D3FFO: The Selfless Jett
If I ask most people, who is the best VALORANT player in the world right now, most people would come back with Tenz, or cNed, maybe Scream or mwzera and they all have one obvious thing in common. Most people would pick a duelist as their top player. It’s easy to see why though, they’re the stars. They’re the Messi’s, the Brady’s, the Jordan’s of VALORANT. In fact, if you look at the Jett players who made it to Berlin they’re almost always the poster boy of their team. However there’s one player that’s noticeably different, and that’s d3ffo.
I’ve been seeing some discussion about the different Jett players and d3ffo gets a hard time of it. On the surface level, you can see why. If you look at the more regularly used stats like ACS, it doesn’t look good for d3ffo. He achieved 187.9 ACS which seems remarkably unimpressive compared to the other Jett’s and he had the lowest on his team.
But don’t be fooled. I don’t like ACS as a stat on its own as it very rarely tells the full story. To understand why his ACS is so low we need to understand Gambits play style more. Unlike the other teams, their focal point is not the Jett and this is the key, d3ffo gets much less help than the other Jett’s he’s in comparison with. Now help is a weird way to phrase this because obviously if he needs a flash to help him out they’ll do it, but it’s more about set-up and positioning. Because of their slower more default-based playstyle, they instead focus more on enabling the information gatherers and in particular Sheydos. They don’t need a big bad scary Jett, to carry the burden of the execute, they don’t run a 4 protect 1 style. What they need from their Jett is to be a solid and consistent entry player and d3ffo is just that. On an execute his job is to take the first fight, crosshair displace and make space for his team.
But don’t just take my word for it. When we look at his first bloods and first deaths we can see that the impact he has is far greater than his ACS shows.
This wonderful graphic was made by current WAVE analyst, Forrest (@forrestvalorant on Twitter, please follow him he’s great and puts out top quality analytical content). This graph shows us where every player ranks compared to the average first bloods and average first deaths. D3ffo is the light green square and we see that he sits in the “High risk, high reward” quadrant. We see that he has more than average first kills and deaths and this fits into what we would expect from them. His job in the team is not to stay alive or but the team on his back., his job is to entry frag. We repeatedly see him take peeks for information, particularly with the operator. He doesn’t care about his own stats, he cares about bringing impact to his team.
A key thing to watch for is d3ffo on retakes. While other teams would flash for their Jett player to take a peek and dash away if they encounter trouble, d3ffo instead plays it differently. We will repeatedly see him dash into his own smokes on the site, pulling focus to him, which would allow Sheydos to pop flash for himself and they can take the fight from two angles. Dashing into a site like this is risky but he doesn’t care. He knows what his job is and he executes it perfectly.
To me, d3ffo is the ultimate selfless Jett. Typically Jett needs more babysitting than any other agent and that’s why we see them get the most help but what makes Gambit so special and particularly d3ffo, is that they can invest that effort elsewhere and still have a consistent entry machine. While I don’t feel like he’s the best Jett at the LAN, I strongly feel that he’s not the worst. Next time you watch Gambit play, watch for d3ffo’s solo play to free up his team and you’ll see the off-the-scoreboard impact he brings.
