20 Valorant Tips You Wish You Knew When You Started Playing

Have you ever learned something new and you were just like “Man, I really wish I knew that when I started playing”? Well, that’s literally what this guide is about. Those bits of information literally make the world of difference between you getting better at a game, and you just walking around like a bot.
We are giving you all things that we think are the most important for players to know in Valorant. And some of these are things that players aren’t going to tell you. And we don’t mean they are secret tips that nobody heard of, but what we mean is that all the guides you’ll find online just consistently tell you the same things. So let us try to tell you some things that you don’t hear or read that often.

The first thing being, that aim isn’t that important as you think. Don’t get us wrong, having good aim can be a great asset, but people treat the game, especially when starting out, as if aim is the only important factor. When you’re learning the game you should focus on improving your raw aim. This means doing aim trainers and deathmatch, and actively trying to take duels in your matches. But there will be a point where your aim will be good enough, and that point will come sooner that you realize. People miss shots. Rather than telling yourself “my aim could have been better”, try to ask yourself how you could have made it easier to hit your shots. This sort of segues perfectly into the next tip.

Your teammates might be terrible but we’ve seen this in practice. Having a Radiant level player matched up with bad teammates, and they are able to make these bad teammates look like exceptional players. And they do that by playing off of them and turning their mistakes into an advantage. Basically the logic here is if you teammate is going to do something stupid, you yourself can try to make that stupid play less stupid. For example if you play Omen and your teammate is going to wide swing somebody for no reason, you can be there to blind that target whey they fight them. Or another way is if you teammate is just sitting in a one and done try to bait for them, because if you don’t, they’re just going to get themselves killed. Furthermore, what this means is that if you communicate with your team clearly and correctly, you can generally count on them to trade you. Trust us, we’ve practiced this with absolute beginners. If you tell them that you’re going to swing and ask them to swing with you, and then count it down, regardless of how good or bad that player is they will generally be able to get the trade.

Obviously the comparison Radiants to Immortals isn’t relevant to a lot of people who read the guide and that’s not any shade, everyone starts somewhere, but the thing you need to realize is that you can start working on your team play right now, whatever rank you are. Specifically what we mean is that Radiant players are constantly aware of what their teammates are doing, and how to play off of them. One great way to play off your teammates as well, is by comboing utility. For example, using and Omen Blind at the same time your Sova uses his Recon. Or using a Raze’s Ultimate at the time your Skye Ults. There are a lot of diferent ways you can combo abilities, but there are things you’ll see pros do all the time. Because one ability alone is generally a lot easier to handle than 2-3 abilities being combined together. If there is anything we’ve learned from Immortal lobbies and analyzing pros players, is that Immortals are really good at playing solo, but they don’t really understand team play all that much and it holds them back. And that means it’s probably holding you back in your rank too.

Obviously there’s the potential to rank up more by playing more. And the best way to get better at the game is by playing the game. But in our experience the best way to rank up is to play just a few games a day, and actually focus during them. Don’t tilt, don’t rage when you miss shots, don’t get upset with your teammates. Just play a few games, and genuinely enjoy them. You’ll play better, you’ll notice you win more, and when you lose, you won’t go on a loss streak, because you’ll quit playing. The counterpart to this is queueing a low, and hey if you win every game doing this, it will be faster, but that’s not normally how it’s going to go, and that’s why if you’re looking to climb, I suggest to play less.

Tip number 5 has to deal with team comps, and that tip is absolutely necessary to have a controller on your team. No matter if it is Viper, Omen, Brimstone, or Astra, you need to have a controller. Otherwise, you’re going to have a very rough time in the game. Some gamers think that the game is not even fun without a controller. There are just too many angles and it’s incredibly obnoxious to deal with them. This isn’t just our take, we’ve heard pro players to say this before. You can get away without a Sentinel or an Initiator, but if your team doesn’t have a controller, it’s going to be a rough time and you should save yourself the trouble, and either dodge, or lock controller.

If you guys got a controller, don’t lock Sentinel if you don’t know how to play it. Don’t lock Initiator If you don’t know how to play it. We’d rather have you lock an agent that you know how to play well, rather than an agent that you’ve never played before, but is good on a map. The only exception to this rule maybe is that Viper is pretty necessary on Breeze and Sage is pretty necessary on Icebox. You can obviously still win without them, but they are both very strong on those respective maps, and we do believe without them, it does make the game quite a bit harder. But hey, if you don’t even know how to use those agents on those maps, not going to mater all that much. Remember, it’s the utility that makes those agents different, and if you don’t know how to use their utility, they’re useless, so don’t pick agents you don’t know how to play for the purpose of filling (unless it’s Controller).

This one is a bit more difficult to do, but what we’ve started to realize most recently, is that when you’re dealing with a team that likes to just full rush everything, the best way to deal with them is to set up crossfires, and shoot them when they’re coming in. You will not be able to deal with a 5 man rush solo, when they are using utility, and barreling down on site. You need your teammates to help you and you need to position in a way, where you and your teammates play off of each other. Obviously, throwing down a molly to block the entrance giving your team more time to get there if you play off of you, is super helpful, but if you’re setting up on site in a way where you’re going to be taking a 1v1 duel, you really don’t want to do this. The way most site defenses work, is you’ll have one player in a position where key take first contact, and then you’ll have another player who peeks off of their contact. But if instead you have one player take contact solo, die, and then another player takes contact solo, and die, like what have you accomplished? Set up a crossfire instead with your teammates on site, stop setting up solo. Play off of your teammates, you’ll get more kills and win more games.

Crosshair Placement is kind of meme’d up, but the reason for this is because crosshair placement is basically the whole game. At the end of the day, if you crosshair placement was perfect like many players think theirs is, you’d win every single one of your 1v1 duels, because all you would have to do is click. This is why it’s so important to learn when you’re starting out, but many lower rank players kinda just shrug it off and go “Yeah, yeah”. The reason we say it a lot is because it’s a very large part of the game. If you are under the rank of Immortal your crosshair placement probably sucks, try to work on it a little.

Here we mean the bad type of baiting. Sometimes your head space is just not in the place it should be, and you don’t even realize you’re baiting your teammates incredibly hard. Maybe you’re sitting there inside of a smoke doing nothing, or maybe you’re playing in a position far away, when you could be pushing up to help them. Baiting your teammates is really easy to accidentally do, and it takes active attention to not do it. Baiting isn’t something you just flip a switch and you stop doing it, even the best players have times when a rounds plays out and they’re like, oh shoot I accidentally baited the heck out of that guy. It happens, but by acknowledging that it happens, we can try to make it happen less. Always keep an eye on your map, and try to think about how you can help your teammates during the round, and it will reduce the amount you accidentally bait them.

Speaking of looking at the map though, let’s talk about the opposite thing that has gotten us all killed far too much, and that is looking at the map, at the worst time, and getting killed because of this. One of the ways we’ve learned to avoid this, if you’re holding an angle, rather than looking at the map, try asking your teammates what they’re seeing. Hopefully, if you are holding an angle, you can rely on the callouts from your teammates just a little bit more, and that way you won’t have to glance at the map all the time. Because theoretically, they all have the same information on their map too, right? So, hopefully if you ask people what they’re seeing, they can say the same exact thing you’ll see. This obviously isn’t always going to work, because sometimes people won’t talk at all, but in this case, it might be best to just give up the angle, look at the map and then re-peek afterwards, to save yourself the risk.

This tip is a bit more obvious but still so many players have a bad habit of this, and that is that Pushing smokes when they really shouldn’t do it. We’ve all been there when we’re pushing a smoke thinking “I really shouldn’t push this”. Like we said, so many players have this bad habit, of needing to push every single smoke they see, and just waiting a little bit for the smoke to dissipate, can often times be so much better. You don’t need to push every single smoke you see, it’s okay to let a smoke exist, and hold it. Often times players will push them, and you’ll pick up a free kill because of this. Like we said though, there are some times when you have to push a smoke, but start thinking about the situations where you don’t have to a little more, and you’ll probably save yourself a number of times.

Tip 12 takes us to probably one of the biggest things you’d wish you knew, which is communication is one of the harder skills to improve in Valorant. This one literally just revolved around getting people out of their comfort zone. So many gamers are incredibly introverted and trying to get people to communicate effectively in a game can be really hard. That being said, that’s why it’s so valuable, if you can get people who actually know how to communicate well on a team. At some point, you’ll wish when you started out in Valorant you practiced making callouts a lot more, it would have helped you improve a lot faster. This is something I still struggle with today, and it’s because, communication is hard, and for many players, it’s the thing holding them back.

Another problem many players have though, which is they’re probably using counter strafing wrong. A lot of people know what counterstrafing is, but don’t actively use it in their matches. Instead what they do is they go “yeah, yeah, counter strafing” and then every time they take an engagement, they full crouch in the open, and get themselves killed. If you are taking a prolonged engagement in the open, or you’re fighting multiple enemies at the same time, you need to be counter strafing between your shots. Otherwise, you’re just going to get traded out, or worse, killed before you even get one, Counter strafing doesn’t actually make you accurate faster in Valorant, so the point of counter strafing isn’t to hit your shots faster, the point of it is to make yourself more difficult to hit.

This tip takes us into something that many players especially in low elo struggle with, and that is relying too much on gimmicks. What are gimmicks though? Well those are those wombo combo Killjoy setups, Cypher Setups, Sage wall boosts, aggressive Omen plays, double shock dart lineups, stuff like that. And listen Gimmicks can be really cool, but what you need to recognize, is they’re gimmicks for a reason, and you’re probably going to peak with them eventually. Whether that peak is Gold 3, or that Peak is immortal, eventually you’re going to run into players that they don’t work against, and you’re going to have to adapt. This doesn’t mean remove those gimmicks from your playbook though, this means just understand when they will work, and when they won’t work, and use them sparingly. A lot of players don’t have this skill, but when you develop that skill, that’s when you’ll run into some of the best, and more exciting players to watch.

That sort of ties into our next tip though, which is to pay attention to pro play. When you watch pro play, it will be a lot more simple to understand what standard play looks like, and how you can sort of copy what they do. Now obviously pro play and match making are super different, but you’ll start to pick up on basic concepts of things that are good. You’ll understand how pros play clutch situations, how they use their utility to grab territory, and how they play around their teammates really well. People roast the casters in Valorant a lot, but some of them actually do an excellent job of explaining what players are doing, and why their doing it. When casting, generally there is going to be a play by play caster, and then a color caster. The color casters job is to generally provide analysis during the game, to give viewers a detailed understanding of why pros might do what they do, and then the play by plays caster is generally to cover the more hype moments, and break down the more intense visuals on the screen for the viewer. If you’re looking to improve, try to listen to what the color caster is saying during the slower parts of the round, to have a good understanding what is going on in the game, many of these guys do a really good job.

If you haven’t been recording your games yet, you really should. One of the easiest ways to pick out your mistakes in Valorant, is to look back through them when you’re not playing, and think about what you could have done better.

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This is going to be to try and find players better than you play with. Maybe you will find these guys in your matches, who just seem to be really strong players, or maybe you have to go out of your way to find a community to play with. Generally, if you put yourself out there, you’ll be able to find players who are better than you, and that’s how you’re going to improve the fastest because at the end of the day, playing with people better than you, is going to make things more challenging, and things that are more challenging, always offer more for you to learn, and grow from. What we highly suggest is to encounter good players in your matches, add them, and try to play a few matches with them, you never know who you’ll meet this way.

Something else you have to keep in mind with people in Valorant though, is toxic players will never say anything useful. And this is in reference obviously to players who don’t want to mute people because they might make a necessary callout. Remember earlier how we said that you have pretty much all of the information you need on your map? I mean don’t get me wrong, there are some things you can’t see on your map, such as audio, or your teammates intentions, but you can still kind of read players intentions just by looking at how they’re positioned, and you can still see enemies when they appear on the map. So, trust us when we say someone who is being an absolute jerk to you is never going to start being like “Hey, I’am swinging this corner, can you trade me?”, “I hear 4 B they’re in spawn flanking you!”. This stuff just isn’t going to happen. Trust us, we have thousands of hours in this game now, rather than making helpful callouts, what they’re going to do is bait you, and then get upset when you die after they bait you. It’s not worth it, just mute those guys, and try you best to not only win the game, but enjoy the game, because you shouldn’t be letting some jerk on the internet ruin an experience for you, that is supposed to be fun.

A lot of players must have this really warped mentally that they need to hard carry every single game that they are in, but that’s just not the truth. You have to play well don’t get me wrong, and I would say you have to pull your weight, but if you want to climb. You need to do your job, and a little bit more. That should be your goal every game. Don’t expect to hard carry, and there are going to be gamers where you might actually have to hard carry to win, but if you want to climb, matchmaking should do a good job of creating balanced teams, meaning that all you have to do, is pull your weight, and a bit more. This won’t always hold true, but most of the time it will, and this will prevent you from having that whole mentality that it’s you vs the world, because it’s really not. You have 4 other teammates on your team that are the same rank as you, so stop trying to act like a hero, and just try to do your job. You’ll be surprised how much this helps.

As we already said earlier in the article, you have to always try to play better and to learn from yours and others’ mistakes. But at some point you might feel really powerless like you can’t complete a certain task yourself. One of the hardest things in Valorant is to play good while your teammates are absolute noobs. Although, we told you to try playing even with bad teammates, sometimes you can get tired of trying and trying all over again, while the other people on your team are not helping. Luckily, there are various Valorant boosting services out there, and Boosting Ground’s professional players will be more than happy to be the teammates you’ve ever dreamed of. We offer very affordable prices, account and data security and 24/7 live customer support!