Competitive TF2, Part Nine: Tips and Tricks from the Pros
Well, himmelstoss and I noticed a series of comments which asked what made us qualified to write about competitive TF2. Well, we play it, and we know the theories and strategies behind competitive games (which is what this guide is all about, anyway). Neither of us claim to be professionals, and there are certainly better players than us. But apparently we just weren’t good enough for some of you people. So, we went around and got advice from other competitive TF2 players – players who are certainly far better than you naysayers.
Soldier Tips from Jaeger
Jaeger, a mighty good soldier who played for the professional team Pandemic, and who now plays for Loaded, gave some great tips via the comments section of the Soldier article:
When doing these “long jumps” it is important to control your height so as not to take fall damage. This is a common mistake I see inexperienced competitive soldiers making.
There is also another jump which I suppose you might call a short jump. These are fast, low 27 damage rocket dashes. These are useful for catching up with your team, blocking capture points, denying health packs to enemies, accessing health packs which require a rocket jump when low on life, and chasing down a fleeing opponent.
In competition a soldier is often limited by his ability to kill before having to reload. Almost invariably you will kill someone and be rushed by an enemy scout while you’re weapons are empty. It is thus important to not overkill an enemy.
Make it a habit to use one rocket and one shotgun to kill unbuffed light classes and two rockets and a shotgun to kill unbuffed soldiers. After getting the kill with your shotgun switch back to your rocket launcher without reloading the shotgun until there is a lull in the action. A common mistake I see is for soldiers to only switch to their shotgun in desperate situations when they are caught without any rockets loaded. When switching from rocket launcher to shotgun make sure you press your key to switch to shotgun immediately after you fire your rocket, otherwise it will take too long to be able to shoot your shotgun and you might die or miss and easy kill shot while the enemy is recovering from the rocket hit.
Prefiring/spamming rockets at choke points or long range opponents is a common practice for soldiers and a good one. When doing this make sure to keep at least one rocket loaded to defend against unseen threats like scouts or spies.
Direct rockets do substantially more damage than splash rockets. When aiming at an enemy try to aim for the ground about a foot behind them. This will let you hit them directly and pop them up if you predict their movement correctly and if you miss slightly still give you good splash damage. A common mistake I see is people shooting rockets directly at the feet and allowing a mostly well-aimed rocket to fall just short of the enemy letting them get away with only splash damage taken instead of direct damage.
In general I try to fire one rocket and reload it before firing again if I’m shooting at targets that I’m not likely to immediately kill such as far away targets. You should note that a rocket finishes reloading before the animation of the reloading completes. Practice consistently firing one rocket as fast as possible after reloading it so you always have at least 3 ready for more immediate threats and opportunities.
Medic Tips from Sigma
Sigma played medic for the competitive TF2 team Overthrow, and is currently a backup for Reverse Harem; in addition, he hosts the competitive TF2 podcast Friendly Fire.
When talking about healing order, it might be helpful to note that you should change your priorities based on the map and position. Soldiers are lumbering spam-cannons on Badlands mid, and the Scouts/Demo are much more important; however, on Granary, you absolutely need to control the boxes, so getting a Soldier up to ~250 is more important than healing a scout (usually).
To some extent this depends on the style of team, but those examples are pretty important in my opinion. Having Sollies in the red and overhealed Scouts is great on Badlands, but you want the opposite on Granary.
With regards to calls, it’d be good to explicitly say where you are when you’re alone, and in general, you should say what you’re going to do/where you’re going (at least when alone. If you’re not leading the team, I suppose you’re just following the Solly making the calls once you group up. I prefer to have the medic make all push calls, but that’s again a style choice).
It’s important to realize that your uber doesn’t increase the damage people do (obviously), so instead of just ubering whoever is dishing out the damage (Soldier/Demo), flick your uber to whoever is going to take damage next.
Popping earlier is not a problem at all if you took less damage before you popped and you end on the high ground. Notably Well’s mid — a lot of people just drop their uber, but popping just so you can hold the point is completely fine. They have to waste their entire charge just getting past the door spam/up the ramp if they try to pull back then uber into you.
You die in 1 shot from 100-110 hp, so you should pop then because it’s always better to pop at >100 hp and block a rocket than let it hit you and still have <100 after it wears off.
Credit to French Toast for the picture.
You can hold mouse2 (or whatever your +attack2) is before you get uber, and you’ll pop as soon as you have it.
The healing rate speeds up after 10 seconds without taking damage. You should always abuse this fact when you know someone escaped from an engagement a while ago and is coming back for health (usually scouts), or just watch for when you’re healing someone fast and take them to 150% then rather than spreading heals.
Whew! Thanks for the contributions, Jaeger and Sigma!
So that wraps up the competitive TF2 guide. It was a blast writing for you guys over the last nine articles – thanks for being great readers! From clubtheseals, himmelstoss, French Toast, and our guest authors – Jaeger, Sigma, and The Black Watch – we thank ye kindly. Signing off.
Stumble it!
Heretic responded on 12 Sep 2009 at 11:23 am #
lol, naysayers get ownt!
Again, great job on this whole thing. I absolutely loved reading it; I’m sure it’ll send me on my way if I ever want to explore the comp world of TF2.
Paper Shadow responded on 12 Sep 2009 at 11:27 am #
Aaaaaaaaaaaand, we’re finished here. Nine articles about how to play effectively in a competitive environment…
You don’t need me to add to the praise that you already have and will soon get, do you?
Skat responded on 12 Sep 2009 at 12:59 pm #
Now what quality articles can I expect from ubercharged? I loved this nine part series and all the other ubercharged articles just don’t compare in my opinion. :C
Wilhelm Screamer responded on 12 Sep 2009 at 1:09 pm #
Top notch work all around!
XDLMAO responded on 12 Sep 2009 at 1:13 pm #
This article is really good. A lot of things I didn’t know about at all.
It would be cool if you also later interview a pro demoman, and a pro scout.
NotJim responded on 12 Sep 2009 at 2:12 pm #
<3 the pros saying stuff, that is all.
himmelstoss responded on 12 Sep 2009 at 2:53 pm #
@Skat: If you ask nicely…
Corodan responded on 12 Sep 2009 at 5:24 pm #
Oh gosh, yes.
Was hoping for a bit of Scout ideas but, eh. This was great.
General Balls responded on 12 Sep 2009 at 5:44 pm #
It would have been nice to have tips from professionals on all nine classes, but good article in any case.
Skwart responded on 12 Sep 2009 at 6:07 pm #
Nice article
Helped me with the medic a lot.
Thingy Person responded on 12 Sep 2009 at 7:13 pm #
I was hoping for an entry that described all the server-side modifications and league-condoned maps required to set up a proper clan practice or friendly.
n00bie51 responded on 12 Sep 2009 at 9:46 pm #
I dunno, I was hoping for more myself as Thingy Person said. I think it’s a decent ending to the series, though.
However, these tips from Jaeger and Sigma were really good — I approve. It makes sense that you want to maintain a balance of damage output between rockets and the shotgun and use only as much rockets as you need to when engaging the enemy.
gelugon2105 responded on 13 Sep 2009 at 2:49 am #
Yep, all of those Medic tips are very spot-on and very helpful.
wat responded on 13 Sep 2009 at 5:56 am #
seems to me like the last two articles were pretty half assed compared to the first 7…
HelisPoe responded on 13 Sep 2009 at 6:02 am #
I’d like to see tips from pro Scouts and Demomen instead of a bare minimum of Solly and Medic tips.
More please pl0x?
This is not my real name responded on 13 Sep 2009 at 7:11 am #
Yeah, well, IMO there could be MANY more tips, at least for Medics..like healing priorities (he talked only about soldiers and scouts), when and how to use the kritzkrieg, how to watch out for (eventual) spies, and of course how to be a good heavy buddy.
), you just have to ask any experienced TF2 player, like the UC writers…and fuck all those who disagree with this (l know, it sounds Nazi, but still..).
Also, where are all the other classes?I am pretty sure that you can easily find articles written by “pros” on the net…IMO there is no need to ask the best of the best for general tips (they won’t reveal their secrets anyway
Sarda responded on 13 Sep 2009 at 7:22 am #
@wat: originally there were only going to be 7…
Kitalpha responded on 15 Sep 2009 at 3:43 am #
Of course there are a lot more tips I eman it is not the complete “Idiot’s Guide; How to Play a TF2 Medic Like Pro”.
As a team medic I agree with your tips here. It is so important to have certain classes healed on certain maps. One thing I’ll take from this is rather than uber willy nilly when I am forced to I’ll try to uber the guy that is about to die. I have seen meidcs do this before, uber a soldier that is about to die and then u aim for the demo next to him and suddenly he is also ubered.
Yeah, the only wasted uber is the one you died with. People act as if once you have used an uber in what there unskilled brain says was “too early” that you’ll have another one in about a minute or so.
Sandman responded on 15 Sep 2009 at 9:03 am #
I agree with the above, please interview scouts/demomen for some of their best knowledge. Who says a 9 part series can’t have a tenth installment?
Sigma responded on 15 Sep 2009 at 10:13 am #
Take those medic tips as a supplement to the medic article. If you couldn’t tell from the sketchy grammar, I was messaging clubs with these after reading it. If you want a more complete source, eventually there will be an episode of Friendly Fire that covers all of this stuff. However, that isn’t going to be exhaustive either; it’s much easier for everyone involved to teach or learn med through selected examples. While I’m sure I could talk point-by-point for every competitive map, nobody will listen to 5 hours of, “Okay, you’re attacking 4th point of freight from the top right. Your demoman and scouts went in left, but you didn’t get a chance to buff them. You see top right is stickied. Uber in the door if you already have a few picks on them, otherwise switch to heal the flank and delay the push. If you still have your kritz from mid here…”
There’s one thing I neglected to mention in here regarding ubers. Of course, the main goal of an uber is to prevent as much damage to your team as you can while making it last as long as possible. Hence, you want to stick to one target as much as you can, though you must also flash people so they can pass stickies, jump to an advantageous position, etc. However, if there is a ton of spam going down or you lose track of exactly what is going on, don’t be afraid to keep 3-4 people invuln for the full duration of your charge. While ubering 2 targets increases the charge drain from 10%/s to 20%/s, ubering 3 or more people is still a 20%/s drain (it would be more concise to say 1 person = 10%/s, 2 or more = 20%/s).
Finally, I am not a pro medic. Despite any claims my ego might let me make, my experience and movement is not of the same caliber as the top medics. I may have some useful knowledge about the game, but I’m a mid-high or high player at best.
himmelstoss responded on 15 Sep 2009 at 5:47 pm #
@Sigma: Overthrow was a good team, and you ARE pretty good (I have pugged a few times with you). Sad that Overthrow went down. :/
cpy responded on 15 Sep 2009 at 9:59 pm #
overthrow was awesome. pMb forever <3
robot makes music responded on 17 Sep 2009 at 1:12 pm #
pro demo tip: spam
wand responded on 19 Sep 2009 at 10:24 am #
dear article author:
you said that jaeg played for pandemic and now plays for loaded. this is not true. he still plays for pandemic.
because pandemic is the same team as loaded — they just renamed themselves.
Grimm responded on 24 Sep 2009 at 2:16 pm #
Pandemic and Team Loaded are completely different teams except for the players. It was more than just a rename.
Jon responded on 29 Sep 2009 at 12:08 pm #
I say we need more contribution from Sigma. :3!
CT responded on 06 Oct 2009 at 5:29 am #
@Skat: If you ask nicely…