ACS Explained: What Average Combat Score Actually Measures
ACS is the first number your team sees and the last one you should judge yourself on. It is a good stat — but only once you understand which parts of your game it counts and which parts it is blind to.
What ACS actually is
ACS stands for Average Combat Score. Every round you play, the game awards you a combat score based on what you contributed to that round. At the end of the match, the game adds up all your round scores and divides by rounds played. That average is your ACS.
The division matters more than people realise. Because ACS is a per-round average, a 25-round grind and a 13–0 stomp are directly comparable. Total kills are not — 20 kills in a 25-round game is a completely different performance from 20 kills in 13 rounds. ACS is the scoreboard's attempt to put every game on the same scale, and for that job it works well.
What feeds your combat score
Riot has never published the exact formula, and anyone claiming a precise breakdown is guessing. What is well established from years of observation is which categories of action move the number:
- Damage dealt. The largest and most consistent contributor. Chip damage counts, which is why ACS rewards players who trade shots even when they lose the duel.
- Kills. A kill is worth more than the damage alone would suggest — there is a bonus on top for finishing.
- Multi-kills. Doubles, triples and above pay out more than the same number of kills spread across separate rounds.
- Assists. Both damage assists and ability assists (a flash, a stun, a molly) contribute.
- First bloods. Opening a round is weighted more heavily than a kill later in the same round.
- Spike plants and defuses. A small but real contribution, and the reason a support player who plants every round is not sitting at the bottom of the board.
Notice what is missing: winning the round is not part of it. You can drop 350 ACS in a 4–13 loss. You can also win a game while sitting at 140 because your team did the fragging. ACS measures your individual output, full stop.
ACS is not the same as your Combat Score shown mid-round, and it is not the same as damage per round. If two players have the same ADR but one has more first bloods and multi-kills, the second will have a higher ACS.
What a good ACS looks like
The honest answer is that ACS drifts with rank, agent, and how long the average round lasts in your lobby. These bands are what competitive players broadly treat as normal — useful as a gut check, not as a scoreboard to be graded against:
| Band | Rough ACS | What it usually means |
|---|---|---|
| Low | under 150 | You are contributing very little damage per round. Almost always a positioning or timing problem, not an aim problem. |
| Average | 150–200 | Pulling roughly your weight. Typical for controllers and sentinels playing their role properly. |
| Strong | 200–250 | Actively winning your team rounds. Solid target for a duelist or a fragging initiator. |
| Carrying | 250+ | You are the reason rounds are being won. If you sit here across many games, you are almost certainly under-ranked. |
One caveat that matters: ACS inflates in losses. When your team gets rolled, rounds tend to end with you fighting outnumbered, taking multiple duels and racking up damage on enemies who then get healed by a Sage or simply survive to the next round. Plenty of players have a higher average ACS in their losses than their wins. That is not a contradiction — it is a sign your damage is not converting into round wins, which is a real and fixable problem.
Where ACS lies to you
It undervalues smokes and utility
A Viper who walls off half a site for thirteen straight rounds might finish at 130 ACS while being the single most valuable player in the game. Controllers systematically sit lower on the board. If you main Omen, Brimstone, Astra or Viper, comparing your ACS to a Reyna's is meaningless — compare it to other controllers instead. We break this down properly in the role benchmarks guide.
It rewards damage that goes nowhere
Hitting an enemy for 140 and dying is worth real combat score. Hitting them for 140 and dying also means they buy back next round with full health. ACS counts the damage; it does not count whether the damage mattered. This is exactly the gap that KAST was designed to fill.
It punishes disciplined play
Holding an angle, not peeking, and letting the round clock work for you is often correct. It also produces no combat score. Some of the most impactful defensive rounds you will ever play generate a flat zero.
Use ACS to compare yourself against your own past games on the same agent. That removes role bias, rank bias, and lobby-length bias in one move. A Jett who normally sits at 230 and drops to 170 for a week has a real signal. A Jett at 230 next to a Cypher at 150 has nothing.
How to actually raise it
Because damage is the dominant input, the fastest way to move ACS is to take more winnable fights, not more fights. Three changes that move the number quickly:
- Stop entering without utility. Dry-peeking an angle is a coin flip. Half your ACS ceiling is lost to fights you took with no flash, no smoke and no trade partner.
- Shoot at things you can hit. Chip damage across a smoke or at 40 metres with a Spectre feels productive and mostly is not. Closing to a range where your gun's damage curve actually works is worth more than a hundred sprayed bullets.
- Play for the second contact. First blood is weighted heavily, but so is the trade. If you are consistently the fourth player through a choke, you arrive after the round is decided.
Notice that none of those are "get better aim." Aim raises your ceiling. Fight selection raises your average, and ACS is an average.
See your real ACS, agent by agent
FragLy pulls your actual competitive matches from the official Valorant API and breaks your ACS down per agent, per map, and across your recent form — so you can compare yourself to the only benchmark that matters, which is you last month.
Search your Riot ID →The short version
ACS is a per-round measure of individual output, driven mostly by damage with bonuses for kills, multi-kills, first bloods and utility assists. It is genuinely useful for spotting whether your raw contribution is trending up or down. It is genuinely useless for comparing a Killjoy to a Raze, or for telling you whether your damage is actually winning rounds. Pair it with KAST and ADR and you get a picture worth acting on.
Written by the FragLy team. Benchmarks in this guide are rules of thumb drawn from competitive play, not official Riot figures — use your own tracked matches as the real reference point.