Welcome to the second installment of Booster Shot, an article series where I–your ever-stalwart Counter-Strike reporter–explore and explain unique, highly situational, and mostly useless boosts in excruciating detail. Plus, this week I found a map-breaking boost. It’s at the bottom of the page, though, so you’ll have to slog through a couple paragraphs to get to it. I know, nothing’s easy.
This week, we’re going to be taking a look at Cobblestone. Professional teams and players are slowly starting to innovate on the map, but the development of the meta on Cobblestone is still in its infancy. There’s plenty of tricks that either aren’t widely used or simply haven’t been discovered yet.
And if tricks are for kids, then call me a five year old, because I love this shit.
Miss B. Haven (“Upskirt”)
Cobblestone’s B site is one of the hardest bombsites to defend in the game–once the Terrorist side gets an opening pick, it’s practically a guaranteed round win. Personally, I’m terrible at holding B–I panic when there’s a rush, use my nades at stupid times, and get caught out of position.
This two-person boost provides an excellent passive defense of the B plat area. To get started, ask your teammate to crouch on the ledge of Statue.*
*Remember–Cobblestone is a map that has incredibly punishing rush timings for the CT side. If your teammate can’t figure out the correct boost position or it’s taking too long to set up, abandon ship and play the round out normally.
Thankfully, this boost is fairly forgiving as far as lineups go–your teammate just has to get into a “good enough” spot for you to get the angle you need. Now, once they’ve crouched–assumed the position, if you will–you jump on their head.
Do a quick little jump so that your teammate can stop crouching–you’ll need that extra bit of height for the boost to work correctly. Once your teammate is standing, your boost has become fully armed and operational. You should see something like this.
Not only is this a “headshot angle,” meaning that the enemy will only be able to shoot your head if they see you, but it’s incredibly uncommon to see in PUGs. Any Ts that are aggressing onto Plat will usually focus on clearing out the sides of Statue or Chicken Coop, which leaves you with an easy and unexpected angle to mow down the oncoming Terrorist horde. If you happen to miss the shot or multiple Terrorists rush the site to try and force a bomb plant, you have a teammate nearby (well, underneath you, technically) that can throw flashes, dump utility, and try to make sure you’re traded if you get fragged.
My recommendation would be to whip out this boost only in important rounds–if your team is faced with the prospect of an economy reset on their CT side, using a trick like this to secure a round win and build up your team’s bank can be enough to regain momentum and take control of the half.
In other words, this is probably the most useful boost I’ll ever talk about in this article series.
Jump Scouting Long A Like an Idiot
Now that I’ve shown you a boost that can actually win you rounds, I’d like to direct your attention to something far more situational on the CT side. Defending A site is another difficult task–especially given the current meta of stacking 4 players towards B at the start of every round. For this boost, you will need to:
- Buy a Scout (SSG 08). Buy armor/nades if your economy allows for it, but it’s not a bad idea to use this somewhat gimmicky boost when your team is on an eco/light-buy round.
- Have a teammate come to the CT entrance to Long A with you.
Now, your incredibly patient teammate is going to stand in the right-hand corner outside of Long A. Just like this.
If you’re unfamiliar with how the Scout works in CS:GO, the gun is more than just a two-hit-kill sniper rifle for AWPers on a budget. Most guns–especially the AWP–are incredibly inaccurate while jumping. The Scout, however, is fully accurate if you shoot it at the ‘top’ of your jump. This is known as “jump scouting,” and the timing can be tricky to nail, but once you’ve mastered it, it’s a very powerful technique that can be applied to devastating effect.
I’ll be honest, I don’t think this is the best use of the jump scout on Cobblestone–if you’re on eco, you might be better off having a player with a Scout push out to Long A to get information and/or a pick while stacking the remaining members of the defense on the B site to stop a potential rush.
But that’s not going to stop me from showing it to you. Once your teammate is ready, jump onto that cozy little noggin of theirs–make sure to jump again after you’ve landed so that your teammate can stand up. Now, from here, you have a wonderful view of a preposterously short roof–why is there even tiling there? It looks like this:
Boring, right? Think again, stranger. Check this out.
If you try this boost, make sure you take one thing into account: this is not a position that you should try and hold from. If you spot any Terrorists pushing Long A, take a potshot at them while jumping, fall back to the site, blocking off Long with a smoke grenade if you were able to afford one–if you’re confident in your ability to tag people with the scout, it can be useful to have your teammate buy an HE grenade and throw it after you take a shot. The slow rate of fire on the Scout, combined with the fact that you and your teammate can be mollied/naded to oblivion once you’ve revealed your position, mean that RUNNING BACK TO THE SITE is really the only “smart” play to make in this scenario.
Oops, I Broke Cobblestone
Here comes the good stuff, dear reader.
A friend and I figured out this three-person boost while we were mucking about on an empty server–it’s difficult to replicate, takes more time than it’s worth in almost every scenario, and Fnatic have already requested that I take it out of the article. But that’s not enough to stop me–I’m a journalist, dammit. I’ve got, you know, journalistic integrity and stuff.
I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves, but the idea is this–you triple-boost behind this ledge halfway up Ramp on A, and BAM! You can see the entire site.
Note: the game actively tries to “fight” this boost. Your character model, if it’s in the position pictured in the second screenshot, will slowly slide to the left or right. You do remain fully accurate, however–crouching also minimizes the amount of sliding.
Think you can replicate or improve this boost? Feel like giving it a shot in Matchmaking or PUGs? Try it out, and send a video or gif of the results to joshua@esportsedition.com to be featured in the next installment of Booster Shot!