- Spawn Waves and Pushing
So you may have noticed next to the game time, a secondary timer. This is your spawn wave timer, this tells you when the next spawn wave will be, as well as when the enemy’s is as well as it is typically offset by 10-5 seconds. So if it’s 10 seconds before your next wave, typically that means the enemy wave has just spawned, so expect to be outnumbered.
The best way to approach pushing is to time it so when you go out, you force the enemy to wait a full 20 seconds before spawning, allowing you plenty of time to kill the rest of the team, then plant the bomb.
This does require a lot of coordination but in my exprience on pubs, here’s the best way to utilize the spawn timer.
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Skyhammer Airstrikes, time it so that the enemy team just walks right into a full blown wipe, giving your team the territory to control.
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Multi Kills with Fragger Nades, big one, especially if you get a Sparks, Aura, Sawbonez, or Phoenix, a full wipe is pretty much guaranteed as there will be nobody to revive them.
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Planting a bomb only when the enemy has a full spawn timer, this puts a lot pressure on the enemy team as if they are without an Engineer it will be damn near impossible to defuse the bomb.
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Killing yourself to respawn with a different merc instantly, or respawn with full ammo and health. Your streaks don’t mean anything.
It’s also important to understand what the higher priority targets are, when the bomb is not planted, kill and gib Medics first, when it is, kill and gib engineers. When it’s an EV map, kill their Support mercs so you can push the EV without a hassle.
- Changing your sensitivity
One of the biggest things that’s helped me is lowering my sensitivity, the reason why is simple. With a high sensitivity, you are mostly using your wrist, compared to a low sensitivity where you use your whole arm, your wrist is for micro corrections to your aim while your arm is used for swipes. This gives you a wider range of control and precision, as it’s more difficult to make slight adjustments to your aim or do consistent movements when you are using just your wrist and finger tips to move the mouse. For some games this works well, like an RTS or Moba, but for FPS a lower sens generally means more consistency.
So, how do you do this? Well, first off all you need to know that lowering your sens is like adding weights to a workout, it’ll require more effort overtime the lower you go, but once you do a higher sens or lighter weight, will feel like nothing, you’ll overcompensate and adjust and it just won’t feel right. My best advice is to figure out where you are now, by going to MouseSensitvity.com, and putting in all the information, your dpi, current sens, etc, and pay attention to the measurement per 360 number. You want that number higher, higher cm per 360 = a lower sensitivity, because you have to move your mouse more, whereas a higher sens means you move your mouse less.
The best way to get used to lower sens is to gradually lower it by 2 cm, lower it by 2, play with it for a few days till it feels too fast, you’ll know when it does, it’ll feel like you’re overcompensating your shots by a lot. Just keep going till it feels like you’re nailing every shot without fail.
Another good method I’ve found, is to get a large or medium sized mouse pad, like a Pure Trak Talent, a Artisan Hien SOFT L, or Steel Series QCK Large, then take the width of your mouse in mm, and subtract it from the width of your mouse pad. In my case, my Mionix Naos is about 85 mm wide, and my Pure Trak Talent is 483 wide, that gives me 398 mm, or 39.8 cm. Then, measure the width of your hand, your hand should be flat palm on the desk with no space between your fingers, just bring it as close together as possible. Then measure that with some measuring tape, mine was about 10 cm long, aka 100 mm. Then subtract that from the length of your mouse pad, I got 383, so my range for my sensitivity is 38.3-39.8 cm, and I got to basically fiddle around with that range till it’s perfect.
The reason this works is because the sensor is in the middle of the mouse, you don’t want the exact width of your mouse pad for your sens cause you literally have to have the sensor at the very edge of your mouse pad to do a 360, that’s not going to happen in practice. You generally are going to do a swipe to the left or right for a quick 180, then pick up the mouse and set it down in the center of the pad, you’ll do smaller swipes for quick 90 degree turns. The goal here is your are trying to get consistency, this is complete control of your sense of touch. You should feel the edge of your mouse pad, the amount of force you need to get it there, and it should all be one constant repetition of movements. Over time you WILL notice a difference in your aim, and you will get a higher K:D ratio assuming you do the other things I mentioned.
Now also keep in mind none of this guarantees success, you always face better enemies, so you need in turn to challenge yourself to keep improving. Constantly try to push your limits to their maximum to improve, that’s the only way you get better at anything. With that, I wish you luck.
