Some of Bak's Tips and Tricks (How to stay alive and whatnot

[Bakuryu]

People sometimes ask me, "How do you not die all the time?" "What do you do differently?" and "What do I take for this burning sensation?" I decided to throw a few answers to these questions out there.

Part one - Enemy Snipers: How do I stop those pesky snipers from popping my head off?
There are a few tricks to not get shot as quickly, but a very good sniper is pretty savvy to these tricks, so it might just keep you alive longer.

1) Crouch and stand often while moving - Doing this changes where the hitbox for your head is, and your average sniper will either wing you or miss - either way your head is intact

2) Travel in pairs - A sniper can only shoot one person at a time, and one person can run interference (die or spam like a monkey on cocaine) and the other person can close ground on them

3) Use your terrain - there are places on every stage that let you close ground on a sniper, but you probably need to be clever about using them. They can be buildings, barrels, water, anything that lets you not be where the little red or blue dot is

4) If you happen to be a solly or demo, aim for where you would dodge to if a rocket was coming your way, because chances are, they will too. If you shoot a rocket or a pipe at a sniper (or anything really) they are going to move out of the way, but if you shoot for where they are going to move, you can psyche them out and make them eat a fiery explosive death

5) Small arms fire is a deterrent, but move around a lot and never in a pattern. If you run back and forth like a duck target in a carnival game, you will get shot, and I will win a teddy bear for it.

Part Two: Sentry Guns
1) The key to taking down a sentry gun is all about knowing its position and the range it has. If you know where it is, you also know where you can hit it from without getting fire from it.

2) Aim for the engineer, not the gun. Smart engies hide in places
where they think they won't be hit, but there is always an angle that lets you hit them. Doing this not only makes the engineer second guess his position and expose himself (naughty naughty) but it does occasional damage to the gun and forces the enemy team to focus on you instead of the rest of your team.

3) Sensitivity (awwww). Sentries lock on at different times and can only keep up with so much rotation, so if you are fortunate enough to find one at that level, you can take it down with the appropriate amount of circle, strafing, but make sure you change directions every once in a while or the lock will hit you faster.

4) As a spy, always have your weapons set to knife and sapper in your rotation. Learn to love your "q" (or weapon switch) key. Take it out to dinner, maybe a nice mojito and lobster, who knows, but you'll need it. Sapping stuff makes you a pest. Backstabbing the engineer, hitting q and then sapping all his gear before anyone has a chance to stop you - that makes you a priority. Good spies are hunted ones, and being able to take out an Engy and then his gear will make you a target.

Part Three - Ubercharge Defense and Use
When defending an uber, you are generally one of two things: a pyro with compression blast, or a demoman. You can do it as a solly, but that's a bit harder and less efficient.

1) Pyro defense has a few options. You can attempt to juggle the uber target, blow them backwards, or my favorite, split the uber. If you are going to juggle, use the blast at an agle so it pushes the target high and away, and keep blasting them away from their medic and towards your team. Putting someone straight up in the air will probably get you killed, and whatever you are protecting killed as well. If you want to split an uber, you throw the target towards your team, and push the medic in the opposite direction. This breaks the chain and forces the medic to pick a new target, who will probably be surprised by this, and you can repeat the process. It is rarely worth it to blow an uber straight back, but sometimes you have no choice, and you should try your best to push as many people back as possible, even if it means getting yourself killed.

2) Demo defense is quite simple and hilarious. You can put stickies on your sentries to blow would be projectiles and attackers away, or you can put stickies down that send the uber target careening off into the map ceiling, with their medic chasing after them.

3) Offense requires a bit of savvy. Any troglodyte can rush in with an uber, but us Homo Sapiens like to be efficient. That's why if at around 20% of the uber, things aren't looking hot, you fall back and/or tell the medic to run for it, because medics are the most important part of your team. If an uber goes well, tell the medic to go grap some friends, and try to keep the other team busy while yours arrives. A soldier and a medic are dandy, but a medic with an entire overhealed team is much better

4) The kritzkrieg can be absolutely devastating in the right hands. Depending on your situation, you choose your target, but more often than not, the demoman is the way to go, even over a soldier. Demos have an 8 shot clip of instant kill explosives as well as a 4 shot clip of killing explosives that might miss. Soldiers have 4 rockets with similar explosive spread and a shotgun. Heavies are fantastic for narrow areas, and sponge damage much better than a demo or soldier, so if you know there's a bunch of people waiting, unless you have a fantastic demo or soldier, the heavy is going to be your best bet, because he can take a ton more damage.

5) Always overheal your uber target before you use the uber, and make sure you are at full health as well. It gives you the ability to eat an extra hit or two if need be, and allows your target to keep fighting just a little longer after the charge expires.

Part Four: Being a medic
Living as a medic can be quite hard, especially when you are the only one on the team or your team tends to drag you into explosive situations.

1) Know when to bail, and when to start fighting. Far too often, I see a medic getting gunned down with his medigun out. If something gets close enough to you to attack you, two things are happening: your teammate isn't protecting their medic, and your team is probably getting smoked. Don't be afraid to run back, but don't turn tail on your teammates unless you are sure that you'll die if you stay. There's no sense in dying with someone if you can make it out alive and possibly get an uber and/or save your teammates. Medics are the most valuable people on your team, hands down. No other class saves the others or provides as much tipping power as a good medic or medics. The demo might be an incredibly powerful class, but without medics, the demo is much less effective.

2) When you fight, don't bring out the ubersaw unless someone is right in your face. It can't heal you and chances are you'll die without damaging them. The blutsauger is an ungodly good weapon and deterrent. It can put out fire if you are burning, and it's fire sinks, which gives you the ability to shoot enemies in cover behind ledges, rocks, etc.

3) Jump. Seriously, jump a lot, because if you travel in a path on the ground, chances are you'll get hit by direct damage, which is never a good thing. If you have to cross an area under heavy fire, make sure you make yourself as unhittable as possible. Also, use everything to keep yourself protected - teammates, terrain, etc. Don't be afraid to take a hit for a wounded player though, and never be afraid to charge someone if they are chasing your teammate. If a medic is coming at you, people tend to change their attention to the medic, or run away, because who knows what's following that medic.

Part Five: SPY CHECK SPY CHECK!!11!!!1!

This is more a how-to part, but spy checking and catching is usually quite simple.

1) Spies only appear with the weapon with which the class spawns. Medic - needlegun, spy revolver, etc. Don't waste your ammo checking people with other weapons out. Also, change weapons when you run into a teammate to let them know you aren't a spy. If you do it enough, when someone sees a spy as you and they don't switch weapons, they're gonna get smoked.

2) If a spy is in the area, cover the ammo boxes, and watch for any that disappear. You can get an idea for where a spy likes to hide based on where and when ammo disappears from the area. Most spies also pick from a few classes (Engy, Solly, Pyro, and Demo) because they appear the most realistic and populous (snipers don't generally run around unscoped and they are too slow to be scouts).

3) Spies are stopped by enemy players and engineer objects. If you have an area you don't want a spy getting to, throw a dispenser in their way. Chances are, they'll try to destroy it, or spend time getting over it to get to you. If a spy saps your gear, kill them first, and then knock off the sapper.

That's all for now, but I might put more up in the future.

P.S. For the burning sensation, you must plunder a goat from the Kilaaks and drink its sweet milk.

[Red Seal]

nice Bakuryu

[Nick Mame]

Two really simple tips that will increase your medic survivability by an absolute ton:

1) Heal at the length of the beam. You should be several dozen feet away from the person you are healing always. Standing near the person who you are healing (and consequently is getting hurt) is not a good idea.

2) Always heal someone. If you stop healing someone to go retrieve some health or chase after some random spy, you're going to die a horrific death. Medics heal people - weapons are for when people are dead.

[Plinko]

Good guide, Bak. After staring at the stats for a long while I'm starting to think surviving (meaning making better judgement calls on how to avoid useless deaths) is one of the top things people can do to improve their gameplay.


When I play medic, I have two plans for surviving attacks.

1. If I know/trust the player I'm healing to watch out for me - then I stay healing until theyre dead or the threat is gone.
2. If I cannot trust them - I will go straight for the blut and retreat.

I find most players don't even try to watch out for their medics, which I find extremely frustrating when playing the class. I would love to stick with #1, but most of the time thats a recipe for a quick death.

[Soltan]

Great points regarding medics. The only thing I would add is that learning to use the ubersaw effectively is an absolute must. It helps you charge faster and catches most people by surprise.

[Guardian]

I have one tip to add for being a spy:

1. As a spy if you've annoyed the other team enough that they have 3 scouts and 5 pyros running around all trying to kill you and succeeding once a while but they are not doing much else.... Congratulations you've done your job

[Nick Mame]

A lot of the times deaths as medic are because the medic's inexperienced rather than their patient not watching out for them. Soldiers are the one class that medics need protection from, everything else they can handle on their own.

It may be that I have an advantage over other players in that I've heavily invested in soldier (I have to keep reminding people; I used to be a medic with 0-hours soldier) and can easily predict enemy movements merely by playing a few rounds against my opponents. But that's something I've always encouraged people looking to improve to do: play every class until you are average at them all, specialize in two or three. A medic who only medics won't be able to survive because they don't know how other classes strive to kill them. So much pain can be avoided by being a more class-versatile player.


With all classes, there are several keys to survival:

1) The most important part of surviving is in positioning. If you stand in the right place, you have an absolute immense advantage.

2) The second most important part is anticipation. If you can predict your enemy's movements (play demoman or soldier), you'll be able to prepare yourself before danger arrives.

3) The least important (but still very valuable) part is in grace of movement. Once the enemy arrives, you have to dance them.


I've never found a use for the medic's weapons because my teammates are better at killing things and it's not that often I'm the only one alive. Syringes' dual purpose seems to be killing pyros before you retreat and killing things on the point as a last-ditch effort. The Ubersaw can distract you from your team and get a ton of people killed in exchange for some percent that can't be used on the dead.

Among the first advice I give training medics is ditch all weapons until they've learned how to keep an entire team alive on their own. A fatal flaw of most players is how often they resort to combat instead of more effectively healing the people who excel in combat.

[Bakuryu]

Yeah. The ubersaw is an amazing sneak weapon if you can get a quick jab in and get away, but the beam length thing was something I totally forgot about, if only because it's force of habit to stay at length and behind cover.

[Guardian]

[quote="Nick Mame";p="152981"]

It may be that I have an advantage over other players in that I've heavily invested in soldier (I have to keep reminding people; I used to be a medic with 0-hours soldier)


[/quote]

What the....

You used to main medic?!?!?!?! I always thought you played demo/soldier. YOU LIEE!!!

[Soltan]

I forgot to mention that the ubersaw should probably only be used in the way I described by very experienced medics. I had over 400 hours as medic before I started to focus on it as my primary alternative to healing (I was a pure blutsauger and retreat specialist prior to that).

[Boss Llama]

Another medic-related tip, not for people playing medics, but for everybody else on the team.

When you have a medic in the area, and you need healing, don't go grab a health pack. Unless the enemy is right on top of you and there won't be time, wait the extra couple seconds and let the medic heal you. The acceleration it puts on your medic's uber-charge rate to have injured people to heal is tremendous, and will help the entire team. Likewise, do not stand near dispensers while being healed by a medic - it's just as bad as double-healing for uber-charge rate. Wait until healed, then use the dispenser for ammo.

Yesterday on Warpath I had an entire team that understood this rule, and waited for medic healing whenever available. The result was that I was kicking out ubercharges every 75 seconds or so, and combined with the other medic on the team, we were hitting our foe with so many that they never could put together a counter-attack.

[mr_s]

NOTE TO ALL MEDICS:

When someone says "Hit it DOC" or "lets go doc" using voice, would you kindly hit it as they do not have a microphone to tell you exactly when to hit it.

thanks