|

Valorant 12: The Movement Gun

Byjack

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 9: The Last Bullet

Byjack

I just warmed up with a pistol spike rush then tried to do a little exercise I call – the last bullet.

Immediate benefits:

  • Warms up hand with all the spraying, next time should use to control spray pattern
  • Spray warns enemies for harder fights
  • Need to focus on switching weapons
  • Need to often wait for them to enter your crosshair
  • Started to feel the movement-based aiming a little more for some reason

I tried it again today with AMAZING results (no recording though). This really helps you take your time in a nice way. The easiest way to start is to try to “catch” them on your crosshair when you enter. Then you progress to “catching” people on my crosshair.

|

Valorant 11: Getting Back From Being Washed

Byjack

I’m doing REALLY badly with Valorant. Some observations:

Good Things
  • Movement is actually REALLY good
  • Aim is not bad
  • Gamesense OK
What I Need To Work On
  • Stop having the bad habit of moving TOWARDS the enemy. Try to keep strafing. More so in game, but also in deathmatch.
  • Movement is good, but move in the way to isolate angles, don’t try to peek too hard.
  • When aiming, need to have a smoother crosshair, don’t let the movement throw off crosshair
  • Need to work more on “catching the kills” and timing
    • Catching kills is mostly trying to hold angles, need to feel the swing (either wide or close)
    • Need to feel the timing of how soon and quickly to peek back out after missing
    • Use movement to adjust aim
    • Spray through and feel out the preaim (feel out where they are)
  • Can improve movement by using the crouch/crouch peek more often

Overall, I think I’m not doing as badly as I think I am. Just need to slow down the frantic movement to have steadier crosshair movement. I need to hold angles more, and only peak when I feel like I can snap onto a head (catching the aim).

Like in my aiming exercise, I should only hold angles, until the aim comes alive for me.

The biggest downfall I see multiple times is using movement to get closer when I can just hold the angle from far away. My aim is actually really good, just don’t give it any room to shine.

The Attractiveness Challenge

Byjack

I’m working on discovering and developing my own attractiveness. Just to clarify:

  • Attractiveness is not about finding faults, it’s about understanding your most beautiful self and letting yourself grow into that version of yourself. It’s not about imagining other people and wishing you were like them.
  • Attractiveness is very personal. It should be how you want to look to feel like yourself and feel confident. It can match societal versions of beauty but does not have to.

I discovered an exercise that can help:

  1. Stand in front of a full-length mirror
  2. Remove as much clothing as possible, naked if possible
  3. Stand straight and adjust your body to find the most attractive posture
  4. Note any other areas that need adjusting, skin, hair etc. in order to reach peak attractiveness
  5. Once you find your baseline (just standing straight), try different poses
  6. This is PARTICULARLY good at detecting problems with posture
  7. You can take this practice into ordinary life by imagining you are naked, it’s a more natural mentality for intuitively good posture and can make you feel more open and confident

This is an interesting idea, to be naked first because I think it follows the idea that I have with learning in general. You should always start with the basics and move upward. In attractiveness, you must first find your attractive yourself naked before finding your attractive self with clothes on. Just like with any other learning technique, clothes and other accessories (like makeup) actually distract from you seeing the lowest most basic level of yourself. You are the MOST natural and yourself when naked, so it makes sense to start there.

My initial thoughts:

  • The MAIN area that is keeping me from being my most attractive self is the posture of my neck and shoulders. My head is jutted forward making my chin weak and shoulders rounded forward, making my stomach stick out.
  • I may need to cut my hair since it is too much for the features of my face and makes my features look duller.
  • I have other minor areas of posture that need to be adjusted and other grooming things I may want to do.
  • This exercise is GREAT for feeling confident in your own skin, I noticed when I focus on improving my own posture, I open up my body instead of hunching and feel more confident.
  • I don’t actually need to get more fit and muscular like I always think I do. I just need to strengthen my back and core so I can naturally maintain a better posture.

This seems to work mostly for your body though, and not with your face. My intuition tells me that the biggest tool for facial symmetry is just finding ways to relax your face but I’m pretty lost in that area.

Onwards to a better-looking future!

|

Valorant 8: Incorporating the Pistol Into Movement

Byjack
  • Need to aim higher than you think to knife
    • If you are close enough, you can look almost directly up and still hit them in the head
    • Looking higher makes it hard to aim, since their head moves fast, try to look somewhere slightly higher than usual
  • Feeling out the potential lost (what would have been the perfect scenario) is a REALLY strong way to deal with the feeling of dying
    • Helps take off the shock and frustration
    • Allows you to improve from every death since you imagine a better scenario
|

Valorant 7: Embracing Death (and Improving Movement)

Byjack

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.

|

Valorant 6: Feeling Out Aiming

Byjack

I realized something today. While deathmatch and the practice range are a time to focus on hand-mouse-crosshair connection (basically pure aim), that doesn’t work in competitive game practice.

When I practice Valorant in a comp game, I should be feeling out everything including game sense, movement, and ability usage. See, aim in a real game only matters if the other aspects are set up correctly. It matters which agent you play. It matters how your enter, what your ability usage and game sense tell you. I was able to get so many more headshots when I was starting feeling out the entire game not just my aim.

The one area I realized I need the most practice with is game sense – feeling out where the enemies are hiding and being ready for multiple to peak out at once. I either don’t check corners, keep my crosshair super low or lower my guard after killing just one enemy.

I was able to ace with just game sense, ability usage and a little aim.

In the clutch clip, the one area I can clearly see room for improvement is the use of my ult. It was good for the first shot, but the next two shots should have been very intentionally trying to clear out the enemy hiding spots.

Also, in the clip below for the last round, I can see my decision-making skills need work.

  • I need to do something with phoenix and reyna inevitably who were going to rush me. I also had my ult.
  • I could have jiggled the wall, then try to make my way to long.
  • I could have dodged the phoenix flash by hiding in the corner and facing the left.
  • Or I could have peeked hard and try to make my way to long.

Here are the full game clips.

|

Valorant 5: Trying to Do Movement Based Aiming

Byjack

I’m back from two weeks of traveling and I finally tried it. Movement-based aiming.

It was quite a challenge let me tell you!

Game 1-3: Competitive Games on My Smurf (Comps)

Comp 1: Horrible, terrible no good very bad game. Practiced clutching since the Cypher was completely being annoying, toxic, and throwing (trying to sabotage our team). Was fuming by the end.

Comp 2: Much better team, still missing everything and being horrible.

Comp 3: Finally got a nice team and was able to focus on movement-based aiming.

Comp 4: Bad aiming. Focused on Sova utility. Hit someone with the ult using pure gamesense. 

Main Takeaways

  • I need to follow my previous concept of feeling out the unknown parts of aiming in a controlled setting (deathmatch or shooting range)
  • I’m much worse than before break, probably Bronze 1-2 level.
Game 1-3: Deathmatch Practice (DM)

DM 1: After practicing in the range, I realize that moving only the movement keys to aim is too hard. I need to do a little micro-adjusting with my mouse. I feel like I need to be looser about my mouse movement, when I intuitively move it in the opposite of my movement, I get some nasty headshots. Mostly I get destroyed.

DM 2: Still getting destroyed. I start to understand that movement-based aiming is basically what the Miyagi Do method is teaching.

DM 3: I realized that I need to make sure it’s not just about the movement and feeling that out. Aiming is about TIMING. I spend the entire deathmatch feeling out timing and it starts to be more clear. I am successfully about to “feel out” the aiming on a deep intuitive level like art or dance. 

Main Takeaways

  • I need to constantly move. Movement is something I will also need to practice getting a feeling for.
  • The movement of the crosshair should be with movement, smooth and intuitive.
  • You need to feel the mouse-hand connection, your posture, and your sensitivity. Shift to what feels good, shift to what feels clear and controlled.
  • Timing is absolutely key. Dying is not a problem. Waiting for the right moment is much more important. If you are getting killed first, that’s to be expected for good timing. Your timing will naturally tighten and your time to kill will go down without feeling rushed, out of control, or unclear.

I’m soooo happy!!!

I’m starting to “feel out” aiming just like I feel out drawings, dance and sales processes.

Here are the main takeways:

  • The main goal of practice sound is able to “Feel Out” and play with the mouse to crosshair connection, how to smoothly track, strafe your crosshair while moving, and shooting moving things. Play around with it, feel it out.
  • The Miyagi Do method is the main method you use to practice. However, you don’t just feel out the movement. You also feel out the timing. This is key.
  • I tend to rush and even if I get a kill, it doesn’t feel natural, in control, and comfortable. Dying is always preferable to bad timing. Since timing will get tighter, spamming will make sure you never improve.
  • The next things I need to feel out are:
    • Gun spray control
    •  Gamesense
      • watching the minimap
      • understanding timing
      • guessing what they will do next
      • Isolating 1v1s, only peeking as much as needed
      • Switching between primary and sidearms
    • Movement
      • How to jiggle and peek safety
      • How to get on top of things
      • When to pull out your knife
      • Agent movement abilities
    • Ability usage
      • Lineups
      • Timing and combos

I’m extremely confident that this method will NOT ONLY make you a monster after warming up, but every warmup will make you internally better at aiming (to the point that you will need to warm up less and less to have insane aim).

|

Valorant 4: Thoughts While I’m On Break

Byjack

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 Challenge 3: High Elo Play

Byjack

I played with my brother and his friend who are in Gold 1 and Plat 1 respectively.

I feel that a huge part of the problems I run into in playing Valorant is self doubt.

When I get worried that I am playing with people better than me, instead of learning and adapting, I freeze up and cannot think properly and play worse than I would normally:

  • I make bad decisions
  • I don’t take time to aim and spray wildly
  • I push too fast

One way I’ve handled this is lowering my expectations for myself and my game but this is still an ongoing challenge for me.

I also played with a girl who wasn’t that good at the game on my slow laggy laptop. It was an interesting experience because at first, I did really bad, but I ended up getting so many kills. She wasn’t very good so I felt the people we were matched with were in iron (who I should easily beat) but I found it hard because it’s hard for me to flick onto their head with my laggy laptop. I always find it tough to play on the little f*cker.

Two ways that I adjusted:

  1. Hold angles, stop pushing so fast
  2. Make sure I isolate as much as possible. Even if I miss, I might not die if I don’t peek out to 3 or 4 enemies.

I feel like these lessons can pass over to my regular gaming PC.