For the majority of competitive players, there is one main goal in mind: winning games and ranking up. Nevertheless, not all players are made the same. It’s important to play to your own strengths and not feel pressured to conform to the “norm” of how a game should be played.
If you are a player who enjoys playing ranked game modes whenever you log onto the games you play, you’ll know that there’s nothing more satisfying than putting up a good performance to rank up. Of course, the most important factor in how your games end is how good you are as a player, so it’s important to practice and improve to win more consistently.
In the majority of competitive esports, there is typically a “meta”, or “correct” way to play games. This is due to the nature of how games are designed. For example, Valorant encourages the use of long-range weapons such as the Vandal and the Phantom due to the mobility and damage output from these weapons. Additionally, abilities typically have an orthodox way of being used: Sage’s Barrier Orb for blocking enemies, smokes for cutting off deep line-of-sight, etc.
In reality, these mechanics are promoted, but not enforced. Nothing is stopping players from using game mechanics in unorthodox/surprising ways to catch their opponents off-guard, winning their games in a different way. Of course, this is less so the case in professional environments, for reasons including being able to study opponents beforehand and the amount of time and practice available for these teams. But for the average matchmaking game online, anything is fair game.
In this article, we will cover this concept in the game of Valorant by looking at some examples of players that are successful while playing the game in an unorthodox way.
If you’ve played Valorant, you would know that there are two different ways to win rounds. Either eliminating all of the opposing team, or detonating/defusing the spike. Most games will have a combination of these objectives being completed, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter how you win rounds. Thus, as long as you accomplish these objectives in one way or another, you can succeed in your games.
To understand how unorthodox strategies are even viable, let’s take a closer look at the mechanics of guns/abilities in Valorant.
In Valorant, it’s safe to say that the “meta”, or effective guns are the Phantom and the Vandal. They have a solid fire rate, capability to one-shot opponents in the head, have decent penetration, and a healthy magazine size. With the way the game’s economy is designed, these rifles are usually the best option for the majority of rounds, barring thrifty rounds and purchasing operators.
Although these guns are the best all around, other weapons may have one or two specific characteristics that may be superior. For example, the Spectre doessignificantly less damage, but its running accuracy and fire rate are superior to the rifles. The Judge is an automatic shotgun, with extremely high damage output and moving accuracy at close range. The Guardian is a semi-automatic gun, with higher penetration and body shot damage, but with a slower fire rate and smaller clip size.
If you understand how to place yourself in situations where these characteristics are heavily in play, you can win duels against guns that are superior on paper. Although positioning is important, you also need to use your abilities in tandem with your gunplay to refine your playstyle.
The abilities in Valorant were designed to be versatile, but each type of ability has a theoretical “proper” utilization. Smokes are implemented to block off enemy sightlines, molotovs are meant to prevent enemies from taking ground, etc. In most cases, it’s important to utilize the abilities in their conventional ways to help the team as a whole, but if you are able to properly communicate to your teammates about what play you want to make, you can use abilities in any way you desire.
To tie in how abilities can help your gunplay be more effective, let’s consider an example with the Judge. At close range, the Judge is the deadliest weapon in the game. However, if there is considerable distance between you and the enemy, it’s impossible to deal enough damage. To counter this, you can use smokes to close the gap between yourself and the enemy. When moving through a smoke, you can only see players when you come into close contact. Thus, by taking away the range advantage of your enemy, you seize the advantage with your Judge.
This is just one of many examples that are possible in Valorant, and we’ll take a look at three successful content creators who each put their own spin on how they play the game.
Perhaps the most controversial Radiant player in history, Dasnerth has a play style like no other, using only the Judge with his primary agent as Cypher. Theoretically, this combination should not yield any success. By limiting yourself to only the Judge, you are essentially deadweight in long-range duels right?
Take a look at this clip of Dasnerth eliminating three professional players in A Main of Ascent. You can hear him using the enemy footstep audio to find the perfect time to peek out. Additionally, he combines great shotgun aim with perfectly timed jumps to avoid being shot. Dasnerth knows that his speed significantly decreases when getting tagged by a bullet, so he stays mobile to give him enough time to get his shots off.
Another example of clever use of game mechanics is this following clip. After the enemies close the door and begin planting, Dasnerth walks right up, quickly breaks through using his Judge, and runs into three enemies who are completely off-guard. Even professional players aren’t necessarily aware of how fast the door can be broken with a Judge, which is a prime example on how unorthodox playstyles take advantage of players who aren’t expecting them.
Of course, Dasnerth doesn’t always make the perfect plays. Tuning into any of his streams will show you that he gets countered quite often by alert players. Nonetheless, he sits in the ranks of Radiant, maintaining a positive kill/death ratio.
Dasnerth’s Episode 5 Act 2 statistics (from tracker.gg)
The truth is, it’s not easy to make this playstyle work. If you made the average Radiant player use only a Judge while playing Cypher, they wouldn’t be able to immediately replicate the performances Dasnerth puts up. It’s through a lot of practice and experience that Dasnerth is able to make the right play at the right time.
The next creator is none other than T1’s Grim, infamous for using Sage’s Barrier Orb to boost himself into unexpected angles, typically yielding eliminations on even the top Radiant players. By essentially creating unforeseeable off-angles, Grim is able to shoot his opponents before they even know where he is set up.
Similar to Dasnerth, Grim’s playstyle receives criticism, as his usage of utility is heavily dependent on whether he can get value through eliminations, instead of using it for more team-focused objectives. Everything is great when Grim gets a couple of eliminations, but less so when he dies instantly, leaving his team without a heal and a wall.
Again, it takes a plethora of knowledge to do what Grim does at a top level. Once he uses a certain boost or technique, it becomes useless as opponents will simply check the angle in following rounds. Thus, it’s important to put in the time to learn different setups for every round to get the most value out of the investment of the Barrier Orb.
Perhaps lesser known than the other two creators, JinZled is a Viper player who takes lineups to the next level. If you haven’t heard of lineups, they are essentially when a player positions themselves far away from the spike, then deploying damage dealing utility to prevent defenders from defusing. Most players will know one or two lineups, typically thrown from the main entrance to a site.
JinZled takes this to the next level, having lineups from essentially anywhere on the map, making it impossible for enemies to locate him before he deploys his Snake Bites. He combines these lineups with clever placements of Viper’s Poison Cloud and Viper’s Pit to sneakily prevent defusals.
Once again, a playstyle like this involves a lot of time spent creating and practicing strategies. It’s important for JinZled to have a versatile playbook, so that he can perform no matter what the opposition is doing.
To take it back to the main point, why would someone play unorthodox when it’s not the most tried and tested way to play the game? Well, it could be for a variety of reasons, but it’s mainly about how comfortable it is to the player. For example, you might have a history of playing barebones first-person shooters, meaning you have good mechanics, but lack effective utilization of abilities. Alternatively, you could come from a game where the guns have no recoil, making it difficult to spray using rifles. No matter what gaming experience you have beforehand (even having any at all), it’s entirely possible you might be more comfortable with some mechanics than others.
We can even see this in our examples above: Dasnerth struggles to use rifles, coming from a history of Minecraft, where the combat system was close-range, and more lenient on hitboxes. Thus, he uses the Judge, a weapon that deals damage as long as your crosshair is generally on the opponent, while moving at a close range.
The similarity between the two games (close range, jumping, crosshair placement)
JinZled doesn’t have exceptional mechanical ability, but his sneaky playstyle enables him to get behind opponents or eliminate them with only utility.
If you have the time available, it’s obviously better to invest it into learning the game’s fundamentals. However, this will take a lot of effort, and if your goal with gaming is just to have fun, it might not be worth it to you. Thus, if you find that you feel more comfortable playing the game in a certain way, you should try to play to your strengths, instead of forcing yourself to learn a whole new playstyle.
It’s very important to consider your goals when using an unconventional playstyle. Although you might find success winning many of your games, it’s possible to encounter smart players who will find the counter to your strategy. Thus, when you start to get to more difficult lobbies, the harder it is to keep winning, unless your strategy is extremely refined.
If your goal is to eventually pursue a professional career, or to reach the top regional leaderboards, it’s probably a good idea to practice the fundamental mechanics of the game in order to be adaptable to the majority of scenarios. Because these environments differ vastly from randomized matches against standard players, specialized strategies tend to get shut down, or “anti-stratted” once other top players figure it out.
The playstyles of the creators listed above all revolved around catching the opposition off-guard. If the enemy team studied places that Dasnerth and Grim played, or where JinZled does his lineups, they could easily create protocols to directly counter these strategies. Thus, if you wish to seriously improve, you should seek to practice your fundamental mechanics and game knowledge, which will reliably help you in every situation.
But, if you’re a casual player who just wants to rank up, you really shouldn’t feel pressured to conform to a certain playstyle. After all, the condition to win rounds is that you have to eliminate players, so it doesn’t matter how you utilize the game’s mechanics to accomplish this. Additionally, if you are trying to win while having fun, it shouldn’t matter how you choose to play the game, as long as it isn’t intrusive to other players.
At the end of the day, people shouldn’t forget what the root purpose of games are: entertainment. Thus, if you make an effort to win your games, it shouldn’t matter if your playstyle is conventional or not. The most important thing is that your playstyle shouldn’t intrude on your teammates, and that you are at least making an active effort to try.
