How to Improve at Nosgoth Efficiently
This little Nosgoth strategy and tactics guide offers a way to improve at the game quickly enough to enjoy the surprising depth of play at mid and high levels.
Update: Nosgoth is now in Open Beta - if you're not playing yet then you should! You can start with a free booster using my friend referral link - see you in the game!
As a new player Nosgoth is pretty punishing. I still remember the confusion and slaughter of my very first game and perhaps you still remember yours.
Rather than hand out specific yet somehow unhelpful tips, such as "learn to time the charge duration on your warbow so the shot is ready when you need it", I've chosen to write about a method for improving efficiently. It will help your first 100-200 hours of play up to level 40; after that you will understand more than enough to choose your own onward path.
The guide is divided into three sections:
Basic advice and skills - aiming, listening, dying
Playing to learn - set round goals, flow of play, learn from the masters
Mid-level play - class counters, yomi, teamwork
This guide assumes you already know the basics of play - what zoom does, how to dodge and so on. There are plenty of other guides that cover those kinds of basics. Instead I want to call out three things about Nosgoth that reward closer attention.
Depending on your choice of class Nosgoth can be enjoyed without perfect twitch skills, but being able to aim accurately under duress will always make a big difference. If you play a lot of FPS shooters feel free to skip this short introduction.
If you don't play a lot of FPS shooters and don't know what inches/360 means then you need to know only one thing:
Your mouse sensitivity is too high.
Let's fix that now before you get used to it. Edit My Games\Nosgoth\config\BCMPUserProfile.ini and make these changes:
Change bMouseSmoothing=True to bMouseSmoothing=False
Change LookSensitivity=whatever to LookSensitivity=1
Change MouseSensitivity=25 to MouseSensitivity=15
Make changes #1 and #2 in BCMPUserProfile.ini too for good measure. I actually play with MouseSensitivity=9, but 15 is a good starting value if you're used to oversensitive mouse movement. Once you're used to it, try reducing it by 2 or so each time and notice how much easier aiming becomes!
You can read up what all these do on this forum post, but these values are fine to start playing with. Also turn off "improve pointer accuracy" in Windows' mouse settings while you're at it and put the sensitivity slider onto 6/10. Direct movement is easier to learn.
On the subject of aiming: many people find it more accurate to hold the mouse with their whole hand and move the arm/wrist to aim. Try this too instead of pushing the mouse around with your fingers!
Much of early Nosgoth play as a human is long periods of tension followed by extremely intense periods of action. This is a difficult environment to get used to aiming in.
Instead, spend a couple of minutes per session in the tutorial. Run through to the first health station then turn and find a marker on the wall behind the flags. Hover your crosshair over a flag, then rapidly move it to the marker, shoot it and move it back. Repeat this with many different flags, ranges, zoomed and unzoomed, moving and stationary for your 120 ammo them exit the tutorial and start a match.
After a few sessions you should find it quite easy to keep a vampire in your crosshairs during short range and melee combat. If the action seems too confusing, check your frame rate by going to the video settings during a match. Anything below 30fps will be a problem; turn every graphics option to low or off, reduce your resolution and if you are playing on a laptop check the right graphics card is used and your CPU's turbo boost is disabled. While you're changing graphics settings you might as well increase your gamma, too.
As a vampire rapid aiming is less important but do use dodge-melee-dodge exclusively for movement on the ground in your first few matches as it is faster and less predictable than running and is worth making second nature. Also force yourself to only use charged attacks for a couple of rounds to get a feeling for how long they take to reach full power and how far and fast you move. You can actually turn corners while diving forwards like this!
The aural soundscape of Nosgoth is more revealing and important than most other games. Wear headphones and turn the volume up enough to hear footsteps clearly. Often hearing an audio cue is the only thing that separates you from life and death, so learn to recognize the distinctive sounds each vampire makes before they attack.
When you unexpectedly die, take a moment to recall the sounds you heard leading up to that moment.
Every time you die, which will be a lot, a ten second or so timeout gives you a natural moment to pause for reflection. Cultivate the habit of using this time well. Often, particularly at the start, you'll feel you were killed unfairly, with no chance to do anything. Maybe you were rammed and pounded by two Tyrants and unable to move or react at all until pasted across the floor. Instead of raging at "lame tactics" reflect on the life choices that led you to this moment.
There are no lame tactics in Nosgoth. Everything can be countered. Nosgoth is a high-skill game. A good player will reliably destroy a worse player. Random chance and luck play a much smaller part than it sometimes feels at first.
Often the lesson to learn from a death is Do Not Let This Happen. By the time the first Tyrant hit you it was all over, but the audio cue for a stampeding Tyrant is very distinctive and gives plenty of opportunity to dodge out of the way. Were you standing in a particularly charge-worthy place, too close to your teammates or trapped in a tight space? Were you even aware that two vampires were playing Tyrant?
Improving at Nosgoth efficiently means asking these questions every time and trying different behaviour as a result.
The hardest thing to do is not to blame your team. You will play most of your low and mid level games in public servers with random groups of inexperienced players. You cannot expect your team to always have your back, but you can learn to make it easier for them by standing where two or three of them can clearly see you, for example.
Always remember you are not playing to win yet, you are playing to learn. Dying is an important part of that. Quietly give thanks to your opponent for showing you a way to improve your play.
The greatest barrier to improving early on in Nosgoth is trying to win. Whether you want the highest individual score or for your team to win every match, these goals are largely out of your control in a randomly-filled public server.
We are not playing to win, yet. First, we are playing to learn.
Spend the time waiting for a match to start contemplating what you want to learn and improve in each round of this match. Pick a goal that is as much in your control as possible. For example, perhaps you are learning to play as a Reaver. Equip Savage Pounce and make your goal to perform four Savage Pounces and escapes in a row without dying.
This has two benefits. Firstly, you can be entirely satisfied and happy at the end of a losing round in which two teammates rage quit because you had the opportunity to work on more stealthy and surprising approaches. Secondly, it forces you to develop a whole range of skills and way of understanding the game and level environment that you otherwise wouldn't have.
In our previous example, to maximize pounces before death you will quickly learn to sneak carefully around the map, to select targets who, momentarily, are not being watched by their teammates, to cover your entry with a distracting smoke bomb or choking haze, to find just the right psychological moment in your team's attack in which the humans are fighting every man for themselves. More than continually trying to get in fast and LMB-spam inexperienced alchemists would ever teach you.
When the round ends consider your personal goal score, not the round score. Did you achieve your goal? Did your approach work? Noscam is a great way to review rounds that just didn't work out. Often although you felt "unlucky" during the game a careful review from your opponent's perspective will highlight how their style of play made things particularly difficult for you. Again, our opponents are teaching us. What friends we have in them!
If your match goal is WHAT you want to achieve, the flow of play is HOW you want to achieve it. This is best explained by example. Let's take a flow of play for learning how to play as a Sentinel:
Goal: Kidnap, finish and drink from four humans in a row without dying.
Watch them, choose a target and a time to attack and an ideal place to drop them
Dive in, pick up and get out with minimal damage
Land and finish your target
Safely drink from them, if possible, then repeat
You wouldn't play a competitive match with a script like this, but breaking down the messy complexity of a round into distinct tasks and phases is an incredibly powerful way to learn faster.
By playing with this plan in your mind, you will begin the game fully focused on the best way to find the humans without getting sniped out of the sky. This leads to checking which classes they have, learning the common spots for humans to gather and the best approaches and observation areas. There's no excuse for taking damage in this phase and you will quickly learn to accomplish it without being seen or shot at all.
Here's another example that I used when learning how to snipe as the Scout:
Goal: Snipe four vampires with the warbow without dying.
Choose a good sniping spot close to my team's location and defend it with a trap
Watch for opportunistic targets and take early shots
Move to a more hidden spot further from my team where I can cover them just before the vampires arrive, perhaps using Camouflage
Snipe vampires in the melee, disrupting Tyrant jumps, Reaver pounces and Sentinel dives
Either finish the fight quickly with LMB spam or move under cover to another vantage spot before too many vampires decide to come looking for me
This flow taught me so much about the strengths and limitations of Camouflage vs just standing in a bush or dark doorway, about timing my draw, about vampire psychology and the right moment to choose a new spot (protip: in an extended fight, roughly 15 seconds after my first kill a vengeful respawned vampire will come to the spot I killed them from. A different flow includes "Find a spot overlooking the first one and kill them again for bonus points").
You won't use the same flow forever, only until you feel you have mastered it. New ideas and adjustments will come all the time and it's good to try these out! Just remember to separate how well you played from how well-suited your flow was to this match when looking at the results. Understanding this difference is the first step towards mid-level strategic play.
Watching high-level teams battling it out with each other in tournaments is fascinating, but most of what is happening and why will be opaque to you during your early levels.
A more efficient way to learn from experienced players is by watching their twitch streams and reading their guides. I learned everything I know about dealing death from above from Warmonic's excellent guide and videos and the guides from high-ranked EU team Dead Sun.
When an experienced player talks about their understanding of the game, pay attention not just to what they say but to the way they are thinking about the game. A great example is Saturnity's reply to a question about "stupid" stunlock:
Your stunlocking point directly ties in with spacing and dodging. High level players can roll out of the way of every vampire and potentially every human CC in the game.
Sent pickup gives audio cues you can use to dodge without even looking at the guy. Good tyrants do a wiggle charge, but you can predict how he's going to try to swerve into you and get out of the way.
Think yomi. Reavers are the hardest to dodge but you have multiple ways to stop a pounce. You can shoot them down for fall damage, CC them out of the air, or just roll.
You can out-think humans when it comes to dodging their CCs. Did you just charge a melee attack through a human? Did they just roll backwards in a fight? Are they waiting for you to use a gap closer? In any of those situations, they'll immediately want to hit you with a CC.
Either space+aim your attack so you slide past them or roll through them afterwards. If the human will predict that and aim the CC behind them, you can counter their counter by sneaking in a melee attack before dodging since they'll wait a sec for the dodge. More yomi.
Tyrant grab can be interrupted by your teammates, use good positioning and spacing and don't let them grab you at bad times. Don't stand near a corner if you predict a tyrant will attack from there. He'll grab you. Get away from jump landings or cancel the jump by airshotting with a CC move. He could grab you if he lands on you and your team is busy.
One of the top players, chriZor, has uploaded videos of the competitive ESL matches with German commentary. If you can understand the language, watch them and listen to his advice! If you can't, watch them anyway and see how top players use your favourite class effectively.
Attempting to emulate a master has been a tried and tested method of learning for millenia, and with videos and Noscam we have more opportunities for this than ever. Use them!
Players in the level 10-30 range often get the idea that class stacking (e.g. 4 Tyrants or 4 Scouts) is overpowered and unfair.
Competitive teams play with a mixture of classes because it is more effective. 4-stacks are rather rare in competitive play - so far in 9 ESL tournaments I've only seen three matches in which one team used a 4x class stack. The second half of this match is an example of a 4x Reaver team being taken apart by 1x Scout, 2x Hunter, 1x Prophet.
So why does class stacking in Nosgoth feel overpowered to relatively new players? There are two reasons.
Firstly, stacking classes is the simplest kind of team-level tactic to implement in a pub. "Hey let's all go Tyrant and keep charging them lol" is all it takes. The hard counter to that would be something like a team of Alchemists, but low level players don't necessarily have all the classes available to them or aren't willing to change.
Secondly, matchmaking sometimes puts a much better team against a much worse one. In this case the better team will often just mess around. A fun way to mess around is to e.g. stack Sentinels and try to catch each others Kidnap drops. It would get slaughtered against a team of decent Scouts or Hunters but they don't care because they've quickly realised they're all better than you anyway. They'd beat you even more if they were playing properly.
So when you see a stacked team, embrace the challenge. Switch to a counter class and encourage your team mates to do so too. Learn the strengths and weaknesses of your opponents.
Here's a rough-and-ready guide to class-based counters:
4x Hunter: mixture of classes - e.g. 1x Tyrant for CC, 2x Reaver, 1x Deceiver or Scout. Infect on the Deceiver can be fun because new players will tend to bunch far too close together as humans.
4x Prophet: also a mixture of classes; I'd field 1x or 2x Sentinels as the Prophet lacks any good way to get them out of the air (but beware of their accurate and powerful heavy pistols).
4x Scout: 4x Deceiver. Scouts hate deceivers. It's easy to get in close to them without being hit by a charged shot but watch the ground for traps and be ready to disengage if they all throw their volleys down.
4x Alchemist: 4x Sentinel. Sentinel is such a hard counter to Alchemist that it isn't even funny. Enjoy soaring through the skies with no danger of being shot at all. Hover above and throw air strikes to your heart's content - take your time and try to stick them to a player, it's hilarious.
4x Sentinel: Scouts and Hunters. It's so easy to knock a careless Sentinel out of the sky with a warbow and on the ground they're basically dead. Hunters can also practise their bola aiming.
4x Deceiver: a mixture of Hunters, Prophets and Alchemists. If the Deceivers are using illusions fire explosive shot to dispel them immediately. If they're using shroud, the Prophet's banish/hex shot will light them up like a Christmas tree for your team to focus fire.
4x Tyrant: at least 2x Alchemists and whatever else you fancy. If the Tyrants are using Leap, 1x or 2x Scouts with warbow will change their minds very quickly. It's so easy to shoot them out of the sky, land them in a volley and then stun them with knives to keep them in it.
4x Reaver: a mixture of classes. I'd want to include at least 1x Scout with volley to create a protected area for the rest of the team to stand in and fight.
All of which leads us nicely on to the next section: yomi.
David Sirlin has written such a good explanation of yomi that I won't repeat it here. Go and read it now, then come back.
As you hit the 20s you will have a good feeling for your favourite classes and flows of play. You'll often hit the top score on your team even if that isn't what you were trying to do. You will find, now, that you CAN play to win, using the skills and techniques you have learned so far.
But sometimes it just won't work. Sometimes there's that one deceiver who always gets behind you as a scout. That one scout who always snipes you as a sentinel. That one alchemist whose firewall is always exactly blocking your approach. That one prophet who hits you with such inhuman accuracy you can't believe they didn't know you were coming.
Yomi level 0 is playing your favourite class in your favourite way. It's what, given random opponents, pushes you to the top of the scoreboard when you play to win. Mid- and high-level players will recognize your effectiveness and will switch to a different class, loadout or positioning deliberately to counteract you. This is yomi level 1. To continue being effective you need to watch for this and to do it yourself.
Regularly checking the opponents' classes is a one way to spot a yomi change coming. As soon as you spot it, you can react. Switch from a sentinel to a deceiver and stab those newly-spawned scouts in the back while they vainly scan the skies. Switch from a scout to an alchemist and tear that team of lumbering tyrants apart. Yomi level 2, bitches!
The best yomi moves come not from pure class changes, which are coarse and immediately visible to all attentive players, but from loadout and tactics changes. How will you play differently as a Scout, knowing that Deceiver is coming for YOU? Stand in front of a teammate? Always place a trap behind you in the bushes? Move across your team every 15 seconds? The choices here are both endless and extremely entertaining. Let your creativity soar!
As you reach higher levels you'll start to feel yomi in individual fights as well. As a Sentinel you've just dropped a Hunter, landed behind him and hit him with Puncture. He 100% wants to dodge-roll away from you and then bola you in the face. So you want to dodge roll through him (vampires roll further than humans) so you're still behind him when he stands up. But if he's expecting that, he'll roll through you instead and now you're out of auto-attack range and have a bola around your waist while your snack disappears around the corner to rejoin his teammates.
Yomi. Find the most effective technique and exploit it until your opponents reactions to it become predictable. Then exploit that instead.
By this point most of the people you are playing against have a similar understanding of the flow and intricacies of a game of Nosgoth; the ever-shifting balance between the teams based on their respective health, distance, clip ammo, cooldowns and attention.
Now it is possible to play as a team. Basic teamwork such as "cover each other", "drag a spare corpse to keep it fresh for a teammate" and "attack together" will already be well-ingrained. To go further you have to communicate. Is it better for the humans to stay in this camp or to keep moving to new health packs? Should the vampires rush the humans now while they are on the move or regroup and AoE them at the next health point? Do we need to change our classes and loadouts to counteract this team combination?
Some basic advice about team-level tactics:
Humans: Positioning - stand far enough away from each other that a vampire who has killed one of you has a long and painful walk through a hail of bolts and bullets before they get into range of the next one, but not so far away that you can easily be too cut off from each other by scenery or smoke grenades. Watch chriZor's ESL match videos to see good positioning at work.
Humans: Defend your teammates - scouts should throw down a volley as soon as the vampires engage so the rest of their team can use it as a powerful place to stand and pick off the enemy. Hunters should use explosive shot to clear out deceiver illusions and blast reavers off teammates. Blinding shot and sunlight vial can be life savers for an outnumbered teammate and give you all an edge.
Vampires: Coordinate your attack - plan in advance the order you will engage in. For example, have your sentinel throw an air strike to force their Scout to dodge and lose his drawn shot and your Reavers to lay down smoke bombs. Once the smoke hits have your Tyrant charge into at least 2 of the enemy and ground slam them to keep them stunned while the Reavers close the distance to melee range and your Sentinel swoops in to pick off the Scout before he can throw his volley down.
Vampires: Focus fire - attack 2v1 or 3v1 to quickly down a human and then move onto the next one. The only exception here is the Sentinel, who will take one human out of the fight and then come back with e.g. a second air strike to help finish off the remaining humans.
Learning the depth of team-based tactics and strategies will take you way beyond the level of this guide and into clans and competitive play. You have already learned more than this little guide can teach you. Enjoy the rest of your journey towards mastery of Nosgoth!
CecilSunkure's "How To Improve At Starcraft II 1v1 Efficiently" made a big impression on me when I first encountered it. It's much better written and more complete than this and I heartily recommend reading it. The title pays homage to that great work; thank-you, Randy.
Also thanks to RazielWarmonic, whose Sentinel guide inspired me to write this in the first place, and to SilentVirtue for taking the time to teach me about positioning and whose competitive Sentinel play continues to provide inspiration.
Nosgoth is now in Open Beta - if you're not playing yet then you should! You can start with a free booster using my friend referral link - see you in the game!
