Introduction to Team Roles

I don't think I'd be wrong by taking a small part of the article to introduce team roles. Most of you should be familiar by now with these names: entry fragger, lurker, support and in-game leader. If you've ever watched the pro scene, you've more than likely heard about them at least. You might have heard the term awper as well, which more than likely morphs into several pro-player names resonating inside your head. As crucial as a weapon such as an AWP is, I really don't believe it is a role, but more like a different tool for a similar purpose.

Each of those roles has a very well rounded and defined purpose at the beggining of the round, which will be explained in-depth in this series. I put the world beginning in italics on purpose, because unlike other competitive games such as MOBAs, these roles were conceived by the players according to what works best to win a round and have no mechanics purposefully created by the developer. The main difference between each role is how they use the information available to them during the round.

What I believe is also important to mention is that these roles are as insignificant as people want to make them. If everyone in a terrorist team wanted to rush a site as a five-man team, then there's no lurking there and everyone is just trying to brute-force their way into a site. What I mean by this is that they're important to know and are tools used to understand the dynamics of a complex, strat-based round. I can't stress this enough - a player can take any role at any time during a round; they're not set in stone, they're used to better explain and adjust to different situations according to what a team has available to increase their probabilities to win the round.

Entry Fragger

For the attacking team, these are the guys that get the whole thing rolling. They're the first hint of commitment to an attack on a site, whether it is the terrorists attacking the counter-terrorists, or the counter-terrorists attempting to retake a site where the bomb has been planted. They're the frontlines, the terrorists that will go first through that long door in Dust 2 in order to secure the long hot zone along with pit. They're first line of attackers (even if it's just one entry fragger) that will attempt to clear out a crucial zone in order to try and win the round. When playing solo or with friends with no structural groundwork for each player's playstyle, the entry fragger role will more than likely be taken by the player that's the most confident in his/her ability to secure a site and clear all the necessary angles.

If you haven't picked up the hint already, the entry fragger heavily relies on aim and reaction time. In a way, both are intertwined. Conventionally speaking, aim is a skill that can be described as how quickly you can snap to an enemy and pull the trigger, making it intimately linked with reaction time. An entry fragger's main job is to go into a site and clear all the angles, attempting to take care of the enemies that might be there. This is why aim is so important. There are so many angles in a site to clear that having a second entry fragger to help clearing them and trade kills might substantially increase the chances of securing all angles and winning all the immediate engagements, making the commitment a success and increasing the probability of winning the round.

Inferno's B site is a perfect example of a map with a lot of angles

Grenades are an utility (and sometimes deadly) tool that should always be used if available. Whether you're committing to taking a site as a terrorist or holding it as a counter-terrorist, you'll always want to use them either for defense or offense. In the case of entry fraggers, smokes should always be used to discard angles by blocking a possible opponent's line of sight, flashbangs (popflashes do wonders) to effectively blind them and give your teammates a window of opportunity to grab a kill or at least displace an opponent. Molotovs have a special section here, because of their damage factor. Sometimes they're even more useful than smokes in clearing a site. For instance, a smoke grenade might give teammates disadvantageous visual clutter if you throw it to block a player holding oranges' (Inferno B Site) line of sight. In contrast, a molotov will not only allow your teammates to see them, but it will also displace the opponent, giving them an advantage against the displaced since they'll have to deal with your teammates shooting at them and the damage they take from standing on the fire.

Trading kills is a term I used a few lines above, and it is a very big deal. It is always advised to play with your teammates at least in pairs, and for very good reason: if a teammate you're close to (or you're paired with) commits to an engagement against an opponent and dies to him, it falls to you to trade your teammate's death for the opponent's death by finishing the engagement your teammate started and take the kill your teammate failed to. This is a concept that is not part of team roles, but that rather applies to both teams in the game. It's a basic concept, albeit an extremely important one.

The last paragraphs allow me to give you a quick peek into the next series of team roles: support players. This is a role that is often misunderstood and considered "boring", but it is one of the roles that I find the most fun because of how versatile it is. Just so that I can keep some things to talk about in the next articles, I'll introduce one of their jobs: when an entry fragger is committing to a site, these are the players that will be trading kills and flushing the opponents out, or at least making the lives of entry fraggers easier as they're committing by using their grenades and going in with them. Their game knowledge is on point (well, everyone's game knowledge is on point if they do their job right, it's not that one role is "easier" than the other, as I said in the introduction regarding different uses of available round information).

This is it for now, next week I'll be covering the support role. I hope you enjoyed, and if you've got a doubt or discrepancy please go ahead and let me know! Have a great day!

Are you into fantasy leagues? Then check out AlphaDraft and put together your allstar lineup!