Standoff 2 Ranked Games Guide: Tips and Tricks for Wins Only
There have been a ton of guides created for Standoff 2 since its release, these included. All of them are meant to help you guys improve. However, it can be difficult for players to keep up with all of them when they’re on a time crunch. Perhaps you’re busy working full time or are a full time student. So time is scarce to practice and improve if this is the case, you’ve come to the right guide. These are 3 insane tips that will take you to another level. If you were to only follow 3 tips to run away with, these are going to be it. If followed correctly, you’ll notice drastic improvements in your gameplay just by consistently using these tips. These tips are going to be dense and detailed, so make sure to keep up.
Strategizing
The first major tip to rank up is knowing general strategies in Standoff 2. This is the bread and butter of being able to play at the highest level. A lot of players mistake the game as just “who can aim better” but you couldn’t be more wrong. Having a solid strategy will always trump better aim. Strategic play will always beat better aim. It’s not to say that you don’t need some aim, but having strategy can make up the difference and then some. So what are these general strategies? On the attack side, there are a few strategies you could do. The first is the simplest but also the riskiest, and that is hard rushing.
This is when your team throws all their utilities and charges onto a site from one position, hoping to overwhelm the enemy with sheer numbers. The benefit of doing this is that if the enemy doesn’t stop the push, you can easily stomp your way in. The cons are that this exact push is easily countered with a simple use of utilities. You’ll end up significantly slowed down, making it easier for the defenders to get a few picks while also giving more time to rotate. By the time you go for the push after the utility is done, you likely have lost a few members or are about to face a stacked site.
It’s recommended only hard rushing as a way to change the pace and catch defenders by surprise. Other than that, a lot of times, especially at the higher ranks, these pushes can be stopped quite easily. So what is the main strategy you should employ? The best push you can do is what’s called split pushing. Split pushing is exactly what it sounds like. Your team will split into 2 groups and take control of 2 separate choke points on the map that lead to the site. By doing a split push, the defenders have to divide their attention more, which leads to fewer players for each of your 2 groups to face, and therefore, this is much better than only going through 1 choke point, where all the defenders nearby can simply turn their crosshairs on you.
To execute a split push, though, the timing has to be perfect. Both sides need to go in at the same time. If one goes in too early, then the defenders could put all their attention to that area and kill everyone off, before transitioning to the other choke points. Now you know essentially the 2 ways to push through on attack. What you need now are 2 strategies to make sure those pushes are successful.
First is having a buddy system, which is having 1 or 2 teammates with you at all times when you push. The benefit to this is that if an enemy was to show up and kill you, another teammate will be close by to get the kill or “trade the frag” back. By using the buddy system, you’ll always ensure 3 scenarios. First, you’ll push together and kill the enemy. Second, if you or your teammate gets killed, one of you can get the frag back in return to even the numbers. Third, even though you played correctly, the enemy still ends up killing both of you. However, if you do this right, the third scenario should rarely happen until the defenders have a similar setup themselves.
The last crucial strategy to get your way through not only the attack site, but also the defender side, is baiting utility. A hard rush can easily be stopped by utilities. However, if the defenders run out of utilities before you go for that push, then they’ll have nothing to stop you besides their aim. You’ll have a WAY easier time hitting the site. This is an area that a lot of lower-ranked players miss. If done properly, you’ll notice that your site hits will be much more effective. The easiest way to bait the defenders’ utility is by making noise in certain choke points.
When defenders hear this noise, they’ll be more likely to use utilities. They will think that your team may be potentially going for the push. However, your purpose by doing this is exactly to burn the defender’s utilities. Make sure to do this in a couple of areas to get rid of more utilities from multiple enemies that are in different positions. You may have to expose yourself and get into some initial engagements to achieve this. However, it’s important to not over-commit to this and only do enough to do a bit of chip damage and bait the utilities out. A kill would be great, but it’s not the goal of this drill.
Check Yourself
If you work on those general strategies, you’re already well on your way to higher ranks. However, you still need to take that next step further. You need to work on actually implementing those strategies and doing it well. The first thing to do is to try them out by communicating them to your team and then executing the strategy. However, things are likely not going to be perfect on the first attempt. Perhaps the timing was a little off on the push, or someone forgot to use their utilities to block off or flash an area. In order to find these mistakes, the best thing to do is what’s called “VOD reviewing”.
VOD reviewing is when you record your own gameplay and then watch it back to observe certain areas of your play where you could improve on. Now that you have the footage recorded, the best way to VOD review is to look through rounds where you did particularly poorly on. For example, in one of your clips, you do a good job of smoking off the choke points to delay the push. Then you make a bad call to push through the spawn smoke and end up in front of 2 enemy players that shoot you down. You never want to go through a smoke unless you know that it’s safe to do so.
First, you see the mistake, then you need to figure out how to improve for the next time. One thing that could’ve been done was wait until the smoke faded before going for the push. This would’ve prevented you from facing a surprising number of enemies and given your team the ability to get into more favorable engagements. The second option is to wait for your teammates to gather information. If your teammate was able to hear those enemies and make a distraction, that would be ideal. It would create an opening for you to try to push out of the smoke and help him out since the enemy can’t focus their shots onto both of you at once.
The goal of VOD reviewing is to find mistakes and flaws in your play. Then come up with ways that you could improve those areas to brush things up. Try these ideas out when you play Standoff 2 again and see what works. Once you find out what works, you run with it and do that every time.
Become Better
The third major tip is to practice your weaknesses. From the first two tips, you should’ve found a few areas that you need to work on. To give a few examples, perhaps you aren’t implementing strategies well into your play. Maybe you’re wasting your shots and utilities when you don’t need to, or maybe you have areas of your aim that you need to work on. Once you’ve identified your weaknesses, you need to focus your practice on working on them. If your crosshair placement is bad, and you’re hitting too many body shots it will take longer for you to get kills.
To work on that, you need to focus all your attention on that in practice. In the training, you want to try to kill players by only hitting headshots. Make sure your crosshair is on the head before you fire a bullet. If it’s at the body, we need to stop for a moment and take an extra millisecond to adjust before you shoot. Eventually, this will become more natural, and you can progress by going into deathmatch to practice the same. No shooting until you feel confident that you’re at head level, and then fire. This may feel awkward at first, but eventually, it’ll become more of second nature. In no time you’ll already be at the head without thinking about it. Another area could be utility usage. Perhaps you just don’t use your utilities enough when they could’ve helped you take a site, make a clutch play, or block a site take.
This particular example will have to be done more in-game. For now, you need to have a conscious thought in your mind that you want to use utilities. Only then will you be seeking opportunities when you can use them. It’ll take more effort at first. As you get better at knowing where to use your abilities and when to use them, it’ll become much more natural. These are just a few examples, but you need to think about what areas of your play you need to work on and then focus your attention on that area so that it can get better.
