Hello, Librarian Husky here! There are a lot of hidden rules in Valorant that you learn over time. There are even more that you never learn unless you find out secretly. So, that’s why we’re going to break down the three must-know rules for every single role. Of course, we have to start off with the Sentinel Role.

Sentinel Role

The first rule that you need to know about Sentinel is that you should be playing to Disrupt and not necessarily kill. I know that everyone wants to have really high kills in Valorant, but if there’s one role that worries less about kills than any other role, it’s the Sentinel Role. On Sentinel, your life is everything. The more you Disrupt, stall, and play your life, the more impact you’ll have over the course of a game. Oftentimes, because of this, the kills will come. But if you constantly are trying to force frags and duels, you are not playing your life and you’re not keeping your uptime to its maximum, which is the number one goal a Sentinel should be trying to accomplish.

Clutching Up

Once you’re last alive, clutching up is also incredibly important but difficult to do. There are a lot of decisions you have to make when there is a very little amount of time, you have multiple enemies coming after you, and you have to best use your utility and combine that with great gunplay.

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Sentinel Role: No Flank Trips, No Problem

If you’re playing a Sentinel without consistent flank watch, it’s your job to be aware of it more than the other roles. This doesn’t mean that you have to be fully locked in on the flank, standing there AFK like a turret, but you need to understand the timing and tell your team it’s possible. It’s incredibly important that you have a sort of awareness over the possible movement of the enemy team and you’re actively keeping that in the back of your mind. The other roles have many other things to worry about, but the Sentinel Role, on attack especially, has this thing that they need to focus on.

When to Rotate

Last but certainly not least for the Sentinel Role, you need to understand when to rotate. When defending, anchoring is your main job, and knowing when to and when not to rotate can be a bit tricky. In scenarios where your team isn’t communicating much, the mini-map is your best friend. If you spot four enemies on the map, you can expect a lurker. Spot all five and you can rotate or even take space through Main and go for a flank yourself. It’s really important that you play around all possibilities. Basically, the Sentinel Role is the role of Game Sense, and the more you’re thinking about things, the more you can predict enemies and make better plays overall.

Controller Role

The next role we need to talk about is definitely the Controller Role, and there are three rules that are incredibly important. First off, Flush Smokes. Smokes need to be flush with every single choke.

Proper Smoke Placement

I can’t tell you how often it happens for a controller to use a smoke that actually helps the enemy team, which is the worst-case scenario. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: when your smokes aren’t flush, you create pockets for the enemy to play in. This is the single most important rule, especially for Dome smokers. One of the reasons people mess up smokes is because they’re trying to match the tempo of their team, which is going really fast. As you get better, the mark of a great controller is someone who can get the smokes flush every time and do it incredibly quickly so that you can always match your team’s tempo.

Timing Your Utility

Going with that, you should be putting up your utility sooner rather than later. A lot of controller players will try to time their smoke a little bit too late, most of the time when their team is already playing default and getting ready. You want to put your utility up as your teammates are approaching these chokes because they’re ready and going to burst out very quickly. We know how fast our team can just Leroy Jenkins it down the map, so make sure that you are erring on the side of being a little bit too early rather than being a little bit too late and getting your teammates killed.

Choosing Your Controller

The third and final rule for controllers is to pick based on your Play Style. What controller you’re playing should be directly dependent on your Play Style. If you want to play a slow, lurky style, characters like Astra or Viper will have better utility that plays into this and fits the natural Play Style of the character.

Choosing the Right Controller

If you’re someone that wants to play with the team or do a combination of different things, Harbor, Omen, and Viper are all great picks. If you want to play ultra-aggressive, the controller that’s going to match your Play Style best would definitely be Clove. There are going to be some controllers you have to pick on certain maps, like wall smokers for Icebox and Breeze. It’s important to understand that if you have a natural propensity to be super hyper-aggressive, picking a controller that complements that Play Style is better than trying to go against the grain or play a character like Astra hyper-aggressively or a character like Clove relatively passively in comparison.

Duelist Role

The next role we have to talk about is, of course, the Duelist Role, and there’s a lot you need to know if you want to succeed in this role.

Timing is Everything

First off, timing is everything because Duelists are the ones that kick off the whole engagement. When you enter the site, you must time it with your initiator’s utility. You don’t want to hit a site before your Sova dart has landed or after it’s already been broken. Overwhelming the enemy is the key to victory, and it’s really important that you make sure all your team is ready so that the smoke can go out, the dart can go in, the blind can go out, and you dash in all at the same time. You’re going to completely overwhelm the enemy, they can’t react to all of it, and you’re going to easily take the point. But if you dash out or go out way before your team is ready, die for free, now your teammate is pretty screwed, and you could have had a much easier engagement.

Don’t Play for Kills

I know you want to have crazy high kills so you can flex to your buddies, but it’s not the most important thing a Duelist can do to win the game. There will be games where you are destroying everyone on your entries, but there will also be games where you get destroyed on your entries as well. Getting killed is often part of the game, and you shouldn’t lose your confidence and stop doing your job when things go the wrong way. If you dash out and die, but your team kills or trades out and gets Site Control every time, you’re still doing your job. If you continue to commit and adapt, you will learn that way as well. So it’s really important to not just play for frags or completely forego your team to try to be a kill-hungry player.

Flexibility in Character Choice

If you are someone that just wants to one-trick your character, that’s all power to you. But realistically, a Duelist that knows how to play the proper Duelist in the right situations or on the right maps is going to give you the best leg up to actually climb. A great Duelist is flexible within the Duelist Role to an extent because there is a Meta and there are certain characters that are really powerful on specific maps.

Maps like Sunset and Split have really strong Cypher trips that playing Raze can naturally interact with. This is just one example of many where certain characters line up well with the current Meta, and it’s a good idea to know exactly what threats you’ll come up against so that you know how to develop play on these Duelists to counteract them and still do your fundamental job.

Understanding Phases in Valorant

It is really important to understand that Valorant works in three phases: the start, the middle, and the end of every single round. Info utility Cooldowns usually reflect those phases. The idea here is that you trade your info utility at the beginning of a round, and by the time the enemy is prepared to make another move, your utility will once again be online. This is super important because initiator Cooldowns can waste enemy Cooldowns that they don’t get back, but you do. That’s really important. If you wait too long to actually bait out any form of utility or get any response, you’re wasting those cycles altogether and not utilizing those phases to the most value you can get.

Importance of Communication

If the Initiator Role would be defined by anything, it would be Communication. Communication is everything for this role. Comms are just the most important on the Initiator Role. You should be the middleman that times executes throughout your team, counts on utility, and makes sure that everyone is on the same page. If players don’t Synergize at all but Synergize with their initiator, at the very least you’re going to set up kills and site takes. That is so important. So, if you’re someone that doesn’t want to talk or prefers to stay silent, initiator is going to be harder for you to play. I would highly suggest working on those Communication skills while you’re playing this role.

Choosing the Right Initiator

When teams are playing solo initiator, it’s good to pick a jack-of-all-trades agent. Agents like KAY/O, Gekko, and Skye can gain info and initiate for the team. They are more rounded initiators.

Specialized vs. Versatile Agents

Agents like Breach, Sova, and Fade specialize in very particular categories, making them better in real compositions or in situations where you have actual comms or teammates that you can rely on and Synergize with. Imagine trying to set up Breach flashes and stuns when your team doesn’t want to listen to you at all or doesn’t even want to play with you. But as a KAY/O, Gekko, or Skye, you can do a combination of things and still support your team, making them better picks for that Solo Queue grind.

Solo Queue Picks

Agents like KAY/O, Gekko, and Skye don’t have strong strengths in one particular category but can handle multiple roles. This versatility makes them ideal for Solo Queue, where coordination with random teammates can be challenging. They allow you to adapt to different situations and still contribute effectively to your team’s success.

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