Arty is a great marksman, and his Arty Salvos are one of the most versatile abilities in the game.
120 health and a set of powerful weapons that are very effective in mid to long range (Dreiss) and close to mid (Stark and BR) and reward high accuracy. I’d recommend trying out the min FOV and lowering your sensitivity for Arty, being able to land headshots at longer ranges than your enemies is crucial with his weapons.
I use his salvos for three main purposes
1. Killing enemies:
I’m listing this first, but it’s the least common and often least effective use of Artillery. Generally speaking, if you can drop a salvo at someone you can also probably shoot them, and if you can shoot an enemy, you should do that instead. When it does work out it feels great, but generally speaking this plan comes second to…
2. Moving enemies/Area denial:
When you drop Artillery at someone’s feet, if they don’t move they’ll die. So, they will usually move. This can be used bring enemies into the open (where you can shoot them), or just to move them away from objectives like C4.
For example, you come across an enemy Vaseline who’s giving your team a hard time sniping from behind some crates. Because your Dreiss is accurate and damaging enough at that range you manage to hit him a couple of times and he crouches back behind his crates to think.
At this point you will probably lose if you continue to fight him if he’s any good, he just needs one good shot to finish you while you probably need several good shots, so you need to push the fight back into your favor.
You aim at the ground to the side of the crate and drop a salvo. He’ll probably hear or see it coming so it probably won’t turn into a kill, but he does have to move, so when he panics and runs out to escape the salvo, you ping his head a couple times with your rifle while he’s too disoriented to fight back effectively.
3. Destroying Objectives:
This one is often the most important, Arty is the king and lord of Chapel, you decide when the enemy EV is allowed to move or condemned to stay, and the long open spaces mean you have the upper hand in most firefights. On EV maps it is your job to keep the enemy EV at a standstill, and even to prevent repairs by dropping salvos behind the EV when you’ve got extras.
But don’t forget you can also destroy secondary objectives with enough damage. On Dome it only takes two salvos to destroy the door generators at the first objective, allowing you to rush the left courtyard well before the enemy is prepared to defend the area.
You can also destroy Ramps with enough artillery strikes (though to be fair I can’t think of any ramp that needs to be repaired for you to jump up it).
As far as aiming the Designator, if there’s a wall that serves your purpose that’s usually most useful, you can target areas while still in cover, and catch enemies off guard. Sometimes there are no walls to aim off of though, so you’ll have to use the ground. The ground is very unreliable if you have to move while aiming, and if you’re aiming at the ground you’re probably not behind cover so it can be dangerous (remember, always shoot an enemy if you can instead of dropping artillery to get them). As you play him more you’ll start to learn useful artillery spots
I might add stuff later if I think of it. tl;dr Arty is a mid range marksman who benefits from fighting on uneven terms, engage outside of the enemy’s comfort zone and use salvos to keep them distracted and moving while you pick them off. Also the stuff Badmin said, direct hitting ammo packs is forgotten about all too often.
This is a real Signature.
