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Sometimes you just need to challenge yourself, whether it be in your real life or in your favorite game. Everyone knows that having all the Agent roles filled gives you the best chance at victory. But, what if you played Valorant with one Agent role unfilled, how would you determine which one should be left out?
Players Have Two Main Choices for the Redundant Agent Role
One player, Brentums, brought this thought experiment to their Reddit community. They noted: “I’ve noticed some teams still succeed even when one Agent role isn’t filled. If you had to leave out one role (Duelist, Initiator, Controller, or Sentinel), which do you think is the least necessary and why?”.
One thing is for sure, no one mentioned leaving out the Controller. As you might have already suspected, the players nominated two Agent Roles. The Duelist and the Sentinel. These roles were deemed as not essential for winning.
AngryNoodleMan88 noted: “Definitely Sentinel or Duelist. I’ve played many games without Sentinels and it’s playable. And, a few without Duelists, which were also playable. While having a sentinel is great with good utility uses they are necessary. And then when it comes to duelist you can always find someone to enter frag if you need to”.
DaechwitaEnjoyer agreed: “Realistically sentinel, even if you count Viper as a Sentinel and exclude her too. Especially in Ranked. Anchoring/holding space is probably the easiest job to accomplish without dedicated Agent utility, Controllers already do half of it (Viper especially)”.
Valorant Players Explain the Factors That Go Into Decision Making
Other Valorant players insisted that choosing which Agent role not to use depends on several different factors. The main factor is, of course, the map you are playing on. Some-Culture7058 said: “Depends on the map, but either Sentinels or Duelists. Imo both of them can be replaced by great teamwork and specific team comps”.
Sure-Ad-5572 wholeheartedly agreed: “Depends on the map. Icebox likes no Duelist fairly often and Bind often actively prefers no-Sentinel at a high level. Occasionally certain comps will get away with no Initiator or Controller with agents like Yoru/Pheonix/Cypher to sort of tape over the gaps, but it’s still much weaker”.
Several players explained how their choices were based on utility. Clindcosta noted: “For me, it’s more utility-based. A Flash, any kind of info gathering until like drone or even a raze boombot, and something to stop a rush like mollies. And of course a Smoke. If the comp has all these, then it usually makes things work quite well”.
MarkusKF added: “It highly depends on rank and enemy team comp. If the enemy team has loads of utility to break let’s say Cypher trips, a Cypher becomes basically useless because they just spam all the breaking util into a site before entering. But if the enemy doesn’t have that a Sentinel might honestly be the strongest pick”.
These were some very well-thought-out hard choices. These decisions are easier to get the more experience you have. So, if you want to be able to dissect and truly understand the Agent roles in Valorant, there is no better way to learn than through playing the game. Maybe you can even treat yourself in the night market, to visually enhance your experience.