Abyss has been on the forefront of the VALORANT meta currently. It is one of the most picked maps across multiple regions. It is the most picked map thus far in the VCT 25 : CN Kickoff and VCT 25 : EMEA Kickoff.

In this article we will especially focus on the matches from the EMEA region. It is the region from which it was the easiest for me to collect data but I believe what I have researched for this article will hold true for any region.

The article will focus on concepts such as:

• ESR (%) : Entry Success Rate
• Retake (%) : Post Plant defensive Retake Percentage
• Plant (%) : Attacker’s Plant Percentage

Point of Discussion

It all started after the recent Karmine Corp vs. Natus Vincere match on Abyss. The match was very unusual for multiple reasons. For anyone who watched that match must have noticed the awful lot of space and free sites Karmine Corp were getting on attack.

In fact NAVI let Karmine Corp plant on 11/12 (92%) occasions. That is an absurd amount of Plants to give up on a single half. So, it’s natural to assume it must have been a part of the game plan. The one round where Karmine Corp failed to get a plant was very intriguing as well. In fact that round confirmed my suspicion that retaking must have been a part of their game plan.

The second intriguing thing that happened during this half was to do with marteen the duelist player on Karmine Corp. You see ESR (%) is a normalised statistic i.e its value will always be between 0 and 1. So, it’s very rare to get a value of 1.

A 100% ESR basically means the duelist hit a successful site entry on every instant he attempted.

During Karmine Corp’s attack half on Abyss vs Natus Vincere, marteen hit a 100% ESR score. Hitting the site successfully on 11 different occasions. Whilst I have been tracking and developing ESR (%) since November 2024, I have only seen a perfect ESR (%) on 6 different instances some of which occurred in scrims. I have also never seen someone do it on 11 different attempts in a single attack half. What also makes it abused that all of Karmine Corp’s plants came via marteen’s site hits, not through lurks, fakes or contact players just through pure duelist site hits.

The above heat map shows marteen’s opening engagements during the attack half. It was a total of 4 (1 Kill, 3 Deaths). You will instantly notice all of them were inside the site ensuring he created space for his team to enter. By looking at the heat-map above you can also grasp that out of the 11 successful entries by marteen he was met with resistance from the defenders on only 4 different occasions. So, that means 7 times he was allowed to enter the site successfully unchallenged. That’s 64% of Karmine Corp’s site hits.

To further shine some light on this statistic. Whilst perfecting this ESR (%) statistic on a daily basis I noticed that certain agents always held some sort of advantage over the over. For example a Jett would nearly always have a higher Entry Attempt than a Phoenix or Iso. It’s only natural if you think about the ‘site diving’ abilities that a Jett has compared to an Iso. So Hence I started referring to these agents as ‘Dive Duelists’. These include Jett, Raze and Neon.A Yoru does not fall into the ‘Dive Duelist’ category. Statistically a Yoru will always have a lower ‘Site Entry Attempts’ compared to Jett, Neon and Raze. Having understood that now let’s take a look at the graph below.

The above chart shows the average ‘ESR (%)’ for the four mentioned agents from various Kickoff tournaments across the globe at the time of writing. If you see the Chart you would be made to believe that Yoru should also fall into the ‘Dive Duelist’ category as he isn’t far behind the other three. But the fact is nearly 27% of those successful Entry Attempts for the Yoru came from marteen from that single attack half against Natus Vincere. I believe after reading this you can finally grasp how bizzare that sounds.

Retake Meta

You might ask why am I glazing Karmine Corp so much even though they ended up losing this map. While that is true, if we were to look at it from an Attack half point of view Karmine Corp did end up winning the half with a scoreline of 7–5.

What followed during the second half surprised me even more. Despite having such a good half and seeing the consequences of giving up the site so easily, Karmine Corp went on to do the exact same thing as Natus Vincere did. They let Natus Vincere have a 92% Plant Percentage, even higher than theirs during their attack half. And they met with a similar fate losing the half with a scoreline of 8–3 and thus losing the game.

If you thought that was just one occasion, the next Abyss game between Team Liquid and KOI had a very similar statistic. KOI let Team Liquid rack up a Plant Percentage of 92% and thus also losing out the half in a convincing manner.

I then went on to look at some of the best teams on Abyss from VCT Champions 2025: Seoul and the correlation between their win-rate and how many plants they let in on defense. The results are below.

Fnatic were the worst team on Abyss during the tournament losing the map with a record of 0–2. While DRX and Team Heretics were the best teams on the map with a record of 3–1 and 6–1 respectively. EDward Gaming and Leviatan also had positive records on the map.

Team Heretics is an interesting point of discussion in this regard. They ended the tournament with a map record of 6–1 on Abyss. The only time they lost this map was on that fateful day of the grand finals against EDward Gaming. And do you wish to know an interesting fact about that match? Team Heretics let EDward Gaming plant 12/12 during their defensive half. Thus losing the half with a scoreline of 8–4.

The Solution

Just when I thought most team’s loved giving up sites and retaking more on Abyss, BBL Esports came up with an absolute defensive masterclass against Fnatic. Fnatic were restricted to a Plant Percentage of 50%. BBL won the half 9–3 and ended up taking the game.The BBL Performance proved far superior than playing passive and retake on Abyss. They played an aggressive style of defence that yielded them far better results than most teams. Just how aggressive did they play? Their Duelist LewN went 6–3 on Defense on Opening Kills. But that’s not it, in fact a majority of LewN’s opening engagements came within 15 seconds of the round start.

Conclusion

The fact is that many teams probably get into a trap of thinking that a cartain map is favorable for retake. While it is true that Abyss does record a 34% Retake Rate (Fair Situations) across both sites which is just above average and not as hard as certain maps like Split or Ascent which have Retake Rate far below the 30% mark.

However, what people tend to forget often especially in the current meta is that Abyss is currently the second highest Attack Sided map. So yes, while it does have a decent Retake Percentage, you tend to lose the site more often thus outweighing the Retake Effectiveness on the map by a big margin.

One of the best Retake teams of all time i.e. Fnatic from 2023 recorded a Retake Percentage of 40% on certain maps during VCT Masters 2023: Tokyo. It suggests that realistically you can never expect to Retake the site more than 4–5 times if you let in 10 plants during a half.

While each team has its own game plan and meta shifts happen due to new agents. The point of this article was not to look down on any team or their performance rather to highlight some insights towards how the game is being played in the current state. In the end we need to appreciate the strategic depth that Abyss offers.