How to Climb Ranked as a 5-Stack in Valorant

The Valorant 5-Stack Guide to Climbing as a Squad

Does the solo-queue experience in Valorant get on your nerves? Are the randoms in your team sabotaging you once again? You are stuck and unsatisfied in your current rank but cannot climb the Ranked ladder because of unfair matchmaking?

Maybe, grouping up in a coordinated 5-stack is a possible solution to all of your problems. A large population of the Valorant player base is queueing the Ranked or Unranked matchmaking in a lobby of at least three people.

Especially in Valorant, this approach may secure you a clear advantage over your opponents because of the more reliable communication and consistent teamwork. That’s why we want to cover the process of establishing a dependable Valorant 5-stack for you and your friends.

Starting from the initial step of finding fitting players for your lobby, going all the way through to explaining what opportunities there are for your team to compete besides the official Ranked ladder.

Coming Together: How to Make Friends (or at least Teammates)

A good portion of you might already have a group of friends you can grind and climb Ranked with. You probably meet a few times a week to play together or just bunch up with the players that are available in the moment to have a little fun.

However, many people who generally enjoy this game aren’t so fortunate and have to expose themselves to the risky and oftentimes toxic environment of solo-queue.

One option for those players could be to constantly be on the lookout for skilled and communicative mates in the matches they play.

Separating the wheat from the chaff and recruiting teammates that might qualify to be invited into your lobby to play further matches can be a tricky task.

There’s always a chance the player who was supposed to enhance the team chemistry turns out as a burden to the rest of the lobby by being toxic or simply in a lower skill level.

But in the past this attempt showed to be very successful in several cases and even a few of the best professional teams found their line-ups this way.

Agreeing on a Schedule

Depending on the availability of the group of players you now established, it can help immensely to work out a basic schedule for playing together.

Everyone knows the problem: Your friends are at work, in school, or busy doing “more important” stuff than playing Valorant when you are eager to rank up in your next few games.

Most of the times it makes sense to pick a few days of the week (or even every day) and to arrange a set time when you should come together.

There are many possibilities that work well as a meeting point, most fitting would be some kind of voice conferencing software which you should use anyway if you intend to communicate more fluently with your team, for example: Discord, Teamspeak, or even Skype.

So, now you are almost good to go for queuing Ranked with your mates and dominating the opponents due to the improved quality of your communication and teamplay.

But, one thing is still to be determined: Who plays which agent and what kind of player types did you gather in your squad.

Pre-Game Strategizing

After you found yourself a reliable and fun-to-play-with lobby, you and your teammates have to decide on which agents to play and who is going to play them. And ideally, this discussion should take place before you find a game.

Just like people have strengths and weaknesses in real life, players in Valorant prefer some agents over others depending on their playstyle.

Here are some general tips to find your perfect agent selection based on the player types you are working with:

• Aggressive players who tend to simply out-aim opponents are most valuable to the team by playing duelists like: Jett, Phoenix, Raze, Reyna.
• Thinkers who are constantly trying to maximize teamwork and work out the smartest solution to a tricky situation probably find supporting agents most fitting, for example: Breach, Sage, Sova, or the latest added agent Skye.
• Strategists who are likely to stay in the back at first and observe the action carefully before charging into battle presumably find the most joy in playing more passive agents like: Omen, Brimstone, Cypher, Killjoy or the by the community more or less neglected Viper

Be sure to include the different maps and Spike sites in your decision making and differentiate between them. Not every map is the same and thus should be approached in an appropriate manner.

But testing is above studying and worrying too much about tactics and such details of the game can shift your focus from the actual gameplay. So try things out and learn with your team!

However, if you are clueless about the best agent combinations on each map, we’ve got you covered with our Valorant agent tier list.

Here you can find our recommended agent picks for the current map pool during every patch:

Outlook on Competitive and Esports

If you and your teammates reach a point at which the regular Valorant Ranked experience bores you to death and ranking up isn’t a goal that is worth striving for any longer, you could make the next step and enter the big and competitive world of Valorant esports.

Every week and especially weekend there are lots of tournaments and cups to compete in for either a certain price pool or simply “honor and fame”.

As a really new game, Valorant already has a fairly big esports scene which is continuously growing.

Price pools are getting bigger and the first tournaments administered by Riot themselves (Valorant’s development studio) are seeing the light of day.

Esports is a huge market and a great passion for millions of people all over the world but it’s not for everyone – and that’s totally fine.

We merely want to draw your attention to the possibility to further your Valorant experience when Ranked matchmaking just doesn’t do it for you anymore. The esports community welcomes every new and interested member.

Want more tools to help your 5-stack? Head to our Valorant Maps feature to help plan your executes and tactics.