GTFO – Advanced Mechanics (The Pro META)

This guide will explain advanced mechanics and meta for being a GTFO pro.

Basics

Note: Credit goes to Dioroxic

These are basics. Not exactly pro meta, but good to cover for new players before we get to the meat and potatoes of the guide.

• You should always stealth melee kill when possible. Do not move AT ALL when the creatures glow and twitch. You have to wait for them to go dormant again, then you can sneak up and melee. Full charge strike to the head is most consistent.
• Glow sticks do not affect creatures. Throw them everywhere. You find them all over the place.
• You do NOT need to explore everything and open everything. You have one main goal. Just try to do that and complete the mission as soon as possible. Every encounter will drain resources, so avoidable rooms should always be avoided unless you are low on supplies.
• The game doesn’t scale. That means the difficulty is the same for 1 player as it is for 4. So always have 4 if you can.
• All melee weapons do the same thing.

Those points made, let’s look at enemies first.

Enemies

Here we will describe basic enemy strategies:

• Sleepers: Stealth melee to the head. If you miss or they are still alive just keep rapid fire melee swinging. You can usually kill them before they alert others if you mess up.
• Scouts: These are the creepy enemies that have all those tentacles come out of their head. Wait for the tentacles to go away and you can stealth melee them in the head. Alternatively, you can snipe them in the head, but that will alert the rest of the enemies in the room. This is kind of a middle of the road option as best case scenario is to stealth melee her, then stealth melee everyone in the room. Second best option is to snipe her and deal with everyone waking up, worst option is to screw up the kill and she glows and alerts a horde. It’s almost the same as dealing with a security door event. You do not want to screw that up. So if you don’t think you can stealth melee and someone in your party has a high powered weapon, just snipe her and go loud. Set up sentries before and what not. Another thing you can do is hit them with a c-foam grenade and them bop them in the head. C-foam completely immobilizes scouts so melee killing is extremely easy. I would rather save c-foam grenades for a security event though.
• The big enemies: You need to shoot them in the gut too.
• Shooters: Distance helps dodge their shots, but yeah just shoot them until they are dead.

So here is a basic concept about striking enemies I haven’t seen discussed yet. These enemies run up to you, stop, and then do a little animation before sticking a tentacle out to strike you. This can be used as a telegraph for dodging attacks. Don’t be afraid to zip straight past an enemy running full speed. A lot of the times you can dodge their attacks because they have this long start up animation. Keep an eye out for it when you play and you’ll start to notice these attacks can be dodged somewhat consistently. You just have to get out of their range when they start doing their attack animation. This is very useful for kiting when you need to kite.

Weapons

The current meta is pistol + combat shotgun. Machine gun can be an alternative to the combat shotgun, and if you want someone to have a sniper for special circumstances, that’s okay too, but pistol + combat shotgun is optimal at this point in development. Here is the breakdown for primaries:

• Matalack AR: This gun is okay, but the shots are too weak and you blow through ammo too fast.
• Hanaway DMR: Higher powered, but too slow for hordes.
• Van Auken SMG: Even weaker than the AR. Arguably the worst choice.
• Shelling Pistol: The best choice. It has almost DMR damage, can be fired slow or fast, lots of ammo, you should almost always pick this weapon until balance changes are made.

Here is the breakdown for specials:

• Buckland 870: A worse combat shotgun.
• Combat shotgun: The best overall special weapon. It can obliterate a big boi or destroy a horde. Doesn’t require aiming and holds a ton of ammo with a fast fire rate. The best choice until patches happen.
• Koning Sniper: This is okay to have on a team sometimes. It allows you to pop and drop scouts from a distance. You will wake up some enemies, so it isn’t optimal.
• Mastaba Revolver: A worse sniper.
• Techman MG: This is a decent alternative to the combat shotgun and the only real contender. It excels in killing hordes further away than the combat shotgun, but the ammo economy is worse. Situational depending on your map plans.

Tools

Two words, shotgun sentry. This is by FAR the best tool in the game. There really isn’t a reason to not run 4 shotgun sentries right now. They need to improve other tools to compete. Here is the breakdown:

• C-Foam launcher: The ammo economy is GARBAGE. You barely start with enough foam to cover two doors. Even so, that just delays a fight. Laying it on the ground can slow some enemies, but you really don’t have enough foam, and it just delays the inevitable. Really not worth much until they improve it.
• Mine deployer: This is an okay tool, and the noobie strategy is to c-foam a door and place a mine under it. That’s fine, but it doesn’t help in the worst case scenarios which are extended fights in open areas. That is the hardest part of the game, and the mines get destroyed rather quickly and you run out fast.
• Bio tracker: The most worthless tool in the game. You don’t need this. The game gives you about a billion glow sticks per mission, just chuck those into a room to spot threats. The bio tracker is completely pointless if you are playing optimally. You don’t need it. Maybe if tracked enemies got a damage debuff or something, it would be worth it. Right now, this thing is garbage. Avoid it.
• Burst sentry: A worse shotgun sentry. The ammo economy is worse, the damage is worst, only the range is better, and this game is almost all close quarters.
• Shotgun sentry: The creme de la creme. THE current best tool in the game. This thing does mad damage, can be picked up and placed infinite amount of times, and has GREAT ammo economy. There is no reason to pick another tool. Run four of these for an easy time. I’ll explain more in the strategy section.

Strategy

So like all zombie-esque horde coop games, the hardest part of the game is dealing with a ton of enemies coming at you all at once. Delaying the fight (c foam) is usually not the best idea in these games. The best idea is usually to create a kill zone to deal with the horde with the greatest of ease. You also want high damage weapons that require little precision. This is why the auto shotgun in Left 4 Dead was the best weapon in the game. GTFO is no different. Here is the strategy in short bullet form:

• Equip pistol, combat shotgun, shotgun sentry.
• Stealth melee everything you can.
• When a security door event happens, create a 4 shotgun sentry kill zone and use your own combat shotguns.

The 8 shotgun killzone is DEVASTATING. I cannot stress this enough. At this current point in the game, this is by far the easiest strategy. Just crossfire your sentry guns and stand behind them with combat shotguns. It requires very little aiming and every enemy will be obliterated when they enter the kill zone. Once you’ve gotten through the security event, just pick up your sentries, use your supplies, and go back to stealth killing until you reach the next horde event. Create another kill zone and you’re on easy street baby.

With this strategy you can duo or even solo some missions. However, more moving and kiting to avoid getting hit has to be done when you solo or duo. You have to continuously run away from the kill zone and then bring the enemies back into the kill zone. You simply don’t have enough firepower by yourself to stand there and blow everything away like you could if you had 4 people. So evasive actions are necessary.