Valorant tier list: the best agents for ranked

Viper is a bit of a meta pick and not great for solo-queuers, but if you’ve got a good team behind you this is one agent who can be wielded like a surgeon’s knife. Difficult to master, she requires precision, and piloted by the right person can lock down a site on her own, provided the map is suitable for it. This makes Viper the perfect agent to pick on defence as her abilities can be lethal when timed correctly.

Most of her abilities do chip damage rather than actually killing enemies, which is why she needs good support so that others can come in and capitalise on the opponent’s weakened state. The addition of the ‘fragile’ debuff to Viper’s Snakebite means players have to avoid her molotov unless they want to take double damage, making it considerably more effective on eco rounds.

Sova is a pure reconnaissance agent, although his ultimate is handy for netting some free kills. In the right hands, and with a memory bank of Recon Bolt lineups, you can get a read on how many enemies are stacked up on a certain site. His Shock Bolts are useful for clearing out traps, chipping enemies with damage, halting pushes, and his Owl Drone can be used as a follow-up to the Recon Bolt to gain intel on any areas the bolt couldn’t see. All of this makes Sova equally viable on attack and defence, making him the best agent in the game for supporting a push onto site.

Finally, there’s Sova’s ultimate, which can be used with map pings to deliver deadly blows to key map positions like heaven and window. Even if you can’t land a kill with the three arrows, you should at least be able to flush the enemy out of position so your team can clean them up.

Jett is an agent for players who want to take big risks but are confident they can hit their shots. She’s fast, nimble, and can escape practically any situation. The best Jett players are sharp with her blade-throwing ultimate, can navigate the arena quickly, and who can use the Operator or Judge.

Her kit is all about movement: she can hover, dash, soar into the air, and throw down clouds that obscure vision for a few seconds. In the hands of a skilled player, Jett can zoom straight onto a site, carving up the defense and allowing the rest of the attackers to clean up. Her dashing ability encourages playing in unconventional and unsafe spots, as you can get a shot off and retreat immediately. Jett’s ultimate is invaluable in the hands of a skilled aimer, especially if you unleash it on an eco round. Check out our dedicated Jett guide for more.

Astra literally changed the game when she was introduced, and it’s no wonder because she has powerful cosmic abilities that mean she plays quite differently to the other agents on the roster.

She can crowd control with her Gravity Well ability, or she can concuss enemies with Nova Pulse. She also has smokescreens to block line of sight in an emergency, but underpinning her themed ability set is the need to go into astral form and place ‘stars’ that are used to fuel the other abilities. Make sure you don’t get lured by the beauty of this form – as cool as it is to be a ghost, you can’t actually win if you stay there too long.

The astral form is also where Astra triggers her ultimate – Cosmic Divide. This splits the map along a set axis with a giant wall that can block bullets and dampen sound, giving your team the breathing room it needs to either regroup or plan an ambush. She’s definitely not easy to pilot, but a good Astra player is an asset to every team.

Sage has been tweaked more than once since the game’s release, so her place on the tier list has shifted with the meta. At the moment she’s pretty strong, and it’s not hard to see why. Not only is she Valorant’s only dedicated healer, she can also bring dead teammates back to life with her ultimate, which can instantly swing the tide of a match.

Her signature orbs have other uses as well – she can place a wall to seal off a route with the Wall Orb, and she can also slow down enemy agents who are caught by her Slow Orb. While these can be destroyed by the enemy, doing so forces them to reveal their position, which can be used to gain the upper hand. Sage can pair quite nicely with specific operators, so if you’re taking her make sure you think hard about team composition.

Raze gets a lot of flack for being too simple and only useful for picking up cheap frags with her Paint Shells cluster grenades and rocket ultimate. However, she’s one of the strongest agents for clearing utility in Valorant. Her Paint Shells and Blast Packs can be lobbed into default Tripwire and Nanoswarm spots, perfect for clearing out utility and buying a quick path onto site. On defence, these same abilities are handy for slowing down pushes.

Raze’s Boom Bot can be deployed for intel gathering and corner clearing. It’s also a simple and efficient means of distracting the enemy team, allowing you to swing out and get a shot off.

Raze’s most undervalued piece of utility however, is her Blast Packs. These joyously versatile satchels can be thrown and detonated for a range of results. The most obvious application is that you can throw these packs down and use them to elevate to a higher position, or to quickly push or escape an enemy.

Valorant’s newest agent has hit the ground running – quite literally in that her entire thing is zipping around the map at incredible speeds with her High Gear ability. Fast Lane is another great ability for giving a clear pathway into a space, or potentially for isolating an enemy agent for a 1v1 bout. Her other two abilities are less about speed and more about harassment.

Relay Bolt is a great way to disrupt an enemy formation and create an opening for the rest of her team, while her ultimate ability can either be used to crank up her speed to 11, or condense it all into a lightning bolt attack that will make you feel like Emperor Palpatine.

Neon does come with some risk, however – she’s not especially hard-hitting, and will need support to ensure she doesn’t get stuck in a position she can’t zoom her way back out of.

While Killjoy’s no longer as potent as she used to be (which saw her frequently banned at pro level), she’s still a very solid operator so her A-tier rank is more than justified. Killjoy’s main benefit is that her gadgets can collect information without risking her own neck.

The Nanoswarm can punish aggressive pushes, lazy default plants, and will need to be cleared out, meaning Killjoy’s role as a defender slightly edges her utility as an attacker. That said, her ultimate ability – Lockdown – can be lethal in either circumstance. Literally locking down anyone in range, it can either prove fatal for a well-timed push, or it can help your team retake the site and defuse the spike.

There’s nothing particularly clever about KAY/O, but he’s a dependable and solid operator with plenty of offensive utility that make him a solid foundation for any push. His Zero/Point, Frag/Ment, and Flash/Drive abilities are situational, but give KAY/O a well-rounded loadout to meet almost any situation.

His suppression ultimate isn’t flashy, but if you pair him with someone with a bit more utility, he can clean up enemy agents quite quickly. This ability was buffed late last year to continue pulsing even after downing an enemy, making KAY/O even more annoying to deal with.

Skye’s higher up the list than she used to be thanks to some targeted buffs that mean she doesn’t have to rely so much on teammates exploiting the openings she can create. Guiding Light can blind enemies with its flash effect, and Trailblazer or her ultimate Seekers can help you flush enemies out of cover as well as deal damage.

Skye’s pick rate drastically improves when playing on smaller maps on both offence and defence, thanks to her impressive utility options.She even has some light healing, although she’s not a replacement for Sage in this regard.

Omen’s ability to move around the battlefield without being spotted and feint moves makes him incredibly difficult to read, forcing enemies to second guess anything you do. He can quickly move between cover in the heat of battle without exposing himself, blind and deafen huge areas of a site with his flashes, and cut off important Operator angles with his precise smoke placement.

The main issue with Omen these days is that he /can/ be anticipated and managed, especially as a lot of standard strats with this character are well known at this point. He’s still great fun for new players, but as you come across more veteran players you’ll find it harder and harder to surprise them.

Cypher’s recon utility is a little too easy to predict and destroy if you’re not switching up placement every round, but codename Gumshoe is an incredibly powerful agent in the right hands. Recent nerfs have tanked his pick rate, meaning he’s not as favoured as he used to be.

Cypher’s ultimate is very ‘feast or famine’ as it relies on Cypher being near a downed enemy, but it can be a round-saving ability if it confirms the site is clear for you to plant on or reveals the last couple of enemies hiding in corners ahead of you.

There are many positive arguments and things to be said about Reyna’s potential and toolset, but she’s also a ‘feast or famine’ agent, and that means she’s only as good as the player controlling her. She can be S-tier in the hands of the right player, especially when solo-queing, but for the purposes of this list she struggles to remain in B as she’s a poor team player.

To her credit, Reyna’s flashes are very powerful for peaking and pushing, and her ability to chain frags together makes her the ultimate agent for clutching out rounds. This is extremely powerful when paired against a lesser team, but Reyna’s abilities simply aren’t as good when matched up against equal opposition as she can’t score kills as easily.

If this list ranked agents in terms of how well dressed they were, Chamber would be God tier. Sadly, it’s a ranking on how well agents fare in a team in ranked play, and here the exquisitely cut Frenchman struggles a bit more.

He’s great for eco rounds, and has some manoeuvrability thanks to his Rendezvous ability, but the majority of his lethality comes from how good a shot the person controlling him is. Chamber’s ultimate ability summons an Operator – unless you’re particularly good with this sniper rifle, Chamber will be as much use as a suit in a firefight.

As with a lot of the agents in Valorant, in the right hands Breach can be a powerhouse. But in the wrong house he’s as much a hindrance to his own team as he is the enemy team, and he’s /always/ in the wrong hands.

He’s a very complex agent to pilot, so you will need to understand his abilities and how they work to a very high degree if you want to give him a go. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Phoenix is fun, but relies a little bit too much on other teammates to be truly viable. At the very least, there are usually better picks, but that’s not to say he doesn’t have some tricks up his sleeve.

From his Hot Hands ability that he can use to heal while it burns everyone around him to death, to his ultimate that lets him run in, wreck house, and essentially rubber-band back to where he started like nothing happened, there’s a lot of disruptive potential here. The fact remains that in the current meta there are still better picks – unless Phoenix receives buffs to put him on the same level as agents like Skye, he’s going to remain in C-tier.

While Brimstone was more dependable when Valorant first launched, as newer agents have come online his utility has become less and less desirable. Each of his abilities, bar perhaps his ultimate, is better done elsewhere and in a more focused kit. Originally he was thought to be boring, but now he’s boring and underpowered – a tragic combination.

Considering Yoru is getting a rework in the not-to-distant future, it’s no wonder he languishes at the bottom of the list at the moment. You can see the potential of his teleport ability in someone like Chamber, who has a more manageable version of the same concept, and there are other agents that are just far better at disruption and intel gathering.

His ultimate is about the only interesting thing about him, but it’s hard to justify picking Yoru just for that these days when there are so many other potent agents to pick now.