Being Invisible or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the DR
There’s a lot to hate about the Dead Ringer.
It’s widely accepted that most people stopped reliably falling for disguises when looking straight at a player about five days after Team Fortress 2 left closed beta. The disguise isn’t useless, for sure- it keeps sentries from killing you, out of the corner of your eye, if you see the enemy colour you’ll spin around and if you see a friendly you won’t, and in the middle of battle you won’t spy check much. But it’s not as powerful a tool as it used to be, even as it’s tweaked to be more and more believable.
Because of this, a lot of spies use invisibility as their only tool to get behind the enemy and sneak up to their target. If you’re that kind of spy, you’ll probably have dismissed the Dead Ringer right away. Not only can you not uncloak near your target without an ear splitting racket giving you away, but you can’t cloak at will and if you’re even a single percent under full cloak, you can’t cloak at all. With either other watch, uncloaking is still annoyingly loud, but it can be drowned out to some extent by the sounds of battle. And with those watches, even a silver of cloak is enough to make you invisible for at least a moment.
However, the main problem I’ve always had with the Dead Ringer is that it’s so buggy it makes the backstab look accurate.
It often seems to have a delay between when it pops open and when it’s actually going to activate. It will extinguish flames, but Jarate stays on you. You can refill from dispensers, but no shimmer and damage reduction stop after 6.5 seconds. If someone activates your Dead Ringer, it counts as killing you while invisible and gives out false achievements. Ragdoll physics snap in half when the DR is involved. And last but not least, it hands out false dominations and revenges. Dominating a DR spy? Well if you activate his DR, it might just say you got revenge on him. One kill away from a domination on a player and they activate your DR? Well now they’re apparently dominating you, and they just earned Ghastly Gibus Grab. And this is leaving aside the problem of lag causing you to be killed after your Dead Ringer has come up because their bullets are compensated and your watch is not.
But obviously I like the Dead Ringer, or I wouldn’t have made a cheap Dr. Strangelove reference in the title. So what’s so good about it that I can get over all those problems? Two things.
The first thing is that the Dead Ringer allows you to play as aggressively as you want. With the invisibility watch, once you stab someone mid-battle you’re most likely dead. The glut of other enemies hanging around will make it hard to escape even if you do cloak up, because splash or stray bullets will reveal you and tear you to bits. With the Cloak and Dagger, playing aggressively is basically the devil, since it’ll take you an age and a half to get over to enemy lines again, and with the normal watch you likely won’t manage to stay invisible long enough to lose the heat even if you do escape the scene (which you probably won’t.)
However, if you’re using the Dead Ringer, you can stab whenever you feel like it. Sniper with Soldiers hanging around? Big deal. Stab the Sniper and make your escape. Heavy tearing up your team, but with an attentive Medic ready to milk you for an uber? No uber for him, you’ll be gone after one hit. The Dead Ringer is untouchable when it comes to escapes. While some of the enemies will suspect you’re faking it, a lot of them are going to fall for the fake death. Fire is extinguished when it activates, damage is toned down so stray bullets are unlikely to kill you, and most importantly, being damaged won’t cause any flicker effect.
And with that point we come to the second thing, and the reason for the first part of the title. The Dead Ringer gives you FULL invisibility. There’s no “translucent outline” like when you try to sneak around with no cloak using the Cloak and Dagger, no team-coloured shadow like when a wild minigun bullet clips you with normal watches, and short of fire and jarate, nothing in the world is going to show anyone where you are outside of them walking straight into you- and as far the game tells them, you’re dead and gone. And even if you are aflame and being chased by an angry Pyro, the damage resistance means you’ve got a very good chance of surviving until your cloak runs out, giving you six and a half seconds to get back to your team, which last time I checked was about 6.45 seconds more than the normal watch will buy you if you’re on fire.
So yes, you might be a little less in control of your invisibility with the Dead Ringer, and you might be tied to metal more, but to me, that’s a fair price to pay to completely disappear when I hit right click.
SirMax on December 23rd 2009 in game classes, spy, tactics, team fortress 2
Stumble it!
Corodan responded on 23 Dec 2009 at 6:47 am #
Awesome.
I need to start showing more love for this thing. It’s just old habits to use the normal Cloak.
Paper Shadow responded on 23 Dec 2009 at 6:54 am #
“that’s a fair price to pay to completely disappear when I hit right click.”
“It often seems to have a delay between when it pops open and when it’s actually going to activate.”
What do you do when you hit right click and the delay causes you to die?
Anony1200 responded on 23 Dec 2009 at 6:57 am #
…But again,the DR is kind of loosing it’s ability to fool you.You can usually easily tell when a spy is bluffing,and at that point you can just spray at the nearest cover entrance and then a Spy falls out of nowhere.
Jackal responded on 23 Dec 2009 at 6:58 am #
Max…you know that the damage reduction only last 6 seconds regardless of if you are still cloaked right?
BertieB responded on 23 Dec 2009 at 7:02 am #
A very good defence of the DR. It was kinda serendipitous this came up in my RSS reader actually, as not an hour a two ago I watched the Dead Ringer guide (Youtube) after seeing the ever-awesome EvilDaedalus put it to good use in one of his excellent videos. His channel is worth having a look at if people haven’t seen it already.
A nice post in all. I do enjoy the format of the posts here, the images help the flow rather nicely and are on occasion hilarious. Moar GMod poses!
SirMax responded on 23 Dec 2009 at 7:06 am #
@Jackal: I did not.
Coming Second responded on 23 Dec 2009 at 7:08 am #
Few things:
1. Killing a Spy using the DR will only get you a “fake” achievement. That disappears for the player responsible as soon as you decloak. Playing through the Demo/Soldier update, I’ve watched the same Soldier get “War Crime Spybunal” multiple times off me. Which is very amusing. You WILL still get a Gibus I believe if you manage that specific achievement off a DR, but really why do you care? Let him have his daft hat that everyone else has, it’ll feel bitter upon his head when you come back and backstab his arse.
2. The point about the DR isn’t that you’re fooling anyone. On decent servers, you really aren’t; there are so many ways of telling whether or not you got a Spy or just his doppelganger. The real point is that a) you survived, b) you have that incredible 6 1/2 seconds of REAL INVISIBILITY, and c) as long as you can find a metal source you can do it again almost immediately. On some maps like Badwater it’s almost impossible to kill a DR Spy if he knows what he’s doing.
3. Don’t ever use the DR if you’re trying to take down Engies. For that the normal Invisibility Watch is absolutely essential. In my opinion the IW is massively underrated and in contrast the C&D is massively overrated.
Tyke responded on 23 Dec 2009 at 7:15 am #
Nice article, I’ve printed it out.
Davie responded on 23 Dec 2009 at 7:28 am #
This may have just convinced me. I’m the patient sort of spy and am usually fine with the C&D, and I like the ability to hide in one place. But I think it’s timer to give the other watch a try for a while.
RJ-Pilot responded on 23 Dec 2009 at 7:48 am #
Yanno, I don’t think i’ve ever even tried the DR yet. :/
Zorgulon responded on 23 Dec 2009 at 7:55 am #
I, for one, welcome these non-tutorial posts, but I can’t help but feel you could’ve left it a little longer.
Tsk, you’ll get people expecting regular updates.
FlyingHat responded on 23 Dec 2009 at 8:03 am #
The usage of the Dead Ringer, along with numerous ammo respawns, allows you to become the biggest asshole thorn prick douche distraction to the other team.
Ronnoc responded on 23 Dec 2009 at 8:32 am #
Just started using the DR a couple of weeks ago. It’s nice to get more than one backstab out of a life.
SirMax responded on 23 Dec 2009 at 9:51 am #
@Coming second: I find the DR quite good against BUSY Engies. Terrible against Engies who are mostly un-assaulted, but if the Engie’s under some pressure, backstab and immediately put up the DR. If the sentry’s turned away far enough and you’re quick enough, you can survive the hit and disguise and sap, and the timing is easier than stab ‘n sap due to the lack of weapon switching- or get behind cover, undisguise, DR up, walk out, Engie murdered by his own gun. As for the first point, I didn’t actually know that, interesting to find out, and the second point I’d say that sometimes it works out enough that it’s hard to tell. Most of the time it’s obvious, sure, but you’ll fool some of the people some of the time and that’s more than you can get with the normal watch. Even if you don’t fool the people who killed you, people watching the killbars to see when the spies are dead might be fooled if you activate it a couple times pretty close together.
Jeremy responded on 23 Dec 2009 at 10:00 am #
I just recently started using the DR as if two weeks ago, and man do I feels stupid for neglecting it. Its not good for EVERY map, but I did just get 52 points in one round on CP_Well, a map where its not silly for you to be running around the map disguised as a enemy. I’m dying a whole lot less too, and pyros are 90% less annoying now.
RJ responded on 23 Dec 2009 at 11:30 am #
I enjoy the fact that you guys are having a new article pretty much every day
Keep it up guys!
ericthered responded on 23 Dec 2009 at 11:40 am #
The dead ringer seems to be exploted on some maps like goldrush where there is ammo boxes everywhere. Other than that its a fun weapon
ericthered responded on 23 Dec 2009 at 11:40 am #
The dead ringer seems to be exploted on some maps like goldrush where there is ammo boxes everywhere. Other than that its a fun weapon
Bobby responded on 23 Dec 2009 at 12:16 pm #
I always use the Dead Ringer, and whenever I switch to Spy I’m usually the top player of my team =D
tribestone responded on 23 Dec 2009 at 12:37 pm #
Yeah, I am a huge fan of the DR. No other cloak can save you from a lucky shot. We need more Dr. (X)love or: How I learned to stop worriying and just love the (contreversal unlock) articles. Strike the iron while it’s hot! I still need to get totally sick of them yet!
Axe Murderer responded on 23 Dec 2009 at 6:00 pm #
DR is a really nice weapon for a server running 30+ players because of all the crap thats going on. sound unnoticed, cant go over and pull out fillings (too much crap going on [rocket spam])… its a great weapon. unfortunately, I play on servers that are like 10-24 players, so its useless. everyone has the time to spy check, and they will. I really hate the damage reduction, though, because a pyro will do basically nothing to a spy as the spy runs away. cheap.
Ezion responded on 23 Dec 2009 at 8:14 pm #
The DR is great on maps where you can make nice trails in between the ammo boxes (one of the sections of Pipeline comes to mind.)
I think the damage reduction is obscene though- a rough estimate that I’ve gathered from chasing spies down as a pyro is that it can absorb somewhere in the realm of 700-1000 damage. Generally you have to roast a spy for at least 4 seconds to kill him, even though you’ve already called his bluff.
Monchberter responded on 23 Dec 2009 at 10:38 pm #
As a rather dedicated Pyro, if you get the drop on a DR Spy, i’ve found that chasing and following the sizzling sound is pretty much the best way to defeat them. Takes perseverance, but the can’t fight back and if you can tail them for the time it takes to remove the cloak, you can get the kill.
SirMax responded on 24 Dec 2009 at 12:51 am #
@Monchberter: Airblast them and Axtinguish. As long as they’re aflame, the axtinguisher will be doing 19-20 damage a hit even with the damage reduction.
orange!Gamer responded on 24 Dec 2009 at 2:19 am #
I gave the DR a chance during the war, since the splash damage kept giving away my position with the Good Old IW, and I gotta say, I’m overly satisfied with the DR, it’s simply a “perfect” trick, even if the enemy hear you, you just gotta act natural during spy check, and try to avoid pyros. I’m changing my Sudden Death Watch from de C&D (Damn n00b spy clock, I hate you) to the trustful DR
Jammers responded on 25 Dec 2009 at 8:43 am #
I’ve been using the dead ringer lately, and I think that my 20 kill streak (17 of those backstabs) speaks for itself.
Here are my protips for spies looking to use the dead ringer -
Basic cloakless infiltrate: Disguise as enemy spy,
then run backwards towards your enemies, calling for medic and jumping.
Ignore enemy spycheck bullets unless you KNOW they’re chasing you.
If you kill somebody around a corner that nobody else can see, DISGUISE AS THAT CLASS. STEAL THEIR IDENTITY. RUN BACKWARDS OUT OF THAT AREA.
Nobody checks the kill logs, and the amount of time a medic has rounded a corner to find me standing on top of the corpse of the person i’m disguised as and obliviously overhealed me is too hilarious to count.
When spotted by a pyro ,wait until the pyro is out of fire-setting range, then drop your body.
Basic spy disguise tips such as never disguise as pyro and know your ammo placements still apply.
Finally, cloak and dagger sucks balls.
Jammers responded on 25 Dec 2009 at 8:44 am #
Oh and also, if you have to decloak in an enemy base with the dead ringer, disguise as enemy spy.
People will go ‘WTF DEAD RINGER oh its one of ours no worries.’
aznblur responded on 28 Dec 2009 at 10:34 pm #
hud_combattext 1 is DR spy’s worst enemy.
Nik responded on 14 Jan 2010 at 12:34 am #
what does it do?
(I’m too lazy)
discrider responded on 05 Feb 2010 at 11:05 am #
The DR doesn’t give out -perfect- cloak.
Be aware that bullets will still cause your body to trail blood splatter effects, so a spun-up Heavy who is at close range and triggered your DR can track you by the bleeding air, and still do significant damage.