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
Today we are going back to the Valorant Challenge but from a different perspective.
I strongly felt that the one time when I didn’t feel stressed at all, but instead felt the timings of the enemy and where they could be, and how I could systematically take them apart, I was playing Valorant at a significantly higher level.
Some thoughts for today:
Closing eyes to mental reset
Playing music to hype up
Breathing and letting the energy carry the action
Most of all, I will endeavor to feel out the enemy’s position and figure out how I can take the map piece by piece with util, teamwork and aim diff.
I will create another post after the game to review how that went.
A new mentality that I’ve been working with is the idea of chaining kills.
Come up with a play that I want to go for (util, direction, etc.)
Go for not a single kill, but a multikill
Expect more than one
Have a gameplan for getting not one, but 5 kills
It is interesting that taking the offensive makes you much better at being confident. Also, expecting multiple attackers and working on killing as many as possible makes it a lot harder for people to catch you with a trade.
Something that I noticed when playing Valorant today, is that I tend to speed up and rush when I feel under pressure or stressed, when in actuality, I need to slow down.
Last game I trusted my instincts, and really slowed down when I felt danger and I felt it was much better.
I realized that when I feel safe, I can move fast. When I feel in danger, it is time to exercise extreme caution like in real life.
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.
I want to learn how to have comfortable hand positioning
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.
