[STRATEGY] Battlefield Bad Company 2 Sniper tips

My favorite class, there's a lot to learn before you can become a great sniper.

First of all, if you're the type of sniper who sits there for a minute in a well concealed location and fires a shot once a minute, you're not helping your team. Snipers in Battlefield are not, and probably never will be, "true snipers." What they really are is "fire support marksmen". They aren't spec ops snipers who spend five days army crawling to their target to assassinate a tyrant, then sneak away. They're deliverers of lethal, long range, anti-personnel firepower who have the unique luxury of being able to pick their targets and to disengage at will.

Ok, well how should I play a sniper then?

• Fire often and efficiently. That doesn't mean that you should pump some bullets into a poor rock if you have no targets. It means you should shift position to be able to see more enemies if your area of fire is clear. Your team needs you to cover them. Don't let them down.
• Prioritize. Chances are your team can kill the guy right in front of them that they know about. They can't kill the sniper a mile away hiding behind a bush on top of a mountain, because they don't have a sniper scope to know he's even there. Kill enemy snipers. Kill stationary gun users. Your tanks and teammates will thank you when they no longer need to advance through a hail of AT rockets and mounted machine gun fire.
• Don't focus on kills.

Hit anybody who you can see. If they get behind cover, don't just "camp" your sight on them and wait for them to come out. Find somebody else and hit them. Your team can finish them off and you'll get the assist, or at the very least you've taken out of the battle for 10+ seconds as they heal. That being said, you'll get a surprising amount of body shot kills on guys who are already injured.
[/list]

Ok, how the hell do I aim this bloody gun?
I'll cover the M24, which is the sniper rifle most of you will be using.

The M24 is...

• Really accurate. There's very little horizontal shifting in the bullet's path, and it even stays pretty steady while moving. They sway isn't a problem at all but really long ranges.
• Bolt-action. It's not even semi-automatic. That means you'll have about 1.5 seconds before you can fire again. As nunya pointed out in the other thread, you can hold the fire button to stay scoped after firing, but I prefer unscoping to improve my awareness.
• High damage. Upper body shots do about 80%. At close range you can whip out a pistol to finish the job. At longer ranges you often get kills when they're even slightly injured. Headshots are instant kill of course. Headshots through OBJECTS are also instant kills. More on that later.
• Limited on ammo. You have 5 rounds chambered and 20 rounds stored. If you average 5 shots per kill (which includes misses and hits but not kills) that's only 5 kills. You'll need to grab ammo if you survive for more than a minute and a half (which you should).

Aiming mechanics

• There is bullet flight time. It's trivial for most people, but for you it really matters. You'll need to lead targets by a bit depending on distance. More on that in later in "ranging".
• There is bullet drop due to gravity. Again, trivial for most combatants, BIG deal for you. See "ranging".
• There is movement sway. You are inaccurate while moving. Don't bother firing when moving. In sniper duels, move until you're ready to fire, then stop for a split second to fire and then move again.
• There is scope swaying as well. It's not a huge deal usually but it will rob you of some headshots. If you're aiming at a stationary target, you can wait till the sway brings your scope to the exact spot you want the bullet to go, then fire.

Ranging

• When you're firing from a new position and distance that you haven't before, try "ranging". Fire a single bullet into a horizontal face like a building wall. It's important that it's actually horizontal- slanted surfaces will mess you up. Leave your scope on after firing and don't move it. You'll see the bullet fly through the air and strike a location below your crosshair. The amount of time until you see the bullet land will be flight time. The vertical distance that it dropped will be the bullet drop. Apply those adjustments to all shots you make to targets in that area.
• If you don't have time to range, fire at the top of their head. If the bullet drop is insignificant, you still get a headshot. If it's significant, the drop will still probably put the bullet into their jaw and get a headshot for you.

Cover

• Your instinct is to probably get to the highest possible point and to fire from there. This is usually a bad idea. The enemy expects this, and if you can see everything, everything can see YOU. Regular small arms fire can kill you in these types of positions, to say nothing of explosives from grenades, mortar strikes or vehicles.
• Pick locations that conceal your profile. Trees, bushes, fences all help to disguise you. Standing against the sky (on top of a hill or the pipes) makes you super obvious to anyone looking in your direction.
• Until you're really good, pick locations with limited fields of view. It's less likely they can shoot back at you, and you'll probably have your hands full with what's in your vision already without moving.

Equipment

• Switch to the mortar ASAP. The c4 is nice, but it's so situational that it's nearly useless for a long distance sniper. Mortar fire is ALWAYS useful and you're practically guaranteed to use it at least twice before you die.
• Your pistol is vital. The M1911 is the best pistol by far and will finish off injured enemies and kill undisciplined shooters who sneak up on you.

What are cool things I can do as a sniper?

• Shoot mounted gunners, either in a vehicle or a stationary emplacement. Most of them have an exposed head. You can shoot through the glass on that anti-personnel machine gun metal shield too.
• Kill helicopter pilots. I'm serious. I did it twice today already. If the chopper is stationary, it's an easy shot. If they're moving it's much harder, but they usually only move in one dimension (straight forward, or horizontally) so just lead appropriately. Bullet drop will almost definitely be a factor so keep that in mind. You really need to go for a headshot too since they're unlikely to be injured and will probably flee if they take as sniper bullet in the chest. Also, remember that the pilot is in the front seat.
• Shoot people through walls. Spot them, watch them run behind cover, shoot and kill. Same for enemies your team have spotted. An enemy gets lit up, they hide behind a concrete wall, BAM. Dead.

[STRATEGY] Battlefield Bad Company 2 General Tips

General noob tips:
-By default, pressing "F" will throw a frag grenade. Every kit (class) has one and only one. If you run across an ammo pack you can get that grenade back. Grenades are fairly lethal (they can kill if they are close enough) so don't be afraid to chuck them over obstacles and into buildings.

-The middle mouse button (by default) will do a melee knife swing. That attack is insta kill. Considering that weapons do low damage and have high recoil, in building fights your best bet is often a knife kill.
-SLOWWWWW your game down. The battlefield is composed of:

Your safe zone -> Your fighting area -> No man's land (NML) -> their fighting area -> their safe zone

You want to spend your time in either fighting area. If you're going across NML, do it FAST. Don't linger in the big open areas like snow plains or roads. My biggest mistake was either sticking aroudn in the NML too long, or charging across it every time I spawned and spam dying.

-Recoil is hardcore in this game. Bursts are always better than holding down the trigger. Anything short of point blank should be controlled fire. Your individual bullets are pretty accurate. I've had success doing long range sniping by firing individual bullets really quickly (semi-auto mode). Medium range is usually 3-4 round bursts.

-Health kits and ammo kits dropped will heal or resupply anyone near them. They have a short "startup" time after being dropped before they start resupplying. You don't need to click or run over them for it to work. Ammo kits will reload all your ammo, not just your equipped weapon.

-Reloading is counterstrike style (like shotgun rounds), not realistic. For example, if I have a 30 rounds loaded and 90 in storage, if I fire 15 bullets and reload I will have 30 rounds loaded and 75 stored. This is different than BF2 where you tossed clips (or recycled them to the end) whenever you reloaded.

-In your spawn screen, you can click on any living squad member (they appear as green icons) and you can spawn on them. THIS IS HUGE. It will save you tons of walk time and encourage teamwork. This also means if you're deep behind enemy lines you should try to stay alive to get squadmates to spawn on you.

Vehicle tips:

Vehicles are huge. There are six types of vehicles:

T-90 main battle tank (offense)
This is the primary weapon of the offense. There is only one tank on the field and the offense has it. The pilot only has access to the main gun, but a secondary gunner has control of the anti infantry machine gun on the top.

This thing is supreme on the field. There is no individual vehicle or unit on land (I'll cover the chopper later) that can take it out one on one. It has very tough frontal armor (it takes like 6 infantry launched AT to kill it), decent side armor and shitty rear armor. It's usually used as an artillery platform, providing long range fire support to force defenders away from good positions and to tear down buildings. It can also be rolled up to take out vechiles.

Attacker infantry APC (offense)
I can't remember the name off hand, but this guy can fire four high speed, contact grenades before reloading. It's useful for flushing infantry out of cover or buildings. It's immune to small arms but ~3 infantry rockets will kill it.

Bradley fighting vehicle (defense):
The defense gets this vehicle after the third? base. It has a high caliber anti infantry machine gun available to the pilot.

Vodnik (offense)
Players of BF2 will remember this. It's a lightly armor van with an anti infantry top mounted gun. Mostly used for transportation.

Quad bike (offense)
Very fast two seater all terrain vehicles. Used to flank the enemy. Has very little health and provides no driver cover.

Anti aircraft vehicle (offense)
This shows up after the chopper is available to the defense. Haven't used it yet.

Apache attack helicopter(defense)
Only available at the last two bases, this has an anti-tank rocket barrage and an anti-infantry high caliber machine gun. The glass is NOT bullet proof (you can kill the pilot with small arms) and the chopper in general takes damage from small arms fire and can be brought down with just infantry.

eneral tips

-Spam "Q" (socialize button by default) to spot enemies. This is practically map hacking. I do this at any target that I don't think I'll be able to kill within a couple seconds and vehicles. Why?

Why? Not only does it show your teammates where they are, but it tells you their exact position for the next four seconds or so. Case in point:

See enemy at long range next to cover. Spot them using Q. Start shooting at them. They back off and hide behind cover. Keep shooting at them through the wall. Voila, maphacking kill. I get so many kills this way, especially with high powered weapons like sniper rifles or vehicle mounted guns.

-On that note, you can shoot through just about everything. It does reduced damage but usually when you're doing that they're already low. Wood, concrete, fences, go nuts. Vehicles block fire and I think the thick metal pipes do as well, but the vast majority of objects do not.

-Swap kits on the battlefield if it makes sense. Your medic buddy go down? Swap to his kit (aim at his stuff and press "E") then revive him.

-Stay away from vehicles in general unless you're in them or repairing them. They attract fire like no one's business.

-Cover is crucial. Spotting somebody can help negate it when you're shooting at them, but that half second before you realize there's an enemy in those bushes usually means you're dead.


How do I win the game?
There are five? (I think) bases that the offense must destroy. Each base has 2 M-COM points with big bombs ready to be armed. The offense takes the base when it either arms and destroys the location with the explosive, or blows up the containing structure (this isn't always possible). After a base is taken, the map extends and everyone's spawn gets moved to reflect the new battleground.

The defense has unlimited respawns, but the offense only has a limited amount. They start with ~70 respawns and every death that isn't revived by a medic takes it down one. Every time they destroy a M-COM point they gain tickets.

What's the flow of the game?
1. Defenders get into a good fighting position.
2. Attackers spawn and attack.
3. Attackers get shredded.
4. Cover is destroyed in the process of the fighting.
5. Go back to #1, but the defenders are forced to move due to #4.

Eventually, this becomes:

1. Defenders get into a mediocre fighting position.
2. Attackers spawn and attack.
3. Attackers gain ground, taking some of the outlying cover for their own use.
4. Cover is destroyed in the process of the fighting.
5. Attackers may end up arming the bombs, which forces the defenders out of cover to defend the bombs.
6. Depending on the state of the defense, this either succeeds or fails.
7. Go back to #1, but with even less defensive cover.

At the next base, repeat from the first phase.

What can I do to help attack?
-If you're in a vehicle, support your troops. The tank should destroy enemy vehicles and blow out cover. Infantry Fighting Vehicles should lend anti-personnel support and provide cover.

-If you're a sniper, take out anyone using stationary weapons like mounted machine guns or AT launchers. Also kill enemy snipers. After that, kill anything visible. Help spot enemies for your team.

-Everyone else should push together and try to flush the defenders from their positions. This will involve a lot of dying. Try to stay alive so teammates can spawn on you. This will usually result in flashpoint to flashpoint fighting, taking room and crates one bloody yard (or meter for your canadians) at a time. It's not unusual to be pinned behind cover and killing, dying and spawning in the same spot for over 30 seconds.

-Your initial objective is to just take good cover and to wipe out stationary gun positions, but your ultimate objective is to arm the bomb. If you can arm the bomb and get away, you can slaughter defenders trying to defuse it.

-If they have too much fire in the front for you to get close, take a flanking route and force them to defend two fronts.

-Remember, this is NOT a war of attrition. If you plan on just sitting there and shooting people forever, you will end up losing. They have infinite respawns: you don't.

What can I do to help defend?
-The main principle is reversed. Your whole plan is to bleed tickets (spawns) from them as much as possible. Kill, kill, kill.

-Don't let them get to the bombs. If they arm them, you have to expose yourself to defend. It's better to take them down early.

-Cover all avenues of attack. Don't let them go across the No Man's Land without taking serious fire.

-Don't let flankers get by. They are the #2 priority, only behind defending the bomb. Letting even one guy get behind you can easily become a four man, well coordinated squad. Hunt them down and kill them. Or better yet: don't let them get behind you to begin with.

-Hide from vehicles. Especially at the beginning, you will have no counter to their tanks. You can put down some AT fire and force it to repair or even get a lucky kill, but your playing for time and tickets. Ultimately that tank will push you back until you get your chopper.

[REVIEW] Assasin's Creed 2

Overall: B+
Gameplay: B+
Main storyline: B+
Side quests: B
Graphics: A-
Voice Acting: A
Music: B
Replay value: C
Appropriate difficulty: B

Quick hits:

-75% running/climbing, 25% fighting. If you don't like platforming, don't even bother looking at this game.

-Combat is surprisingly deep. There are three different "classes" of weapons that are used against you in melee combat and each has different strengths and weaknesses. You have quite a few combat moves available to you, such as disarming, countering and dodging. Even normal attacks requires skill in the form of precisely timed follow up attacks to get combos going.

-The platforming "stickyness" holds up well most of the time, able to tell the difference between when you're trying to jump sideways to a ledge instead of just diving, for example. However, later in the game as the jumps get harder this will break down quite a few times. It wasn't a big deal, but an annoyance when you mess up an easy jump at the end of a five minute long time trial.

-Voice acting is really well done and believable. Whatever they paid the actors, it was worth it.

-All cutscenes were done in game, but the game itself looks really pretty.

-There's really no reason to replay this game again, unlike games like Resident Evil 5 or Devil May Cry. I could see somebody picking up the game again in a year to do the platforming and action sequences again, but there's no "New Game Plus" mode to give you any extra incentive.

-The first ten hours are reasonably difficult, but if you make some smart economic choices (such as improving your villa to get a cash stream, see: Fable) you'll quickly start overwhelming guards. The fact that you can just walk up to guards and use the hidden blade on them right after doing the same to their buddy in front of them makes any group size less than 5 trivial. It only gets kind of tricky with guard groups of about 8, but you really aren't under any real threat with anything under 13 or so, or a large group of elite guards. This was probably done intentionally to reward you for good choices, but I wish I could have changed the difficulty to make it harder still.

-Stealth missions are fairly forgiving. They aren't super hard to do (see: GTA3 tailing cars) and you can still keep a mission going after minor mistakes, but you still need to act differently than you normally would.

Starcraft 2 updates

New updates recently, check it out.

Starcraft 2

[NEW] Super Mario + Tetris

An entertaining flash game that combines super mario and tetris to make a completely new kind of platformer.

As advance warning, it's pretty hard.

http://www.freemariogames.org/play/tuper-tario-tros.html

[TIPS] Torchlight mini-spoilers

For the curious...

• The final boss is on level 35. He also has a ridiculous amount of health.
• When you finish the game, you can retire your character to give all your fame to a new character, plus one of your items (which is also buffed in the process). That's in addition to your stash, of course.
• An "infinite" dungeon opens up after you finish the game, complete with quest givers that repeat the same quests you've been doing in the regular dungeon. Joy.
  

[STRATEGY] Torchlight Alchemist Summoner build

The amount of information out there on Torchlight is depressingly low. The Torchlight wiki is sparse at best, which I'd attribute to it being a single player game (and thus collaboration isn't as encouraged).

However, I'll share my current build which has served me well into the end game of my first playthrough. I'm level 25 and on level 31 on hard mode, and the first 60% of the game for me was a cakewalk and even until dungeon levels 26+ I was breezing through most guys.

Quick summary of my Alchemist Summoner strat:

Pros-

• Very easy on your wrist relative to practically any other build. There just isn't as much clicking with this build (most of your damage will come from your minions).
• Fairly high margin of error, since you can run into a whole pack of guys and have plenty of warning to back off when you see your minions dropping like flies.
• Against any mob that doesn't do AOE damage, I doubt any non-end game build can outdamage you. Six nether imps + 2 golems + pet + buffs + your spells hitting one target = instant death.
• You can clear most rooms very, very quickly. That's probably the second best pro for this build besides it being easy on your wrist.
• You can let your personal gear slide and not have to worry about survival since you'll rarely get hit.
  

Cons-

• Don't do this with an imaginary pet. My pet does about 3x as much base damage as I do with our normal attacks, and the Burning Bind doubles its damage. Often when fighting really strong bosses your pet's the only guy left alive. Plus, its spells are super useful.
• You will need to spam buffs a lot. It gets better as you level up since the durations increase, but it's still kind of obnoxious.
• You have poor individual monster killing ability in the late game. Your spells are AOE focused and your regular attack tends to suck. If a couple monsters sneak around your minions and start attacking you, it's time for some kiting.
• You're very susceptible to AOE damage. This is especially bad when it's elemental damage (i.e. spells) since your minions have virtually no resists against that. Physical damage isn't quite so bad.
• You need to watch your minion count and constantly raise nether imps. The interface sucks for keeping track of your minions, so you need to visually do so.
• Some of the end game traps are really annoying (particularly the flaming grates and the triggered/timed spike traps)
• The gear you need tends to be stuff with very specific attributes, almost always uniques and rares.
• In the end game you can get two or three shotted by monsters.

Build (as of level ~25):
Nether imp - 10
Pet Mastery- 10
Thorned minions - 7
Burning Bind - 5
Frailty- 4
Alchemical Golem - 1
Beam Golem - 1

Ice shock -1
Ember Lightning - 1
Ember Lance - 1

Pet build:
Summon Archers (spell)
Heal All (spell)
Rings/necklace - +strength/+defense/+elemental resistance

Ok, so how do the summoning skills synergize?

Burning bind + minions = ridiculous damage output. Once my minions get into melee range they do ~2200 dps without me ever pushing a button other than buffing them.

Unfortunately, the buffs are crucial. Thorned minions is crucial to keeping them alive and increasing dps (reflects damage). Burning bind speeds up their attack speed and gives them a LOT more damage. Frailty severely weakens the enemy, which I only use for bosses or especially strong creatures (constructs and trolls, for example). You have to level up the buffs just as much for their % bonuses as for their duration increases. Until level 16 or so I was casting buffs nonstop, and only around level 20 did I actually have time to cast a bunch of spells inbetween buffs.

What are your arcane spells?
Ice shock was super useful early for clearing mobs. Lightning was similar- it did good damage for a long time. It also scales well since it receives 100% bonus from your magic attribute.

Ember lance appears to be the best arcane spell for dps. It does aoe damage in a line and there's no cooldown.

So what's with the pet choices?
The +stats on the items should be obvious. The spells are chosen specifically- summon archers, for ranged dps (the melee area is crowded enough from 6 imps, 2 golems and my pet), and heal all to heal all my minions, the pet, and myself at the same time.

There are a lot of extra points that you didn't list.
Feel free to allocate them where you wish. This was only a description of the core skills needed to make this work.

Adventurer is a great choice if you're planning on the long haul. Treasure hunter is the same deal. You can stack the arcane skills with some points if you want more damage out of them.

[REVIEW] Torchlight

placeholder

In the beginning...

Space saver for a real intro whenever I get around to it.