Bots. They're the crux of crossfire. They make offensive pushes, they bolster defensive power and (with the right class balance) generally annoy any pro infront of them. After reading through various posts on the forums (and please let me know if this topic has already been brought up), it's my personal belief that not enough credit is given to these little guys. With the prevalence of juice-rushing during overtime and the occasional juiced gunner shooting down your money ball, I feel that sometimes the importance of bots themselves may have been overlooked in some way, that people really only see black-jacks,slim-bots and Jackbots, so i hope to create an imformative post (and hopefully general discussion) about just how strong your "fodder" really is. I'll start with class-specific bots. Just outside of your spawn, you'll find a place where you can spawn your own bots. These are unique to every class (besides the tank and gunner, who share the same bot), and all serve different purposes. Personally i feel that ALL of these bots are useful and ALL should be spawned, should you have the $100 spare to spawn them. Let's look at all the bots and their uses and flaws. Tank/Gunner Bouncer-With the second highest armour of all of the bots in the game (the jackbot having the highest), Bouncers can be death to newer players, and a serious pain to more experienced players. Why? because bouncers are the only bots in the entire game with a grapple. From my own experience as a support, even with a gold armour endorsement, these bots will still deal around 50% damage to me if they grapple me, and while frustrating when not under enemy fire, they are crippling when you are in a 1v1 situation, holding you in place for the opponent to continue shooting at you. They take an unbelievably long time to kill (for a bot that is) and WILL cause you trouble if not immediately dealt with. Sniper Scrambler-(My own experience with scramblers is pretty limited, as I feel that personally they are not strong enough to really be viable in crossfire, but I will explain what they do, and try and add how I feel they are effective) Snipers are able to summon scramblers using the bot station within your team's base. These bots have considerably lower health than most BUT if they are left unnoticed can devastate teams. Their ability to drain a player's skills can be incredible against classes that rely on their skills to aid offensive pushes or bolster defenses. If, for example, a scrambler were to reach your enemy's base, and a support were to leave it unnoticed, it could drain that support's hack ability, thus leaving them to wait for the long cooldown to use hack. The only problem is that the scrambler is VERY easy to destroy, I'm fairly sure one shotgun blast from a support would destroy them with ease. I've yet to find a viable tactic to using these bots, other then spawning them and hoping for the best. Since you can't expect to get kills from a scrambler like you may do with bouncers, gremlins or maybe even buzzers, you can only really hope that the scrambler disrupts an enemy's skill usage, thereby helping to halt an enemy push (maybe?! I can honestly say I've never spawned them as a sniper). Support Gapshot- My personal favourites :twisted:. The most noticable (besides bouncers I suppose) of all the class specific bots, these walking longshots are the death of turrets in an enemy base. If left unnoticed, a support can destroy two or three turrets with one gapshot, thereby making them incredibly cost effective (You will make $35-per turret destruction). I don't think i need to stress how devastating this is to an enemy base. I've found that these turrets will only have trouble destroying the rockit turrets outside the money-ball, but if the opposing team has been pushed back into their own base, I find a viable support strategy is to spawn 2 gapshots on each side of the map. 4 gapshots will usually be too much for 1 or 2 (sometimes even 3) supports dedicated to defending to heal, and you will usually get one or two turret destructions in this time. Their only weakness that I have found is that they make a very distinctive sound when firing mortars, it is not too difficult to hear one that has spawned, and this, coupled with their low health, make them easy kills. But leaving them unnoticed can be the difference between a solid defense and a crippled one. IF YOU SEE THEM KILL THEM. Assassin Gremlin-Ah the gremlins. Personally, I believe that besides the smoke bomb, they are an assassin's best friend. These little buggers have a cloak very much like the assassin's, so you probably won't see them until they're afew feet in front of you, and assassins spawn them in waves of four. They have very little health, but since they do a serious amount of damage, and there will always be four of them, they can really be pests. Offensively, these bots are powerhouses, in the way they force an opponent into a 50/50 situation. Lets say for instance you are an assault fighting a lone gunner. I personally find that I have a hard time keeping up with the gunner's high damage output, coupled with his above-average health BUT add gremlins into this, and the gunner has a serious problem. He can either take out the wave of little invisible nuisances infront of him (It's not that difficult for a gunner either, a single slam will stun/ kill them), and hope the assault doesn't take advantage of his moment of weakness, or he can run, escape the assault's line of fire (hopefully) and deal with the gremlins. Either way, the assault (and in effect the assault's team) wins. He effectively pushes his opponent back, allowing for a harder push towards the money ball! While these bots are powerful, they do have their problems. I believe they focus on the enemy closest to them and will chase them down until they die, so I have found they will sometimes run into walls endlessly, which can make them a waste of $100, they also cannot attack pros that are in elevated positions BUT their effectiveness against defensive supports and anyone not in an elevated position should never be underestimated. They should always be killed as soon as possible, they hurt, they're unrelenting and they WILL attack turrets if left unnoticed. Very much like bouncers, their effectiveness is lowered greatly if your enemy is jumping, but also like bouncers, it is advisable to deal with them immediately. One tactic I have found to work as assassin is to follow these bots, and while the enemy pro is distracted by them, unleash your own attacks :twisted: Assault Buzzers-Probably the most distinctive of all bots ( you will hear them coming from a mile away), these pesky bugs are very much like gremlins, they target enemy pros and chase them down, inflicting a fairly sizable amount of damage. Unlike gremlins, these bots can fly, which gives them the ability to attack those annoying snipers on top of bridges, and I believe that Assault spawn four of them (Again, i rarely use these bots, so any clarification would be appreciated). Alas, these bots aren't without their bugs (No pun intended). It's not uncommon to see these bots fly randomly at walls and get stuck, thus making them utterly useless, and I've even found that sometimes these bots may hit me and inflict no damage at all (This may just be lag). Unlike gremlins, they will die after inflicting their damage also, meaning the their true effectiveness really lies in all four buzzers hitting one target. Never-the-less, these bots can be a true annoyance to a sniper. I'm pretty tired at the moment, but I have more to add to this soon. I'd really appreciate some input to see how other people use their class's bots, as I honestly believe bots can and do change the course of matches. I will hopefully update this with tips on "bot killing" classes soon (most likely tomorrow).
Yeah, people totally underestimate bots. It's gotten to the point where with some classes I only upgrade 1 thing to 3 and save up until I have about $800 and then just release waves of bots. There's been games where 1/3rd of my kills come from Gremlins (and I think twice they were over half my kills!), though I find Scramblers to be completely useless. I wish they'd up the armor and/or speed, but I don't think they will because apparently they hurt in some other mode besides Crossfire, which is really sad, because they could be very effective in Crossfire otherwise! I still spawn them for kicks now and then but in all the time I've played this game, I've only gotten 1 kill and 1 assist from it and I've never actually seen one of my own spawns alive once it rounds a corner. You can cough on the other side of the map and it'll die unfortunately =(. The rest of the bots are very effective though!
When I'm playing aggressively, I typically use the Gunner or Assassin. After I've made my requisite upgrades, I frequently spend a lot of my cash on spawning Bouncers or Gremlins to run ahead of me. Depending on how much cash I'm holding, I'll spawn them on both sides before I get going. And between any kills/assists and clearing lanes of enemy bots, I typically find myself with cash to spawn more when I find myself back at the spawn point. While it's a definite risk that they might not catch an enemy on the ground, it's nice to see a kill message out of the blue letting me know they've done their job. As a bot-related question - Does Support's bot-aura affect character-spawned bots? Is a Gapshot or Bouncer better for being near a level 2 or higher Support? (aside from the benefits of getting overhealed)
I spawn a lot of bots as an Assault. The number of assists and kills you get from Buzzers makes them very worth the $100 pricetag. Also, if you die during an offensive push and your teammates are still in the firefight, the Buzzers will arrive to help long before you get back across the map... I also like it when my team spawns Bouncers. Nothing makes killing enemy Pros easy like a Bouncer or two rampaging through their ranks. I just pick them off as they try to deal with the bouncers. Extra credit to Supports that manage to overheal Bouncers before they get to the enemy base, or who heal them during a firefight. Gapshots are also good, especially if spawned in large numbers (though utterly useless on SteelPeel). I think they're a tad hard to keep alive though, and as an Assault I do a LOT of bot escorting so I should know! Love it when they start hammering enemy turrets though, especially if I'm already targeting one...
From what I've noticed, there's no visible indicator that gapshots are effected by the support aura at all which is unfortunate...It may do at level 3 passive, but at level 2 it doesn't. Besides, the pudgy little fella would have a hard time keeping up with gremlins or bouncers anyway i believe. I really think the only purpose the scramblers could really serve is draining skills while pros are caught in the sniper's ice trap, but since level 3 ice trap does that anyway, these bots seem highly redundant :| .I mean, even if they were given some sort of health or damage boost, they're too slow and most classes (bar support) don't really have to wait long for their skills to recharge anyway. I never thought of that!
The one thing that's neat about gremlins is that if you run with them, they make all your grapples one-hit KOs because while you're doing the animation they'll keep beating on the victim who's helplessly locked into the animation with you :3 The fact that they chew throught turrets then take down the moneyball regardless of what the bot situation is like is priceless too and if someone sets up firebases near the lane the gremlins will usually happily divert to take them out and they're damn good at firebase removal too in general :3
Yeah I play alot of assassin and I personally believe gremlins to be the backbone of a good assassin. Their uses far outweigh their cost, they serve so many purposes AND watching supports hop around like fools trying to avoid them is priceless. :evil: I felt that it may be a good idea to discuss bot killing here, and what classes I believe to be the most effective at bot killing. So here goes. 2 to 3 black-jacks. That's all it takes to drop the shields on your money ball. While escorting you bots can sometimes be troublesome, the uses of having a dedicated "bot farmer" on a team (personally) seems invaluable to successfully ending the game before overtime. But why bot farm you ask? Well, not only does it effectively shut down an enemies ability to push forward, you also make ALOT of money while doing it, and picking up any juiceboxes around pretty much ensures you will get juice VERY fast. While all the classes (bar the support without a firebase) are efficient at destroying bots, I feel that 3 classes make excellent bot killers, those classes being (in no particular order, although I'm rather bias towards the assassin, more on that later) Tank, Sniper and Assassin. Assault is rather middle-of-the-road in bot killing i believe, while they can do it, their primary weapon isn't all that effective, so you'll find if you are an assault, you'll be switching between the nade-launcher and assault rifle fairly often. Never-the-less, I believe it's worth mentioning them. The gunner's mortar is always deadly to bots aswell, but with no real method of escaping enemy fire, I find that just killing bots in your way, then concentrating on turrets on pros seems to be much more effective. That's my opinion anyway. So what makes the other 3 classes SO good at killing bots? Well, all 3 can damage multiple bots at once, all three can temporarily halt the movement of bots, and all three have methods of killing bots straight out of the enemy spawn before escaping to safety. I'll start with sniper since he's the only one with real range (bar the tank with his godly rail-gun of doom). Sniper The sniper's rifle, when passive is upgraded to level 3, has the ability to damage multiple bots with one shot, I believe that it takes 3 shots to kill a blackjack, but with numerous blackjacks huddled together, you will usually take them all out with little to no problems at all. Your freeze traps will temporarily hold bots in place, where a well-timed flak will mow them all down in one go. This can make the sniper an incredible lane-pusher if used effectively. Your flak can also be used to scare away lower-health pros who may try and halt your lane-pushing, and if the pros are standing near any bots you shoot, they will also take some damage with passive level 3. This can cause pros to believe you are trying to shoot them, and may force them back in cover, so you can continue lane-pushing. The one problem I find is that you may be standing still, zoomed in, for a good 4 or 5 seconds, causing tunnel-vision to take over, but if you are experienced with the sniper and you take your environment into account, you shouldn't have to worry. Tank Incredibly powerful lane-pushers, the tank's effectiveness at lane-pushing lies in his ability to take out multiple bots at once with the death-blossom, coupled with his very large health pool. Tanks can be a real pain to kill for some classes (I'm looking at you assassins), their product grenade will damage and stun large groups of bots (and any pros standing nearby), and the rail gun will kill blackjacks in 1 or 2 hits, should you need to be at range. If you find things get a little hairy (eg. standing infront of the enemies bot spawn) you can charge towards cover, giving you a burst of speed and making you the little bit harder to hit. Unfortunately, without your charge you become incredibly slow, so clever use of charge to escape damage can be important. Level 2 deploy allows you to regen your health at a faster rate, which can be great while in cover. Overall, Tanks make great lane-pushers and bot escorters. Having a support latch on to you couldn't hurt either. Assassin OK. It's my personal belief that Assassins are THE primary bot killers in the game. The lunge attack (RB or reload if you didn't already know) will kill multiple bots, it can also be used as a very good method of escape in that it's very much like the tanks charge, but with no cooldown. This, coupled with the highest speed in the game, makes you very effective at dealing with large groups of bots and quickly escaping to relative safety. The smoke bomb stuns all bots infront of you, allowing you to quickly mow through them, and the sword cuts through all bots like a hot knife through butter. If you ever wondered how that pesky assassin on the other team got juice so fast to destroy your turrets, chances are he's been clearing out lanes and ultimately pushing his bots through to your money-ball. I've played games where I've noticed assassins literally standing outside the bot spawn point and cutting through them before they even leave the base, thus halting any offensive pushes, and with the highest speed in the game, they can quickly zip from the left hand lane to the right hand one, thus halting pushes on both sides. If you decide to push lanes intelligently with the assassin you WILL get juice fast and you WILL help your team alot. I've gotten 8-10 juices in a single match from using this tactic, which lets you slice up turrets and shank anyone in your way, thus helping your bots push into the enemies base. I really don't think i can stress enough just how good assassins are at this :mrgreen: Sorry for the long post, they're just my personal opinions, I'd love to hear any thoughts anyone has on this, and I hope that this will raise some bot-awareness and therefore help newer players become more aware of the importance of bots.
As a gunner, I loooooooooove spawning gorillas. That's what I call bouncers. I just wish I could saddle one up and ride it into the enemy base. YEE HAW!!! Devs, as Tim Gunn would say, make it work! I will often follow my spawned gorillas and provide suppressing fire so they can go do their thing.
