An age-old debate that pre-exists professional VALORANT itself is the fierce competition between two rifles, the Phantom and the Vandal. While nearly everyone who has ever played VALORANT can agree these two guns are the optimal choice for the game’s many possible scenarios, deciding which of the two is better continues to puzzle players.
Most of the time the Vandal has historically taken the title of the best weapon in the game, with this statistic reflected in all levels of play, from Iron all the way up to the professional league. Dot Esports has, however, been closely following a trend that has seen the Phantom’s pick rate slowly rise.
One league of the newly structured VCT, which is now broken into three circuits, has finally broken the Vandal’s dominance. For the first time, the Phantom is the No. 1 weapon in the game, but only in the Pacific league.
Related: The Phantom continues to chase down the Vandal in pro VALORANT play
While VCT Americas and VCT EMEA have continued to use the Vandal more than the Phantom, the players in the Pacific league have just barely pushed the Phantom to the No. 1 weapon spot in their region.
There have always been players in the professional league who use the Phantom, even when the Vandal was considered by the majority to be the stronger weapon. Both rifles are respected, and the choice of which to purchase on a full-buy round has largely been up to personal preference.
But now more than ever, longtime Vandal users are making the switch over.
Through the first three weeks of the Pacific league, the Phantom was picked over the Vandal by an extremely small margin, just 14 more times, according to The Spike.gg.
As Dot Esports speculated earlier in the year, the change of preference from Vandal to Phantom is likely mostly due to VALORANT’s current competitive map pool and meta. Agents that excel at long-range, like Chamber, are virtually out of the meta completely. Chamber actually has a zero percent pick rate in VCT Pacific.
In addition, two maps with some of the longest sightlines in the game, Breeze and Bind, are both out of the map rotation in favor of maps that force closer engagements in tight corners. The game’s newest map, Lotus, pushes agents face-to-face in close corridors and small rooms.
These changes largely favor the Phantom because of the gun’s better spray and noise reduction at close range.
Though the Pacific region, based in Seoul, South Korea, has fully embraced the transition to a Phantom-dominated meta, players in Europe seem to totally disagree.
According to The Spike.gg, EMEA players haven’t been using the Phantom nearly as much as players in Asia. Compared to the Phantom’s 14 picks over the Vandal in the Pacific, in EMEA the Vandal has been picked over a thousand times more than the Phantom.
With Bind being set to re-enter the competitive map pool, Vandal pick rates could go up in the Pacific league on this map. The three-pronged structure of the VCT is already working to foster new ways of playing the game, and regional variants will likely still emerge as the leagues’ weekly games continue.
