Sniping 408 - Advanced techniques - Enemy Territory

[unlawfulsniper]

Hey guys I'm a pretty decent sniper so I thought I'd share some key 'secrets', well maybe not secrets but good tips on what makes a good ET sniper.

 

Part I - Concealment:

 

We all know this is key to survival in the bush, but did we all know that sometimes it is better to stand in front of a tree than behind it? Take 'Battery' map as an example. Consider those rocky outcrops in the ocean where people like to snipe from. Most players like to stand behind them and expose as little as possible to prying enemy eyes (usually axis can only see a small head poking out from their rmountaintop vantagepoint. However, because of the oceans mid blue color and the lighting on the map, your head, although a small target, casts a perfect silouette against the background, making it easy for countersnipers or mortar teams to 'pop' you. Counterintuitively, it is actually a far better concealed position to crouch in front of the 'rocks' since their color is rougly a fleshy orange and allies, as seen for afar, also appear roughly this same fleshy orange color. Sure, once seen, you make a large target if you sit in front of the rock, but if you only take headshots and you scan the mountaintop horizon and axis pillbox for prying eyes, the enemies will never see you sniping. One shot 1 kill. Well most of the time unless they have full health, then 2 shots 1 kill.

 

Part II Scoping and aiming....... coming soon....

Edited March 30, 2018 by Fearless Staff

[LanceR]

wow good point buddy.

 

and i love to stab snipers in the back. lol.. it makes them sooo angry.

[unlawfulsniper]

wow good point buddy.

 

and i love to stab snipers in the back. lol.. it makes them sooo angry.

 

 

Hahah yeah. Well in real life you would dead from either a claymore or from my spotter's sidearm after you tripped our IR flares. Either way. Done deal.

[unlawfulsniper]

hehe. if you like that idea, try hiding inside and behind the trees on fueldump if you are axis early on, snipe through the branches. most of the natural camo from the branches make you invisible, the only worry is muzzleflash. you can almost always get a 5 or 10 spree, if ultra sneaky never be spotted until you have no ammo.

 

Yes, very good point. Especially that tree clump nestled on the back side of the mountain on the frozen river bank. If you own that spot you own that frozen river!

[unlawfulsniper]

Part II - Scoping and Aiming

 

Okay so you are in your favorite concealed spot, all nestled up in your nook and you're looking to 'pink mist' a few enemy heads, but how to aim your K43 and shoot it to guarentee a first shot head shot?

 

Stance:

First we consider that the gun's site is the most steady when prone, then crouched, then standing. But I find that the difference between crouched and prone is very minimal and its usually better to remain crouched for fast mobility in case you are spotted, or in case a would be knifer misses with the instant knife kill melee. This allows you to react fast and have a chance of killing your enemy back, before he kills you. While prone you are simply too immobile for the 1 second it takes you to get up and 1 second can mean life or death in war. Of course if your sniper location is the bomb diggity, then go prone with confidence and solitude.

 

Drift:

This is what I call the side to side, up and down, 'wawa' of the sight that you experience when aiming with the scope. The 'wawa' actually follows a figure eight pattern turned on its side, of if you prefer the sign for infinity in mathematics. Since we know this pattern constantly repeats, we can use two subtechniques to use this knowledge to our advantage.

 

a) The nodal point - a node is the point in the wawa's figure eight that is right in the middle of the eight. It is the place where the scope's wawa experience's a moment of inertia, aka it doesn't move at all. This is the sweet spot my friends. If you find this sweet spot overlays on an enemy's head, shoot! You will headshot them everytime (there is no wind, corealis effect, thermal ground convection effects, air pressure calculations, etc. in ET so fire away!)

 

Curving 'her' in there - once your brain starts acclimating to the wawa's figure eight pattern, you will notice that you can still get headshots just outside of the nodal point, in other words just before the node, or just after. This involves shooting slightly left of the enemy's head, or just right of it. The technique relies on the fact that some of the movement of the scope's wawa can be translated into the bullet's movements. I mean after all, if you have your sight aimed perfectly at an enemies head, but the wawa is not at the nodal point, you will miss everytime since the bullet carries a portion of the scope's wawa momentum vector. So reverse engineering this difficulty and using it to our advantage (adapt and overcome), we simply aim a bit off and rely on the wawa to 'curve her in there'. This is pretty hard to do admittedly, especially if the wawa is great and far from the nodal point on the figure eight, but its extremely satisfying. One time, with a little luck and a little skill, I curved one in a distance of over 10 meters. I shot 10 meters right and 2 meters high of the enemy's head and it curved into a heashot. That was freaking awesome, and lucky, but a willfull kind of luckiness that practice makes luckier and luckier with every shot

 

 

Magnification and scouting:

This is a very important part of sniping, since often you will not kill your opponent with 1 shot in ET, even if its a perfect 'between the eyes' 3rd eye headshot. So you will need to squeeze off two in rapid succession. Always make sure your first shot is a headshot. If you don't kill the enemy outright, your second shot can hit them anywhere and they will die guarenteed, even if its and ankle shot. But, if you hit their ankle first, they will be alarmed and the probability that you can headshot a visibly shaken and rapidly moving enemy decreases drastically. Some maps have line of sights (LOS) that require only the first magnification order in the scope, say 1x. But if you've ever played Minas Tirith, you know the LOS are very far and to kill an enemy at 1x is a fantastic feat, but why make it hard on yourself? Zoom in all the way, say 8x with your mouse scrolly and make that enemy head as big a target as possible. The drawback with being dialed in all the way at 8x is the kickup after the first shot is huge and you'll find your scope 300 meters up in the air after firing, which means you'll have to lower your sight again and refind your target for the second shot.

 

My advice is don't try to refind your target while still dialed in at 8x, but rather use the mouse scrolly to quickly dial down the scope to 1x, to quickly refind the target and once found, put your crosshair on the target (well the rough area of the target, it doesn't have to be dead on his head) and then redial up your scope to 8x for the final kill shot. This may sound somewhat like a mouthfull, but it takes maybe half a second to do once you are used to it. 1x scope also makes a great pseudo pair of binoculars but with a smaller field of vision (FOV). But still, I think its better to scan for enemy with the 1x scope rather than using binocs, since binocs can't fire bullets once they've located a target and sniper guns can

 

Next: Part III - Countersniping and relocation.....the art of suvival.....

[X-style]

nice, nice description, I expect the following forward

[LanceR]

good stuff buddy. keep it up.

[CaldasGSM]

Great great tutorial.. one can learn a lot.. keep up the good work.. cant wait for the 3rd part..

ps: all text is a bit heavy on the eyes.. maybe some ss.. to make it more attractive

[AngelofDeath]

wow this is a great tutorial, i learned some great stuff. thanks for the info

[daredevil]

i believe you can also adjust the level of zoom each click of the wheel does. i'm not sure if there is a way to bind this, there probably is. but adjusting that might allow a little more comfort in sniping. unlawful, where's your mortar post? you'd hit me in random spots when i'd only be sitting there for like 10 seconds (3 second mortar fall, yes)... still... kind of a **** move when i'm trying to camp jokes.

 

 

cg_zoomstepsniper "n"

 

16/n = how many steps of incremental zoomin/zoomout for both binoc and sniper.

 

Select your 'n'.

[milli vanilli]

hehe. if you like that idea, try hiding inside and behind the trees on fueldump if you are axis early on, snipe through the branches. most of the natural camo from the branches make you invisible, the only worry is muzzleflash. you can almost always get a 5 or 10 spree, if ultra sneaky never be spotted until you have no ammo.

 

 

even better, if you lay down in the tree at the bottom of the hill when allies have blown the tunnel doors, as a fops you can keep them from moving the tank with your arty and a few quick headshots. if you headshot kill someone, they auto gib so they won't know where you are. and that tree itsself provides great camo, even for the black axis against the white snow

[unlawfulsniper]

@everyone - Thanks fo all the kind words I freshened up the first 2 parts of the, I guess it is a tutorial, as you suggested.

 

@tetra - haha ya. I can mortwhore pretty good, in fact Elliot spitzer kept calling my cellphone but I told him I was a not that kind of whore.

 

@milli - Its so true, those trees are an amazing spot since their branches are so droopy and covered in leaves, its like a little fort in there.

 

 

more to come...

[PHANTASM]

Unlawful seems to know a vast amount about sniping.

 

Here are some of my favorite spots to party with my K43:

 

On Minas Tirith, I like to hide way down at the bottom level on the left side and pick off the allies on the top when they lean over the edge to try to get the axis coming out the tunnel (at the last stage of the map). Minas Tirith is made for sniping, there are great hididng spots for allies too everywhere on the ledges.

 

On fueldump I like to play axis and crouch on the ledge of the bunker in the little indention in the wall. You can get ten or twenty nice K43 headshots here before someone catches on and shoots you back. When you're up there it's hard to get goated in the back because the other axis are coming out the door behind you when they spawn. On the allies you can hide behind the rock wall by the cabin to counter this axis sniper position. Later on fueldump it's fun to get up on the hill behind the allied command post to snipe the germans inside the fueldump. It's fun to pop them in the head as they run past the windows on their way out to fight. It's pleasant to think of them going into battle with half their health gone before they even get out the door.

 

On battery it's fun to hide out on the rocks as a covert ally and pick off the axis with the K43 when they stick their heads out the bunker to lob a nade down the hill, or when they are running around the top of the rocks trying to shoot the allied spawn. Once you've got the forward bunker I switch to eng with the nade gun and lob nades around the corners into the axis room by the stairs where they spawn. If you can get past them you're ready to plant your dyno since you're the engineer.

 

On Marrakesh, go axis and get into the church with the open roof by the tank to snipe allies coming over the bridge. It's usually crowded up there and you'll get mortared if the allies have anyone who knows how to use a mortar (like unlawful). Usually the allies don't have a good mortar so you can get lots of pathetically easy headies. Also it's easy to pop the allies when they try to climb the ladder when you're sniping on the church.

 

The new MBL Temple (name?) map is awesome for sniping. I always go covert on this map and hide in the buildings. Either side is a lot of fun - the allies are obvious targets as they try to get near the tank, and the germans are easy to pick off when they run out their spawn on the walkway. I love giving each German a nice headshot as they run out and jump off the walkway trying to get away. It's my way of saying "here is your free headshot, go try to find some health".

 

It's best to change position after you get a few kills. Remember the line from Enemy at the Gates: "A sniper who doesn't relocate isn't normal."

[Ackmey]

Awesome tut, really detailed.

 

Unfortunately for me, my mouse is a 10 dollah piece of junk, and the scroll wheel doesn't work, so I can't zoom in... ugh...

 

I'm looking for a decent one atm, hopefully I'll find something good, cheap.

[SuicidalManiac]

still waiting for part 3. Everything you posted so far would be really helpful for beginners trying to take their sniping to the advanced/intermediate level. Let me know when finished and I'll comment if you'd like.