When talking about Vandal skins, two names always appear: Prime and Reaver. Present since the beginning of the game, these skins are considered by many the best Vandal skins in the game, however, are they really the best? Or can another in-game skin compete with them?
“And in a fit of anger, you decide to finally open your wallet and take your first step into the Valorant Skin Shop abyss. Never again will I be called ‘broke, skin-beggar noob’, you vow, for this day onwards only my teammates will ask for my great skins. And with a new load of Valorant Points in your account, you open the store page looking for your soon-to-be precious drip-inducing skin. So, without a second thought, you put your mouse icon over the Prime Vandal in the leftmost square, knowing that this was a god-giving opportunity. Before concluding your purchase, however, a beginning of doubt appears in the corner of your mind… You need something rarer, something that will make everybody in the lobby take your gun from the ground. So you close the buying pop-up and open the Vandal skin list on your collection page. There has to be another more uncommon skin as good as the Prime... you think. There has to be…”
Every Valorant player already found themselves, be it between friends or the friendly Spike Rush teammates, in the middle of a conversation about the best skin of said weapon in the game; it’s natural for this topic to appear since everybody has an opinion on the subject.
However, while it’s possible to have this discussion for every gun in the game when looking into this subject two weapons appear more than the others: said weapons being the Phantom and the Vandal. And, even though we saw a crescent of premium Phantom skins coming to the game shop in recent times, in this article we’ll work with a pair of Vandal skins considered by many as the greatest skins in the game: The Reaver and Prime.
But, are they really the best Vandal skins out there? Are they, really, the solely GOAT competitors in the Vandal skin category? Thinking about it, does the fact that both of the skins are part of early bundles make the opinion of the player base shift towards it while looking for justification in their purchase? While it’s impossible to nail the best skin in-game, what we can do is analyze both of these skins, seeing what are their highest and lowest points, and look if there is another possible candidate between the newest skins released in the race for the seat of Best Vandal skin. So come with me in this analysis of every crook and cranny of these skins and see for yourself if they really deserve their status.
Starting with the basics, the first thing we want to check is the skin on its own; both the vanilla and colour variations versions. Notice that for this first part of the analysis I’ll be borrowing the classification for talking about the details of a skin used in a previous article.
Looking at the Prime Vandal, we find an exquisite example of a top-oriented skin; with the wolf adornment in the top of the gun followed by the simple yet clean details through its body, the Prime Vandal shows itself as a lean and elegant skin. Its colour variations, however, do fall short by a little in the first variant (named orange variant) that don’t follow the said level of elegance.
The Reaver Vandal, on the other hand, makes a good example of bottom exclusive skin with its ominous rune and big metal frame in the bottom part of the gun; these two bigger details, coupled with all the pointy parts that complement the gun build its edgy appearance. The same details that make the gun shine as a whole, however, can make it look a bit chunkier over time. On the variations side, we have three great variants that don’t follow behind the vanilla in terms of personality and edginess.
Now, before we move to the juicer parts of the skins, essentially the animations and finisher, it’s necessary to talk about another pivotal part of a skin: sound effects. When thinking about sound, however, it can get more complicated by the sheer scale of possibilities involved in it; take gunshots for example, as something always present in-game, their sound can grow on or get old pretty fast. So, since it can get really personal, hence more difficult to classify, what can be done is to analyze the one common aspect of any sound effect, its volume. Now, while what skins are or are not loud can generate some debate, there are some cases where one can definitely say “That skin is Loud!” without worries, such as the Origin skin line.
If you stop to listen to all the different sounds of both of the skins, be Prime’s pew-pews or Reaver’s bells, you’ll see that both are in a good volume and, scaping a little of what was said earlier about the difficulty of classifying sounds, arguably possessing the best shooting, for Prime, and kill, for Reaver, sounds in-game.
After talking about sounds, it’s time to check the main feature of high-end Valorant skins: the visual effects. However, contrary to what is listed in-game when you’re spending Radianite points to unlock the different features of your skins, I’m going to put under the visual effects, or VFX, banner all types of visual features available in those skins, be it a reloading animation, muzzle flash and tracer, kill banner, finisher or other secondary visual effects.
Different from other Premium line skins, both the Prime and Reaver collection and, therefore, Vandal skins do have all of these elements in the skin (if you take the Spline and Nebula collection, for example, both in the same Premium tag, you’ll see that neither have any of the features listed in the previous paragraph); and some beautiful ones nonetheless. Following their thematics, in the Prime Vandal, you’ll find neat, futuristic tracers that resemble laser shots, one of the best reload animations in the game, and an awesome howling finisher; looking in the Reaver Vandal, you’ll feel the cultic, ominous atmosphere in the gun, with dark tracers that appears to be absorbing all of the light on its way, a shadowy reload animation, and a soul trapping finisher. In this aspect, both of the skins are flawless in their delivery, with no over-the-top animations that can scare part of the player base like the Elderflame collection, and require only one’s taste to decide between the two of them. It’s necessary to notice, however, the lack of an equipping animation in the Prime Vandal, while it’s present in Reaver.
Now, after this analysis, we found a few weak links (and even these spots can be treated as normal, non-flaw details, for other people), in two of the most popular Vandal skins in-game; namely the weak colour variation and lack of equipping animation on the Prime Vandal and the chunkier bottom of the Reaver Vandal. Thus, seeing such a low number, it’s safe to say that the popularity of these skins is not a fruit of some justification or nostalgia of the player base.
So, considering these, is there another Vandal skin in the game that can compete with these two? I believe so. While the Prime and Reaver Vandals are easily two of the best skins ever released in the game, I understand that there is one slept on Vandal skin capable of competing with those two: The Sentinels of Light Vandal.
Released during the Sentinels of Light event, this skin is part of a crossover with the League of Legends universe together with the Ruination bundle. Said to be wielded by the Sentinels of Light, this skin possesses all of the features present in Prime and Reaver with the same, if not higher, quality. With top-oriented details and beautiful pastel colours in all of its variants, clean sound with not too loud parts, and great visual effects, the Sentinels of Light is a great Vandal skin that deserves some of the limelight in the GOAT Vandal skin discussion.
