3 Underrated Valorant Agents

Valorant, as an esport, has grown exponentially since its release. Fans love it for its high-paced fights and super-powered radiant agents they use to compete.

However, the game is plagued by players choosing the same agents over and over. So many competitive matches are filled with Sages, Sovas, Reynas and not much else. Where the meta is a bit stale, we’d love to take a look at three underrated Valorant agents that deserve a bit more attention.

Brimstone is Valorant’s gun-toting every-man, which doesn’t help his very average turnout in the competitive scene. He’s got a very middling 21% pick rate, despite having the 4th highest win rate.

This soldier has a lot more to offer than people expect. If you compare him to his fellow Controllers, He has the second highest win rate, higher than pro-scene favorite, Omen. Similarly, he has the second highest first blood percentage.

His abilities mesh team support and point control and more players should use him to bolster themselves and their team to victory. Just don’t get too heartbroken if the enemy team moves out of your ultimate; it comes with the agent.

This druid agent has struggled to find her legs since her release. One of Skye’s greatest flaws is that, while casting a lot of her abilities, she’s left more vulnerable than the average agent.

Her win rate doesn’t reflect that danger, though. While she has an abysmal 16% pick rate, she has the 5th highest win rate in competitive play, at 48.3%. That’s higher than Sage, Reyna, or Jett. That’s also a better win rate than Sova, the Initiator that famed Sentinels Tenz himself named the best agent in the game (although the difference is only by .01%). With that kind of win rate, more people should be using her supportive skills.

Her vision and healing abilities are a tad unorthodox and less intuitive than Sova or Sage, but she makes up for it in multi-talented skills and a kit built around supporting her team, not sustaining herself. Next time you’re playing with friends, become the healer and spy of their dreams.

When it comes to comparing potential to lack of gameplay, Phoenix is easily the most under-appreciated Duelist in the game (sorry, Yoru fans). That likely has to do with the fact that, out of all of them, he’s the most supportive and self-sustaining. His skills are not as flashy or exciting as Raze’s explosives or Jett’s knives, but he can do so much on his own with decent survivability.

While his win rate isn’t great (45.8%), it is only .01% less than Reyna, the second most picked agent in the game. He’s also tied for second place when it comes to Duelists scoring First Blood.

Now, we’re not going to pretend that there aren’t other duelists better at doing damage. Valorant has done a great job at creating the perfect agents for that. But in solo queue, Phoenix could be a great asset for a lone player. He has sustainability and map manipulation that other duelists don’t. Think a duelist with a little flair of Controller in him; that can be a lot more powerful than people give him credit.

Valorant is fun because it’s a game where players try to be the hero with quickscopes and quickcasts. Brimstone, Skye, and Phoenix are easily ignored because they aren’t the best agents of their roles; they tend to be good at multiple roles. Brimstone is effectively a Controller/Sentinel, Skye an Initiator/Sentinel, and Phoenix a Duelist/Controller. They don’t perfectly fit expected roles and it makes it harder to put them in an uncoordinated team. There’s a reason synchronized pro-teams are more likely to use them.

Well, and two of them have a flash.

The Valorant community doesn’t seem to appreciate flashes nearly as much as the developers think they do. When it comes to pick-rates, five out of the bottom eight agents have a flash. The top seven only have Reyna’s Leer and Omen’s Paranoia, which both work a lot differently than the other all-blinding flashes. Fans clearly aren’t, well, fans of the current flash system and it shows.

But as there is a growing shift towards larger maps, Controllers, and interwoven teamwork, hopefully Brimstone, Skye, and Phoenix can get the attention they deserve, regardless of their complications.