Valorant 13.10: Sentinel adjustments and a fundamental change to assists

Valorant patch 13.10 is now live, and it arrives with two fronts that go straight to the heart of how the game is played: a round of adjustments for several agents in the Sentinel role, with buffs for some and nerfs for others, and a change to how assists work during a match. The underlying information comes from Dexerto, which outlines the broad strokes of the update.

It may look like just another patch on the calendar, but there's more to it than that. Sentinels are the backbone of any organized defense, and any tweak to their kit ends up shifting team compositions, round pacing, and the decisions attackers have to make. Add a change to assists, a stat that shapes how each player's performance is read, and you have an update that deserves more attention than its version number suggests.

What you need to know

• Patch 13.10 is now live in Valorant, as reported by Dexerto.
• Several Sentinels are being adjusted: the update mixes buffs and nerfs rather than moving in a single direction.
• Assists are changing: the outlet describes it as a major in-game change.
• The source report doesn't give specific numbers or name specific agents, so it's worth checking the full patch notes before drawing conclusions about your main.

Sentinels: the role that holds defenses together

Anyone who plays Sentinel knows their work rarely makes it into the highlight clips. It's the role that watches flanks, delays pushes, gathers information, and holds a site while the rest of the team rotates. That's why adjustments to this class have a domino effect: when a defensive tool becomes more reliable, attackers need more utility to break it; when it loses strength, fast executes become worthwhile again.

What's interesting about this patch is that it doesn't simply raise or lower the role as a whole. According to Dexerto, there are both buffs and nerfs spread across different agents, which points to an intention to rebalance the role from within: making the choice of Sentinel depend more on the map and the game plan, and less on one option being clearly superior. That mostly affects teams that build their composition around a fixed Sentinel and players who specialize in a single agent in ranked.

Assists: a small stat with big consequences

The second pillar of the patch is the change to assists. The source doesn't go into detail about how the system works now, but the mere fact that it's being touched is significant. Assists are how the game recognizes work that doesn't end in a kill of your own: the damage dealt beforehand, the utility that sets up a duel, the support that opens the door for a teammate.

Any change there alters how the scoreboard is read. It affects support players, who tend to shine the least on the scoreboard, and also how a match is judged at a glance, something that carries a lot of weight in community discussion, in post-match analysis, and in the perception of who played well and who didn't.

Our take

At Underworld Lordz, we're glad to see the adjustments aimed at Sentinels. It's a role that demands discipline, game sense, and patience, and it rarely gets the spotlight it deserves. Having buffs and nerfs at the same time strikes us as the right way to do it: it forces players to adapt and punishes the comfort of always playing the same thing. For a competitive team, that means going back to the lab, reviewing positions, and testing new setups before trusting them in an official match.

We're more cautious about assists. If the change helps to better recognize support work, it's more than welcome, because we've spent a long time watching players get judged solely by their kills. But a reworked stat can also create noise: comparisons that no longer hold up between patches, pointless debates about inflated or deflated scoreboards, and content creators who will have to explain to their audience why the numbers no longer mean what they used to.

Our advice is simple: don't stop at the headline. Read the full patch notes, jump into a custom game, try the changes for yourself, and only then decide whether your agent is still the best pick. Patches are won in the first few weeks, and whoever figures out what changed first plays with an advantage.

What do you think?

We want to know how it looks from your side of the server, whether you're the one holding the site or the one going in first. Drop by the team chat or our Discord and tell us: do you think Sentinels needed these adjustments, and will the change to assists make the scoreboard fairer?