TF2 General Chat & Speculation Station V15 - Buff Pyro plz - Games

my thoughts is this shouldn't be. It's already unacceptable that the homewrecker/neon interferes in this unique relationship. Spy's gun and knife is what messes with the other classes. I cannot imagine spy sacrifying his vital anti-sentry business for gimmicks that piss off other classes.

pretty sure the ambassador and the revolver both have the same spread, ever since the update that made first shot accuracy a thing on all weapons the ambassador is not objectively better

nah it always had secret tighter spread. I remember it from as early as its release when it shot giant projectile hitboxes ... uh.

if you're actually good you're gonna deal out more damage with the ambassador, for someone who doesn't hit headshots often its a straight downgrade.

because one click is to a small target (the head) and the other two are much larger targets (the entire body)??? what kind of fuckin' question is this? not to mention you aren't one-shotting jack shit with the ambassador, so you need to take another bodyshot after, which takes longer than with stock, or wait a full second to get crits back, which takes way longer than stock and even if it were the same difficulty, which it's not the revolver still out-DPSes the ambassador unless the target is already at 100 hp or lower, the ambassador is fuckin pointless. it's extra time and effort for the same result that two bodyshots with the revolver will get you. oh, and god forbid you miss any of your headshots, because at that point you lose even the burst damage benefit and you're probably fucked if you're fighting an enemy with even slight situational awareness. I don't like getting on this horse often, but you're operating with a fundamental misunderstanding of Spy's kit if you actually think the Ambassador is good for anything besides style points in frag videos. Revolver is better for self-defense, better for securing picks on low-health targets, much easier to use... ...also, revolver spread is pretty damn tight, so @Xmarksit , if you're missing with the Revolver in mid-range or closer...you're just missing. don't blame the spread for that. Revolver spread at its worst can still kill a Mini Sentry at over 1000 HU without missing one shot. (though the mini sentry's hitbox is admittedly larger than it appears).

at the end of the day, it's 2shots vs 3shots. I understand the difficulty to pull it off is your main argument, I myself can't do jack shit with the ambassador and swear by stock revolver. however it's better to balance shit around gifted players than the bad ones. That's where sniper becomes questionable too.

700 MB update to TF2.

I had nearly 50% of my Games List just go "Update required" despite taking 0 second to update and nothing was really updated.

False alarm. Everybody go home. https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/al6h7l/another_giant_pile_of_updates/efb9tev/

i'm straight-up telling you that with perfect aim the revolver is still better. unless the first shot kills the target, the revolver does more damage at a faster rate and far easier than with the ambassador, and it gets even more one-sided if you're actually playing in semi-close or closer range. the things I'm saying now were still true before the Ambassador nerf...at least within 1000 HU. past that, yeah, 102 pretty handily beat the revolver's max falloff pew-pews. i'm not saying that we need infinite range 102s back, but with crit falloff and a headshot range limit, the ambassador's niche has been completely lost. with the current range limit and falloff, however, the Ambassador has become even worse in close range and doesn't have its long range benefits anymore.

I don't believe revolver can shoot three times in the time amby needs 2?

Aye, that happened to me too. 153 games and counting. The difference is that the rest were 0 KB, and TF2 was ~686MB. https://i.imgur.com/7N9rPMx.png

well i confirm that's literally just you.

I think giving him sapper unlocks that serve different purposes would be the best way to do it. When you make them too simular it either becomes a tug of war situation as to which one is better to use over the other or in a lot of cases the unlock will just be nerfed into the ground like the current RTR is. One of the bigger issues with the spy to me at least is that he's too predictable too. If they could make reasonable unlocks that changed him up on how he approaches it could help make him a bit more unpredictable. Which could benefit the class as a whole without making him more powerful. Of course, only time would tell if Valve could actually pull this off though. Speaking of RTR, I was wondering on an idea I tossed up a while ago. I'd like to see a change to it to make it more ideal for punishing grouping engineers together, but worse against individual sappers as a whole and was wondering if this could be a possibility. A Sapper that doesn't need to be directly applied to a building, takes one hit to destroy, but it has an area of effect attack that disables, and slowly damages buildings as a whole ( damages at a slower pace ). Maybe has a small cool down after placement instead of being able to be reapplied immediately like the stock sapper. Engineers can repair their buildings, but they must attack the sapper directly to completely remove the effects of the sapper.

GUESS WE'RE DOING THIS NOW revolver firing speed: .58s ambassador firing speed: .696s we also have to subtract the first shot from these timing calculations, since the first shot will fire as soon as M1 is pressed. revolver x 3 = 1.16 seconds ambassador x 2 = .696 seconds ambassador wins, right? that's roughly half a second better than the revolver! wrong. the first shot from the ambassador in that time was a headshot. the second shot could not have been a headshot, because there is a cooldown. specifically, a .95s cooldown before headshots will register again. without taking the cooldown into account, the maximum amount of damage the ambassador could have done in that time is 153 damage. the revolver's maximum, in the same amount of time, could be as high as 120...and it's going to get an extra 60 before the ambassador gets a third shot. unless you have killed the target in these first two shots, you are now behind. but let's say you have superhuman timing and accuracy. you account for the cooldown and you make your following ambassador headshot the fucking millisecond it is possible. let's throw this into the equation! revolver x 3 = 1.16 seconds for a maximum of 180 damage ambassador x 2 (headshots) = .95 seconds for a maximum of 204 damage congratulations! you've gained...roughly two deciseconds and 24 points of damage for much more effort. but let's say that this encounter lasts for...god forbid, more than a single second. let's say it lasts...two seconds. let's see...how many shots and how much damage have these weapons done at 3 seconds? at 3 seconds into the encounter, the revolver has fired six shots dealing as high as 360 damage. at 3 seconds into the encounter, taking into account the Ambassador's headshot cooldown time and assuming both perfect human timing and aim, the Ambassador has fired four shots dealing as high as 408 damage. congratulations. you have aimbot-level aim and precision, your enemies have no concept of movement, and you have dealt at absolute best 22% more damage than you would have otherwise. which you did not. because you're human. because you're going to miss that cooldown at least a few times, by at least a few deciseconds. and, statistically, you're aiming at a smaller, faster-moving target...so you're much more likely to miss one of those shots and die. the moment you miss a headshot, you've lost that minor damage lead. you cannot balance and strategize around aimbot skill level, because it is very literally impossible to reach that level. the best spies in the game regularly and frequently run revolver- in fact, they still ran revolver before the nerf. for a class that's already so inconsistent, especially in high-level play...more consistency is better. without amby-sniping and an impossible-for-humans level of skill, timing, and precision...the revolver is better.

Wow the last time the TF team made a blog post that wasn't copy-pasted was for the Blue Moon update, in March last year.

I'm no spy main but you have to admit the threshold from 120 to 153 is pretty relevant. It's the difference between half the roster being alive to half the roster being dead. Isn't one headshot and an immediate easy bodyshot without waiting for spread recovery a much faster kill on light to medium classes? I don't really have much a stake in the discussion, I don't live and die by the ambassador but I think this at least warrants some discussion. I agree that reliability is more important over-all but I don't know if it holds that ambassador is always worse if you're not a complete god when all it takes is one headshot to get a pretty substantial leg up over stock in a mid-close range situation against some of spy's most important targets like med, sniper, and engi.

Following up with the "sonar" suggestion, although Sapper replacements would be a lot of fun, anything that interacts with players directly (such as knowing their positions) would be too strong and I personally believe and any and all Sapper replacements should fill a niche that compares to being able to nullify, then destroy sappers. I think this was suggested before, but having some sort of tool that makes a health pack or ammo pack on the map into a "poisonous" one, meaning that the player would be under some sort of effect or damage after picking it up, would be pretty neat and would fall into the kinds of mindgames that Spies like to play.

I still think a fake healthpack could work. Since it would be way to easy to spot fakes why not make it a fake Sandvich instead? That would fit with the game's style IMO and maybe have some fun play to it. It could have a slight 'arming' delay so you can't just toss it on people like a short-ranged GL pipe. That way the only way to know if its real is to see a heavy throw it. If you want to make it good without making it do too much damage, perhaps it could be thrown while invisible for a longer 'arming' time.

A cool concept but would be rendered completely irrelevant unless it did damage in such a way that the user couldn't tell and just ask a Medic to heal them, or if it negated Medic healing completely, and in that case (an item that, when you touch with the belief that you'd be instantly healed, almost invisibly damages you and can't be healed away), it wouldn't be much more interactive or fun than the Spy knife Curly suggested that just insta-kills you in 3 seconds with no counterplay.

I was about to write out a long post about how thinking the amby is good, let alone a better revolver for "good spies" was the most objectively wrong and laughable thing I've read here in a while but I'm glad to see someone else already did. Anyone who thinks the current amby is good or even viable does not play spy and clearly does not understand how to.

Dead Ringer should provide complete immunity to the first hit. It completely defeats the point of the item if you die trying to activate it, which happens far too often ever since they lowered the initial damage resistance. It's not reliable at all for what it's designed for, and Valve's loading screen tip of "try to use it when you're weak" is laughable. You die every time if you try to use it at ~20 HP, which most classes will put you at in one shot. If you can't use it at low health, all it will ever be used for is an unconvincing damage shield. That was literally what nobody wanted to happen. It's just trash now, and I always end up switching back to the other watches after it fails me one too many times. Not to mention the last nerfs they stacked on intentionally made fighting against it predictable due to the static recharge time. Because that's a good idea, adding more predictability to a class based on trickery, stealth, and deception. A class that is already widely agreed to be relatively weak already. As it stands, the Dead Ringer is currently in a miserable state. It's a non-viable pile of gimmicks that nobody asked for (such as speed boost and afterburn immunity). Why is this current design a good idea? How can it be justified to leave it that way? The only rationale I've ever seen is "because fuck Spy, I don't like him", or "this isn't Spy's job", while completely ignoring the fact that most classes have alternate ways to play them. Ambassador didn't deserve to be butchered, either. Spies already used a variety of guns before the severe nerfs.

and yet most of the spy mains don't even know amby has reduced spread. so much for undisputable knowledge because you're a main, right? ambassador gives you the chance to inflict a perfect meatshot or pipe worth of dmg in a single hit at will. It's 2 revolver shots in one (minus 15 dmg). It delivers as a sidegrade. Even if you just want to hose down with amby, you can use the tight spread to your advantage and still land solid ~50 hits. wheter or not it's *hard* to use is not relevant in this discussion. There are countless good players that have no issue with the headshots (yes i'm aware the caliber of opponents play a large part). I still see the gun being used reasonably often and well. people seem rather upset they can't use it at ranges where spy has 0 business anymore. It's likely valve's fault for having acted so late however. It's unsettling the way some people get snappy extremely fast about their precious "baby" when so many weapons got permanently ... "ruined" the same way. Crit fall off is not *that* outlandish as an attribute, flamethrower and bison had it for years. Shotgun and minigun crits naturally lose dps from spread. So does pistol and syringues. I will concede that Enforcer and Diamondback existing really make amby seem like a rip off however.

Dead Ringer as too slow for me before hand, I honestly don't see a reason to ever use it at all now. They really should have compensated the nerfs to it with buffs that made sense while keeping the actual problem of the watch ( being spammable by quickly recharging it with ammo ) at bay. But no, I guess making more of the spy's unlocks to be straight downgrades is fine too lol. I'm really under the impression though that people will actively agree that he's a weak over all character. But anything that might make him at least a little viable against more competent players is just a no go. aka, Yeah's he's fine, but I hope he never changes because then I might have to actually deal with him being a threat lol.

What people find as fun and unfun is suggested tecthnically. People hate that soldier can spam objectives and tight hallways to get kills, when can we see the rocket launcher get a significantly blast radius reduction to counter that? If weapons are poorly designed, they should be changed in a sense that fixes that while keeping them at least viable. If they make them to a point where they're not even situationally good then they may as well be deleted from the game then. This is probably why Valve doesn't actually make any new weapons for the game any more, because it's honestly a collosal waste of their time if a lot of them just become worthless in the end.

Make the fake sandwich look like it's rotten

even with the 1-2 headshot-bodyshot combo, another (not even) half second of fire with the revolver (which, at this point, is just keeping crosshair in center-of-mass instead of waiting for any kind of cooldown and has been from the start) brings the revolver's damage total to as high as 160 for barely any more time spent and much easier and more consistently. it takes another half-second after that for the ambassador to close the gap...another full second, actually, if you've interrupted your headshot cooldown period with another normal shot. the moment you stop making headshots or miss even one, you completely lose any damage advantage that you may have had over the Revolver. DPS and consistency > burst and inconsistency on any day of the week I know I'm kind of appealing to authority here, but seriously. I've run both of these weapons a lot, in pubs and competitive alike. the actual spy mains popping in are outright telling you guys that the revolver is better- or, at the very least, that the ambassador certainly is not. I mean...the fact that even Hell-met himself said that he doesn't use Ambassador kind of proves my point, doesn't it? If any of you are running Ambassador full-time and you aren't hitting every single one of your shots- and they aren't all headshots- in your fights, you are not seeing any benefit whatsoever from that weapon, you're just earning style points at best. But most of you are smart enough to know where your limits are and...not run the gun that becomes a straight downgrade the moment you click outside of the head hitbox.

Maps are inherently designed to solve that issue though? Most of the most popular maps have very few narrow hallways that the Soldier can abuse.

What about objectives then? Payload Carts, control points and what not that generally amase groups of enemies and require you to huddle around a small radius around the objective in order to complete it.

I only use Ambassador when I really want to fuck over a Razorback sniper without him having any opportunity to react whatsoever, or for getting cheap kills on weakened enemies who spot me. Otherwise, I use stock if I need consistent damage or need to quickly destroy buildings, or Diamondback if I am playing against potatoes and can guarantee crits. L'Etranger used to be my favorite but with the Dead Ringer nerfs I'm usually better off with stock cloak where it's not a terribly useful gun to use.