Juking Infected

Well I'm back.. kind of.  I'm still a little emotionally hung after losing my father this past week, but I've found that drowning myself in work/hobby's still is one of the most effective defense mechanisms that exist to combat emotional pain.  I will be posting but probably not at my usually 1-3 article a day pace.  Expect maybe 2-3 a week for a couple weeks.

A lot my time spent in L4D is pugging, and unfortunately trying to help your team can often be a frustration and futile effort.  Most of my time is spent ramboing it up on survivor practicing my solo survivor skills.  This also allows survivor side to go quicker so I can practice big damage pouncing, because well survivor isn't fun if you are playing with bad players so might as well get switched to infected asap.

One thing I've become extremely good at is dodging infected attacks in 1v1 situations.  This includes hunters, boomers, smokers, and even tanks.  In this article I'll give you some tips and trick on how to individually deal with dodging each class if you ever find yourself in a situation where you need to run and gun.

Hunter:
Hunters in my opinion can be extremely easy or extremely hard to dodge it all depends on whether your movement is impaired.  If you are slowed your own prayer is to get a melee off mid pounce and kill the hunter before he can pounce again.  Getting melees off on good hunters especially when you are snared is often more luck than skill as well as very lag/ping dependant.  However if you are not snared hunters can be incredibly easy to deal with.

It is pretty simple, DO NOT MOVE IN A STRAIGHT LINE.  You need to circle strafe and reverse/change direction as much as possible.  Even the best hunters will have trouble pouncing you if your footwork is good.  There have been times whens I've danced around 2 hunters for a good 20-30 seconds until I kill them by gun fire or by landing a melee.

This brings me to my next point, meleeing hunters.  Sure getting a mid air melee is cool and flashy, but it isn't something that happens often enough to really rely on.  I've seen with maybe 1-2 players consistently mid air melee hunters (Fluke from MoB comes to mind).  The biggest cause of hunters getting melee is when they barely miss their pounce and land in front of or next to you.  Many people think these to be mid air punts, but they aren't it is just so unnoticable because they are so close to landing the pounce.  Unlike jumping off walls, when a hunter lands on the ground there is a noticable delay before being able to pounce again.  There is where footwork comes in, if you can make hunters miss pounces you will get great opportunities to melee them after they land.

Smoker:
After the most recent smoker buffs they have become significantly harder to deal with if you are solo.  Mainly because they don't release you after taking a certain amount of damage like they used to.  There are however still effective ways of denying and breaking smoker tongues.  Unless you can get a good few seconds of gunfire off chances are you won't be able to kill the smoker and will end up grabbed.

There are currently 3 other ways to deny a smoker grab that don't involve killing him.

1. You can make the tongue break if you break line of sight with the smoker before the full grab lands.  This includes any small object as well.  So if you hear a smoker about make sure you are strafing in and out of line of site until he tries to grab you.  Force a break by going back under cover then pop out and kill him while his tongue is recharging.

2. You can shoot the tongue to break the hold.  The amount of damage the tongue itself can take is extremely minimal, so if you can react quickly and shoot the tongue mid pull you can most likely save yourself.  The angle can be really tough, and it it most effective with the shotgun due to the spray so it might take some practice to do it with other weapons.

3. You can melee the smoker if you get pulled at a close range.  Often it is better to try to shoot the smoker at this range especially with an auto shotty, but it is still an option if you are close enough.

Boomer:
As many players know the boomer can be really frustrating to play.  Many times you will start a vomit it will look like it landed, but then you explode and the survivors are all fine.  You can use this to your advantage, to either rush and melee the boomer in close quarters before he can vomit, or to shoot him at range.  You need to be very careful in your judgement as there is a bit of a dead zone between where he can explode on you but you can't melee him.  Generally the rule of thumb i go by if you are indoors you can usually get a melee off if you are turning corners, but outside you are better off trying to shoot them.

Also there is a small delay between when a boomer spawns and when he can vomit so use this to your advantage.  Many times I've heard a boomer spawn very close by and end up rushing him and meleeing him mid vomit so it doesn't hit me.

Tank:
Tanks like hunters is all about the foot work and exploiting their misses.  Obviously when there are projectiles the game changes and you have to play completely defensively.  There are 2 attacks you have to deal with, the punch and the rock throw.

1. Dealing with the punch is fairly easy as the range on it is pretty limited.  One of my favorite tactics is to rush a tank, then back off at the last second putting me out of his range.  After the tank uses his punch I juke him side to side and run past him.  You can also try straight up juking around him but a lot of smart tanks will hit box block or use the rock + punch combo when you are up close.  Another option is using your environment to juke him out, you can bait him into chasing you in a direction where you will have a place that you can put him behind you.

2. Rock throwing can be tough to dodge vs good tanks.  Luckily with the T2 weps you can shoot the rocks to break them.  You can also position yourself behind an object to block it, and try to get by while it is on timer.  Lastly you can try to juke them, this can be tough but I find last second direction changes work very well.  Beware though rocks have a pretty large hit range so dodging them out in the open can be hard.

Note: I didn't really proof read this so feel free to pm me errors and I'll fix them tomorrow (I'm dead tired and don't fee like proof reading it right now).