Quake Duel Theory

hello everybody cdk here and we're back with some Quake Jewel Theory well I say back this is the first time i' I've ever made a video on theory for qu jel but but this will uh be with the aim of helping anyone who's new to the game anyone who is trying to improve at all at any level in jeel uh maybe get something extra some get some insights maybe help you improve that's that's the goal so if we just get started what makes us win a jewel that is the if if we're going to start

right at the top that is the fundamental question you got to ask yourself and uh what I want to do is break everything down from the right from the top and then put it all back together again and if we can develop an understanding for all the compos the composite parts of what jewel actually is and what your options are like then it's going to help you build an understanding of what and and and build the ability to read the game better so uh right starting right at the top what is what is uh basically

it's it's two things it's execution it's what do you do with the mouse and the keyboard the movement and the and the um and the aiming and stuff like that and it is decision- making which is the thinking aspect of the game so if we examine these areas because we want to basically be the most efficient we can be in how we focus our efforts here for for the sake of improving like where should we put our analysis and um if we look at execution there are inherent issues here because execution isn't something you can

really base uh your thought process around because the problem with execution is that it's inherently inconsistent so because of that fact and the inherent inconsistencies or unreliability of execution and that you won't hit this you know the same percentage as every game you won't hit the same uh like you're going to miss a rocket jump here or there you're going to miss a trick jump here or there like that inconsistency is not a good basis for making good decisions or or sorry it's not a basis for improving because no matter how much you play there's

always going to be those inconsistencies you can never guarantee yourself you're going to hit two rails in a row sure it can be likely but it's much more it's much better and much uh more reliable if we look at decision- making because decision- making is a process in which you can basically quantify everything like you can quantify you know you can get a value for you know the weapons the positioning you can get a value for um the armor the the stacks the you know the element of surprise as a value you know all these

things have certain values and you can quantify these things and and basically put that into your decision- making and that's a much more consistent way to play the game than relying so solely on execution so so if we look at the three states of jeel and basically analyze the bigger picture just to begin with and I'll just introduce these three states we have in control out control and contested control so anytime a Dro is being played it's going to be in one of these threee uh phases basically so in control is when your stack is

so significantly overpowering that the opponent cannot challenge any of the items that you choose to be at to take because he will die I mean unless he wants to die then you know he can't he can't challenge you because your stack is so good so out of control um your stack is so poor that of course again you know you can't challenge for any of the items that the in control player chooses to take uh and you must basically react you're very reactive when you're the out ofc control player because you have to basically play

around the guy who is in control you got to read his movements in the game and and where he moves dictates where you're going to be because you you can't be where he is basically that you always need Escape options so and the third the third state the game can be is be in is contested control and that's it's like that's when stuff is more even it doesn't have to be like even even so if we have like one player with the with a huge stack one player with with less of a stack we've got

um like the the Lesser stack player hitting a rail so the guy's stack goes down a bit then the Lesser stack player picks up at the yellow and all of a sudden it's getting closer now and all you need is is an efficient engagement or a certain level of efficient of an efficient engagement like a really efficient G engagement or only a slightly favorable engagement where you can get just the first shot off whatever um to basically even out and that that's that contested control period of the game is where we see the most interesting

decisions because there's so many more options than the other two stages of the game so as I have noted down here down here as a player you must quickly recognize when the state shifts which can happen whenever whenever damage is dealt or more armor or health is picked up you must then understand how it changes your options so that's what we just discussed and I have a little example here to illustrate further what I mean so on the map ztn 21 the opponent has 125 Health 200 points of armor and you have 100 health and

50 armor you at the grenade bridge and ra him as he moves below you to the teleporter and ra him again as he comes down to the teleporter and receive no damage in the process so then if we assume that he does not pick up the 25 that it was you know at the uh next to the rail we can just assume that for the sake of this example You' dealt 160 raw damage to him now you know that he was running the megas and the and the Reds and stuff like that so you know

he's stacked you know he's got like pretty much 200 armor and you've only been able to scrape away at a yellow so your guess is that he's pretty darn stacked right now and at least there armor so if you hit 160 damage that's really nice so but how does this change things does or does it change things so you've hit both of those rails and you can never know exactly what health and armor is on of course we can never exactly know it's always got to be a guess and an estimate and it's something you

to get good at um estimating and basically not only have you hit this damage but he's also in a choke point so you have to consider the value of the positioning to uh and and apply that to also the situation of the stacks so you've done 160 damage and you have better position so you'll probably guaranteed at least another like another rail probably if he pushes his way through you're probably guaranteed another Rail and so what happens here is if he wants to go further and basically by himself using the stack that he has stack

Advantage by himself a better position by moving through this horrible choke point and taking damage that's what he pays for with his stack if he wants to do that then that's fine but then it's a risky decision because basically sure the red armor is up but he's in an an open and exposed position and now you're on even Stacks pretty much and you have the ability to escape more so than he does um if should you get low so it becomes a risky play for him and you have to understand that you can actually stick

around there that's that's the thing you can you have to understand that you can basically shoot a rail at him if he tries to come through but if you miss the rail you can back off and if you miss the rail that's great for him because he can get the red and perpetuate his control but um you did do a lot of damage and you have red Time start so there's there is Merit there stuff for you to take away from that but let's say you only hit one rail so you hit one rail and

uh he comes through the let's say you hit the rail as he came through the teleporter so basically you hit the rail as he came through the teleporter meaning that he can't just jump straight through so you have maybe another guaranteed rail on him or not necessarily guaranteed but very likely and your angle is so good that it's much harder for him to hit you than it is for you to hit him so the damage for you is more likely like the damage onto on to him is more likely however um now we have to

have a different consideration in mind because his stack is actually so overwhelming that he can take a really hugely inefficient engagement and he can use that massive stack advantage to buy himself a new red and buy himself position unless you hit like three rails in a row and or four rails in a row and he uh basically like misses everything or something that's like what it has to take basically for him him to die or not get the red in that spot then then basically that's it so we can see that all of a sudden

it's now a very favorable play for him to go and push on push onto the red and buy himself that red with with the stack that he's going to lose from his terrible position so and and you need to be thinking about Escape options now because you're still out of control it's not your control is not contested this the state hasn't really shifted because you only hit one rail so you have to leave and to touch on another Point quickly on Zen um there is a very familiar situation where if you have a player that's

out of control and a player that's in control we've already decided that the player that who is who is in control basically has his pick of items he can pick any item he wants there's so many items he can choose and if you can read your movements while he can really deny you a lot of stuff so let's look at the situation where you try to surprise him by you know hiding it on some angle and waiting for him to appear to take an item and then rail him let's say um you take the shot

and you miss which is very familiar situation um a lot what I see a lot of players doing is they stick around and they try to shoot again because they want they want that they want that ra on him now this is like a really this has becomes a risky situation and it's fine to do it but you have to understand the risks at play so if you take that second shot the first shot was with surprise so you're guaranteed the first shot and then you can leave before he has time to react and shoot

you so that's that's great but if you miss and you're like okay I need I want to shoot because I want the damage then if you take a rail and let's say you trade rails which is the best scenario then is that you trade damage it is completely fine for him because he can stack up on arm much more easily than you can he's basically by him by him hitting you with a rail he set you back like a minute or something to to having any hope on getting a major item he set you back

like massively at least a minute by hitting you H hitting you with that rail had you just left though um you don't lose a minute in having such a shitty stack that you have to run around and and try to avoid him really hardcore maybe you can get like hit the rail and or miss the rail and get another yellow and then you can try you know so your options change but if you get set back that far it affects you much much more than it does him to trade rails so that I just wanted

to make that point because I see a lot of people making that mistake um Okay so we've looked at the three states of jewel let's look at the most important principles and stuff to consider and stuff like that so um I may have missed some stuff here but I wanted to not Ram you too much with information and so here we have the most important principles or at least the most important three principles in Jing that I think are immediately of our concern so the first thing at the top is efficient engagements and it's really

important to understand efficient engagements because efficient engagements is something you can always ask yourself about if you ever took a fight at any point you can you can analyze whether or not it was an efficient fight for you and if it was an inefficient fight for you was that okay because there are some situations where taking an inefficient fight as we talked about before is okay if you're in control and you've got a big stack Advantage you can pay uh you can pay some of your stack to get a kill because sometimes that is what

it takes to win win the game sometimes that's a great decision to make and that inefficient engagement is completely fine in that case but there's a lot of times when maybe you took an engagement that was just plain plain horrendous for you and you have to understand when those situations are so that you can minimize them and so that you can build on making better engagements for yourself in the future so to basically break everything down into into little Parts we've got things to consider uh when we're thinking about making efficient engagements so we've got

we've got weapons of course so let's just say you know the rocket launcher how does the I mean this is something we need to be thinking about when we're like in a game like how does the rocket launcher affect my options so what's the rocket launcher good at so that's what we have to ask ourselves and it's good at choke points it's good at close-range fighting it's good at um long range spam stuff like that but it's not it's not really good at fighting with long range you don't want to do a rocket versus a

ra fight long range or anything U mid-range it's unreliable very unreliable so uh it's good when you're baiting items and stuff like that's good if we take the situation where on Zan again the guy is coming through the teleporter let's say he's running through that Corridor and you're hiding at the shotgun with a rocket launcher and he has no idea you're there you get an amazing engagement there because you not only do you get a free shot the shot is going to be on average providing much more damage than uh maybe normal because he has

nowhere to move he's in a little Corridor he's in this choke points and the rocket launcher is great there you're going to probably definitely hit well probably definitely you're probably going to hit with quite a high likelihood the second shot cuz he's in such a close confined space and that's what the Rocket's good at so the shaft the shaft is great at situations where the player is uh in the air it's great at situations where the player is um so for example uh when the player's in the air let's say on Furious Heights when the

player comes through the teleporter the rocket launcher and spawns next to the mega jumps across to the mega you can hit like insane amounts of d damage when if you're underneath them with a a shaft it's good at um close range engagements it's good at mid-range engagements it's it's very versatile much more than it used to be back in the OBP days and it's a generally a very good weapon uh especially if you get the surprise um we have the rail gum it's of course not so good at uh not so good at close range

if you miss a shot at close range of rail that has really huge implications you can take a lot of damage without dealing much uh but however mid and long range it's really good um it's good if you want to basically try and play The War of Attrition and try to just like pick away at your opponent it's good if you're out control and you don't want to go close to an opponent so you know this you got you got to think about all the weapons like of of course you know we can talk about

the other ones like shotguns really good close range and blah blah blah so so we got positioning um positioning is a really huge maybe one of the biggest elements in juel and I don't want to simplify it too much and I'll go into it again after going through this list as you can see on the little document I have uh written up um so positioning is really important and it always comes into every single decision for example I mean all of these elements are synergistic they tie in together so the position can affect how efficient

or not your fight with the rocket will be the positioning will affect um like where you want to stand to get the most out of you know every weapon basically there's just so many ways positioning is important yeah the element of surprise of course um the element of surprise is a great way to start or create an efficient engagement and it's a way to really get yourself back in the game because the element of surprise usually usually means that you're getting the first shot off and if you're getting the first shot off and getting maybe

like a guaranteed rocket or something or a guaranteed rail or guaranteed like 80 damage 50 damage 60 damage with a shaft that's really good for you because not only you getting free damage um the if the opponent didn't expect you to be there he's going to be taking more damage because he has to get his bearings switch to the right weapon maybe and and turn around and like you know it's a horrible uh thing for him so element surprise is can is not to be undervalued in uh in your considerations uh Stacks Stacks always come

into the considerations because you have to realize whether or not the type of Engagement you want to pick is is so efficient enough that it's going to basically help you change the stack difference from like this to to this basically cuz it because if it's not going to do that and the stack difference is so huge then the fight is just going to end up with you dying so even if it's a great you got element of surprise and you got the right weapon and the right positioning and stuff if the stacks are just so

overwhelming and you just you know you just you'll just die so you have to understand how how efficient or not the engagement will be how much damage you're going to make you're going to net in that situation whether it's enough to be uh to to be something that's actually going to be worthwhile um which uh does bring me on to another thing I need to talk about but which I haven't written down but I hopefully I won't forget that by the time I get to the end so items that are spawning so items that are

spawning is a really interesting one because it's not it's not directly about the engagement itself it's about what's happening during the engagement so for example this this is this is an example that has happened many times on on in the jewel I'm sure a lot of people have experienced this so you know that the red armor is spawning soon and a fight happens at the grenade deck now the interesting thing here is that it's all it's often a great option for you to move yourself towards a spot in which you can actually in the middle

of a fight Rocket Jump as soon as like the guy takes cover you bang you rocket jump up to the red red spot and that changes the engagement completely because that's actually something that you can go into the engagement with knowing and so you can Factor it in and as soon as you get a get a tiny opening to to to do that Rocket Jump to get that red that can change everything and you can go into the fight thinking about that so you can set it up for yourself so that's like items at this

morning the the other thing that's um maybe less uh less um uh harder to know is whether or not an item is spawning um I mean if let's say you're not sure whether an item is spawning or not but if you have a general time of the items what you can do with engagements is you can take an engagement and use that engagement to reposition yourself and reposition the opponent so that you get position on the item as it's spawning and you can use it to waste time so for example uh another thing is in

in this example with the uh grenade deck if there's a fight on the grenade deck in ZN uh there are some situations where maybe red and mega are spawning uh and you you decide that um you don't want to rocket jump up to to Red because the sit Situation's looking a bit poor so what you can do is then you can U jump back down and position yourself onto the mega and because the mega is going to be up in like a few seconds all you all you've had to do with that engagement is buy

yourself some time and what ends ends up happening is basically um it's not as direct as what we're talking about with an efficient engagement cuz cuz what we're thinking about here with efficient engagements is is getting a net gain in in uh damage right so you get so basically the stacks shift much more in your favor so you can take control because we're always aiming to take control right but what happens here is that you don't get a net gain gain in damage uh necessarily but what you do is get a net gain in uh

resources so you jump down you you basically waste time you do a bit of damage and you then you're able to take the mega and you use that engagement to to get get an item so so it's a it's a bit more of an advanced concept but basically it's something that again can basically make the engagement that you took it doesn't look efficient but when you take you actually get the item by using it to force positioning on the opponent then it then it is then an efficient engagement so it's all about trying to trying

to push yourself into that position of getting control um let's see so we've got Escape options so Escape options are really important for you're not sure about an engagement um and this is especially true when you're out of control and you're not certain what the enemy movements are like you need to always leave yourself with options to escape and I'll use this opportunity to talk about uh death in jeel because on the majority of maps I mean that this this differs depending on the map but uh on all maps apart from Maps like uh Arrow

walk and and anything like Arrow walk anything that's really got a very small enclosed uh well a very small map basically any any map that's really small with all the big items next to each other like AOW walk um death is much different on that map because you can trade damage so much quicker off the spawn than you can on other Maps so if we look at a map like ZN or dm13 or you know Maps like this um when you kill someone all of a sudden you can there's so much armor and health on

the map that you can just keep running that constantly you can just keep running and running that so when you when you die it's really bad because your position off of the spawn is so much worse than it is uh sometimes in awalk although awalk can be quite nasty if you're playing a really good opponent who knows how to play the spawns and and how to force your spawns and stuff but uh if we're thinking about ztn for a moment if you don't die there's always an opportunity for you to get an armor basically um

dying is is never favorable because you can always get yourself an armor just run keep running around outside of his control trying to deal damage and not getting caught be wary of your Escape options and eventually you can get an armor that's your so if you're if you're a beginner trying to figure out what to do on a map PL set TN or any or dm13 or any map that has a lot of armor and health and stuff like that and it's is not a small map like AOW walk you want to be making sure

that you don't die that's the first thing don't you you don't need to worry about anything else first get get the not ding thing down cuz as soon as you start dying um you're playing it wrong basically and and once you get good at not dying um once you get good at Escape options and stuff like that and you're good at not dying against the level of opponents you're playing the next step is figuring out how to deal damage to them and do increasingly more damage to them whilst you're out of control and still not

die and that's that's the hard part that's that's the hard part and uh anyway moving on um as I okay I've got positioning as a NE as the next important principle so positioning is very a very interesting factor in jeel um there's lots of ways you can use positioning um uh dm13 is a really interesting map when we're thinking about positioning because it's it really demonstrates how you can control the opponent's movement with positioning and it's a really elaborate example because uh I'm sure there's been a lot of situations where you've seen someone who is

trapped at the shaft yellow and if they're trapped at the shaft yellow you'll probably see the opponent He he'll probably start leaving items up and he I mean the mega could spawn the red could spawn the you know the other yellow could spawn like he's going to be leaving these items up sometimes because what he wants to do is he is he's carefully controlling the uh the Escape path the the options the angles of the opponent so that he can actually get every item and continue perpetuating his control and continuing his pressure and dealing damage

and that controlling of the of the spaces is what positioning is about and this is of course a much more advanced thing to actually start doing in a game but it's something to look out for it is something that you can use to mitigate the stack Advantage so let's say um uh let's take an example here let's say uh dm6 on dm6 you're out of control and you are in a position where you're on the bridge the um Bridge next to the rocket launcher and the opponent is like the red armor is spawning soon and

you know you know that the opponent's going to be coming to the red armor like not he's not going to be using the jump pad uh like let's say he's already below you near the plasma area and you know he's going to be standing on the on the red very soon cuz it's spawning so in this situation uh you can have like a really bad stack you can have a really bad stack and stand there uh and you basically take an engagement and it's because you have the Escape option of basically that position gives you

an escape option the only way he can catch up to you to kill you or finish you off is by basically rocket jumping up so you have to know whether or not he's willing to rocket jump up because if he does rocket jump up he's uh going to potentially take a lot of damage so it's something that you have to judge and you have to weigh up but what you can do is you have to think about the angle of attack that he has on to you and how this mitigates the damage that he's dealing

to you because it is something that you can control if he's using a sha or or a rail or something um you're making the angle really hard for him like he's he's having to shoot up like this uh at the bridge and if you're on the bridge you can always duck back off the edge if you need to so it's an opportunity for you to deal a lot of damage and it's a great spot to be in if an opponent is uh finding himself with um a lot of control on the map it's a good

way for you to deal with it there that's a good position to try and play with so that's another way that positioning is useful um positioning is also useful and capitalizing on the strength of your Loadout against the opponent's Loadout for example at dm13 again another good example here is or lost world sorry if you're not familiar with the older names uh on DM on Lost World um uh there is a really important principle as far as the weapons go because if we think about the strengths of weapons which we talked about before and efficient

engagements we'll we'll uh think about the shaft and and the nature of the middle area the middle area is really open really really really open and so and and so basically the the shaft is King in the middle area if you do not have a shaft you can't go into the middle area if your opponent has a shaft because you'll do so much damage to you and you just there's no way you can return the level of DPS that he can he can deal with the shaft versus your rocket or whatever on mid-range she just

can't keep up with it so if you're in a position where you've killed someone on dm13 or rather let's say um uh let's say that they killed you they killed you on dm13 and you don't have a shaft maybe you could get a rocket or something but you have no shaft and they you know for a fact that they have a shaft if they're playing the middle positions and stuff you just cannot go there you just can't and that's that's a positioning thing is taking advantage of the strength of your weapon and that's a way

of using positioning to to the weapon strength to stop uh certain options of the opponent and you have to recognize this because if you don't take advantage of it then the opponent's going to get a lot of stuff that you otherwise wouldn't have been able to get also not only this is a a psychology element um not only can we think about uh the fact that he can't if you're sitting in the middle of the map with a shaft and he doesn't have one that he can't engage you that's something you now know about him

you know that he knows that he can't go into the middle area so it starts to play on you understanding how he chooses to move around the map because of how what you have affects him so uh let's I mean positioning there's a lot more I'm sure but I don't want to go too crazy this video has already been very long so item control is another important principle cuz we talked about a lot a lot about um how the kind of contested part like the contested control part of the game and the out control part

of the game with efficient engagements and positioning and stuff like that um but item control is something of course that is more of a consideration for the guy who is who is trying to run control or who is in control so what have I written here I've written controlling items effectively requires item timing whether you like it or not it's pretty pretty fair I think one method for beginners that is often also employed at the top level is to only time the mega and run the armor by a pattern so how does this work so

um we have to time items it's just something you have to just get over and get used to I know a lot of people uh are kind of annoyed by it but uh you can make it easier by yourself by just timing the mega uh and there's a couple reasons for this uh the first reason is that the mega is the only item that spawns on 35 well all Health spawns on 35 second intervals but the mega is the only important item that spawns on 35 seconds in 35 second intervals which means that um if

you choose just to time the mega Health then that you can run the armors via a pattern because if you take the red armor then the yellow armor it's always going to spawn in in the same order as long as you're taking them in the in the right order so you take the red and then you take the yellow the red is going to spawn and then the yellow's going to spawn like you know between the distance the time of the distance it took for you to travel between them that's the interval of how they

will spawn so so that's always going to be the case so on a map like ztn um you only need to know when the mega is because everything else you can run on a pattern so that's fine I mean you can I mean that's that is a completely fine way to play the game and there's a lot of top players that play like that so that's one reason and the other reason is that the mega is often the item that makes the most difference when we're thinking about the armors and the health and the and

the mega the the mega is going to make more of a difference than the AR the armor will because of the way the damage ratios work and uh you know the damage ratio is like one to two with the armor so uh the mega is going to give you a little bit more of an edge sometimes uh not always but uh it's definitely a more preferable item to have than having like 200 armor and 100 Health you you'd prefer to have like 200 health and uh 100 armor so um let's see so that yeah that's

the reasons why that method can work and why you should probably do that method if you're if you're kind of skeptical about using timing just do that um so all these con concepts are synergistic and they all come into considerations together uh when you're when you're looking at any fight when you're analyzing any demo when you're watching yourself play when you're watching your opponent's play when you're trying to read the game all of these things come together and you got to figure out how they how they affect the fights and so that helps you to

make better decisions in the future so at the end I've put um let's revisit the fre states with these principles in mind so okay so what I'll do is I'll give you an over overview of how you want to play each of the phases of the game so we got the three states and when you're in control this is the state this is where you want to be the entire game and the reason is because the more health and armor you take the more um the more uh the more you can make errors basically the

more damage you can take you know before you'll die so that means the opponent has to deal more damage than you in every in every engagement to to kill you and to win so whoever has the most resources is most likely to win that's that's common sense I think so out of control is the situation where um where basically like you have to whittle away the other the the opponent and it is by far the most difficult position to play because you you have to not die and every time you die the situation gets a

little bit worse um and you're going to have to make good use of traps and efficient engagements and you're going to have to take risks because with if the opponent has more resources than you you just have to take risks and hope that the risk pays off there's always going to be risks in when you're trying to set up a trap or when you're trying to uh basically stick your neck out there when you have less Health armor or weapons there's always going to be a bit of a risk there you're always going to be

be be a bit of an underdog that's the whole point so and contesta control yeah I mean yeah I guess there's not much I can say that I've have not already said so I hope that I broke these Concepts down enough and I hope that I didn't go too crazy with this CU I tend to run a bit so I hope this helped people and let me know if you like this or want anything more like this I been thinking about running a kind of like a weekly show where I look at the demos of

people who send Demos in and I go through the situations with all this stuff in mind and hopefully like I can try and help to analyze where people can improve analyze where they maybe took an inefficient engagement or where they didn't and how it changed the game and so on and so forth so if if there is interest for that interest for anything more like this me ranting about Theory then uh let me know and I will do my best to make it happen so thanks for watching and I hope you enjoyed it and catch

you guys later