Valorant: nades and dynamic usage

I’ve written before about how important received wisdom is for a game like Valorant. I fully expect that the standard of high-level play in Valorant is going to rise more quickly than in most similar multiplayer titles, because it is genuinely a case where you can draw on a lot of concepts almost directly from similar games (primarily CS), and have them fit pretty well and pretty quickly. The explorations into economy here are good examples of that; we were able to borrow a lot of base concepts, and even the broad strokes of more specific patterns, from CS wholesale and have them fit.

Of course, there were also wrinkles in there; the one immediately coming to mind here being the nature of Heavy Shields/Light Shields buys, but the pressure caused by ability buys etc. in pistol/eco rounds have also been playing out quite differently. There are things that don’t translate specifically, and there are things that also feel like they might not translate conceptually in the same way as in CS.

My inclination is that smokes (and utility in general) might be one of them, so let’s talk a bit about it.

The CS:GO nade is an institution of that game. For those unfamiliar, smokes are something of an institution in themselves in CS; the nature of the game (and the engine behind it) mean you can be extremely precise with them, and train usage of them to a very particular degree. Entire social media empires have risen and fallen on the basis of making good nade practice videos, and particularly in CS:GO’s true formative years competitively (2013 and 2014 particularly), discovery of a new smoke could swing entire tournaments, change the entire way that a map could be played out, etc. CS and CS-likes are, after all, games fundamentally defined by spatial understanding and line-of-sight; nades, and the ability to reshape the map in the most important way essentially as you go, are what make them so interesting tactically.

This, of course, brings out the natural tendency to approach smokes and utility in the same way in Valorant — a focus on opening and set-piece utility that changes everything for how you get to play the round out (about half of which seem to involve something to do with Sova arrow). They are to be taken relatively slowly, safely, and very, very precisely.

I’m not sure that this holds in the same way for Valorant, however, for a few reasons:

1) Map design and game engine should mean that the opportunities for these sorts of utility plays are likely going to be a bit more limited than CS:GO; it all seems almost designed to prevent pixel-perfect plays of that nature. A lot of the craftier nades in CS rely on it taking multiple bounces off this or that or the other, and even for abilities that can do that (and it’s really only Sova arrow that does that to any reasonable degree), that’s something that’s far harder to pull off on the Valorant engine than on Source.

2) Valorant is a game of motion to a far greater degree than CS; between the mobility abilities, fewer penalties for walking or even running in relation to aim, a literal three-site map, and so on, and so on, you don’t naturally have the same easy ability to cut enemy teams out of areas entirely with a few opening smokes.

3) Also, as I’ve said before: the information that these sorts of opening round flourishes gives up to the enemy team in Valorant compared to in CS:GO is probably not being fully appreciated as of yet.

4) Even if patch schedules for Valorant aren’t going to be as aggressive as in League, they’re still going to be pretty aggressive, and Riot has usually been pretty firm on patching out things for not fitting in with what they see to be the spirit of the game.

So, with that being said, let’s go through some of the basics of smokes in Valorant, and what I’m thinking when I’m talking about dynamic smoking. First off: a cheat sheet of all smoke abilities in Valorant:

I’ve particularly been thinking about most things here in terms of Brimstone, naturally enough; he has the most smokes, he doesn’t need line-of-sight to place them, and he can smoke more precisely with ease than anyone else on this list. However, the broad principles here are going to apply to everyone.

STOP AND GO

Almost all good smokes are going to, fundamentally, do at least one of two things:

1) They stop one or more enemies from moving through a place (‘stop’).

2) They allow you to move through a place (‘go’).

There will be some smokes that both ‘stop’ and ‘go’ (the classic example is something like smoking the site tunnel on Split B — it should both stop their rush and allow you potentially to get another defensive spot on site if you so choose without giving them line-of-sight), but there will be very few good ones that do neither.

This hence should be your first port of call with any smoke — is it letting you move somewhere you want to be but otherwise would have to take too much risk to get to? If it’s not doing that, is it genuinely stopping someone whose position is known on the enemy team from getting out of it?

If it’s not doing either, chances are that it’s not a good smoke, and that should be your rule for whether you’re going to throw it. The closest to an exception would be something like Jett smoke to enable a Jett duel (where by nature it’s a very quick, very impulsive thing, and doesn’t work if you take the time to evaluate it on that basis a lot of the time), and even there, it’s basically fulfilling the second condition. Either you’re stopping, or you’re going.

QUARTERS AND HALVES

This is the big thing that’s different to CS. Compare and contrast a CS smoke and a Valorant smoke:

Almost every Valorant smoke is an orb, and the one exception (Cipher) is still circular. Smokes in CS have some randomisation in their shape, but in any case, clearly aren’t really defined, and certainly not defined in the same way as in Valorant.

This is relevant, because it can make the difference between a good smoke and a terrible one. Compare and contrast these three tunnel smokes on Split B:

The first one is fine. The second one isn’t terrible, but note how much bigger the angle that an enemy pushing through it can pop out from — you are enlarging the angle you’re having to potentially fire at slightly, and making it harder to crossfire on it; it’s not a big deal, and there can be reasons with regards to enemy tendencies that you might even deliberately do that, but it is creating more risk. The third one is helping the enemy team more than your own 99% of the time, because they can sneak through it and hide to your right, spring through to your left and encircle, and so on.

You need to be mindful of this, both to avoid situations like the aforementioned, but also because it can create possibilities for you yourself to use it offensively or otherwise play around it. The general rule is to keep the angle as narrow as possible on ‘stop’-type smokes, and vice-versa on ‘go’-type smokes, but this is absolutely something that you’re going to have to get a feel for.

ROUND TIME

As I mentioned earlier: I think you’re going to want to fight your likely natural instinct to dump everything you possibly can in the opening seconds of a round.

Even allowing for those smokes that don’t give up much information (Brimstone and Omen’s are mostly fairly agnostic — there are clues you can gleam but you have to really know what you’re looking for), a) it’s very easy for those smokes to end up wasted if they’re aggressively-minded unless you get a full commitment from your team (and a pick or two off of them), and b) it leaves you undertooled for movements later in the round. Remember: once you’ve got used to assessing and placing smokes quickly, these can end up completely reshaping mid-round fights.

For a personal note, without said specific plan, I will tend to at most throw out one smoke (from a full load) on Brimstone and Omen, and usually deploy Viper’s smoke (since it can be redeployed); much more than that and I usually feel undertooled going further into the round.

It’s entirely possible that larger commitments will be needed in high-level play down the line, but for once, I would tend to say it’s better to start leaner here rather than fatter.

WALLS

We aren’t going to go into walls in too much depth here, but tactically, the same general principles apply — if you’re using them for vision purposes, you’re using it to aid your own movement or stop an enemy’s.

In practice, Viper and Phoenix’s walls being as paper-thin as they are make them pretty poor for sealing off vision passively (‘stop’) from what I’ve seen — it’s just too easy for multiple players to push through a thin wall at the exact same time and outgun you through that. They’re far more interesting for enabling the ‘go’ side of things, where they’re mainly looking to block off a far-off position with line-of-sight

Sage wall, meanwhile, is of course extremely good no matter how you slice it, but…I tend to think that you want to be very careful about deploying it until you absolutely need to. It’s just too good as a physical barrier (and as an offensive tool to attack vertically) to deploy it in a lot of the situations where you’d want to use a smoke

There are definitely some ridiculous things you can do with walls, particularly when it comes to exploiting verticality in sites, but to be perfectly honest, I don’t know enough about them to write much on them yet.

CASE STUDY: SPLIT, B LONG (MAIN)

Let’s sit down and see how these principles apply to a real site; we’re going to look at Split, and we’re going to look at attacking/defending primarily through the long tunnel on there specifically.

DEFENSIVE SMOKES — OPENING

I have no idea how controversial this opinion is, but: unless you’re getting completely overwhelmed over and over AND have a defensive default that doesn’t rotate onto B well (2 A, 2 split mid, 1 B would be the classic example), I tend to think that you want to be aggressive as the defending player on B; ult orbs are valuable, and while bunching up into the tunnel there is one of the stupider things an offensive team can do on a Valorant map anyway (second only maybe to the same thing on Bind A site), you’re not likely to be able to properly punish them for that with just zero information.

With that in mind, this is a smoke (from Brimstone or Omen) that I’m actually a big fan of. With the barrier where it is on the attacking side, it’s extremely difficult to get more than one player into tunnels by the time it’s down no matter how aggressive you are, and you end up with a 1-on-1 that you have a good quick retreat path from as long as you don’t get one-tapped (yes, yes, having the smoke behind you technically makes it better, but nobody except maybe Jett is going to be able to pursue you quickly enough from that position to actually do damage).

Note that we’re using the ‘quarter’ concept here; if you put it fully in the opening on their side, it’s too easy for them to push two through quickly (and if you leave it up further, it creates a really wide angle for them to attack through), so we instead settle for reducing your angle as much as possible and not leaving them anywhere to sneak through.

DEFENSIVE SMOKES — ANTI-PUSH

To emphasise: we’re looking specifically on the basis of a push through tunnel here; obviously if you lost window control, you wouldn’t even be putting this down.

#1: as we discussed, the standard anti-push tunnel smoke. Something to emphasise here: smoke time is different for different agents, but it’s never more than 15 seconds. You do not have enough smokes across your entire team to permanently block that tunnel, and don’t presume that you do; they’re going to get a chance to push as a team at some point. Hence, take it slow, and only block it when it’s absolutely necessary (e.g. your team gives up a pick at mid and you need to buy a little time for a rotation)

#2: I have never actually used smoke #2 in a game, but if you want to be really aggressive, you could smoke and sneak up into the gap there. Bear in mind though that any competent team will still be blind-firing into the smoke to some extent, so it’s extremely risky in most cases.

For retakes, you’re essentially playing things out as if it were an offensive action anyway (because it is).

OFFENSIVE SMOKES — PUSH

Remember: your aim here is to get one or more people to somewhere they couldn’t otherwise go safely; you’re essentially trying to, at most, reduce the number of places that they can fire on you at any given second to as few as possible, preferably one (and you can then aim and/or prefire at that spot as you move in).

The smoke towards Back is the one where you have to be most careful; you want to push it up to cover the entire escape here, but not so much that it’s easy to run through. Bear in mind, smokes can vary in terms of your visibility within them (Omen is the one that comes to mind), so you probably want to leave a small gap to move through without having to go into the smoke itself.

For context here, these are the spots and areas that I tend to see defenders most commonly taking on the site itself (this is based on intuition for now rather than hard data), with red being very common and black being less common although not unheard of:

If I just run into the site at that point with all three smokes, the only spots that are exposed are pretty much on the ledge only (which always has a crossfire risk for the defender), and the areas directly adjacent to the entrance (which I’ll usually take; chances of a revenge kill are much higher there than anywhere else, and if someone’s pushed up that far, they’ll tend to either use enough abilities to tell me that they’re there, or they’ll have such a strong tendency towards it that I’ll know to look for it).

A small note on the right-side smoke; remembering that quarters/halves principle, it is possible for someone to work themselves into a nasty place adjacent to the tunnel wall in theory before you can get the full way around the site (and you may need to adjust the depth on it anyway to boot). In practice, I don’t think it’s possible to do it usefully, but bear it in mind.

Again: typically I’ll do two of these, depending on what information I have from mid and the site. For the window smoke, I tend to smoke on the window itself; there is a little trick of sorts that you can do:

You get this by aiming for the closest corner of the ledge to the window itself; it blocks both window and right side of ledge (though, as you can see, there is a split second where window has vision of you moving onto site). I tend to think this isn’t a good trade-off, but it’s at least worth knowing about.

OFFENSIVE SMOKES — BOXES

One other thing I’ll note are the box smokes; there are a few these can theoretically go on, but these two (particularly the one at the site’s corner) are the most common applications. This is the closest thing you’ll find to breaking out of the ‘stop’/’go’ paradigm; it’s still basically to help you move, but what you’re trying to do with these is, if you have a prolific box camper, you throw down a smoke on top of them; they hence don’t have vision to fire on you, and if they then get down from the box, you know before they see you because of their legs (which is why it’s important here that they’re on a box — this doesn’t work unless you get the underside of the smoke orb too). The same principle can apply too to spots on the ledges.

Note that you have to be VERY careful about the near box smoke in particular — if you hit the lower of the two boxes by accident, there is a chance that they’ll be able to see out of it.

CONCLUSION

While I could theoretically go through every site in the game (and then some) and try to map out smokes for all of them, that would be missing my own point. Valorant nades are not quite the same beast as CS nades; there’s a far lower skill floor to using them acceptably. On skill ceiling…I don’t know as of now. The one thing that’s definitely true is that they have to be understood in far more dynamic terms than in CS, and as a far more inherent part of the gameflow even in pug-type settings.