Monsters beware - Cabot is going to find you. Yes you, Goliath player who’s been skulking through the jungle sneaking meals on-the-low. Evolve’s third support leaves monster players little room to hide, and a slim margin of error in combat, making him perhaps the most impactful support in the game - assuming you can get a little lucky.

As a class, supports tend to be about doubling down on something another class or specific hunter brings to the table, and Cabot is no different. His orbital dust strike ability blankets a huge area with radioactive dust particles, sticking to whatever it touches, and making its outline visible to all hunters for a duration after impact. It’s a tool that, combined with competent trapper play, can make escape a near-impossibility for the monster.

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Not only can you use this on a fleeing monster to keep it from eluding your team, but it can be used to thwart stealth-minded opponents who excel at keeping a low profile. Startled birds just over the horizon? Running in circles with no monster in sight? Sometimes a random dust strike is just the thing to remedy a trail gone cold.The perfect example was when I was hiding out in a thick tangle of brush as Goliath, stalking my prey, when Cabot called a random dust strike and tagged me, turning my would-be ambush into a one-sided stomp the other way. Lots of matches in Evolve are decided in this manner, a moment where a sneaky, free-farming monster almost gets caught, but doesn’t - sending the hunters on a wild goose chase to the opposite end of the map while the monster stuffs his face. With Cabot, one lucky dust strike can be the difference-maker in those near-miss situations.With the creature dusted, Cabot’s primary weapon, the rail rifle, comes into its own. It fires single, high-velocity shots through walls for appreciable damage, allowing Cabot to get his licks in no matter where the monster is. This becomes particularly useful in desperate last stands, where a stage 3 monster is trying to rip and tear at your power core, but can’t because of a Cabot player taking potshots from the other side of a reinforced steel wall.For as much as Cabot can prove useful for tracking the monster, he’s no less valuable once it’s been found. His damage amplifier beam tacks a bonus 50% onto all damage dealt to his target. Used in tandem with, say, Val’s armor-piercing sniper rifle, it allows the team’s assault to output staggering amounts of damage in short periods of time.Right about now, you’re probably all ready to make Cabot your mainstay, but though good Cabot play can make life really hard for opposing monsters, playing him isn’t all peaches and cream. His primary weapon is downright unwieldy, and contrary to what you’d imagine from a rail rifle, unreliable at long range. Where the other two supports have versatile, high casualty producing weapons with which to deal with Shear’s aggressive flora and fauna, Cabot really has to make every shot count. And yeah, when you get lucky with a dust strike it can feel match-changing, but when you miss, that cooldown feels agonizingly long, especially since it means that if you spot the monster soon after, he’ll be able to make a clean getaway.

Vincent Ingenito is IGN's foremost fighting game nerd. F ollow him on Twitter and argue with everything he says about them.