Common Tips

Equipment

Wear stereo headphones. You can hear infected coming from farther away than you can see them, and with good headphones, you can also hear what direction they are coming from. Valve put a lot of work into making location sounds accurate in L4D, and the result is that a decent player can play reasonably well against invisible infected. This is especially important for finding special infected, which can spawn almost anywhere and can kill you easily if you don't hear them coming.
Have a microphone. Voice chat is incredibly important for calling for help and pointing out special infected for people who don't follow the first tip. It is also useful for pointing out where weapons are.

Tactics

Stick close together. This is obvious. Move at the speed of your slowest person. This is also obvious, but rarely followed. Many teams leave the last limping team member behind while they dash madly to the safehouse. Help people who are being attacked by special infected, immediately. Hunters do damage incredibly fast, and smokers separate the group. If someone is smokered in the middle of a horde rush, save that person, or he won't survive the massive damage the horde deals. The best way to defend against smokers is to stay close together, so you can melee the tongue before your teammate gets pulled away.
Use the appropriate weapons for the situation. In buildings and areas with short sight-lines, use the shotgun. At medium-long range, use the assault rifle or the uzi. At long range, or in places with tight bottle-necks, use the hunting rifle. Bullets penetrate some solid objects, depending on the object and the gun. Soft objects are zombies and survivors. Hard objects are thin walls and model props. Shotguns have unlimited soft object penetration out to about 10 feet, then they can penetrate one more object and then they damage and stop inside one more object. They can penetrate one hard object at less than about 20 feet, then damage one more object, so you can shoot zombies through walls, but not nearly as effectively as if they were right next to you. The uzi and assault rifle can penetrate two soft object or one hard object, out to about 50 feet. The hunting rifle has unlimited soft object penetration at any distance, and can continue to penetrate soft objects after passing through one wall. These weapon quirks give each weapon specific roles that they excel in.
The shotguns are unstoppable at short range. One shot from either shotgun at melee range does enough damage to kill all infected except the tank. Their excellent short-range penetration lets you kill huge mobs in just one shot. With the auto-shotgun, be sure to not shoot at your maximum rate of fire, because most of your shots will be wasted on corpses. The auto-shotgun is effective for shooting through walls though. Even though it doesn't penetrate after passing through the wall, with so many pellets and a high rate of fire, it is easy to clear a whole room without ever entering it. The uzi is an effective midrange weapon, simply due to the fact that it is better at that range than the other tier one weapon, the pump shotgun. The assault rifle is excellent against special infected, especially tanks, against which it has the highest damage per second, even after accounting for reloading time. It is not effective against infected though, due to its mediocre penetration and its uninterruptable reload. The hunting rifle is difficult to place in a specific role. Its massive damage per shot, plus the scope make it excellent at long range. Its limited ammo makes it ineffective against specials in most situations, but its incredible penetration make it perfect in areas with choke points, since all the infected will group together to get through the narrow opening, where the hunting rifle can kill all of them in one shot. The hunting rifle is probably best used as a support weapon, ignoring the common infected and focussing solely on killing special infected before they can get close to the other survivors.

Campaign

Not much to say here, although on expert, tanks will down you in one shot, witches will kill you entirely in one shot, and common infected do a whopping ten damage per hit. Also, the only health packs you find are between maps, so make them count, and don't get hurt.

Versus

Survivors

Be constantly on the lookout for special infected, as they will be much more skilled as humans than as bots. Reflexes and a mic are crucial. The most important direction to look is up, since your stereo headphones (which you should have; see above) will take care of the other directions, and everyone always looks down anyway.

Infected

The trick to playing infected is knowing all the tricks and quirks of all the different types, and how to take advantage of opportunities created by other infected.
The hunter can jump incredibly far, but jumping a specific distance to land on a survivor can be tricky. One way to make it easier is "airwalking", which is the trick of exploiting the limited mid-air movement control to fine-tune your landing. This is easiest if you let go of the crouch button after jumping, as you will be using your normal speed instead of your crouch speed. Wall jumping is a useful trick for avoiding damage as you pounce and for escaping after a miss. When you get next to a wall mid-pounce, hold crouch and look away from the wall, then do a pounce. Your "field of view" for wall-jumping is about 140 degrees, so you have quite a bit of control over the angle you jump away at. Another trick is "sliding", where you pounce so you land at almost the edge of a platform, then as you land, you slide a bit, then your pounce continues when you reach the edge. This is useful for extending the distance of a pounce for extra bonus damage. Bonus pounce damage is determined only by the distance between the start of the pounce and the victim. It does not depend on momentum when you hit the person, or how far the hunter travelled overall. Therefore, rather than setting up for a pounce directly above the survivors, try and hit them at a diagonal, which will increase your distance, as well as your flight-time, giving you more time to airwalk. The last trick a hunter has is the air-pounce, which involves hitting a survivor either in mid-air or while on a ladder. The survivor takes fall damage well above what a fall of that height would normally deal, plus the pounce doesn't officially end until the player hits the floor, which can result in a longer pounce distance, and most importantly, it moves the survivor, which splits up the survivors and makes them easy to pick off.
The smoker tongue has a range of about 100 feet, and has a "muzzle velocity" of about 50 feet per second and an auto-aim that works up to about 10 degrees away from your crosshair. The end result is that if you time your pull correctly, you can grab survivors around corners, but if you don't time it correctly and the survivors are moving too fast, your tongue will break before it gets to the survivor. The most important thing a smoker can do is set up to pull a survivor as far away from the group as possible. The easiest way to do this is to wait until one survivor is separated from the others, either by line of sight, or preferably by an obstacle like other infected or a wall. The second most important thing a smoker can do is set up in such a way that when the survivor is freed, he can run away to do it again. The easiest way to do this is to use common infected as obstacles. Your tongue moves through common infected unimpeded, but when the survivor is pulled close to them, they will collide and start hitting the survivor, stopping the pull, and netting the smoker lots of assist points, plus ending the drag and starting strangulation, which does twice as much damage. The best pull a smoker can make is at the top of a ledge after the rest of the team has already jumped down. The survivors at the bottom cannot get back up easily, if it is even possible. After the trapped survivor is knocked down, a hunter can swipe at the smoker to "free" the survivor, giving the smoker an opportunity to reposition without waiting an extra minute to deliver another 300 damage. The second best pull a smoker can make is off a ledge. The survivor takes fall damage and is immediately separated from his team in the most effective way possible. In order for the survivors to help, they must also take fall damage or find a longer way down.
The boomer summons mobs of common infected by vomitting on survivors. No matter how many people you barf on, you only spawn about 20 infected, but there are lots of situational modifiers that make the boomer remarkably effective. In areas with lots of common infected, a timely vomit can bring the entire horde down on the survivors, which on its own can be overwhelming. The vomit obscures survivors' vision, which creates an excellent opportunity for other specials to attack. The boomer explodes when killed, covering nearby survivors with vomit, but the explosion only goes to the sides, not up or down, so if someone kills you from below or above, they will not get covered in vomit.
Coordinating your attack is important, as no matter how skilled you are by yourself, against a decent survivor team you will never be able to deal any damage. There are a few different ways to set up an attack, but all of them involve separating the survivors before trying to deal damage. The most common attack has all the special infected alive at the same time, spawned as two hunters, a smoker, and a boomer. Either the smoker or the boomer goes first, then the rest attack at the same time. Each infected should have their own player picked out, so the hunters don't interrupt a good pull or both hit the same person. Prioritize targets so that the survivors are as disorganized as possible. If the boomer goes first, he should try to hit as many people as possible. When the smoker starts pulling, he should try to aim for one that isn't covered in vomit, so that the others don't know where he went. If the survivors try and separate into two groups of two, both hunters should go after the same group and try to pounce both survivors at the same time. If the smoker has someone pulled away from the rest of the group, a good tactic for the boomer is to vomit the victim to protect the smoker. Ideal places to attack from are hills, tops of buildings, tree cover, around corners, in dark areas, and from behind the survivors. The infected should take advantage of all their surroundings and all the quirks of each infected type for maximum effect.

Survival

Survival is simple compared to the other modes. The best way to survive 10 minutes is to pick a good spot. A good spot has only one or two ways in, with more than 270 degrees of "safe area" where no zombies can possibly come from. You should have a way to get out in case you get overrun or need health packs. The health packs, when you need them, should be easily accessable from the spot you choose, and you should have grenades. You should be comfortable with the difference between molotovs and pipe bombs, so you can judge how many of each you will need. Molotovs are ideal for making an entire entrance inaccessable, while pipe bombs are good at clearing out nearby infected or distracting a large approaching mob. Weapon loadout should usually be all shotguns, since all the infected are running towards you, all the time. If you find your chosen spot is vulnerable to special infected, one hunting rifle can be helpful. Two important things to note: smoker death smoke does damage, and tanks can be killed by four full clips of auto-shotgun, so coordinate with your teammates to take down tanks as they come.

Last Updated on Sunday, 20 December 2009 22:31

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