Improving overall skill - Methods?
Warforce17
Join Date: 2013-09-12 Member: 188154Members
Join Date: 2013-09-12 Member: 188154Members
Hello Ns2 community,
I have been playing the game for around 1000 hours now and have reached a point were I find it hard to improve. Since I still encounter a lot of better players which I have a hard time against, I am looking for ways to improve my overall skill as alien as well as marine. I have watched all "It´s Super Effective" Videos as well as the videos on the steam hub but still have problems with:
* Keeping the speed in combat as a skulk when playing aliens [ I love the lifeform
]
* wall jump (to a certain extent I am hiting the walls)
* overall aim especially when trying to hit lerks, fades // Jumping marines
What do you recommend me to do to improve in these areas besides playing more? Is the combat mod a good way to improve the aiming?
Greetings,
Warforce17
I have been playing the game for around 1000 hours now and have reached a point were I find it hard to improve. Since I still encounter a lot of better players which I have a hard time against, I am looking for ways to improve my overall skill as alien as well as marine. I have watched all "It´s Super Effective" Videos as well as the videos on the steam hub but still have problems with:
* Keeping the speed in combat as a skulk when playing aliens [ I love the lifeform
]* wall jump (to a certain extent I am hiting the walls)
* overall aim especially when trying to hit lerks, fades // Jumping marines
What do you recommend me to do to improve in these areas besides playing more? Is the combat mod a good way to improve the aiming?
Greetings,
Warforce17
Comments
Best way to practise futher is to find yourself a team to train different situation in special.
Try out different servers a couple of hours. Find one where people play that have about the same level as you or are little better.
Play, have fun and the skill comes for free.
(I mean you got 1k hour in already)
The best possible advice I can give you is this: pub servers give you bad habits. Playing with and against bad players does nothing at all to help. Play against the best people you can find. 6v6 games are imo the single best way to improve your skill but be patient with yourself and don't expect too much too soon!
NS2 Reddit pugs.
If you are EU:
ENSL.org Pugs
Have fun
Wall of text incoming:
1a) This is a very good question and it depends on your playstyle during certain situations. In the room you've engaged marines in, make a mental note of the surrounding geometry. You could engage with a "glancing bite" by aiming your wall jump past a marine and flicking your mouse slightly to bite him. This keeps most of your speed instead of running straight at him and stopping in your tracks. I believe the recent hitbox changes have made this easier to do. Marines that are aware of you and good at juking can make you miss even if you're going at high speeds, but you could just wall jump past him if you miss your first bite.
If you decide to do a glancing bite (not to be confused with actual glancing bites of previous builds), you could use the surrounding geometry to wall jump and gain your previous speed back. At this point, you could make a wide arc and keep wall jumping in order to gain some speed and bite the rine again. This can be impossible to do while keeping high speeds depending on the layout of your surroundings. You also give the marine more time to shoot you. It's usually better to just keep it simple, biting the rine repeatedly after you've successfully closed the distance.
2) Wall jumping is pretty straightforward. As soon as you start holding W to move, press jump near a wall and press jump again in order to jump off of said wall. This results in a small speed boost, which disappears quickly if you stay on the ground afterwards without jumping. Your speed will disappear much slower if you just keep spamming jump after a wall jump.
Just one wall jump won't gain you much speed, however. You need 3 wall jumps in order to reach a decent speed. So it will look like this: Hold W > Jump near wall > Jump off wall > Jump off ground > Wall jump > Ground jump > Wall jump. Voila, you've reached good speeds. Remember to hold W during all of this.
What to do when you inevitably make a turn? Along with holding W, you now have to hold A or D (left or right) depending on the direction of turn. If you need to turn left, hold W + A. Right? W + D.
What to do when you need to turn and you can't reach a wall? Just spam ground jumps in order to keep your speed from dropping sharply. During ground jumps, hold W + the direction you need to turn, else you lose speed as well. You don't even need to actually turn while holding W + A or D. This is an important habit to get into regardless of whether you're turning since this mechanic applies to fades as well.
3) There's not much you can do besides playing against lerks and fades repeatedly. You should also play lerk/fade often in order to learn their habits and how they move. If you play with a high sensitivity (perhaps as a habit or for controlling melee aliens easier), I recommend that you gradually lower your sensitivity, especially for marines. Professional FPS players generally play with a low to medium sensitivity and it applies to NS2 as well. You'll need to get a large mouse pad and a mouse capable of at least 500 Hz polling rate. I assume you've done your research concerning mouse settings already.
Why lower sensitivity? A high sensitivity makes it easier to do 180s and to track at close ranges, but it's tough using your wrist for both broad sweeps and precise adjustments. With a lower sensitivity, you'd use your entire arm for large motions and fine adjustments using your wrist and fingers. It might take getting used to, but I highly recommend it. Both tracking and flicking will benefit from this.
As for jumping marines, they can be tough to track if they're strafing at point-blank range or if they manage to jump over you while crouching. This can be alleviated by setting your FOV slider fairly high. Otherwise, you'll need to just practice tracking repeatedly. You can practice in pre-game before both teams have a comm - just bite a marine annoyingly and he should eventually start trying to juke you.
Since you have so many hours, some (most) of it will be inapplicable to you, as this video is geared mainly towards 100% new players. But I do include some aiming techniques that might be able to help your Marine play (you can find them in the video description if you want to skip the rest of the stuff).
It's been a very long time since I've made anything, but since I've finally finished grad school and have some free time, I do plan on doing an Alien + Commander video much in the same vein as this Marine one.
Cheers!
Regards,
Scatter
map.awareness is power. I assume you have the command map open for 75 percent of the time you're playing.
The best things you can do is improve your computer to a point where you get a great framerate and play against good players in pugs. ISE is great for learning important tactical things
The action is non-stop, and it has alot of y-axis maps(maps with different heights), and that helps with your up and down aim - for dem pesky Lerks especially.
Edit: Dunno why the link is bugged.
Have to agree fully with this. It's hard to get better than Quake for helping to improve your aim. The three main weapons are perfect for practicing the three different kinds of aiming. Use the LG to practice tracking and the rail to practice twitch shots. The rocket launcher is perfect for projectile aim but that isn't really a skill that is needed much in NS2.
@System-related-questions
My framerate is constant over 60 fps and never had issues in this area. [Settings on medium]
@Gathers
I will try to join more gathers but most of them never seem to get started. [For whatever reason]
As a marine when you walk into a room you want to engage aliens that would leave them the most exposed and have them travel the largest distance to reach you. You don't want to fight against walls/tight corners because that is more to the aliens advantage.
As an alien you rarely ever want to engage head on, it's always about flanking and trying to reach them before they can see you, use cover, sound and teamwork with other aliens to distract players so you can close in from another direction.
This is as laymans terms I will get.
"So, like, you 1-shot this lerk, then 2-shot this fade. Just make sure you don't miss while you jetpack around them while they're blinking. Also, you should aim to shoot at least 3 skulks with 1 mag, reloading is a waste of time."
Yes, me too.
At 1000 hours, I wouldn't worry too much about technique and mechanical skill. Unless you've missed something crucial, which I find unlikely with that playtime, these are things that will improve gradually and systematically by simply playing, and they improve faster if you're playing against more challenging opponents. And to be honest, NS2 isn't exactly the pinnacle of skill-based techniques.
Perhaps the largest difference between a 1000-hour pubber and a 1000-hour premium division player is how they choose their engagements, i.e. positioning as a marine and engaging as an alien. This can only be learned the hard way: playing in competitive matches. Trying to learn positioning and engaging in pubs is only going to get you into bad habits, because at 1000 hours you're likely to win engagements you shouldn't have even thought about against more experienced players.
Another important difference between pub and comp is the aspect of map awareness. You should be able to know or at least make an educated guess as to where the entire enemy team is; good marines should know if a skulk has slipped through to bite extractors even if none are flashing yet, and good aliens should know when there's a risk of a phase gate going up on the opposite side of the map even if nobody's scouting it at the moment. You also need to understand how to exploit this information as quickly as possible, for example, attacking harvesters that you know the aliens aren't defending at that moment or harassing a phase gate you know the marines won't get to in time. These are things that are almost impossible to learn in pubs, especially large servers, since there are usually too many enemy players to keep track of, and most people play extremely erratically. For instance, you might think that harassing a certain extractor is a piece of cake because marines never defend it in time, or that harassing the buildings in the marine main base is useless because there is always someone spawning or just generally standing around defending, but these things might be exactly the opposite when you're playing against a team that uses every asset they have as effectively as possible.
In short, start playing competitively, be it in pugs or gathers, mercing for an established team or forming one of your own.
I have FPVODs of my scrims / matches
Check my thread here
http://ausns2.org/showthread.php?786-mf-FPVOD-of-scrims-matches-thread
Thats sounds like solid life advise
There's a lot that goes into monitor/mousepad/mouse/framerate performance/monitors
You'd be surprised how much of a difference those things can actually make