Easy Valorant trick always lets you know when the Spike is about to blow

Pulling off a clutch on the defender side in Valorant can come down to a last second defuse, luckily there’s a way to quickly tell if a player managed to get to the Spike in time or not.

One of Valorant’s biggest strengths is how optimized some of the finer details of a tactical 5v5 shooter plays out. This covers everything from buying a teammate a weapon to relaying info in case someone forgot an area’s specific callout (Hint: just ping on your map in a bind)

But it goes deeper than that too. Thrown abilities have tracers on them by default in case you like the placement and want to replicate them later on.

It’s these additions to the gameplay that leaves out the guesswork in Valorant so that players can just worry about making the proper play.

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Reddit user ‘TrumansOneHandMan’ saw that the game actually gives you a way to tell if it’s too late to start the defuse process – something that players might overlook when stressing out due to the Spike’s low countdown.

Crvfty via YouTube

The full look at a Spike that’s about to go off.

“If you start your defusal and see this circle right after you start it, you’ve got it,” Trumans explained. “If you start defusing as it’s shrinking, you missed it – the cutoff is right when the circle first appears.”

The circle they’re talking about isn’t the one that glows and shrinks as the bomb is getting close to going off, nor is it the one underneath the Spike after it’s planted.

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Rather, it’s a third halo effect that pops up on a screen the second that the last chance to get a full defuse has passed. The game tells you that it’s too late to start a defuse unless someone else got it to the halfway mark.

TrumansOneHandMan via Reddit

The collapsing halo on the Spike happens is brief, but tells you all you need to know about the defuse.

This is especially useful for newer players and for those who are about to join Valorant when it officially launches on June 2.

In CSGO, people would have to go off of a trained ear to hear if the bomb still had time before going off. In Valorant, there is an evolving sound queue as the Spike is about to blow, but there’s an added visual to eliminate any question.

Knowing these small gameplay features in Valorant can easily clean up the most nerve-wracking parts of a potential clutch, so it’s best to get used to them before heading into Ranked.