Basic techniques

As you might have noticed, I’ve moved this blog to mw2tactics.net. I hope to see you there!

Here I give you some basic and slightly advanced tips and tricks. When you’re 100% comfortable with the basic controls, it’s time to expand. Here we go.

Strafing
Well, in my post aimed at the absolute beginners I mentioned it already. I’ll briefly repeat it, since this is such an important part of the online multiplayer. Strafing = moving sideways, keeping your reticule on one target. You can’t practice this enough.

Dropshotting
Dropshotting is the fine art of going prone whilst shooting, making yourself a smaller target and slightly improving your aim. For this, it’s recommended you change your control layout to ‘Tactical’. If you’re on a PC, just use use the CTRL key.

Autoaim
On consoles, there is a noticeable autoaim to ensure fun online gaming without the need for a mouse. When you’re aware of how the autoaim works, you can use this to your advantage. When you move your reticule sideways and you pass an enemy, you feel it kind of pulling towards the enemy. This comes in handy when you strafe, since the reticule will help you aim at the enemy.

Flanking
In teambased modes, flanking plays a big part. First of all, you’ve got to know where your team is. Then you need to determine, using that information and perhaps UAV, where the enemies are. Try to find a quiet route to the back of the enemy territory. Than you carefully pick them off, one at a time. Stealth-classes work well for this (silencer and Cold-Blooded, maybe also Ninja). Knowing the maps is extremely important for this to work, so go ahead, look at overhead maps and look at map guides (see the category ‘Maps’ on this blog).

Controlling a part of the map
This is a really effective strategy to achieve high killstreaks. Basically you take over one or two rooms, or a building, or a confined space somewhere, and ensure that nobody gets you there. The part of the map that you’re controlling needs to have some bottlenecks, preferably just two small paths that lead to your spot, while still offering a nice overview where you can make some kills. Yes, they will know that you are there. That’s why you’ve brought claymores (use Scavenger, so you can use 2 at a time and replace them when they kill). The biggest danger you will have to face is the use of grenade launchers and other explosives. So it’s better to control a slightly bigger part of the map than for instance one bunker on Afghan. Contrary to popular belief, this is not camping. Camping is sitting in a corner aimed at the door, waiting for someone to pass by. This is just defensive play.

Strengths and weaknesses
It may appear to be kind of obvious, but this is a major overlooked aspect of MW2 online: knowing what your strengths and weaknesses are. Let me give you an example that might be familiar to you: do you have  a class with an assault rifle as a primary and for instance a machine pistol, handgun or launcher as secondary? You’ve likely been killed by guys using sprint-classing (Marathon and Lightweight perks) and knifes / shotguns. Or at least shotguns. That’s because (I’m talking non-hardcore here) the shotguns are basically a one-shot kill on short range, where you will need at least one burst with an assault rifle to kill. The spread is also much greater, making aiming less important (or: quicker!). Here’s the thing: you’ve got to avoid situations where you’re vulnerable to short-range weapons like shotguns when you’re using an assault rifle. From a distance, you can kill them easily. But at short range, they have a big advantage. So when there’s a lot of guys using shotguns, you might want to keep your distance and avoid confined spaces.

If the enemy team is using snipers on the other hand, you might want to get nice and cosy close to those guys! Close range with a sniper is not easy, so with an assault rifle you will have an advantage. They might pull out a secondary, but on the long range you certainly cannot win from them.

Avoiding deaths
To do well in this game in almost every gamemode, including objective based gamemodes, you have to keep your deaths low. On Team Deathmatch or Free-For-All it is immediately clear, but also on modes like Domination it matters. When you get killed too much, you lose control over the situation and give the enemy team an advantage to take over the flags. It’s important to focus on keeping the amount of deaths as low as possible. This will benefit your k/d-ratio but also ensures that you’re on top of the situation in the game and ultimately help your team win. So be careful with your lives, try to make the most of every life, so that if you get killed, you know you were of benefit for the team and can than resume your job.

Go for the objective!
There are lots of players that play Domination like it is Team Deathmatch. That’s a shame, because ultimately it’s about winning the game and I’ve encountered lots of games where the winning team all had negative kill/death-ratio’s for that match. So focussing on kills doesn’t ensure victory. But tactically killing does work. If you defend the chokepoints to your flags and kill everyone that passes, you are working towards the objective. But simply running around and going for the kills does not work. You might get some kills, but you’ll end up losing the match. And even if kills do matter, my highest killstreaks were almost always when I was defending a flag on Domination or HeadQuarters.

2010

02/05

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General tactics

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