The Most Popular VALORANT Pro Gear – August 2024

With VALORANT Champions behind us (congratulations to the winners!) the game’s most important competitive circuit has come to an end for the year. As such, there’s no better time to look at the meta when it comes to VALORANT pro gear. In this article, we’ll go over the most used gear by professional VALORANT players, and analyze why these particular products are so well-loved in the pro VALORANT scene.

For this article, we use data from 434 analyzed VALORANT pros.

Mice

The mouse department is the first one where we see a big surprise. The de facto king of gaming mice -the Logitech G Pro X Superlight– has been dethroned. Razer’s Viper V3 Pro has taken the top spot in the VALORANT pro gear scene. That’s wildly impressive, considering the fact that it wasn’t even released at the start of the year. It’s no secret that the newest Viper was conceived as a direct competitor to the GPX, and it seems like that paid off.

The difference between the two flagship mice is a measly 1% right now. However, both Logitech mice (the Superlight 1 and 2) were at 40% at the start of the year, whereas now they have to be satisfied with 33%. That’s a 7% drop. It’ll be interesting to see if Logitech’s flagship mouse can recover from this.

What’s notable about the Superlight 2 is that it’s having some difficulties in convincing users to swap over to it. Compared to when the first Superlight released as the successor to the G Pro Wireless, we see a slower rate of Logitech users making the swap to the latest version.

The Superlight 2 is closely followed by Razer’s DeathAdder V3 Pro.

Rounding out the top 5 is the Razer Viper V2 Pro. This still has great internals, and its different shape (long and flat versus the V3’s boxier design) might be the reason why it still has a lot of loyal users. Both the Viper V2 Pro as well as the DeathAdder V3 Pro have remained stable since the start of the year.

Brands

Thanks to the huge popularity of the Viper V3 Pro, Razer can now call itself the #1 mouse brand in pro VALORANT. Logitech held this position for years, but now they have to (temporarily?) hand over the reigns to the green brand, as it went from a market share of 49% at the start of the year to 36% now.

Following much further behind, we see ZOWIE. Despite falling out of favor with many hobbyists and enthusiasts, it’s still the third most popular mouse manufacturer in the professional VALORANT scene, though they also dropped by 2% when compared to January.

Keyboards

To anyone who has been following the keyboard scene for a while it’ll be no surprise that the Wooting 60 HE is the #1 board. The VALORANT pro gear scene was one of the first markets outside of Fortnite where the Wooting really started to gain popularity, so it’s not strange to see it here. Even in 2024, the 60 HE has gained 7%.

Following the Wooting, we see Razer keyboards coming out of basically nowhere. In January, the Huntsman V3 Pro TKL had a market share of ~5% in the pro scene, and today that sits at 15%. Another impressive result for Team Razer.

What’s blatantly obvious here is that the pro scene is shifting towards analog keyboards. Those are, objectively speaking, way better than traditional mechanical boards for gaming. As such, it’s no surprise that we see mostly analog keyboards in this chart. Features such as Rapid Trigger makes those boards a lot more responsive and natural to use, and we suspect that we’ll see the numbers for mechanical boards shrink even further over the next couple of months and years.

The Logitech G Pro X is a good example of that. It had a market share of 11% at the start of the year, which is now down to 6%.

Brands

Razer can now proudly call itself the top keyboard brand in VALORANT. They gained over 15% of market share over the past 8 months, which is just enough to put them past Wooting. It’s worth noting that Wooting hasn’t hit their ceiling yet either; the brand is still growing every month. It’ll be an exciting battle to see who comes out on top.

Logitech -which was the top brand at the start of the year- saw a 6% decrease and now sits in the third spot.

Mousepads

Mousepads are in a golden age right now. Every single week, some (new) brand is coming out with a new premium mousepad. That’s bad news for the wallets of collectors, but good news for everyone else. This renewed attention towards more premium mouse surfaces can also clearly be seen in the VALORANT scene.

The Artisan Zero, a mousepad that was previously only known to a very small group of enthusiasts, is the most used mousepad in the VALORANT pro scene. Other enthusiast pads, like the Lethal Gaming Gear Saturn Pro and the Kurosun Samurai, don’t quite make the top 5, but they do have their fair share of users.

Obviously, it’s not all ‘niche’ stuff. Pads like the Logitech G640 (-3%) and the SteelSeries QcK Heavy (-2%) might be trending downwards, but they’re still being used by a large amount of pros.

If you ask us, this is one of the most exciting times ever for mousepad enthusiasts, so we’re very curious to see what these stats look like in a couple of months and years.

Brands

It was pretty much unthinkable just a couple of years ago, but Artisan is the most used mousepad brand in VALORANT. The niche (though you probably can’t call them niche anymore) Japanese brand gained 7% since January, giving them a sizeable lead over their competitors.

ZOWIE (-2%) and Razer (+4%) fill out the top 3. What’s notable is that Kuroson -a new and small mousepad brand- enters the top 10 with 2%. Perhaps that’s further evidence that the scene is moving towards more premium options for their mousepads, but we’ll see what the future holds.

Headsets

If you’ve been following our infographics and our articles for a while, you’re in for a shock. For the first time in years, the HyperX Cloud II is not the most used headset in any given game. Razer’s BlackShark V2 Pro has taken the crown after a remarkable +16% over the past 8 months. The Cloud II losing 3% of its market share was thus enough to give the crown to the BlackShark V2 Pro. The Logitech G Pro X also had to donate some of its market share, as it went down by around 5%.

It will be very interesting to see if this is a short-term trend or if we’ll see Razer’s competition-focused headset take over as the standard headset for competitive gamers.

Another noteworthy aspect is that wireless headsets are really gaining traction. Those have been out for a while, but three out of five headsets in the top 5 being wireless is definitely something new.

Brands

Despite their Cloud II losing the top spot, HyperX (-5%) is still the most used headset brand in VALORANT. Razer is following closely behind though, so we might see this change by the time we write our next article on this subject.

Logitech comes in third after losing 4% of market share.

Monitors

If we had to describe the monitor market in the pro VALORANT scene in one word, it would be very easy. ZOWIE. The XL2566K is currently being used by around a third of all professional players, and every other monitor in the top 5 is also made by ZOWIE.

Usage numbers for their products remain quite stable, but there haven’t been any huge monitor releases this year (yet) so that’s quite logical.

In case you’re interested: the first non-ZOWIE monitor is the Alienware AW2521H, with a market share of 2%.

Brands

Since the start of the year, ZOWIE have made their grip even firmer. They went up by 3%. The brand is obviously the de facto standard monitor brand for the VALORANT pro gear scene.

Alienware gained 1%, ASUS lost 2%, and AOC gained 1%. Those are marginal figures though, as it seems like it’ll be a very long time before anyone will challenge ZOWIE.

Conclusion

There have been some interesting development in the professional VALORANT scene. Contrary to some other esports like CS2, VALORANT pros aren’t shy to switch up their gear, and that really shows in this article. We’ve seen some of the industry’s mainstays being kicked off of their spot, and we also see some new and smaller brands on the rise. We can’t wait to see how the VALORANT pro gear scene develops over the coming months and years.

Lars

Reviews, Community, FPS

Former semi-pro gamer turned writer, product reviewer, and community manager.