Fluid Priorities and Roles
Putting playstyles first
The following is an outline of how I think about the game with regard to team compositions and player roles. I originally made this system back in Splatoon 1, but it was always more of a personal shorthand than anything else, so I didn’t publish it.
Recently, people have been taking more of an interest in team compositions, particularly on a holistic level, so I thought it might be time to polish my system up and give people something to sink their teeth into.
In publishing this guide, I hope to give teams (especially intermediate teams) something to bridge the gap to the higher levels of competitive play. It’s good enough to publish by my standards, so I’m hoping that means it’s pretty solid.
The following is only an introduction. I’ll be talking about the core part of the system, but if I were to go through every edge case and how they explain the way people currently play the game, we’d be looking at a couple hundred pages.
However, if you have any specific questions about how this system works (or doesn’t seem to), feel free to shoot me a DM on Discord (username: flc).
Post-publish edit: If you see numbers in brackets (like [0]), you can click on them to get a more detailed explanation about some of the more obscure concepts that I talk about here. These were originally comments, but apparently comments aren’t visible to readers. Oops.
For Splatoon 3 players: Please note that this guide was written in 2018 for Splatoon 2, based on reviewing gameplay by top-level Japanese players in Splatoon 1 (in 2016-2017). The ideas are very old, and I haven’t used them myself for a long time.
There’s a lot that’s different about Splatoon 3, and it requires a more cynical approach to the game (for example, most weapons are not viable, so you can’t even try to use them; most maps heavily restrict what you can do, so you can’t be as creative; there aren’t many specials you can use to play at long range, so it’s much harder to have an effect on the game without being very good with your main weapon).
A lot of what’s written here still works, but only on a fundamental level, so please keep that in mind as you’re reading. You might also find that a more static style works better for modes like Turf War that play out in a more predictable manner.
I may have time to write a version of this guide for Splatoon 3 in future. If so, I’ll post it on my Twitter page, linked above.
So, with that out of the way, let’s get started.
The basis of this system is not roles, but priorities. We’re starting here because I want to emphasise that the roles we will discuss later are completely determined by how this system of priorities works. They’re a little vague at first, but I’ll explain them in more detail below.
These priorities are:
We’ll go over why the objective isn’t among these priorities in a moment. The number and order are also significant.
Let’s go into a little more detail.
A team wipe is possibly the worst thing that can happen to your team. I say “possibly”, because desynced spawns can be worse, but it’s the same principle either way.
The main practical effect of a team wipe is that you lose all map control for as long as your team is respawning.[1]
The freedom that a team wipe affords an attacking team is so immense as to be gamebreaking; it often results in spawn camp setups, which in turn often result in the aforementioned desynced spawns.[2]
Even when your team has a lot of people alive, it’s very possible for things to take a very quick turn for the worse, resulting in a two- or three-down situation. For this reason, you do need to have some weapons play a little more safely than others, just in case.
As such, avoiding a team wipe so as to always have some presence on the map is paramount. This gives us our first priority.
By “engage the enemy”, I mean to provide resistance against what the enemy team is trying to do. If a team wipe provides complete freedom to the enemy team, the next worst thing is to let them do whatever they want despite having the means to stop them.
The key thing to understand here is that resistance implies persistence. Running in 1v3 and dying is not resistance, it’s feeding. Safely threatening kills[3] is your main way of engaging teams that are in a stronger position than you are.
Engaging the enemy is distinct from avoiding a team wipe in that it’s active and aggressive. You can (and sometimes should) avoid a team wipe by sitting in a corner hoping nobody sees you, but you aren’t really giving the enemy team a whole lot to think about. More importantly, though, engaging the enemy is also a key part of aggressive moves.
This priority comes second for a number of reasons, but the most important of those is that engaging the enemy is the most reliable setup to enable the third priority to be carried out.
If priorities one and two are concerned with not losing, this is the first priority that involves winning.
The fastest and most efficient way to take map control in Splatoon is to win a fight[4]. You can gradually push in with attrition, but this usually invites the enemy team to build specials and gives them more time to mount more counterattacks.
Taking parts of the map that you do not control is central to every game mode in Splatoon, as well as just about any halfway decent game mode you care to name in any other map-based multiplayer game.
In fact, while this is the third priority out of four in this system, it’s the one that everything else is based around (because this system is ultimately about how to win).
Winning fights involves getting kills, but not all kills are equal. For now, let’s define winning a fight as getting all relevant kills in an area. A full dive into kill relevance is something we’ll worry about another time.
To win fights, you need to fight up close[5]. Close fights involve short-ranged weapons (which have much faster and more reliable kill times), and make it harder for people to run away.
This might seem like a strange priority to have. “Accelerate”? It can’t get much more vague than that.
What I mean by “accelerate” is to make your team comp move from fight to fight more quickly.
Explaining why this is the fourth priority involves a lot of concepts that’ll be new to most people reading this guide, but I want to keep this section brief, so you’ll just have to take my word for it for now[6].
In practice, acceleration is making sure the core players on your team don’t have to do things they don’t want to do (which ranges from “backing up to protect the anchor” to “the objective” to “dying”), thus letting them focus completely on their strengths.
Each objective guides you toward certain playstyles, but the core part of each objective still comes down to striking a balance between gaining and keeping map control.
You can look at this system as a companion to the rules of each objective, with objective-specific tactics being derived by combining priorities and objective rules.
For example, to push on Tower Control, you need to win fights ahead of the tower in order to clear checkpoints and keep the tower safe; the objective gives you context for what “win fights” means in practice.
Furthermore, part of the use in this system is to give you the freedom to handle the objective optimally at each stage of the game, rather than bending over backwards to accomodate a dedicated objective player when doing so isn’t ideal.
We’re about to get into how all of this translates to the more familiar idea of team roles. But first, I want to introduce perhaps the most important idea in this entire guide:
In any game of Splatoon, everything is constantly going wrong.
You will never have a game of Splatoon between two similarly skilled teams where everything goes according to plan. You will always find yourself in bad situations.
At its core, this system is about helping you to make the best of a bad situation, because you will invariably be in bad situations.
Handling bad situations gives you consistency. Anything and anyone can look and feel good when things are going right. The best players and teams are defined by how well they turn impossible situations around.
And ultimately, this system is about teaching you how to do that too.
Roles under this system are mostly about what a player focuses on, or specialises toward, but as we’ll soon see, they are just a starting point. For now, keep in mind that under this system, you do not play the same role for the entire game.
Static roles have no place in this game, and I do not use them. The following roles are simply a way to make priorities easier to understand for people who are used to using roles, and so that we have a shorthand for later.
The player focusing on staying alive is the anchor.
We can begin with the established idea of what an anchor is: a long-ranged weapon that sits in the back, farming stingrays.
While this is a valid definition, it’s also a little narrow, and it doesn’t really tell you how to be a good anchor.
If you take anchoring to simply mean a weapon that is as effective as possible while being safe, we can paint a clearer picture of what a good anchor should look like, and how you can better adapt your weapon choice to what other people are using.
Distance, unsurprisingly, is the main way to keep yourself safe, especially since there are no infinite-range main weapons in this game. However, the trick to playing an effective anchor is to use the least distance possible, while still being safe.
Think about it this way: the closer to the enemy team you are as an anchor, the more of their base you can control.
Therefore, to be as effective as possible usually means being close enough to the enemy team that you’re constantly threatening to kill them.
However, your priority is still to stay alive, and that takes precedence over getting kills.
Putting these two ideas together, the “best” spot for an anchor is as close to the enemy team as possible while still being safe.
Crucially, what constitutes “safe” differs from player to player, giving anchors something else to refine about their play: mechanical skill translates directly to both safer and more aggressive anchoring.
If you can react to danger faster, run away quicker, and hit more shots sooner on people trying to run at you, you can play much more aggressively than less-practised anchors while still remaining just as safe as ever.
Now, while anchors in this system are certainly the most similar to the anchor concept most players use, we’re not done with it yet. But let’s get through the rest of these roles first.
The player focusing on engaging the enemy team is the skirmisher, or fighter. I sometimes refer to them as “initiators” too, but initiators need not be skirmishers (they just usually are).
This will be the least familiar role to most people reading this, so I’ll go into a little more detail here.
Skirmishers are weapons that fight a lot (hence why I usually call them “fighters”, but “skirmishers” is a little less ambiguous), and constitute the first half of your fighting pair.
The key elements of a good skirmisher are the ability to force fights and not lose them. Usually, they’ll have a good amount of flexibility into the neighbouring priorities as a result; more on that in a later section.
Let’s start with not losing fights. A good skirmisher needs to be able to take on multiple enemy players at a time without dying, or at least without dying immediately. They don’t need to win these fights; they just need to not lose them.
Skirmishers also need to be able to force fights. The main way to force a fight is to be threatening; you don’t want the enemy team to just ignore you[7], after all.
This role also serves as the bridge between defence and offence for a well-built team. A skirmisher’s ability to stay alive allows them to buy time for their team to respawn when defending, while also initiating fights to let their team safely make their way into a push.
I use three (and a half) categories to cover each of the effective means of skirmishing:
The most effective skirmishers for a standard bait-and-switch playstyle are Tank and Evade, with Trick skirmishers being more focused on initiating by walking into a part of the map where their weapon is extremely strong and finding the opening kill themselves.
It might seem like trick skirmishers are superior, but remember that their strength is dependent on whether they can abuse the part of the map your team wants to control; if they can’t, they need someone else to initiate for them, which dramatically limits which weapons they can be paired with.
Special Tanks, and initiating with specials in general, are an option for handling the aforementioned weakness of trick skirmishers, or as an option on Splat Zones where you aren’t under any immediate pressure to push the enemy team back and can therefore spend more time building specials.
Be careful with specials, though; what makes skirmishers strong is that they let you start fights without specials. Being able to fight without specials dramatically speeds up everything your team does.
Therefore, good skirmisher weapons tend to have minimal reliance on their specials. Which is just as well, mind you; skirmishers die a lot, so they aren’t going to be getting many specials in the first place.
Quick Respawn/Stealth Jump is especially effective on skirmishers not only because they die a lot, but because they tend to get mostly assists when the team plays around them well (and assists don’t cancel Quick Respawn).
Whereas the anchor can play very selfishly and without much concern for what their team is doing (essentially treating them as meat shields), the skirmisher is the opposite. They must be fully aware of what their team is trying to do and how they can contribute to those goals; there’s not much point initiating if there’s nobody to initiate for.
The slayer is the one in charge of winning fights.
To this end, slayers are spoon-fed kills by their team. This entire system is built around enabling the slayer to walk up behind a distracted, disoriented enemy team and hold the trigger for three kills and a hundred twitter points for their sick gameplay clip.
If you’re wondering whether I’m saying this role isn’t very hard to play, you’d be right. But that’s the point. Ease of execution is vital for a good slayer.
Reliability is the name of the slayer game. A weapon that is good at taking control of the map is one that does not fail to capitalise on opportunities because “oh, but this weapon is difficult”. A slayer does not miss opportunities because their weapon fails them.
A good slayer weapon is easy, safe, and effective. This is where your Enperries, Tri-Sloshers, and so on fit in. The next time someone flames you by saying that all you do with your blaster is walk up and hold the trigger down, thank them for the compliment on your team’s behalf.
So, if a slayer’s all about having it as easy as possible, what does a slayer need to be good at? Turns out it’s not slaying at all: in fact, it’s the exact opposite!
A great slayer is one who keeps their team alive by acting so efficiently and decisively that the enemy team doesn’t even have time to take down the skirmisher.
Amusingly, this means that the way to separate a good slayer from the rest is to look at how many times their teammates died, not how many kills they got.
Incidentally, this means slayers should not be flanking as such. Taking an off angle[10] is usually sufficient, and hard flanks cause delays (among other things; see Isolation, below) that limit how often the skirmisher can initiate. Small flanks are fine, but hard flanks are better left to the utility role (below).
This theme of saving teammates also ties in nicely with our next role.
The utility player is in charge of accelerating their team’s pace.
I have very consciously not used the term “support” for this role, because the kind of playstyle that people tend to associate with “support” can optimistically be described as “pretending to be useful”.
The main job of a utility player is to remove obstacles that would otherwise impede the fighting pair. Such obstacles include flankers, the objective, turf control, and even small things like enemy sprinklers or beakons.
You can’t remove every obstacle, though. You need to predict and plan for what you think will hold your fighting pair back the most, and choose a utility playstyle accordingly:
So, yes, this basically means that goo tuber, sploosh, roller, brush, luna, and pro are the same role. Not to worry; that’s just because this role is where you have the most flexibility to tailor your playstyle and team composition to the map and mode.
Also, this is where pretty much every low-tier weapon in the game ends up. The other three roles are focused on three far more important priorities that you cannot do without. Weapons that are only good at things that do not fit into those first three priorities, by definition, are less powerful in general.
It should come as no surprise that I do NOT recommend being a dedicated utility player. It might sound like a good idea to be a “flex” player and run utility, but as I’ll explain later, this role is a little different from the other three.
People have recently taken to using “front-line”[12], “mid-line”, and “back-line” as roles.
While I can understand the appeal, these roles have a number of major flaws that make understanding and learning about them very difficult.
Front line and back line are positions. They identify spots on the map in relation to a team’s map control: the front line is the boundary of a team’s map control, and the back line is anything that the team controls behind the front line. There is no such thing as a mid line.[13]
Again, I can see where these roles come from: “I am on the front line a lot, which makes me a front-liner.” And, yes, you could match back-line to anchor, front-line to slayer and skirmisher, and mid-line to utility.
The main problem with all these lines is that they tell you nothing about the grey areas and edge cases. Usually, if you ask about them, you’ll get an answer along the lines of “you can tell with experience[14]”.
As an example, what does it mean to say “Tetra is a front-liner”? “Tetra fights on the front lines a lot”, you might say. “Tetra is mainly concerned with pushing back the enemy team”, you might continue. But you would struggle to meaningfully separate it from other “front-line” weapons that are completely different.
In this system, we’ve established that Tetra and Enperry are vastly different weapons. We can say that one plays as a skirmisher and the other is a slayer to understand the differences, and we can appreciate their synergy by seeing the similarity in the means through which they accomplish their goals (even if their goals are distinct).
The problem is that talking about things in terms of lines is prescribing a playstyle to a weapon, and not the other way around. Charger and Jet Squelcher both anchor and both “back-line”, but they play very differently.
And while any experienced player knows that you don’t put Charger and Jet Squelcher in the same positions, when you’re trying to learn the game, you need a way to understand exactly what the difference is without needing to rely on experience.
So, with that, we’ve established what these roles are. Now, let’s break them apart.
The most basic way of using these roles is to have one of each on a team. In fact, in spite of everything I’m about to say, I’d still recommend that intermediate teams do so.
The way I use these roles is as short-hand for the priority associated with the role. This affords us a lot of flexibility: the role is merely a goal, and you can work toward it in any way you choose.
So let’s start shifting perspectives a little.
Probably the most important tactic in this guide is shifting.
A shift usually occurs when you lose a player and need to shift your remaining players around in order to cover whatever priorities that player was in charge of.
You can also shift consciously, for example by having a slayer and skirmisher trade roles for a moment.
Shifts are tricky to pull off quickly and correctly, but I’ve laid out this system to make it a little easier.
The priority system is your guide on shifting. You generally dedicate the equivalent of one player to each priority. When you lose a player, you drop the least important priority and have people shift roles to cover what’s left, until you’re down to your last player, who must try to stay alive.
“What if we don’t shift?”, you might ask. Well, that’s explained here too. When you don’t shift, you leave a gap in your priorities that often leads to the situation worsening.
All three of these cases imply that you almost certainly will lose more players by not dropping utility first.
This is why priorities are forced upon you at times. If you continue to play as a slayer when you’re two down, sometimes it’ll work, but often it will make things much worse for your team.
So, when things go wrong, shifts tell you how you should handle it, and the priorities themselves tell you what will happen if you don’t.
This all applies to the enemy team, too. When you take out an enemy player, you can tell by which role they were playing how the enemy should shift and what weaknesses will present themselves if they don’t.
You can also shift players intentionally, based on a smaller change in the game. In fact, voluntary shifts are part of the reason why the idea of a fighting pair exists in the first place.
Remember that skirmishers need to represent kill threat in order to prevent the enemy team from disengaging. But if the enemy team does disengage, their target will almost invariably be the slayer.
This causes a priority shift where the slayer and skirmisher trade roles. Both players need to be able to recognise when this happens so that they can transition smoothly. For this reason, slayer weapons that have something skirmisher-like tend to work better with a wider range of skirmishers.
Trick skirmishers need to take advantage of these shifts in order to be effective. Even a well-chosen trick skirmisher will have moments where their trick won’t work in the part of the map that they need to take next. When this happens, they need to shift into a slayer or utility role in order to remain effective.
Utility is the first role to be dropped when your team needs to shift, and so a big part of choosing a utility weapon is understanding what happens when it shifts roles.
In most cases, the first player on your team to go down in a fight will be one of your fighting pair (and usually your skirmisher at that). Your utility will be the one stepping in to cover for them, either by becoming the slayer (who in turn becomes the skirmisher) or by shifting directly into the skirmisher role.
However, there’s one very big difference when the utility weapon takes the stage: you aren’t in a 4v4 anymore.
I mentioned already that the majority of weapons in this game can only really be played as utility, particularly “low-tier” weapons. But this is just because they’re usually specialised in ways that aren’t as useful all the time; they’re niche picks, in other words.
Once the fight’s started and you’re no longer in a 4v4 situation, these niches can be blown wide open. A roller might have a hell of a time getting in against a team that’s wary of it, but once you’re down to a 3v2, it becomes much easier to get in and start dunking people.
The point here is that your utility weapon being intended to shift allows you to choose weapons that become stronger once a fight breaks out. This allows you to build team compositions that can maintain their strength for a long time in a fight, even when they start taking losses.
This trait is unique to utility weapons because weapons in other roles must be chosen for their strength in their intended role (with the ability to flex being merely a nice benefit), which makes them weaker once they shift out of that role.
Inertia is a somewhat more advanced concept than what I wanted to cover here, so I won’t go into it too much, but I want to at least introduce it so that people know to look for it.
Inertia describes the time delay (sorry, physics majors) between a priority shift being forced on a player and that player taking up the priority.
Now, yes, faster is generally better (so advanced!), but I’m introducing this concept because the moment a priority is forced on a player is not necessarily the earliest moment you can recognise that a shift is needed.
The main example I want to focus on is what happens when a skirmisher initiates. Once the skirmisher’s gone in, it’s usually quite easy to tell when they’re about to die. Not only that, but once they do get taken down, it usually takes the enemy team a little time to fully react and turn on the slayer (or whoever else).
The slayer can recognise this to not only make their shift to skirmisher instantaneous, but also to keep playing as a slayer for a second or two after the skirmisher dies. This amount of time is often plenty for a slayer to get one more kill, which in turn makes their job of shifting to skirmisher even easier!
In a roundabout way, what this is telling us is that the key factor to a successful initiation is timing. If you can time your play so that your skirmisher and slayer hit the enemy team at the exact same time, even if the skirmisher instantly dies, the slayer can still make it work!
Inertia works in reverse, too, when you’ve got a player jumping in and you know they’re going to push you back to your original role once they’ve done so. Recognising that their re-entry is about to shift you can, again, let you reduce your inertia to zero.
Shifting assumes that a player can actually shift into the role they’re supposed to, but that’s not always possible. When a shift should happen but can’t, we can say that the player is isolated from their team.
Isolation allows us to understand how a team that’s split up across the map can function.
The basic premise is pretty simple, as it turns out: isolated groups of players form their own priority system that’s completely separate from the rest of their team. A lone player is forced to play anchor; if they’ve brought a friend, they can play skirmisher.
Remember that the main problem with a team wipe is that you completely relinquish map control, but there’s nothing to say that the same effect can’t be achieved in other means. An isolated player may technically prevent a team wipe, but they are in no position to anchor for the rest of their team should the need arise, which means the enemy team now only needs to kill three people to effectively wipe your team.
Isolation is sometimes necessary due to map design. Luckily for us, in Splatoon 2, this is only on a very small number of maps[15]. The main one is Camp Triggerfish Splat Zones; you can’t really group up as four players when you’re defending the zones, so you’re stuck in a 2+2 split for most of the game.
Isolation also goes a long way to explaining solo queue games, especially in the S+ bracket[16], where games are characterised by four anchors per team (because nobody is helping anyone), with the winning team usually being the first one to acquire a skirmisher.
(Note: This is a much more advanced part of this system, so feel free to skip it if you are having trouble understanding it.)
Splitting is to have multiple players handle parts of one priority at the same time. The possibilities can get pretty crazy, and this is probably the most advanced thing in this guide, so feel free to skip this part if it’s a bit too abstract.
I think it’s best to explain splitting with examples. This time, let’s look at the Custom Jet Squelcher + Explosher duo.
Sticking to a strict role system, you might say “well, that’s two anchors, no way that will work”. Luckily, we aren’t making that mistake, which means there’s no reason they can’t just share the anchor role and do some other stuff while they’re at it!
I like this example because there are actually a number of ways you can split these two. One option is to split both as anchor/skirmisher, playing much more aggressively with what is effectively two weaker trick fighters that play well off each other.
Another option is to split both as anchor/utility, with CJS being a weaker crossfire utility, and Ex being special utility, to maintain a dedicated fighting pair. A third option is to split one as anchor/util, and the other as anchor/skirm (with other splits elsewhere in the team to cover the gaps).
You can see where I’m going with this. Because all a role really is is a way to work toward a priority, there’s no reason you can’t have two people team up on the same priority every now and then.
This is distinct from a shift because both weapons play the same roles at the same time. While there will often be small shifts one way or the other (the Ex will move up more aggressively with bubbles when the CJS moves back to use stingray), both weapons are pretty much always playing both roles.
Even when using dedicated roles, splitting is still present: anchors often try to be effective by slightly splitting utility, while skirmishers can put as much emphasis on getting kills (thus splitting slayer) as they see fit.
Splitting is powerful for two reasons: it lets you specialise your team compositions toward the map or mode, and it lets you recognise how to shift your playstyle to better assist your team.
If you like, you could also say that it’s powerful because it can be difficult for the other team to adapt to what you’re doing. However, that comes at a cost.
Before you get carried away splitting everything up, we’ve got to cover the downsides to splitting.
The most important is that it’s much harder to play split team compositions. You need to understand priorities really well in order to split effectively as an individual player, and then you need to glue all that together with your team.
For this reason, I strongly advise that you don’t try to split your roles too much if you decide you want to try this system out for yourself, whether that’s solo or with a team. I’d say that to be ready to try splitting more seriously, you’ll need priorities and roles to be second nature.
Splitting has some more practical downsides, too. When someone playing two roles at once goes down, their team needs to shift and cover both of those half-roles, which often means shifting half-way (say, pure slayer to skirmisher/slayer).
In other words, splitting roles drastically changes the way your team responds to change, which is difficult and sometimes unintuitive. Many weapons are strong because of how well they handle standard changes; they might not be so good at handling non-standard changes.
Furthermore, what you gain in specialisation toward the map, mode, or team composition, you lose in resilience. If either the Custom Jet or Explosher from the previous example dies, then the team loses not only the player who goes down, but also the catalyst that enables the more aggressive playstyle.
Similarly, what a team gains by using two people to initiate, they lose in flexibility when things go wrong. Half a skirmisher isn’t good enough to initiate; you need both, which can and will slow you down if the game starts getting scrappy.
If you compare this to a more standard role spread, players in dedicated roles are always able to quickly jump into doing their job; they won’t be hovering around in half-in, half-out positions, and can specialise toward being very good at what they do.
Splitting your roles allows you to play a distinct style that may better suit what you and your team want, but the kinds of unintuitive shifts that splitting creates can undermine the smooth transitions that the best weapons enjoy. It’s definitely something to be reserved for the more advanced or adventurous teams.
Because the main difficulty in handling split roles is in how to handle a player going down, the fact that utility doesn’t need replacement makes utility splits significantly easier.
The Jet Squelcher, again, is a good example. I’ve found that it’s particularly effective with a slight anchor/utility split, often with some kind of fairly passive utility/anchor weapon to pick up the slack.
When either the Jet or the utility/anchor goes down, there actually aren’t any full shifts at all; whichever one is still alive just shifts into dedicated anchor, and the fighting pair can focus completely on themselves.
The catch is that utility, as a role, encompasses a very large variety of playstyles, so splitting utility means needing to account for how much defensive or crossfire utility you’re working with and what that means your team will be good at.
Anyway, that’s about as far as I’m willing to go with explaining some of the more nuanced elements of this system. There’s plenty more where that came from, but most of it’s too niche and too unpolished (not to mention, too detailed) to be worth explaining at this stage.
We’ve now covered priorities and roles, as well as how to use them to improve your teamwork and coordination. Now, let’s bring everything together and look at how to turn all of the above into wins. While we’re at it, we’ll also answer one of Splatoon’s burning questions: can everything be good if you play it right?
A win condition is a condition that, once fulfilled, leads to you winning the game. This could be anything from a detailed scenario to something as simple as “if we kill the brella, none of their weapons can do anything to stop us so we win”.
Win conditions are often quite difficult to identify, especially in the middle of a game where you’ve only got about five seconds between seeing the enemy team’s weapons and having to start playing.
It gets a lot easier when you have a system that you can quickly apply to both teams to understand what advantages your team has to work with.
Let’s start with roles. First thing to do when you see which weapons you’re up against is to fit them into the roles I’ve outlined above. Do they have any gaps, such as no skirmisher or the wrong kind of utility for the map? Great, that’s a win condition in the making. I already explained what happens when you don’t have certain roles being played. Your job is now to exploit those weaknesses.
Maybe you look at your team composition and see gaps of your own. No worries! Gaps are only a problem if they’re exploited, so what can you do to cover them?
After you’ve established the what, it’s time for the how. Maybe they’ve got one weapon for each role. How will these weapons play? Do their ideal playstyles mesh well, or will one player be jumping through hoops to do right by their team? That odd player out will be struggling even if they play correctly, so single them out as a weak spot too.
You do the same for your own team, too. Are there any weapons that play really well off each other? The things to look for are damage combos (slosher + burst bomb, rapid + machine, blaster + gal…) and playstyle synergy (curling + tetra, multiple burst bombs, high turf + sharking weapons...). These will form the core of your winning formula.
Just remember to keep the golden rule in the back of your mind whenever you’re coming up with a win condition. A fragile or overly-specific win condition is not good; your win conditions should be easily attainable and, once fulfilled, very difficult for the enemy team to fight against.
By focusing on win conditions, you’re focusing on what you can do rather than what you can’t do. Once you know what you can do, you can align those things with what you need to do to win by studying the metagame.
The metagame is the most misunderstood concept I’ve seen in all of competitive gaming. The metagame consists of what everyone else is doing. It does not tell you what or how to play. It does not tell you what can and cannot win. At no point should you ever utter the phrase, “I’m doing this because it’s meta”.
The reason the metagame is so important is because it gives your win conditions context. You decide how you want to play, and how you want to win. The metagame helps you to study teams as a whole in advance to make sure you aren’t leaving massive holes in your strategy.
Think of it this way: If you want to win a tournament, you have to beat everyone else. To beat everyone else, you have to beat what everyone else is doing. What everyone else is doing is the definition of the metagame. Therefore, if you want to win a tournament, by definition you need to be doing something that is not part of the metagame.
The metagame is also not just about weapon and gear choices, it’s also about playstyles and tendencies. If everyone plays similarly and has similar weaknesses, that’s part of the metagame. In the B-rank solo queue metagame where everyone runs directly toward the objective all game long, the best thing to do to win is to find something that exploits that tendency, such as short flanks and ambushes.
… Almost. I’m afraid it’s not as simple as “every weapon is good in the right hands”; the only reason nearly every weapon works is because the developers have done a great job of giving most weapons something they can contribute to a team.
By my assessment, almost every weapon in the current version of Splatoon 2 can work. Very few weapons are outright better than other options; very few weapons are outright useless. At worst, a decent chunk of the weapon pool is too niche for me to recommend in good faith.
Having said that, I already introduced a few notes on low-tier weapons, particularly with regard to the utility role.
The fact is that certain elements of the game are more important than others, and what wins games is converting map control to objective time. Kills are the only efficient way to gain map control in sufficient quantity for high-scoring pushes.
Because of this, any weapon that is not designed to gain map control through kills must be given a lower priority. And yet, many of these things[17] (turf control, specials, crossfire, sharking, and so on) are still vital to winning the game; you just need to know how to pick the right tool for the job.
Which, in a sense, is the whole point of systems like this. Between win conditions, shifts, roles, and priorities, you should now have a couple ways to figure out what the right tool for the job might be. There’s still plenty more where that came from, but I want to wrap this up.
In this guide, I’ve presented a comprehensive and flexible role system, based on managing the most important priorities that a team needs to fulfill in any given game of Splatoon.
However, as we’ve seen, this role system is just a means to an end, and that end is winning games. You win games by understanding how your team can beat the other team, and then playing around that understanding.
But to arrive at that understanding, you need some signposts to guide you, because it’s no good wandering aimlessly in search of answers to the wrong questions.
Roles, priorities, and shifts are just some of the signposts you can use to find your way to better play. I’m hoping to introduce even more in the coming months.
If I start getting a lot of the same questions, I’ll add answers to them here.
Since this guide was mostly about introducing the system as a means to an end, I wasn’t very specific as to what each role entails. That was with good reason, but at the same time, it’s true that weapons and playstyles fitting each role have certain qualities in common. I’d like to introduce some of them here.
However, I want to make one thing very clear before I do so: I am adding this explcitly so you can practise applying this system, so that you can understand why certain qualities are helpful toward the priorities I’ve outlined. Do NOT categorise weapons under the roles I’ve outlined in this guide. To do so is to fundamentally misunderstand what this system is about.
If I’m being honest, the knowledge that people will misuse this system and start categorising weapons into roles in spite of my protests is why I never made a point of publishing this system until now. I don’t like contributing to problems.
Anyway, with my griping out of the way, let’s run through a few archetypical weapons in each category to give you an idea of how this system comes together at a basic level.
I was using comments to explain things for those who need it without distracting too much from the guide for those who don’t. Turns out comments aren’t visible to people who don’t have permission to write comments themselves.
Since I really don’t want to add random paragraphs of crap to this guide, I’m going to add hyperlinked annotations here. I know it’s not the most convenient way of doing things, but it’ll have to do for now.
This sentence bears elaboration, but I don't want to spend three pages talking about this one thing.
Map control is distinct from turf control, and that's the crux of why team wipes are such a problem. Turf control is "the part of the map you've painted". Map control is "the part of the map the enemy team can't use".
You can control parts of the map you haven't painted, and you can have paint in parts of the map you don't control.
Turf control only contributes to map control when you have people who could be hiding in it. The only people who could be hiding in turf are those who are unaccounted for. Being dead or recently visible on the map makes you accounted for.
Whenever turf control is not contributing to map control, map control is gained only through actively enforcing it (i.e. killing things). You can't actively enforce anything when you're dead.
As for "respawning": The time it takes to respawn is the time between the moment you die and the first instant that you do something useful (not the first moment you gain control).
Respawning after a team wipe removes the option of superjumping to improve your respawn time, so your respawn times are almost always longer.
Desynced spawns occur when you are effectively teamwiped (because you have all four players respawning) but some of your players are back on the map again and are vulnerable to being picked off.
In this situation, you need to wait until your team has respawned before you can do anything significant.
However, the enemy still has ways to kill you when you're sitting in your base; stingray and inkjet, mostly.
If you die while you're effectively team wiped, your one death extends the team wipe until you respawn. This leaves your team vulnerable to more deaths, which each extend your team wipe until you stabilise.
Note that superjumping to base is effectively triggering a respawn, just a much faster one. The main benefit of superjumping to base is that you tend to do so on the tail end of a lost fight, meaning you end up re-syncing with the players who died at the start of the fight and can start pushing out again straight away.
Note that the “threat” part of “threatening kills” has to be immediate, constant, and non-trivial. Shooting your Jet Squelcher down a corridor is not threatening a kill.
Kill threat is more along the lines of, “if you take one more step, you will instantly die to an enperry and a blaster”. Constant kill threat excludes, say, chargers from this discussion; if a charger misses their shot, they are no longer providing kill threat (at least for a moment), and can be ignored or punished.
Winning a fight =
free turf from getting kills +
incidental turf from fights going in your favour because your teammates are the last ones left shooting +
specials being built +
enemy specials being removed (and so on)
This is due to some of the tradeoffs inherent to ranged weapons, which are common across all shooter games and not just Splatoon.
Put simply, when you're far away from someone, it's easier for them to break your sightline, because you're further away from whatever wall they're hiding behind.
This, on top of a number of other factors such as projectile travel time and required precision, makes long-ranged weapons less lethal overall.
Close-ranged weapons are vital in Splatoon to prevent people from barely surviving. You need the enemy team off the map to get much done in this game.
I may write another article like this one to explain game pace, which is the system I use to quantify the link between mechanical skill and results (among other things), and the main way to explain why acceleration is the fourth priority here.
Threatening the objective is another way to force people to fight you. Consider a Tenta Brella holding a power clam on Clam Blitz and launching a tent at your basket.
The problem with this is that you can't always threaten the objective, whereas you can always threaten kills.
Using the same example: to deal with a Tenta Brella spammer on Clam Blitz, you can aim to fight them before they build a clam stock large enough to enable the Tenta Brella to be threatening.
Armour is a multiplier on your survivability. Low survivability is still low even with armour. High survivability is significantly higher.
Booyah Bomb makes you too invulnerable; there's no point shooting you, so people go and fight someone else. That's not what you want as a skirmisher.
Range Blaster can fit in here, but it's more of a slayer and it doesn't have anywhere near enough margin for error for most people to play it as a skirmisher.
This is similar to the anchor in a way: a good slayer can make an off-angle work where a lesser slayer needs a flank.
Mainly turf advantage. Rollers have to screw up very, very badly to die in a 1v1 ambush.
And yes, I know Aerospray can barely even win 1v1s with turf advantage, but this is still its best option.
Just to be slightly less intentionally unclear: The hyphenated version (front-line) is the "role", and the non-hyphenated version (front line) is the position.
I've had a few people throw sports analogies at me regarding this line. Yes, a "mid line" exists in other things, but not Splatoon.
Simple version is: In most sports, the ball moves faster than the players, so you need people to stand in certain positions in case the ball comes their way. Therefore, you end up with a midfield/mid line.
Meanwhile, in Splatoon, the players are faster than the objective. Proactive positioning is still useful, but only if the payoff is immediate. Aside from that, it's often best to group up and swarm the objective. What most people think of as the "mid line" is actually the back line, with the perceived "back line" being overly passive positioning.
A counterexample from sports: think of what happens when there's a corner kick in soccer. Every player but a couple fullbacks come up to the box, because you know where the ball will be and you need the highest possible chance of getting control of the ball.
“You can tell by experience” means "I don't have a clue, but I sometimes do it right by accident," if you were wondering.
Isolation was a big part of Splatoon 1; I'm personally very happy that Splat 2's map design doesn't require it so much anymore. It made for a lot of boring games and annoying maps.
I recently levelled an alternate account to X, and found that upper A-rank players had a better idea of how to win the game than your average S+ player.
I suspect this is because S+ players are S+ because they've stumbled upon a strategy that worked for them in the S and A ranks and are sticking to it.
If you're an S+ player and want to get to X: Stop trying to win your own way and try to help a teammate win in their way instead. Not only will this get you out of S+, it'll also help you stay afloat in X, too.
Note that most of these things are also not something you need a dedicated weapon for.
If you want a stingray, you don't run .52 Deco, you run an anchor that has a stingray.
If you want turf control, you run more dualies/shooters and maybe a painting anchor, you don't pick an aerospray.