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Avara Advanced Play
This document is designed for new(er) players of the fantastic video game Avara. If you need help moving or shooting, consult the basic play guide. This guide covers advanced mechanics, player traditions, and some basic meta-analysis ideas.
This is in the basic guide, but it bears repeating: a stationary player is very often a dead player. There are exceptions, especially stopping movement momentarily to “juke” someone’s prediction of where you will be, but generally you want to be on the move, always.
Speed, jumping, and weight are related. All the ammo you carry, the boosters, it all has weight, and the lower the weight, the faster you go.
That means, when you are low on ammo and on your last booster, you are at your fastest and most agile, and you can get away with more directional changes, higher jumps, etc., but this also means your opponent can run away quickly after emptying their entire ammo store, perhaps to the bubble, where likely they will be teleported onto an ammo pickup.
Every projectile in Avara travels through the world before reaching its destination. “Hitscan” or instant “railgun” type of bullet calculations are never done. Instead, every projectile does a raycast every frame for other objects.
You must lead (as in leader) your shots, or aim towards where your target will be, when the projectile travels through the world. Getting a feel for the speed of each (unguided) projectile is important.
Also important is being able to judge where a player is headed, how fast they will be moving while they’re going there, etc. Read your opponent and see where they are looking, guess where they want to be, by the actions they are taking now.
Swap out to your scout view to get a quick check on your surroundings. Many maps that are commonly played online will include spawn points high up in the air, which will position your scout in an optimal “birds-eye view” position without the player needing to do anything else. If you think someone is behind you, you’re likely right, especially in FFA, and it only takes a couple presses of Tab (scout view default key) to confirm.
Press the jump key and hold it down. You are crouched! Let go and you are flung in the air. You can tap the jump key for a shorter jump or hold it down for a bigger jump. However, you may have seen other players jumping what seems like higher than should be possible! This is called the Superjump.
Originally this was done by mapping a bunch of jump keys, holding your finger against the keyboard, and rapidly swiping it across the other keys, like a pianist doing a large glissando. Don’t do this!
The modern port works differently. Avara keeps track of how many jump keys are pressed down and held together, before they each get released in the same order, and then the jump is scaled based on that number.
What this means is that you can make a single copy of your jump key, press your original jump key, and while holding it, press down the copy of the jump key. Then, release each key in the order it was pressed. This will give you a higher jump.
The faster you can perform this keyboard input, the better. More keys have diminishing returns, two jump keys is the intended design. It is likely not worth mapping more than four keys. These higher jumps are quite useful for dodging incoming fire and reaching high ledges.
Be aware that the higher you go in the air, the more predictable your path becomes! You can expect a difficult landing if you attempt a superjump directly in front of an enemy.
This is most important in 1v1 situations. As you have limits on your ammo, so does your opponent. While keeping in mind your own ammo level is quite important, the ammo level of your opponent is almost more important to keep track of, since there’s no gauge at the bottom of your screen to confirm the information.
A full Light hector starts with six grenades and three missiles. Good Avara players can see or even simply hear some fighting, and have a pretty good intuition of player ammo levels after a skirmish. As your opponent fires ammo limited projectiles, tick down ammo counts in your head.
Knowing when your opponent is empty or close to it will determine when you should push forward, fight for ammo, or pull back and re-engage.
Speaking of fighting for ammo, you should pretty much always take goodies, even if you are already full of ammo.
For one, you can overload, by loading a missile or grenade and then grabbing more, filling your machine, and unloading, which adds the loaded item back into your full stores, “overfilling” the store. This gets reset when you pick up another goody.
But moreover, you want to make sure you deny the resource of the ammo to your enemy. If you control ammo points, you control the damage output, and you control the advantage.
Similarly, you can use the attention to this fact to your own advantage. If someone thinks you are going for ammo or are low on ammo, they might open their defenses to line up a sure attack on you as you grab the ammo.
Avara net levels, specifically unenclosed or “outdoor” levels, are not considered complete without what is called a “bubble teleporter”.
Teleporters in Avara have an “active range”, or a spherical radius from a point in space, in which players that enter are teleported to the destination (group of) teleporter(s). They also have a “dead range”, which allows you to “hollow out” a sphere, and the active range of the teleporter becomes the hollow sphere.
This is how a bubble teleporter is constructed around an Avara level. You can imagine it as an enormous, invisible dome that perfectly fits the level inside, centered around the level. This is why some angles on a level seem to have a smaller bubble distance: the dome is spherical, and levels are typically rectangular.
Usually, the bubble teleporter on the outside takes you back to the center of the level, where again usually, there is a goody that fills all ammo. This is a convention in many commonly played net levels.
You can use the bubble teleporter as a quick escape. If you are on the outside of a level, it is typically a few seconds of walking away. Oftentimes the bubble is used when a player can tell that there are more than a few missiles tracking them, so that the missiles are forced to fly back to the center or exit of the bubble teleporter, and many often can’t fly that far or hit obstacles.
It can be difficult to keep track of how much damage an attack does to you, or how much damage you do to another player, but keeping track of your score can help. The points you score are directly related to the damage dealt by an attack. This can help you get a feel for how much an attack should do in ideal circumstances, and how much damage an opponent has taken before and after an attack.
You may have noticed you can “lead” a missile around in a circle and leave it following you without hitting you, by timing back and forth movements.
You can also just shoot it.
You should probably just shoot it with your plasma guns, especially if someone has sent you a missile quite obviously from a standing position. These will track right toward you, shooting down the path should be easy. Missiles that have lateral movement are harder to hit, but generally from far away, you should still probably try.
Shooting down grenades is next to impossible to do on purpose, but do keep in mind that if you are in a position to flood the future path of a grenade with plasma, you absolutely should do that, especially in cases where you can simply line up the enemy there anyway. If a plasma raycast hits a grenade, it will ‘dud’ the same way as described above.
The primary method of recovering shields is by using a booster. While a booster is active, even if a shield is at max, it will continue to receive the recharge bonus from max energy. The amount of damage a properly timed booster can absorb is surprising.
Knowing when and how many times your opponent has boosted is extremely useful information, make sure you listen for boosts when you happen to be close to your enemy, or notice your enemy taking more damage than a player could take without using a booster.
If a player is out of boosters and at less than 25% shield, pretty much any successful or even glancing attack will take them out. Additionally, boosters have a cooldown, so right after an opponent’s booster ends is a very good time to add damage.
There are a lot of situations in Avara where players are separated by very thin walls or floors. What most players don’t realize initially is that explosions are not “stopped” by walls: the spherical check occurs on the other side of a very thin wall if one is hit.
What that means is that, in a situation where you have a very good idea of where an opponent is walking above you on a thin ramp, you can shoot the ramp “ceiling” where the opponent is walking with an explosive weapon and damage them.
When you back up into a wall and hold the input for that direction, you can sometimes lock your hector up. This is annoying when you’re just trying to walk around, but if you manage to do this up off of the ground, sometimes, on inside corners of blocks, you can stop your vertical momentum (at the cost of being able to move). You can stay up like this as long as you hold the input, usually, until you get shot for being still.
Similarly, collision detection against walls can be exploited when force is pushing you against a wall, either by walking or by an attack.
If you turn your hector towards or away from the wall you’re locked against, you can often gain surprising lateral momentum against the wall. This is an artifact of collision detection working to keep you out of the wall.
An ancient and honored technique. The scout has full collision in the environment: You can stand on top of it. Of course, this means that you can ride it around, if you step carefully. This also means calling it down from its previous position, which is usually already the best place for it to be.
Calling the scout down to jump on it is easily done against a wall, but some players can do it with no wall in a smooth motion, as the scout heads back and forth between positions. It’s done with the “Aim Forward” and “scout control” buttons mapped together, which by default is ‘2’ on the keyboard, sometimes combined with the scout control (arrow keys) positions.
Landing on the scout is difficult, but the stance you take is important, as the rotors (actually the entire scout shape) will continue to rotate underneath you.
The scout still responds to scout commands, so technically, you can fly the scout around–but it is quite difficult to stay on top of the scout while it is moving.