VALORANT sentinel mains are begging their teammates to stop asking for skins

If you main sentinels like Killjoy or Cypher in VALORANT, you probably have a go-to routine to get your utility all set up before the round starts. Sometimes, however, this setup ritual is interrupted by a teammate asking for your pretty skins—and that’s a bigger issue than you’d think.

In an Oct. 23 Reddit thread, sentinel players and Viper mains came together to discuss a huge preround pet peeve—when teammates ask for their skins. Politely asking for a fellow player’s fancy skin isn’t problematic on its own, but it will delay certain agents from getting their utility set up in the limited time they have.

For example, Killjoy has her Turret, Alarmbot, and two Nanoswarms to place down at different spots on the map. If someone asks her to drop her skin, she’d have to waste time on that whole exchange, making sure her teammate buys her another gun and chucking the skin over to them.

That can be a big enough distraction to prevent the German inventor from having all of her utility where it needs to be by the time the round starts, especially on defense. If the whole enemy team decides to rush her site and she doesn’t have her gadgets ready to activate, there’s not much she can do to stop the enemies from taking the site.

In some cases, these preround setups may have you sprinting from one site to the other just to get your utility down. Take Viper on Icebox, for example. On defense, she might want to set her Toxic Screen wall up on A site and throw her Poison Cloud orb up as a one-way smoke on B. There’s already not much time as it is to go from one site to the other without an orb lineup, and being asked to drop a skin will only slow down the process further.

But if you really need a skin from your Viper or sentinel, here’s some advice: trade at the end of the round if you’re both still alive, or ask ahead of time and be quick about the exchange before the other player runs off to start setting up.

On the flip side, if you’re the one being asked for a skin, you could always just drop the gun, regardless of where your teammate is. Don’t feel the need to personally hand-deliver it to them—they can come to you if they’re desperate enough for the skin. It’s probably more important for you to get your setup down as soon as possible.