VALORANT has become the most popular game since its release in 2020. It includes Agents, Abilities, features, and unique maps.

My name is Picsou, and my peak rank is in the top 350 Radiant. Currently, I am working as a Valorant booster for Immortal Boost. My job requires me to keep myself updated regarding all the agents, maps, new features in coming, or any updates.

If you have just downloaded VALORANT and are a beginner, then I have some useful tips and tricks for playing this game effectively. If you still have not downloaded it, you can get Valorant from their official website.

Articles feature image saying tips for beginners to get better in valorant

How to Play Valorant in 2024

The right strategies at the right time make the player win the gunfight. Once you are completely aware of all the fundamentals of VALORANT, the next step is to learn the techniques to play every round successfully. From choosing the best Agent to the Best weapon to use in every scenario, this guide will help you choose wisely to survive the battle.

Fix your Aim

Before and After improving aim comparison

Aim is the most covered topic in any shooter game. Let’s talk about what Crosshair you should use. The crosshair menu has many options, which can be overwhelming. The recommended Crosshair is tenZ Crosshair. His Crosshair is pretty standard. You can also check out the crosshair that every pro player uses in Valorant and decide which one suits you the best.

After getting the Crosshair, you should touch on sensitivity quickly. The average sensitivity of professional VALORANT players is 0.35 in-game sensitivity at 800 DPI. Since you have your Crosshair and sensitivity, the most crucial aspect of aim and VALORANT is Crosshair placement.

There are a couple of factors that contribute to having good Crosshair placement. Beginners will be confused about what crosshair placement is and how to get a good crosshair placement. You should always try to keep your Crosshair at head level. There are plenty of objects around the maps in VALORANT that you can use to help keep your Crosshair at head level such as Boxes all around the Ascent. If you aim slightly underneath the top of the boxes then you will be aiming at head level. After practicing aiming at head level for a while it will become muscle memory.

While we are talking about improving the aim, Make sure you check out the top 10 tips for Aiming in Valorant if you still have not.

Understanding your reaction time is important. If you’re holding an angle at head level then you shouldn’t keep your Crosshair against a wall. You should hold a little out into the open to compensate for your reaction time when you get swung by an enemy. One more confusion is whether you should be Bursting, tapping, or spraying.

Bursting: Bursting refers to a firing technique where you shoot your weapon in short, Controlled Bursts instead of continuously spraying or firing in Full Auto Mode.
Tapping: Firing a single shot at a time. Instead of spraying or bursting. Tapping involves precise, deliberate shots, aimed at the opponent’s head.
Spraying: Spraying refers to a firing technique where you continuously hold down the fire button.

Spraying is powerful at close range. At long range, you should try to focus on precision and aim for headshots while tapping and bursting. Bursting is the best option at mid-range, but it becomes much more powerful when combined with strafing.

Movement in VALORANT

You can walk into VALORANT by holding your shift key. Walking allows you to be completely silent. Try to do it when you are being sneaky to avoid giving up your position. On the contrary, running is the normal form of movement in VALORANT and doesn’t require any key to be pressed. You should only try to run when the enemies can’t hear you or if your presence is already known. You can tell whether or not enemies can hear you by the big sound circle around your character on the minimap.

Good times to run in VALORANT are rotating from one side to another, rushing with your team into the site, or if the enemy team knows about your position. Crouching is what you want to do if you are trying to take cover shoot more accurately. Strafing is moving either a couple of steps to the left or to the right. The best way to utilize strafing is by combining it with burst strafing. Burst strafing is arguably the most powerful shooting technique in VALORANT. To burst strafing, you should shoot three to four bullets at a time. Do a strafe and shoot again. You can repeat this until you win your gunfight.

Let’s talk about how to peek and position yourself for success. The way you peek and position yourself in VALORANT can oftentimes be the difference between a platinum player and an immortal player. The most important thing about peeking is that the further away you are, the less time the enemies will have to react to your peak.

The closer you are to the enemy when swinging around the wall, the faster the enemy can see you in VALORANT. When you peek from further away, you minimize the advantage that the enemy holding an enemy has. A couple of peakings in VALORANT are Jiggle peeking and wide swinging.

Jiggle peeking is usually used to get information on where the enemy is before you commit to a full swing around the corner. Players can also combine jumping with jiggle peeking because it makes you a lot harder to hit while you gather information.

Wide swinging is used to swing around the corner, but when you wide swing, make sure you do it very confidently because if you have committed to wide swinging, you will likely die more often than not.

Good positioning can win you most fights. You should always position yourself in a spot where you are isolating one gunfight at a time. Being exposed to multiple angles is like taking a gamble a lot of times especially if multiple enemies are alive. You always want to play the highest odds at survival in VALORANT.

Economy and Weapon Management

Volarant’s economic system is based on credits that you can use to purchase guns and abilities. At the start of the VALORANT game and the start of the second half, every player receives 800 credits, there are more ways to earn more credits such as killing enemies, planting the spike, and winning or losing rounds to reward them as well. Killing the enemy will net you 200 credits while plating the spike will give you the whole team 300 credits each. When your team wins, you will be given 3000 credits, and the losing team will get only 1900 credits. When you lose the second consecutive round your team will get 2400 credits.

Once you know how to get the credits, you must know how to use them properly, and for that, there are a lot of different gun-wise options. For pistols, there are Classic, Shorty, Frenzy Ghost, and the Sheriff. For submachines, the options are limited to Stinger and Spectre. For rifles, there’s a Bulldog, Guardian, Phantom, and Vandal. For machine guns, you have Ares as a cheap option and Odin as a more expensive one.

The guns that you should be buying on piston rounds are keeping the classic and buying a light shield with some extra abilities or purchasing the frenzy with abilities. The ghost can be good as well if you like to be precise. If you win the pistol round you should force up and win the second round as well. This allows you to have a bonus round on the third round when the enemy team is on their rifle round. The reason it is called a bonus round is because you get the free shot at ruining the other team’s economy on this round. Since you have decent weaponry from the second round it’s very possible to win and get a bunch of weapon upgrades.

After the first three rounds, you should focus on getting as many riffles in as possible rifle rounds. Rifle rounds are rounds where you and your team can afford vandals and phantoms with shields. To do this you should try not to spend a lot of rounds where your teams are low on economy.

In Eco rounds, some good guns to buy for not a lot of money are Shorty, Sheriff, and Stinger. All these guns have the potential to melt through enemies for not a lot of investment. If you are ever curious whether you should buy in a round, hold the Tab to see what your team is doing and buy with them. Even if you think they are making a poor decision by saving or force buying, it’s better to do it as a team than solo.

ALSO READ: VALORANT AGENT NEW LEAKS IN 2024

Maps strategies

The most common map layout in VALORANT is the three-lane map. It’s called a three-lane map because it has a middle and a main entrance to either bomb side. All three maps in VALORANT are split: Ascent, Ice Box, Breeze, and Pearl. Some maps, like Lotus and Haven, have three bomb sites.

There are more options for the attackers on those maps. The other two maps, Bind and Fracture, are similar to each other because they both have their own Quirk. Bind has the teleports, and Fracture has the zip lines. Both have two entrances into each site, compared to the three-lane maps, where you have one entrance to each site and a middle entrance.

After the map layouts, players should learn the basic strategies in VALORANT. Some common strategies on attack include rushes, splits, and default. In rush strategy, you rush a bomb site with your team as fast as possible to overwhelm the defense. In splitting, you take a middle and split a bomb site through the main entrance of the bomb site and middle, but the default is simple. All you do is split up as a team, cover all the areas of the map, and look for the information. Default is also good if the team on the defense is getting aggressive.

In defense, your main goal should be to delay the enemy team from pushing onto sights stopping the spike from going down, and defusing the spike if it does go down. If you know that the attacking team is coming to your site you should do your best to use any utility you have to stall and wait for your team to rotate and assist you. Provide clear and concise communication to your team and also give your team clear and concise calms. An example of two clams could be if you hear two pairs of footsteps outside a main on split you should say I hear two towards A main.

Keep in mind that VALORANT is not a solo game and you should be asking your team to assist you with utility and even jump peeking an angle for you. The map layouts and common strategies lead us to the following.

Rotations
Flanking
Lurking

You should rotate when there is close to 100% certainty the enemy team is going to another site than yours. Rotate when the spike is seen or your team calls that there are three or more enemies there. When you do rotate, you should watch out for enemy lurkers on your way because lurkers will often be posted up holding for your rotations.

If the enemy team is leaving your part of the map empty, you should try to flank them. Applying flank pressure is better because the enemy team will start using resources to prevent you from doing it again. You should only flank a couple of times a half if they allow you.

Lurking is when you stray off from your team on the attack to find an opening in a different part of the map while your team is trying to take some map control. Your job while lurking is to find a time to either kill someone who’s rotating and call your team back to you or find a good-timing flank later into the round. Lurking can be powerful, but try doing it on characters like Cypher, Astra, and Omen, as these characters can have an impact across the map without needing to be with their team.

Terminology

One of the terminologies is Clutch, and it is just somebody who won in a one X scenario, so if somebody wins a one versus two, then they want to clutch. Always remember to hype your teammates up when they win one. Another term you should keep in mind is utility. All people refer to when they say utility is ability.

Another Terminology is Lineups. Someone who has practiced throwing a piece of utility at a certain point to land somewhere specific. Molotov lineups are useful to have for post-plant situations.

Self-Improvement

Setting goals can be helpful. One thing that the players can do is a death match with a goal in mind. Move into the death match and work on getting at burst strafing or maybe work on tapping heads. Tracking your progress can help motivate you to keep working on your own game and improving yourself. To track progress, you need to make progress first.

A couple of things that can improve with the game are going to the range, pressing the practice button, and shooting the boots regularly for a few minutes. Then press F3 to set the bots to strafe and do that for a few more minutes. You should be precise and practice good shooting habits while doing this.

The best way to eliminate your mistakes from your gameplay is by recording your games and watching your games back for mistakes. When you watch your games again, it becomes a lot easier to see the mistakes you make in the game. Something else for self-improvement is to watch Pro play. A lot of plays pros make aren’t possible in ranked since they have a whole team supporting them and they practice a lot of their plays. You will only notice how Pros peak angles, isolate gunfire, and how they use their utility for others and themselves. These all are the things that you can take to your own game and replicate.

Communication is Key

Communication is the easiest way to get consistent value. Somedays, you will not be able to aim, but you can always have good communication, so it is something that you should strive for in every single match. You can always have a massive impact, even in a bottom-frag arena, if you help your team take space and communicate effectively.

Enter
Throw your leers
Get traded or make space
Communicate

If you die early enough in the round to guide the teammates, you can simply see all their mistakes and guide them to a more successful retake or post-plant.

Duelist

Duelists are encouraged to take duels and agents with dismiss abilities like stash inspire confidence because you have to get out of jail free card. The problem arises that getting out of a jail-free card often encourages bad habits because you don’t think about what fights you take and you can get away with swinging anything. Players don’t know how the game works and they just don’t get punished for making mistakes. Duelist has to do with how vile the community is at times. In VALORANT, the duelist will get more kills, which is fine on the surface.

Initiators are meant to use their Utility to help Duelists get kills. This doesn’t mean an agent like Jet doesn’t serve any purpose to a team. A silver recon can help everyone while a jet only helps her team. It’s a selfish role because the Duelists, on average, have higher Kdas than support players. Bottom Frag is the one who gets blamed when your team starts losing. by playing duelists, you will bottom frag less, meaning you won’t get the target of just blatant harassment in your matches due to how many kills you have not only made, but you will get more kills.

Pattern Recognition

VALORANT is a game that is meant to be perfected; think about the same maps, angles, and agents. At each round start the barriers come down and you take the same duels and you practice this over and over and get better and better at taking those fights or pushing those sites. It is a repetitive game so it’s meant to be perfected. Pattern recognition is a massive part of playing VALORANT. Practicing every day will make you feel that you are learning new things and every match feels more or less the same. Most teams play the same way, so it becomes more predictable.

At the start of the round, there are standard positions that teams will play. You can also predict their repositioning the round. The people in ranked that run it down have good ways to deal with standard setup. What you have to realize is that ranking isn’t like a Team Scrim. When the team spawns, they will almost always play default spots. So, they know where fights are and they speed up quickly.

The players must be able to fly out quickly in round two because, based on the timing of the round, there are a lot more options for your opponents. The standard positions they were in at the start of the round quickly started to have more options. They could have flanked or rotated over. More time, they have more variants in their play.

Your life is important

You need to know when the most important thing for you to do is to stay alive. There are going to be times in VALORANT when you are in such a good position that just staying alive is more important than Landing any Hills. If you were flanking and had five players contained in one area. You need to play a rat angle to ensure that you’re going to die for free. If you are holding a significant amount of map control, floodgates are going to be opened and your opponents can go anywhere.

Staying alive can be a bit easier if you know who you are against. There are some tips for playing against every agent in Valorant. Make sure you follow those tips, and it will be easier for you to stay alive in the game.

Remember, your Goal is to contain, not kill. Players don’t know the value of staying alive. Your life is so important and the moment you die, you lose all the impact on the round. You need to be sure that you get enough value while you’re alive to put your team in a position to win before you end up dying. There are ways to have value even after you die.

Backseating

When your team is setting up for a retake, they need to be talking to each other and that is how the game works. If you see the team approaching a retake and the Omen isn’t telling anyone that he is blind and how you want to use it that is an issue. If our teammates are in 2v1 and they are not communicating how they are going to play it then that’s another problem. You need to get good at reading your teammates and calling out the things that they are too bad to call out themselves.

Sometimes, if you are dialed in, you will not be able to make the columns at the moment. If Demon 1 is fighting five players at once, ducking in and out of cover, he doesn’t want to have the key up to scream for help, so the man is focused. Someone else can easily see that he needs help and call for a Flash, a flood, a smoke, or something to help this man out.

Many players are afraid of talking while they’re dead because it will be viewed as backseating. But if you’re saying helpful things then it is not backseating.

Audio Circles

You can gather so much information at the start of the round by just standing in the good spots, especially in low Elo. Players run everywhere that they go, so you can gather tons of information by just listening. On every map, there are different locations where you can stand to listen for enemies immediately at the start of the round. If you are playing an agent like Silva, you don’t need to recon the information. You can save it when they run in because you will already hear them at the start of the round.

For example, if you stand next to the spawn barrier on the C-Long in Haven, you can listen for information from both sides of the Garage and C-Long. You will hear right away if the attackers are pushing C and if you don’t hear anything. Most of the time, you just walk up and take space for free. This is good for Duelists playing C because taking this space will provide your team with a ton of value.

Play Every Role

If you know how each agent works, it will have a big impact on the game. It’s best to try to play one or two agents while climbing so you can build up agent Mastery, but if you heard players say things like I can’t play, smoke countless times, and this is a massive issue by knowing how each agent is played. You can better coordinate with your teammates to make plays that you know are possible due to the agent knowledge that you have.

If you play a lot of breaches, try picking up Jet. The moment you breach on your team, you will call all of the breach utilities that you normally use. It’s not like you need 100 hours on every agent, but three or four games at Swift Play can be enough to learn about them, and you will know how agents work. You need to learn how they all work.

Sensitivity

Sensitivity is technically a preference, but we will optimize it to a sensitivity that you can control efficiently. Sensitivity is based on EDPI. To calculate your EDPI, just multiply your in-game sensitivity by your DPI.

The average EDPI in pro play is 280, and the lowest is 100. The highest is 569 by PRX forsaken. As long as you stay around this ballpark of between 100 EDPI and 569 EDPI, you are in a possible decent range. If these details are not enough, you can always check out the sensitivity settings that suit you best.

Spike Tips

The spike can be half-defused, but many players don’t know that if you Tap to diffuse, the sound pitch will be much different from a non-half diffuse Spike compared to a half-defused spike. You can also know if will die from the spike explosion by looking at your minimap. If your outer white circle on the minimap is out of range of where the spike is planted, you will survive. It’s also important to note that when planting a spike, the direction you are facing is where the spike will be planted. If you’re facing a sage wall, it will break when you plant the spike.

Developing strategies against Smurfs

Sometimes, you feel like you’re playing against a Smurfs, and they are completely running over the game. When you are playing against Smurf, they are probably going to win every single gunfight regardless of what they do. Your goal isn’t to learn from the things they are doing. They may be taking bad gunfights and just getting away with it because they have better aim.

You have to develop strategies against Smurf to beat them. You can learn to beat them if you are playing against players who are better than you in the gunfight. Players who are better than you will punish you more often for the mistakes that you make and when you get punished for the mistakes that you make, you’re forced to adapt your approach. That’s how you get better from playing against Smurfs. There is no magical fix for Smurfs. Try your best to adapt, still accepting that the game is probably a loss, but also recognize that it’s something out of your power.

You will get radiant players, who trashing on you in immortal lobbies all of the time. Everybody can aim decently. The best way to deal with these players is to be a lot more coordinated with your trades and utility. You should not give them a chance to take a 1v1 gunfight. Gather information on their location, and when you locate them, you make sure that any fight that you take, they are sure to get traded out immediately afterward. You need to use your Utility and man advantage to find kills at a pro level; otherwise, you will lose.

Double Up

When in doubt double up with a teammate to keep it simple. The whole game is about trades and number advantage. Whenever possible, you want to take gunfights with teammates, but especially on defense, every player chooses to split up. They have one player cover each choke point and they nearly never fight together. Instead, try to take advantage of Sentinel utility to cover up one choke point so that you can use your teammates to fight the other or even just smoke off an entrance Many players won’t just walk through a smoke without using any form of utility so you can use that time to group up with a teammate and fight especially on maps like bind this is essential. Stop trying to hold down a whole push alone, you’re just going to run over.

Cut your losses

If you are winning a lot and want to keep going, but in situations where you lose two games in a row, just stop playing, especially if one of the losses was incredibly tilting. Climbing for most players is not Sprinting; it is a Marathon. Improve bit by bit and make sure each game is as high-quality as possible. If you are playing three or four games in a session anyway, then you’re going to start experiencing some fatigue and playing worse.

Play a few games a day and win them and then stop while you’re ahead. Quitting after two losses in a row will prevent you from Tilt Queuing and also prevent you from throwing all of your RR in one day.

Picking Your Main Agent

It is important to figure out which agent class you need to play and which works best for you. If you want to be more passive and want to flank enemies. Sentinels are probably a good fit for you. You should choose between Killjoy, Sage, or Cypher. At the moment, Killjoy is probably the strongest, but new players tend to like Sage because she can heal and revive her teammates. If you want to run it down and take fights you should probably go with duelists like Jet, Neon Raze, Reyna, and Yoru.

Try to stay away from Yoru, as he requires a good amount of game sense. Go with Reyna or Jett since they are pretty straightforward to use. If you want to be a support player, you should play initiator, which would be Kayo, Sky, Gecko, Sova, or Fade. It is recommended that Sky or Kayo be chosen as new players as they are more straightforward and easier to use than the other agents.

We have controllers, which are the smoke characters of the game. This is the hardest role for newer players since you need to know where to place your smokes, but this role consists of Brimstone, Omen, Astra, Viper, or Harbor. Brimstone is the easiest one to learn and uses smoke since it is straightforward, and so is his ultimate. Astra and Viper are fairly hard to use since they both require a decent amount of map knowledge to use efficiently.

Play Close to Spawn Barrier

You have to play close to spawn barriers at the start of the rounds. The main purpose for this is that you will get immediately involved in the action. While watching low Elo replays you can see players sitting far back and rotating towards the site only to have all of their teammates die and be in a 1v5. When playing close, the spawn barriers are sometimes not the best thing, but as a general habit, if you are in low Elo and struggling to have an impact, then this is a great way to put yourself into the action.

Advance learning Tips

Following the Advanced tips to play VALORANT will help players win every round. Every strategy will make you a pro player. The following are the advanced techniques that should be applied while playing any round.

Your mouse sensitivity is most preferred. However, the general rule of thumb is you should be able to do a 180 with a swipe of your mouse from the center of your mousepad. This is because if you have good crosshair placement, most of the enemies should be in front of you, so you won’t need to turn around.
Having a large minimap is a great way to increase your awareness. Most players play on low settings for maximum FPS, with all extra features disabled. The one feature that is recommended to have turned on though, is Bloom. This will make some things easier to see, such as Sova, Recons and character outlines.
The hold and toggle aim for the sniper rifles seem to function differently. This is especially noticeable with the operator, and if you’re using Hold instead of Toggle, you can scope in and out.
If you want to practice spray control, spend a few minutes in the range just spraying at the wall.
If you want to practice peeking, you can use Sage wall or do it behind the post.
One of the biggest advantages of warming up in VALORANT instead of Aim labs is that you can practice your movement, too.
Many players have fallen prey to ziplines in VALORANT once or twice but they are simple to tackle. Whichever direction is where you’d exit, is the direction you should press to go up. so, if the exit is left, press A if the exit is back, press S.
If you are having trouble during a match, try to practice on your teammate’s head during the buy phase.
If you are low HP, it’s a good idea to take headshot angles because it will make the opponents have to work harder for the kill.
When playing Deathmatch, stop trying to win and start playing it to practice for the real game. Rather than searching for kills, try to clear angles. You will train your muscle memory better, and it will transfer to a real game more cleanly.
If you are in a retake scenario, you should almost always choose to smoke the bomb off, rather than smoking the entrance. If you smoke the bomb, your teammates can hold enemies out, while you’re protected from all angles. If you smoke the entrance, your teammates can’t hold the enemies out.

Summary

I hope these top tips will help you learn how to play Valorant and improve your gameplay! Being a beginner is not always easy, but let me tell you that we are also offering the best Valorant boosting services.

By choosing our boosting service, you will not only learn how to improve your game, but your rank will also increase when you play alongside our professional booster. All you have to do is head over to our pricing page, enter your current rank and desired rank, and checkout. We will start momentarily and improve your game journey in Valorant!

Valorant Tips For Beginners – Learn How To Play Valorant In 2024