Had one of these over on reddit.com/r/dirtybomb and it was fairly successful, figured it can’t hurt to get it over on the official forums for those who don’t frequent over there. I’ve put all the best tips from the thread here in the OP, feel free to add your own (or argue away with these tips if that’s what floats your boat).
Veterans, post tips for new players. New players, don’t be afraid to ask questions.
PixelTwitch’s movement guide is a great start to get a hang of the wall-jumping and long-jumping systems in Dirty Bomb.
LCTR’s Beginner Guide also has a ton of great info.
There’s plenty of other excellent videos to learn from, and if you want to see how the best of the best play dirty I strongly suggest you check out some of the DirtyCup VODs
If you have questions about the loadout card system, this page does a terrific job of explaining it.
General tips:
- You run ~20% faster with your knife out. Pull it out when you spawn to get to the objective faster. Pull it out when you need to sprint across a street from one point of cover to another. Running behind people and slashing them over and over works well, especially if you’re a light class (like Proxy or Aura).
- Headshots. Always. You do double damage with headshots. You can win fights after get the first hit on you if you headshot them and evade. You can win fights against tankier characters with more ammo if you headshot them. Headshots beat people with fancy loadout cards. Headshots hard counter nearly everything in the game. It’s the most important skill you can have. If you’re losing fights, it’s probably because your enemy got more headshots in than you.
- Play the objective. This is not a TDM game. You are more helpful as a medic constantly reviving people and then dying than as a sniper getting one kill every three minutes. You’ll rank up faster, spend more time in the action, and you won’t piss your teammates off for being dead weight.
- Kill downed enemies whenever possible. It takes a lot of bullets to kill a downed enemy, but if you’re able to move freely then you definitely should be walking up and meleeing that body so it can’t be revived by a medic. When you’re fighting an entire team, sometimes you’re better off just to try and focus down the medics first and finish the bodies when you get the chance.
- Pay close attention to the wave timer in the top left of your HUD. Both teams spawn simultaneously (at least in Stopwatch they do), and you can use this to anticipate the enemy’s movements (You’ll see Fraggers camping corners and pitching nades around them right as you spawn because they’re watching the wave timer) as well as coordinate yolo strats of your own and run in to try and kill as many as possible with an imminent respawn around the corner.
- Long jump into cover. (A long jump is when you press crouch + jump while sprinting - note you’ll decelerate hard when you hit the ground but you leap very far very quickly) It covers distance way faster than sprinting, and I see many players get easily taken out by being too predictable. If you’re trying to cross a street and getting lit up, long up into cover and you just might save yourself (or long jump at downed teammates to revive them). If you accidentally trip a Proxy mine, immediately try to long jump. If you react quick enough, you just might save yourself.
- Play AGGRESSIVE. The objective of the game is to push forward and on to win the game. Anything you can do to push the enemy team back out of a building, into their spawn, away from the objective is good. Sitting in the back of the map sniping or camping a corner is not necessarily the best play when all of the action is nowhere near you.
- If you see a group of people on a heal station, back up and try to kill the station safely before you engage the players. They’ll body you with the regen.
- Learn the roles each character has. Check the scoreboard to see how your team’s composition looks. No engineers? Switch to Proxy/Bushwhacker/Fletcher. Team keeps getting wiped because there’s no medics? Switch to Sawbones or Aura and revive some people. If you’re at the bottom of the scoreboard, one of the best thing you can do is support your team.
- You have two walljumps. Indoors, if you hit a ceiling you’ll plummet to the ground, allowing you to jump again. In fights, jump, wall jump into the ceiling and land again to make yourself harder to headshot.
- All of the maps have shortcuts if you learn the movement. Long jumping and wall jumping is key.
- Never, ever stop moving adada. Moving doesn’t affect recoil like it does in Counterstrike. If you stop moving, your head is getting forcibly removed. (This means sitting on mounted MGs for long periods of time is a huge liability - get on them, get a kill or two and then get off).
- You don’t need to ADS (aim down sight) to be accurate like in Call of Duty. Aiming down sights tightens up your FOV (zooms you in), which is only handy for long-range shots. If they’re close, put your crosshair on their head and keep it there. ADS does shrink your cone of fire a little bit, but it’s not a huge difference (and it comes at the cost of increased recoil) and you should still only need to hip fire most of the time. I see many new players running around like it’s Call of Duty aiming down sights and standing still. This will get you killed.
- Your melee attacks have a long startup time (they do not do damage until you are well into the attack animation). This means you have to swing earlier than you might expect. Start the melee attack and move into range. Melee attacks in Dirty Bomb remind me a lot of Chivalry: Medieval Warfare in that they have a long startup time and then stay active for quite awhile, and in that they benefit from “dragging” which is where you swing the mouse around while the melee attack is active to effectively stretch the hitbox.
- Play with as wide of a FOV as you can be accurate with. The more you can see, the more aware you are.
- Enable hit beeps in the options. You NEED to hear the headshot ding.
- Loadout cards are important, but they honestly don’t make a huge difference. You aren’t losing fights because someone has a better card/gun than you. I promise.
- Shit talk the hell out of the enemy team with V-7. Every character has their own custom taunts, and some of them are hilarious. Arty has one that says “ehhh go fuck yourself” for example.
- Communicate with your team. If you need ammo, press V-2-2. If you need health, press V-2-1 (these will blip you on the minimap to your team as well). Tell your team to get on the objective with V-3-4. If someone hits a sick shot on you, press V-5-6. The in-game voice system isn’t as advanced as Smite or Tribes, but it gets the job done in the event you don’t have a mic/don’t feel like using it.
- Use a low sensitivity. Tracking is king in this game. Mouse acceleration is the enemy (unless you’ve programmed it yourself and are well-aware of the thresholds. Windows stock mouse acceleration is not good). It takes me 40cm to do a 360 degree turn, for example. If you’re playing higher than 20cm/360, you’re probably going to struggle a little bit (imo).
- You have added HUD options in-game by pressing escape > options > game. You can change the color, use a dot, etc. These options are (for some reason) not available in the game menu/server browser.