Climbing the VALORANT ranked ladder is often looked at as a daunting task, especially when there are so many individual ranks to tackle when making your way to the top. Grinding to the peak of the VALORANT mountain takes time, given the amount of ranks you have to scramble past.
If you’re having trouble ranking up in VALORANT, though, there’s a good chance you’re not alone. A strong majority of the game’s player base is climbing up from the lower ranks and only a small handful of players occupy the upper echelon of the game’s competitive ladder.
Still, knowing how the ranked ladder operates is going to be a major advantage when it comes to climbing it. Here are all the ranks available to climb through in VALORANT.
All VALORANT ranks in order
- Iron I
- Iron II
- Iron III
- Bronze I
- Bronze II
- Bronze III
- Silver I
- Silver II
- Silver III
- Gold I
- Gold II
- Gold III
- Platinum I
- Platinum II
- Platinum III
- Diamond I
- Diamond II
- Diamond III
- Ascendant I
- Ascendant II
- Ascendant III
- Immortal I
- Immortal II
- Immortal III
- Radiant
The lowest rank a player can achieve in VALORANT is Iron I, while the highest a player can climb to is Radiant. There are technically nine “ranks,” however all of them save for Radiant have three separate tiers. Players need to progress through all three tiers to reach the next rank.
When the game was in its beta state, the original name for the game’s highest rank was “VALORANT,” but players found the name too confusing, so Riot Games brought about a change.
What’s the highest rank in VALORANT?
The highest overall rank in VALORANT is Radiant, but reaching Radiant is only part of the test to prove you’re the best. Unique to the Radiant rank is a place on a regional leaderboard, which is determined by the total number of ranked rating (or RR) you’ve amassed during an act. At the end of the most recent act, Episode Seven Act Three, the top-ranked Radiant player in North America was Sentinels star Zachary “zekken” Patrone.
The highest rank in VALORANT is something an FPS player dreams of reaching. You’ll likely spend hundreds, if not thousands, of hours striving to reach the almighty Radiant rank. Players grind for extended periods of time to get close to this rank, so don’t think you’ll get there overnight.
A good way to get yourself to Radiant is by queuing with your friends. Hopefully, you’ll all have the same goal, making it a lot easier to be a coordinated team in the first place. You’ll be facing the best that amateur VALORANT has to offer, so prepare for a challenging rollercoaster of wins and brutal defeats.
Players have made their way there solo queuing, but it’s something that’ll require tons of time and patience to achieve.
What is the distribution of ranks in VALORANT?
Patch 5.0 introduced the new Ascendant rank to help fix the rank distribution since there were too many players in Bronze and Silver. Riot didn’t want to overpopulate Platinum and Diamond, however, resulting in the new rank just below Immortal.
The Silver rank features the most total players globally, with over 23 percent of all ranked players ranked at Silver One, Silver Two, or Silver Three. The majority of ranked VALORANT players sit somewhere between Bronze and Gold.
The distribution above has been relatively similar to previous acts since the Ascendant rank was introduced.
Once you start to move up the ranked VALORANT ladder, you’ll encounter a much smaller subset of the game’s player base. Just barely more than one percent of all VALORANT players across the world make up both Immortal and Radiant combined.
Regardless of where you fall on the VALORANT ladder, though, there’s no need to worry about how quickly you can climb up the ranks. With practice, you’re going to naturally move up in the ranks as you get better at the game.
