Valorant 20: The Combination of Crosshair Placement and Strafing

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