Hey, I'm Valom, nice to meet you. I'm the guy who wrote this huge thing!
I'm also the creator of the "You and your machines" guide. so if you want an equally in depth look at the engineers capabilities you can find that guide here.

http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=390538574
Before we get started I want to say thanks to Niker for helping me spellcheck and make sure things makes sense. so if something doesn't make sense, make sure to blame Niker for that.

And since my spelling is so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ horrible I needed two people to spellcheck this guide, so Eels came and helped me as well.

*Audience applauds them both*

Since I am a very auditory person I'd love to give you some music to listen to while you're reading this monster of a guide, so here's an album by Rival Consoles if you'd like to have something going in the background.

To some degree, the Sniper is the only class that doesn't have a counter: all classes (in the right situation) will fall to your rifle. Your biggest counter is yourself and how well you can perform under pressure.

If you ask most people, they would say aim is the most important thing for a Sniper, but although cakes have sugar in them, they aren't entirely made up of it. There's more to this seemingly simplistic class than meets the eye at first glance.

The two main things we'll be focusing on in this guide are Location and Precision.

Here's a quick definition of what I mean by "location" and "precision".

Location is the ability to know when to stand where and where to aim, reading enemies, and understanding their patterns.
Precision is the ability to act quickly and precisely. Being able to have an enemy appear on the screen and having landed a headshot a fraction of a second later.

Location is what you do with the keyboard. Precision is what you do with the mouse
Location is the bigger picture. Precision is what happens from moment to moment.

Under Location we'll discuss:

• In-depth ideas about how to position yourself correctly.
  
• Reading your enemies in order to effectively counter their attempts at catching you off guard.
  
• The Sniper's area denial potential, and different ways to utilize it.
  
• Mind games.

Under Precision we'll discuss:

• The importance of inner game and how to not let your mind distract you.
  
• How to quiet your mind, both by breathing techniques and by concentrating on the moment.
  
• Practices and mindsets you can have in order to push your own boundaries.
  
• Both your hardware and in-game settings, and in-real-life changes that can be made.

Presence is, in essence, how much of a threat you are to the other team; even a bad Sniper can be scary if he's looking right at you, but a good sniper is hard to forget even if you can't see him, and if forgotten, will punish you for it. If you're getting constant attention and people are hunting you down even when you're in the cover of your own team, then you're probably doing it right.

A Sniper with good aim (precision) will do well against players with little to no experience, but someone who has invested a decent amount of time into this game will easily counter a player who relies solely on his aim. The Sniper would position himself poorly and easily be outmanned or outsmarted, resulting in him having no presence at all.

Likewise, a Sniper with great positioning (location) who can't hit his shots will be a pain in the ♥ to get a hold of, but at the same time there won't really be a reason to, as he doesn't pose much of a threat.

A good balance between these skills is what makes a good Sniper.

Sniper gameplay can look very flashy, which seems to attract a lot of people to the class.
This guide will focus strongly on the things which are often overlooked about the class, such as the fact that the Sniper is actually to a very large degree a support class.

Though the Sniper has an amazingly high potential damage output, the difference between it just being a fantasy or reality is very largely based on how much space your team can give you, and how much the enemy team contests your space.

How well you can find your own space is just as important: your team should not roll with you, you should roll with your team. In other words, you are to a large degree expected to find the space that your team will create and utilize it as much as you can; your team is not to be expected to push up specifically to make you space.

I've said space a lot, but havent really explained what I mean by it, imagine you have a Scout jumping around you. Charging up a shot to kill a heavy on the other side of the map won't be possible, and that's because of the lack of space, and if you're playing against experienced players, they will know that this is a huge weakness in your class, so they will abuse it as much as they can.

Now the reason I call him a support is because he fills in the weaknesses that many other classes have: he can give an insane amount of space to other classes so they can do their part, but he is not very capable of making his own space.

The Demoman is a relatively bad class at dealing with people up close. Even he if hits an enemy, he will probably damage himself in the process. If you're standing in the back while the Demoman is doing his job, you can support him both by scaring people away, and by killing anybody who tries to approach him. When they try to counter you by staying behind a wall, the demoman has more than enough space to do one of the things he does best, which is to kill people behind cover.

While it doesn't really take long to charge up a shot, it doesn't take long to kill this 125 health class either. The Sniper is the glass cannon of TF2, and ending up in a sticky situation usually leads to death since the Sniper lacks the escape 'abilities' that some other classes have. Charging a shot may give an enemy Spy enough time to stab you or allow a Scout to run around and get to a distance where you won't be able to deal with him effectively.

TF2 is very much about area control. Each piece's purpose is to defend an area of importance or to be able to push through the opposing players' defenses.

The Engineer is extremely good at keeping an area under lockdown, while the Scout is extremely good at quickly grabbing a new area. By playing TF2, you should intuitively have a general idea of what each class is capable of.

Like all other the other classes, the Sniper has both an offensive and a defensive side. Both of them are quite similar: he's able to penetrate the front lines and support his team by killing a key target without putting himself in harm's way. And he's able to lockdown an area from positions other classes are simple not able to.

I like to think of the Sniper's defensive side as the opposite of the Engineer: when fighting against an Engineer's nest, you'll know where the engineer is, but you can't fight him because of his high damage output and how much damage he can tank up with his sentry, whereas a good defensive Sniper's location will usually be unknown to the enemy team, and looking for him will be very dangerous because of either his sudden high damage output, or the fact that you'll have to walk through his entire team to get a hold of him.

Another common thing which tends to be effective is to "hard lock" an area with your rifle, which is the opposite of being subtle. You'll let everyone know you're going to keep an area clear of enemies, and, depending on how it's done, this might end up giving you a lot of attention. It's important to have something to fall back upon when doing this, as you are easily killed if you miss a shot or they flank you.

Though it's easy to stick with big areas as the Sniper, I really believe that it's healthy to cover small corners a Sniper would usually not cover. It gives the enemy team a surprise that they probably won't forget for a long time, and if you keep killing people at strange locations they probably won't feel safe anywhere, making them spend more time being careful about you than going for objectives.

If you've played Sniper before and have any experience with the class whatsoever, you probably already know that you need to keep the little laser away from the view of your enemies.

There are pros and cons to your laser, so lets talk about the very obvious con first: your laser instantly gives away where your focus is. Many experienced players may understand your current location from seeing your laser for even a split second, so learning how to hide your laser while still not aiming too far away from the original target area is going to be absolutely vital. Even leaving your laser at someone's head while charging it may give their team members enough time to tell them that a Sniper is aiming at them and allow them to dodge before you have a fully charged shot.

The pros are what really make the laser interesting though. They're exactly the same as the cons.

The only difference on whether it's good or bad thing to show your laser or not is in the situation itself: if you're aiming at a door waiting for someone to come through, giving away your position and focus is obviously a bad thing. But if a friendly Medic runs behind cover with very low HP and can easily be flanked, you should make your focus as clear as possible and make it obvious that you're waiting for someone to follow your Medic so you can kill them. While showing your laser may make you miss out on a kill because they where too afraid to follow your Medic, the life of your Medic has a WAY higher value than a couple of points on your scoreboard.

The more presence you have the better your mind games will work.

The mixture of having a rifle capable of killing any enemy at any range and a laser to make them aware of this is a powerful combo. If someone sees your laser dot at a doorway, the chance of them walking through that door for at least another 30 seconds is going to be really low.

So why is that useful? You can keep people too afraid to do anything momentarily, or at least make them hesitate, maybe they will stand and think for 3 seconds before walking through, or turn around and take an alternative route, this can buy your engineer time to set up his sentry. Maybe you bought your engineer 5 seconds, which is enough for a carried level 3 sentry to be fully deployed. Maybe their heavy chose to run around the corner with fist of steel up, which gives him a disadvantage to his offense if your team is hanging around that area as well.

Now it's very arguable if that's more effective than just hiding the laser and then killing them as they come around the corner. The biggest difference between them is that a bullet can keep a single player away from the playing field from in between 20 and 40 seconds. While the fear of being killed can theoretically keep all the players on the enemy team too afraid to do something for as long as they will remember it.

Being unpredictable gives you both a boost in survivability and offense.

As an example on survivability, going to the same spot over and over has gotten me killed many times, by snipers either waiting for me to show my face, a scout being ready to jump the corner once he gets any signs that I'm back or even sometimes just guessing if I'm there or not.

Many of the more effective sniper spots are also very vulnerable to explosive spam. If someone with AOE damage is ready to jump at you in a confined area, you'll stand little chance against them.
Therefore it's important to both read your enemy and not let them read you.

Now for the offensive upsides. Have you ever sniped in the same spot for a long time, and the second time someone runs by it looks like their character is playing "Through Fire and Flames" on a dance pad? In short, if you're constantly changing location they won't know where to do their dance moves for you.

Being able to read your enemy is useful no matter what class you're playing, but it's even more important when you're playing as a glass cannon without a whole lot of mobility, getting caught as sniper usually leads to death. There's quite a chance you'll survive a close encounter with someone, but there's also a high chance you won't, so being smart about your placement and being one step in front of your enemies is very important.

Reading a single enemy is usually not a complicated task, it's actually very easy to do, but it's also very easy to forget to do so. There's very few things you need to see in order to predict your enemy, first one which is both the most important and obvious one is: What class are they playing?

Each class has a 'domain', Soldiers thrive on high ground. Pyro thrives where he can flank. Heavies thrive in small areas. etc. etc

Hunting a demoman into a tight hallway is suicide. And the same goes with soldiers.
Hunting a pyro around a corner is suicide as well. And the same goes with heavy.

Make yourself aware of the capabilities of each class and get to know the map you're in so you know what they can do with that area, a spy walking into a hallway with stairs in it will probably lead to a stair stab.

The next big piece in this puzzle is how much experience does the player have in this game?
It's incredibly easy to see how much experience someone has by just observing their movement.
If a player is able to move in one direction while still looking around, then that means the player isn't entirely new, a few people, specifically spies, equip the gibus and pretend like they are new in order to get cheap kills, fooling people into thinking they are new via their cosmetics, but you can easily see through this if you pay attention to their movement rather than their cosmetics.

Lets say you're running after a spy, he goes through a door on the right, when he goes through he looks back at you while still perfectly walking through the door. This generally means he's trying to time a trick stab on you, and your awareness of him trying to pull tricks on you or not will probably be the decider between who of you goes out of that situation alive.

If his movement was clumsy and he didn't look back when he went through the door, then there's a big chance he won't try. Though with the current meta of how spies play, you should always be aware that even the newest players will try to trick stab you. And even some spies who has more experience tend to not look back so you won't expect the stab, though this is also easily avoided if pay close attention to them.

Or lets say you're hunting down an engineer, it can be extremely dangerous. If he is running backwards and shooting you trying to throw off your aim, then he probably has enough experience to try to bait you into a sentry, listen after sentry sounds, and just as a little tip: a level 1 sentry beeps once, level two sentry beeps twice, level three sentry beeps thrice.

Another decider to what kind of behavior to expect is HP, both yours and theirs. if they have low HP they will possibly try something crazy, speaking from what I tend to personally do, I'll pull out my melee and beg to jebus that they wont expect it, and I beg even harder to the lord above that I'll get a crit in this moment of both need and despair. That's generally not something I would do at other times.

If a demoman or a soldier has low hp then you're nearly guaranteed they won't try to explosive jump, and if they do, then that's a plus for you, either they will kill themselves or they'll be a very easy target for you. a pyro with low hp will generally try to pull as many people with him as he can. while a sniper will generally retreat and fill up his HP again. Pay attention to what people do.

Last thing is the players personality, different people do different things, try to keep your mind focused on what patterns each specific enemies do and think about how you can avoid them.

Staying behind cover isn't all that important as most classes doesn't have a way of dealing with you at long range, soldier and demomen can, but their projectiles are easily avoided if you know it's coming.

The main reason you should stay behind cover is enemy snipers. Trying to counter snipe someone while you're in the open will usually lead to your death unless you hit the first shot. So when you know the other team has a sniper and there's several lightly spots he may appear on you should keep yourself behind as much cover as possible in order to be able to easily take a shot and then immediately slide behind cover. It also becomes a bit more challenging for an enemy sniper to hit you if half of your hit boxes are behind a wall.

Some spots have extremely high risk, some are basically suicide, and your job is to pull as many people as possible with you. An example is the floor hatch at last stage on goldrush. When you go down there, there is no way you're getting up again without walking through the frontlines of your enemies. And as a 125 health class. that won't happen very often.

.
The risk is high, but so is the reward, as there is very little cover your enemies can take while you're at this place. higher risk very often means higher reward if you can pull it off. So you'll have to know your own limits, if the risk is higher than what you can handle and you die, you'll be doing nothing for possibly the next 40 seconds. 40 seconds very low risk gameplay is better than being dead.

It can be fun trying high risk plays though. It's a cartoon game with guns that can randomly do 3 times as much damage for absolutely no reason what so ever, over the top characters, and a world logic that only works in comic books and cartoons. have some fun! it's ok, I allow you.

Just as an example: Grape and Pineapple are very common Sniper spots, and neither of them do anything for the team other than serve up a few kills occasionally. You would mostly be killing other Snipers who are mostly killing other snipers. By killing them, you're basically just killing a Sniper who was only there to kill you. it's a pointless war inbetween two people.

Now don't get me wrong, sniping from Grape can be valuable. but it's not worth using all or most of your time there, as most Snipers likes to do.

in this example our Engineer has placed a sentry nest at the corner, which covers the rails if anyone tries to push in, but is easily taken down by a Demoman or a Soldier who wants to come from above.

Let's say a Demoman is coming around the corner at Banana. If you're at Grape he'll easily spam you out as the sentry doesn't cover you, and he's probably expecting you to stand there as it's a very common Sniper spot, but if you hold Peach and aim up at the Banana, you'll be able to either eliminate the demoman, or scare him away, and now he will have to bring a medic to bring down a sentry which is otherwise easy to kill. In the meantime, the Snipers at the Pineapple still aren't doing anything useful.

Downtime can become a big thing, running between two spots to keep positioning as unexpected as possible has huge upsides, you'll easily get kills, because they didnt even know they should have been hiding or dodging. but the downside is that you'll be spending a lot of time running in between these spots.

in the picture there's an exampled from dustbowl (Part one second point) where you can just completly ignore there common sniper spot and start scoping at their team instead. but the distance is long, it takes maybe 15 seconds getting there without being noticed.

An unexpected sniper is probably the most lethal thing in this game. though this rotation takes a lot of time, and can be dangerous, the pay off is insanly high, you'll will be able to kill their sniper very easily. and killing him from here will usually toy with his head, because he won't be able to snipe the long corridor without being voulnerable to the second location. he will have to be more careful. and loose the focus he had on the corridor. he won't know if you'll come back or not. and that fear alone can make him do way worse than usual.

Both very obvious, Safety is how easy it is for the enemy team to put you in a possition you won't be able to get out of. while escapability is how easy it is for you to avoid their attempts. I think most people are a bit too afraid of going into dangerous spots with the Sniper.

Probably the most important one, if a spot has a great view it may be worth going there even if it's not safe to go there. ask a Heavy or a Pyro to follow you maybe. but what is what is a good view? big open areas are nice, but they aren't alpha and omega.
The best views should:

• Be hidden from their common Sniper spots
  
• give their team little to hide behind.
  
• focus on an area where your team has to go

how much of your body shows? and in what general direction is it compared to their normal focus? if they can only see 1/8 of your body while you snipe them then there's a big chanse they won't know where you are before you've already killed them, maybe you'll get a kill or two from being there before they realise. also note that enemies can look out the gates at the start of the round and there's also loads of one way windows at spawns in this game. so you may want t take the long path to somewhere if you don't want them to see where you go.



With great diversity comes great responsability. some locations gives you the oportunity to slide in and out of cover changing location everytime with rotation time that is so low it's not even worth talking about, these spots are usually great to deal with enemy snipers. and most players don't expect this kind of behavior from you.

and further more, even if they do know what you're on to, it still is very effective tactic, and now it turns into a mindgame in between you and your enemy sniper. as he won't know which one you're going to use next.

Mind games are what I find to be the most interesting aspect of multiplayer games.

Mind games are developped with experience and they are -from what I've seen- usually very personal traits, I don't think there's a step by step process on getting better mind games, because they I believe atleast that deciding what mind games will work is beyond logic.

I believe being aware of mind games will help you develope your own way faster, so lets talk about what mind games.

showing your enemy something, making them expect something.
and then use their reaction to what they expect to your advantage by doing something else.

that's the best way I can define mindgames.

When other people are good at mind games as well,
And they understand how you may be trying to trick them,
And in return they use that to their advantage;
that's where the real fun begins.

Every class has different ways of using mind games. some more obvious than others. There can theoretically be an infinite amount of layers to mind games, but it usually ends up being somewhere between 1 and 3 layers.

Imagine: you're playing as the Sniper and you're up against an enemy Sniper. You've both seen eachother and know eachothers location.

But now you're behind a wall. He doesnt know if you're going to come back the way you came and try to shoot him or if you're rotating somewhere else.

if you expect him to go cover where he thinks you're rotating, you may be able to go back the way you came and take him down.

If he thinks you're rotating, he may think you're going to a spot where you can counter his original spot. But now you have the upper hand because you know he is rotating to counter you, so now you can rotate in a way that counters his rotation.

But what if he knows you're going to counter his counter rotation?

But maybe, while he started rotating to counter where he thought you would go,
you actually just stood still behind a wall chilling for 10 seconds.

#MindGames[s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com]

A couple years ago I had a friend who mained spy, he's by far the best spy I've ever seen, but not because he fooled people into corridors then side stabbed them, he was amazing at using his disguise and cloak together with strong mind games to fool people into thinking he was real. even very experienced players fell to his acting consistently.

as an example, sometimes after sapping a sentry nest he would disguise as an engineer then run further away from the buildings and pretend to be looking for a spy. though it doesn't sound all that mind blowing the way he did it was extremely convincing. change quickly between weapons on the disguise to convince people. hold wrench around a corner, pull up the shotgun afterwards, let people shot him but ignore it completely like any team mate would do. walk in ways that would make it too big of an effort to follow him to check if he really was a spy, but not so much that it would be suspicious.

I'm absolutely sure everyone has good and bad days, if you've tried playing sniper, you have probably noticed some days you can literally hit anything you want to, but then suddenly the next day or sometimes even just minutes later you can't even hit a brass beast heavy.

but how come? aim is not something that you learn and unlearn in a matter of seconds, it's more like riding a bike. you'll need to practice consistently to maintain your peak performance obviously, but when you're doing worse than you usually do, what is keeping you away from making the shots you want to make is only yourself.

inner game is all about giving yourself accessibility to your own peak performance. it's not about knowing techniques to become better. it's about letting yourself use what you already know to the fullest of it's potential. not distracting yourself with your own mind.

I got introduced to the concept of inner game from a book called 'the inner game of tennis", though this book is mainly focused on tennis, it can easily be applied to other parts of your life.
for instance: Team Fortress 2

I pulled out a little quote from the book that I think perfectly encapsulates what the book is about, highly recommend getting your hands on the full book, but that's for you to decide obviously.

Originally posted by W. Timothy Gallwey:

to play at your best you must live ever second in the present, this is concentration. the easy way to concentration is to notice all the details of the game, the way the ball spins, the sound it's making when it hits the racket, the way your arm is moving to take a shot, your breathing. while on the surface this may seem a bit dreamy, it is in fact the opposite, because the moment you really notice things you're not worrying about what will happen next or hitting yourself for the point you missed, all your energies are focused on this moment, this point.

another book which also talks about inner game is "Zen in the Art of Archery", if you're pressed for time, this book is way shorter and can be read in a matter of an hour.

making the mind quiet is no easy task. My mind is nearly always full of thoughts and ideas, and one of the biggest reasons I enjoy playing sniper in tf2 is because it gives my head a task, and it makes me able to have a break from the constant noise.

The most important thing when trying to quiet the mind is to have self-awareness and have a lot of persistent. being self aware enough to notice that your own mind is starting to make noise, and persistent enough to never give up. I'd like to share with you a very simple breathing technique that I learned, which has helped me tremendously.

Triangular breathing is a pretty simple breathing exercise. this is obviously not a meditation guide, so I'll keep it brief, but if you're interested in getting to know this exercise better you should google and find a website or a youtube video about it that looks trust worthy.[www.doasone.com]

anyway, to my short introduction.
the basic premise of it is that all the edges on the triangle are the same length.
and all the sides of your breathing should also be the same length.


inhale while counting to five, pause while counting to five, exhale while counting to five. and then repeat. counting and letting my logical mind focus on the breathing lets my subconsious mind focus on taking the shots, making decisions, come up with ideas and decide where to go next.

Note: when I say count to five, I don't mean five seconds, count at a slow phase that helps you breath at a slow comfortable rate.

you don't need to think about putting one leg in front of the other when you walk, and you don't need to think what keys to push to move in game, you don't need to think about aiming, and you don't need to think about where to go, your body knows, and your mind will only distract you from those answers.

do it in the moment, think about it later. TF2 has respawn times, you get more than enough time to think about stuff. just make sure that the thoughts are neutral, don't beat yourself up over anything,
it aint gonna solve nothn.

I've always done as much as I could to push my own limits, while playing engineer I kept using lvl 1 sentires and rescue ranger together, because I knew it would make me better, and with sniper I used machina because I wouldn't be able to get cheap kills by shooting from the hip with it, it also didnt let me camp anywhere because of the traced rounds, so I had to constantly move around. and on top of that I kept a constant track on my headshot ratio. and I was doing my absolute best to get as close to 100% headshot ratio as possible. even letting people go when I knew they had 40 hp left and would have died from anything, just because I didnt want to mess with my headshot ratio.

another part of pushing myself to get better aim was to find targets that where hard to hit, it's harder to hit a good heavy than it is to hit a bad scout. so finding more experienced players is vital in pushing yourself to start hitting bigger shots.

if you got a lot of time on your hands, get yourself an audio book or an album you want to listen to then download tr_aim_traning[tf2.gamebanana.com] and then go to the muscle memory room and do the point to point exercise. this is something that if you want to see the effect of it, you need to put down some serious time into it. I did it for 25 minutes a day for some time, and I did see quite a good result from it. maybe it's worth trying for you as well.

although getting a 100% headshot ratio is impossible because of the hit detection in this game being flawed, I believe my effort in keeping it as high as possible has greatly improved my aim though, and it's cheap and easy to do non the less. you can get yourself a strange sniper rifle and get started right now.

lets go through a little list of things you can change irl to improve your game.
I won't really go into great depth on all of these are they are things you can easily find with google, and there are people out there that knows way more about these topics than I do.

a bad posture will make your gameplay sloppy, one of the most important things with posture is getting a decent chair, my recommendations is getting something with arm rests and a way to adjust the height. when it comes to improving aim, it's important to keep your wrist straight. and leaning your arm at an arm rest so gravity doesn't have a say in where your will shots go.

most people would like to forget about this, but health actually affects your gameplay. now I'm not implying you need to be an athlete in order to play sniper. but I really do believe that getting enough clean water, nutritious food, stretching and fresh air will make you a better player.

getting yourself a large mouse pad is both inexpensive and yields great results, it gives you space to move your mouse around as much as you want. so it's a worthwhile investment.

because everyone likes different kinds it's hard for me to suggest anything. do some research and figure out something that works for you. a mouse is not the most important thing though, the most important thing about a mouse is that it's reliable.

make sure your cables aren't too short or hindering your mouse movement, some people like to a use wireless mouse. but I would stay away from them.

fixing the sensitivity can obviously be a very important thing, but the settings you should have is based on your own preference. I generally play with a very low sensitivity as that is what I prefer, it helps a lot with presission. if you want to start playing with low sensitivity then do so, even if you're not used to it your mind will only take a couple days before it has become familiar with it. try to not to put it too low though, you should be able to turn at least 180 degrees in one hand movement.

The second layer to this is your zoom sensitivity, basically the sensitivity you'll have while looking through a scope, maybe you'd like to have really high normal sensitivity but really low sensitivity while looking through a scope, it's something you'll also have to figure out for yourself, the default setting on this works perfectly for me but I've heard loads of sniper mains has gotten way better after changing this.

nearly everyone will agree that this setting is worth turning off, there's already loads of guides and forum pages on these topics so I will rather just link you to one of them.

this can also be important, it will clean up your hit detection a tiny bit, I haven't found it to be game changing,so here's a good guide on how to change your network settings.
these are the current settings I'm using.

rate 25000
cl_cmdrate 66
cl_updaterate 66
cl_interp_ratio 1
cl_smooth 1
cl_smoothtime 0.01
cl_interp 0.1
cl_interpolate 1
cl_predict "1"
cl_lagcomp_errorcheck "1"
cl_lagcompensation "1"

There's no excuse to not have your fov set to 90. so if you haven't, there's a FOV slider in the advanced options.

although this is the shortest section in the guide, I still felt like it deserved its own as it is insanely important: Make sure your pc is able to run TF2 at atleast 60 fps no matter how much is happening on the screen. there is two easy ways of getting stable fps.

• Buy good pc.
  or
  
• Tweak your settings.

getting a new pc is something I can't really help you with, but there's plenty of that online. but I can help you change your settings in tf2 to the point where tf2 looks like a minecraft mod. and by "help you" I mean "give you a link so you can go do it yourself". so here's the link for you.[clugu.com]

On the end here I just want to mention a couple things about some of the classes that I find important.

Every class has different hitboxes sizes, and it can be easy to think that when the spy disguises as another class his hitbox changes to fit the shape and movement of his disguise.

while in reality the spy keeps his own hitbox even when he disguises as another class,
I don't honestly know who made this picture, so if you know please tell me and I'll make sure to mention their name here.

your main focus of nearly every game is going to be the medic, medics aren't really a threat to you, but they know you are a threat to them, so a good medic will always try to stay out of your line of sight.

ubers can put an insane pressure on your team, engineer nests can go down to them, vantage spots lost, and their engineer buildings moved further up, pushing on your front lines even more than previously.

sniper being one of the best, if not the best class to take down medics means that it should be a huge focus. the problem is that you need to find him. and a decent team will do their best to stop you from doing just that.

when you're hunting down a specific player, being unpredictable puts you at an advantage, as the medic won't know where to hide from you, and the players who wants to get rid of you won't know where to look for you. maybe even if their team didnt notice you sneaking around you should let people pass so you can keep your position til the medic runs by your little shop.

a single uber doesn't last very long, so if the fear of your presence can make him pop the uber a bit early, that's a few seconds that your team won't have to deal with an immense threat.

scouts are a big threat to you, but you are a huge threat to them as well, because you can instantly kill them at any range, aim is obviously a big decider of who comes out alive in a Sniper vs Scout fight. but there's a couple other things to this as well. other than player skill, one of the bigger reasons a scout can dodge well is because of his ability to double jump. therefore you can save your shot till the scout has done his second jump and he will be gently gliding through the air for you to pick him off.

as we are playing a class with the ability to be a threat at any range we can basically stay as far back as we'd like as long as we're able to see the frontline. scouts do have to get very close to do any damage worth talking about generally. so you can keep a sentry either in between you and the scout, or keep yourself between the scout and the sentry so you have something to retreat upon, making it way easier for you to stay alive.

it doesn't need to be a sentry though, a scout will stay away from you if you are surrounded by team mates, look at your team and figure out who would be able to deal with a scout for you, and try to stay generally close to them or behind them so the scout would have to go through them in order to get to you.

the scout is a low health class, even just one body shot will remove 40% of his HP, if there's any other players or sentry around, it's going to be challenging for him to stay alive. practice your muscle memory and body shots should become quite easy to land.

another thing to keep in mind is that if the scout goes all in to get you, and he is skilled enough to kill you while you're around your friendly team mates then that means that you where such a big threat that a high skilled player is now dedicating himself solely to shutting you down, you are wasting his time. (this is a good thing)

incase you would like to ask me something, I'd be happy to do so.I don't promise any good answer but I'll promise I'll try, if I feel like the question would bring something to the guide I'll add it in this little section here. feel free to add me on steam if you want to chat about something instead of asking a one message question. anyway, thanks for reading. I hope this guide brought you some value.