How to plant the Spike with Gekko’s Wingman in VALORANT

Gekko has wasted little time piquing the interest of the VALORANT community since the start of Episode Six, Act Two, and central to that has been his parkouring partner in crime, Wingman.

Driving Riot Games’ “power in numbers” theme for Gekko, Wingman can come up absolutely massive both while taking sites and in retakes thanks to his ability to plant and defuse the Spike.

As with any ability in VALORANT, however, it doesn’t matter how potentially game-changing these agent kits are if players don’t know how and when to use them in the first place.

How to use Wingman to plant the Spike

All of the Spike-related functions of Wingman are set to the alt-fire key bind in VALORANT. This means that in just about all cases, pressing left click will simply send Wingman to roam for enemies like a Raze Boom Bot.

To plant the Spike with Wingman, players will first need to make sure Gekko is holding the Spike. With the Spike in their possession and Wingman in hand, players will notice that if they look at any spot on a site, they will see a live preview of where it will be planted by Wingman. Once players have determined the right spot, all they have to do is right click and Wingman will take the Spike and power through just about all opposing agent utility to plant it there.

Wingman slips by Killjoy bots undetected, runs through Cypher Trapwires, Breach stuns, and Fade Seizes, breaks Sage walls, and stays planting through Astra Gravity Wells (although the Spike will be mispositioned). The rare instances in which Wingman can be stopped is if he’s hit with a Breach Rolling Thunder or raised off the ground by a Sage wall while planting.

Ultimately, enemies will almost always try to interrupt Wingman by shooting him, so it’s important to provide support for him just as you would with any player-controlled Spike planter.

Perhaps to be expected, Wingman has been a bit buggy early on, with Riot revealing that it will be improving his plant and defuse targeting in the next patch.

When used to perfection, however, it’s hard to deny how useful it is to have someone on Spike duty without having to risk losing an agent’s life.