Are you trying to figure out how to play smoke agents in VALORANT? You poor, poor soul. The controller role is a thankless one, and yet it’s mandatory that a team has at least one of them – on any map. That’s as true for ranked as it is for pro play, too. If you’re selfless enough to main a Controller in the ranked queue, then you’ll need all the help you can get, which is why it’s important you know how to smoke properly.
I’m going to explain the most important tip for learning how to play smoke agents in VALORANT. If you implement this one change into your game, you’ll find yourself taking more sites, and winning more games.
How to Play Controller in VALORANT
The Purpose of Your Utility
The first step to learning how to play smoke agents in VALORANT is to recognize what your utility is actually for. There’s more to it than smoking a sight line and pushing. You need to actually understand the objective of your smokes beyond the effect they have.
Used offensively, your smoke grenades are meant to block lines of sight. This isn’t just to stop you from getting shot, but it’s also to deny information for the opponents – forcing them to take unfavorable gunfights.
Used defensively, your smokes are stall tools. They’re designed to prevent enemies from pushing a lane. That’s why you see Controllers smoking site lanes on defensive – it stops the immediate push and buys your teammates time to react to that push, whether that reaction be rotations or taking space elsewhere on the map.
Related: How to Hold Angles in VALORANT
How to Use Smokes Effectively
Using your smokes effectively as a Controller in VALORANT isn’t as hard as you might think. There’s one key difference between a high-level and low-level Controller main, and that’s how deep they smoke choke points.
Almost all of your smoke grenades will end up being placed in choke points. This lets them block an entire line of sight. Which, in turn, effectively cuts off a part of the map to allow your team to gain space.
Oftentimes, enemies will try to contest your smokes, whether that be by spraying through them or playing around them. If you give your enemies space to play with in your smokes, they’re going to cause you a lot of problems.
You don’t want your smokes to create tricky angles for enemies to take gunfights. Instead, you want to smoke deep enough that the choke point itself is still smoked off, but the majority of the smoke’s body is on the enemy’s side of that choke point.
This prevents the enemy from using your smoke to their advantage, forcing them to fight out of the smoke if they want to contest your push.
If you’re not smoking like this in VALORANT – start. You’ll start climbing the ranks in no time.
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Published: Jan 13, 2023 11:51 am