Strategy: Complimenting the Smoker

So one of the prime complaints I hear about left 4 dead in regards to the infected is that the Smoker is a very weak special infected.  While on paper this is true, but personally I would put the Smoker as the most important class on infected behind the boomer.  The only thing broken is the tongue breaking immediately when people run by an object.

The main way for infected to be successful is through relentless pressure and constantly trying to split up the survivors to open opportunities to do massive damage through swipes/pounces.  The boomer and the smoker are amazing at this, by blinding the survivors, or grabbing someone who is far enough away from the group so that he can't be immediately meleed forcing them to go after him.

One thing that annoys me is too many people try to play rambo as infected.  This is simply the worst strategy in all but one case, which is having hunters suicide rush to get cleaves in to weaken the survivors early in the match, or late in the match for incaps on low health players.  This is even more of an issue with smokers as you do weak melee damage , and you won't do damage on a grab until they get caught on something.  I can't tell you how many times I see someone just grab the last person as soon as he spawns, drag him 5 feet and get shot.  A complete waste of one of the infected's most useful classes.

So in this article I want to discuss a way to help your smoker be more effective.

Having pull protection is the most important tactic as a smoker.  This works fine as a boomer (will help with confusion/slowing them down not so much damage), and the hunter (will put out immense damage).  What you do is when a smoker grabs someone you position yourself between the survivor and his group and just melee the survivor that is grabbed as he is being pulled.  As a boomer if they shoot you the person who is grab will get soaked in vile, and if they don't it allows the smoker to freely pull him along till they run up and melee you.  Generally in this scenario you will either get blown up on them anyway, or your vomit will fully recharge in time to get it off.  The 2 damage per melee also doesn't hurt. 

Now the hunter version of this is easily one of the best and underused strategies I've come across.  You simply follow the survivor being pulled and melee him, you will be surprised how fast you can incap a survivor this way.  In our match last night we did this multiple times in the house in NM1 and it pretty much raped the other team as we coordinated it well (I will post the demos and do a match review as soon as I find a place to host them).  This also like boomer will provide a smaller, though slightly less effective shield for the smokers pull.

Also I plan on doing a weekly blog reviewing my teams matches, posting demos discussing what went right, what went wrong, what we could of done differently, and anything important that you can take out of it.