neoviper

In the aftermath of the meet the scout video, I figure it's a good time to share my knowledge on the class.

Starting off with the basics, scout is the fastest class, so should be spending his time going after whatever objectives there are to go after. secondary to that, is killing enemy medics and snipers, as they have a rather hard time dealing with him. All classes have the same weakness to him though, if your teammates are already engaged with them. in this manner, you help both yourself and your team, they take the enemies firepower off of you, and you get in behind them and do as much damage as possible. in some ways, the scout is like a less independent spy, trying to get behind the enemy without attracting their attention. Making up for his dependence on teammates for dealing with dug in defenders, he is very powerful one on one, in particular against the support classes, demomen, and to a lesser extent soldiers.

Avoid direct confrontation as much as possible, if the other team knows you are there, attempt to either pistol them from range, or shotgun from mid range, reserve the point blank shots for when they dont see you. As was stated earlier, the scout is most effective when he has teammates to occupy the enemies attention. like the spy, try to take the less direct route to the enemy base, and then loop around to where most of the fighting is going on. this puts you in perfect position to attack their medics, either making them run away, or try to fight back at you, in either situation they aren't healing their team. once you've dealth with them, decide what one of the remaining enemy classes left is the most threatening to your team, and pump shotgun blasts right into their back. again, much like the spy, this is much easier to do if your target is at the back of their group. At some point during all of this, they will notice you behind them, and try to kill you. this is when you back up, and double jump like a mad man, making them waste their shots on misses, while your team takes over for doing most of the damage. if they dont attempt to stop you, continue killing them until either they do, or they are all dead. This will not always play out like this, there may be sentry guns, snipers trying to kill you, heavies that turn around in the middle of it, or any other number of things that may go wrong. I cant really give any hard and fast answers as to what to do when these things happen, but the most common solution is to retreat. cant really go wrong with that one.

Any time you see an engineer absent of his sentry gun, try to kill him, because that leaves his sentry extremely vulnerable, even to you. even if he is sitting right next to his sentry gun, sometimes you can get a shot on him with your pistol without the sentry seeing you. I'm sure all of you know about this, but after he is dead, you can shoot around a corner at one of the legs, or the edge of the barrels, without it shooting back at you. Quite obviously, don't try this when the engineer is repairing it, you will go through all of your ammo before it dies.

When trying to capture a control point, do not try to face off against any opponents that try to stop you, run away, come back from another angle, and try to kill them before they know whats happening. often times, once they are dead, you can finish capturing the point uneventfully. Be especially careful of pyros, if they set you on fire, you are basically dead. either he kills you, or you run away to find health to keep from dying. in both scenarios, the point remains uncaptured.

In a situation where direct confrontation is inevitable, try to keep at a distance as much as possible, the further you are, the less damage you take. also, the less threatening you seem. the pistol does surprisingly well if you have a steady hand, and if not, still does respectable damage. Always keep an eye out for them getting overly focused on your teammates, at the point, you can run in, staying off to the side of the fighting, and get at their side. this is almost as good a situation as getting behind them without them noticing. This is most noticeable on cp_well, all of the fighting is happening at that middle point, and there is no way to get around it unless they completely neglect one of the entraces. What you do is run about near the point, shooting pistol at any available targets, and when the time feels right, go down the bottom, run up the side ramp, and take out any targets of opportunity you can get to safely. never sacrifice yourself to kill an enemy though, its better to damage someone and come back to kill them later, than to finish them off, but die to his teammates. exceptions are charged medics, and demomen or heavies that are holding off your team from a choke point. if you get a chance at these guys, go for it. at the least, you keep them from their position for long enough for your team to get through unscathed.



I think I'm gonna stop there, although there is probably more I could go on with. I've started to get into too many specific circumstances though, this should be enough to guide you as to what to do with scout if you haven't played him much.
As always, I would love to hear what other scouts have to say about all of this, and what your main strategies are.

Fish #641

The only thing I really can say about the scout class is that it's really skill-oriented. Neoviper does a good job of giving strategy, but if you can't aim at moving targets while double jumping, then practicing that will help you more than anything else. I believe Magna told me the rule on batting people that don't see you (like a sniper) is to hit twice and then switch to scattergun because they can't actually recognize that they're being hit until then.

C.V. Soul

The time I've seen the most effect with scouts is the stereotypical "scout rush" on maps like Warpath, or most anything with a miniscule setup time. One scout by himself will hardly ever do any good, except for a poorly guarded final point on maps like Badlands or Granary. I'm no expert, but in my experience the most important time to have scouts and their double capture speed is on the Warpath-structure maps where the second point begins uncaptured.
Also the final point only caps in 2 seconds as Scout, it takes 4 with anyone else.

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Sir-Nerd

I use a scout as a decoy usually. Whenever you have the occasional stupid heavy, i charge in as scout and have him shoot me while my soldier buddys hit him with real damage.

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MagnaCentipede

I can't speak for that point specifically, but there's a formula to it; it's not simply a multiplier. For example, Dustbowl Act I Point A is six seconds for a single man, four seconds for a scout. I'm assuming it's like, 6, 4, 3, 2½, 2¼... for each added cap-credit, though I haven't done any testing because that would be a pain in the butt. It's clearly not a linear gain, however.

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C.V. Soul

I'm fairly certain it's at least mostly linear; You'll notice that when you stand alone on the point w/ a scout, the icon on the bottom has the little man x2 icon.
Also, although this may not be completely reliable proof, the loading screen TIP: says "As a Scout, you capture control points twice as fast as other classes." I'm pretty sure he just counts for double.

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Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day.
Give a fish a man, and he'll eat for weeks!

MagnaCentipede

Having seen eleven capture credits on Gravel Pit A and not seeing the point instacap, I'm choosing to disagree.

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C.V. Soul

Upon further review I concede that you're almost certainly right, although Gravel Pit is the exception to many rules. If you watch one lone player trying to cap Gravel Pit at all, and noting that although 11 won't instacap it still goes pretty quick, one could argue that it is somehow, someway linear although obviously not exponential as I may have accidentally implied.

However, I'm still going to argue that my previous statement was wrong and that I misunderstood the question.

Back onto the topic of Scout strategy, I've noticed that if a scout runs out to a wide open space, rookie Snipers will often try to shoot them. They might hit, but since it takes a full charge to kill a medic'd heavy, there's still a good chance to stop at least part of their defense.
Also on the point of distractions, if multiple scouts run into a sentried room at once it can still go over well because the sentry will only take one target at once; If it keeps shooting until the Scout is martyred, a demo can easily have a few stickys on its base.

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Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day.
Give a fish a man, and he'll eat for weeks!