Captain "myles" Fapping
Professor Enigma
ESEA 1-,15
10 October 2016

A Nerd Essay About Mashing Your Keyboard

I posted this on /r/truetf2 and got a really good response so I thought I may as well post it here too. There are plenty of threads and guides out there that will give you the typical advice about staying on the ground in scout 1v1s and abusing props and airstrafing when you're fighting soldiers. Those pieces of advice are great for new players, but they don't do much for the majority of people playing at an open level or above. The purpose of this guide was to share what I believe makes some scouts so much harder to hit than others even though it doesn't look like they're doing anything all that different. I know I'm not a 15 year old straight to invite TF2 prodigy who b4nny will eventually micro to first place, but I think I'm experienced enough to share some of my thoughts that may help you improve your game. I apologize in advance for the pseudo-intellectual bullshit contained in this nerd essay.

If you're looking to not get pooped on by other scouts the following should help you out quite a bit. Besides randomly changing the lengths of your strafes, the best way to make yourself harder to track is to constantly switch distances and your angle of movement relative to your opppnent. When you're moving parallel to their field of view, you appear to be moving faster than when you're moving at a diagonal. The closer you are to them, the faster you move from one side of the screen to the other. Obviously, you're still moving at the same speed in terms of the game, but from the perspective of someone trying to aim at a point on a 2d plane, you're constantly changing speed, which makes you more difficult to track.

One of the most important aspects to improving your scout vs soldier DM is understanding how to move in a way that puts the difference in reload/fire rate between you and your enemy in your favor. For example, if he shoots a rocket at you, you're going to know much longer its going to be until he can fire the next one. By putting yourself in the air as soon as he's ready to fire his next shot, you're forcing him make a decision between going for a risky direct and waiting for you to land for an easier shot. This is really useful when he's at low health and you know that if you jump you can kill him before you land. Someone on /rltruetf2 made a thread about countering scouts as a soldier, so here's what I wrote to him so you can get the other perspective.
[Quote]
A lot of soldier vs scout comes down to knowing what sort of shots to go for based on how long it'll take him to kill you and how much ammo you have in your clip. For example, If you're at low health and you have a full HP scout on your ass smashing their space bar, your best best might be to take a risk and try to get damage out as quickly as possible even if it means going for an airshot. If you have high HP then you can afford to wait for the scout to land for an easier shot because it'll take more time for him to kill you.[/quote]

From what I've noticed, soldiers tend to misplace the distance of their rockets more often than aiming too far to the left or right so constantly changing your distance from soldiers is really important. It also messes with their sense of your speed just like it does when you're fighting a scout. When a soldier is trying to aim at a spot on the ground, the further away the spot is the smaller it is on his screen. This effect is amplified the lower he is from the spot, and the opposite happens when he's above it. From the soldier's point of view, they ideally want to fire a rocket when you're close to them because its easier to aim at ground that's close and there's less rocket travel time to account for. You can take advantage of this tendency by moving forward right before he's able to fire another rocket and moving backwards right as he should be ready to fire it. If you do this correctly, He'll either aim too close to himself, miss, and potentially take self-damage, or he'll have to spend more time aiming his shot at a point that is more difficult for him to hit.

Thx for reading