"Feelins'? Look mate; you know who has a lot of feelings? Blokes that bludgeon their wife to death with a golf trophy. Professionals have standards. Be polite, be efficient, have a plan to kill everyone you meet." - The Sniper, Team Fortress 2

There are many people allured into the concept of sniping in Blockstorm, I mean, who doesn't find it at least moderately interesting? You're able to land a single 1HKO shot on someone anywhere on their body and leave them watching you for a couple more seconds, letting them have a front row seat of you taking their next buddy with them... and the next one, and the next.

It's a great psychological thing and a single good sniper can effectively shut down an ENTIRE route for which your enemies take, forcing them to take another path to the objective or into a single path where they'll be shot down like a bunch of civilians against ISIS. What? Too soon?

Jokes aside, most of these aspiring folk are quickly intimidated by two key factors that normally aren't present in your usual first-person shooter... Scope drag and ridiculous movement penalty. These elements, your role and strategies against common types of players are what we'll discuss in this comprehensive manual for the discerning Blockstorm sniper hopeful.

"...A shot is not just pulling the trigger -- it's factoring in an astronomical number of variables and arriving at a mathematically sound solution, and then using that math to explode somebody else's head."

Let's keep it simple: The scope sway is added to prevent camping snipers, the drag is added to prevent quickscoping snipers and the movement + noscope penalty is added to prevent you from ever getting accepted into FaZe - not like you needed to be in such a clan anyways. But what if I told you (insert mandatory Matrix pic here) that you can circumvent this and all it just takes is practice? Yes, it's possible. Yes, you can now pull-off your own f0rest or KennyS-like quickscopes or trickshots.

Scope Sway and Drag: This is a notorious one and it's possibly the most obnoxious part of sniping, there are two things people often do whenever sniping and that's drag the scope like it's OJ Simpson dragging his dead wife (rather, wives), hard and without regard OR staying scoped in and when someone passes by, quickly swipes the scope thinking this is Counter-Strike, missing and ending up shooting an innocent block from a mile away... And thus; Alerting the entire enemy team of his presence since your ♥♥♥♥ shows up on the map with a bright red dot the moment you fire that gun.

So I cannot stress this enough and so, I will stress this until it hurts you, you do not hardscope in Blockstorm. A personal rule of mine is that the longer I stay scoped in, the higher the chances of me dying will be or missing a shot since the variables of the sway and limited scope visibility leaves me open to getting shot or missing, obviously.

You scope in ONLY when the target is within your reticle, the scope will ALWAYS be SLIGHTLY off-target, but if you do a gentle swipe, you should be able to quickly nail them. This circumvents both the sway and drag - but requires practice. Lots of it, especially when you plan to move around a lot while shooting like I do.

Movement Penalty, Quickscopes and No-Scopes: Let's get this out of the way before I start, no-scopes aren't possible. YES, they can be done! But NO, they will NOT be a useful way to nail people from a mile away or close up, you WILL die since the devs nerfed it like no tomorrow. With that out of the way, let's discuss how to quickscope and how to circumvent movement penalty. This goes hand-in-hand with the "scope sway and drag" we've just discussed earlier.

Movement Penalty occurs whenever you run while scoped in or move even move slightly. If you scope in while moving or just after moving in front of your target without any cover, prepare to respawn. To counter this, during the scope-in, you swipe the scope the opposite direction it's swaying into and into the target, then pull the trigger.

To perform a quickscope, you need to factor in movement penalty, sway and drag. This means that you swiftly place your crosshair on the target, STOP any movement you make, scope in, swipe gently to counter the sudden sway and aim into the target, then shoot. It's easier to do on paper and harder in actual combat. A tip I can give you is to predict where they're going to go and practice. Practice a lot.

"Unlike your mindless bretheren who play spray n' pray 90% of the time, sniping is a patient point and click adventure game."

There isn't just one type of sniper in Blockstorm. There are three types and it's important to master all three styles of play whenever joining a serious game or an intense match, be flexible and adaptable. Sometimes one role will be better than the other, it's all situational in pubs.

The Support Sniper: The concept and role I've invented for UNiT, the support sniper functions as the team's defense and primary pick player. Commonly found with either grenades (to use for escape) or C4/claymore (to use for defense, trolling or baiting) on top of the usual equipment. I find that snipers are most suited for this role whenever in a game against really good players and function very well as a counter-sniper.

Your main role is to clear the path for your teammates to take the objective or support their push by eliminating the opposing sniper or the bad guy's best player, don't stand near your team though. Keep a great distance from you and them, but at a vantage point where you see everything that goes on. Be sneaky and unpredictable, place your traps in places that are objective-oriented but well hidden or just be outright and harass them constantly, make it known that whatever move they take, your long, thick, hard and preferrably big black sniper is going to be the first and the last thing they see. If not? The C4 or Claymore will be there to BONE them.

A great example is whenever I play Defense on Outpost Assault, the first thing I do is place 2 C4s underneath the capture point, conceal them well and then find a good vantage point to start picking off targets left to right. When they manage to break through and kill my mates, they get a big surprise from down under.

The Deathmatch Sniper: Another style that I was the first to use and don't let the name fool you, this isn't just for Deathmatach! The Deathmatch Sniper is named because of Deathmatch's unfriendliness towards camping snipers, so what do awesome snipers do to compensate for this? They master quickscoping.

Find a comfortable area with a moderate to large vantage point or just control an area with a steady flow of enemies, a key point. Then constantly shoot everyone that goes through your line of sight, have no mercy. Once someone threathens to overrun your position, lob a grenade or two to keep them at bay and then swiftly shoot them in the face. Let it be known that they're the bottom ♥♥♥♥♥ in the relationship. What's that? They overran your position in a coordinated team effort? Well, that's okay. Go do your most fantastic escape plan ever and bait them into following you, start lining them up and shooting them down from corner to corner by manipulating cover. Remember: A sniper is never at the bottom, always on top! Figuratively and literally.

Feel free to bait people into thinking you're a retreating coward or you're so afraid of their mighty AKs, use range to your advantage or the "one shot and you're out" power of the sniper, both in fact. Make them QQ. Make them cry. Make them rage. Most importantly, make mama Pandora proud.

The Marksman: The most common type of sniper and usually the most noobiest, these guys will normally wear some cheap camouflage skin, dig into mountains and attempt to pick-off any unlucky player caught dead between their crosshairs. The most popular player of this type is supermattia of TDM fame who uses a thin skin with colors that blend in with the surroundings, while he does think it makes him invisible, he completely forgets that anyone can just disable that custom skin he preciously made. He's also fond of everyone's favorite "big desert" map on TDM and practically has only played that map (seriously, watch him. He leaves everytime you vote a diferent map), you know, the one with the big tower.

These guys often take 3 minutes digging holes, making their 'perfect' hiding spots and thinking they're invincible. When all it just takes is waiting for them to shoot once to see them on the radar.

Oftentimes, they won't do very well against a coordinated or good team since tracking them down is relatively easy once you know how to LOOK at the radar and disable camo skins.

"YOU ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥/♥♥♥♥ YOU PANDORA/OMFG NOT AGAIN/I HOPE YOU DIE HORRIBLY IRL" - Everyone who plays against me on CTF Underground Duel ever.

Prior to my move to TF2 as Asia's primary choice of engineering, I've been known as [UNiT] Pandora or if you knew me later on... [UNiT] Minx ([UNiT] jpb coined that name for me, after we played CTF Underground Duel... Seeing a pattern here?). I've gained notoriety as the best sniper in the game, UNiT's first main sniper and one of the best TDM/CTF/Assault players, as long as it involves team and it doesn't involve zombies, I'm usually really good at it.

As for sniping, I actually started off with the rifle and evenutally learned to love the sniper. I feel that the sniper is a "level up" from the rifle as it's substancially harder to use, but runs the high risk/high reward game. I'm also the first to play and master the Support Sniper as well as the Deathmatch Sniper role, as well as arguably being the first to play effectively using quickscopes.

While I no longer play Blockstorm that often anymore and prior to all this, really wanted to keep most of the techniques I made under lock and key... I believe that since I mostly retired, this is a good way to end my career and hope that this guide to you, the user, will serve you will in your sniping endeavours.



Make me proud.