Defensive Strategies Using Barricades The Finals
Intro
Pro-Tech son Yo, no, cap this barricade. Tech is about to bust. Let's try it again. Let's do it better this time. Imagine the metal being so dense that even Superman himself fears it. Yeah, you know it's protection all right. I know Dome to some people is better, but we're not going to be talking about that today because today we're going to be talking about some good classic.
American Muscle: The Barricade, [__] All right guys, on a more serious note, there is going to be a lot to learn about barricades. You will be very surprised at how efficient they can be. I'm not really going to go over why I think they're, quote, underrated, but more so, show you what you can do with them, the uses that you can get out of them, and let you judge for yourself if you think they can be efficient for you and your squad.
So I'm going to fly over the basics, but then we will quickly get into some tips and tricks, some use cases, some synergies, and some counters. Etc., and then we will get to my favorite part, the clip breakdowns. I feel like that's the best way to really show the use cases of the barricades and really just absorb a lot of information because you can actually see it in practice, but with that said, please remember that there are chapters, and if you want to just skip around the article, feel free to do so because that's what they're there for. And the very last thing before we get started, if you like me or feel like you learned something in this article, please leave a like if you love me, and maybe one day you want me to quit my day job, so please subscribe.
Basics
Let's get started. You can have up to four barricades placed down at one time.
If you try to place another, the first one will disappear, You can right-click to rotate the barricade, and if you look down towards the lower third of the barricade, you can actually pick it up. It actually took me quite a while to figure this out somehow, but yeah, now this one applies to other gadgets as well when I place my first one.
I will not automatically switch to my primary, and you can get stuck looking at your tablet, so I would highly suggest that you get into the habit of switching to your primary every time you place something down to get into the habit of doing so.
Use cases
Now let's hop into some use cases, the first and most obvious.
The use case of the barricade is instant cover. Just boom pop it down, and now you are protected from enemy fire. You can use this to reload and maybe heal up. You can place them down for your teammate so they can heal up. Cover is always valuable in a gunfight, so this is a Pixel Peak setup. This requires two barricades; you place them right beside each other, and you create this little gap.
It is much harder for the enemy to shoot you than it is for you to shoot the enemy, and if you were to increase his gap just a little bit, it would make it easier for you to shoot the enemy. But it will also make it a little easier for the enemy to shoot you. This is especially true. It is useful if you have a medium or a light on your team so they can have cover and still use it offensively, and it is also useful if you have something like a goo gun or you're really good at setting up your objective so you can funnel the enemies into a much more narrow space, and this can be pretty awesome. Then I will go over the pixel peak a bit more once we get into a quick play so I can show you what that actually looks like a bit better, but for now, let's talk about the RPG.
Rpg
I've noticed that heavies love to fire their RPG at barricades because they don't want your head glitching and destroying their whole team, but if you back away a little bit and you place a second one, it's very hard to tell that there's even two there, and when they fire their RPG, it will not only get rid of a lot of that damage, although for some reason Splash still goes through that second shield, but you will still have your second shield.
Ideally, you would rather run an APS with a medium, but this is still a little workaround if you don't have one, so please keep in mind those grenades. And C4 barrels and stuff like that will still pretty heavily counter barricades, so let's talk about firing the RPG over the barricade. If you try to fire the RPG over the barricade, it will usually blow you up.
If someone has high ground and you shoot upwards, it won't blow up, but if someone is ground level with you, it will blow up right in your face. Sometimes it doesn't happen now that there's a bloom if the bloom goes over. In the top half, it will not blow up, but if the bloom decides to go down, it will blow up in your face, and it will do a lot of self-damage.
What it looks like in game
So let's hop into a quick play with my brother so I can show you guys a few more things. Now this is the pixel peak that I was talking about earlier; it's really hard to tell, but I am hitting the shield a lot more than I'm hitting my brother, and from his perspective, he's able to hit me with every single shot.
Now this is what the head glitch looks like from the enemy perspective: This looks way different than the way it does in the firing range with the test dummy because the heavy is a little shorter than the test dummy in the firing range, and even with one of the largest headgears in the game, it is very hard to see for the most part, and it is very hard to track, especially when they're strafing, so unless you have really good aim, it's going to be pretty hard to put very consistent shots on target.
This is what the barricade looks like on High Ground. My brother is trying his best to take cover, and you can see that I'm still able to shoot his head, so yes, the good counter to the barricade is getting high ground, but now this is him being able to shoot back at me for a while. He does have a bit of cover, which is much better than having no cover at all, but it is still not an ideal situation to be in now.
Block doors and holes
The last thing I'm going to show you before we get into these clip breakdowns is that you can block doorways, and it's pretty hard for a heavy vehicle to get through.
It's a little easier for mediums and lights, but you can also block these little mouse hole things, and there's no way a medium or light is getting through that hole unless. They blow it up somehow, or, I mean, they could try to shoot through it, and you can break the barricade with bullets, but it takes so many that it's really not.
