Originally posted by Kaizoku in the steam forums. I made a few minor edits but mostly it’s unchanged.
Boomer Guide
The Boomer Guide:
(videos pending)This guide will explain everything I know about the boomer, and will be used as a place to share and update knowledge on the game from this fat bag of vomit’s perspective. Just like any other guide, this is to be used as a compendium, and not a work created by a single author. If you have knowledge, share it, if I give incorrect information, question it, if you don’t understand something, ask for an explanation.
I’d like to start this guide by listing some points about the boomer’s primary (and nearly only useful) ability, the vomit:
–Knowledge–
–The vomit acts, not surprisingly, like a short range liquid spray, though instead of a spray it will only hit people that are on or near your cross-hair, or where your cross hair makes the “physics based liquid shot” fall.
–The vomit has a delay after spawning that it cannot be used of about one second, long enough for the survivors to hear you and start spraying, so choose your spawn spot carefully if you plan to vomit close-range.
–The max range of the vomit is roughly 30 feet away, for reference on range, this is from the opposite wall of the NM1 spawn point, to where the survivors spawn.
–The vomit is at it’s maximum range when first shot, then rapidly reduces its range to zero, so if you’re going for range, you need to be on them right when you click.
–The shot does act like a physics object, and will retain its maximum horizontal distance (roughly 30 in game feet) from up to a vertical range of 60 feet. This means if you’re high up, you can rain vomit down on people from relative safety if you know how to aim it….
–Aiming the vomit from above needs a bit of adjustment of aim, instead of aiming directly at the person, you will want to aim above their head more and more as you get higher and higher. If you’re 10 feet above, aim just a bit over their head, if you’re 60 feet up, you’ll want to aim almost 0 degrees (straight ahead of you above your target.
–A successful attack only needs you to have the vomit stream on them for a fraction of a second, so flail it around to secondary targets as soon as you hit the first before your range goes down.
–The boomer’s death explosion is a non-physic radial attack, this means that it extends outwards on a plane, not up and down, and it does not fall on people like the vomit does.
–The boomer’s death explosion goes through doors, often this is a great trap to set for survivors that like to blast boomers by sound before getting a visual. If you can checkmate them on a door, you’ll get at least one person with either your vomit (if they open it) or the explosion (if they fall for the trap).
–You can become a “fire bomb” if lit on fire as a boomer, you don’t have much time at all, but you can kamikaze into the survivors once lit to replicate self-detonation.Quote:
+ A Boomer explosion can set off a Witch ( I think you need to scratch her once before you go boom)
Quote:
+ The Boomer explosion causes both Survivors and Infected to stagger , this can be bad as it can stagger a Tank …and good as it can cause Survivors to stagger off ledges and required to be pulled up.
Quote:
+ Surprisingly a Boomer is very hard to spot (easy to hear) in a Horde, use this to get as close to a group of defensive survivors.
Thanks to Asnogard for the above quoted notes.
With these things in mind, I would like to move on to tactics and team play. In this section I’ll explain how to work with your team mates, and use the horde to its fullest potential.
–Tactics–
First off, I’d like to talk about something relatively new and unused. I might be giving my enemies some good ideas here, but combined with a hunter/smoker a boomer can vomit *while moving*. Now most of you already know what I’m referring to, a boomer can start his vomit, and a hunter/smoker claws the boomer, moving them in the direction and angle that they were hit at. Most people don’t see the application of this… yet. Specifically for the No Mercy campaign this has a lot of potential. Using this to launch boomers off of roof tops combined with a boomer skilled at aiming can create an unavoidable boomer vomit. Even better, if not shot the boomer tends to land in the middle of the survivors. There are many applications, but I’ll leave it to the community to discover them…
Another tactic not used often is to use the smoker/hunters to create an opening for the boomer to separate the survivors unavoidably. This is most commonly used on BH 3 near the spawn. How this works is you have a boomer spawn somewhere safe near the smoker. The smoker pulls someone, and usually one person will come with them to help, the boomer vomits on those two people while the hunters pounce the other two. In this situation the horde will be between the still standing survivors and the people downed by hunters. While this only leads to incaps in very well synced scenarios, it still does a ton of damage if set up properly.
You can also use the following idea in a few situations:Quote:
Survivor melee doesn’t do damage on hit. It is scripted so that after a certain number of hits, the target dies outright. A boomer with 1 HP will still last four or five melees, just as normal. The right way to do this trick is to have a hunter soften the boomer up until the boomer’s health is at 6 or less. Then one melee from the hunter will explode the boomer.
With this idea, specifically in relation to ladders, you can get a boomer to cover survivors in vomit after he has used his projectile vomit attack. While this will stun the hunter, the other two members of the party (assuming they are alive) will be ready to attack, and I would say that even the hunter who hit the boomer could get away for a pounce. Used on ladders this can be a great stall/chip away strategy if you’re trying to stagger spawns to keep attacking on said ladder.
Something a little more practical that some people still don’t do with the boomer is a double horde. What I mean by this is vomiting, getting away, and suiciding when the first horde fades. I’ll turn you over to Woden for exact info:
Quote:
The vomit wears off in exactly 20 seconds, so when your meter is approaching 2/3 full, start putting on your suicide vest.
This gives your team a huge window of time to act, and usually ends up blinding the whole survivor’s team. The timing this should be done at is just before the vomit wears off, and they’re dealing with the last stragglers in the horde, you should suicide. This is roughly 15-20 seconds, 10 seconds faster than just vomiting again, and it keeps them in the same position. This is a great way to set up hunters for 25’s since it’s much harder to bash a hunter coming from above when boomered.
Quote:
+ A Boomer makes a decent shield, jump between a pounced victim and his would be rescuers to leave them with a nice dilemma. You can help the Smoker too. (I am pretty sure that if the Booomer gets shot and explodes, the explosion will push a hunter off his prey, or to cause the Smokers tongue to release)
Thanks again to Asnogard. On top of this idea, there are places where a smoker can pull near an edge, the boomer can then get in between him and his team mates, boom the team mates, and if he’s shot he will push the survivors off the nearby ledge. The other approach is to claw the survivor while he’s smoked, keeping in the checkmate position so the other survivors don’t shoot you.
This is what I have so far, I really hope this helps people do better as boomer and understand why they might not be hitting people, or how people are hitting them. Again, I’m open to any and all questions, comments, corrections, or clarifications.
As always, good boom’ing, -Kai.
Source → http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=815442
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