Harassment: The Most Underused Strategy and How-to.

So, you're attempting to win a tough game of Crossfire. Your bots and their bots are duking it out alongside pros in the middle. There needs to be some way to turn the tide.

Alas, most people would attack the front lines. What is commonly ignored is hitting the rear. To flank. To bombard. To constantly harass and annoy. It is very underwhelming in terms of money-gain, but often the hidden factor in a team being able to steamroll another team.

Harassment. Your purpose is not to kill enemy pros (although you'll be doin some pro killin.) Your purpose is not to destroy the enemy's moneyball (although you'll be doin some moneyball shootin) Your purpose is to keep the enemy occupied. To keep their pros away from your bots. To destroy turrets and bots, so as to ensure that the enemy is wasting money. A player playing proper harassment may end up fighting the same three pros for a minute of time without a kill, but that time spent wasting the team's time frees up your own to do their proper jobs.

Harassment How-Tos: Harassing the opponent with the Sniper.

A harassment sniper is an interesting case - because most snipers tend to aim for enemy pros in hopes of scoring a kill. As a sniper, your goal is not to kill pros. It is to kill bots and turrets.

These rules apply to most classes, although I'm catering this specifically to the sniper for the sake of the time-limit I have to type this.


Rule # 1: Location Location Location! -

Position yourself somewhere you have a prime sight of a lane / turrets. Considerations to a prime location are things long the lines of: How many access points to your location? How exposed is your location to enemy snipers? How often does the enemy come through this location? Can you see anyone who is approaching you before it is too late? These are all vital questions when finding a location to snipe from, because as harassment, you need to survive to keep the enemy occupied.

Rule # 2: Do not prioritize Pros unless they are a direct threat.

If someone isn't shooting at you, why worry about killing them? Your goal is to focus on the little things, the underlying elements that will cause the enemy to collapse. A support spawns a longshot that will earn him money. Kill that first - you kill his money supply / his investments, your team will gain the economical edge as the match goes on. If you can see two pros and a turret - take out that turret! The turret, depending on the type, represents between $175 and $1400 investment spent by the opposing team. Remove that investment and waste their money!

Always remember:
Killing a pro = +$25 to you. No enemy investment lost.
Killing a turret = +$20 - $35 depending on level. $175 - $1400 enemy investment wasted.

Rule # 3: Keep the enemy occupied.

By killing enemy turrets, you help to waste their valuable resources. This makes you a target to their pros, who will often come after you. Place some currently OP freeze traps around the perimeter of your wisely chosen location. Replace them as needed. As the enemy will undoubtedly be annoyed by your persistent harassment, they will aim for you. And you will survive. By having three enemies concentrating on you, you keep those three enemies from doing just about anything else. Realizing the value in merely keeping the attention of the enemy and diverting their focus is an important aspect of being able to harass. There are many ways to keep enemies occupied.

Have a support healing the turret? Shoot a different one, then when he comes to heal that turret, begin shooting the other turret. Remember - your goal isn't to kill this support so that he can respawn and flank you, your goal is to keep him occupied. As long as he is healing turrets, he isn't healing his teammates, he isn't hurting yours. Once you get juice, you can easily out-damage his healing ability.

Have a sniper taking notice of you? Keep him occupied with the occasional shot towards him. Don't worry if you hit or miss - if you have a good location you can pop out, take a shot, go back into cover and ignore the sniper while he waits for you to re-emerge (which you won't, until he takes his focus off you again.)

Any other class? Pop some shots their way. Slow them down with freeze traps. Kill only when you are able to do so without getting yourself killed.

Rule # 4: Don't do anything that will get you killed.

"Well, I died, but at least I killed two turrets."

Most people would consider this a gain. But, as harassment, you have multiple objectives. You will have succeeded in killing two of their investments, but at the cost of losing your position for a significant period of time. Your survival is worth backing off. 15 seconds of leeway is all a team really needs to be able to get organized. As constant harassment, you create the illusion that there is no leeway, that they must be on the defensive.

If you are dead, you do not have the attention of anyone on their team. You are not doing your job if you are waiting to respawn. Minimize how much this happens - a retreating sniper still has the attention of the 3 players chasing him, a dead sniper has lost the attention of the 2 survivors.

More to be posted later, but the basic rules of harassment are thus. Keep this in mind players, as if you need that subtle touch to push your team from Loser Lucy's to Winning Wilfreds, this may be the trick.

THIS!!!!!!And this is exactly how I play Sniper. You can be such a pain in the ***, particularly on Lazer Razer. Remember, Flak is your friend.

Dont forget to taunt. Nothing gets under other peoples skin as much as a sniper taunt(especially the smg taunt, it just looks more insulting). This can be a huge help to your team because when people get sniped in the face and then taunted, their first thought it "o ill go over there and teach him a lesson." You can then insult them further by trapping them and either head shotting them or 9-ironing them, followed by a taunt. This causes people to ignore all other objectives and go after you for revenge. I have personally caused 4 out of 6 enemys to target me at a time, making the win for my team easy. Snipers play such a mental game its amazing. Also with counter snipers, just sit behind your bearer and when you notice their aimed in on you, just taunt at them.

This is how I play Sniper, too. I don't waste time looking for teeny little heads to pick off. I go straight for the wallet of the other team faster than Elin Woods, and gets lots of cash through taunts to help keep the turrets up.

Tank Harassment Guide next, Pancake? >_> Maybe Support or Assault? <_<

i get pissed off at snipers that do this but now that i know how ill try it soon

Great post, I was gonna make one about this later. I've been doing this with other classes lately. Honestly? Assassins are the best harassers, and I think the developers meant it this way, which is why they gave shurikens massive color streaks. It fills the screen with a blurr of colors and despite all the "omfg shurikens are the best weapon in the game by far" threads, lol, they're only effective in close to medium-close (if you're very good at aiming them) range when it comes to pros.

So what I do sometimes, is just start long ranging with shurikens, then I'll cloak, move to a slightly different spot, throw more, etc. They get so damn frustrated with you, not because they fear death, but simply because they know they're getting hit and aren't going to die and know they can kill you in 1 second. They'll chase you all over the map. And the ones that don't start ignoring you, and that's when you cloak and grapple them. And if I'm not confident I can get a back grapple on someone, I'll smoke bomb them and jump away just to piss them off lol.

And if you don't think you can safely get in close to help a teammate, again, just spam your shurikens, the colors all over the screen just mentally mess with you and break your concentration while you're trying to aim at people, and they're just a mental hassle.


When I play assault, all I do is harassment really (tbh I don't know how to play them any other way ). I take armor for my Gold just to stay alive longer, and then I think I have skill regen for silver, and reload speed for bronze. I start out by spamming grenades to help hit bots and cause explosions on the screen, then in medium-long to close range I just pepper people with the assault rifle, and it takes forever to kill them but I throw a bomb inbetween me and them. After I take a couple shots I go into cover and reload. If they chase me, I blow the bomb and it kills them or I finish them easily afterwords. If they don't chase me, I come back out and keep harassing them until they do come at me, or a teammate jumps in the fight. As an assault I get alot of games where I go like 6 and 13, but with 18 assists and we win before overtime. And hell, if I learn to play as an assault I'd probably have even better results. I'm just not very good with em for some reason lol, probably not my style kinda thing.

I'm a fan!

Wow. That's pretty much exactly how I play a Sniper. not out of skill, though. I'm pretty bad at killing people, but great at just pissing them off. I sometimes have 3 or 4 enemy Pros go out of their way to fight me, it's fun times.

I love this thread. <3<3<3<3<3<3

I specifically play Sniper to put pressure on the moneyball, clear out bots for cash and get trap kills on anybody who tries to stop me. Shooting random bullets across the map to disrupt enemy pros engaged in firefights with your pros is just the icing on the cake.

In enemy sniper firefights, like Grenade 3, I'll stand behind the glass shield and taunt while their sniper targets me. 75% of the time, I've just made a friend for the rest of the match, and 100% of the time if I manage to pop out behind the shield, headshot, and taunt again. In nearly every match I play, I won't have enough traps on hand to stop the flow of angry pros who drop what they're doing to rush me down 3 or 4 at a time so frequently that I don't have time to taunt after kills anymore, and on the off chance that I DO manage to take them all out with a trap or two and a triple headshot or more, I've suddenly become the pied piper of enemy pros until a moneyball drops. In any case, taunting is the Sniper's best skill. A shame you can't upgrade it.

Once, a high-level assassin was trying to juice in our base on Steel Peel, and I chased her off down the back entrance as she lost her juice. As I saw her running away, I taunted her. It was spur-of-the-moment, and too risky, but IT FELT GOOD. As soon as the taunt animation ended and the camera swung back around, she was maybe only two body lengths away in full dash towards me (I half-expected this, so I had my finger on the 'B' button. I pressed 'B' on reaction and made an example of him vis-a-vis 9-iron. After that, he made it his mission to chase me for the rest of the match and if he ever strayed from his patch to kill some of our bots, I'd fire a warning shot to remind him of his new mission. His K started to drop as a result, freeing up much of the arena for my teammates. I'm not a great sniper by any stretch of the imagination, but even I know that the benefits of taunting cannot be ignored.

Good post. I will just say this:

Kill an enemy pro = save at least 3 bots.

The first part of the game is to escort bots. Kill pros only helps. I wouldn't, however, prioritize it over killing bots or turrets (especially). That flak grenade devourers turret investments to the point that they will be defending with lazerblazors.

Aye I play very similarly to this as a tank. If I see someone far away I don't usually bother Railgunning them (unless they're stood still). I rush into the enemy spawn, blind the enemy rocket turret with the Product Grenade, finish it with the Jetgun, then use my Charge to get out of there before I drop. While Tank might not have the best mobility, he has more than enough health to take down a Rocket Turret (or w/e) while easily sponging a Lazer Turret for a few seconds. As well as this, keeping my Jetgun out means that anybody trying to get close gets burnt to pieces.

Once I get a few upgrades going it's as easy as rushing a lane and taking down that moneyball with all the juice you earn taking down turrets / bots etc.

Ya I play a similar way to this as a Tank as well.

Assassin's shuriken grapple is the most humiliating thing you can do to a pro. You could have killed them but instead you mounted them and slapped them on the head. People will chase you for ages after this.

Making a pro think you're trying to grapple them will have them jumping around shooting air for quite some time. If you do it to a gunner or sniper, that will take a lot of firepower out of the opponents. The trick is to vanish and make yourself effective elsewhere while enemy pros chase your ghost.