For Context, I am pretty new to Valorant and I did not play too much CSGO. I mostly used to play COD and story driven games.

I started playing Valorant about two months ago after discovering a couple pro players streams and it looked super fun. So I did some research on the basics and started playing.

At the start I ended up deciding not to play duelists as it seemed like all the Valorant memes were about insta-lock duelist, so I would play agents like sage and cypher.

As much as I enjoyed playing I found it hard to win games (cliche blaming bad teammates for losses). I wasn't fragging out like crazy or anything, mostly hovering around a 0.8 - 1kd, again I am pretty new to the game, however I just felt like most of the time one of the biggest reasons I was losing was because people would play duelists such as Jett or Phoenix and go double negative.

I then decided to change my mindset. I decided that instead of relying on others to frag out, I would do so myself. Again I mention that I am no God, but instead of complaining I just decided to work on my game and change up my playstyle so that I can try and fill the gap that I felt was missing in my previous games.

I mainly started playing Phoenix and to my surprise I actually started fragging out more often and actually started winning more often. I believe it has mostly to do with the fact that my job almost got easier, instead of worrying too much about utility my job was to (mostly) be aggressive and try and overwhelm the opponent.

I still sometimes feel a bit cheesy insta-locking a duelist, but in the end I decided that I would rather be the one that gets thrown toxicity in my direction if I do bad, than being the one complaining about the duelist bottom fragging.

I do not think this is the solution to all the problems related to solo queuing, but personally I am glad that I found a way to enjoy it a little more.

TL:DR Started playing duelist in solo queue to surprising success