The Offensive Support Guide

I keep reading threads and forgetting to post; I too enjoyed this thread and its advice. I never knew the shotgun's grapple was so useful until I tried it out myself after reading this, and I've been bringing my firebase to more lane-pushing areas rather than area defending ones. The knowledge that a single airstrike or ejector gets rid of a firebase has helped my gameplay both as and against support incredibly.

Nice read there,

Support is already my favorite class and I think that I got the hang of it pretty good. Yesh, assassins are almost never a problem to me and whilst trying to push with the team I feel better knowing our turrets are well prepared. Even though I mostly go for hack 3 as fast as possible...

...what I DON'T approve of is when I join late and someone already picked support... THEN I get to witness how not a single one of our turrets is hacked properly... Even worse when they don't get healed. WHAT do I forfeit support class for then? Lately I just pick it even if there's already one...

Heal/Hurt gun is absolutely amazing with Gold RoF and while JUICED...

Great guide btw, this is what got me a good start and eventually developed my own style.

Awesome guide, man, huge help.

Juiced hurt gun is only useful for shits and giggles, or if they are playing on the edge of your shotgun range. It is infinitely better to use a juiced shotgun: it becomes a one hit one kill wonder.

Nah, Juiced Hurt gun is still great for taking out turrets.

Bumping this because I'm tired of seeing supports who are trying to kill a cloaked assassin with their HH gun, constantly airstriking themselves, placing their firebases in ejector areas and using level 1 hack.

Super-bumping for seeing support pro's not using firebases offensively enough.

bump for such an awesome guide. Wish I had seen this when learning support instead of just figuring out everything by trial and error.

Although I do have a question about endorsements. The ones you have are perfect, but I'd like to go back to the "gold armor vs gold RoF" you briefly mentioned.

My most used build is currently gold armor - silver RoF - bronze skill recharge. In my personal experience I find the 100 extra HP more useful than the 10% faster RoF. In a general sense you do generally have enough health to survive with silver, but in very chaotic battles with lots of splash (talking at least 4 people fighting at once) I find it helps having a little more HP so I can heal my team a little longer before pulling back to recover my health. Now I will go on to say that generally I play more medic-style support with the occasional ambush to pick wounded foes being healed

I'm sure the 10% for the shotgun is very helpful since it is percentage based, but how much does it increase the healing per second of the HH gun? It just seems that having more health is more versatile than increasing the fire rate of your shotgun, especially when weakened enemies are going to die in the first shot anyways.

Not knocking the build or anything. This is a serious question and something I have been wondering about for awhile when playing with both builds, but sadly you don't find many supports who know what they are doing.

It's mostly a personal choice, but I'd much rather take out the guy just a little bit faster so he can't deal the damage at all. With ROF Gold and proper technique, you can usually kill them before they even have a chance to actually respond to your attacks. I've found that with ROF Silver that way too many people get away or deal extra damage to me that wouldn't have been dealt had I killed them faster, so I just go with ROF Gold.

I play the class very recklessly as well. I am not afraid to take damage, and not too afraid to die either (but because they die so fast I don't typically have to deal with this). The point is, it fits my playstyle. It may not fit everybody's, but it is just a guide. It's not a rulebook.

Yes I will agree that gold RoF is much better for a more offensive style of play (which this guide teaches) and is a style I need to become more comfortable with. I play more defensive due to my medic-tf2 background so I had found armor more useful for that purpose.

I was just curious if there was a significant advantage to the gold RoF or if it was entirely play style/situation dependent. The "kill him before he kills me" motto makes perfect sense when you consider the insane damage the shotgun deals and wasn't something I had really thought about before. Once again great guide and thanks for the reply

Not a problem.

I wanted the 1000th post in this forum.

I think gold ROF makes sense when you have the HH out helping friendlies too, as long as there is some type of enemy in range as well. That way you can use the quick health suction of the hurt gun on the enemies to artificially extend your health bar, (over)compensating for the %10 loss by going to silver armor.

how many hitpoints does bronze armour give support? i was thinking of switching it out in favour of a speed endorsement if the bronze armour bonus was negligible.

Heal/Hurt gun section added. I probably should have explained how it's used in the original iteration of the guide, but whatever.

As an aside, you can drain tank a level 1 or 2 Laser turret by yourself with the Hurt gun. As in, stand right in front of it, hold right click, it dies.

I forget if you can do it with a level 3

Either way they all die with an airstrike or two but I find this kind of entertaining : P

Shotgun does it faster :/, but I guess it's okay if it's for your entertainment.

Yeah just another funny illustration of how terrible laser turrets are when you can just stand in front of one and drain its life faster than it hurts you.


Though honestly I'm loving the Hurt beam while juiced more and more. Last night I got my quadruple-kill endorsement with it while juiced, and took out a turret.

I know that theoretically the shotty would be better there, but that's only if you land all of your shots. When rushing into the enemy base alone things are crazy, and I tend to freak out and I'm afraid I will waste my juice with some misplaced shotgun rounds, and that beam is just so easy to lock on and kill with.

One of those things where it may not be quite as good, but in some scenarios in can be twenty times easier to use, which is good in its own right.

Something extra to note, when handling juiced pros, throw an airstrike right before you grapple so you martyr yourself and kill the enemy 100% of the time.

Detpacks ?

and is shaveice really that usefull.. i would almost say.. skip it and create a lvl 3 hack 3 rockit. ( which can easily take on Jackbots when you heal it )