So, I always play pubs, and it can get kind of repetitive. Tonight I was in a game consisting of pretty much only people on my friends list (and being the elitist ******* that I am they are all good players of course) and it was a ton of fun (if a bit frustrating at times). Anyway, I just want to point out some basic game mechanics that many players do not seem to grasp. Before we get started, I want to put it out there a few little snippets that you should take in to consideration. Anything not optimal is bad. The best defense is a good offense. If you want to play with buildings safely go play sim city. If you push your bots you will never need turrets, because the enemy will not have any bots to bring down the moneyball. Longshots can be the exception as they provide offensive support. Never buy lazer blazers. Ever. For any reason. OH WAIT THERE IS NO REASON TO BUY THEM, THEY ******* SUCK. Seriously, they do more for the other team than they do for you. A level 1 rockit costs less and does more and is harder to kill than a level 3 LB. Don't stand still. Don't die. I will begin with your mind set. DO NOT DIE! That is the golden rule of the game. This is not CoD where you can run around go pewpew die and be like no big deal I'll just respawn. NO! If you die, your 6 man team (or less) will be losing 16% of their team for 7 seconds while you respond, and depending on your class, another 20 seconds while you run back. There are 2 acceptable reasons to die. The first is getting the annihilator while losing. If you aren't losing, you shouldn't die getting it. The second is keeping the enemy moneyball down. If it is about to go up and is well defended, it is worth dying to keep it down. I would argue that getting headshotted is an acceptable death, but against most snipers in this game it really isn't. Jumping and strafing should keep you safe when you aren't using LoS obstacles. While I am not going to argue for having a good K/D ratio, I will argue AGAINST the D. Dying gives the enemy team money for skills, and turrets, ejectors and bots, all of which make you die more or put you at a disadvantage. Having kills does the same to them. The more consecutive kills someone has the more money they get per kill. This is an OBJECTIVE based game. In order to complete your objective you must escort bots to the moneyball and destroy it. This means escorting bots is your objective. In order to do that, you must kill enemy bots, kill enemy turrets, and kill enemy pros. All pros can somewhat effectively (minus the support, who has to use an airstrike) wipe out a wave of bots in a few seconds. This means if enemy bots are dead, and enemy turrets are dead, you should make enemy pros dead. If the enemy moneyball is down, kill it. Mainly an assault task, as they can get there and do lots of damage and leave quite easily, because the bomb does 10% of moneyball damage in one hit. A juiced assault or support can generally bring the moneyball from 100% to 0% in 10 seconds flat. Assaults may take slightly longer. DO NOT LET THEM. When defending in a losing game, ignore the bots that are already about to hit your moneyball. Unless you are a tank or assassin, you probably won't kill them in time. Your efforts are better spent killing the bots farther away, if you do this for enough waves you give your team breathing room. Treat the moneyball like a bot, because that is how it takes damage. You don't use an assault rifle on bots, and unless you are farming money for juice you shouldn't use it on the moneyball either. The exception to this is the assassin who should use shurikens so they don't have to be right on the moneyball to damage it, as that is dangerous and not optimal. Next, the classes. I'm not going to give you a guide to each class (I will append links to the appropriate threads later) but rather an overview. Their are 3 categories for pros. Slayers, bot control, and balanced. In general, the slayers are assault and gunner, the bot killers are tank and assassin, with tank and sniper being balanced. Balanced meaning that they are effective at both bot and pro killing. You may have noticed I didn't list support. That is because support isn't really focused on either task, but more so on getting control of the annihilator platform (excluding grenade iii) with the firebase, which should also be in a position to kill bots from at least 1 lane, if not both, and airstriking turrets. If you are playing a slayer class, your goal should be slaying enemy pros. When there are none overextended or nearby, that doesn't mean stand around and do nothing, your secondary weapon can in fact kill bots, just not as effectively as other classes can. In fact, as a gunner, it is your job to kill turrets. a fully upgraded mortar can kill a level 1 rockit in less than half a clip! The bot killing classes should be KILLING BOTS! Don't run around as an assassin focusing on getting kills. I don't care how good you are at it, you are better at killing bots and slayers are better at killing pros. At the very least, you are better at killing bots than the other classes are, and so you should be killing bots so they don't have to. The balanced classes should be focusing on whatever is more convenient or optimal. If you have a slayer tearing the other team up, focus on bots. If you have a bot killer demolishing enemy bots, wipe out the other team so they can't do anything about it. The point is, you can do both effectively. If one is being done well, do the other. If you can't be doing one job at any given point in time, do the other. I will say though, if you are a sniper then countersniping is a priority if the enemy has a good sniper. Because headshots hurt, and when their sniper kills the rest of your team, chances are their team will kill you. Hazards are your friend. See a silly tank walking with his bots? Eject that fatty! if you don't get a ring out you will have killed his bots, damaged him, and dazed the already painfully slow class, making him an easy kill for pretty much anyone. If you are making a good bot push and have the money to spare, buy ejectors in your path. Think of it as a safety deposit or a tax that you have to pay to ensure you are protected. This is even more true for the annihilator. There is no circumstance where you should not buy the annihilator. Not one. If you have the money, buy it. If you are winning, it presses your advantage and denies the enemy breathing room. If you are losing, if gives you breathing room and can turn the tide of battle. If the game is balanced, it gives you an advantage. Juice. If you have it, don't activate it the instant you get it. You will spend half your time getting to where you want to actually use it, and you basically threw away 250$ by doing so. Use it to heal yourself so you don't die, use it when you get to the enemy base to wipe out turrets, use when you see a big group of enemy pros AFTER you get closer to them(then kill them all). Don't use it to pick off a single player. In general, you should stick to your normal jobs with your class when juiced and just do them more effectively. Also, never grapple while you have juice. Never. No excuses. If an enemy has juice, crowd control them. Grapple them with your grapple skill, grapple them with your alternate fire on your secondary weapon, charge them, knock them back, freeze trap them, anything that keeps them away from your team and your base. I think ringing out a juiced player should earn you bacon, thats how important this is. If you see a teammate grappling a juiced player, get right up by them and as soon as their grapple finishes, grapple the player again. This effectively wastes half of that players juice, they take damage from being shot at while being grappled, and will generally have to retreat, wasting $500 of the other teams money. Map control. If the enemy can't get to the annihilator and juice platform, they can't use it to buy the annihilator and juice. This puts you at a large advantage. If you have the money, it can be a good idea to buy them just to deny the enemy use of them. The most glaring example of map control is a firebase at the top of the jump pad outside your spawn on steel peel. There are 3 exits to spawn on that map. A firebase in that location covers all 3 of them. And it is very difficult to win if they are allowed to keep a firebase there. As a final point, I want to say don't overlook the bot buying stations. I had a game where I got an uberstreak by literally staying in my base buying bots and taunting every kill so I could afford to keep buying them. It wasn't exactly exciting but it was funny as hell and probably helped my team. I Just bought bots and killed enemy bot waves while it was on CD. I ended the game with top kills, assists, and money, and least deaths. While I discourage doing that, they ARE useful.
Disagreeing with this, and the fact you ommited the support means something is wrong in your reasoning. It's more like there's tasks to be done: killing enemy bots while keeping your bots alive, destroying turrets, damaging moneyball. Now there's different ways to contribute to this, for pro killings everyone can do that but there's two ways to achieve that: area denial, and hunting. Area denial is "don't come here or you're dead", while hunting is "I'm coming to get you". Both can contribute to all parts of the game, because if it were not for the enemy team, killing bots and turrets is not really hard. Now everything is about who to kill and why. Playing mostly tank and gunner, as they're usually the classes nobody takes and I like to play in balanced teams (also because 80% of people picking gunner are totally useless and spend their matchs deployed in the worst possible places to spray random stuff at the other end of the map with their minigun), so my views might be biased, but I did play all classes a few hours already. Tanks and gunners are good at area denial, but they're not so good at hunting because they're fat, slow and visible, so it's unlikely an aware opponent will let them get to their sweet range where they can tear people apart, and if they start roaming around while there's a decent sniper in front they're going to have to expose themselves too much (especially the gunner who's one of the easiest target in the game when he's shooting his minigun, barely harder to hit than a support hacking a turret). Support would also go in the area denial category, not only because of their firebase, but also because they can make tanks & gunners much more efficient. Sure thoses classes can also gank unaware people, but that's capitalizing on the enemy's incompetence, and out of their sweet spot they usually can just harass (if you don't have time to get to cover after being railgunned a bit too much or having caught a few mortar rounds with your head, you're doing something wrong). Assaults, assassins and snipers are good at hunting, they have either the mobility to go attack someone from a good position, or the range to do a lot of damage to someone from the other end of the map in the case of the sniper. Even if they can't kill a target by themselves, they can go finish a weakened enemy who got to cover in the case of assassin and gunner, or provide the extra burst to kill someone being harassed. For the lane pushing part, the best is by far the tank, death blossom kills a wave in one click at close range, and rank 3 product nade (which also builds juice decently fast) + eventually a few railgun hits at long range, all that while denying an area and protecting his own bots mostly because of charge. Second would be the gunner, even if he's rather slow at killing bots he's very good at area denial, close range with minigun to protect bots ofc, but long range with mortar spam which also kills bots before they progress too much, and more importantly: mortar on bots gives a lot of juice, which means if he slowly works his way without dying to the proximity of the enemy base with the assistance of hunters to help clear the way, he has good chance of having juice at that point. Saying assassins' primary job is to kill bots seems a common misconception to me. While they're good at bot killing, they're not gonna be able to do that efficiently if the bots are protected, sure they can harass with shurikens, but that's far from optimal, so according to yourself it's bad. If she goes and kill a wave of bot before dying or having to retreat she's just gonna deny juice to other players in her team while her squishiness means she can die and loose all juice built so far rather easilly, and even once juiced the fact she often has to go melee also means she's going to be easier to grapple or ring-out, in fact she's also so squishy that even juiced up she can get pwnd pretty fast. Because that's another thing to consider when killing bots, in fact, bots are not only a way to put the enemy moneyball's shield down, they're also walking juice dispensers, and depending on what's to do next, it might be better to let another class get juice first. There's even some cases where having the right class juice up is almost necessary to go further, most obvious example would be if you're facing a very strong defense with badass and actively healed turrets, a juiced up gunner will achieve more than anything else in this game, or at least way faster seeing how mortar can build juice fast, and rapes even an overhealed rockit 3 in a few shots when juiced. Doing a search for "juice" in your guide, and the only mentions to juice are in the terms of "if you happen to accidentaly have juice at some point", or "how to stop a juiced player", while I think working on getting juice ready is a friggin important thing for a lot of classes, in close matchs it's how you will make some decisive pushs and break defenses, or stop the other team's pushs. It's the main reason why you should be killing other players, staying alive and helping your team mates staying alive too, so your team makes some juice rushs and the other team doesn't, more than cash or respawn timer penalty which are really very small in this game, especially since if you damaged players before dying and they die a bit later you'll get almost as much cash with getting assist.
*eye twitch* Yes. *head twitch* But they can smash people just fine between waves. *twitch* Remember - if an assassin or tank kills someone, the enemy lose 16% of their team for 7 seconds. And gain cash in the process. And can spend those 7 seconds smashing a few bot waves... Well, if you're the sin. A good tank or sin will mix pro killing with bot killing.
Hmm... Another KDR type player. Mostly good advice, but deaths really don't matter especially for classes that have low requirements for full effectiveness. Obviously this doesn't mean go die 50 times in 15 minutes, but 10-15 is fine if you actually pressure the other team and work to break contain. Or just dive into their base with a juice run. Economic victory is not an actual useful concept. With a proper build you can still purchase juice and annihilators and have all the useful skills without needing zero deaths, since zero deaths is only ever going to happen on stompfest games anyway... Expecting zero deaths means you are too passive. On juice, you really want to be using this as soon as practical. Do not save it for a rainy day or other such stupidity. Go to the bot lanes and push hard, if they are pushed up, juice into the base killing players and turrets to gain the final ground into the ring. In general, 1-2 deaths at a time on offense is fine. 1-2+ deaths on defense at the same time is a critical failure.
Again, I'm not arguing for KDR, I'm simply arguing againt the death part. I've gotten uber streaks and still lost. Point is, if you don't die you are going to be doing something for your team. Even if it means distracting an enemy player who is trying to hunt you. If I get a kill streak, I will probably have a bot streak too. That means bonus money for me to buy skills and juice to kill you more and destroy your teams juice pools as they build up. No you don't. Why waste it because you have it? I would rather use it as a heal so I can continue doing my job and annihilate any obstacles to my objective.
Uber streak and losing means you play KDR style instead of being actually useful in breaking a contain. Stop doing that. Play more aggressive and accept deaths. Go out there and shoot things to provide counter pressure to the contain and take advantage of a Jackbot wave to contest middle. If you just stay in your base you accomplish absolutely nothing except delaying your loss. Do something to break that and you'll be infinitely better off even if you lose your uber streak or other such meaningless metric you can come up with. Uber streak is a badly created protag. It means "I play KDR and F winning" in essence. You aren't pressing hard enough if you are getting close to an Uber streak. I never advocated wasting juice. I advocate immediate heavy pressure when you have juice. Waiting for the perfect moment is an awful decision and one that will rarely occur. In short, go out of your base and do something. Optimal is not playing on your heels... Press your advantage, provide counter pressure to the other teams advantage and break the moment there is weakness. None of this "save juice for the time when you can get a 6 kill" which won't happen. Press in and destroy stuff with juice. The only exception is an eminent money ball drop. That benefits conservative play, but in general a drop is more valuable then a 50/50 chance at no drop but a juice in the bank. Use that juice. Then really work on figuring out what skills are actually necessary and dump the ones that aren't. Assault($700), Gunner($550) and Assassin($550) are all pretty cheap. Use all the rest of that money for juice and annihilators. The other classes likely have similar no cash builds to use but I lack experience with what is actually useful to say. This is optimal. Banking on kill/bot streaks is foolhardy at best. Fortunately for now it is quite possible to out skill people by gigantic margins to enable those streaks. Whether or not this gap closes remains to be seen if actual competitive games emerge (which looks quite doubtful right now). The ideal game has one money ball drop leading to a quick kill. That is what you shoot for in trying to find things that enable a quick win. None of this OT required bias needed to have a good game (and the associated people that sandbag to enable). Keep adding pressure. If you see weakness, even minor, you go after it right away. No hesitation. Passive means you lose and never develop a sense for openings. If you make the other team play passive you will over come their advantages. You can not beat a aggressive team with advantage with passivity. It will not work. You can however beat an aggressive team by forcing them to play back and then keeping up that pressure. This is really hard and you are going to end up with a poor KDR yet still be trying the absolutely correct response.
In that same game I also had over 300 bot kills, and had around 6 turret kills (stat isn't recorded so I don't know for sure). It's not that I wasn't pushing, it's that whenever I gave my team an opportunity to push, they didn't. Had I been dying we would of had bots shoved into our base because I would of been out f combat for around 15 seconds, enough to push bots halfway across the map while my team played sim city in my base. Even with the sheer number of juices I unloaded on the opposing team and their turrets, we still lost because my team sucked. It's not because I was playing DM, because I wasn't. My team was (average 10 bot kills) and were bad.
Why in the world would you bother killing turrets when contained? It isn't going to accomplish anything other than waste time, juiced and otherwise. The thing about dying is that where it happens matters much more then avoiding it. Stop thinking about it as x seconds for you and instead think about the x second delta you gain or lose by fighting in various spots. For instance, if you can force 2-3 players to engage you not in your base while contained, that's a win even if you die! Even more if you kill one or two. That's a huge loss to their pressure time. But if you delay them while in base every death is a net of -5 seconds to your team since they are already in position to make the kill the moment the money ball drops. And they are constantly charging and buying juice all preparing to stomp the static players grouped up inside the ring. If they have juice and you make them blow it outside your base you also win even though you killed nothing and did no damage. That is a huge time resource effectively squandered. This is the reason why "rainy day" juicing is bad. If you see a random guy with juice ready to go (not sniper, they always have juice...) go for the kill. You might get a drop if you are lucky or you might get a trigger in a worthless spot. This must be prevented at all costs because just one solid juice run and you are done for. You can certainly defend some of them, but they get to keep trying over and over until one works. Quite the advantage to break. Something you are never going to do playing passive and defensively. Fighting in your base can only be at best zero time lost, frequently -5 or more seconds. Fighting outside your base, if sufficiently far away and engaging enough players, makes it possible to go positive.
I think its wrong to fit classes into certain genres or roles. The thing about this game, which i love, is that nothing is absolute. Any class can excel at any role depending on how you play.
I think it is more correct to say that a pro falls into these catergories: -Bot Killer -Pro Killer -Turret Killer -Moneyball Killer Most classes are balanced to do some of these without others. Assault can't push bots or turrets, gunner can't push bots or moneyball, assassin can't push pros and thus cannot push bots guarded by tank, tank can't push moneyball or turret but can push pros and bots and assassins. The assassin is agreed to have a specific behind-enemy-lines job, so you mess with adamant gunner zoning and all. Balanced though by weak armor and weak direct attack weapons. Same with support, he is a particular niche class for supporting your turrets, pros, and bots, and can kill moneyball, but is limited on bots, pros, and turrets.
