from anger that all my opponents were so hard to beat.

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Valorant 24: Looking Forward

Byjack

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