About Hitman Roulette #2 - Resources
Guides and documents to get started
This is part 2 of 3 of an introduction to Hitman Roulette. See also Part 1: The basics and Part 3: The community.
Playing Hitman is no easy task - especially while aiming for a Silent Assassin rating, which is required in almost all roulette races and competitions. Completing a single roulette spin requires a great amount of game knowledge, from understanding the basic layout of a mission to knowing when and how targets can best be isolated or killed.
Hitman Roulette has both a high skill floor as well as a high skill ceiling. Not only does it take a lot of preparation to do well, but it is also constantly evolving, with players figuring out new strats and shifting the meta along the way.
It doesn’t matter if you've never played roulette before or if you want to play without signing up for competitions. The following post should be helpful either way; both at the start and each time you come back to deepen your roulette knowledge.
What to look out for
The rest of this post will showcase several great and detailed guides, but the sheer amount of info in them can be overwhelming. Players have a lot of different ways to build up their roulette knowledge, including the following five-step plan:
0. Unlocking mastery
While there are countless ways to play roulette, including house rules with no loadout, almost any variant will encourage players to unlock as many items and starting locations as they can. Not all items are relevant (those that are, can be worth their own post), but a new player’s priority should be to unlock most starting locations on maps they want to get better at. Some of the crucial starts can be locked under mastery level 18 or above!
1. Basic isolations
The aim of roulette is to complete randomised missions with a Silent Assassin rating, which requires players to escape undetected in the first place. A newcomer can know every strat and tech known to the community, but that doesn’t mean much if they are unable to keep their guns green. It is advised to start with the simplest spins (examples seen below), learning the main target isolations along the way, without worrying about speed too much.
2. Items and disguises
Once players have a good understanding of the targets and their cycles, it’s time to open the map! No one knows every inch of a map better than a roulette player, as they have dozens of disguises and melee items to plan out and prepare for.
Some lethal melee items can be easy to acquire, some are only available with a detour. They can be unique, but even if they aren’t, it’s likely not all of them are viable, due to some of them being so far away from the targets.
Disguises can be trivial to get, for example in a room where no one else looks. They can be starting disguises, though selecting that particular start isn’t always the best course of action. In some cases, the NPCs who wear them cannot be easily isolated, not without a recommended sedative or emetic item.
Firearms can be kill conditions as well, which are sometimes carried by key guards or left near security rooms. Picking them up means the player doesn’t need to bring the firearm in question, resulting in a more optimised loadout.
The best way to learn about melee items and firearms is looking them up on hitmaps.com, while the more recent guides cover all disguise grabs. A list of all disguises and kill methods can also be found under Manual Mode of a selected mission at roulette.hitmaps.com.
3. Difficult kills
By this point, players should be able to tackle all simpler spins at their own speed. But what if a target has to be eliminated with a loud firearm, and/or without pacifying them? And how about those accident kills which seem so impossible to do?
Recent guides contain sections on how to eliminate each target with live, loud or accidental kills, with added timestamps of when these kills are meant to be done. When in doubt about the legality of a kill, players should check the banned conditions list as some kills aren’t possible or viable even in competitions.
4. Putting it all together
Knowing all isolations and strategies on a given map is just the beginning. From these building blocks, a spin can be approached in several ways. Which starting location is the best for this spin? What are the optimal items to bring? How should the target isolations, disguise and item grabs be ordered for the smallest distance?
The answers to these questions are rarely obvious, which is the magic of roulette. Players only receive a randomised spin, with the only goal of completing it as fast as possible, like these Roulette Rivals 14 finalists did.
Roulette Guide - The ancient scrolls
The first attempt to collect all useful tips and strategies were made by Yannini and In4Fun in the fall of 2021, just before the second world championship.
Available at hitmanrr.com, this 30-page document contains not only basic information on 18 maps1, but readers can also find introductory general tips, including which items to unlock first, and what to be careful of when acquiring lethal melee items or firearms.
All things considered, the Roulette Guide is not only the first database of its kind, but also the most dated one in today’s eyes. After its release, the guide only went through minor updates, slowly losing relevancy for those who wanted to become competitive immediately.
What is HITMAN Roulette? - In-depth commentary
A common complaint of roulette guides is that most of them are either only in written form, or they provide little context or commentary. For those players, The_Buff_Guy’s YouTube playlist, called What is HITMAN Roulette? is the perfect resource.
Over the course of 23 videos, Buff dissects every map in the same structure: talking about the map in general, then showcasing the most common target isolations, providing examples to all disguise grabs, and finally playing out an example spin.
While both entertaining and informative, Buff’s guide is now also more than 2.5 years old. As it is impossible to constantly re-record the entire playlist whenever the meta changes, he’s decided to upload three update videos, keeping the series relevant well into the year 2023. However, in order to be up-to-date on all strategies even today, the two remaining guides are recommended the most…
Roulette Strats - Notes by a world champion
To become successful in Hitman Roulette, talent goes a long way, but nothing substitutes preparation. TheTimeCube, the 2023 world champion, has made it vocal during his title run that his extensive notes have been the most useful resource to him. Thankfully for the community, these personal writings were cleaned up and published for everyone to see. Enough for a small book, Time’s documents are 81 pages long in total, and can be accessed in three parts:
Season 1: 25 pages from Paris to Hokkaido;
Season 2: 35 pages from Miami to Haven Island;
Season 3: 21 pages from Dubai to Ambrose Island.
Each section describes a map in utmost detail, including every known isolation, multiple disguise grabs, as well as all the non-obvious accidents and other kill methods.
Roulette Resources - Your one-stop shop
Roulette Resources, made by ThatObserver and Moo, and with help from Phanium and others, is the most comprehensive guide to learn more about roulette.
These resources can be found in two places, both important for a different reason. Tons of information can be found on the interactive Milanote board, where everyone can navigate the page to their liking, arriving at flashcards for a specific map or even specific kill condition.
The Milanote board now contains more than 1000 videos, all of which also appear on the Roulette Resources YouTube page. They are all sorted into playlists based on which maps they are from, so learners have another way to study every strategy and tech known by the community.
Previous post: About Hitman Roulette #1 - The basics
Next post: About Hitman Roulette #3 - The community
One of the shortcomings of the Roulette Guide is the fact that it was never updated with strats for Ambrose Island, the 19th and latest main map, released in July 2022.