|

Valorant 16: Initial Thoughts From The Coach

Byjack

I had an initial discussion with a Valorant coach on a couple of things on improving in Valorant and here are the main takeaways:

  • In low elo (gold and below), aim and mechanics are more important than gamesense as low elo doesn’t have much gamesense worth learning
    • I suspect it is because low elo doesn’t have many patterns or strategies that are worth learning to play against
  • In low elo, try to take as many gunfights as possible to get better
  • To train gamesense, try to play with as many people as possible, ideally five stack
  • Stop playing so much sheriff in the deathmatch because it isn’t the gun you use in your games as much
  • In solo queue, try to play off of your teammates more, try to entry together more

 

Similar Posts

|

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 21: Aim Mechanics

Byjack

I’ve narrowed down core aiming principals to a couple of things:

  • General Aim: Pointing your body toward your target
  • Survivability: strafe peeking (strafe out, prediction of enemy location, hit strafe and shoot at the same time as seeing enemy)
  • Preaiming: crosshair placement
  • Flicking: loose mouse hand + some general aim mechanics

Overall, I think the most important technique is just having the mindset of pointing to your body toward your target (what I’m starting to call general aim since it gets you in the general vicinity of your target). This helps massively with confidence, with holding angles, and with tracking and flicking.

Second most important is probably a combination of a loose mousehand and good crosshair placement as this allows you to hit most targets while also being ready for a flick. This pairs with a strong understanding of how to slice a pie and clear a site.

Finally, some sort of strafing is important as it increases survivability by a lot.

There are a couple more aiming techniques that I feel are significantly less important as they are more niche. These will help you in deathmatch and higher elos but are not part of core aim:

  • Strafe shooting: general ability to track and strafe a moving target, paying attention to crosshair
  • Spray control: the ability to crouch spray and spray adjust
  • Angle holding: predicting how close or wide a peek will be

Strafe shooting is probably the most important as it is good for long range fights as movement based aiming is a lot more effective on those fights.

Spray control is pretty niche to close range gun fights and fighting multiple enemies.

Angle holding is very important but general aim and strafe clearing are more key to holding angles.

 

|

Valorant 42: Chaining Kills

Byjack

A new mentality that I’ve been working with is the idea of chaining kills.

  1. Come up with a play that I want to go for (util, direction, etc.)
  2. Go for not a single kill, but a multikill
    1. Expect more than one
    2. 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.

|

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

 

|

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 15: Reframe

Byjack

I’ve been doing my Valorant challenge for about four months now and I haven’t seen much progress.

I think there are a couple of changes that needs to happen.

  1. I need to be kinder to myself. I don’t have much time for gaming and this is my very first FPS game. I have already improved by quite a lot in the time given.
  2. I need to be a lot more focused on learning and make the learning less effort. I will try to play only one ranked game every day on my main and VOD review that.
  3. I need to focus the rest of my time with having fun with Valorant. Creating more motivation is important.
  4. I am going to get more outside help, will get more people to review my gameplay with me.

I am going to make a list of things I actually like doing on Valorant:

  1. Trying new agents
  2. Playing on my smurfs with ridiculous challenges:
    • A specific gun (sheriff, marshall etc.)
    • Play only with guns from ground, never buy
    • Rushing in as quickly as possible
  3. Deathmatch can be fun
  4. More aggression in general