Question for spies

[trilobite]

YNWA: My question is: when do I heal a spy who is on my team?

At any time. You worry about your tactical situation. Let the spy worry about his tactical situation. If he has a problem with you healing, let him voice it to you. There is usually so much confusion going on, that after five seconds, the enemy team is likely to forget the appearance of one of their players being healed by the enemy medic.

YNWA: The other thing I was wondering was when I play engi is it harder to back stab me if I'm up on my dispenser in the corner?

Usually, but it depends on what you are doing up there. If you are just standing there, the spy might be able to maneuver just a tad behind you and back stab you. But standing on your dispenser or gun makes it a bit harder. When I play engie, I am constantly wrenching the air looking for spies. Sometimes I stand or crouch on my gun, sometimes I hop up and down on it – but I am always wrenching. I try to make myself a challenging target so the spy will give up trying to kill me and just sap stuff.

YNWA: What is the hardest setup for a spy to take out? (I try to spread my stuff out a bit so that you can't get all my gear in one pass)

It depends on the situation and how you want to play it. I like to bait spies (and incoming ubers) by spreading things out a bit, but I stay close to my gun, bobbing and weaving, wrenching the air for spies. Spies usually take the bait and go for the easier targets I am not close to at the moment. I watch for players approaching my dispenser and move to wrench ‘em. If a spy gets through and saps, I alert my team which often acts to kill the spy while I deal with the sapper. If they get near my stuff, every player on my team gets hit with my wrench at every possible moment; at my dispenser and exiting my teleport. This tactic works best if your team is responsive and good at killing spies.

Baiting ubers. Dispersing your buildings a bit also sucks time from incoming ubers who must take precious but limited uber time to travel between your buildings to take them out. This is a reasonable tactic especially if the opposing team comes in one-uber-at-a-time. One of the engineers puts sacrificial buildings in a place where the incoming uber can’t resist, meanwhile their time runs out and they haven’t accomplished much. The most important gun placed by the other engineer isn’t touched.

YNWA: As much as I try to heal my entire team, healing an enemy spy is one of the worst feelings as a medic.

I hear you. You can spy-check as much as possible to reduce the chances of healing an enemy spy, as you already know. But when things are rockin' and the point is under imminent threat, you can't be worried about spy-checking. That's when spies can slip under the radar and humiliate the medic. What evs. It's a game of percentages.

[BETTEH]

On TV8 I tell my spies to tap the mic key when calling for medic as well, or if they don't want to do it they always get the customary ubersaw to the face before the beam.

[YoullNeverWalkAlone]

Great stuff guys. I probably need to wrench more as i tend to Pomson spam (I'm not good at melee, so I find myself using my gun all the time) instead, more so if I'm on offense. Having someone say something over voice has saved me all sorts of shame Spies can't shoot without giving themselves away right? Do unusual effects transfer to a spy as well? Seems as I heard somewhere they didnt.

[Boss Llama]

Aye - practice your melee. As an engy, it's far more powerful than your primary and secondary guns (though Pomson is currently the troll cannon of choice at long range).

Unusual effects do show up on Spy costumes now - they finally got that working. I'm no longer aware of any visuals that distinguish a spy from the real thing.

Spies cannot attack without revealing their true form, though they can place sappers at will. While cloaked, they can neither attack nor sap.

---

A huge thing for anybody who cares about spies, which means engies in particular, is to pay attention to every detail of them. Know which players on the other team are spying, and determine what type of watch and knife they are using. That will tell you what kind of threat you're facing. If they're a Dead Ringer, make sure to call them out as such and be ready for the return attack. If they're an Eternal Reward, they're wasting their time trying to attack you, because they have to attack somebody else and be identified first in order to get a disguise so your SG won't shoot them. Watch the kill scroll, and when you see people dying, make a note of any spy kills. Know where those people were if possible, what class they are, and judge if the spy is on a Deathmatch pattern, or moving in for a sap. If you see a name that was previously a spy kill somebody as another class, that's good - you have one less spy to worry about. For the love of all that is holy, keep your ears open. You need to be listening for the sounds of stabs, cloaks and decloaks, freezes, and footsteps. Pay attention to your SG as well - if it emits a warning beep, don't assume somebody took care of it. Rather, assume there is a spy nearby, and go into sweep mode. Situational awareness of the entire battlefield is required, much like the medic. Keep communicating with your mic, and never be in the same place twice in a row.

[Bronze Fox]

Unusual effects do show up on Spy costumes now - they finally got that working. I'm no longer aware of any visuals that distinguish a spy from the real thing..

I don't know if it's just me, but when a Spy picks up a healthkit the little symbol that appears
will be their team color instead of yours; even if they are disguised.

[Fano]

Aye - practice your melee. As an engy, it's far more powerful than your primary and secondary guns (though Pomson is currently the troll cannon of choice at long range).

nonononononono.


As an engineer, your shotgun is your strongest weapon besides the sentry. The shotgun does upwards of 70-90 damage while your wrench only does around 65. When fighting spies it is best to use your shotgun and keep a small distance between you two so that he can't get a back/facestab on you, it's far more reliable to do it this way as it's much harder for a spy to aim his revolver than it is for you to aim your shotgun. Yes the Wrench crits more often but relying on random crits is a very bad practice to get into, even at 20% chance they will fail a large majority of the time, fine tune your skills, they'll be much more reliable in the long run.

Because of this I would suggest dumping the pomson, as useful as it can be against medics it lacks the raw killing power of the shotgun, and against spies you'll be far better off if you kill him as opposed to draining his cloak meter.

The easiest way to position yourself to prevent being stabbed is to move around a lot so the spy can't get to you, if he saps a building, kill him before unsapping it with your shotgun, not your wrench, it's two quick meatshots which are easy to pull off on spies because they don't move very fast, and you don't have to be near him to do it. If you lose your buildings it's not the end of the world, you can get a level 1 back up fairly quickly if you're not sitting in the respawn queue.

YNWA: My question is: when do I heal a spy who is on my team?

At any time. You worry about your tactical situation. Let the spy worry about his tactical situation. If he has a problem with you healing, let him voice it to you. There is usually so much confusion going on, that after five seconds, the enemy team is likely to forget the appearance of one of their players being healed by the enemy medic.

This is the correct answer, I guarantee you that 99% of the time the other team won't be paying much attention, and if they see your teammate spy, it doesn't really matter as he's not in a position to be a threat anyway, they'll quickly forget about it, give your spies health when you can spare it, but remember the heal order! In the heat of battle focus on your combat classes: Soldier/Demo/Medic -> Heavy/Pyro -> Scouts -> Sniper/Spy/Engie, if it's during downtime you can afford to give him a quick overheal before he disappears, but if you've got soldier/demo/heavies around you on low health, let the spy go and get your combat classes up to at least full health before you give him any attention, unless he's burning, of course.


Spies actually have a pretty hard time taking out sentry nests unless they can stab you first and then sap your buildings so you can't repair them, putting you and your buildings out of the fight for 10-15 seconds gives his team a sizable opportunity window with which to make a move. If a spy saps and ultimately destroys your buildings but doesn't kill you, then he hasn't accomplished much unless he was coordinating that with his team and they all come in at once in a big push, this is unlikely and in either case your buildings would have fallen anyway.
The point is, don't be afraid to spread out your buildings, walk away from them and try to deal some damage with your shotgun so that maybe instead of waiting for the uber to come, you can prevent it from happening by providing additional firepower up front while your sentry covers the back.

[l33tOMGlolz!11!shift]

Another spy give-away I noticed while playing engineer. If you use the widowmaker (if you don't, you're wrong! lol) you WILL get ammo back when shooing a disguised spy. So if you know you hit them and didn't get ammo back it's your team's spy.

[YoullNeverWalkAlone]

Unusual effects do show up on Spy costumes now - they finally got that working. I'm no longer aware of any visuals that distinguish a spy from the real thing..

I don't know if it's just me, but when a Spy picks up a healthkit the little symbol that appears
will be their team color instead of yours; even if they are disguised.

I've noticed that too in the past. Plus I assume a DR spy is nearby if I see that my metal is being stolen.

[OmgOhnoes]

I've noticed that too in the past. Plus I assume a DR spy is nearby if I see that my metal is being stolen.

No no, that's just disappearing metal.. not me at all. Same with the backstabbing while healing me... it's your team mates just disappearing. So yeah, nothing to see there.

[flyingdutchman]

I have found that as a medic most people don't run to me when they are crying for medic, they run around frantically trying to not die. If someone is coming towards me straight-on, I'm more likely to try to stab him first, then heal him on up. Like Oldman said, heal everyone. Keeping that spy up and going for, even for all the longer it would take him to respawn, can make a difference on a push or retreat.

My noobish view.

[Thorn]

Getting healed by a medic is great.

The #1 you should avoid doing at all costs, is following a disguised spy as they are trying to sneak behind the enemy team. You will draw fire, blow his cover, and he will cry.

just WAIT literally 3 seconds for him to get far enough away from you that even if u draw fire, he will be far enough from you that his cover wont be blown.

He will love you long time if you do this

[Boss Llama]

Getting healed by a medic is great.

The #1 you should avoid doing at all costs, is following a disguised spy as they are trying to sneak behind the enemy team. You will draw fire, blow his cover, and he will cry.

just WAIT literally 3 seconds for him to get far enough away from you that even if u draw fire, he will be far enough from you that his cover wont be blown.

He will love you long time if you do this

I agree, and apply this policy to any class! Everybody, please do not follow or stand near your own team's spies! That's precisely how spies get killed half the time - unaware teammates drawing fire on them.

[YoullNeverWalkAlone]

What about times when a spy goes through a door? I'm thinking a map like Turbine where you go through a door to enter the central area. I know that when I see the enemy gate open and nothing comes through, that a cloaked spy passed through it. I've thought about timing my exit to go about when the spy does so that people see the door open and a non-spy comes out.

[OmgOhnoes]

It's probably stickied so you'll probably die and they'll continue to live if they are using the DR.

It's better to lose a spy than a medic.

In fact, it's almost better to lose any class than the medic which is how i got better, trying to stay alive and die as few times as possible.

It's not really advantageous for you to "help" the spies in ways like that. If a spy doesn't know how to get to their target alive without help then they are either learning spy or shouldn't be playing spy with the particular loadout they are using.

[somedude]

What about times when a spy goes through a door? I'm thinking a map like Turbine where you go through a door to enter the central area. I know that when I see the enemy gate open and nothing comes through, that a cloaked spy passed through it. I've thought about timing my exit to go about when the spy does so that people see the door open and a non-spy comes out.

I try to do a similar thing on warpath where there is an audible "security alert" when an enemy enters at the last point. I'll try to go in just ahead or at the same time as a spy to throw that off.