Battlefield 2 - sniper's guide
- Learn how to be a top sniper from one of the best -
Written by Juxtaposition
How to use secondary weapons
Here we cover the weapons that aren't your sniper rifle. They are the knife,
silenced pistol, grenade, and claymore.
To begin, your knife is a useful weapon in some situations but hypothetically
you don't really want to be in those situations in the first place. The knife
does its job well as a last-ditch weapon however. In most first person shooters
the melee weapon usually takes two or more hits to kill, making it nearly
useless. However, in BF2 the knife is an instant kill so if you can land a hit
you just might save yourself. The knife can also be useful in a combat
situation where there are many people from both sides fighting, hide yourself
well and they'll probably get right next to you without noticing, then its
curtains for them. It can pay off to practice with the knife a bit, your
primary weapon isn't any good at extremely close range and the pistol will
usually run out of bullets pretty quickly in any kind of prolonged situation
so the sniper probably pulls out his knife a bit more often than other classes.
The next weapon is the silenced pistol. This weapon has a number of uses for
the sniper primarily because it's the stealthiest weapon in the game. However,
it's also got very very poor stopping power and a small small clip so it's
somewhat situational. When you can get the jump on a guy and take a second to a
im you can usually take him down purely with the pistol. I usually take most of
the clip to kill an opponent, always reload it even if you got lucky and only
need half or a fourth of the clip to take someone down.
The good news is that it's totally silent from anything but a few feet away.
You can hunker down in a nice patch of grass and pick a guy off, if you have
good aim he probably won't even realize where you are until most of his health
is gone. This can be a good tactic to use on the last guy at the back of the
squad; sometimes the rest of his mates won't even realize he's gone. The pistol
is also a good weapon to clean up with, the bolt-action rifles will demolish
most of an enemy's health no matter where you hit him so it will only be a shot
or two from a pistol to take him down, this tactic is useful in 1 on 1 sniper
battles where your opponent has a semi-automatic. It's terribly inaccurate but
I have used it to pick off people from long range after I have hit them with
the M24 or M95, just be patient with the bad aim and make sure they don't have
cover to get behind. All in all I wouldn't take it into a stand up fight with
any of the classes with body armor (assault, supply, and anti-tank). I haven't
tested it to see exactly how many shots you need on someone with body armor,
but I have noticed I succeed significantly less of the time.
The hand grenade is pretty basic. Not many applications for the sniper except
it can be useful to lob over cover in a close range sniper duel. Otherwise
reserve it's use for combat situations and use it like anyone else would.
The claymore is the last of the sniper's special weapons. Many people use it to
cover ladders up to roofs, but like we talked about earlier you want to try to
avoid being on the tops of roofs anyways. I try not to just distribute them
around flags and the capture points mainly because there is always going to be
some fool on your team who isn't paying attention and walks into the mine and
then punishes you for it. I have found a few uses for them however. First, you
can toss them in the path of a FAV you spot coming down the road. They explode
and while they don't do major damage to the vehicle you can seriously hurt the
passengers. It's also possible to set up ambushes along roads if you think your
team is competent enough not to drive into it. If you get lucky and the
claymore takes out the driver the gunners are going to take a second to figure
out what just happened which is a perfect opportunity to take them out. I have
also found use for them when I'm deep behind enemy lines. For instance, when
sniping the airfield you are inevitably going to be found out by someone. When
that happens drop one or both of your claymores generally where you were and
high tail it out of there. By the time they get to where you were you could
plausibly be pretty far away, if they trip your mine and take a dirt nap you
should have a good window to find another good position to snipe from before
they respawn and come looking. The last situation I have found it useful is
when you round a corner and get surprised by one or more enemies you can go
to pistol quickly and snap off a few shots to get them to take cover. You run
around a corner and drop a claymore or two in their direction. They realize you
were just a pathetic little sniper who can't defend himself at close range and
chase you around the corner, thus getting a faceful of death.
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