How to Check Your Teammates’ Abilities & Cooldowns in Valorant

It has been over two years since the release of Riot Games’ free-to-play first-person hero shooter Valorant. The publisher has been steadily introducing new agents, maps, and better in-game settings to make players’ experiences better and to make matches enjoyable. The best part about Valorant is you can combine precision shooting and abilities to make for unique gameplay. However, most of the matches feel like a hit or a miss due to the way players communicate and coordinate within the game.

Checking for ability cooldowns of teammates

The biggest issue while playing Valorant, that too as a Controller or Sentinel agent, is the constant nagging thrown your way in the voice comms. Teammates often breathe down your neck, seeking heals and smokes since they do not know if they are available or off cooldown for you. Unlike League of Legends where you can ping your ability to show the current cooldown timer, Valorant does not have that feature. Instead, players are forced to yell the cooldown timers in the voice comms or type it out in chat in the middle of a duel. Sometimes, a dead player will have to spectate you and notice the cooldowns and communicate it with the rest of the squad.

However, these tense scenarios can be avoided by all parties. Before that, let us look at the types of abilities available in Valorant. Each ability in Valorant is unique and all agents have three types of abilities: Basic, signature, and ultimate.

While basic abilities are abilities that need to be purchased using credits, signature abilities are those that agents are guaranteed to be able to use every round. Each agent has at least one signature ability that will give them one free charge for them to use. For example, Omen’s smoke Dark Cover, Sage’s heal, and Killjoy’s Turret are all signature abilities that come back from cooldowns. Meanwhile, ultimate abilities can be only used by acquiring ultimate points.

So, if you are looking for a heal from Sage or a smoke from Omen, all you need to do is look on top of their in-game names and hold the ALT key. When you face another player and hold down the ALT key, you will be able to see the abilities they currently have and you will also notice if their signature ability is coming back from its cooldown.

If an ability is available with your teammate, it will be displayed above their head in white while the ones that are not currently available will be greyed out. This is in addition to the loadout they currently have: their primary gun, shields, and secondary gun.

Next time you load into a game of Valorant, use this simple trick of holding ALT to check your teammates’ abilities before pestering them to use an ability that they do not have.