I wanted to share my experience of how I solo queued from Gold to Ascendant. This is by no means an objective guide, I am just providing things that I felt like were valuable to me. This is my tracker: https://tracker.gg/valorant/profile/riot/A%C5%82ter%20Ego%23NA1/overview

Lessons learned (IN-GAME)

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• Gold/Plat can play as aggressive as you want, reyna works super well.
• Gold/Plat instalock a duelist and just believe in yourself. YOU will be responsible for the win loss. Don’t blame ANYONE else other than YOURSELF if you lose.
• High Diamond let your team know what you can play. You should ideally know how to play multiple agents/roles by now.
• Diamond play defense more passively, getting 1 for 1 is very bad.
• Learn to count. Who is where and doing what.
• Observe patterns and behaviors. This is very helpful in predicting what is going to happen and knowing which enemy is going to be where.
• USE YOUR MIC. let your team know what you want to do, what you want them to do. where the enemy is, what they might do.
• Warmup before you play. My routine: Easy bots hit all 30. Medium hit 28. Deathmatch.
• Clear one angle at once. Do not expose yourself to more than one angle by swinging wide unnecessarily.
• Play every attack round with an intention. Who is going where doing what and why.
• Gold/Plat if win pistol, full buy second round (full util + armor), buy for next third round. if lose pistol, force buy.
• Diamond, same if win. if lose, just full save.
• On save round, just five man rush and do eco dmg.
• On buy for next, buddy up and hold so you can trade for rifles.

Lessons learned (OUT OF GAME)

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• <30 ping, use ethernet!!!
• Use a light mouse, I use the GPW (don’t just copy someone else’s sens and dpi, find what is right for you)
• High refresh rate + fps, 120hz is good enough and make sure your fps is consistently above your refresh rate. Monitors will also have response times, you want the value to be as low as possible.
• Watch pro players’ streams, pro games (+analysis if you really want to.) You will learn a LOT. Try to understand why they do what they do. Personally, I felt like I have learned the most macro from Shahzam. When his solo queue games get really close, he’ll automatically enter IGL mode and you can learn a lot of valuable execs + post-plants.
• Know when to take a break. I usually play my games in threes. If I’m playing well, I’ll play another three. But if you notice yourself dipping, take a break and do something else.

This is all the stuff I can think of right now, thanks for reading. If you want to follow me, I post Youtube shorts on the daily (other than sunday) at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSEkRvNgElA8mQXV3_NiRaw

You might be able to catch a rare stream at https://www.twitch.tv/dr45tic Feel free to ask me anything, I am more than happy to answer + I always want to help people improve.