how to survivve in ET (the beginners guide)

Subject: how to survivve in ET (the beginners guide) Sat Jun 11, 2011 8:02 pm

1: Improve your movement
When you're in a firefight, you're both moving and shooting. If you only focus on improving your shooting, that will only help you get that far. Improve your speed on the battlefield and learn to use your movements to your advantages in a firefight. Being flexible and unhindered (e.g. you don't bump into the doorstyles when you enter a room) in your movements gives you a great advantage.

2: Watch your surroundings
Every firefight is different. Sometimes there will be medpacks on the floor, sometimes you will be able to fall back into the direction of a teammate. Keep your eyes peeled for anything you can use to your advantage. If there are medpacks on the ground, be sure you're the one to pick them up during the fight, boosting your health greatly (1 gibbed medic = 4 medpacks = 80 hp = more than half a health bar!).

3: Tame your mouse movements
Don't do too crazy mouse movements, this will greatly increase the spread of your bullets (and make it so that even if you put your cursor on the opponent's head, bullets will miss). Crouching briefly is a good way to stabilize your aim. Put \cg_crosshairpulse to 1 to see the spread symbolised by your crosshair becoming larger. Play around with this and see what you can do to improve your spread.
Also, when your opponent is strafing left-right like crazy, it's much better to move too little with your mose than move too much. When he's strafing, he'll make two 'invisible walls', the points where he starts strafing in the other direction. Make sure your mouse stays in between these two 'walls', you'll have a much better spread and you will get much more hits. Especially sprinted strafing will tempt you to go crazy with your mouse, instead keep your cool and keep your mouse movements limited.

4: Don't listen to Limp Bizkit. Don't jump around.
Do NOT jump while in a firefight. 9 out of 10 times this will go bad simply because when you jump, your 'flight path' is as good as set (you cannot dodge whilst jumping) and good players will certainly punish you for that and possibly even kill you before you land. As an additional reason, jumping fawks up your spread pretty badly (see previous point).

5: Instead of fighting 5v1, do 5x 1v1
Play with your surroundings, play with your opponents. Make your surroundings block all but one opponent, take him out (AND gib) and move to the next one. Make your enemies block each other's shot. Dance around so that the guy you're shooting covers the guys behind him shooting you.
This also means that if you are in a safe spot, overlooking multiple enemies, don't just shoot everyone to do as much damage as possible. Instead, make sure you hit only 1 person and take them out before they know where you are. If you start shooting everyone, they'll know something is up and turn around and shoot you. Combine this with tip n° 7 to be an extra stealthy ninja!

6: Stamina, stamina, stamina
SAVE YOUR STAMINA FOR FIREFIGHTS. Do not just sprint out of spawn and run out of stamina. Stamina is represented by the (initially) green bar in the bottom left corner. Always keep an eye on it, try to make sure it doesn't drop below 70% when travelling the map. Try to find efficient ways to use your stamina and still have some left for when you bump into an opponent. An important note: when this bar is empty, it takes a *LONG* time to refill, but when you never let it drop below 25 - 30%, you'll see that it replenishes much faster. Basically, there's 3 states to the stamina bar:

* The bar is green, it will replenish quickly
* The bar is red (and almost empty), it will replenish slowly until it is in the green zone again.
* The bar is completely empty (= you press shift but you don't run any faster), the bar freezes for about a second and then starts empty in the red zone, slowly working its way up to the faster green zone.

Experiment with the stamina and get a good feel of how much you can sprint before you get into the red zone. The perfect situation would be to never have it in the red zone at all, but that's practically impossible, as most likely a firefight will consume a lot of stamina.
This tip is very important. Very often the outcome of a firefight is heavily influenced by the amount of stamina a player has when beginning. When one player has stamina and the other one hasn't, you'll see that the slow player will almost always die.

7: Pick up enemy weapons
When you're shooting with a Thompson in an Axis camp, chances are some players will notice the sound of a Thompson coming from their rear lines and come hunt for you (if you're playing against me, I will come hunt for you). Don't give away your position if you can help it, use the weapons of the enemy and blend in sound-wise.

8: Be a ninja, pull out your knife
Most people don't realise this, but the knife is one bad-ass weapon. Know how and when to use it.
Don't use it in open areas, keep it for fights in hallways and small areas. If your opponent has nowhere to go, you can block him into a corner and slice him up. If you're being tailed by someone, you're low on hp and stamina and you pass around a corner or you pass a door opening, disappear for a second and then exactly when he catches up to you, catch him off guard with your knife. For example: in ETBeach this is a real life-saver.

9: Learn how to take a bullet
Know what your limits are as to fighting with enemies firing at you. Know when you must back up and heal. This also means that you must know what the limits of others are. You're an invaluable factor in helping your team survive if you can predict by the second when a teammate is going to die. You can have your revive needle out before he falls to the ground (and gets gibbed). Well-timed revives can change the outcome of the battle.

10: Keep your cool
Always keep in the back of your head that this is just a game. It's meant to be fun and if you notice you're not having fun because someone got you raging, take a deep breath, count to 10 and just have fun. Don't take yourself too seriously. You can't expect to play good when you're raging. Shit happens and there will be days when you will get pwned by people you know are cheap naabs. Doesn't matter. Have fun, play covy, play sniper, play rnade, play without sound, play with music on the background.. whatever makes the game fun for you.