When first discovering Viper, many players use her abilities in the heat of combat to gain the upper hand when defending a retake, going for a pick, or simply taking an aim duel. However, Viper’s abilities are best utilized when carefully planned out before the round even begins.

Before we get into specific setups for executing on attack, let’s first discuss how to – and, perhaps more importantly, how not to – use your signature ability Toxic Screen while defending. Make sure your abilities don’t deny your team crucial angles that allow the attackers to push into the site unimpeded.

A teammate is holding a long sightline with an Operator? Consider not placing a wall straight through their line of sight but setting it up in a way that allows them to retreat after taking their shot. Your abilities, in particular your Poison Cloud and Snake Bite, can be harmful to your teammates as well, not just denying them sightlines but damaging them and setting up your opponents for an easy pick-off on a weakened teammate.

Now that we’ve got you up to speed on not putting your team at a disadvantage, let’s get into how to create advantages to swing the tides of the match.

Using Your Basic Abilities Correctly

When deploying your Poison Cloud and Toxic Screen, it is important to remember that neither of them are limited to your line of sight. Similar to set smokes that any experienced CS player will be familiar with, Viper’s abilities allow her to warp the map the moment the spawn doors open.

Toxic Screen can be placed across the map (though it does have a limited range), often by using the surrounding scenery as indicators. In addition, its theoretical placement is indicated by a teal line on the map while holding the ability. Combining these two factors, you can use Viper’s Toxic Screen to take crucial mid control early in the round, deny the defenders valuable sightlines or even go for a cheeky plant off of spawn, catching the enemy off-guard.

As for Poison Cloud, placing it becomes a little trickier, since there will be no indicator on the map as to where your throw will make it land. Still, after a bit of experimentation, you’ll manage to find cross-map spots in no time! As for what to look for, though it is no less potent on offense than it is on defence, its applications are vastly different. Rather than using it to stifle a push with its armour corroding abilities, it is best used as a smoke grenade to supplement your Toxic Screen’s vision denial. However, be aware that using them in conjunction absolutely tears through your supply off toxin, so you’ll have but a short window to take advantage of your abilities.

When using Poison Cloud on defence, look for positions that the enemy is bound to push through when attacking the area you intend to defend. Tight corridors and key positions for rotating between sites (such as mid on Split) are ideal, as they force the enemy to push through your toxins to gain space, loosing valuable health and armor in the process and making themselves vulnerable to being pre-fired by you or one of your teammates.

Try to place both of your basic abilities in a way that leaves the advancing enemies vulnerable to more than one angle, otherwise you may find yourself pre-fired through your own utility. When it comes to Poison Cloud, some chokepoints, such as the exit into A from bathrooms on Bind, allow you to create a one-way sightline. Because the Poison Cloud can be placed above the doorframe, pushing enemies will have their vision obscured by it, but their legs will be visible to any defender holding the angle, making for an easy kill with little to no counterplay for the attackers. Set Poison Clouds that are thrown across the map are not nearly as common on defence as they would be on attack but keeping a few of them in mind – especially for retakes – can still come in handy.

When playing site by yourself, you might also want to consider placing your Poison Cloud somewhere on site, cutting off one of the sightlines on your position, to allow you to focus on the other. Not only does this give you the opportunity to position at on off-angle for one entryway, it also enables you to fall back into your Poison Cloud if you are overwhelmed, need to reload or are waiting for reinforcements to arrive. Of course, it isn’t bulletproof, so try to keep the enemy guessing as to where you are.

To get into her final basic ability, snake bite fits perfectly into Viper’s kit, giving her another temporary form of area denial and utility. You’ll be most frequently using it to flush people out of positions that you know or suspect they are in as well as to stop an advance – whether from the attackers or defenders trying to retake the site – in its tracks. It slows and does permanent damage to players who walk through it, unlike your decay applied by your other abilities, which is slowly regained when leaving them.

When you use it in a chokepoint, you force the enemy team to either take a heap of damage as they push through or delay their push for its duration, allowing your teammates time to rotate. It is no less potent on offense, where it is especially useful for clearing corners or denying positions such as sniper nest. Make sure your crosshair is in position to collect the kill when the enemy inevitably leaves their compromised position.

Finally, it does enough damage to finish off low-health enemies that have retreated from a gunfight and throwing a Hail Mary Snake Bite after them can often net you a kill you would’ve otherwise barely missed out on.

Making the Most of Your Ultimate

Now that we’ve gone through all of her basic abilities, let’s get into her most powerful tool: Viper’s Pit. Viper’s ultimate allows her to warp the battlefield to give herself an incredible advantage, whether on attack or defence. The most straight-forward way to use her ultimate is to grab the spike at the start of the round, ease your way into a site using your smoke and wall and pop your ultimate for a very easy plant. When used like this, it is quite possibly the most powerful attacker sided ultimate in the game. Getting an early plant puts you into a commanding position as the attacking team, since your teammates will still have a vast majority of their utility left and you are holding a single site as 5 players.

A minor tip when it comes to getting a plant with your ultimate up, your ultimate animation can be cancelled by planting the spike. In essence, walking into the site, pressing X+M1 and then immediately holding your plant key will deploy your ultimate without playing the elaborate animation (though it still takes a second for the smoke to bloom to full size).

To get into what the ultimate actually does, Viper deploys a giant poison cloud-esque zone that covers a sizeable area, essentially creating a room around her. The walls of this zone can be shot and walked through with no issues, but completely obscure vision from outside. When inside, the players vision range (including Viper’s) is limited by an effect similar to fog of war which stops the player from looking from one border of the ultimate straight to the other. When any player but Viper is inside the ultimate, their HP and armor will rapidly decay until they are left at a fraction of health. As if all of this vision denial, damage, and the opportunity to get a very easy plant as an attacking Viper wasn’t enough, enemies within the ultimate are marked in bright red for Viper, allowing her to get the upper hand when fighting within it.

Finally, the ultimate lasts indefinitely as long as Viper remains inside. When she does leave it, a bar at the bottom of the screen will indicate how long it will take for it to dissipate. If she re-enters before that bar is empty, it will quickly refill it and the zone will remain intact.

All of these things combined make for an incredibly powerful ultimate, no matter what side you are on. While its usage on attack is described above, when defending it completely stops the enemies in their tracks. If an entire team were to push through your ultimate, they would all simultaneously fall to low HP, allowing for an easy clean up no matter how outnumbered you are. Combine that with a snake bite or two within the area, and you’ll be picking people off left right and centre, while they scramble to figure out where you are.

As such, when you have your ultimate on defence, play passively while you wait for the enemy team to commit to your (or a different) site. You want to avoid using your ultimate early and having the attackers simply rotate to a different site, making it useless. Also watch out for the opposing team using area denial ultimates such as Breach’s and Brimstone’s to force you to leave your ultimate.

Playstyle Fundamentals

Having covered all of her abilities and how to use them effectively, let’s finish by examining what playstyle fits Viper’s kit and what other agents work well with her.

Having her abilities tied to her fuel mechanic and thus never truly being used up for good – unlike, for example, Phoenix, who has access to two flashbangs and cannot get more once they have been expended – Viper gets stronger as the rounds go on and other agents run dry on more and more of their utility.

Because of this, you should try to enable your teammates using your abilities rather than entry fragging or taking risky flanks yourself. Communicate as much information as possible, stall the enemy team and make them use their abilities on you, giving your teammates opportunities to strike. If you are going to run into the site within the first 15 seconds of the round, make sure you have at least got a clear strategy, be it ulting to get an early plant, clearing a corner so your Sage can wall off the rotate or punishing a player on the enemy team who you’ve noticed has overaggressive tendencies.

As a rule of thumb, playing Viper as a second entry, going in after your entry fragger to refrag or set up your utility inside the site to prevent an easy retake tends to work out well. Keep in mind that, as mentioned at the beginning of the article, you don’t want to hinder your own team with your utility. A surefire way to be useful is to grab the spike, deploy your utility and plant under the cover of them as your teammates are clearing the remaining angles.

Being communicative is key to succeeding at Viper, allowing your teammates to play around your utility almost as well as you can. Dropping a wall at an opportune time can present your lurker with the enemies on a silver platter and covering your teammates retreat with a poison cloud will leave enemies guessing as to how they vanished.

Speaking of teammates, I’ll be briefly touching on a few characters that I’ve found to work exceptionally well in conjunction with Viper.

The first and perhaps also most powerful is Sova. His ability to scan enemies and chuck splash damage past your utility provide the perfect combination to set each other up for success. Especially early in the round, when establishing mid control, a set wall and a recon bolt can make a deadly duo, whether on attack or defence. Just be prepared to get called out for wallhacking on the regular!

In a similar boat, though slightly harder to execute, is Cypher, who can also provide glimpses of the enemies’ position regardless of your wall placement and lead to very easy and slightly cheesy kills. His tripwire combined with your poison cloud is also incredibly effective at cutting off narrow corridors, ensnaring the enemy in a position with no cover and questionable air quality.

Finally, Sage and Viper can work together to make a site nigh-on inaccessible for the attacking team using their walls and slow fields. Though you might not be getting reported for cheating, abusive behaviour might not be too farfetched.

With that being said, have fun playing Viper and make sure your opponents don’t!