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Get an A-Grade with Fade: A VALORANT Guide
With the right tools and knowledge,here’s how to be an absolute nightmare to your enemies with Fade.
Fade introduced a new twist to the Initiator role in Valorant with skills that haunt, seize, and terrorize the enemy team. Similar to other agents like Breach, Skye, and Sova, Fade pushes the envelope by forcing the enemy players outside their comfort zones in defense, flushing out opponents, and engaging in creative offensive plays to the objective.
Fade’s abilities have a nightmarish flair to them. Her passive ability, Terror Trail, marks enemies affected by her other abilities with a dark trail on the ground that leads to their position and follows them until the debuff expires. It’s the synergy stemming from this ability that makes Fade’s kit truly stand out from the others.
Her E ability,Haunt, and her Ultimate, Nightfall, allow her to mark enemies with a terror trail, while her C ability, Prowler, tracks the enemy down by following the trail: revealing intel like the opposition’s exact identity and location. With a mastery of Fade’s skills, you’ll be able to know your enemy’s every location and move.
Haunt (E Ability)
Haunt is Fade’s unique ability, setting her apart from her Initiator counterparts. What's interesting about Haunt is its ability to get the ball rolling and synergize with Fade’s entire kit. The Haunt ability sees Fade throw out a watcher ball that activates whenever it reaches the ground or if triggered immediately to activate and fall straight down. Once the watcher activates, it rises up and any enemies that within its line of sight and range become marked with a Terror Trail.
A Terror Trail pings the location of enemies and reveals their identity to Fade’s team. The enemy’s position can also be seen through walls. While the eyeonly lasts for 2 seconds, enemies spotted by the Terror Trail will have their trails attached for 12 seconds, giving plenty of time for Fade and her team to reach the enemy and catch them by surprise by either flanking or pushing them out of position.
The watcher also has its own amount of health points, making it another distraction for your enemies to focus on. They now have the difficult choice between either focusing the watcher to destroy it or finding a new position since they are about to be compromised. A fun little addition to this ability is that Fade herself will call out how many enemies she has spotted with her watcher too. This will help with callouts in case you aren’t able to see who’s been marked or if you are in a tough position or firefight.
Prowler (C Ability)
Similar to Skye’s Seekers Ultimate, Fade’s Prowler is a weaker version in terms of health but shares the same speed and capability to nearsight the enemy. What separates the Prowler from the Seekers is that it is an ability, making it more accessible since it can be used more often and also synergizes with Fade’s Terror Trails.
The Prowler ability has 2 uses and costs 250 per each one. If Fade does not have an enemy detected or marked with a Terror Trail, simply activating the ability will send the Prowler in a straight line, but holding it will allow Fade to control where it goes during its uptime. If the Prowler spots an enemy, its movement speed increases to pursue them and, if the Prowler is set to pursue an enemy marked by a Terror Trail already, their movement speed increases even further. Once the Prowler reaches their target they can inflict them with nearsight, which shortens the enemy’s range of vision.
This ability’s potential to complement Haunt and Terror Trails makes for interesting strategies and dynamic playmaking. Being able to learn the identities of the opposition, weakening their vision, as well as tracking their location makes it that much easier for Fade and her team to push and clear out objectives or eliminate the enemy team. Not only that but, because the prowler can be shot at, it lends Fade the ability to create a distraction to surprise her enemies or weaken their vision if their reactions are too slow. It creates an advantageous situation for Fade regardless of the outcome because, not only is the enemy already marked in most situations but they are now forced into a situation where Fade can easily come out on top.
Seize (Q Ability)
Seize is Fade’s crowd control ability that operates on its own. This means that it does not share synergy innately with Terror Trails, Haunt, or Prowler and does not trigger them. It can still be combined with these abilities nonetheless, though.
Seize costs 200 credits and has only 1 charge. Its casting properties work just like Haunt, in that it is a throwable ability and can be canceled mid-air to drop it down immediately. Beyond that, once Seize hits the ground, it sends out a wave from its initial landing radius. Any enemies hit by the wave are then debuffed with Decay, a debuff well-known from Viper’s Toxin passive. When the wave reaches its maximum travel distance, any enemies inside the zone will be defeated and tethered. This ability by itself is already powerful enough, but is exponentially more powerful in the hands of a strong team.
Not only can Fade use this ability to trap any enemies she’s located with her previous abilities, she can also coordinate with her teammates to easily pick off any enemies that she finds with an explosive combo. She can use it to block enemies off from trying to push or leave a location.
Nightfall (Ultimate Ability)
Fade combines the best utility gathered across her abilities and sends out a wave of nightmares forward similar to Breach. However, any enemies caught by her ultimate will be deafened, debuffed with Decay, and marked with a Terror Trail. The decay from Nightfall is a bit stronger than Seize and will take longer to recover fully but, similar to Haunt, Nightfall can create Terror Trails and Fade will call out how many enemies she has caught in her nightmares as well.
With Nightfall, you can utilize the full capabilities of Fade’s kit and synergize with all of her abilities even further alongside Prowler or Seize to ensure that the enemy is also debuffed with nearsight or tethered to a single location. With the combination of all of these debuffs and tracking tools, Fade can create chaos for the enemy team allowing easy initiations to objectives, corners, and other areas.
