The Complete Guide to Left 4 Dead

Smoker

The smoker is a tactical unit. It’s very difficult to get a lot of points or incapacitations as a smoker, but that’s not to say it can’t be done. Don’t concern yourself with getting a big score, concern yourself instead with maximising the number of survivors you annoy or drop into ambushes. As you’ll know from co-op mode, smokers are easy to spot and simple to kill, so if you concentrate only on your own score, you’ll never have much fun playing the smoker.

It takes a long time to inflict damage with a tongue-drag, and whilst you’re dragging you’ll be out in the open – unless you’re particularly cunning. When you grab someone with your tongue the smoker pulls back, lowering its head slightly. This means that if you start your tongue attack with only your head showing, you can keep yourself hidden.

If you can stay alive for more than one attack at a time you can be very useful to your team. Your job as the smoker is to pull survivors out of the pack, separate them and force the group to backtrack or split up. Just standing behind the survivor pack and tongue-grabbing one of them as doesn’t do this. They’ll quickly turn round and shoot you dead.

The most effective way to use the smoker is to pull a survivor out of a window, off a train car, or through a horde. One of the best places in the game for this is just after the crescendo event outside the gas station in No Mercy’s sewers.

The survivors have to run along the roof, and jump through the large window in the middle of a huge horde. No matter how tightly organised they are if your timing is good you can pull one of them just as they jump through the window. This always ends up with at least one survivor separated from the pack and thus highly vulnerable. If they’re already low on health the fall will incapacitate them, forcing another survivor to help.

You don’t always have to work on splitting the group up as a smoker. Some situations allow you to damage survivors. There are two obvious situations when this is the case:

• The first is when all the other survivors are pinned or too far away to help. Good examples are when the survivors jump down the hole in the floor on the first level of No Mercy, the sewers in No Mercy’s third level or the drop before the cornfield in Blood Harvest’s fifth level. Grab the last survivor just before they jump down to try and join the group, and you’ll have yourself well over 1,000 points and a kill under your belt. The hunter can do this as well, but unlike the hunter, the smoker doesn’t have a telltale silhouette for the survivors to shoot at.
  
  
• The second is to use the horde to do your dirty work for you. If you constrict a boomer-biled survivor they can’t defend themselves, and the horde is attracted to them. Although the horde only inflict 1HP each per hit a survivor inside a huge mob can take 20 to 30 hits a second, incapacitating them very quickly. Snag one of them when all are blinded, recoiling from a boom, or a hunter pounce - you can even do this if all the survivors are close together.

Hunter

The hunter is the only one of the three playable special infected who’s able to do real damage on his own. He’s incredibly fast, and his secondary swipe is worth 6HP a hit. However, he’s incredibly noisy. The hunter’s primary attack is a pounce, which is charged by crouching. When he’s getting ready to pounce he growls loudly. When you’re crouched and ready to pounce you can crawl up any sloped surface in the game, allowing you to perch yourself right at the top of buildings, or scramble up rock faces to lie in wait for your prey.

To pounce you click left mouse – as you do, you’ll let out a scream. As long you hold down crouch you can pounce as many times as you like, without having to recharge. This allows you to speed around the maps much faster than the survivors can, and the hunter is often the only unit that can catch a single survivor fleeing to the safe-room.

You can also wall-jump, which allows you to reach parts of the map that are inaccessible to other players. Jump at a wall, tree, lamppost or other object, and turn just as you hit it. Click pounce again and you’ll vault off it. This is particularly effective in alleyways, but you can use it to speed down corridors as well.

If you spend a lot of time practicing as hunter then you’ll learn to use your WASD and Ctrl keys to utilise some even more specialised wall jumps. Normal wall jumps require you to jump directly at a wall and turn as was mentioned before, but with practice you can scale single walls, lampposts – any flat object in the game.

The easiest move to pull off is the vertical jump. Put your back to the wall and look directly up. Hold down Ctrl and S, dip your view slightly, pounce and then look directly up again. Holding the S key will back the hunter against the wall, allowing you to dip your view slightly and pounce again.

You can repeat this continually to get up the high water towers in Blood Harvest, or the tall buildings in No Mercy. You can use the same kind of jump to move sideways, using A or D instead of S. This jump is a lot more difficult, and requires a lot of practice, but it’s sure to confuse survivors if used in an alleyway. These techniques get you closer to the enemy or high above them and enable you to maximise the potential success of your pounce attack.

If you jump straight at a survivor from the ground you’ll pin them and any nearby survivors will be stunned for a second, protecting you and making them easier for your team of evil ne’er do wells to attack. This ‘shockwave’ effect is very short-lived and the survivors will be back in control before you start clawing at your enemy and doing real damage. There are ways to deal significant damage to survivors without having to wait for your claw attacks to start, and that’s by maximising your pounce attack. To do this you need to pounce from a height. The longer the trajectory of your pounce the more damage you’ll do, up to a maximum of 25HP.

The simplest way to achieve this is to arc your pounce trajectory. Aim far above your targets and leap into the air to land on their head. You can control your jump in the air using the WASD keys. To get maximum control in the air release Ctrl as soon as you pounce, as this makes you a lot more manoeuvrable. It’s not difficult to deal 10HP damage with a simple jump. You can increase that damage to 25HP if you use the same kind of arced jump from the top of a building. This means an adept hunter can cause significant damage without help from the team.

You can also deal another kind of damage by pouncing, and that’s push damage. If you pounce a survivor at the top of a ladder they fall down, with you on top of them. When they hit the ground under you they receive damage that correlates to the distance they plunged. The damage dealt is exponential, so a small drop won’t hurt too much. Get them at the top of a long ladder though, and it’s an instant incapacitation.

The best way to reduce the health of a survivor when you’re a hunter though is to set yourself on fire. Unlike other infected, hunters don’t suffer greatly when set on fire. You’ll still eventually burn to death, but the hunter’s abnormally high health stops the fire killing it quickly. If you land on a survivor as a burning hunter and, any survivor pinned underneath you will take 10HP of fire damage per second until the hunter is killed or removed with a melee attack. A synchronised strike with two flaming hunters is extremely damaging, and only the tank can achieve incapacitations faster.

When the tank appears the survivors will almost always set a fire, and they’ll be concentrating on killing the tank as quickly as possible. If you’re a hunter this means you can set yourself on fire and pounce. Not only does this turn you into a burning killing machine, you’ll also force the survivors to take notice of you and thus help the tank in the process.

The best pounces are those performed as part of a team (it’s true - think about how dull the Thriller video would have been with only one zombie, for instance). For example, if the smoker snags one survivor you should almost never pounce the survivor who’s constricted. Instead wait for another survivor to break from the group and try to help, then pounce them. This means you can knock down two survivors instead of just one, doing considerably more damage.