The 13 Best VALORANT Tips for Beginners
VALORANT has grown exponentially in popularity since its release in 2020. It has persuaded players from all across the globe to give this tactical hero shooter a try. VALORANT can be challenging to get good at initially. The combination of hero-like abilities in a tactical and strategic shooter setting needs a bit of getting used to, which is why we’ve gathered the 13 best VALORANT tips for beginners in this article.
Getting good at this game takes time and practice. We all know how hard ranked is, especially with instant lockers, bad teammates, and poor communication. Some tips, however, can make your journey a whole lot easier. In this article, we will be going over 13 tips that can help you in learning the game.
Also read: VALORANT Ranks Explained
1. Use Optimal VALORANT Settings
Before we get into more mechanical and strategical tips, the first thing you need to do is to optimize your settings. Having the optimal settings can give you a little boost in ranked. This means having a comfortable sensitivity, good crosshair, and optimal video settings for high fps. We already have a whole article covering all of the best VALORANT options and settings, so we recommend checking that one out. They are taken from the best players in VALORANT (the pros) and are an ideal place to start.
2. Find Comfortable Agents to Main
To win matches consistently, you need to build a pool of agents that you are comfortable with. While having a single main like Jett sounds good, if she is taken you don’t have another agent to fill. A good idea is to learn and master at least 4-5 agents, in all roles. Having a wider selection of comfortable agents makes filling for your team easier.
Example: your teams need a controller, and you are pretty good with Omen, meaning that you can fill with him. On the other hand, if you had only one main, you’d be playing with an uncomfortable agent the whole game.
Of course, learning and mastering an agent takes time and practice, but if you truly want to get good at VALORANT you will need to dedicate a significant amount of time to the game. Of course players will always have one or two agents they feel best on and we’re not saying that you should completely master a big variety of agents, but it definitely pays off to be at least proficient at all roles.
For beginners, these are the agents that are easier to master: Brimstone and Omen for controllers, Killjoy and Sage for sentinels, Reyna, Raze or Phoenix for Duelists, and Sova, Breach or Fade for initiators.
3.Communicate With Your Team
As a team-based game, communication is one the most important parts of winning your games and ranking up in VALORANT. Playing together as a unit can and will improve your odds of winning any game, so speaking up is of crucial importance.
Even basic callouts for utilities and enemy positions can help your team out in winning the round. Sometimes your teammates can be hesitant in communication, so you should try to be the first one to initiate communication. Better teamwork can be the catalyst for your ranked growth.
Comms are especially hard in lower ranks because many players are starting out and don’t have mics or don’t want to use them. In this case, you need to be the conscientious person who carries out your duty, which will encourage the players to open up and give comms and win more games. And even if they don’t speak up themselves: your call that alerts a teammate of a flank can make or break rounds, so keep talking, even if no one talks back and it feels a little awkward.
4. Understand All Maps and Agents
Starting the game and having to learn the maps and agents might seem a little fatiguing but if you’re up to it, the process is very fun and fulfilling to do. Playing unrated gives you insight into how the various maps and agents are played and how the comms and callouts work.
There is always more to learn about the maps and the agents you play. There are lineups, off-angles, and much more. If you are losing matches on a certain map, you need to learn about the map more. Look into how rotations work, what the best positions are, and find angles to hold based on your playstyle. It won’t hurt to jump into a custom game and figure out the map for yourself.
Having a better understanding of agents, maps and the mechanics of the game will help you win more games and rank up, so we recommend reading up on all of the abilities and ultimates that the agents have before jumping into ranked games. You don’t want to come up against a Killjoy (for example) while having no idea what her ult does. If you’ve been out of the game for a while and a new agent has come out, experiment with the agent in an offline server and get to know the agent a bit before jumping into a ranked match.
5. Try To Avoid Tilt
You lost a couple of games, or maybe you are not just feeling your aim right now. Whatever the reason is, it’s always a good idea to keep a positive mindset toward the game. Tilting is like a snowball effect: you tilt, you play worse, and you tilt again. It worsens your decision-making and makes you make bad plays. Tilting the other team is a strategy pros use to gain an advantage, so playing while tilted is never a good idea.
It might sound a bit crazy but if you are having a bad day, just take a break. If you can’t switch to a more passive playstyle and/or nothing is working, there’s no use in grinding out the ranked ladder. Getting angry over little things only makes the game more painful. At the end of the day, it’s a game, and if you are not having fun, just log off for a few hours.
You don’t have to take our word for it: TenZ says you ought not to queue ranked if you’re tilted because it will only tilt you more if things don’t go your way, so start being merry and have fun. Staying positive even while losing 13-0 is a quality that can only help you in the long term in your journey to Radiant, and if you find that you’re really getting worked up, take a little break.
6. Focus on Improving Movement and Aim
Aiming is where almost all players struggle. Hitting headshots consistently is a skill that’s can be hard to master. However, there are some tips and tricks that make aiming a lot easier.
Aim
The first and most important advice for any players struggling with the aim is to stop changing their sensitivity. Find a sensitivity that you are comfortable with and stick to it. You can make tiny adjustments of course, but if you’re a new player you won’t help yourself if you drastically change your sens every single day. If you need help with this, see our article on how to find the best sensitivity.
Also know that consistent aim comes from consistent training. Aim is like a muscle in a body, the more you train it the better it gets. If you truly want your aim to get better, start implementing an aim training routine. Just going into the range and shooting bots for half an hour each day can massively improve your aim.
Crosshair Placement
The second thing to master is crosshair placement, which means keeping the crosshair at a head level all the time. The reason you see pros hitting headshots consistently is their excellent crosshair placement. Keeping the crosshair at a head level all the time makes hitting headshots easier since all you need to do is micro-adjust. This takes a lot of practice, since newer or inexperienced shooter players tend to keep their crosshairs aimed at the ground or at stomach level.
Really try to be conscious about your crosshair, even when no one is around. Think to yourself ‘if an enemy popped up from around the corner I’m looking at, would I need to do a massive flick in order to do a headshot?’ If the answer is ‘yes’ then your crosshair placement is off. Getting into the habit of placing your crosshair correctly (even in areas where you don’t expect enemies) is a good one.
Movement
Crosshair placement can help you solve a good chunk of your aiming problem, but there is one thing that can truly help a lot – that’s movement. It might be hard to believe, but most people who struggle with bad aim actually have bad movement that limits their aim.
Movement is a combination of positioning, clearing angles, and peeking. A player with good movement and bad aim is better than a player with good aim and bad movement. Just being thoughtful of your peeks and positioning can make hitting shots easier, and it can also make you harder to hit. If all you do are Ferrari peeks where you launch yourself into a wide open area you’re going to get killed by someone who has cover from a bunch of corners pretty much every single time.
Training These Aspects Of Your Gameplay
Here are some things you can do to train your movement and aim. To improve your aim, try playing in the range for a bit after or before your session. Focus on precision over speed. As you get precise, try to get quicker.
For movement, hop into a deathmatch, and when you are navigating around try clearing every angle, even if you know nobody is there. This might sound useless, but it builds the habit of always checking angles and trains your brain in knowing how the angles work exactly. Also focus on crosshair placement here.
You also need to practice is strafing. Moving left and right while still shooting accurately is a necessary skill. There are tons of videos on the web that teach strafing, but this is another skill that can be honed in deathmatch or in the practice range once you know the theory.
The final thing you need to practice is your crosshair placement and angle holding. Same as before: hop into a deathmatch and try to hold angles rather than pushing for kills. Keep your crosshair at head height. Go through this regime consistently and you will see improvement in your aim and movement.
7. Gamesense and VOD Reviews
Gamesense is something that you’ll improve as you play ranked matches. Playing more games will force you into situations that require good decision-making. At the start of your VALORANT career you might make poor plays, but as you understand the game more you will find yourself making these mistakes less and making better decisions. Gamesense is something that comes naturally by playing games, but there are some ways to improve faster.
The best way to speed up this process is by watching VODs. Watch pro players, and see how they play in tense situations. For example, in a post-plant situation, do they go aggressive or play time, and how do they respond to a fake execute? These are basic things that occur in all games no matter the rank, and seeing how pros deal with these situations helps you improve your gamesense.
The other thing you can do is to rewatch your own matches. When you are playing the game it’s hard to identify your own mistakes since you’re in the fray and have to think about a million things all at once, but when you watch your matches back with a clear mind, mistakes are easier to spot.
While watching your replays, ask yourself questions like “Was I in a good position”, “Should I have played aggressively or passively”, and “Did I use the utility right?”. VOD reviews offer a bird-eye view of your shortcomings, which in turn helps you avoid them in the future.
Reviewing your own mistakes can enable your thought process to become better and more inviting to out-of-the-box ideas. This really is one of the best VALORANT tips for people who are serious about the game. You’ll be surprised by how much you can learn and improve by simply watching yourself play.
8. Warm Up Before Your Sessions
Have you ever seen an athlete go into a match without warming up? VALORANT is the same as any other sport. Yes, it’s not as physically demanding but you still need to warm up your mechanics before any session.
You don’t need a complex and long routine to warm up 5-10 minutes in the range or a deathmatch session or two is usually enough to get the blood pumping in your hands.
When you don’t warm up before a ranked session you end up whiffing shots, which can decrease your confidence. This can in turn lead to you losing more duels in-game, and all of this can quickly spiral out of control. Skip this annoying process by warming up properly so that you can start your ranked matches in full confidence and ready to frag out.
9. Avoid Solo Queuing
Playing VALORANT ranked can become the absolute bane of your existence and push you into the lowest pits of despair because of the immense variety of players that you’ll encounter. There are a ton of amazing people playing VALORANT, but there’s sadly also a large group of toxic trolls who use the anonymity of the internet to ruin the matches of others without repercussions. To counter this and fight through these games you need to have a partner with you so you don’t lose your mind.
Along with helping you keep your sanity, you can also depend on your partner to help you execute your ideas on how to win rounds and games. Plus, trio and 5 stacking also provide reasonable entertainment for you while ensuring that comms and round-winning plans get made with considerable ease.
If you don’t have any real life friends who play VALORANT, make a habit of adding friendly and constructive teammates to your friends list. This way you’ll build a network of reliable and trustworthy players to queue with.
10. Work on Peeking and Angles
We explained what off-angles and peeks are in the movement section, but considering how important peeking and holding angles are in this game and the fact that even advanced players sometimes struggle with this we’ll add it as a separate entry.
Common Angles
As you climb the rank ladder, players get better. Their aim and movement are substantially different than what you face in the lower ranks. At this point, holding common angles is not going to benefit you.
For example, holding A main while stationary with a shotgun on Ascent as a defender might work in the lower ranks. You can easily get an early kill to make the game 5v4. But, on the higher end of the ranked ladder, players expect this and are ready to punish, leading to the ‘how did he know I was there?’ moments. They probably didn’t know you were there, but common angles get prefired and peppered with utility by default, so keep that in mind.
This is why you should avoid holding common angles all the time. Of course, sometimes you have to hold these angles for map control, but there are ways to stop getting pre-fired every round. First, if you are going for an aggressive hold, ask your teammate to help you out. You can ask him to support you with utility or hold the angle with you. Secondly, avoid holding the same angle every round. Mix it up a bit. This keeps the enemy guessing and on their toes.
Off-Angles
When you’ve exhausted all of your common angles or the enemy team is way too diligent in clearing the common angles, you can try holding off angles. Off angles are angles where enemies least expect you to be, meaning that they probably won’t clear it using prefires or utility. This can often net you an easy kill or two, but try to make sure you’ve got somewhere to fall back to as well. Don’t go for off angles that are way in the open unless you’re playing an agent with a way to escape.
Of course, don’t do this every time. Off-angles work on the element of surprise, if players start expecting it then there is no use to it.
Peeking
A common mistake that low level players make is that they try to peek too much at once. If you want to enter a certain section of the map (especially if you do it without utility or teammates) you need to break it down into bite-sized chunks. On Ascent A, for example, don’t run into the site while holding W and try to get kills that way. You have way more angles to clear than your enemies, so if they’re holding the A main entry and you’re running into A without clearing any angles you’ll always die easily.
Instead, peek sections one at a time. Do a little shoulder peek and clear the right side of A heaven first. Once that’s clear, peek a bit further and clear the area underneath heaven. Once that’s clear, peek out a bit further and check generator. You get the idea.
Of course this can always go wrong: you could clear A heaven and then be busy checking generator, after which an enemy pops up in heaven and kills you, but that’s just the way the game goes. Luck is part of the game, and it’s impossible to 100% clear every angle without utility, but you can make your life a whole lot easier if you break your clears down into manageable chunks.
Armed forces call this technique ‘slicing the pie,’ and this can and should be applied to virtual battlegrounds as well.
11. Learn to Manage Economy
Learning how to use the economy of VALORANT correctly can help you win games in ways that lower-ranked players don’t think about much.
Just deciding when to save and when to buy is enough to manage the economy in VALORANT. When you start a round you can see how much money you will get the next round on the buy menu. Use that to decide whether to buy or save.
Important here is that your whole team follows the same strategy. If you have enough money for a rifle buy and the rest of your team doesn’t then you should also eco (meaning you save your money for the next round) or do a half buy at most. If you buy and your teammates save in this situation, you won’t have enough money the next round and your team will be playing with 4 full buys and 1 eco, drastically lowering the chances of winning the round.
The economy can be the deciding factor in your winning matches, and a ton of matches in the lower ranks are lost because of teams that cannot coordinate their economy, leading to a vicious cycle of rounds where there’s always at least one player saving.
12. Stop Blaming Your Team
The main reason people claim they’re stuck in their ranks is their teammates, which can be true in some cases. However, the primary reason for not climbing is your own skill level. That’s why you’re here – to improve and reach Radiant. Many players make numerous mistakes in their games and then blame their teammates. The first step to improvement is acknowledging your errors and working on your gameplay.
No comms can be frustrating, but overcoming these shortcomings is the only way to escape your current rank. If your teammates aren’t communicating, try to play off their actions and trade whenever possible without risking your life. These situations will help you develop your problem-solving skills and succeed in challenging scenarios.
Some games are definitely unwinnable. We all have games where you’re pulling off a top tier performance and it’s still not enough, but everyone also experiences the reverse. Games where you’re just a passenger and the other players do the heavy lifting. These games will always happen and will keep happening, but try to focus on your own performance and your own role in the team. Don’t get worked up on the skill level of your teammates and focus on the games where you can make an impact. If you consistently do well in those games, you will climb the ladder eventually.
13. Trade your Teammates
VALORANT is a team game, and no matter how good you are, you can’t solo win against 5 enemies unless you’re a smurf or a cheater, and we do not condone that at all.
It’s crucial to play well with your teammates. The least you can do is trade them, meaning when they peek to kill an enemy and die, you can peek again to secure the kill, using the info (you’ll know exactly where the enemy is) and the fact that the enemy is focused on the previous engagement to your advantage. This keeps the man count balanced. If you don’t trade your teammate you are left with a 5v4 situation which is hard to win from.
A lot of lower ranked players are scared to trade for various reasons (doubting their own skill, trying to preserve a good kill/death ratio, …) but you’ll be surprised at how effective it is. No matter how good the enemy is, if they’ve just been fighting a teammate of yours they’ll have to wait until their recoil is reset, they might be in a suboptimal position, they might have lost a chunk of their HP, … Capitalize on the chaos and adrenaline that comes from a fight and trade your teammates. Don’t give the enemy the chance to reset themselves and their positions. Your team (and your own score) will thank you.
VALORANT Tips for Beginners – Conclusion
If you follow all these tips, you will see improvements in your gameplay and matches, The ranked climb is a long and tedious journey, but you can make this better by practicing and training daily. Try to fix your mistakes, learn about the game more, be a better team player, have a positive mindset, and do this consistently and you will be at the top in no time.
At the end of the day, VALORANT is game, and you need to have fun with it. You will lose and win games, and losing is part of getting good. You can use these losses as a valuable lesson as well (by doing VOD reviews or by simply reflecting on any mistakes you might’ve made) so don’t see a loss as something that’s entirely negative. It’s part of the journey, and even the very best players lose games all the time.
Learning as you play and being open to improving not only your mechanics but also your mindset will truly help you skyrocket to the top ranks.
