A new VALORANT meta is forming after the conclusion of the VALORANT Champions Tour Last Chance Qualifiers on July 23, all based on an agent who fans and analysts alike have their worries about—Chamber. The last time we saw the French agent dominate, he stuck in meta for a year and defined the success of many teams around the world—and there is a chance that it is happening again.
Out of the three major regions, both the Americas and Pacific regions had Chamber in a key role for the team who eventually became LCQ champions. Both KRÜ Esports and ZETA DIVISION used Chamber in their grand finals match as well as throughout the tournament. With VCT Champions only weeks after the qualifiers, there is a high chance Chamber will continue to be picked at the pinnacle tournament, starting Aug. 6.
This said, the success of the pick is still relatively limited: Chamber saw action in only eight percent of the matches at the Pacific LCQ, and only 15 percent for the Americas LCQ, according to VLR.gg. Just because the pick worked during the LCQ tournaments doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll work against some of the best teams in the world, like Fnatic or Paper Rex—especially since Chamber was meta for the entirety of the VCT 2022 season. This same idea was brought to light on July 26 in the Plat Chat VALORANT podcast, by some of the same analysts that work on the official VCT streams.
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Analysts Brennon “Bren” Hook, Arten “Ballatw” Esa, and content creator Thinking Man’s VALORANT (TMV) debated Chamber’s place in the meta, agreeing the agent was crucial to ZETA’s success during the LCQ. ZETA’s Laz was playing a more aggressive style on Chamber, quite unlike the regular slow, methodical approach the team tends to take.
TMV pointed out KRÜ has used the agent on multiple maps, thereby believing Chamber was already becoming a staple of the meta once more.
“KRÜ was playing Chamber on Split, on Haven, and ZETA DIVISION played Chamber on Fracture and Lotus,” TMV said on the Plat Chat VALORANT podcast. “We’ve seen other teams pick it up on Bind, and he’s going to become a common pick on Bind anyway. That’s five maps already.”
The only two maps where Chamber hasn’t seen a lot of use in this meta are Pearl, where in theory he could work, and Ascent, a map known for its own meta that has stuck for years. Should a team find a way to utilize Chamber on Pearl, he could very much be present in all but one map at VCT Champions. But it isn’t just the pros, either—the ranked queue is starting to catch on to the French agent.
So far in the first act of Episode seven, Chamber has a 3.9 percent pick rate at the Gold 2 rank, putting him at 10th out of 22 agents. In comparison, the first act of Episode six had him at 2.9 percent, in 16th place.
Chamber was overly nerfed in 2022 when we last saw him dominate. But the team at Riot is beginning to buff the agent again, making his Trademark trip and Rendezvous longer range. This has enabled players like Laz to come up with creative teleport spots, allowing them to play aggressively for a pick and have a free escape to an area of the map that would normally take longer than five seconds to rotate to.
One of the best examples is on Split, on the attack side. Heading to A site, attackers crucially need to control heaven—the high ground to the left of the site. Going there is easy, but it’s often contested by enemies. Putting a Rendezvous on or around the area marked below allows for a Chamber to help peek heaven and escape to sewers, only steps away from the middle of the map.
There are plenty of other creative places players are putting their Rendezvous which weren’t available until recent patches.
It took a while, mainly because both ranked and pro players alike are a bit tentative about playing the French agent again. But he might just be the key to success at VCT Champions 2023.
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Published: Jul 27, 2023 02:50 am