Stinger Guide: Hive-Tech Healing and Rescue Play

Stinger (Roy Smee) is the Support operator whose entire kit is built around keeping other people upright. Nothing in it grabs, dashes, or opens a flank. What it does is heal at range, turn smoke into a healing field, and revive faster and fuller than anyone else on the field.

That matters more than it sounds. In Operations a death costs gear; in Warfare a revive saves a ticket. Either way the operator who resets a teammate is worth more than the one who trades a kill.

The healing loop

The Hive-Tech Pistol is tactical gear, not a weapon slot, and it fires homing rounds. Hold the lock and it heals allied operators — several at once — and it can be turned on yourself by holding the gadget button. While the heal is running you gain immunity, which turns a losing duel into an escape window if you start it early enough.

The loop is short: heal, reposition, heal again. Do not stand still to finish a full heal on someone already safe. Top up, move, top up. Heal rate and total charge decide how many times you can reset a teammate: a burst heal with a short charge rewards topping up, a slow one rewards full heals behind cover.

Where to stand

Second line, inside the squad’s formation, within pistol lock range of the two players most likely to take damage. Not behind a wall at the back of the map — the pistol has range, but a healer who cannot see the fight cannot decide who needs the heal first.

In Operations that means staying one room behind the breach, not in it. In Warfare it means the cover behind the objective, not on it.

Smoke as a heal field

This is the part most players miss. The Smokescreen gadget launches a gesture-controlled UAV that lays a smoke wall as it flies — you steer it mid-flight, so you choose the shape of the wall instead of accepting a grenade’s circle.

Then the Hive-Tech Smoke Grenade does the second half: shoot that smoke with the Hive-Tech Pistol and it becomes a healing cloud. The trade is real — visibility inside the healing smoke is worse than in normal smoke, so it is cover you cannot see through either. Use it to hold a wounded squad in place for a reset, not to push through.

What kills him

Anything that punishes a stationary, low-damage operator. Snipers watching the smoke line, grenades into the healing cloud, and any flanker who reaches the second line — Nox exists precisely to walk that route unseen. Stinger has no escape tool: if a duel starts at close range and no teammate is nearby, the correct play is to break contact, not to out-shoot.

Rescue math

Support revives faster than other classes, and his trait pays out on top of that: Quick Rescue sends the revived operator back with more health, and in Operations the reduced-max-HP debuff is removed. That changes priority — revive the player with the most fight left in them, not the closest body.

Check the in-game revive timer before you plan a rescue under fire. If the timer will not finish before the enemy pushes, smoke first and revive second. A body you never reach is worse than one you left.

For squads running two support operators, split the job rather than duplicating it: Vlinder owns the timers and the drone rescues, Stinger owns the healing volume. Add Toxik only when the squad needs buffs more than health.