there's a lot of things that you learn over time but sometimes it takes way too long and even still there are some things that you never really learn so here's 20 big things that I wish I knew sooner in valerant starting with smoking in general one thing that I didn't really understand is how to stop enemies from just brute forcing their way on to point right you throw a smoke on the choke points and often times people will go into it pop out with all kinds of utility and rush on the site I didn't realize how powerful a smoke was was just set somewhere in the middle of sight somewhere on site this adds immense pressure to the enemy trying to push because you could be in the smoke around the smoke try to pop out of the smoke with utility there's so many different things that can happen which forces the enemy to actually split the sight takes often times into multiple sections where they're clearing the front of the site they're clearing inside the smoke they're clearing the back of the site and it really breaks up that utility a lot gives you a ton more options as a Defender and I didn't really realize why this was so strong I always felt like At the beginning these smokes felt random or purposeless but as I started to learn more and more and as I started to watch more and more Pro play I realized the power of these sight smokes and how they force the opponent to act in a very particular way that is to your advantage as a Defender and that's really a lot of what valerant is is finding ways to put yourself in consistent advantages and force your opponent to act in a certain way now to help you understand this a bit better we have a 1v5 course on our website made by expert analyst and player TS TV check out this clip where he breaks down his mentality in a clutch situation and you can incorporate this as well we have tons of other courses just like this that will break down round after round that you can check out plus mechanical guides and agent courses if you want more in-depth learning about those specific things with our rank Improvement money back guarantee if you don't climb you don't pay so what are you waiting for check it out right now in the links down below and number two is that aim is as much movement as it is mouse control I always thought that I just needed to get the perfect movement of my mouse I need to get the perfect Mouse perfect sense practice every single day to just find everything perfectly optimal so that I have amazing aim but timing correct strafing and click timing with every single weapon are equally as important as Mouse control in developing good aim you got to split up your aim into multiple sections as far as your timing as far as your strafing as far as your movement and every single aspect of this needs to be mastered or you'll never be as good as the top aimers even if your mouse control control is on point number three that I wish I knew earlier was learning to lurk at the pace of your team everyone knows that lurking is one of the most powerful things that you can do in ranked play but it's super easy to mess up and it makes it so that every time you try you feel like it's either random when they work or you try and then you die and feed and everyone flames you so here's the trick that I wish I would have known if your team is rushing every single round you need to find a way to match the pace on your lurk this doesn't always mean taking a a fast fight but you got to get into a position where you can either hear the enemy rotate and quickly call back to your team or try to find some other form of value but it has to be at the rate of your team if you're too fast you're going to get isolated you're not going to get any info for your team if you're too slow then you're going to just be playing retake your whole team is dead and you're constantly wrapping around really easy to isolate and enemies are going to know they're going to deduce where you are because you're not going to be with your team and it's super important that you pay attention to what your team is doing and line that up if you ever want to have successful lurks another thing I wish I learned is to passive entry on duelist this was something that I always did where I was either entering really really quickly aggressively like a psychopath and dying and feeding most of the time or I was not going in that aggressive and I was waiting and buying time and often times my team would go before me or my team would get mad at me and I didn't really understand to find the right balance but something that you could do is create openings and opportunities for your teams and not just force a fast fight so an example of this would be dashing into your smoke as jet on point and not instantly peing instantly challenging because let's say you smoke and dash into it and you instantly challenge you could either win that fight or lose it but losing that fight right here means that a lot of the value that you got a lot of the Spades that you created a lot of the entry that you created for your team none of that will continue to exist if you lose that fight right there right let's say say you die instantly and then that person gets to swing to your teammates coming in and kill another one of them too but if you would have just smoked again delayed waited it keeps the pressure on the opponent and you're basically postponing the win or loss of that fight the idea is is you wait as long as possible so that when you do fight it's okay if you lose it cuz your team are right there ready to trade you and they got to walk on the sight at that same time where your opponent is being put between a rock and a heart place where they're waiting for you to pop out and they're waiting for your team to push the choke and they wish you would Peak right away they wish you would fight right away but you're putting more pressure on them by playing that passive or being patient number five is limit testing is a speedrun to becoming a lot better so limit testing often times will start off as trolling and the idea behind limit testing is that you go above and beyond you really try to be aggressive with the way that you're playing you be aggressive with the angles that you're challenging and most of the time you're really trying to push your character's kit to their limits but often times this is going to be trolling because you're forgoing a lot of the proper things that you should be doing and you're going to learn a lot of lessons the hard way but it will teach you a lot about getting better over time much more quickly but the only way that limit testing goes from being something that is like a temporary thing a temporary feed to you becoming great is by you analyzing why things didn't work work you can't just keep being aggressive running and using your utility and being like okay I just wasn't aggressive enough or I'm not going to think about why that didn't work I'm just going to do it again and again and again you need to be re-evaluating every single game I highly suggest if you really want a limit test you really want to get better quickly record your gameplay play aggressive push the limits and then reel those limits back in so that you're not playing overly passive you know exactly what you can get away with and you know where the lines are what you can get punished for and that's how you're going to get better a lot quicker now number six is try every agent at least once even if it's just in the range this is something that a lot of players just don't even do there's a lot of you right now if there's a character in valerant that you have not played you've not used a kit if there's an ability you haven't used if there's an ultimate you haven't used you need to use them you need to understand them and I'm not saying to play and grind every single character I've taught a lot on this channel to specialize have a small agent pool maybe three characters four characters Max right but this still doesn't mean that you should have zero idea how your opponent's kits work you should have a good understanding of how it feels to be in like a Viper even if you've never really grinded Viper you should understand how that feels what the visibility looks like you should know what it's like to try to smoke certain coronor you should know what it's like to try to flash for your team or entry dashes jet for your team every single thing that you could know you know the pain points you know what you're waiting for you know how the kit works and functions and you know how to interrupt an opponent's flow all these things are super important but if you are sitting here and you've only played like five characters in the roster I'm telling you right now go play at least one game or like a swift play even on every character that you haven't played and you're going to get that much better very very quickly now something else that I think a lot of people should do that I didn't do nearly enough is making sure that I warm up every single time even if it's short sometimes all you need is a f- minute warmup and I think actually some players warm up too much like if you are warming up for like an hour or an hour and a half or 2 hours between aim labs and freaking death match and warm-up training and all that stuff you are probably doing too much right you're you're you're cutting into your grind time you're cutting into the time that you should be grinding comp matches which is not going to be great for your development however if you just spend a consistent amount of short time an optimized 5 minutes where you go through these things you're going to just have that extra bit of consistency you're not going to maybe be 100% warmed up but you're going to at least be 80 95% much more than you would be if you just hopped on the game now something that I didn't know at the start and I wish I would have because now as you climb the ranks everyone does this in High ELO and almost no one does this in low ELO and it's just smoking the spike in almost every single retake situation where you need to diffuse smoking the spike is almost always the optimal play and the reason is it puts a lot of pressure on the attacker because they don't know if you're sticking it and they want to get you off of it right so they either have to manually check inside the smoke or they have to spray spraying gives away their information and manually checking also gives away their information and gives you an ability to counterplay them right if you are not smoking your spikes and you're just trying to press that diffuse and hold it right an enemy is going to Peak you right before the half they're going to know you're on it or they're going to know you're there and you're not going to be able to do anything about that and you should not go through the motions of that and then smoke it if you can I need you to smoke it right away and then gather that information tap the spike get off the spike wait in the Smoke even maybe to an angle get off that Spike and force an enemy to come in there's a lot of things that you can do to force enemies to act in a way that you want to but it needs to be automatic you need to make sure that you always go through these motions every single time you're in a defuse situation and you're going to have a much more consistent and better post plant in general number nine is the mini map I didn't realize how busted the mini map was but especially when you have little to no coms in a rank game the mini map is actually your best friend like as an example you know that the enemy Cipher likes to lurk and because you're paying attention to your mini map you notice that your teammate spots them on a sight hit more often than not you can now freely rotate to help your team without worrying about a lurker and this is a little bit of information that you don't need translated to you if you're just paying attention and trying to absorb it all on top of that jiggle peaking while looking at the map is a simple way to get info even if you only see a sliver of the enemy or it was literally impossible for you to make out what type of character it was mini map can provide that information for you another thing is the 40 4020 rule this is something that I wish I would have adopted when I first started because it would have helped my mindset a lot and here's the idea 40% of games you're going to lose no matter what you do maybe there's a Smurf on the enemy team you have someone that leaves or throws on your team you can't win this game no matter what and there going to be another 40% that you win the enemy team self-destructs they get toxic they have a lever you have a Smurf whatever happens well for whatever reason that's not a game that you're going to lose really no matter how you play in both games you don't have a lot of agency but that last 20% that's the 20% that you can change the outcome of now here's the real kicker you don't know what 20% is the actual 20% you can change you have no idea you have to treat every single game like it is all the 20% and here's the reason because if you are losing a game maybe you lost a couple of rounds you lost three four rounds and you're like okay this game is chocked I'm going to give up this is just a game I couldn't win no matter what but in reality you could have easily won that game you could have clutched up in one round and then the momentum changed how many times have you been dramatically winning a game and then lose that game it happens all the time there's so many turnarounds so you need to give everything you can to turn every single game that you have any agency over into a win even if on the outside from the outside looking in it looks like that game's already lost there's a lot of games that are not but then afterwards if you gave it your after all you tried a lot you are really impactful you were high up on the leaderboard you know you had a lot of impact with your abilities then I want you to take things from that game of course you can learn things from every single game but don't let it destroy you mentally because there's some games that you just couldn't have won unless you turned into freaking tens yourself so it's important to make sure that you don't beat yourself up too hard about some of these losses because there are some amount of them that are unavoidable they're built in you're not going to have a 100% win rate so don't beat yourself up too hard and number 11 is practicing weapons other than rifles in Deathmatch you may notice that you don't fully understand a weapon when you buy it in game no matter what it is you should use it in Deathmatch to learn the reset timers and how it feels to shoot against Real players I know that a lot of people just want to run it down with only the Vandal in deathmatch and while this can be good of course to get better aim and overall just get more comfortable with a weapon you should still do this with other weapons and even if you're getting destroyed using a classic or a bulldog or whatever in Deathmatch this is a literal cheat code to improving Niche weapons and when you walk into a game with a weapon that you popped off with in deathmatch and then you use it in a comp game you're going to dominate with it and you're going to feel super comfortable and relaxed which is going to be great now number 12 is that there's no single play style for each role and I think a lot of people kind of get locked into this idea that you should play this play style you should play aggressive you should play lurky fraggy whatever but don't feel locked into a certain play style on specific agents Sentinels can be aggressive controllers can create opportunities duelist players can play slow and initiators can make solo plays there is a lot of flexibility when it comes to Valor about how you play depending on the teammates that you're playing with depending on how your players or enemy players are reacting and how you're personally feeling how consistent you're feeling in that given day there's a lot of opportunity for you to go above or Beyond Your Role or make plays that are maybe untraditional for your role so it's important that you don't feel like you have to play in one particular way and I think it's actually bad for your development if you feel like only players should play In This Very linear specific way because you're not going to be able to predict things that go outside of that and you're never going to try and experiment with things that make you a better player now if you m an agent with lineups you got to learn them and I know that lineups are cringe right that's what people say lineups are cringe and I thought that too I was like I'm not going to learn lineups there's nothing you can do to make me learn lineups but the reality of it is you can guarantee some free wins and it's going to take 5 minutes to learn that meta and there will be a hard cap where at some point if you're playing a SOA a Viper a brim and you don't know lineups you are just going to be less effective less efficient than another SOA that does they've learned them Pros learned them and if you want to become good and consistent and reliable you need to learn them it takes almost no time at all and it's so important for your overall impact and then from there you can focus on other aspects of your kit that you like more but these are non-negotiables pretty much Necessities if you want to become good you need to know now normal and jump jiggle Peaks may be the single important mechanic to learn in valerant like there's a lot of mechanics about movement and different abilities but if you don't know how to jump and jiggle Peak this is just unacceptable jiggle peaking is the easiest way to dis Place enemy cross aayers and gain infos about where they are jump jiggling is best used against an operator but be careful if your jump Peak is too readable they may hit that shot if they're good enough but you should practice these and know how to do these and be confident in doing these it shows full control of your character and it shows an understanding of a mechanic that is incredibly useful you got to learn it it's very very important now in caling agent names and specific number of people is extremely helpful and I have been known to make some pretty poor coms and there's a lot of vague coms that you can make that will just lose you rounds if you hear one or two footsteps and yell it's a it's a your entire team will rotate and potentially throw the entire round away it's really important to be precise with the coms that you're given many valant rounds are like a puzzle everyone on your team gains different in the more specific you are the easier it will be to put the pieces together and fully predict the enemy now to set up a perfect double hold use the Ping function if you're holding an angle with your teammate pinging the angle that you are holding will make it easier for your teammate to line up in the perfect position pinging is honestly just way underrated it's more effective than actually calming in a lot of instances and it can be really great for your teammate to know the exact line of sight that you have covered so they can set up the exact perfect double hold it's really easy and simple to do but it's so important number 17 is plan your rounds based on your enemy economy and ultimates available it's really easy to just kind of only think about what you want to do in the round that you're going to play but there are many rounds that can be won before they even start because there a lot of information that's given to you just by pressing tab like let's say you notice the enemy has a decent amount of money but not enough to get a full buy you could easily get an outlaw because you know that they're going to be rocking that light armor and now you have a more powerful double tapping off now if you notice the enemy has a kill Joy you can expect a specific sight hit because some SES work better with that kill Joy all and if you play around that it's going to be a lot easier like on a scent you know that they're either going to go tree or they're going to go be that's really really easy for you to predict and it's super strong because you know that they're going to want to make a play off that kill joyle these are some examples that you can have and apply to your games to get free prediction free information and free wins in rounds now number 18 is is that crouching is only bad if you're peing multiple people in simple terms crouching locks you into your fight in most 1 V ons it won't negatively affect the fight at all it more so hurts you a lot when you're going to fight multiple people or if you don't know if you're going to fight multiple people but when peeking into multiple people crouching makes you basically almost guaranteed to be tradeable it's really easy to trade you so if you have a true isolated fight crouching isn't all that bad but if you're in a fight against potentially multiple people committing to that Crouch means probably either committing to a spray transfer or you're going to get traded number 19 is I wish I understood that making your smoke flush with the choke points is always the best option it's super easy to get lazy with smokes I've been there everyone's been there where you just throw the smokes out and you're like oh that did the job I can go do whatever I want to do I can go lurk I can go do this do that right but smokes that aren't flush with the Enemy choke point give the enemy slight cover to play around and create counterplay within your own utility like they can funnel onto your site and they can potentially get a better pop out flash than they would be able to otherwise because you let them set up on site a little bit so just make sure that you're being consistent and efficient with your utility and you're not allowing your utility to be used against your own teammates or to set your opponents up for strong plays and number 20 is something that's subconscious and hard to get rid of but you should be using your ultimate more especially in ranked valerant games there are no round rounds that are truly secure using your SS to guarantee as many rounds as possible will win you more games because there's so many rounds that you think you won on paper you're up by like one person it's like three to two and then you lose you lose that round really easily I know it's happened to you but an old would have locked that round down you would have guaranteed got that win and way too many people hold on to their SS for potentially more value then they don't use a lot of ss throughout the game and they don't secure these rounds that should have been completely dubs you know they were 60/40 rounds or 55 45 rounds that they had a slight advantage in and they're like oh hold it and you don't get that opportunity to secure those easy rounds and it's not often where one ultimate can be the difference between winning or losing a round so put the nail in the coffin win that freaking round use that ultimate and you're also going to get a lot more ultimates because you're using ultimates more so I'd highly suggest it all right though guys before we wrap this up let me tell you a little bit more about skill cap so we offer a five division rankup guarantee and that's a pretty crazy thing to offer it's like a gym membership guaranteeing you'll get ripped your local gym would go bust if they offered that not us we've offered this for years because our service really works it works so well in fact that we're able to produce by far the largest catalog of Premium valerant guys on the internet we had new courses every month with over 1,000 guys created into 50 courses no one can compare we also have a direct line of communication with subscribers in our Discord so you can get connected immediately some of the best players in the game Who respond to any and all questions asked sign up today for as little as $66.99 a month if you are serious about improving so that's going to be all for this one today thank you so much for watching and we'll see you in the next one