Ok so basically it's a 5v5 tactical shooter that is similar to cs go but with abilities. There are 4 general categories of agents, the duelists, initiators, controllers, and sentinels.

The 5 duelists are jett, reyna, raze, phoenix, and yoru. These 5 are almost always the entry fragger or the second man in. Their kit is made for taking fights and being aggressive, and it is a general rule you put your best aimers on a duelist to take advantage of their skill. Some people that play duelists are TenZ, Asuna, Cned, and Heat.

The 4 initiators are kay/0 skye, breach, and sova. These 3 are the support agents, they send out flashes, get info, and overall support their fragger with their util to make the kill easier. Breach is a straight up flasher and concuss agent, with an earthquake that causes impaired vision and the inability to ads, sova has lots of info gathering util with his drone and darts, and skye is a middle ground between the two with the added benefit of being far more aggressive than the two. Kay/0 is unique with his dart that takes abilities away for a short amount of time, along with his molly and flash. Some people that play initatiors are Ethan, Crashies, and Koldamenta.

The 4 controllers are astra, omen, brimstone, and viper. These 4 are the smokers/vision deniers, they cut up the sites and make it so the duelists can isolate 1v1s far easier. Astra, brimstone and viper also are renowned for their postplant util with brimstone and viper's molotovs and astra's suck that makes it very difficult for the defenders to defuse. Some people that play controllers are Nitr0, Marved and Zombs.

The 3 sentinels are sage, cypher, and killjoy. These 3 are the defensive anchors and lurkers. Their job is to be the site lockdown, and us their util to make a site execute as difficult as possible, and also on attack lurk and make flanks impossible or very difficult. Sage is a very unique case among the sentinels, as she is used very aggressively, as her tools are straight up delay tools, but the other 2 agents are far more passive with util made for getting easy frags on people getting caught in the util. Some people that play sentinels are NatS, dapr, and FNS.

Overall, valorant is far faster than csgo, with many agents thirsting for fights and many abilities encouraging gunfights. Also, the verticality of the game is incredibly different, with many agents being able to get onto strange off angles relatively easily. One of the most important parts of the game is the team composition, due to the fact that many abilities are unique to a specific agent. Many comps are shown to favor a specific type of playstyle, such as a double duelist set up showing that the team prefers an aggressive approach to the game, or a triple initiator setup that a team prefers fast and quick executes.

Finally a huge difference is the presence of ultimates. Ultimate abilities are huge abilities that are potentially round changing, such as jett's bladestorm, which is basically a free rifle that has 100% accuracy even while moving, and replenishes when you get a kill. Many rounds hinge on how and when ultimates are used, especially as the game goes on, and a kind of secondary goal is farming up ultimate orbs which give an ult point to make progressing to an ult far easier. Some ults are much better than others, but overall it is generally though that ultimate abilities are the most powerful in the game, and the presence of them are round changing.

For a new viewer I can see why it's very complicated, but listening to the casters will really help, as they basically just name all the util that's thrown out and really helps to be able to notice what's happening.

all the jett one tricks nightmares

yes

G2 by far one of the best orgs in all of esports

there's no other way around it, Envy completely outplayed 100Thieves yesterday, they honestly looked like the best team in the world by far

Yeah man for real idk why teams are taking this champions qualifier seriously 🙄

Let him get the bag, he’s getting paid to basically be a part of the 100T bench, great deal for him and also 100T gets a solid backup in case anything ever comes up

This has been a dominant half for NV even when factoring in the fact that Haven is a t sided map

100T 2-0 Acend, 100T just looks so much better than Acend right now

I can dream ok man

can't wait to see 100T icebox again, been a while since I've seen Asuna on the rope

I've had to do that for school and my grades have been slowly dropping as Berlin keeps going lol

Idk bro, especially for the players that aren’t used to the big stage I’d say having some assurance that Sentinels actually can be beaten is very reassuring and can help them play better

I know this match between SEN and F4Q means nothing to the tournament anymore, but I feel psychologically this is pretty bad for Sentinels. Before, they’ve had this aura around them that they are the unbeatable giants of the valorant scene, but now after losing 2-0 to G2 and dropping a map to F4Q they seem more like a beatable team. This could be huge psychologically, especially for the side of the bracket their on since it’s almost all NA teams. The kind of mindset that I’m sure has been pounded into some NA players heads especially after being dominated time and time again is that SEN is unbeatable, and now that myth has kind of been shattered. What do y’all think?

Tf am I getting downfragged for, SMB was being hyped up as a potential finalist for Berlin but they got knocked out in groups and the only team they beat was a Paper Rex team that pushed them to map 3, if that isn’t a disappointment then what else is

Look at the other t1 cs pros that switched, Scream and Jamppi are disappointing on Liquid, Nitr0 is playing third fiddle to Asuna and Ethan, Ethan is playing second fiddle to Asuna, ska and auti are flailing on T1. Success in cs doesn’t guarantee success in valorant

SMB was a huge disappointment, hope they can figure out what the problem was before EU lcq

I think y’all are overrating VS just a little bit right now
https://www.vlr.gg/pickem/19aa8b8b

The mental gymnastics is absolutely insane

Their improvement is such a short amount of time is honestly shocking to me, if they can keep this up I can see them going pretty far in Champions

Half or even more of these reason fit for basically every other team in the playoff stage, the only advantage unique to VS is the Lakia thing, and I think you’re overrating how impactful not using him in groups would be since other teams have VODs of him playing for NUTURN and Visions Strikers from the Korea challengers finals and Masters Reykjavik and can just review those. This playoff stage, especially after G2 2-0’d Sentinels, seems like a huge tossup that anybody could win, except for maybe KRU.

Acend over 100T after VS bodied them and 100T beat Gambit? Sure

I think if it comes down to a tie it comes down to map record, and G2 has won 3 and lost 2 to SEN

But they have also consistently beat every other team in NA… the Reykjavik no show was a one off fluke too

Something needs to be done about people not caring about seeding matches

calm down bruh weren't the draws dropped like an hour ago

In both of the recent tournaments in Valorant BR has severely disappointed

Anyone blaming the SEN loss on the fact that it’s a seeding match is being incredibly disrespectful to both SEN and G2. First of all, this is the biggest tourney in the game so far, why would you not want the best seed possible? G2 completely dominated SEN today, and that’s the fact. SEN never has and never will underestimate or play down because of a seeding game. This seeding game bullshit is just copium from NA fans who aren’t ready to accept that NA can’t blow the doors off of every team anymore and other teams are developing to SEN’s level.

Shahz performed incredibly poorly this series

Holy shit Brazil looks like a complete clusterfuck idk how Brazil fans can take the mess that Brazil valorant looks like

Get challengers finals events on LAN so the onliners are filtered out and the actually good teams can go on, plus the teams that usually wouldn’t get LAN experience could get a chance to at least experience a LAN environment.

Well I said this before the match happened

KR is a top 3 region, VS and NUTURN showed that already

HL can bear CR without showing 50% of their playbook, JP is massively overrated

I hope they do, it will be very interesting

No matter what happens in LCQ, all experience that AU teams get against NA teams is good for international valorant in the long term

Whoops lol I fucked that up, but still that’s only one map out of how many, not exactly a great statistic

I mean renegades was a pretty solid top 20-30 team, they weren’t exactly dogshit but they weren’t exactly good either

Nice to see esports being taken as seriously as conventional sports, my question is how is the general public's reaction to these types of school, because I know many Americans have a very negative attitude towards video games. Is the same sentiment in Korea, or is it different?

I guess whenever Koreans touch a game they completely dominate it lol, it's crazy. Isn't there also a really healthy upbringing of esports talent in Korea? That's what I've heard from my brother who's really into League.

how do you have JP over SEA when JP has literally not won a single map so far in both masters events

1. NA
2. EMEA
3. KR
4. BR
5. SEA
6. LATAM
7. JP

EMEA and Korea are very close, Japan and LATAM are very much the worst scenes in the game right now. NA and EMEA ranking pretty obvious if you pay any attention to valorant esports. All my opinion of course, go drop your regional rankings if you want ig

If Korea is already performing this well with being the 11th most popular game imagine the talent if they went to top 5, holy shit I can already see the era of Korean dominance incoming

EMEA should get seperated into EU CIS and MENA and have them have their own qualifiers (I'm including Turkey in MENA)

I’m just going off of recent history, and the past tournaments and results have shown that NA is better than EMEA, could be proven wrong in playoffs tho

They also have the easiest group in the whole tournament

I go to a school with lots of international students, and many of them have been basically taught English by watching American movies lol, though the Asian kids have some trouble speaking it

I really like the trash talk going on in Berlin, it really makes the competitive environment feel real and serious, and not just a bunch of buddies hanging out and messing around. As long as the talk doesn’t go too far I think it’s completely fine and healthy for the game.

It’s a pretty unfair comparison because they play very different roles, S1mple is an awper through and through, he’s basically like Waddell and tries to get an awp any time he can get it, while TenZ is more of a hyper aggressive rifler/duelist, and also the relative difficulty to pull off a carry job like TenZ does sometimes compared to cs. I’d say because of the way duelists function and thrive off of aim duels in valorant TenZ still isn’t on S1mple’s level due to his straight up talent and ability, but we’ll see in the future.

I think that it’s probably due to the American and British dominance in the pop culture world that makes English easy to learn, imagine being bombarded by the English language basically since the day you were born and then trying to learn it later, you would find it pretty easy because you have been exposed to it for so long