I don't understand how this guy doesn't even have 1000 subs, this guy is awesome! His tutorials help me so much in MVM, especially the scout, you are awesome!
Damn, it's actually pretty sad that this youtuber is underrated. I mean he has good audio, good content , and great animating skills. You deserve more dude.
I've basically learned to play Spy mostly by myself with just more niche tricks being read up on such as Medic or Sentry aggro to allow Spy to backstab "infinitely" without attracting aggro. I prefer Kunai as I get very aggressive with health and I'd prefer to just not spend any on health upgrades. I find Spy relaxing as I'm always moving and positioning well. He also has distinct weaknesses with his strengths which engages me more. Demoman bores me with a good team as crit sticky camping giants to blow them up instantly is just not engaging. Engineer and Heavy give me similar feelings but Demoman is on a whole level on his own. A good point to note with Spy is that since he can basically choose when robots spot him, he is excellent collecting money in hard spots even a Scout can get to if the team fails to hold the front. Some expert missions and certain maps are notable when I'd much prefer collecting money with Spy over Scout.
I took a short break from TF2 a few years ago, and from Mann Up MvM for even longer, and I was aghast at how boring Sticky-Camping Demos are making the the game these days. They have really perfected their craft over the years. Fortunately, a lot of custom missions I've been playing recently are too fast-paced for a sticky abuse, and a lot of custom maps feature two attack routes that are too far apart for one player to block single-handedly (Best Map Design Strat: It punishes the Two Cities meta so hard), so Demos don't ruin the game. Plus, since missions are new, they haven't been rehearsed 1,000 times like Two Cities. If I ever get to the Demo guide, I'd like to make it mission-agnostic: noting that sticky-camping is possible, but focusing on tactics that work generally, even if you haven't completely memorized the robot spawns. I don't like to advertise The Spy as specifically a "money collector", even though he can absolutely be the main money collector, because when most the people hear that, they assume the job is run back and forth across the map in an endless Easter Egg Hunt, while more or less ignoring the objective. I don't even think The Scout should have that job. But the video was already 20 minutes long, and I did not have time to go into all of that. You can never fit everything.
Holy crap an actual good MvM guide on RUclips ! Cheers to you and thank you for that video ! You will be the first RUclips guide I will ever recommend regarding MvM
I had a extremely bad first experience with mvm, I got bought in to a match by a friend and was told the "meta", since I was new they made me heavy for the tour. It was braindead. after the tour was over i didn't play again. this video popped up one day, remembering being told spy is useless by my friends I watched it, seeing all the cool stuff so i tried out a boot camp mission and almost top scored above a phlog pyro and had tons of fun while playing. I've also picked up tank buster scout from your scout video, also being told by friends the same thing you say in the video, switching off on last wave to crit pyro. I've been playing tons of boot camp mvm lately playing spy scout and sniper, depending on what the team has. with the stuff I've learned here, my friend group beat calignous with me as scout nearly top scoring below the engineer. thank you for showing me how to have fun with the mode. :D
That is certainly a useful feature! If I made this video today, I probably would have included a brief blurb about each gun even though knives are much more important.
I'm personally of the opinion that the L'etranger is the perfect option. Its damage might not be on par with the Diamondback, but the utility you can give yourself by distracting robots after you need to flee and being rewarded for it with extra cloak lets Spy lick his wounds AND directly benefit the team at the same time.
Fantastic guide! Very, very rare to see guides without misinformation, opinions and personal bias overflowing (Read: Better than 'famous' TF2 player guides that say the Tomislav is the best weapon for Heavy because it's accurate) If you're looking to genuinely play Spy I'm sure you know more than the average MvM caveman so I'll give a few tips that aren't super focused around gameplay. Mostly talking about Mann Up here because I play a lot of Two Cities. Below is a long read but a lot of important tips I've picked up over the years. -Play with a full group of friends. Don't forget, a single random can deny you from beating a mission by sitting in spawn and dodging vote kicks. Randoms hate nothing more than someone playing off-meta, look at the mental disorder narcissists at Tacobot. If you don't play exactly to their standards they'll do everything in their power to deny you from ever beating the mission. Picking spy with randoms makes your games rough considering everyone's morale drops to zero so expect throwers. -If your friends bash on you for picking Spy, remind them that Mann Up only really requires 4 decent teammates at minimum to win a mission, and if they can't arguably do it with 5 they shouldn't be here (Drive it home that there's room for errors in MvM, and that they're made constantly by nearly everyone. Too many people treat Mann Up like it's some extremely difficult monster, even the people at over 1,000 tours that are so jaded they have to tell themselves the thing they do all day is a real challenge) -Teleport to Spawn canteens are my absolute favorite, I've been getting decent usage out of them on a lot of classes. In most situations where I would buy Uber canteens, teleport to home can work great. Only costs 10 credits, keeps my form dying, lets me stop the giant Scout my team refuses to remember has ended this wave 5 times in a row, cheaper than a buyback and lets me upgrade instantly without demanding my Engineer buy 250 credit 2-way teleporters on wave one exclusively for my benefit. -TF2 is a buggy nightmare of a game. There are so many bugs that happen that affect your average MvM mission it's not even funny. With good ping, roughly half my Mad Milks don't register, for four years everyone in my team except me saw all spies as giant robots, sometimes your weapon will just shoot a different projectile (running around official Valve server shooting fire out of the Syringe Gun, I didn't even blink when this happened, it's to be expected at this point.) this game is a nightmare. When playing Spy, I've had waves where, for no real reason, **every robot can see through my disguise. Even if they don't shoot, they face me and hold aggro for an entire mission.** Even if you disguise in spawn and walk out to the robots, you'll see a hail of grenades flying at you. Be wary that sometimes, the game just doesn't want you to play spy. -If you're playing with your friends or a team where more than half of you can hold your head up to look at the monitor without your nurse's help, you really don't need a Scout. Now, the MvM purists (read: elitists) might say that Milk is *sooo* useful, and Fan of War is *soooo important*, and that the Soda Popper is one of the highest DPS weapons once you dump an obscene amount of credits into it, but if at least half of your team understands that money is to be picked up by everyone, not just the Scout, then there's room for all sorts of fun team compositions that are far more effective (Now you can run 1Eng1Med4Demo teamcomps, and no one will suffer because everyone will pick up the money. Though, running without a scout can be hard on the basis that, when playing with Randoms, they'll often suicide deep in the enemy lines for a few kills and effectively lose your team hundreds (if not 1k+) dollars due to extreme negligence. If you don't have a team of complete idiots, play around with not having a Scout! Having a Spy or a Sniper fill that place leads to a really smooth MvM experience! -If I recall, the Ammo canteens replenish your Sapper, but only if you kill all sapped robots -Engineer has the most MvM voicelines, so disguising as him can give you the most information about what's going on! -A note on *Strafe Stabbing*: It's really hard to calculate, but there *is* a bit of science to it to drastically tip the scales in your favor: First two stabs in the back, third stab is a sidestab, fourth is where the robot was originally facing you, and the fifth should be about where you originally stabbed him. If you're having trouble nailing this, doing 1-2 stabs in the back, then stabbing where he was facing works well too. You can juggle a robot doing 1 stab every 180 degrees this way. Not nearly as much damage but still a **ton**. In tight quarters such as the Coaltown training map U_ put in the description, when robots go to the far left/right buildings, I find it's impossible to circlestrafe around a robot hugging the wall, so I'll go for a backstab, then rotate to his frontside, then bail and lose LOS/Aggro Good luck playing Spy, and good luck beating missions with pissed randoms that you're breaking the precious "Meta" and "ruining" the game! Also props for telling us to not share your guide so our friends think we're just smarter lol. I'll pass this around to other well-intentioned MvM Spies.
I'll add to this that, if you have the money and patience to play Mann Up (too) many times, eventually your tour count will get high enough that most people will start to assume (for better or for worse) that you know what you're doing. This means that you can usually get away with playing The Spy with random teammates from Matchmaking if you have a decent tour count.
@@UnderscoreGamingChannel Most of the randoms we meet are just plain selfish bastards that start throwing fits when you tell them an upgrade they're using is bugged or try and tell them what a Scout block is, or to ask them to move the Sentry from spawn to the front line. Sometimes yeah a higher tour might be able to get their way with tour number, but it's hard enough to penetrate the thick skulls of randoms. We're not *high* tours, around 50-150 in our group, but we've never had someone listen to us because of our tour numbers, either they're willing to learn and improve in general or they're not going to listen to anyone because it's "Just a game" Still, to anyone who wants to get into Mann Up, it's extremely fun. We play it primarily for the social aspect of getting a bunch of crazy people in a call, and it's something cooperative we can all play that's very relaxed. Ask your friends to join! To my surprise we even get some people who join in who have never played shooters before, they're willing to cough up the cheap $4 for a tour to have some fun. And to that I add, if you have a vague familiarity with the biggest threats in your tour of choice (i.e. when to just pick Pyro in Mannhattan and airblast everything to the pit), you can invite anyone of practically any skill level you wish, so long as they understand what a Medic does. Official MvM missions are really easy, so invite your friends, play some meme builds once you know what you're doing and enjoy yourselves. It's not worth getting worked up over some narcissistic randoms in such a chill game mode. Enjoy it!
Sorry if I wasn't clear: I was trying to emphasize that they will usually leave you alone to do as you see fit if you have enough tours, but perhaps the counterexample I gave about the bossy high-tour was a bit confusing. I agree that it's extremely hard to get people to do what you want (I rarely try). I will edit the previous comment to avoid confusion.
Once I had a spy join my team playing Bavarian Botbash after our scout left after wave 2. Not only did we beat the mission, but the spy didn’t miss a single money pickup.
This is why I use the Sandman while playing Scout. Not only can I mark without risking myself, but I also don't want to get our Spy/Pyro (or the occasional demoknight) killed as they dance around the giants. The best revolver as well in my opinion would be the L'etranger. In situations where you have to rely on your DR, the 15%+ cloak on hit can be very helpful as a utility to get you back in the fight again.
What I can add - attack speed also decreases your time between hit and ability to use your watch, so it can save you sometimes. Also dps with 3 penetration and 2 attack speed is slightly higher than 4 penetration but thats like 20 dps, dealing faster less damaging hits is better than dealing slower more damaging hits through because you can spend an entire stab for 100hp robot. In 1 rare situation upgrading last armor penetration is better than 2 attack speed - it's when giant medics come, you deal roughly 4500 with 5 750 dmg stabs, but medic can regenerate some health so after 5 stabs he will have less than 50 hp, in other words - popped uber. Also first tick of sapper power is nice to have on uber medics/steel gauntlets waves. Also disguising as medic is the best option, you have the same movement speed and can hear things such as snipers or giant robots come or teammates death which is nice. Also sapper can be ressuplied by using refill canteen, but you can use it only if none of the robots are sapped by you(useful for broken parts only ig). Recall canteens are the best for spy, if you left without dead ringer charge and robots start shooting at you, you can use it as faster, cheaper buyback with speedboost
Omigosh, I forgot that Canteens refilled Sapper. I haven't done that in years lol. I used to care more about picking disguise (Engie also had nice voice lines... but now Engie is a speed debuff), but now I mainly care about speed. One benefit of disguising as The Scout instead of The Medic is that you're more likely to be able to get robots to follow you around instead of pushing, taking pressure off your teammates. Still... might deserve a footnote in the errata.
One quick thing, the spycicle still works if you use the sapper first and it's on cooldown, instantly refreshing the knife. Not a bad strat if lots of pyros are around.
Yes, Potato MvM missions can be quite friendly to The Spy. People love to make broad statements about what's good in "MvM" when really they mean "the small minority of official but developmentally abandoned Valve missions popular among loot farmers".
i dont collect money as a spy so a scout can have overheal when he picked it up, but he trashed talked for not collecting , i saw he was low hp so i let him but he trashed talk and went for a health pack instead of getting the money and actually getting over heal, not soon after a giant pyro appeared when i died because im forced to collect money, with no overheal source a scout went for a hp pack, and seconds later a pyro lit the heavy who was the main output damage on the tank got lit and going to an hp pack and it was gone because scout took the pack, the tank planted the bomb before i could even walk out of spawn, after the round he tried to kick heavy for not doing well untill i saw taco bot on his "player played as" list on his steam profile i reported him immediately please do not let scout do this
I have a problem I can circle strafe but every God damm mvm server has a m2 spamming pyro getting me killed while still being productive with liquid skill.
15:58 Demo is more useful for Gear Grinder aka exp mann up missions, but still is meta in 2cities tour. Soldier and Medic are only really meta in two cities while being outclassed by two more heavies in Gear grinder. Also Spy is surprisingly just better for gear gribder then two cities due to how spammy two cities missions are while gear grinder difficulty revolves around careful medic and giants location, aka the two things Spy excells at removing
Note on the red tape recorder, for missions with engineer bots, they completely ignore red tape sappers on their teleporters, allowing you to disable them easily without risk. so its a direct upgrade.
I just beat an mvm mission (Manhattan) with 3 spies including me for 5/6 waves. (They switched the solder). The best part is the robots never capped the first gate.
As a spy main i tried every Single knife in mvm here is what i found out Stock: this is the best in terms of reliability and has no downsides Kunai: Low health to start with but if you have full resistance Upgrades and backstab a heavy or soldier you basicly become a tank yourself YER: disguise takes a few seconds but can be usefull if you have a small Group of lonly robots Big earner: low health and no way to make up for it the speed boost is good but i wouldnt reccomend it Spy-cicle: as long as there are no pyros or hu long heater heavys you are free to go on a rampage and if you are surrounded by pyros you can get out of there.
Late to the party to say this is the best Spy MvM guide to date. I've been wanting to make an MvM Spy guide but this video summarizes almost everything I'm going to cover. Incredible!
The video was very put together; you clearly know what you're talking about and the information was delivered neatly and efficiently! However, it appears to be I am having some issues with the practice map. Not with getting it to load or anything, but for the fact that the bots do not seem to spawn at all. The wave starts, and they just don't come down. If anyone knows any sort of "fix" to this issue, I'd appreciate it. Nonetheless, great content and keep at it!
About the Scout..... Playing Binary Blackout as Scout, there was a Spy with the Kunai in our team, so it was hard to not take away his kills so he can keep healthy.
Go ahead and take his kills. He should be able to deal with it. The Spy can only have so much overheal, and avoiding damage is probably more important to staying alive than healing. And he's probably taking "your" health, too... in the form of money. It's not that big of a deal. Also, killing robots before they shoot your teammates is perhaps the best way of all to keep your teammates alive.
I know that the spycicle feels a downgrade, but if you watched weezy’s video, it melts up and can’t be used IF your sapper is not used. If the sappers on cooldown it will just give you afterburn and fire resistance for free! Edit: I’d also say that you shouldn’t even pick spy as a whole if you can’t get armor penetration, speed, resistances atleast 2 ticks and health on kill.
i feel like, even though on paper swing speed is the higher DPS option (when you have 3/4 upgrades for Armour pen), getting the 4th point in Armour pen, more often feels useful you're not always chaining backstabs, and sometimes you need less backstabs to kill the target because of the extra point in armour penetration just my feelings after many hours playing spy in mvm
I'd actually say that the spycicle is a sidegrade if you're careful, because if you use your sapper first before stabbing, your knife can't melt as the spycicle is coded where you always switch to your sapper everytime it melts, but since you used up your sapper, you have fire immunity for how ever long that sapper is on cooldown.
I've run into a problem while downloading this. I was able to put it in my population folder a few months ago, and that worked. The mission worked fine. So after a while I try to boot it up again and the "Spy Practice" doesn't appear. I've checked if the file was in the folder, and re=downloaded it, and it's still not appearing. Any suggestions?
No... that is strange. I've never had it happen before. It sounds like it might be a problem with your Steam directories, especially if other custom missions still work for your. You could try putting it in your custom > population folder. Or reinstalling. Or renaming the file. But really, those are all just guesses.
can someone give me more comprehensive instructions on how to import the spy custom mission? I don't have a "population" folder, and importing it into my "custom" folder doesn't work either.
Ironically, pyros tend to be my main issue as spy in mvm. Not even the robot pyros, but the ones on my team. They are constantly close to the robots and myself and bots kill me while attacking the pyro lol
I always find that max all res with health regeneration leads to me getting launched across a room by explosions rather than blown to pieces......you do become rather tanky
fun fact the spy cical is pretty good as if you use your sapper then get hit with fire you will gain the fire res but cus you can't swap back to your sapper it stays and you can be a backstabbing french men all you want
I swear to god that solo Spy map is actually impossible. By the time the giant Heavy is dead, there are two giant Soldiers within spitting distance of the bomb - which is right next to the point. I realize that I'm just bad, but holy shit, I have no idea how to deal with those two Soldiers.
I think the best way to beat the Soldiers is to just land 5 stabs in a row without stopping or missing (keep the turn tight), but a viewer actually uploaded their own playthrough where things go a bit differently than on any of my playthroughs, and they even recover after I thought they'd already lost: ruclips.net/video/0wLRDAznrFQ/видео.html Not gonna lie though, it's insanely hard. I haven't done it in awhile, but think I only win like 1 out of every 10 times.
Has anything changed recently about mvm ? because I really want to play spy on higher missions, but I allways feel useless there, because there is simply no need for a spy there. All giants die really fast, multiple übermedics are far more common than giant medics, and even then, the other classes can do so much burst damage that a giant is already dead after 3 seconds. why should I use spy in such waves?
What do you mean by "higher missions"? The Spy is pretty good for Gear Grinder and for Broken Parts. If every giant is dead after 3 seconds on these missions, you just have a really good team that should probably get a hobby other than MvM. It is true that, since MvM is almost 10 years old, all of the official missions suffer from large numbers of people having them *memorized*, which is inherently not normal or balanced. That's a big part of why I like playing Potato custom missions: They're new, and nobody has them memorized.
@@UnderscoreGamingChannel I mean missions like 2 cities. There, the teams I am in Deal with giants most of the time without problems. Normal robots are more of a Problem than giants.
Two Cities is really easy and suffers very badly from the memorization problem due to its popularity among item farmers. Especially the Mannhattan missions, which are poorly-paced and have long lulls where a Kritz Medic and Demoman can set up crit sticky traps and obliterate everything. The Spy is a "clutch" class and, admittedly, there is little point to a clutch class when your team is just shooting fish in a barrel, as they say. Bavarian Botbash and Metro Malice (even though it's on Mannhattan) might be your best bets.
I try to make my videos "exploit-agnostic", where I teach the basics of the class without relying on bugs to boost performance. However, this was my first and shortest tutorial. If it were 30+ minutes like my more recent ones, I probably would've had time to at least describe how the Spycicle interacts with the Sapper.
Another thing about medics reviving you is medics sacrificing themselves to revive you: if you died and are in the middle of the robots, and a medic tries to revive you, refuse so the medic has no option but to run away.
I thought the meta was one heavy, one pyro, one medic, 1-2 engineers, one demo, and one scout, sniper, or spy. All three of these are fairly good supports. The scout obviously collects money and mad milks the robots, the sniper provides some AOE damage with explosive headshots and can pick of giant robots just as good as spy but from long range, and spy well you kinda showed what he does in this video.
The "Meta" changes from mission to mission and map to map, 2Cities standard is what he listed of 1 Scout, Soldier, Demo, Heavy, Engi and Medic. With minor exceptions for Bottbash which is 4-5 soldiers where they use either no engi and all cow manglers, or 1 engi for ammo
Hey. I found this through Quenquent's MvM guide. I gotta say, this made me feel pretty guilty, I've been one of those "meta scouts" for a long time and never really knew what to do differently when we had a spy on our team. Thanks for making this.
hi underscore i just wanted to thank you for opening my eyes to mvm and how it works in a more realistic way without you i wouldnt be enjoying mvm like i do so i thank you for showing me the right way to do things
I WISH. Most people see the sapper and think that's spy's one and only purpose in MvM. Hiding and stabbing giants would at least do a significant amount of damage.
I agree with McCarthy's Ghost. We'd be better off if all people did was hide and stab. Sapper spam is the bigger problem. In fact, hide and stab is really just playing at a low skill level. It's arguably a necessary first step toward becoming good.
@@UnderscoreGamingChannel Honestly. While "Hide and stab" is of course, a big step in spy, this really cant apply to mvm since you are fighting hordea and giants that may outnumber and have crits 100% of the time who will turn to kill you just about instantly. And calling Spy "anti-tank" is just an understatment to what spy can actually do. Like he can do stuff not even Scout could: -Eliminate *specific non-giant* robots that can be a huge annoyance to the entire team instantly (Crit Rapidfire Huntsman, Uber medics, Steel Fists, Engineers with their sentries, Samurais, Snipers.) Like where these bots can be dangerous to any specific classes, a spy can shut them down instantly. Mostly those Steel Fist Heavies in large numbers. -Be sneaky and make it easier to elimate Ubers should Demo isnt available or not good enough. -Be a 2nd money collector to Scout, maybe collecting cash dropped by enemies in the front once the team got pushed back. And bypassing Sentries entirely to do so. -Bots *CANT* attack you if you bump, cloak or decloak in front of or near them. They will if you so happen to litterally decloak when they havent forgotten about you after a few seconds, or forgetting to take your disguise aftee a while. -Sappers isnt only good for both giants and normal bots. It's basically a total slowdown and shutdown for each, respectively. Use sappers on Scout Giants to effectively stop them where they go when Mad Milk, Jarate slowdown and Airblast isnt enough. Use (Lvl 2 or 3) sapper on hordes of clustered normal robots, where you'll be able to disable them and finish them off easily. And disguise dont get lost when you do. -And not many people knows this but..you can basically cheese the bots into focusing on you and you only, since Spy has the most aggro out of the rest. Everything will just drop their attention to shoor you unless a teammate is too close to them. This makes fighting the burst fire Black Box giants much easier to handle since you can dodge their rockets and make them focus on you solely. -Can fight against bots solo if upgraded enough and team is busy holding tanks. And they say that "Spy is bad. We dont need him" are people who probably havent even known his true powers when utilized correctly. He doesnt need to be an anti-giant to be good. He only knows when to move and appear, sappers can be very good if it is used well at the right moment, you cant just spam sappers like they are in pub because it's not like your knife does the entire lifting.
@@UnderscoreGamingChannel A great way to start learning the class is "hide and stab". It may be the only way if you have high ping too. Hide and stab can easily get you enough damage to hold your own weight in the easier advanced missions
Good video, I always took a liking to spy in MvM but hardly anyone talked about him so it was a lil rough learning him, but this goes over a lot of things very well, it would've been amazing to have found this earlier lol Some thoughts, I agree that regen is underrated for spy (dunno about engi since he can usually access his dispenser), and I find 1 tick to be incredibly useful, though I honestly have never tried using Health On Kill with my knife, so whether or not its better than that on average, I don't quite know I pretty much exclusively use the Big Earner, and, while resistances are always useful, imo the first tick of Blast Res is one of the best upgrades you can get as spy (with big earner). Lets you survive a single demo pill or soldier rocket directly, and paired with health regen, is really good for shrugging off some residual splash damage you'll inevitably take One thing I've never seen anyone else mention though, do Giant Demos just have increased reaction speed to spies? I know robots not distracted tend to turn around after 1 backstab, but with giant demos, I find this happening A LOT even when they're distracted. I've almost never encountered this issue with other giant robot types, and rarely do giant demos not seem to immediately swivel around
Best gun I can think of would be the diamondback, specifically for the tanks. store up a bunch of crits from the robots, and spend them blasting the tank
The reason I hesitated from recommending the Diamondback specifically is that it's rare to get more than 10-20 crits stored up, since The Spy gets relatively few actual kills relative to the damage he does. It's definitely helpful, but not game-changing, in my opinion. I wanted to focus on the knives so I didn't spend 10 minutes just talking about the weapons, which happened anyway on the Soldier video, lol.
thank you for the video! I both learned something new in this video AND used the mission in the description to try it out. Fantastic video all around and I plan to use the mission much more in the future to train myself more on the ways of the spy. Once again, thank you for making this video!
I’d say the current Mann Up meta is One Engie, One Heavy, One Scout using the mad milk and fan of war, one pyro using the phlog and (sometimes, providing there’s no tacobot player on the team) the gas passer, and sometimes a demo using the Scottish resistance with Crit canteens or a kritz medic, generally the last few classes are up to the teammates, which are usually sniper or medic.
I like how in boot camp the meta is just Engi+Medic and Scout. You can see a lot of silly things like Engi+Med, 3 Soldiers, and Scout. Or Engi+Medic, Spy, Scout, Soldier, Heavy.
The medic is just as if not more important cause of his shield. Without it, you can get steamrolled very quickly and with it, it’s a godsend. Medic is the backbone of the team, especially moreso in MVM.
What about emergency tank busting? I feel valve overly gimped spy, and he could be useful in a pinch to help more if either knife or revolvers got damage upgrades.
@@quentonfrancis2616 Obviously not, but on longer missions when there is money to spend emergency ability to have famage from the distance and to add some damage.
Yeah, being a spy while an annoying Demonight, scout and pyro run around me and giant robots while I try to do my job is ultra annoying and difficult. I am pretty sure I died a few times becuase of them making giants start chasing them and shoot us all while I tried do a bunch of stabs in the back. Thanks team, hope you get crushed by a Tank by accident.
As someone who mains scout in mvm because no one else ever wants to play him, and they expect me to always get all the money, I'm not sure how to feel about your hatred of scouts (although it is pretty funny). Nonetheless thanks for this guide! I usually try to be mindful of any spy on our team but now I have a better understanding of their playstyle and how to allow them to do their thing.
Oh, I don't hate Scouts. It's possibly my favorite class. But a lot of Scouts aren't actually helpful enough to their team to justify how annoying they are to The Spy and other classes. I think the "meta" Scout is probably the single worst thing about the Two Cities "meta." I have a whole other video for The Scout. Check it out. Drawing fire toward The Spy (or other teammates) because you're actually busy killing robots is one thing. In fact, you're probably still making The Spy's life easier overall by making there be fewer robots to shoot at him. Scouts getting The Spy killed instead of waiting 5 seconds for him to get out of the way because there were 5 credits on the ground or because they don't know how the Fan O' War works is the actual problem.
Mvm meta to me is Scout and medic and engineer everyone know why and solder for help pyro for airblast and demo for damage so Scout,medic,engineer,pyro,demo,solder But you can switch solder with spy if you're team is good enough
the 5 safest classes in MVM are engie - heavy - medic - soldier - scout, with the 6h slot being a free slot for wathever you need. Pyro is good against tanks and crowd control if he's using the gass passer. Demo is good at crow control and tanks too (not as good as the pyro tho), sniper and spy are good against giants especially giants that are pocked by various medics
@@scantyer i- I can't deny you're right But airblast is really useful some matches we all fighting a demo boss for 15 minutes we will never win if I didn't get max crit/explosive and got him in to airblast circle I just saw one do it but he saw me do it first is this a new Strategy that no one did it before me?
Hey, great vid but I'm confused on some thing. I want to get the auto disguise script in the files but when I open the cfg file I'm not sure how to import the code. Any ideas?
In your cfg folder, if you don't already have class-specific config files (e.g. "spy.cfg") and a clear/reset config file, then you'll need to create a series of text files with the appropriate names and nothing inside but the class config files except "exec clear" (or whatever the name of you clear/reset file is) and "crosshairswitcher/switcher; [classname]. At least that's the way I've always seen it done. The script should go in the spy.cfg file after the first two commands. It's easy once you have all of the requisite config files in place, but the clear.cfg file is too complicated to explain in a RUclips comment, and I'm honestly not an expert on this sort of thing, anyway. I think that most people just rely on an online TF2 config generator, so I recommend doing that as well.
If you run the spy-cicle, you can negate the loss of the knife by popping your sapper first, then switching to the knife. If you get hit with fire, the benefits remain, but because the sapper is also on cool down, it forced the knife back on, so you can keep back stabbing
One time I was on a community mvm game with modded cash to make so you have a full upgraded class at wave 1, I was medic, and there was this spy who I pocketed the entirety of wave 4-6, and by the end they did 181,646 damage.
Thank you for your guide. The practice map is absolutely sadistic though. Advice how to circle stab from a guy who figured it out through all the rage quits: there is a certain consistent timing to the giants turning around after you stab them - learn the timing. Also the angle of rotation is the shortest to where your position is when the timing happens. So what I do is stab them not directly from behind but slightly to the left/right so I know from which angle they will rotate. After the stab I wait briefly before the timing, then run around them in the direction they will be rotating. So: stab lightly to the left -> wait a while -> run to the left -> stab.
Hey man I'm having problems with the bind you set in the description it's not seeming to work even though I sent it up right is there something I have to do first to make it work in Game?
That comment about medics going for the revive is too true. Got fragged by a crit giant soldier, here comes our quick fix med with Uber to insta res me. Ended up dying several times in a row. Couldn't even refuse the revive cause the Uber revive speed was too fast XD
i fully believe spy could solo wave 5 of benign infiltration if 2 things were different 1. bots didn't weirdly follow spy around like he is there leader as it makes getting stabs on the robots even with disguises really slow and awkward 2. the bots weren't player capped as it stops the spawn of bots after the cap fills up which means all the valid spawns are filled with support bots not the actually important bots
It's important to be flexible as any class. Real games are messier than theoretical treatises. Also, this is my shortest, least-detailed guide. If I remade it today, it would probably talk about tanks at least a little bit.
I didn't see this mentioned in the guide or in the comments: Ammo canteen can refill the Sapper charge instantly. I learned something from this video. I didn't know you could backstab giants more than twice!! The gameplay was really cool, and the info is also really good. Thanks for teaching the community!
Note that you CAN actually spam the sapper by wasting it and then using prematurely bought recall canteen. There is no limit for canteen usage so you basically can apply sapper every 5 seconds of you will.
this guide is so useful, this guide singlehandedly made me become a competent spy in MvM. 11k damage in the end of Bavarian Botbash is absolutely insane and is so fun. Thanks for making this video and the practice map!
The spycicle is a upgrade, you just need to have your snapper on recharge and because you can't switch back you'll now lose your weapon but gain fire red
I didn't expect Strafe-Stabbing to be a possible technique. I used to just stab until getting detected, then cloak away before re-engaging because of how the bots aim. (Near instant snapping toward the player's exact position with a very short pause before snapping towards their new position.)
Great video, but _FUCK_ is that practice map hard. To help with that, is there any consistent way to predict the direction and rate the robots turn towards the spy? I've found that sometimes I could easily spin around the backs of giants while they tried helplessly to find me, while other times they'd make an unexpected flick towards me and track my movements really well.
Missed this comment, somehow. Yes, you can actually influence which direction the robots turn by standing slightly to one side or the other. The robots will make the shorter turn. If you're right-handed, I'd recommend standing slightly to the robots' left and then moving right to strafe counter-clockwise.
This guide reinvigorated my enjoyment of MvM. After I had experimented with many of the conventional classes, I grew bored and didn't know what to do until I watched this guide and hopped on MvM with Spy. I kept dying back then, and I still keep dying now. However, it has been stupid fun and through practice, nowadays I periodically topdamage on robots. Spy has been extremely fun and rewarding for me, even if some of my teammates are not enjoying it. Thank you.
Honestly, my current config is a spaghetti of previous settings from old computers, and I don't remember what I have in there. I used to use Eniere's "Improved Default" HUD, but I don't think I ever configured it on my current machine. What you see is probably just the default HUD with some bare-bones settings changes made by me. I really need to update my config, especially so you can see the damage numbers better.
Great guide, but I'd like to offer some constructive criticism: To be blunt, there are several points in the video where you are unbearably pretentious, making the video pretty difficult to watch at times; the multiple times you frame meta classes to be braindead / require no understanding of MvM, the self-indulgent diatribe about inexperienced players, and the offhanded remark about how scout is useless (demonstrably false, especially on expert missions) come to mind It's all just really bad for viewer retention since most people don't want to take advice from someone who's constantly stroking their own ego.
Thanks for the feedback. This was my first "real" video, uploaded over 3 years ago. Hopefully, I've been getting better with each subsequent release. This one's still the most popular of my MvM tutorials, though, since it's about an "exotic" class. Sometimes I think about going back and "remastering" it to meet my current upload standards. Also, not sure specifically which remark about The Scout you're referring to, but there's a good chance it was sarcastic/tongue-in-cheek. The Scout is extremely powerful and one of my favorite classes, but he's frequently gimped by people taking the "Money, Milk, Mark" thing way too literally, so at the time I wrote this video, like 90% of Scout players were demonstrably the weak link on their team. I think that's gotten better in the years since, but one of the most reliable ways to get a stuck team unstuck from a wave is still to have someone who knows how to play Scout switch to Scout, and to have the previous Scout switch to Heavy or another "easy" class.
![TF2: TRUTH about Australium Drop Rates! 1,700+ MVM tours [Case Study]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/-0IZ4X0ZBjs/mqdefault.jpg)
![TF2: TRUTH about Australium Drop Rates! 1,700+ MVM tours [Case Study]](/img/tr.png)
wait holy shit you only have 200+- subs? dude this is really high quality i was expecting more smth around the 100-200k range
Thank you! I appreciate that.
I love playing spy in MVM, he’s really good in the custom potato MVM missions due to the pacing and gimmicks.
facts bro theres way more giants in custom mvm so spy really shines there
The potato tour i played in 2021 was much harder thatn expert in regular Mvm (and more fun)
Undersore Gamer is a really but really really underrated youtuber
U forgot to add "good"
U forgot to add "good"
U forgot to add "good"
U forgot to add "good"
U forgot to add "good" please just fucking add "good" already.
I don't understand how this guy doesn't even have 1000 subs, this guy is awesome! His tutorials help me so much in MVM, especially the scout, you are awesome!
Damn, it's actually pretty sad that this youtuber is underrated. I mean he has good audio, good content , and great animating skills. You deserve more dude.
I mean he's called underscore gaming
I've basically learned to play Spy mostly by myself with just more niche tricks being read up on such as Medic or Sentry aggro to allow Spy to backstab "infinitely" without attracting aggro.
I prefer Kunai as I get very aggressive with health and I'd prefer to just not spend any on health upgrades.
I find Spy relaxing as I'm always moving and positioning well. He also has distinct weaknesses with his strengths which engages me more. Demoman bores me with a good team as crit sticky camping giants to blow them up instantly is just not engaging. Engineer and Heavy give me similar feelings but Demoman is on a whole level on his own.
A good point to note with Spy is that since he can basically choose when robots spot him, he is excellent collecting money in hard spots even a Scout can get to if the team fails to hold the front. Some expert missions and certain maps are notable when I'd much prefer collecting money with Spy over Scout.
I took a short break from TF2 a few years ago, and from Mann Up MvM for even longer, and I was aghast at how boring Sticky-Camping Demos are making the the game these days. They have really perfected their craft over the years.
Fortunately, a lot of custom missions I've been playing recently are too fast-paced for a sticky abuse, and a lot of custom maps feature two attack routes that are too far apart for one player to block single-handedly (Best Map Design Strat: It punishes the Two Cities meta so hard), so Demos don't ruin the game. Plus, since missions are new, they haven't been rehearsed 1,000 times like Two Cities. If I ever get to the Demo guide, I'd like to make it mission-agnostic: noting that sticky-camping is possible, but focusing on tactics that work generally, even if you haven't completely memorized the robot spawns.
I don't like to advertise The Spy as specifically a "money collector", even though he can absolutely be the main money collector, because when most the people hear that, they assume the job is run back and forth across the map in an endless Easter Egg Hunt, while more or less ignoring the objective. I don't even think The Scout should have that job. But the video was already 20 minutes long, and I did not have time to go into all of that. You can never fit everything.
Support Spy > scout
Holy crap an actual good MvM guide on RUclips ! Cheers to you and thank you for that video ! You will be the first RUclips guide I will ever recommend regarding MvM
agreed, its a shame most youtube guides just suck :(
Very underrated
I had a extremely bad first experience with mvm, I got bought in to a match by a friend and was told the "meta", since I was new they made me heavy for the tour. It was braindead. after the tour was over i didn't play again.
this video popped up one day, remembering being told spy is useless by my friends I watched it, seeing all the cool stuff so i tried out a boot camp mission and almost top scored above a phlog pyro and had tons of fun while playing. I've also picked up tank buster scout from your scout video, also being told by friends the same thing you say in the video, switching off on last wave to crit pyro.
I've been playing tons of boot camp mvm lately playing spy scout and sniper, depending on what the team has.
with the stuff I've learned here, my friend group beat calignous with me as scout nearly top scoring below the engineer.
thank you for showing me how to have fun with the mode. :D
Best, and probably the only good, guide on MvM on RUclips I've seen. Cheers.
I think the diamond back would be the perfect revolver because you get crits
That is certainly a useful feature! If I made this video today, I probably would have included a brief blurb about each gun even though knives are much more important.
I'm personally of the opinion that the L'etranger is the perfect option. Its damage might not be on par with the Diamondback, but the utility you can give yourself by distracting robots after you need to flee and being rewarded for it with extra cloak lets Spy lick his wounds AND directly benefit the team at the same time.
I always use the Ambassador regardless. Nothing better than making the insides of a robot's head explode in an electrical cloud
Fantastic guide! Very, very rare to see guides without misinformation, opinions and personal bias overflowing (Read: Better than 'famous' TF2 player guides that say the Tomislav is the best weapon for Heavy because it's accurate)
If you're looking to genuinely play Spy I'm sure you know more than the average MvM caveman so I'll give a few tips that aren't super focused around gameplay. Mostly talking about Mann Up here because I play a lot of Two Cities. Below is a long read but a lot of important tips I've picked up over the years.
-Play with a full group of friends. Don't forget, a single random can deny you from beating a mission by sitting in spawn and dodging vote kicks. Randoms hate nothing more than someone playing off-meta, look at the mental disorder narcissists at Tacobot. If you don't play exactly to their standards they'll do everything in their power to deny you from ever beating the mission. Picking spy with randoms makes your games rough considering everyone's morale drops to zero so expect throwers.
-If your friends bash on you for picking Spy, remind them that Mann Up only really requires 4 decent teammates at minimum to win a mission, and if they can't arguably do it with 5 they shouldn't be here (Drive it home that there's room for errors in MvM, and that they're made constantly by nearly everyone. Too many people treat Mann Up like it's some extremely difficult monster, even the people at over 1,000 tours that are so jaded they have to tell themselves the thing they do all day is a real challenge)
-Teleport to Spawn canteens are my absolute favorite, I've been getting decent usage out of them on a lot of classes. In most situations where I would buy Uber canteens, teleport to home can work great. Only costs 10 credits, keeps my form dying, lets me stop the giant Scout my team refuses to remember has ended this wave 5 times in a row, cheaper than a buyback and lets me upgrade instantly without demanding my Engineer buy 250 credit 2-way teleporters on wave one exclusively for my benefit.
-TF2 is a buggy nightmare of a game. There are so many bugs that happen that affect your average MvM mission it's not even funny. With good ping, roughly half my Mad Milks don't register, for four years everyone in my team except me saw all spies as giant robots, sometimes your weapon will just shoot a different projectile (running around official Valve server shooting fire out of the Syringe Gun, I didn't even blink when this happened, it's to be expected at this point.) this game is a nightmare. When playing Spy, I've had waves where, for no real reason, **every robot can see through my disguise. Even if they don't shoot, they face me and hold aggro for an entire mission.** Even if you disguise in spawn and walk out to the robots, you'll see a hail of grenades flying at you. Be wary that sometimes, the game just doesn't want you to play spy.
-If you're playing with your friends or a team where more than half of you can hold your head up to look at the monitor without your nurse's help, you really don't need a Scout. Now, the MvM purists (read: elitists) might say that Milk is *sooo* useful, and Fan of War is *soooo important*, and that the Soda Popper is one of the highest DPS weapons once you dump an obscene amount of credits into it, but if at least half of your team understands that money is to be picked up by everyone, not just the Scout, then there's room for all sorts of fun team compositions that are far more effective (Now you can run 1Eng1Med4Demo teamcomps, and no one will suffer because everyone will pick up the money. Though, running without a scout can be hard on the basis that, when playing with Randoms, they'll often suicide deep in the enemy lines for a few kills and effectively lose your team hundreds (if not 1k+) dollars due to extreme negligence. If you don't have a team of complete idiots, play around with not having a Scout! Having a Spy or a Sniper fill that place leads to a really smooth MvM experience!
-If I recall, the Ammo canteens replenish your Sapper, but only if you kill all sapped robots
-Engineer has the most MvM voicelines, so disguising as him can give you the most information about what's going on!
-A note on *Strafe Stabbing*: It's really hard to calculate, but there *is* a bit of science to it to drastically tip the scales in your favor:
First two stabs in the back, third stab is a sidestab, fourth is where the robot was originally facing you, and the fifth should be about where you originally stabbed him. If you're having trouble nailing this, doing 1-2 stabs in the back, then stabbing where he was facing works well too. You can juggle a robot doing 1 stab every 180 degrees this way. Not nearly as much damage but still a **ton**. In tight quarters such as the Coaltown training map U_ put in the description, when robots go to the far left/right buildings, I find it's impossible to circlestrafe around a robot hugging the wall, so I'll go for a backstab, then rotate to his frontside, then bail and lose LOS/Aggro
Good luck playing Spy, and good luck beating missions with pissed randoms that you're breaking the precious "Meta" and "ruining" the game!
Also props for telling us to not share your guide so our friends think we're just smarter lol. I'll pass this around to other well-intentioned MvM Spies.
I'll add to this that, if you have the money and patience to play Mann Up (too) many times, eventually your tour count will get high enough that most people will start to assume (for better or for worse) that you know what you're doing. This means that you can usually get away with playing The Spy with random teammates from Matchmaking if you have a decent tour count.
@@UnderscoreGamingChannel Most of the randoms we meet are just plain selfish bastards that start throwing fits when you tell them an upgrade they're using is bugged or try and tell them what a Scout block is, or to ask them to move the Sentry from spawn to the front line. Sometimes yeah a higher tour might be able to get their way with tour number, but it's hard enough to penetrate the thick skulls of randoms. We're not *high* tours, around 50-150 in our group, but we've never had someone listen to us because of our tour numbers, either they're willing to learn and improve in general or they're not going to listen to anyone because it's "Just a game"
Still, to anyone who wants to get into Mann Up, it's extremely fun. We play it primarily for the social aspect of getting a bunch of crazy people in a call, and it's something cooperative we can all play that's very relaxed. Ask your friends to join! To my surprise we even get some people who join in who have never played shooters before, they're willing to cough up the cheap $4 for a tour to have some fun. And to that I add, if you have a vague familiarity with the biggest threats in your tour of choice (i.e. when to just pick Pyro in Mannhattan and airblast everything to the pit), you can invite anyone of practically any skill level you wish, so long as they understand what a Medic does. Official MvM missions are really easy, so invite your friends, play some meme builds once you know what you're doing and enjoy yourselves. It's not worth getting worked up over some narcissistic randoms in such a chill game mode. Enjoy it!
Sorry if I wasn't clear: I was trying to emphasize that they will usually leave you alone to do as you see fit if you have enough tours, but perhaps the counterexample I gave about the bossy high-tour was a bit confusing. I agree that it's extremely hard to get people to do what you want (I rarely try). I will edit the previous comment to avoid confusion.
@@UnderscoreGamingChannel unless you are with Mexican food
@@khrislove5277 why?
Once I had a spy join my team playing Bavarian Botbash after our scout left after wave 2. Not only did we beat the mission, but the spy didn’t miss a single money pickup.
holy shit dude, amazing guide. why the hell don't you have atleast 100k subs? Hope you get there soon!
This is why I use the Sandman while playing Scout. Not only can I mark without risking myself, but I also don't want to get our Spy/Pyro (or the occasional demoknight) killed as they dance around the giants.
The best revolver as well in my opinion would be the L'etranger. In situations where you have to rely on your DR, the 15%+ cloak on hit can be very helpful as a utility to get you back in the fight again.
What I can add - attack speed also decreases your time between hit and ability to use your watch, so it can save you sometimes. Also dps with 3 penetration and 2 attack speed is slightly higher than 4 penetration but thats like 20 dps, dealing faster less damaging hits is better than dealing slower more damaging hits through because you can spend an entire stab for 100hp robot. In 1 rare situation upgrading last armor penetration is better than 2 attack speed - it's when giant medics come, you deal roughly 4500 with 5 750 dmg stabs, but medic can regenerate some health so after 5 stabs he will have less than 50 hp, in other words - popped uber. Also first tick of sapper power is nice to have on uber medics/steel gauntlets waves. Also disguising as medic is the best option, you have the same movement speed and can hear things such as snipers or giant robots come or teammates death which is nice. Also sapper can be ressuplied by using refill canteen, but you can use it only if none of the robots are sapped by you(useful for broken parts only ig). Recall canteens are the best for spy, if you left without dead ringer charge and robots start shooting at you, you can use it as faster, cheaper buyback with speedboost
Omigosh, I forgot that Canteens refilled Sapper. I haven't done that in years lol.
I used to care more about picking disguise (Engie also had nice voice lines... but now Engie is a speed debuff), but now I mainly care about speed. One benefit of disguising as The Scout instead of The Medic is that you're more likely to be able to get robots to follow you around instead of pushing, taking pressure off your teammates. Still... might deserve a footnote in the errata.
One quick thing, the spycicle still works if you use the sapper first and it's on cooldown, instantly refreshing the knife. Not a bad strat if lots of pyros are around.
Finally unironically used Spy a couple of times during one mission from 2nd unofficial MvM event of summer 2024 and damn was he needed for giants 😅
Yes, Potato MvM missions can be quite friendly to The Spy.
People love to make broad statements about what's good in "MvM" when really they mean "the small minority of official but developmentally abandoned Valve missions popular among loot farmers".
Yes,Now i cant get kicked from Mvm ghost town
The Four Scoutsman of Ghost Town disagree, as they'll kick you on the spot lol
Crits on kill for knife transfers to all weapons so it can be helpful for dealing damage with tanks
This is true. I didn't mention it because I didn't want to go that far into the weeds with niche tactics.
i dont collect money as a spy so a scout can have overheal when he picked it up, but he trashed talked for not collecting , i saw he was low hp so i let him but he trashed talk and went for a health pack instead of getting the money and actually getting over heal, not soon after a giant pyro appeared when i died because im forced to collect money, with no overheal source a scout went for a hp pack, and seconds later a pyro lit the heavy who was the main output damage on the tank got lit and going to an hp pack and it was gone because scout took the pack, the tank planted the bomb before i could even walk out of spawn, after the round he tried to kick heavy for not doing well untill i saw taco bot on his "player played as" list on his steam profile i reported him immediately
please do not let scout do this
coming back to this vid to say it has helped me a lot with playing as spy, thanks a ton
I have a problem I can circle strafe but every God damm mvm server has a m2 spamming pyro getting me killed while still being productive with liquid skill.
15:58 Demo is more useful for Gear Grinder aka exp mann up missions, but still is meta in 2cities tour. Soldier and Medic are only really meta in two cities while being outclassed by two more heavies in Gear grinder. Also Spy is surprisingly just better for gear gribder then two cities due to how spammy two cities missions are while gear grinder difficulty revolves around careful medic and giants location, aka the two things Spy excells at removing
Note on the red tape recorder, for missions with engineer bots, they completely ignore red tape sappers on their teleporters, allowing you to disable them easily without risk. so its a direct upgrade.
I just beat an mvm mission (Manhattan) with 3 spies including me for 5/6 waves. (They switched the solder). The best part is the robots never capped the first gate.
Damn nice vid, make me want to try spy in MvM for once
11:00 In our defence, mann up people can sometimes be that toxic and DO kick scouts for not perfect score, so ya can't blame him xd
this is a really good guide! I plan to do a tour and I'm sure this will make the difference
As a spy main i tried every Single knife in mvm here is what i found out
Stock: this is the best in terms of reliability and has no downsides
Kunai: Low health to start with but if you have full resistance Upgrades and backstab a heavy or soldier you basicly become a tank yourself
YER: disguise takes a few seconds but can be usefull if you have a small Group of lonly robots
Big earner: low health and no way to make up for it the speed boost is good but i wouldnt reccomend it
Spy-cicle: as long as there are no pyros or hu long heater heavys you are free to go on a rampage and if you are surrounded by pyros you can get out of there.
Late to the party to say this is the best Spy MvM guide to date. I've been wanting to make an MvM Spy guide but this video summarizes almost everything I'm going to cover. Incredible!
The video was very put together; you clearly know what you're talking about and the information was delivered neatly and efficiently! However, it appears to be I am having some issues with the practice map. Not with getting it to load or anything, but for the fact that the bots do not seem to spawn at all. The wave starts, and they just don't come down. If anyone knows any sort of "fix" to this issue, I'd appreciate it. Nonetheless, great content and keep at it!
About the Scout..... Playing Binary Blackout as Scout, there was a Spy with the Kunai in our team, so it was hard to not take away his kills so he can keep healthy.
Go ahead and take his kills. He should be able to deal with it. The Spy can only have so much overheal, and avoiding damage is probably more important to staying alive than healing. And he's probably taking "your" health, too... in the form of money. It's not that big of a deal.
Also, killing robots before they shoot your teammates is perhaps the best way of all to keep your teammates alive.
F in the chat for this mans sub count and this vids view count
bruh after looking at how good this episode is I thought iwas some big tuber I haven't heard about but then I realized it only had 6k views
i love the extended information. I really needed this kind of educative content.
I know that the spycicle feels a downgrade, but if you watched weezy’s video, it melts up and can’t be used IF your sapper is not used. If the sappers on cooldown it will just give you afterburn and fire resistance for free!
Edit: I’d also say that you shouldn’t even pick spy as a whole if you can’t get armor penetration, speed, resistances atleast 2 ticks and health on kill.
The Spycicle glitch is alluded to in the description.
I find The Spy to be perfectly playable without resistances and Health on Kill.
i feel like, even though on paper swing speed is the higher DPS option (when you have 3/4 upgrades for Armour pen),
getting the 4th point in Armour pen, more often feels useful
you're not always chaining backstabs, and sometimes you need less backstabs to kill the target because of the extra point in armour penetration
just my feelings after many hours playing spy in mvm
I'd actually say that the spycicle is a sidegrade if you're careful, because if you use your sapper first before stabbing, your knife can't melt as the spycicle is coded where you always switch to your sapper everytime it melts, but since you used up your sapper, you have fire immunity for how ever long that sapper is on cooldown.
I've run into a problem while downloading this. I was able to put it in my population folder a few months ago, and that worked. The mission worked fine. So after a while I try to boot it up again and the "Spy Practice" doesn't appear. I've checked if the file was in the folder, and re=downloaded it, and it's still not appearing. Any suggestions?
No... that is strange. I've never had it happen before. It sounds like it might be a problem with your Steam directories, especially if other custom missions still work for your. You could try putting it in your custom > population folder. Or reinstalling. Or renaming the file. But really, those are all just guesses.
@@UnderscoreGamingChannel Ok yea. I just uninstalled, reinstalled, verified the files, re-downloaded the files and that worked. Thanks!
can someone give me more comprehensive instructions on how to import the spy custom mission? I don't have a "population" folder, and importing it into my "custom" folder doesn't work either.
Your "population" folder should be under \...\common\Team Fortress 2\tf\scripts. If you don't have one, you can create it.
Yeah I figured that out. This course is really well done btw
Thanks!
Thanks! MvM for spy has been alot easier!
Jesus man this is legit making me wanna learning spy
Ironically, pyros tend to be my main issue as spy in mvm. Not even the robot pyros, but the ones on my team. They are constantly close to the robots and myself and bots kill me while attacking the pyro lol
I always find that max all res with health regeneration leads to me getting launched across a room by explosions rather than blown to pieces......you do become rather tanky
fun fact the spy cical is pretty good as if you use your sapper then get hit with fire you will gain the fire res but cus you can't swap back to your sapper it stays and you can be a backstabbing french men all you want
I swear to god that solo Spy map is actually impossible. By the time the giant Heavy is dead, there are two giant Soldiers within spitting distance of the bomb - which is right next to the point. I realize that I'm just bad, but holy shit, I have no idea how to deal with those two Soldiers.
I think the best way to beat the Soldiers is to just land 5 stabs in a row without stopping or missing (keep the turn tight), but a viewer actually uploaded their own playthrough where things go a bit differently than on any of my playthroughs, and they even recover after I thought they'd already lost:
ruclips.net/video/0wLRDAznrFQ/видео.html
Not gonna lie though, it's insanely hard. I haven't done it in awhile, but think I only win like 1 out of every 10 times.
Has anything changed recently about mvm ? because I really want to play spy on higher missions, but I allways feel useless there, because there is simply no need for a spy there. All giants die really fast, multiple übermedics are far more common than giant medics, and even then, the other classes can do so much burst damage that a giant is already dead after 3 seconds. why should I use spy in such waves?
What do you mean by "higher missions"? The Spy is pretty good for Gear Grinder and for Broken Parts. If every giant is dead after 3 seconds on these missions, you just have a really good team that should probably get a hobby other than MvM.
It is true that, since MvM is almost 10 years old, all of the official missions suffer from large numbers of people having them *memorized*, which is inherently not normal or balanced. That's a big part of why I like playing Potato custom missions: They're new, and nobody has them memorized.
@@UnderscoreGamingChannel I mean missions like 2 cities. There, the teams I am in Deal with giants most of the time without problems. Normal robots are more of a Problem than giants.
Two Cities is really easy and suffers very badly from the memorization problem due to its popularity among item farmers. Especially the Mannhattan missions, which are poorly-paced and have long lulls where a Kritz Medic and Demoman can set up crit sticky traps and obliterate everything.
The Spy is a "clutch" class and, admittedly, there is little point to a clutch class when your team is just shooting fish in a barrel, as they say. Bavarian Botbash and Metro Malice (even though it's on Mannhattan) might be your best bets.
The spy-cicle is essentially a direct upgrade to stock if you wasted your sapper,which you probably did
I try to make my videos "exploit-agnostic", where I teach the basics of the class without relying on bugs to boost performance.
However, this was my first and shortest tutorial. If it were 30+ minutes like my more recent ones, I probably would've had time to at least describe how the Spycicle interacts with the Sapper.
@@UnderscoreGamingChannel I understand.Have an amazing day sir.
@@erikarsov4365And you as well!
Another thing about medics reviving you is medics sacrificing themselves to revive you: if you died and are in the middle of the robots, and a medic tries to revive you, refuse so the medic has no option but to run away.
I thought the meta was one heavy, one pyro, one medic, 1-2 engineers, one demo, and one scout, sniper, or spy. All three of these are fairly good supports. The scout obviously collects money and mad milks the robots, the sniper provides some AOE damage with explosive headshots and can pick of giant robots just as good as spy but from long range, and spy well you kinda showed what he does in this video.
The "Meta" changes from mission to mission and map to map, 2Cities standard is what he listed of 1 Scout, Soldier, Demo, Heavy, Engi and Medic. With minor exceptions for Bottbash which is 4-5 soldiers where they use either no engi and all cow manglers, or 1 engi for ammo
But honestly you can rock most team comps. As long as 50% of your players actually know how to play their current class.
Hey. I found this through Quenquent's MvM guide. I gotta say, this made me feel pretty guilty, I've been one of those "meta scouts" for a long time and never really knew what to do differently when we had a spy on our team. Thanks for making this.
Great video man! Can't believe you only have 400 subs
Ikr
hi underscore
i just wanted to thank you for opening my eyes to mvm and how it works in a more realistic way
without you i wouldnt be enjoying mvm like i do so i thank you for showing me the right way to do things
Spy is probably the most misunderstood and poorly used class because most people just keeps thinking that it is "hide and stab."
I WISH. Most people see the sapper and think that's spy's one and only purpose in MvM. Hiding and stabbing giants would at least do a significant amount of damage.
I agree with McCarthy's Ghost. We'd be better off if all people did was hide and stab. Sapper spam is the bigger problem.
In fact, hide and stab is really just playing at a low skill level. It's arguably a necessary first step toward becoming good.
@@UnderscoreGamingChannel
Honestly. While "Hide and stab" is of course, a big step in spy, this really cant apply to mvm since you are fighting hordea and giants that may outnumber and have crits 100% of the time who will turn to kill you just about instantly. And calling Spy "anti-tank" is just an understatment to what spy can actually do.
Like he can do stuff not even Scout could:
-Eliminate *specific non-giant* robots that can be a huge annoyance to the entire team instantly (Crit Rapidfire Huntsman, Uber medics, Steel Fists, Engineers with their sentries, Samurais, Snipers.) Like where these bots can be dangerous to any specific classes, a spy can shut them down instantly. Mostly those Steel Fist Heavies in large numbers.
-Be sneaky and make it easier to elimate Ubers should Demo isnt available or not good enough.
-Be a 2nd money collector to Scout, maybe collecting cash dropped by enemies in the front once the team got pushed back. And bypassing Sentries entirely to do so.
-Bots *CANT* attack you if you bump, cloak or decloak in front of or near them. They will if you so happen to litterally decloak when they havent forgotten about you after a few seconds, or forgetting to take your disguise aftee a while.
-Sappers isnt only good for both giants and normal bots. It's basically a total slowdown and shutdown for each, respectively. Use sappers on Scout Giants to effectively stop them where they go when Mad Milk, Jarate slowdown and Airblast isnt enough. Use (Lvl 2 or 3) sapper on hordes of clustered normal robots, where you'll be able to disable them and finish them off easily. And disguise dont get lost when you do.
-And not many people knows this but..you can basically cheese the bots into focusing on you and you only, since Spy has the most aggro out of the rest. Everything will just drop their attention to shoor you unless a teammate is too close to them. This makes fighting the burst fire Black Box giants much easier to handle since you can dodge their rockets and make them focus on you solely.
-Can fight against bots solo if upgraded enough and team is busy holding tanks.
And they say that "Spy is bad. We dont need him" are people who probably havent even known his true powers when utilized correctly.
He doesnt need to be an anti-giant to be good. He only knows when to move and appear, sappers can be very good if it is used well at the right moment, you cant just spam sappers like they are in pub because it's not like your knife does the entire lifting.
@@UnderscoreGamingChannel A great way to start learning the class is "hide and stab". It may be the only way if you have high ping too. Hide and stab can easily get you enough damage to hold your own weight in the easier advanced missions
13:22here he is the fan-o-war scout coming to save the money i i.I mean the day
Ho... ly... shit. Words cannot describe how amazed I am at this video.
Good video, I always took a liking to spy in MvM but hardly anyone talked about him so it was a lil rough learning him, but this goes over a lot of things very well, it would've been amazing to have found this earlier lol
Some thoughts, I agree that regen is underrated for spy (dunno about engi since he can usually access his dispenser), and I find 1 tick to be incredibly useful, though I honestly have never tried using Health On Kill with my knife, so whether or not its better than that on average, I don't quite know
I pretty much exclusively use the Big Earner, and, while resistances are always useful, imo the first tick of Blast Res is one of the best upgrades you can get as spy (with big earner). Lets you survive a single demo pill or soldier rocket directly, and paired with health regen, is really good for shrugging off some residual splash damage you'll inevitably take
One thing I've never seen anyone else mention though, do Giant Demos just have increased reaction speed to spies? I know robots not distracted tend to turn around after 1 backstab, but with giant demos, I find this happening A LOT even when they're distracted. I've almost never encountered this issue with other giant robot types, and rarely do giant demos not seem to immediately swivel around
I'd assume it's that Giant Demos have faster move speed than Heavies and Soldiers, though I don't know for sure.
I dont like spys in mvm but this video is a very good tutorial cheers
Thanks man, was trying to figure out what to do as a Spy in MVM. Got a sweet score!
incredibly good production quality and just general content, how tf do you only have 900 subs
Best gun I can think of would be the diamondback, specifically for the tanks. store up a bunch of crits from the robots, and spend them blasting the tank
The reason I hesitated from recommending the Diamondback specifically is that it's rare to get more than 10-20 crits stored up, since The Spy gets relatively few actual kills relative to the damage he does. It's definitely helpful, but not game-changing, in my opinion. I wanted to focus on the knives so I didn't spend 10 minutes just talking about the weapons, which happened anyway on the Soldier video, lol.
@@UnderscoreGamingChannel i just use spy as a ubercharge canteen guzzling giant buster. and money.
You're missing out, bro.
also, how do you deal with the damn blackboxes in the training map?
Don't miss.
Actually, you can miss, as long as you run in tight enough circles that they can't get you in their crosshairs.
@@UnderscoreGamingChannel yeah but as soon as they lock on to you, you're fucked and have to start over.
thank you for the video! I both learned something new in this video AND used the mission in the description to try it out. Fantastic video all around and I plan to use the mission much more in the future to train myself more on the ways of the spy. Once again, thank you for making this video!
I’d say the current Mann Up meta is One Engie, One Heavy, One Scout using the mad milk and fan of war, one pyro using the phlog and (sometimes, providing there’s no tacobot player on the team) the gas passer, and sometimes a demo using the Scottish resistance with Crit canteens or a kritz medic, generally the last few classes are up to the teammates, which are usually sniper or medic.
I like how in boot camp the meta is just Engi+Medic and Scout. You can see a lot of silly things like Engi+Med, 3 Soldiers, and Scout. Or Engi+Medic, Spy, Scout, Soldier, Heavy.
The medic is just as if not more important cause of his shield. Without it, you can get steamrolled very quickly and with it, it’s a godsend. Medic is the backbone of the team, especially moreso in MVM.
Can you make a video about enngineer or pyro i love both characters and i need a guide
Those are currently planned as videos #4 and #5! Soldier is next (#3).
When does it come out? The spy video was made 11 months ago and the scout video was made 6 months ago
Hmm. There appears to be a pattern developing. ;)
(Spy video was released Christmas Day 2019... basically 12 months ago.)
Good video, even when it'S 3 years old!
Dude you need more subs
What about emergency tank busting? I feel valve overly gimped spy, and he could be useful in a pinch to help more if either knife or revolvers got damage upgrades.
No, he shouldn't tank bust...
@@quentonfrancis2616 Obviously not, but on longer missions when there is money to spend emergency ability to have famage from the distance and to add some damage.
Shouldn't the Diamondback be the best revolver, hands down? Backstab 20 robots, then unload 2000 damage into the tank.
Yeah, being a spy while an annoying Demonight, scout and pyro run around me and giant robots while I try to do my job is ultra annoying and difficult. I am pretty sure I died a few times becuase of them making giants start chasing them and shoot us all while I tried do a bunch of stabs in the back. Thanks team, hope you get crushed by a Tank by accident.
As someone who mains scout in mvm because no one else ever wants to play him, and they expect me to always get all the money, I'm not sure how to feel about your hatred of scouts (although it is pretty funny). Nonetheless thanks for this guide! I usually try to be mindful of any spy on our team but now I have a better understanding of their playstyle and how to allow them to do their thing.
Oh, I don't hate Scouts. It's possibly my favorite class. But a lot of Scouts aren't actually helpful enough to their team to justify how annoying they are to The Spy and other classes. I think the "meta" Scout is probably the single worst thing about the Two Cities "meta." I have a whole other video for The Scout. Check it out.
Drawing fire toward The Spy (or other teammates) because you're actually busy killing robots is one thing. In fact, you're probably still making The Spy's life easier overall by making there be fewer robots to shoot at him. Scouts getting The Spy killed instead of waiting 5 seconds for him to get out of the way because there were 5 credits on the ground or because they don't know how the Fan O' War works is the actual problem.
@@UnderscoreGamingChannel Ah that's understandable. I'll check out your scout guide, thanks!
Mvm meta to me is
Scout and medic and engineer everyone know why and solder for help pyro for airblast and demo for damage so
Scout,medic,engineer,pyro,demo,solder
But you can switch solder with spy if you're team is good enough
the 5 safest classes in MVM are engie - heavy - medic - soldier - scout, with the 6h slot being a free slot for wathever you need. Pyro is good against tanks and crowd control if he's using the gass passer. Demo is good at crow control and tanks too (not as good as the pyro tho), sniper and spy are good against giants especially giants that are pocked by various medics
@@scantyer i- I can't deny you're right
But airblast is really useful some matches we all fighting a demo boss for 15 minutes we will never win if I didn't get max crit/explosive and got him in to airblast circle
I just saw one do it but he saw me do it first is this a new Strategy that no one did it before me?
@@scantyer sniper with eh can do onpar with demo tho
Hey, great vid but I'm confused on some thing. I want to get the auto disguise script in the files but when I open the cfg file I'm not sure how to import the code. Any ideas?
In your cfg folder, if you don't already have class-specific config files (e.g. "spy.cfg") and a clear/reset config file, then you'll need to create a series of text files with the appropriate names and nothing inside but the class config files except "exec clear" (or whatever the name of you clear/reset file is) and "crosshairswitcher/switcher; [classname]. At least that's the way I've always seen it done. The script should go in the spy.cfg file after the first two commands.
It's easy once you have all of the requisite config files in place, but the clear.cfg file is too complicated to explain in a RUclips comment, and I'm honestly not an expert on this sort of thing, anyway. I think that most people just rely on an online TF2 config generator, so I recommend doing that as well.
I got it to work, thanks!
If you run the spy-cicle, you can negate the loss of the knife by popping your sapper first, then switching to the knife. If you get hit with fire, the benefits remain, but because the sapper is also on cool down, it forced the knife back on, so you can keep back stabbing
One time I was on a community mvm game with modded cash to make so you have a full upgraded class at wave 1, I was medic, and there was this spy who I pocketed the entirety of wave 4-6, and by the end they did 181,646 damage.
a very underrated channel
thanks for the guide
Thank you for your guide. The practice map is absolutely sadistic though. Advice how to circle stab from a guy who figured it out through all the rage quits: there is a certain consistent timing to the giants turning around after you stab them - learn the timing. Also the angle of rotation is the shortest to where your position is when the timing happens. So what I do is stab them not directly from behind but slightly to the left/right so I know from which angle they will rotate. After the stab I wait briefly before the timing, then run around them in the direction they will be rotating. So: stab lightly to the left -> wait a while -> run to the left -> stab.
Hey man I'm having problems with the bind you set in the description it's not seeming to work even though I sent it up right is there something I have to do first to make it work in Game?
That comment about medics going for the revive is too true. Got fragged by a crit giant soldier, here comes our quick fix med with Uber to insta res me. Ended up dying several times in a row. Couldn't even refuse the revive cause the Uber revive speed was too fast XD
i fully believe spy could solo wave 5 of benign infiltration if 2 things were different
1. bots didn't weirdly follow spy around like he is there leader as it makes getting stabs on the robots even with disguises really slow and awkward
2. the bots weren't player capped as it stops the spawn of bots after the cap fills up which means all the valid spawns are filled with support bots not the actually important bots
What about emergency tank busting?
It's important to be flexible as any class.
Real games are messier than theoretical treatises.
Also, this is my shortest, least-detailed guide. If I remade it today, it would probably talk about tanks at least a little bit.
As spy main
Have backstab from behind line Enemy machine just backstab one of there important ( Uber medic/buff banner soldier)
I didn't see this mentioned in the guide or in the comments: Ammo canteen can refill the Sapper charge instantly.
I learned something from this video. I didn't know you could backstab giants more than twice!! The gameplay was really cool, and the info is also really good. Thanks for teaching the community!
Note that you CAN actually spam the sapper by wasting it and then using prematurely bought recall canteen. There is no limit for canteen usage so you basically can apply sapper every 5 seconds of you will.
I frickin cant play spy at other gamemodes but at mann vs machine im a spy god (idk how)
this guide is so useful, this guide singlehandedly made me become a competent spy in MvM. 11k damage in the end of Bavarian Botbash is absolutely insane and is so fun. Thanks for making this video and the practice map!
The spycicle is a upgrade, you just need to have your snapper on recharge and because you can't switch back you'll now lose your weapon but gain fire red
Is nice
It doesn’t matter what type of zapper you equip…until engineer bots start showing up
I didn't expect Strafe-Stabbing to be a possible technique. I used to just stab until getting detected, then cloak away before re-engaging because of how the bots aim. (Near instant snapping toward the player's exact position with a very short pause before snapping towards their new position.)
"""meta"""
Great video, but _FUCK_ is that practice map hard. To help with that, is there any consistent way to predict the direction and rate the robots turn towards the spy? I've found that sometimes I could easily spin around the backs of giants while they tried helplessly to find me, while other times they'd make an unexpected flick towards me and track my movements really well.
Stab 3 times only if you have teammates. Stab and start spinning if you are alone
Do the thightest circle that you can do
Missed this comment, somehow.
Yes, you can actually influence which direction the robots turn by standing slightly to one side or the other. The robots will make the shorter turn. If you're right-handed, I'd recommend standing slightly to the robots' left and then moving right to strafe counter-clockwise.
Engineer is a great tank, just don't bother with the turret & shotgun away with unlimited ammo!
I am Gug
This guide reinvigorated my enjoyment of MvM. After I had experimented with many of the conventional classes, I grew bored and didn't know what to do until I watched this guide and hopped on MvM with Spy. I kept dying back then, and I still keep dying now. However, it has been stupid fun and through practice, nowadays I periodically topdamage on robots. Spy has been extremely fun and rewarding for me, even if some of my teammates are not enjoying it. Thank you.
Hi nice video, I have a question, what is the name of your HUD? And It works with a really bad pc (like my pc lmao) ?
Honestly, my current config is a spaghetti of previous settings from old computers, and I don't remember what I have in there. I used to use Eniere's "Improved Default" HUD, but I don't think I ever configured it on my current machine. What you see is probably just the default HUD with some bare-bones settings changes made by me. I really need to update my config, especially so you can see the damage numbers better.
@@UnderscoreGamingChannel thanks for answering :)
everyone is carrying a giant gun and this guy destroys robots with a knife and a pocket watch
Great guide, but I'd like to offer some constructive criticism:
To be blunt, there are several points in the video where you are unbearably pretentious, making the video pretty difficult to watch at times; the multiple times you frame meta classes to be braindead / require no understanding of MvM, the self-indulgent diatribe about inexperienced players, and the offhanded remark about how scout is useless (demonstrably false, especially on expert missions) come to mind
It's all just really bad for viewer retention since most people don't want to take advice from someone who's constantly stroking their own ego.
Thanks for the feedback. This was my first "real" video, uploaded over 3 years ago. Hopefully, I've been getting better with each subsequent release. This one's still the most popular of my MvM tutorials, though, since it's about an "exotic" class. Sometimes I think about going back and "remastering" it to meet my current upload standards.
Also, not sure specifically which remark about The Scout you're referring to, but there's a good chance it was sarcastic/tongue-in-cheek. The Scout is extremely powerful and one of my favorite classes, but he's frequently gimped by people taking the "Money, Milk, Mark" thing way too literally, so at the time I wrote this video, like 90% of Scout players were demonstrably the weak link on their team. I think that's gotten better in the years since, but one of the most reliable ways to get a stuck team unstuck from a wave is still to have someone who knows how to play Scout switch to Scout, and to have the previous Scout switch to Heavy or another "easy" class.
You need more recognition man, i think its because of your outro and everyone wanting to be a wizard