VALORANT players discover broken Clove interaction that leads to easy smoke kills

Might need a quick fix.

Clove in VALORANT
Image via Riot Games

VALORANT‘s newest agent, Clove, has only been out for a short time, but agents are already finding little tricks to help them win skirmishes on the battlefield—including a glitch that might need patching in the next update.

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Players on the VALORANT subreddit are reporting that Clove’s smokes have an unfortunate desync issue that causes any players in the area of activation to have their vision blocked a bit earlier than players outside of the smoke activation. As a result, Clove players are able to smoke off areas and use well-timed peeks to get an unfair advantage against their opponents in a gunfight.

Clove casting their Ruse smokes while dead in VALORANT.
No peeking. Image via Riot Games

The timing window for the peek is very quick, but when learned correctly, Clove and their teammates outside of the smoke will get a brief glimpse of the opposing player before the smoke completely activates. This allows them to efficiently spam where the player was and could be moving towards, getting a kill without any fear of accurate retaliation.

Luckily, it seems like Riot Games’ developer team will be taking a close look at the situation since game designer Penguin hopped into the comments of the original post to acknowledge the report for the team to investigate. If this vision glitch is easily repeatable and can be exploited, the devs will take the necessary steps to squash the bug before it gets out of hand in casual and ranked ladders alike.

Ever since their release, however, Clove’s unique kit has quickly taken over the solo queue ladders with some of the highest win rates of any agent in multiple different ranked distributions. They range from a 53.3 percent win rate in Gold to a 53.4 percent win rate in Ascendant, making them one of the most successful picks for multiple team compositions, according to Blitz.gg.

Author
Image of Tyler Esguerra
Tyler Esguerra
Lead League of Legends writer for Dot Esports. Forever an LCS supporter, AD carry main, with more than five years in the industry. Sometimes I like clicking heads in Call of Duty or VALORANT. Creator of the Critical Strike Podcast.