Scout

Scout tends to be one of the most important and useful classes you can have in MvM, one of the reasons being that he is better than any other class at collecting credits– something that everyone needs in order to get upgrades each wave. He excels at this role thanks to his great movement, ability to pick up credits from a short distance, ability to gain overheal by picking up the credits, and respawning quickly upon death. Scouts with over 500 HP are a common sight, and don’t require the support of any other class to remain alive, so long as the robots are being killed. Thanks to all of this, a Scout is a perfect candidate for distracting robots, so that they focus their fire away from the rest of the team and towards the class that can both avoid and tank a lot of the damage coming his way, especially if he bothers to purchase resistances.

Equally as important as collecting credits, however, is supporting the team with the help of the Mad Milk and Fan O’War. Robots coated with Mad Milk help keep the team alive, as any damage done to “milked” enemies is immediately converted into health for the one doing the damage, effectively allowing your team to leech the robots’ health. It is of utmost significance to throw Mad Milk whenever it is available onto large groups of robots and especially onto giant robots.

The Fan O’ War, on the other hand, helps the team by causing any enemy struck by it to take mini-crit damage, meaning that damage fall-off against the victim is entirely nullified, and they take an extra 35% damage to boot. Use of the Fan O’War should generally be reserved for giant robots, who have the highest health pools and are hurt the most by being marked for death.

The combination of both items can ease many difficult encounters, with mini-crit damage working well alongside healing on hit, allowing your team to mow down robots and stay alive much more efficiently.

Though Scout is often pigeonholed into being a pure support class, he is also capable of doing notable single-target damage. He tends to struggle somewhat against crowds, but can be a good help towards killing giants and destroying tanks, however it’s important to note that fully specializing into doing damage requires investing in some very expensive upgrades for his primary.

Common mistakes

A relatively infrequent but nonetheless annoying trend with newer players. The Force-a-Nature isn’t just a subpar primary, it’s also a detriment to your team. By knocking around robots, you throw off everyone’s aim and make it harder for the robots to be killed quickly and efficiently. The only feasible upside for the Force-a-Nature’s knockback feature is to reset the bomb or kill a giant standing next to a bottomless pit, but this is an uncommon occurrence and not enough to justify equipping it full-time. It is true that it can be used for a triple jump, but the Soda Popper can fulfill this same role without making your team want to rip their hair out.

Shooting things is fun, but remember that you have responsibilities to your team besides doing damage. You don’t have to go into a panic every time there’s a single credit on the ground, but if you look at the credit counter and see that there’s 40 or more credits laying on the ground, that’s your signal that you should probably take a breather on shooting and to go pick it up sometime soon! If you end up missing more than 50 credits per wave, your team won’t get the end-of-wave credit bonus and people will be very cross with you.

Though neglecting to mark robots for death can arguably be forgiven, you must not neglect your duty to milk robots. If there’s no Medic around, the responsibility of keeping your team healthy falls onto you, and people will rightfully be angry with you if you never own up to it. If you don’t have the Mad Milk, you shouldn’t be playing Scout– end of discussion.

Tips for collecting credits

Generally, if there's a lot of credits laying on the ground, you should avoid drawing too much attention to yourself. By shooting the robots you can draw their aggro, and if you don't have resistances it's wiser to instead ignore them and hope they'll do the same until you've collected everything. You should do cursory studies of the current map's layout and figure out routes to safely get behind the robots while staying in the open as little as possible-- upgrading jump height can help you out in this regard, especially on Decoy. Staying on the high ground in general can be a good idea in order to give you ready access to whatever spot on the map you have to go to, but be careful not to have the attention of groups of Heavies who can push you into the stratosphere with their miniguns. If your team has been overrun and the terrain is too riddled with robots to be able to pick up the credits, then it's a good idea to temporarily equip the Bonk! Atomic Punch until you've gotten everything.

Outside of emergency situations, it shouldn't be too difficult to figure out a patrol route for picking up credits. Pay attention to where the action is: If the robots are being killed behind the front lines, you should check in the back. If you're not sure where the green stuff might be hiding, it's sometimes advisable to simply follow the bomb path from spawn and hope you'll run into the stray bundle on your way. Note that on certain maps such as Decoy and Rottenburg, bundles can sometimes glitch out and spawn in unexpected places; on the aforementioned maps, if credits would normally spawn underneath a bridge, they might bug out and spawn on top of the bridge instead. Be sure to look out for oddities like this if credits don't appear where they logically should.

Upgrade priority

Despite it being commonly recommended to max out movement or resistances right away, Scout's upgrade path can be very open and adaptible to your playstyle, so long as you're capable of fulfilling your supportive duties. Which movement upgrades to get is a matter dependent on what map you're playing on; on maps like Mannhattan and Decoy, it's usually recommended to get 2 ticks of jump height right away. Immediately putting everything into movement speed and jump height on the first two waves is an acceptable choice, but truth be told, you don't actually need full movement to be able to get all the credits easily. In fact, if you know how to get around the maps, you can sometimes get away with having nothing or almost nothing invested into movement, provided you intend to spend the credits on other upgrades such as your primary or recharge time for your Mad Milk.

Resistances are somewhat of a tricky subject. Many will insist that they're always necessary, while some will claim that you don't need them whatsoever due to your overheal. Thankfully, you can easily infer how much you'll need resistances just by looking at what robots will spawn during the upcoming wave; If there's an overwhelming amount of Soldiers and Demomen, you might prefer maxing out blast resistance, but because they fire projectiles you can also get just one or zero ticks of it, and instead attempt to dodge all incoming explosives (Jump height will help a lot in this regard). If a large amount of minigun-wielding Heavies are spawning in a wave, however, then it's pretty unavoidable that you'll have to put credits into bullet resistance, simply because it's a fool's errand to try to dodge an entire cluster of miniguns firing at you, and the damage they'll do even at a range will be devastating and will, at best, waste a lot of your overheal, or otherwise just kill you.

Upgrading your Mad Milk can be very helpful, but not necessary and can use up a lot of your credits if you want to substantially upgrade its recharge time. It largely depends on context whether you'll need it: If there's a lot of giant Heavies in a wave, or if your team is just dying a lot, then it'd be good to sacrifice your budget to help keep your teammates alive more consistently. The slowdown upgrade should only be purchased if there's a significant amount of Super Scouts in a given wave, as they're the only viable target for slowing.

Finally, there's your primary. Some players will focus all their attention on playing "Damage Scout" and throw everything at being able to contribute as much as possible to the team's DPS. This is a totally viable way of playing, but remember to not get carried away and overspend should you need any of the previously mentioned upgrades. As far as what upgrades to get for your primary- this is dependent on what weapon you're using. With the stock Scattergun, the priority is reload speed > firing speed > damage, with the Shortstop, it's firing speed > damage > clip size, and with the Soda Popper it's firing speed* > clip size > damage.

Upgrading firing speed on the Soda Popper

If you're new to playing Scout, you might've cocked an ear at the idea that you can upgrade the Soda Popper's firing speed-- after all, the game itself doesn't give you the option. However, people have discovered a glitch that allows you to do it, and while it sounds convoluted at first, it's very easy to do. It goes like this:

And there you go! You now have the Soda Popper, which now shoots slightly faster. It might not seem like a significant boost at first, but the slight increase in firing speed does impact your DPS enough that you'll always want to take it whenever you use this weapon.

This glitch will work on official Valve servers, but note that it will not work on certain community servers such as Potato.tf.

Weapons

Primary

Secondary

Melee