What Is a Good ADR in Valorant?
Average Damage per Round is the least fashionable stat on the scoreboard and one of the most honest. It has no bonuses, no weighting, and no way to fake it — it is just damage divided by rounds.
The definition, and why it is so clean
ADR is total damage dealt divided by rounds played. That is the whole formula. No multi-kill bonus, no first-blood weighting, no assist credit. If you did 2,600 damage across 20 rounds, your ADR is 130.
That simplicity is the point. ACS blends six or seven different contributions into one number, which makes it good for ranking a scoreboard and bad for diagnosing a problem. ADR answers exactly one question: when you are in a fight, are you hurting people?
What counts as a good ADR
These are the bands competitive players generally work with. They are approximations that hold across most ranks — ADR does not scale nearly as sharply with rank as people expect, because higher-ranked opponents also die faster and trade harder.
| ADR | Read | Typical situation |
|---|---|---|
| < 100 | Low | You are not getting into fights, or you are dying before you connect. Very common for players who lurk without purpose. |
| 100–130 | Below par | Fine for a heavy utility controller. A warning sign for anyone holding a Vandal on entry. |
| 130–160 | Solid | The realistic target band for most players in most roles. Roughly one full kill's worth of damage per round. |
| 160–190 | Strong | You are winning your duels and getting extra chip damage on top. |
| 190+ | Carrying | Sustained over many games, this is the profile of someone climbing. |
A useful mental anchor: an enemy with full shields has 150 effective health. An ADR of 150 means that, on average, every single round you did enough damage to kill one fully-armoured player. Whether you actually got the kill is a different question — but the output was there.
Why ADR barely moves between ranks
New players assume Radiant lobbies have enormous ADR numbers. They usually do not. Two forces cancel each other out:
- Better aim raises damage. Higher-ranked players hit more of their shots and land more headshots, which pushes ADR up.
- Better trades cut fights short. In a high-rank lobby, the moment you take a duel, two teammates are already lined up to trade. Fights end in under a second, and short fights produce less total damage.
The net result is that the raw ADR band from Silver to Immortal is much narrower than the skill gap between them. What changes with rank is not how much damage you deal — it is which rounds you deal it in, and whether it converts.
ADR by role
Judging every agent against one number is the most common mistake people make with this stat.
| Role | Reasonable ADR | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Duelist | 150–190 | You get first contact and the best angles. If a Jett is under 140 something is wrong. |
| Initiator | 140–175 | Recon and flashes create your own openings. Sova and Fade should be near duelist output. |
| Sentinel | 120–155 | You often hold an angle that never gets pushed. Lower volume, higher conversion. |
| Controller | 110–150 | Smoke timings pull you off angles. Viper and Brimstone gain some back from post-plant damage. |
The full role benchmarks guide goes deeper on what each role should be judged on instead.
Reading a low ADR properly
A low ADR has three distinct causes, and they need opposite fixes. Diagnosing which one you have is the entire exercise.
1. You are not in enough fights
Check your rounds with zero damage. If you have five or more per game, the problem is not aim — it is that you are arriving late, holding a flank nobody is using, or rotating after the round is already resolved. The fix is timing, not training.
2. You are in fights but losing them early
If you are dealing 40–80 damage and dying, you are getting into fights on bad terms. Look at whether you are peeking wide into three players, whether you are taking fights without a trade partner, and whether you are pre-aiming the right height. See the entry and first-blood guide.
3. You are dealing damage that does not finish
ADR of 160 and a K/D of 0.8 is a specific, recognisable profile: you win the opening exchange and then get traded, or you break shields and let people escape. This is usually a positioning after first contact problem — you are winning the shot and losing the follow-up.
You can inflate ADR by spraying at long range through smoke and by refusing to ever plant or defuse. Both hurt your win rate. ADR is a diagnostic, not a target.
Check your real ADR over your last matches
FragLy calculates ADR from your actual rounds — not an estimate — and shows it next to your kills, headshot percentage and win rate so you can see which of the three low-ADR profiles above matches your game.
Search your Riot ID →The short version
Aim for 130–160 as a general floor, adjust for your role, and treat anything above 190 as a genuine carry performance. But use ADR the way a doctor uses a temperature reading: it tells you something is off, not what to do about it. Pair it with your rounds-with-zero-damage count and your KAST, and the picture gets actionable fast.
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.