Learning How to Double-Bottle Combo
Before one can learn how to use both their yellow and pink bottles together, it’s important to understand that both bottles serve two different functions to achieve the same end. Clown’s pink bottles are immediate, stronger in effect, and shorter in duration. His yellow bottles are delayed, weaker in effect, and significantly longer in duration. Not all circumstances call for yellows and not all circumstances call for pinks. Some circumstances call for both. It’s all about making sure you use the right tool(s) for the right job.
Identifying when situations call for yellow bottles comes from plotting a course of action before you execute it. Refer to the definition under Important Terms and the video above titled “How to Read a Chase Blueprint” for more context if needed. As the person throwing the bottles, you possess the prior knowledge of what you attempt to do with them. Survivors can only guess. Even then, there’s very little room for counterplay when both bottles are optimally combined together. The speed difference between Clown and the survivor becomes a colossal 40-44% (with and without add-ons). Not even Dead Hard for distance back when it was still around was strong enough to counter yellows + pinks at a variety of loops (Killer Shack being one of them). In order to understand how to plan a proper course of action, we should take a look at the different roles both yellow and pink bottles serve.
The role of the yellow bottle is the initiator. It should almost always be the first bottle that you throw when planning a double-bottle combo. So much so, that you might as well consider this a rule of thumb. Although the effect comes out on a delay, that doesn’t mean you’re limited in continuing your course of action until it is active. You should be factoring that delay into your course of action and supplementing it with the necessary tactics. These tactics can be anything from moving/facing another side of the loop to shove them further inside, pretending to break a pallet, pretending to vault a window, faking a reload while still having available bottles, throwing a pink bottle in conjunction with the yellow, and more. A very generalized way to understand how to use yellow bottles in practice is: 1. Throw Yellow Bottle 2. ???? (Pick one or more if necessary from the above) 3. Profit (Run through the yellow). When it comes to specific examples for what to do in chase, those will be covered very explicitly in the bottom half. I encourage you to defer to this above generalization when viewing these specific examples as that should hopefully make the concept more clear.
As for Clown’s pink bottles, their purpose is best served as the finisher. What makes pink bottles excellent finishers is that they inhibit fast vaulting at windows while also being extremely hard to play around due to their effect coming out immediately. At the same time, although the slowdown is more powerful and comes out immediately, the shorter duration means that you will close less distance between yourself and the survivor using just a pink bottle as opposed to using a yellow bottle instead. The optimal threshold for only using a pink bottle is if lethality comes within 2.5 seconds of the slowdown. Anything more than that, and you’re likely to need a second bottle. Once two bottles become necessary, the justification for initially using a yellow first instead of a pink becomes significantly more valid. The hindrance from your pink bottles cannot be compounded by additional pink bottles. However, you can absolutely compound your yellow’s haste with your pink’s hindrance if you can correctly anticipate that the next hit in the chase is going to last long enough to require two bottles.
Why the Yellow?
Clown’s yellow bottles open up a level of strategy that would otherwise be impossible using only pinks. For a good handful of maps at the majority of tiles, if a survivor is efficient with their movement and you’re only using pinks, you’re very unlikely to reach them before they make it back to a window. This fact has led to the prevailing sentiment of counterplay against Clown to be merely pre-dropping pallets. Since most Clowns do not use the yellow bottles, not a lot of survivors have experience against it. You cannot counter a Clown that uses his yellow and pink bottles together by simply pre-dropping the pallet. If anything, you are actually making the chase easier for Clown to some degree by removing the threat of a pallet stun. Yellow and pink bottles used together enable Clown to catch up to survivors even before they can make it back to a pre-dropped pallet. As Clown, this increases your lethality by creating opportunities for faster hits and reducing how long you artificially extend your chases by kicking pallets.
A Clown that doesn’t use his yellows in chase and also has to kick plenty of pallets is going to waste a lot of time during the most crucial stage of the game without getting any downs or hook pressure – the early game. Survivors are at their strongest in the early-game, and you need your first down to come quick. They will always be at their maximum pallet count at the very beginning of every match. If you spend the early stages kicking pallets, you’re giving them absolutely every advantage during the early-game period to snowball their control to a point where you can’t recover. Plenty of maps are either large enough in size or have so many pallets that you just can’t afford to kick them unless absolutely necessary
Opting not to break pallets puts survivors in an extremely awkward position. This gets them thinking about how choosing to drop the pallet forces them to lose distance that they would have otherwise gained by running forward. However, not dropping the pallet and running forward also has the possibility of leaving them vulnerable before they make it to another tile. If the Clown is using both his yellows and pinks together, it becomes even harder to gauge if that would be the outcome. Survivors are thus forced to think on their feet in a way where they don’t actually have confidence that they’re making the right decision.
I’ve gone against players where after hitting a survivor using a complex double-bottle setup they lose all courage at every pallet loop for the rest of the match. They go from willingly running unsafe loops to abandoning much stronger loops at the drop of a yellow bottle. It is because now they respect what it is they have seen I’m capable of doing and still don’t know what else to expect going forward. The only fact they know for certain is that I am looking for any chance they are willing to give me in order to hit them. Their whole behavior changes to where the way they play chases is strictly about creating as much distance as possible instead of efficiently trying to stall for time by looping at pallets.
Chase Blueprint
Click to enlarge…
In this example, I’ve recently hit Jane at the Silo and forced her out the right side. The pre-dropped pallet from earlier in the game forces her to lose some forward distance when she vaults it and also encourages her to try and hide behind one of its two sides. Behind her is a dead zone to her right and the closest jungle gym is two tiles over to her left.
Once I get her behind the pallet, the first thing I do 1. is establish this information for myself before attempting a reload. The best time to reload is when you have a survivor at a pallet. Similarly, the best opening a survivor has to escape being trapped behind a pallet is to break away from the tile when Clown has to reload.
In order to ensure that I succeeded in my reload without her breaking away from the pallet, I establish specifically which part of the Z-Tile that she is hiding behind while also rapidly changing both my facing and movement directions to ensure that she doesn’t know how to slip away. Survivors are looking for the most vulnerable part of the loop to abandon the tile and you need to make sure they can’t come to that decision. Once you start reloading your bottles, the survivor is put on a hard timer until that reload is finished to find a way to abandon the tile. If they don’t find that opening and take it before the reload is completed, the hit afterward is almost always guaranteed.
With my bottles reloaded and the knowledge she was still at the tile, 2. I started my setup by throwing a yellow at the right corner while also moonwalking to the left. This was to push her more to the right and further inside the loop. After setting up the yellow, I moonwalked into the pallet and looked down to fake a pallet kick. This pushes her further back to the left. 3. I then transitioned from that fake pallet kick by moonwalking to the right into my own yellow and quickly threw a pink to the opposite left corner as I circled around the loop into Elodie.
The moment that pink hits the floor, it becomes impossible for her to reach the pallet before I hit her with my yellow boost. Further, in the event that she tries to abandon the tile at that point, it becomes absolutely guaranteed due to my invigoration buff that I hit her before she reaches another pallet. This is not just true on Coldwind Silo. It should also be stated that this kind of situation requires zero add-on dependency across all maps but for maybe 15% of loops. It only takes two bottles (one yellow + one pink) at the majority of setups – meaning that with the basekit bottle count you have two extra bottles for flexibility. These bottles can be either used to slow down survivors when they run into a dead zone so they don’t reach another pallet, or they can also be used to make the longer loops more lethal.
I hope you found this useful. Wishing you luck!
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