Rotating is the best way to make the most out of your in VALORANT, as efficiency is always going to be important. You never want to be standing idle while the rest of your team engages in the action.
Rotating is one of the most important mechanics VALORANT has to offer. When making your way from site to site — whether you’re on offense or defense — timing is everything. In this guide, we’ll detail what exactly a rotation is, when you should be rotating, and how you can effectively do it on both offense and defense.
Rotating, simply put, is moving from one site to another on the map. You should ideally be rotating when the location you’re covering or pushing is no longer relevant to the round. For example, if you’re holding A-site on defense, and the entire enemy team is running to B-site, holding down A-site isn’t the most ideal play anymore.
If a full push is coming to a site, or if the spike has been downed somewhere on the map, you’re going to want to rotate as quickly as possible so you can join your team and start to rack up some kills.
Only rotate when your teammates call for assistance at another site. Once you have enough information from the other members of your team, you’ll know when it’s safe to stop covering your initial angle.
If you decide to rotate too early, an enemy player could sneak up through an alternate angle — or perhaps even the angle that you were covering — and take your site for free. VALORANT is all about information, so if you aren’t sure about where the enemy team is at all times, you’re better off playing with caution until you know it’s entirely safe to rotate.
Rotating on offense is usually a lot easier than rotating on defense, considering you’ll be doing it with your teammates most of the time. Normally, when approaching a site, you’ll be doing so with a majority of your teammates, making the objective clear-cut and obvious. However, should things go awry and your team is forced to split up, you’ll want to make sure that you’re not making predictable moves and allowing the enemy team to spot you out. In many scenarios, you’ll designate a player to “lurk” behind and try to catch out defending players who are attempting to counter-rotate.
Another major tip to take advantage of when rotating on offense is to make sure that your team is splitting up so that you don’t crowd yourselves into one angle. If you make which angle you’re approaching a site from too obvious, the defending team can react accordingly by stacking themselves at that angle and catching you off guard by initiating a gunfight.
If your entire team rotates together, you run the risk of being cut down by one enemy player holding down a single angle. The more angles you approach a site from, the better chances you have of throwing the enemy team off-guard.
For example, if you’re attempting to take B-Site on Icebox, and you realize that it’s simply not going to work, your team can rotate out through B-Long, send two players to A-Belt and three more through Mid to approach the site from Screens. From there, you can divvy up your resources even further by sending players through the alternate angles.
The same can be done for nearly every site in the game. Each site in VALORANT has at least three ways to enter it, while Icebox in particular gives players the most versatility when it comes to options. Icebox’s B-Site has five different angles from which rotating players can peek from when reaching the site. If you and your teammates can coordinate which players should be peeking from which angles, you’ll have no problem overwhelming defending players. Even if one of you goes down because you’re approaching from the angle that the defender is covering, your teammate is guaranteed to get a kill, assuming you both peek at the same time.
Rotating on defense is objectively harder than rotating on offense, as it usually requires cross-map coordination between your teammates. Timing is everything when rotating on defense, as one misstep at the wrong time could see an entire round unravel at the seams.
If you’re rotating from the middle of the map to a site, try and see if you can coordinate your movement with one of your teammates. Depending on where you’re headed, the teammate that’s rotating with you can trail your movements and cover any alternate angles that you don’t cover during your rotation.
Additionally, when you’re rotating with teammates, you want to coordinate when you arrive at your destination. If you and a teammate are both going to the same site during a rotation, you want to ensure that you arrive together and peek at precisely the same time.
You’ll need to find the most optimal route to rotate to where the action is happening. For example, rotating through the middle of any map is going to be the most dangerous path to another site, considering it’s usually covered by enemy players. So, if you feel the need to rotate through either the attacker or defender spawn to get to a site, don’t be afraid to take the extra time to ensure that you’ll stay alive.
But, be careful not to take too much time rotating. Slow-walking all the way across a map can take an extreme amount of time that you might not have. This is especially important if you decide to start rotating after the spike has been planted on a site you’re not covering. Case in point, the sooner you get the idea that the enemy team won’t be coming to the site you’re covering, the quicker you should start rotating.
If you’re on defense and your team is able to take down the Spike carrier, you should start making your way towards where the spike was spotted in order to surround the enemy team. The more players you have “hawking” the spike, the more difficult it will be for the attacking team to rotate out and take it elsewhere.
Don’t forget that attackers can fake a push. While it’s rare for a team to commit all of its players to one site, it’s important to not get fooled by a fake push. You don’t want to be the defending team that is 100 percent convinced that the attackers are pushing a site, only for them to fake it and go elsewhere once they’ve realized you’ve called for a full rotate.
A more specific trick; Omen players can effectively rotate by carrying the spike and casting From the Shadows (X) to travel to another site and plant the spike. This strategy is pretty risky and most Valorant players are aware of its existence, so make sure you’re completely safe when exercising it, and more importantly, that the site you’re travelling to is unoccupied by a defending player. The “Omen Cheese Plant” is best used during the later stages of the round, when only a handful of players remain on the map and the seconds are winding down on the plant timer.
