How to hit all your pipes by following this simple guide!

The moment you’ve all been waiting for, the secrets are finally revealed, the reasons why doctors hate me with my most requested secret (given out with a payment of £19.99) will now be told. I will go through the standard stuff like how to improve pipes, when to use them effectively and your general mindset when you use them.

This is of course coming from me, WARHURYEAH, the best demoman in the world , I have a long list of stats to prove how effective I am (although I did go from from 2.4 scouts per game at i49 killed with direct pipes to 2.3 during season 16 which I do apologise for).

Anyway, this is something you may need to practice because then how else are you going to make it into the prestigious eXtv’s top 10 plays of the month when you hit a double airshot in tf2pickup?

When to use pipes

This part is actually a pretty important one, I see a lot of people using pipes when they should really use stickies and vice versa, it’s a bit difficult to explain but I will try my best.

Always remember to yell at your scouts to get on the point, even if they are dead. That way if you fail the push it’s always the scouts fault.

As you can see from this screenshot from live in game top tier footage, I have placed the stickies on the point for my two scouts to get on to it, the enemies are now trying to advance to this position so I quickly throw 8 stickies everywhere in 1 second to cover the scouts.

So this creates a small channel of where I want the team to stand, you are using your stickies to manipulate the enemy, to give them the choice of A: Stop shooting the player going for the point and focus removing the stickies, or B: Carry on. Now when your team mates are standing on the point the enemy team will try to shoot the guy standing on it and it will start forcing the enemies to move towards the point. This is then the moment when you can go ham and start bringing the pain, the enemies are now bunched up together and it should start giving you a free opportunity to do some serious dam dam.

The same applies to all aspects of the map, on badlands middle you can focus the enemy train to force the players to go to the left or right of the train or behind it, again, this is creating a channel for them to run in to, once you hit one of them with a pipe all the other players receive almost the same amount of damage, just don’t forget to call that everything is weak, even though a soldier was fully buffed and is now 200HP, that doesn’t matter as you have successfully encouraged your team to do what you want.

In terms of other opportunities the rest comes down to experience, you are going to fuck up massively sometimes and to this day I still do, the most important thing is that you learn from what you’ve done wrong as there are many moments where I will burst in to badlands last, the entire enemy team are there for the taking with 6 hp between all of them and I decide to go for pipes only and hit fuck all. You will improve so much more once you start taking a good hard look at yourself and focus on what you need to do better.

How to hit more things

For starters you need to get your aim in the right place and get yourself to a consistent level, a good amount of pipe aim is down to muscle memory,  by this I mean being able to flick and hit a player because you’ve repeated that action 100 times before.

Now, there was a time when I was unemployed, I would stay inside playing video games, neglecting my girlfriend, ignoring my family and indulging my 5th serving of tuna and pasta bake, I would spend a good amount of time playing MGE vs. various scouts or just practising on tr_walkway (you don’t really need to practice this much, I’m a just an idiot, if I put as much time and effort as I do with TF2 into building a boat I could have built a massive yacht by now) . This is the same for other top players as well, it becomes second nature and you never really have to think about it, if I try and hit an airshot on someone that is just floating in mid air, I’d miss, but if the same person was doing like a Tony Hawk style 900* spin , and I follow that by doing a 1080 spin and launching a pipe half way through that spin, I’d get a quad airshot. At some point you will need to put a bit in effort into aiming, even though pipes are not that important, for an aggressive play style it is a rather key element, not only that but when your back is against the wall being able to connect dem pipes will really really help you turn things around.

This soldier has no idea, but he’s about to get fucked. And worst of all, he’s going to respawn and get fucked again.

For practising in general I now go through a rather small routine:

Step 1. Play 20 minutes of tr_walkway

Step 2. Play MGE as soldier

Step 3. Play  public TF2 with the chargin targe.

I personally find that this is the best way for me to practice without having to put a lot of strenuous effort into the game, as I don’t have much time any more and I still enjoy playing TF2 I prefer this way above everything else.

One thing that I would say isn’t a very good way to practice is to play on DM servers, the main reason being that DM servers create a very unrealistic portrayal of TF2, I know that public TF2 doesn’t help either but I found that quite a few DM keeners in the lower divisions would be incredibly over aggressive, this is mainly and isn’t helped out by the fact that in DM servers you will regen health over time and you regain health and ammo on a kill, this  puts some people in a really shitty habit where all they are used to  is running around and killing stuff without even taking any note of their position, health or ammo. Once I found myself playing less DM I found myself becoming more self aware of what was going on around me, and valuing my life a lot more. I’m not saying that DM doesn’t help, I still go on there if I make a major change to my set up as it’s a very quick way of making sure everything is optimal, but it does create some very bad habits.

MGE is a good alternative of practising aim as it’s very distant from normal TF2 and you can die more, however, it’s very very shit to play as demoman unless you play endif and even then it’s very shit. So I just play MGE as soldier because it at least serves as a good warm up.

The enemies

Now, a large amount of hitting pipes is down to the enemies, when I play and have to go full gaming mode you can catch on the small nuances that players do when they move around, this will make pipes a lot easier to hit once you get an idea of what to look out for. The only thing I can suggest is to watch some of my VODS on my stream, or even any other TF2 players stream, most players can get a read on their opponents movement and what they are thinking next, TF2 is like chess, but a lot shitter and being good at it doesn’t mean shit. And there’s no hats in chess. It’s not like chess actually it’s more like playing hungry hungry hippos.

Anyway, understanding your enemies and the classes is a really big bonus, now I have played a variety of classes in the top of TF2 and outside of PCW’s I like to play the other classes as much as I can, even though it gives you basic knowledge you can still get a grasp of what you are expected to do from the class your’re playing, the movement required and the routes you take. You can learn this the more you play but I found that playing other classes gives you a really big boost to your game as you understand what the limitations are to the other classes etc.

So, lets say you’re 1v1 vs. a scout, most of the time people shit themselves and run away frantically but I now just go for it, there’s very few scouts that are unpredictable in their movement, but the main secret when playing against a scout is to make them jump. When they jump that’s it, they lose a bit of control and you can now see where they will land, if they double jump then it’s even better as it restricts their movement even more, yeah some scouts can pull off some fancy strafing, but if they stay grounded they have more control over their movement and they just need to kill you before you get your stickies out. And when you are fighting them try and put as much space between him and you as much as you can, being able to move back and give you some space just gives you more of an advantage to read their movement, as soon as you’re in a position where he can jump over you, you are pretty much dead.

For soldiers you really need to understand who you’re playing against more, as a good soldier with decent aim can absolutely destroy you no matter how well you are hitting your pipes, if you are in a fight with a good soldier you need to be able to read the situation well based on positioning, players around you and the location on the map. Staying in vs. a good soldier can easily go sour, as most of the times it’s a case of whoever is the most accurate wins, with a soldier they can kill you quicker with good rockets and shotgun combos, most of the time the soldier can easily win the 1v1 situation if you don’t give them enough respect, one missed pipe can easily give a soldier enough time to turn the fight and kill you.

Fuck demos and medics, hit them with a bottle.

Anyway, that’s all for this week, apologies for the dwindling content, the season has now started and work is getting shit. However, I do have a new keyboard which is fucking awesome!

GOOOOOOOOOODBYE

Posted by warhuryeah on February 11, 2014

https://warhuryeah.wordpress.com/2014/02/11/how-to-hit-all-your-pipes-by-following-this-simple-guide/