Operative: Video Guide

[system]

[QUOTE=xzen;316326]All classes can remove stickies from team mates.

You’re exaggerating. It takes 10 seconds tops to comms hack and disguise. The comms hack would be incredible if anybody actually paid attention to the radar but as far as I can tell, very few players do.[/quote]

I could be exaggerating. I haven’t timed the process accurately. But 10 seconds is still to long to comm hack, and then steal ident imo. I don’t consider “UAV” a valid reward to sacrifice my vulnerability and time into that process.

I just don’t see why it takes longer to comm hack, compare to the time to steal ident.

If you get a direct hit on an enemy it’ll stick to them and go off shortly. You can also stick it to the ground where it will last for a minute or two and then detonate, unless an enemy runs over it in which case it will stick to them and the shorter fuse will start.

Ah.

I guess i got confused with the spikes on the grenade and i thought you can throw against a wall and it stick to that. Where the main purpose is to have it attached onto a player. I would assume a sticky bomb like in SAving Private Ryan would have made more sense. Not a spiked grenade.

[H3LLS1]

i’m attempting to work OP class now. and i can see the problem is it just doesnt feel like you are directly helping your team. i mean…you can raise some decent havoc behind the scenes…but don’t bring anything to actual battles really.

which, i guess is the point…you shouldn’t be in the middle of the fire fights. i think…in my lowly opinion…that if the command post upgrade allowed for your team to spawn there, your team would be much happier to have you around?

[xdc]

disguising and beaconing groups of enemies does allot of help, but some enemies have combat intuition. if you are a operative and dont have emp nades at level 20 then ur doing something wrong

comms hack does auto-tea bag to enemies, so i guess its worth the long amount of time it takes to get it
same with disguise, but it shouldnt reset meter if you stop disguising like in ETQW

[Mapex]

I’ve played a lot more this weekend and leveled up a bit and I’d like to revise and newly introduce a few things.

1. Outside of knowing where the enemy is and communicating to a well organized team (of which there are few on pub servers), Operatives are lackluster in team support. They are just glorified assassins/spies/agents from the Fortress series of games, minus the invis, one hit capabilities, confusion grenades, and tranquilizer (slowing) darts.

Hack Turret is cool, but turret AI is terrible and HP is low and it undisguises you.

Comm Hack is cool, but it takes a while and it makes you an undisguised sitting duck for way too long.

Homing Beacon is cool, but the lack of crosshair makes it take longer than it should and the obviousness of the ability usage (you are aiming directly at enemies instead of friendlies) make nearby enemies suspicious.

Spy checking is made more obvious with FF on than off (wait, what?) because you don’t get “FF -XP” alerts if you shoot a disguised enemy. With FF off, the only difference is that you see blood spurts/can knockdown a disguised enemy spy but you cannot do the same to teammates. Operatives need to be very careful around enemies because of how easy it is to spycheck, no different than other similar games, but because of the lower damage-to-health ratio in this game compared to others you can get away with more random spychecking here than you can in other games. For instance, if you see a friendly with very low HP on an FF=on server in TFC, you do NOT spycheck them else you risk getting a teamkill. In Brink, you know a knockdown melee attack or a single bullet from a weapon won’t finish them off so you have no qualms about hitting them before healing them.

2. Comm Hack isn’t worth it unless you are surrounded by teammates, and even then it is suspect. I reiterate that you are competing with both enemy medics AND friendlies to get to a downed enemy before he gets revived or melee’d. If you are alone and kill an enemy, the Comm Hack + disguise combo can allow enough time for the enemy to catch up to you and kill you on many maps, especially given how close to the enemy’s spawn relative to your teammates you will Operate - after all, you can’t cause chaos and confusion and assassinate enemies behind friendly lines. This ability really should be automatic upon disguise or be a throwable item.

3. Caltrops do enough damage but their spread pattern is highly variable. Depending on the physics you may get a nice even layer of Caltrops or you may have all of them situated on a small portion of a walkway, allowing an enemy to easily sidestep them. This is why they felt weak to me initially. When Caltrops spread well they work as intended, but when they do not they feel like a wasted cooldown. Unfortunately how they spread is completely out of your control since the caltrop grenade likes to bounce a bit.

4. You do NOT trip land mines when disguised. Very cool - this is something most other games completely overlook. I am not positive if the same is true for enemy sticky bombs seeing as they are more grenades than they are deployables.

5. Operatives seem to do best as light body type. Yes, they are in the thick of danger all the time (separated from their team, easily found out and slaughtered since there are only 8 enemies you can disguise as and one of them with inevitably see their name and kill that target, etc). But even if you are medium you won’t take much more damage - as light you can at least run circles around opponents and knife them to death, get away from heavies with miniguns much more easily after being undisguised,

6. This one sucks - if you are disguised as an enemy who then DCs, you lose your disguise. This is NOT fun to deal with especially when you are mere seconds away from dropping a hack turret + sticky bomb + caltrop combo behind an enemy squadron. All that setup (the stars have to align to gain these opportunities) for zero gain.

7. More maps need Operative hackable secondary access routes. It gives the class more purpose in a team but also provides a means to get around and come up to enemies from behind that many if not all maps lack.

[xzen]

Comms Hack is really good if everybody on your team actually looks at the radar, however due to the way Combat Intuition works it can be a burden on the team. Combat Intuition only triggers if the enemy looking at you is not on the radar, so it’s effectively disabled while the Comms Hack is up.

[Mapex]

Comms Hack is really good if everybody on your team actually looks at the radar, however due to the way Combat Intuition works it can be a burden on the team. Combat Intuition only triggers if the enemy looking at you is not on the radar, so it’s effectively disabled while the Comms Hack is up.

That and the radar tends to clutter. The dead enemies on your radar (I think only operatives see them) are represented with significantly larger blips than live enemies. Last I checked, live enemies are more dangerous - I can hold off on knowing what enemies I can disguise as after first killing the alive ones. Etc.

[SkAface]

Comms Hack is really good if everybody on your team actually looks at the radar, however due to the way Combat Intuition works it can be a burden on the team. Combat Intuition only triggers if the enemy looking at you is not on the radar, so it’s effectively disabled while the Comms Hack is up.

one more reason to not rely on combat intuition and to ignore that ability:stroggbanana:

last night i learned a new very annoying way to play observative,

1.grab caltrops gren
2.run into a bunch of enemys
3.die and drop the caltrops
4.detonate cortex bomb
5.
6.profit

the people on my team didn’t understand that AT ALL, they died from that observative for two or three full maps, even tho i told them to gib that obs asap several times.