The ULTIMATE Hunt Showdown 1896 Teamplay Guide (2026)

Intro

Hi guys, Rex here.

In this video, I’m breaking down teamplay in Hunt: Showdown — what it actually means, how team fights work, and why teams often lose fights even when each individual player is mechanically solid.

This guide is intended for beginners and intermediate players who want to bring their teamplay to the next level and improve the overall team dynamic.

We’ll go through teamplay from the ground up, focusing on the systems that matter the most when you play with others: traits & health bar allocation, burning and revives, dark sight boost, positioning, rotations, synchronized pushes, communication, and team mentality.

After watching this guide you’ll understand how team fights work and how to apply your knowledge of the various systems in practice, regardless of your current skill level.

So without further ado, let’s dive into it!

1. What Teamplay Means

Teamplay in Hunt: Showdown is often misunderstood because players bring expectations from other shooters. In many games, being close to your teammates or having more players nearby automatically makes you stronger. In Hunt: Showdown, that’s not always the case.

Hunt doesn’t reward proximity. It rewards coordination.

Teamplay in Hunt means making decisions that account for your teammates, your opponents, and the systems that determine how fights unfold. Every sound you make, every angle you peek, and every second you hesitate — the consequences are shared across the entire team.

You’re not playing your own games side by side. You’re playing one shared fight, where a single bad decision can lead to a loss, and a single good one can lead to a win.

That shared responsibility is the foundation of teamplay in Hunt, and without it – things will fall apart very quickly. In fact, the difference is so big that I would claim it is easier to play solo than to play in an unsynchronized team, while playing in an synchronized team makes you feel unstoppable.

2. Team Formats and Match Context

Before we talk about mechanics, it’s important to understand the environment you’re playing in.

When you play in a team, you enter matches either as a duo or a trio. Duos can choose to play against other duos or against trios, while trios always get matched against teams of up to three players. Solos can appear in both modes.

This matters because teamplay dynamics shift depending on team size.

In trios, responsibilities can be divided evenly. One player can hold an angle, one can rotate, and one can watch a body or flank. In duos, you need to split these responsibilities between you. If one player rotates, the other suddenly has to cover everything else.

Solos change the dynamic even further. A downed solo is not necessarily out of the fight, because solos can self-revive with the Necromancer trait, like I covered in my solo guide. That means body control and burning matter more than many players expect.

Good teamplay starts with understanding who you might be fighting and what that means for decision-making.

3. Teamplay Traits

Before you load into a match, you make decisions that heavily affect how well your team functions.

Traits are passive upgrades you assign using trait points, and some of them are especially important for teamplay.

Necromancer is one of the strongest teamplay traits in the game. It allows you to revive a teammates from a distance using Dark Sight, and in case it wasn’t obvious – that can be an absolute game changer in a lot of situations. Necromancer is a burn trait, meaning it is single-use and disappears after, so it should be used sparingly with a clear outcome in mind – for example securing a revive when nobody is watching the body or when a hand-revive is too risky.

Resilience is another extremely important teamplay trait. When you’re revived in Hunt, you don’t automatically come back at full health. Resilience ensures that your remaining health bars are fully healed when you’re revived. This doesn’t give you back lost health chunks, but it makes you far less fragile following a revive, which is crucial in team fights.

Vigilant allows you to see nearby traps in Dark Sight. This is arguably one of the best traits in the game, especially for the low price of 1 trait point. Scanning a compound for traps before you push is the best way to prevent an early grave.

These traits don’t just help you individually — they define what options your team has under pressure and as the game progresses.

4. Health Bars and Survivability

Health bar setup is another pre-match decision that has a huge impact on teamplay.

Every hunter has 150 total health. Large health chunks are 50 health, and small chunks are 25 health. The first chunk is always large, but you can choose how the remaining health is divided.

In teams, small chunks are in my opinion the best choice.

In team fights, getting downed and revived is very common. That means how much health you’re missing following a revive directly affects whether you survive the next engagement. Losing a large chunk means you’re missing 50 health, which makes you an easy kill. Many weapons deal more than 100 damage, making you vulnerable to instant torso kills following a revive.

With small chunks, each death is less punishing, and you can even be revived more times, as every death takes a bar. You’re harder to one-shot, and your team has more time to stabilize the fight instead of constantly having to revive the same player again.

Health bar setup doesn’t just prevent deaths — it also increases the chance of recovering after.

5. Team Roles & Responsibility

Hunt doesn’t have fixed roles like a healer, entry fragger, or sniper. Instead, every fight demands that certain responsibilities are covered at all times. Someone needs to apply pressure. Someone needs to watch flanks. Someone needs to hold angles. Someone needs to keep track of downed hunters, and someone needs to think about revives or rotations.

What makes this difficult is that these responsibilities are not static. They constantly shift as the fight evolves.

At the start of a fight, pressure might be the priority. Once a hunter goes down, body control becomes critical. If someone rotates, angle coverage shifts. If a teammate dies, every remaining responsibility suddenly becomes heavier, and the main goal usually becomes to revive that player if possible.

Most quick team wipes don’t happen because of bad aim. They happen because the various responsibilities are neglected. Everyone pushes forward, so nobody watches the flank. Everyone focuses on a kill, so nobody watches the body. One player hesitates, while the other two push, or even worse – one player pushes in alone.

Strong teams don’t wait to be told what to do. They notice what’s missing and fill that gap instinctively. If nobody is watching the body, someone takes responsibility. If a teammate rotates, someone else consciously covers what they left behind. If a player gets downed, someone immediately considers if reviving is an option.

Teamplay in Hunt is about stepping up where it’s needed and filling the gaps as they appear.

6. Downed Hunters, Burning, Revives, and Risk Management

This is the core system that defines how team fights are won and lost in Hunt: Showdown.

When a hunter goes down, they don’t leave the fight. They become a pressure point — and how your team handles that pressure often decides the outcome of the engagement.

Like I mentioned earlier, you lose a health chunk every time you get downed, and those chunks do not regenerate naturally. Over the course of a fight, this alone makes revives increasingly risky. On top of that, a downed hunter can be burned, which removes their maximum health over time and eventually prevents normal revives entirely.

When you burn a downed hunter, you are forcing decisions and controlling tempo.

Once a body is burning, the enemy team loses options. They can’t rotate freely, and they can’t wait indefinitely. They have to either push, stop the burn, or accept that their teammate will burn out. That pressure often forces the enemy into less optimal situations that can be punished by the team that has the upper hand.

Choke bombs can stop burning, but only temporarily. A choke lasts for one minute before it fades. This creates a tug-of-war where you burn the body, it gets choked, you burn it again, it gets choked again and so forth. In most prolonged fights, the defending team runs out of chokes before the attacking team runs out of fire.

Burning also buys time. While the enemy is forced to react, your team can heal, reload, reposition, rotate, or set up a stronger push. Even if no shots are fired, the burning body is actively affecting how the fight plays out.

Burning can be stopped in several ways. Interacting directly with the body immediately stops the burn. Using the Necromancer trait to revive a teammate pauses burning while the revive is happening and stops it completely once the revive finishes. Knowing these interactions helps you make the right call for every situation.

As the fight goes on and hunters lose more health chunks, revives become more dangerous, as it will take less damage to re-down the hunter – eventually rendering you a one-shot to basically any weapon in the game and regardless of where you are hit.

When a hunter loses all their health chunks, they become red-skulled. At that point, they can no longer be revived normally. Reviving a red-skulled teammate requires carrying a bounty token and burns 50 health from the reviver. The reviver becomes extremely vulnerable, while the revived hunter only keeps their last bar.

This is where many teams make emotional mistakes.

There’s a strong instinct to revive immediately, especially when a bounty is available. But reviving a red-skulled teammate at the wrong moment renders your entire team at risk, and the revive itself becomes the losing condition.

Strong teams understand that sometimes the correct play is patience. Winning the fight first often matters more than reviving fast.

7. Healing, Recovery & Sustaining Team Fights

Once fights go long, teamplay in Hunt becomes less about landing the next shot and more about managing resources — health chunks, recovery options, and how well your team can stabilize after things go wrong.

This is where burn traits and recovery tools come into play.

One of the strongest burn traits for teamplay is Remedy. Remedy can only be acquired in-game, and it allows you to restore full health to your entire team by channeling through Dark Sight while interacting with another trait. This is an extremely powerful effect, especially after multiple revives, burns, or prolonged standoffs where your team is missing health across the board.

Remedy doesn’t win fights by itself — it resets them and gives you the option to keep fighting instead of backing off to recover.

Another burn trait that’s highly relevant for teamplay is Relentless. With Relentless, you don’t lose a health chunk when you die. Instead, the trait is spent and that health chunk becomes charcoaled and slowly recovers over time – but be mindful that you’re an easier pick until that happens.

Charcoaled health bars recover slowly by default, but this recovery can be sped up. The Vigor trait accelerates charcoaling recovery while you’re in Dark Sight, and the wet status effect also speeds it up. These two effects stack, meaning that if you have Vigor and are affected by the wet status while entering Dark Sight, your charcoaled health recovers significantly faster.

Beyond traits, recovery tools are just as important.

Recovery shots can be brought into a match or sometimes looted in-game. A recovery shot restores a lost health chunk, but that chunk is charcoaled similar to the relentless effect.

In teams, every player should carry a recovery shot. Not just for themselves, but for each other. You can use a recovery shot on a teammate after reviving them, or if they’ve run out of recovery options. If someone has lost multiple health chunks, they may require more than one shot — which is exactly why recovery should be treated as a shared responsibility.

The same principle applies to healing in general.

Medkits can be used to heal teammates if they’re running low, and consumables like vitality shots, antidote shots and regeneration shots can all be used on your teammates as well. In teamplay, consumables are not personal property — they are shared survival resources.

Strong teams don’t think in terms of “my healing” or “my shots”. They think in terms of keeping the team alive, especially once fights drag on and resources start to run out.

Managing recovery properly can make the difference between winning or losing.

8. Solos, Necromancer, and Body Control

Solos are an exception to normal teamplay — and they punish teams that play on autopilot.

A solo with the Necromancer trait can revive themselves. That means a downed solo is not out of the fight unless you can actively confirm it. Many teams lose fights not because the solo outplays them, but because they relax too early and forget to secure the kill.

After a down, teams often stop watching the body. They loot, rotate, or refocus on something else, assuming the numbers advantage will carry them. Against a solo, that assumption is dangerous, especially because solo players have a team-size modifier ensuring their opponents are lower ranked, particularly if they play solo vs trios. That means the body you’re leaving unguarded and unburnt is likely one of the deadliest players in the lobby and could stand up to wipe your team at any moment – given the opportunity.

Proper body control against solos requires intentional assignment. Someone needs to watch the body and keep pressure on it. Someone needs to be ready to react if the revive happens. Burning without watching allows a self-revive, and that self-revive comes with a full health restoration, regardless of how long the body burnt for.

This is not a solo problem — it’s a team discipline check.

All it takes is applying an early burn, having eyes on the body and being ready to react if they revive. You’re not safe until the body is burnt out. If you suspect the enemy is a solo player – instaburning is the usually the best play. In any case, a downed hunter should never be ignored. Whether it’s a solo or part of a team, body control is a team responsibility.

9. Bounty Tokens and Dark Sight Boost in Teamplay

Once a boss is killed, it drops bounty tokens.
Regular bosses drop two tokens, while wild targets drop one.

In teamplay, this immediately creates an information imbalance — because only two players can carry bounty tokens from the same boss. That means not everyone on the team has access to Dark Sight Boost, and that fundamentally changes how information needs to be handled.

Each bounty token provides five seconds of Dark Sight Boost in teams. If your team takes both tokens from a boss, that’s ten seconds of Dark Sight Boost total — split across two players. While active, you can scan and see nearby enemy hunters as an orange glow through terrain and walls. This is one of the strongest information tools in the game — but it’s also very limited.

Because only part of the team can scan, Dark Sight Boost is not a personal advantage. It’s a shared team resource.

If you are holding a bounty token, you are responsible for turning your scans into useful information for your teammates. Simply saying “I see someone” is not enough. The value comes from communicating how many enemies there are and how close they are. If you see more than 1 team, that’s relevant information that should be shared with your teammates.

This is especially important during pushes, rotations, and extractions. A scan followed by clear callouts can prevent your team from walking into an ambush or wasting time holding the wrong angles.

In addition to dark sight boost, bounty carriers have access to the instinct effect. If enemy hunters are within 75 meters, the edges of your screen glow orange — even if you don’t scan actively. This allows you to check for nearby enemies without wasting dark sight boost – or even if you ran out of seconds.

It can often be smart to use instinct first to confirm proximity, then use Dark Sight Boost only when you need more precise information.

The key takeaway is this: Dark Sight Boost doesn’t win fights on its own. What wins fights is how well that information is shared and acted upon, and how well you time your scans.

10. Movement, Spacing, and Loot Discipline

Movement in Hunt is not just about repositioning — it’s about what information you give away while doing it, and how easily the enemy can punish you for it.

One of the most common and costly teamplay mistakes is stacking too closely together, especially during moments that feel safe — for example looting bodies after a fight or resupplying in an armory.

When multiple teammates occupy the same small area, you remove uncertainty for the enemy. They no longer have to guess where your team is or how many players are nearby. You’ve turned your team into a single, predictable target.

Explosives punish this harder than anything else. A single well-placed dynamite or dark dynamite satchel can instantly wipe an entire team before anyone has time to react. Even without explosives, stacking removes reaction time, as the enemy can easily move from one target to the next without having to watch other angles.

There are moments where pushing closer together is the correct play, but those moments are intentional and communicated. The key difference is purpose.

Good spacing denies information, increases survivability, and gives your team time to react when a fight starts.

11. Angles, Crossfire & Flanking

Most players understand that a good angle can make the difference, but sometimes one angle isn’t enough. The enemy is behind solid cover, and you don’t have the option to move without exposing yourself to their angles. It becomes a risky push or a stalemate.

This is where crossfire and flanking comes into play. Instead of pushing alone into their angle, you should push together as a team, but from two or more angles. If the enemy hunter is taking cover, push from the left and the right side at the same time. This makes it almost impossible for them to react in time, and drastically increases the chance of your team winning the engagement – even if one player goes down or trades.

When the enemy is distracted – a flank can often be an even better option, for example a wide flank with a sniper rifle when there is open line of sight. One or two players keep the enemy distracted and keep the fight going, while one player makes a wide flank unnoticed to open a new line of sight or sneak up behind them before they realize. This can work in all sorts of engagements, depending on your loadout and the overall situation.

12. Rotations As A Team Commitment

Rotations are one of the strongest tools in Hunt — and one of the most misunderstood.

A rotation is not movement for its own sake. It is a deliberate repositioning to shift the odds of the fight. This usually requires good timing, game sense and map awareness. Rotating at a bad time will leave you vulnerable to other teams who can punish you for being out of position.

Rotating at the right time can make or break a fight, and it can be the difference between being the bread or the bologna in the sandwich. If you hear a third party approaching as you’re attacking a compound, rotating to the opposite side will avoid a bad situation before it even happens.

Rotating can also be used tactically, for example by putting yourself between the bounty team and the nearest extract, actively preventing them from leaving without them going through you first. And finally, it can be used aggressively, for example by leaving your safe position on one side of the compound to third party the attacking team on the other side while they are distracted.

Knowing when to relocate and doing it cleanly as a team can be the winning factor in a hectic match.

13. Synchronized Pushes

One of the most common teamplay mistakes in Hunt is confusing numbers with pressure. Three players pushing one after another through the same doorway is not pressure — it’s a queue.

Weapons like bows and shotguns are specifically designed to punish this. If attackers arrive staggered, defenders get time between kills to reload, reposition, heal, and reset.

A proper push is planned before it happens.

Angles are established. Space is created. There might even be an entry frag. Teammates position themselves so that when the push begins, it happens simultaneously, ideally from two or three different directions, with enough spacing that one death does not stop the momentum.

The more synchronized the push, the harder it is for defenders to simply hold angles. Even strong positions fall apart when they have to deal with multiple threats at once.

Trades are not necessarily failure in Hunt. If one teammate goes down but the enemy loses a player in return, the push could still play out in your favor.

If your team keeps dying one by one, the problem is not aggression or aim — it’s timing and coordination.

14. Communication & Callouts

Communication in Hunt is not about talking constantly — it’s about maintaining a shared understanding of the fight or situation as it evolves.

Good communication answers the following questions in real time: where is the enemy, what are they doing, and what are you doing or about to do. This allows teammates to plan accordingly and stay synchronized.

Good callouts are a huge part of effective communication. There are many ways to give effective callouts, but here’s how I usually do it: Think of it as a sculpture that becomes increasingly recognizable the more you chip away and polish it.

I usually start with broad and general information: “Players ahead in the main compound”

I then narrow down the location and the specifics: “Left balcony, Cain. Sparks sniper”

The next callout might sound like this:

“Another player, crack in the wall. Headshot her! It was a luz mala. Cain rotated back inside, probably going for a ress – let’s rotate around!”

You get the idea. The goal is to get your teammates ready and focused as quickly as possible. By immediately letting them know there are players in the compound they are already looking for angles and cover. The order in which you give information matters. Let them know what to look for and where, then describe it in more detail to narrow it down.

Keeping the comms clear and precise without overdoing it is key. Talking too much can drown out critical audio information, and talking at the wrong time can overload teammates who are already under pressure.

15. Feedback, Backseat Gaming, and Long-Term Improvement

Whether you win or lose a fight, you are in it together as a team. Blaming teammates when something goes wrong almost never leads to improvement. It creates friction, breaks trust, and makes players hesitant instead of decisive.

Constructive feedback only works when it’s wanted. Some players actively want advice during a match. Others need silence to focus. Backseat gaming — telling someone exactly what to do while they’re already playing — can help in some situations if done carefully but will usually just clutter the audio and distract the player who is trying to clutch.

If you’re unsure, ask. Especially if you’re the more experienced player. Ask whether your teammate wants advice, tips, or critique — or if they prefer to learn through experience.

That way everybody gets to enjoy the game to its full potential without misunderstanding, unnecessary pressure and bad vibes. In the end, the main goal should be having fun – and winning should come second, at least if you ask me!

Outro:

And that’s it for this teamplay guide!

If you want to keep improving, make sure to check out my guide playlist. This teamplay guide is meant to work alongside my beginner guide and solo guide, and together they cover the core fundamentals of Hunt — how the game works, how fights play out, and how to make better decisions both alone and as part of a team. I’m continuously working on expanding these guides with more focused breakdowns on specific mechanics and systems, so if you’re trying to get better over time, there’s a lot more coming.

On the topic of guides, make sure you check out my Mastery Series playlist for a full breakdown of all the weapons in the game.

If you learned something useful from this video, don’t forget to like and subscribe. These guides take a lot of time to make, and by subscribing you are letting me know it was helpful.

And finally, if you want to purchase Hunt: Showdown or any DLCs and support the channel, I’ve got a referral link in the description.

Thanks for watching — and until next time, I’ll see you in the Bayou.