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Hardcore Wall of Text 1.5 Kabuto Guide

Posted: Sat Jul 25, 2009 10:30 am
by [NEO]Vortex
This guide will cover the basics of playing Kabuto as well as a few tactics and I have found useful. I also discuss some gameplay mechanics that most people don't seem to be aware of. It's long but I think anyone can learn something from it. I may update it in the future if things change before the final 1.5 release or if I notice I've forgotten something.

I feel Kabuto is the easiest of the three races to pick up the basics of. Beyond the basics, the majority of your skill simply depends on how clever you are.

If you're new/returning to the game and don't feel you'll ever be able to compete with some of the freaks who've played MvM for years, I suggest you try learning to play Kabuto.

// Notes on controls, cameras, and the interface.

You might want to try lowering your mouse sensitivity compared to what you use when playing a mecc or reaper, I've found this makes using red adrenaline attacks easier.

The health bar lies, and not just for Kab. You're at about 89-92% before you ever actually see damage done on your healthbar. Because of this, eat 2-4 extra things when healing.

The adrenaline bar is actually two in one. The first bar is how much adrenaline you currently have, it regens slower the less health you have or when shrunk. Because of this, you want to try and keep yourself at full health all the time.

The second bar shows your current charge for using adrenaline attacks. You charge adrenaline at the same speed regardless of your health.

The crosshair turns to an x shape when directly over someone, this lets you know when you have a lock and are in range to use a red adrenaline attack.

As far as cameras go, I tend to switch between third and first for adrenaline depending on the situation and use first for throwing things. I only use zoom when ordering offspring but you may like it.

// The basics of moving, attacking and surviving as Kabuto.

- Punching and Grabbing

When you have an enemy infront of you and relatively close to the crosshair, you can click LMB (left mouse button) to punch at them, or RMB (right mouse button) to attempt to pick them up. When sprinting, your grab range is reduced (more on this later)

After you've picked someone up, you can eat them, throw them, or impale them on your spikes to eat later.

- Adrenaline Attacks

When you hold down your adrenaline button you can charge it to do special attacks with a left or right click, here's an overview of what they are and how they work. Note: the damage of each group of attacks is the same (both greens, both yellows, etc) the only difference between them are animations played.

Green:

The green adrenaline attacks have a very limited radius, but can kill enemies if close enough. For the most part, you want to use these sparingly, usually predicting where a mecc will land and finishing this attack on them right as they do.

Left click is the more useful one here in my opinion. The animation finishes slightly faster, I believe.

Yellow:

I think yellow adrenaline attacks are useless. The damage radius is larger than a green adrenaline attack, but the damage itself isn't much more. Keep charging for a red if you get to yellow.

If you for some reason you want to use these, I think left click's animation finishes very slightly faster.

Red:

Red adrenaline attacks are special, not only do they do an obscene amount of damage, if you have a lock on a building or enemy - even in the air, you will go flying towards them and kill them. You really want to use this about 95% of the time, and green attacks the other 5% or so.

Left click has two animations. If you're jumping and use a left click attack without a target, you'll do a very quick ending slam animation. If you're on the ground and use it or have a lock, you'll do an animation where you flatten out on your belly.

Right click has a single animation, you sort of curl up in a cannonball like shape regardless of whether you're jumping or have a lock or not.

I think left click is superior in most circumstances. The jump animation ends much faster than RMB's and you want that. The longer you're sitting there waiting for the animation to finish, the more time people have to hit you with mortars or get you stuck in a time slow, etc

The belly slam left click animation also conceals your weak spot, which is useful on the air or ground. You can even get weakspot mortared flying at a gyro if you use right click (keep in mind it's really rare, but one hits you)

- Sprint

Sprinting lets you move much faster and climb steep cliffs easier. When active, it allows you to punt/kick enemies when running over them and clicking LMB.

It also speeds up your eating and grabbing animations, so you really want to have this active when eating.

Unfortunately, when sprinting, Kabuto's grab rage is reduced considerably. You also have to look down slightly or you'll never pick up anything while sprinting. I don't think this is a bug however, I think it was probably put in because the developers felt Kabuto was able to run up and grab everyone (including flying gyros) too easily with the regular grab animation while sprinting. Keep this in mind, you may not always want to use sprint as soon as it's available, you could miss out on an easy grab.

- Jumping

Jumping is useful in many ways. You can use it to break just about any animation if you need to. Roaring, laying eggs, eating, finishing adrenaline animations (after the damage has been done), etc

You can jump before initiating a red adrenaline attack to reach targets farther off, but keep in mind after a short while kabuto enters a "falling" animation when finishing a jump, during this animation you cannot use red adrenaline attacks.

Don't worry about not being able to use it again to break the ending animation, it should be available to use again by then most of the time.

You can also use jumps to dodge stuff and move faster, they're also extremely useful for getting out of time slows.

If you aren't sprinting, you can jump then grab or punch enemies in the air. I haven't been able to grab gyros in 1.5, but I know I've done it in 1.4. You can try it at least, maybe I just suck.

- Eating

Eating is important, the closer to full health you are the more adrenaline attacks you'll be able to use.

Eating has changed slightly in 1.5. In 1.4, everything you ate healed you by the same amount. Vimps heal different amounts based on their size, they heal the same as 1.4 when full grown. smarties heal slightly less than before, meccs heal the same and reapers heal the most.

If you're eating while under attack, grab something and quickly dash to the side or behind a hill before eating it, this will help ensure you don't take a bunch of damage while eating.

And as I mentioned earlier, you want to have sprint enabled when eating to speed up your animations and if you have the chance eat a few extra things even if you appear to have full health.

- Throwing

Throwing objects at enemies damages them. You want to throw different objects at different enemies. It's usually best to throw something at someone so that it hits them just as they land.

Vimps, palm trees and rocks are the best for taking out gyros.

Use palms, smarties or rocks on lone meccs, since they can survive proximity missiles.

Throw whatever you want at reapers.

- Roaring

Roaring doubles your adrenaline recharge rate, this is simply insane when you're at full health, which is why I continuously stress how important it is to stay at full health. You can't move while roaring but you can turn and use jump to break it.

- Offspring

Get them as often as you can. Offspring auto attack enemies within their line of sight, they're great if you can juggle manually ordering them to attack people or positioning them before you charge at someone so that your enemy might run into them trying to run from you. They can also help take out low flying gyros.

// General Tactics

- Rushing directly at someone usually isn't the best way to go about chasing someone down. You want to get them to come to you or move towards them zigzagging to get them to waste weapons or spells and use as much of the terrain as a shield as you can.

- You can use the third person camera to see around/above cliffs you're hiding behind.

- For the most part, if you grab someone you want to eat them. You might also want to consider throwing them extremely high up if you feel that particular player is a big threat to you - this will essentially keep them out of the game for a good 10-15 seconds. They'll still be able to shoot at you, but probably won't hit too often. Meccs will also die after hitting the ground, but Reapers can survive.

- You can purposefully get yourself stuck on terrain between you and your target, yet still kill them, when using a red adrenaline attack. An example being when you rush up a cliff at a target and use adrenaline on them before actually climbing to the top of it. Everyone will call you a lagger or say "WTF" but you'll know what happened, and that's all that matters. Left click is easier to do this with, since it flattens you out. This is really useful if you want to kill someone without exposing yourself to their teammates' onslaught of crap.

- If you want to hit a gyro with a vimp, palm, or rock, try doing this: Run away from them with sprint, get them to pick up their speed, then suddenly run backwards. Hopefully the pilot will fly directly over you, use nitro, and turn around to face you. You want to throw your object at them as they pass over you, by the time they turn around to see it they'll be moving too fast in one direction to dodge and hopefully won't even have nitro available to use. I've found this to be extremely useful when low on health and unable to use adrenaline.

- Red adrenaline attacks break current animations, you can fake laying an egg or roaring and charge up adrenaline as soon as the animation starts then use it on an enemy that gets too close. You can also use adrenaline attacks while carrying objects, a useful way to trick enemies (especially gyros) is to pick up an object and immediately start charging adrenaline as soon as the grab animation starts. They'll usually move in closer to you, expecting you to throw the object or eat it, then get killed when you adrenaline attack them unexpectedly.

- Keep in mind it's possible to dodge homers as Kabuto just like reapers and meccs can. This is really only useful against extreme powerup bow spam, but can still let you live a little longer if done right.

- You can climb up extremely steep cliffs, such as the ones on Lost World. These are useful for using green and red adrenaline attacks on gyros (yes, even green) or simply surprising someone.

- If you jump off a cliff then red adrenaline before the falling animation kicks in without a target, you will fly backwards to where you jumped off the cliff at, I've got plenty of kills doing this.

// Miscellaneous tips

- When targeting the Reaper comm center with red adrenaline, aim for the cylinder like shape on the top of it, otherwise it won't work.

- If you see a reaper cast time slow and miss, go after them with adrenaline if you can, they won't be able to cast cloak for about 5 seconds.

- You can grab the Mecc flag from outside the comm center without destroying it if you aren't sprinting.

- 1.5 added in rock generators to a few custom maps (before only available in singleplayer), on a few maps you can bombard an enemy base from afar with these if your aim is good. It's not anywhere near as effective as simply raiding yourself, but it is a lot more entertaining.

- Try to keep tabs on how many spells a specific reaper has used, so that you know when the best time to attack them is. Also learn to recognize play styles so that you're able to tell who is who without seeing their name tag, this will help you prioritize targets better.

- You can douse firewall by moving in shallow water.

- You can drown in some water you're normally able to wade through if you are shrunk

- You can adrenaline attack people behind terrain, it just involves some guesswork on where they might be. Wait for the locked crosshair then do it, you'll get stuck on the terrain but kill them like I mentioned earlier.

- If you get stuck in a time slow, be sure to jump as soon as you can and turn away from enemies so that they have less of a chance of scoring weakspot hits.

Posted: Sat Jul 25, 2009 11:05 am
by Ventovir
Oh mens! This was ALMOST as gud as SprinkalZ' kabooto guides!

Posted: Sat Jul 25, 2009 3:26 pm
by Giants_Gamer32
Great guide ! Kabuto has been always my favourite. The yellow adrenaline attacks are more useful than you think. It's very effective agains large groups of reapermen and rippers and does lot's of damage to the stone structures, without talking that he has much more range than the green one's and kills meccs and reapers with one hit.

Posted: Tue Jul 28, 2009 12:15 am
by [NEO]Vortex
This guide is only for multiplayer, and it only takes an extra 2 seconds or so to charge from yellow to red if you have the adrenaline available. Green one hits meccs and I think it's going to one hit reapers in the the next 1.5 beta.

Re: Hardcore Wall of Text 1.5 Kabuto Guide

Posted: Sat Jun 22, 2019 12:49 am
by Salazar
Bumping for Accuracy and Relevance.