VALORANT player punished by weird interaction between Clove and Iso’s ultimates

Iso’s popularity has skyrocketed among VALORANT agents following a huge buff, and players have discovered an unexpected interaction between his ultimate and Clove’s.

Ever since VALORANT Patch 8.11 buffed Iso, the duelist has been seeing a lot more play, to the point where some believe it’s ruining the game. Only his Double Tap ability was changed, but this also indirectly buffed his Kill Contract ultimate. Now that Iso can immediately activate his Double Tap shield without getting a kill first, he has an even bigger advantage to win the one-vs-one duel in his ultimate. That’s exactly what one Iso player did in a clip shared in a June 17 Reddit thread—except, what came after was quite bizarre.

In the clip, Iso pulled Clove into another dimension with his ultimate just as they were about to enter B site. With his shield advantage, Iso won the isolated duel and killed Clove. But the newest agent immediately followed up with their own ultimate, Not Dead Yet, to come back to life. Usually, Clove will simply come back to life right where they died, but Iso’s ultimate put a weird twist on the whole situation. Since Iso’s ultimate essentially removes the two players from the map, you might wonder where the immortal agent would be resurrected with their ultimate.

Intuitively, it’d make sense for Clove to come back right where they left off, in the spot where Iso’s ultimate grabbed them. To everyone’s surprise, they were instead teleported all the way back to attackers’ spawn—away from all the action. This is almost the worst-case scenario because Clove’s ultimate requires them to chase down a fight and get a kill or damaging assist. If they don’t do that within a short time period, they will die again. Returning to spawn basically seemed like a waste of the ultimate since the enemy was more likely to be somewhere closer to one of the sites or mid.

Interestingly enough, there was actually a lurking Reyna nearby, seemingly waiting to snag an easy kill on Clove at the end of the clip. “Reyna knows something we don’t,” one player commented. Either Reyna knew about the weird interaction between Iso and Clove’s ultimates, or she was just lurking like what other Reyna players are known for. Regardless, that did at least give Clove one opportunity to get a kill and come back to life—even if it didn’t work out for them.

Now that we know about the interaction, one player pointed out it might be better to hold off on using Clove’s ult until after you’re completely out of the other dimension from Iso’s ult. That way, you should be able to avoid being sent back to spawn when coming back to life.