Valorant is a game focused on strategy, and while it can be easy for new players to pick a duelist character or a controller because they seem to do a lot of the work in the game, it takes a more strategically focused mind to pick up an initiator.
The different roles for agents in Valorant are important to learn if players wish to rise through the ranks, and initiators are all about helping start attacks on the site, flushing enemies out of hiding spots, and helping their team get the upper hand in an attacking situation. To do this, players will have to get to know the abilities and where they work best on certain maps for whichever initiator agent they select.
5 Skye
The initiator that can heal teammates is a usual position to have around indeed. While there are a couple of agents in Valorant that are considered almost unusable under the current professional meta, none of the initiators are particularly in this category and that makes it difficult to rank them for competitive or unrated play. Skye can be very useful for flushing out enemies because of her wolf, which allows her to see directly ahead of herself and her teammates in order to clear corners and stun any enemies she finds there.
Skye also has a powerful ult ability which enables her to chase down enemies in different parts of the map and blind them temporarily. This ability can clear out sites alone and is incredibly useful, but besides these Skye can heal her teammates within a ring around herself, ideal for situations where the team is sticking closely together as they try to enter a site. Overall, Skye buffs a team and their positioning hugely, and does what is required of an initiator, it just happens that other initiators are currently more empowered to do those things than she is.
4 Breach
Breach is a powerful Swedish cyborg and is incredibly useful with his abilities that can blind, damage, and even throw enemies around the map. The best thing about Cyborg is most of his abilities can be sent through walls. He has a damaging blast that can clear out a corner of any site as the team enters. Additionally, his blinds can be sent through walls, a rare but incredibly powerful ability that can completely halt enemy resistance or an enemy attack.
However, a problem with Breach is that there are signs ahead of a lot of his utility that can help higher-level enemy players avoid a lot of the damage they could take. Both the concussions and blinds can be dealt with, and so despite Breach being difficult to get to grips with initially, it isn’t worth it in the end as he will become less viable an initiator for competitive Valorant games after the first few ranks.
3 KAY/O
The robotic agent that is designed to halt the use of other agents' abilities to try and give his team an advantage. KAY/O is an agent who can irritate and annoy the enemy team by stripping them down to the guns they are holding. Using his ult or his knife to temporarily stop the opposition from using their abilities at key moments like a charge onto the site is an incredibly useful ability at every and any level of play in Valorant.
Besides this, KAY/O is also a high-level capability agent because of his flash grenades and his fragment which can clear out corners effectively anywhere on the map. These two abilities combined with his unique stoppage of others' abilities make KAY/O a unique agent who can be hard to plan against. He can completely shut down strategies involving a lot of abilities in seconds, and his knife can be used either to find the enemy team at the beginning of a round or to completely shut them off if they are trying to enter or defend a site.
2 Sova
Sova is a difficult agent to get to grips with, as are many initiators because players need to know the maps and game very well in order to perform the duties of an initiator role as well as they need to for a successfully built team. The strategic elements, like scouting forwards with Sova’s drone or being able to hit perfect shots with his recon arrow, are massively helpful to the team as a whole and are necessary parts of high-level strategies that only an initiator can perform.
Sova’s shock bolts and ultimate ability are both high capability, but difficult to master, and the damage from these cannot be relied upon unless the player is a true Sova master. Putting together Sova’s utility in combo maneuvers is crucial to success, and when it is all brought together, often with specific line-ups for shots, Sova can be a menace to any opposing team that can help break the opposition down every game.
1 Fade
However, the most recently introduced initiator agent in Valorant is currently still on top of the pile. Fade is a devastating character, the young Turkish agent has a set of utilities that can tear apart enemy teams trying to enter or defend a site. Fade is one of the easiest initiator agents to learn, because her utility is great, makes easy combinations, and provides a lot of support for her team at whatever level of the game is being played.
Fade’s haunt marks out enemy agents on the map, and her prowlers can chase down these agents to blind and confuse them, as well as mark them out even better for her teammates. Seize is about trapping enemy agents in one spot, and her ultimate ability is again about marking enemies out. The opposition doesn’t often know how to defend a site from an oncoming Fade with backup, because better than any other initiator, she can flush them out and make them completely vulnerable to her teammates and their utility.
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