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Valorant Omen guide - 30 tips and tricks covering all Omen abilities

The right way to use your smokes and teleports

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Guide by Ollie Toms Guides Editor
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Omen is the jack-of-all-trades of Valorant agents. With his smokes, teleports, and blinds, he can be an accomplished initiator and flanker or a stalwart defender with a penchant for wrongfooting the enemy team. Learn how to make the best of all his abilities with our Valorant Omen guide and the below practical tips and tricks.

Valorant Omen guide

Omen abilities overview

Before we dive into our top-tier tips and tricks for all Omen players, let's just brush up on each of his four abilities:

Dark Cover | Signature | 2 charges | Replenish 1 charge every 30 seconds
Equip a shadow orb and see its range indicator. Fire to throw the shadow orb to the marked location, creating a long-lasting shadow sphere that blocks vision. Hold Alternate Fire while targeting to move the marker further away. Hold the ability key with targeting to move the market closer.
Shrouded Step | Purchasable | 2 charges | Costs 100c each
Equip a shadow walk ability and see its range indicator. Fire to begin a brief channel, then teleport to the marked location.
Paranoia | Purchasable | 1 charge | Costs 200c
Instantly fire a shadow projectile forward, briefly reducing the vision range of all players it touches. This projectile can pass straight through walls.
From The Shadows | Ultimate | 7 charges
Equip a tactical map. Fire to begin teleporting to the selected location. While teleporting, Omen will appear as a Shade that can be destroyed by an enemy to cancel his teleport.

All on the same page? Right. Let's talk about how you can unlock the full functionality of each of these abilities (and therefore Omen himself) in turn.

Omen tips - Dark Cover

  1. Unlike Brimstone's Sky Smokes, Omen's Dark Cover is perfectly hollow on the inside, and your vision remains unimpaired by any effects.
  2. A Dark Cover smoke lasts about 11 seconds after its initial creation, regardless of how far it has to travel beforehand.
  3. Using the minimap is a necessity when using Dark Cover. Use the marker to see exactly where the smoke will end up, as well as its trajectory.
  4. The actual smoke covers a slightly larger area than what is shown by the initial minimap marker, so bear this in mind when deciding on exact placement of your smoke.
  5. The maximum distance that can be covered by a Dark Cover is 80 metres, which is enough to cross from one side of any map to the other. This allows Omen to have a global impact on the map in a similar (but more limited) manner to Brimstone's Sky Smokes.
  6. A unique aspect of Dark Cover is that you can dictate how high in the air the smoke will activate, and after a moment it will begin to sink down until it hits a surface. This can be used to catch a glimpse of the lower half of an enemy before the smoke settles.
  7. A common use for Dark Cover is to obscure your teleport (Shrouded Step or From The Shadows), but both these abilities are very noisy. A more insidious technique is to make it seem as though you have teleported into Dark Cover, when actually you moved somewhere else (or not at all).
  8. Dark Cover can be used several times in a single round. You always start with two charges, and you regenerate a charge every 30 seconds. So don't be precious about your Dark Cover usage.

Omen tips - Shrouded Step

  1. Shrouded Step offers plenty of utility, but it's a very short-ranged teleport that requires line-of-sight on your desired end location.
  2. One of the most common and powerful uses for Omen's Shrouded Step is to reach high ledges. It also synergises very well with Sage's Barrier, as Omen can teleport to the top of even the strangest wall placements.
  3. Shrouded Step has a significant wind-up and wind-down, which means you're locked out of moving around or using weapons for a good two seconds in total. So be careful where and when you use it, because you are vulnerable while teleporting.
  4. The audio for Shrouded Step can be heard by nearby enemies.
  5. Another powerful use for Shrouded Step is to cross watched areas without the enemy knowing. As long as the enemy is far enough away for the ability to be inaudible, and as long as you remain unseen, the enemy has no way of knowing that you're now on the opposite side from where they were expecting you to peek from.
  6. A specific use for Shrouded Step arises on the map Bind: you can fake the use of one of Bind's teleporters by using Shrouded Step just before you enter the portal. See the below video for a demonstration.

Video source: ProjectStrat

Omen tips - Paranoia

  1. Paranoia can cover a max distance of around 30 metres - not nearly as far-reaching as Dark Cover, but still enough to cover most long corridors and walkways on any map.
  2. The actual hitbox for the ability is smaller than the visual effect leads you to believe. Look at the central orb that appears during the channeling animation: this is roughly the size of the ability's actual hitbox, so this is what you need to hit enemies with in order to Nearsight them.
  3. The use of Paranoia gradually slows your turning to a halt, just like Sova's ultimate does. So don't expect to be able to quickly change the direction of the ability after initialising it.
  4. Like all of Omen's abilities, Paranoia is not an instantaneous thing. There is a wind-up time of around one second, so you are vulnerable while casting.
  5. Paranoia is best used as an initiating tool. Use it to hit common spots where enemies may be lying in wait, or to temporarily zone certain chokepoints to prevent enemies from approaching.
  6. Paranoia may inflict a Nearsight rather than a traditional blind effect, but either way it's common for affected enemies to respond by shooting at where they think you'll peek out from. And this is a very viable tactic, so you should attempt to time your peek properly by waiting a beat. Don't worry, the effect lasts long enough to accommodate the hesitation.
  7. On the topic of following up a Paranoia with a peek - keep in mind that there is a travel time associated with Paranoia. Don't peek immediately, or you may find that the Paranoia hasn't even reached the enemy yet and they can easily just headshot you.

Omen ultimate tips - From The Shadows

  1. You are seriously vulnerable while using your ultimate, so there is a very high risk associated with this ability. Often it will either go very right or very wrong, with no middle ground.
  2. If you are shot while in shade-form (gathering shadows), you are teleported back, unharmed, to your initial location. But most players know it's better to wait until you've fully corporealised and just headshot you.
  3. The good news is that you can start moving from the moment you begin to reform; it's only during the "gathering shadows" phase that you are locked out.
  4. It's very loud and very obvious to the entire enemy team when you use From The Shadows, so don't think that you can use it secretively. Not only is the sound globally audible to every enemy, but each enemy's minimap will turn black during the teleport.
  5. Make sure you equip your primary weapon before using your ultimate, in case you teleport into an immediate duel.
  6. Here's a common and powerful mind-game you can play with Omen's ultimate as the attackers: let yourself be seen with the spike near one site, then use your ultimate. Whether or not you decide to teleport to another site, it will force the enemy team to split up in most cases, weakening the defence of any one site.
  7. Dark Cover has a great enough range that you can use it before deploying your ultimate to give yourself some cover when you arrive. However, this comes with the cost of making your position more obvious (enemies will only need to catch sight of a giant black smoking orb, rather than a single player model).

Some additional Omen tips

  1. Omen's strength doesn't really come in the form of solo-fragging potential as some players might think. His ability to wipe entire teams is very dependent on the overall skill and experience of the enemy team, and most experienced players will not let an Omen ultimate ruin their entire round. Instead, Omen's strength comes in his team plays, and his ability to wrongfoot the enemy team on a 1v1 scale as well as a wider "team strategy" scale.
  2. In general, as the average player skill in a match increases, Omen's effectiveness decreases. Brimstone has better map control, Breach has stronger initiating potential, Jett and Raze are better at following up abilities with kills. But Omen is still a powerful jack-of-all-trades agent, and if you can use his abilities to mislead or impair the confidence of the enemy team, you can lead your team to a victory they otherwise might not have achieved.

Valorant Omen guide

With that, we'll conclude this Valorant Omen guide. But we've got plenty more to offer for any Valorant player looking to increase their skill and knowledge! Click any of the links below to head over to a different Valorant guide.

Valorant basics (start here if you're new!)
Valorant weaponsValorant crosshair
Valorant characters
Valorant charactersValorant team comps
BreachBrimstoneCypherJettOmen
PhoenixRazeSageSovaViper
Reyna
Valorant maps & callouts
Valorant Ascent mapValorant Bind map
Valorant Haven mapValorant Split map
Miscellanious Valorant guides
Valorant Store & Valorant PointsValorant ranks
Valorant error codesHow to report in Valorant

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