TF2 General Chat & Speculation Station V17 - Ms. Pauling Won't Stop Calling Me - Games

it's a trade-off, and a drastic one at that losing the revolver's self-defense capabilities and stopping power is almost never worth it, imo. i'd only recommend l'etranger as training wheels for spies who don't understand cloak management yet, not an actual gun replacement.

Because a lot of options are not really viable... If it isn't this revolver it'll be the Diamond Back or Stock and that's it... I wonder how long it'll take for people to want the L'Etranger nerfed though... Most went Diamond Back now from what I can see...

I'd much rather fight the l'etranger than the Diamondback.

L'Etranger is a great utility weapon. It's not "training wheels." It doesn't need a nerf. The Diamondback does. It's a weapon completely broken by design. Let any class store crits is a questionable game mechanic. Letting one that can cloak and disguise do so is insane. Ideally the DB needs a ground up rework, but at MINIMUM it needs to only reward crits for backstabs, not sapped buildings. The fact that an even remotely competent spy can sap jose.jimenez.2004's nest and then punish more competent players with crits is Phlog levels of stupidity. Also, the Ambassador is overly nerfed. It needs it's falloff range to be roughly doubled. I say this as someone who hates Spies with a (back)burning passion. Valve have a storied history of leaving an OP item in the game for years at a time before finally nerfing it into oblivion.

Spy barely scrapes by on viability sometimes so things like the l'etranger seem more like a usefulness buff than an op unlock. Not the Diamondback though. Fuck that thing, I shouldn't be able to brawl with a soldier in open DM combat as spy and win with two quick shots to the body. That's utterly ridiculous.

The problem I keep seeing though is that People like to openly admit that Spy is baring scraping by. But they also seem to want anything that makes him even a little bit more viable is just bad and needs to be nerfed into the ground. I've been under the impression that people just want to pretend that they care, but really don't I guess you could say. I will agree though with the Diamondback. At least the old Ambassador required a good degree of skill to make it viable. Diamondback is the exact opposite...

I don't agree with that people want to nerf items that aren't fun to play against usually it just happens that most items that make stealth characters viable are unfun because stealth is pretty much fundamentally broken in terms of a genuinely viable character, since stealth is essentially a gimmick in the first place. I don't think the letranger is in any danger of being targeted.

At the very least the Diamondback should only get grits from backstage and not be able to use stored crits while disguised (and maybe like 1 second after losing the disguse so enemies have time to react).

Either replace the crits with mini-crits or remove the mefhanic entirely. 3x damage for stabbing somebody in the back is outright ridiculous.

it's still incredibly good for spies who do understand cloak management?

just the opposite, actually- it's crippling. I already understand cloak management, I don't need the extra boost in the vast majority of maps. as long as the map is designed with spies in mind- hiding places, ammo kits at reasonable distances from each other- then I'm just fine. the only time I feel the need to run l'etranger is when I'm also using cloak and dagger, and also on offense. this is an extremely rare scenario that only ever occurs in HL and an intel-centric playstyle. having easier cloak is not worth trading off my gun slot. it doesn't matter if I have a longer cloak if I'm not actually using that extra cloak time, and it especially doesn't matter if it lowers my overall pick utility and ability to defend myself when discovered.

What you don't need isn't how we balance the game or weapons

Same, but it might just be because I like being able to see that if a Spy opts to break disguise to attack me, it's not going to be an instant 103 damage regardless of if they hit my head or hit my foot.

The L'Etranger pairs really well with Your Eternal Reward, especially since the YER now allows the wielder to disguise at the cost of all cloak. Imagine that. Weapons in the same set synergizing.

god you're fucking obnoxious sometimes by "what I don't need", I mean "what isn't useful", or "what isn't an effective buff". throwing away your gun slot for a longer cloak time is not a worthwhile tradeoff in the vast majority of situations. insisting that the l'etranger is somehow overpowered despite the fact that it's near-objectively worse for spies experienced with cloak management is ridiculous. it is a training wheels weapon with limited viability once you have good cloak management. period. that isn't something that needs nerfing. also, shit- first spy has too much combat viability with ambassador and DR, and now stealth is too viable if the spy gives away his primary's damage? is your idea of a "balanced" spy one with no ability whatsoever to sneak past or kill you?

I don't think anyone ever said etranger was OP. but see there's this new trend where passive benefits "take no skill" and people want it all gone, but apparently it's double standards for spy. I also don't think 50 dmg a shot is "giving your primary away" when it 3shots light classes just the same.

Something something pot kettle.

i don't know what world you're living in where the L'etranger does 50 damage a shot. it does 48 at point-blank, and in most scenarios it deals much closer to 30 (32 is its base damage). you aren't three-shotting jack shit with that. making posts like this pretty clearly demonstrates that you don't know what you're talking about. @Racist Gamer Man Even though you literally only lose ~10 damage per shot? losing 10 damage per shot when most of your shots are only doing 40-50 is a pretty big deal, actually. I assume you're replying specifically to me because your entire post is focused on me, but either way I have no clue why you think suddenly people think the Leet ranger is anything besides a viable and strong revolver sidegrade, I have yet to see a single person here actually shout "Alert the masses! Spy is OP again!" you pretty strongly implied that the current L'etranger is a balance issue- I don't know what else you could have meant by "What you need isn't how we balance the game or weapons". if it isn't overpowered, I'm pretty sure that means it's not a balance issue. digging further into this point, the entire point I'm making is that the weapon isn't a viable and strong revolver sidegrade. it's training wheels in all but a few incredibly specific scenarios...if you have good cloak management. it's only a viable sidegrade when you don't know the map and/or ammo locations. Fucking hell man, people are saying the Diamondback is OP. Maybe take a sip of tea and relax, stop freaking out because Spy is the focus of the thread's discussion and people aren't saying he's the worst class in the game not ever worth playing and only balance ideas from Our Lord & Savior Spy Main Contra can save him yeah, that's not what's happening here. don't fucking strawman me. I was saying that the L'etranger has a very real downside, which it does. The last bit was me being agitated because from my perspective, it seems that you're just moving on to complaining about the rest of Spy's kit now that the dreaded evil of the DR and Ambassador has been defeated.

Lmao. For real though, go sit down, take a sip of tea, and relax. I didn't, in fact if you stopped assuming what people thought, I'd tell you I think it's one of the most balanced weapons in the game, but you'll probably launch off about how I'm stupid and wrong for thinking that anyways What's happening here is a meltdown, as far as I can tell. Just ~4 hours ago the discussion was wildly different and about how the Diamondback is ridiculous and the Leet ranger is a pretty okay sidegrade.

point blank also doesnt mean youre literally touching the person. you're still gonna get 45 dmg shots at a reasonable distance. not to mention you have no reason to revolver people if theyre far enough for fall off to ruin your dmg. cloak away and try again like youre meant to be. better than you getting pissy for no reason. stuff happens outside of mus.

I can say someone doesn't know what they're talking about when they straight-up say something that isn't true. L'etranger does not do 50 damage, and the only way you would think it does is if you don't actually play with it. I can also say "don't fucking strawman me" when you are, in fact, strawmanning me. Neither of these things mean I'm having a meltdown. I'm feeling just fine, just voicing my opinion like the rest of you. What, I'm not allowed to take part in the discussion if I'm not saying "yes Johnny Joe sir, you're right! I adore you so"? I didn't realize we were required by law to take part in an agreement circlejerk here.

I am a trash tier spy. I mostly use the C&D, Spy-Cicle and L'Etranger to menace one sniper that upset me. Three rounds ago. I'm actually fairly good at not getting detected (at least on Doublecross and Landfall) but I'm fucking useless at anything objective related. When I'm picking away at someone with L'Et, the damage number I see the most is "17."

The L'etranger should be removed from the game and be replaced by something easier to pronounce.

This piece of shit too while we're at it https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/249352/e74b90bc-3425-4d7b-ba3a-498977fc4872/image.png

Back when pl_cactuscanyon was playable via QuickPlay (remember THAT SHIT?) I was once on a team that got completely curb stomped by by a soldier with 11,000+ kills on his Direct Hit. His name was: It's Pronounced "Let Tran Jay"

people only switch to spy because they're weaboos or because they're is a sentry in pubs anyway. most newbie spies either: a)use the amby and spam it b)never use the revolver at all and go frontal at you with a knife out most likely listening to nothing but themselves. https://media.giphy.com/media/RJOYRvEEeMlby/giphy.gif in either case, no matter what gun these people use, their aim is still crap and nothing could remedy that, so i'd take them out of the equation.

Clie-uv-more

confession: I've always read its name as an English speaker I know it's wrong- horribly, horribly wrong- but I can't be fucked to learn French

Over the course of the numerous years I've wasted on TF2, Spy seems to be the only class where the general/average pub player has gotten worse over time. There are still plenty of Scouts that will run at sentries until their three brain cells snap into action, and certainly many Snipers that have zero situational awareness and couldn't hit you even if you stood still in front of their scope, but then there's Spy. I'm actually surprised to see a half decent Spy nowadays, because about 99.9% of the ones I encounter, either on Valve servers or community servers, can't aim a revolver, struggle to backstab stationary targets, and somehow believe that anyone that still has cognitive thought is going to fall for their stairstab (which they'll mess up anyway because they forgot to consider the momentum of a jump).

The funnier part of the names issue from above is that if you just say the direct translation to avoid mispronunciation, The names could still work because they don't overlap with other items. L'Etranger / Ley-Trawn-Jey = The Stranger Claidheamh Mòr / Clee-Av-More = Claymore