TF2 General Chat and Speculation Station V6 - Year of the Guard Dog SURVEY IN OP - Games

stock melees really make me feel like 2007 tf2 was incomplete sometimes, tbh aside from engineer and spy's, stock melees served no purpose whatsoever and were functionally identical to one another across classes. they felt like afterthoughts. once we started getting utility melees for individual classes, that felt much better and more sensible than "everyone gets the same melee weapon with the same damage and function times". san's scout's bat, I guess, which is still pretty useless.

Bad players are still capable of clicking on immobile targets at a distance, as well as spam, or panic firing it as a melee weapon, all where the downsides don't make this weapon any less ass. That, and bad soldiers who cant be assed to learn the class threatening good ones who actually rocket jump for no reason other than the gun is a crutch for unnecessarily speedy minicrit airshots is absolutely unacceptable.

Yeah I'm hoping the next balance update includes something for stock weapons, it feels like it's long past time for Valve to do something with them. Other reworks I'm hoping for (not including heavy weapons assuming those will be featured in the heavy update) is a buff for the Buff Banner (needs some sort of passive buff like the other banners), Back Scatter, the Baby Face's Blaster, the Gas Passer, all three syringe guns, the ambassador, the dead ringer and (a slight buff) the Dragon's Fury.

A reworking of stock melees would hopefully be paired with the removal of random crits, because they will be crippled without their bullshit 60% max critical hit chance. I'm personally hoping each class gets unique stock melee stats that work with their specific game mechanics. I won't speculate on what they could be, though, because I'm terrible at coming up with ideas for new weapons.

I loathe the Quickiebomb Launcher. My biggest gripe with it is that can destroy other stickies. The fact that spammiest, easiest to use SBL complete cockblocks the most difficult to use one (the ScoRes) is terrible design.

spammiest with 4 clip? ok

They weren't afterthoughts, they just were designed in a vacuum, like the original Soldier and Demo ammo counts. The vacuum was that "there's a possibility classes could run out of ammo for both of their weapons, and need a way to fight in close-range against a Spy, or for Classes that were bad at close range like Demo". They didn't originally have the idea that they would add more weapons down the line, I'd imagine. Stock melee is and always has been designed purely as a last-resort function, and as a way to give Engineer/Spy their core mechanics without them feeling out of place compared to other classes.

Yes... bad players can hit things that don't move. That's not because the rockets are fast, sweetie. that's because the other person is slow. That isn't unfair, that's literally what balance is.

That is a silly reason for wanting to nerf the Direct Hit. It's one of the most balanced items in the game. Splash is, hands down, the single most powerful tool in the Soldier's arsenal. No need to aim, and its an insidiously powerful tool for denying Scouts/awkward to hit targets. Take that away, and Soldier becomes an incredibly easy class to pressure. The Direct Hit makes a completely valid trade-off, because splash is just that useful. Being able to make direct hits with any rocket launcher takes a strong sense of prediction and even more so if someone is actively trying to dodge you. If you wanna shut down any Direct Hit solider, stand 15 feet in front of him, and move in a weird pattern. Because the Direct Hit has such a razor-thin margin of error, its gonna be a miss-fest. If you move predictably, of course someone is going to get hit, isn't that how it works? I do agree that it does make certain actions easier, such as shitting on Heavies. But those are minimal when you can't pressure around corners, deal with annoying scouts, deny pyros from airblasting, and so on. You are trading a defensive measure for pure, unbridled hyper-offensive. Yes, one-shotting scouts and spies is annoying, but those classes have an easy time checking you if they understand the right way to pressure a Direct Hit soldier. And if a Direct Hit soldier is still ruining your day, then blame the player and not the gun. It's beautifully balanced, and easily one of the smartest designed weapons in the game.

Yes, and the additional damage for doing the very easy task of spamming into choke points is a whole lot of effort too, right? Balance, mein friend, means also having the downsides matter in a way that they don't let the user cheese or abuse the upside. This is why the machina was banned in competitive, the beggars was nerfed into it's current version, and weapons like the diamondback are being discussed as next on the chopping block. Granted, the DH is nowhere that egregious, but you can't seriously tell me that soldier v scout or other close range/light class deathmatches should be that easy. It's practically a melee at that point. Saying that it still takes effort to defeat someone with direct hit directs, is like claiming it still takes effort to hit the pins while bowling, when the gutter guards are up. You're not wrong, you still have to hit them, but at which point the kill is made so monumentally easier via the undodgable speed, bonus damage and, ah yes, minicrits that punish explosive jumping- one of the cornerstones of advanced movement in tf2, just for equipping the thing. A launcher that rewards directs is great. But one that also makes them easier too defeats the point.

dh isn't too strong or too weak, it's just an all-around dick move.

With the exception that the Direct Hit is capable of making handling heavies in some situations even more difficult given the lack of splash damage. It's almost as if it's a situational sidegrade.

Splash (or even an okay fire rate, which the dh still has) isn't always a necessity for a good weapon to fling blindly into chokes. You'd think the huntsman and crossbow would have taught you that by now....

man i hope they add some good paints to help better customize better. I dont like the overly dark black, and wish there were colors to help match certain character's pants better. I saw this one, and hope they add something similar

i think this one gets it about right

I think exceptions to the last question though for stock melee's... It's a well know fact that melee's are pretty much garbage outside of Spy's Knife and Engineer's Wrench. Since those have special implementations on top of just being your basic close combat weapon. But I feel that upgrades invalidate them aren't bad in their own right. For the most part, 5 of the remaining 7 almost get no use as it is, as there's little to no reason to use them over your primaries or secondaries. Meaning, if an unlockable melee has any use, it pretty much already invalidates the stock counterpart no matter how small it's use maybe. Exceptions though is when it comes to Demoman and Sniper, who in general are suppose to be weak at close combat. Giving them better melee options would be hindering that decisions IMO. Another potential exception I like to add is for engineer sentry replacement questions, and that's wither or not the sentry replacement will negate weakness of other sentries when paired together to hold a point. I feel that this is more of a special case, but I never liked the idea of having multiple sentries that all removed each other weakness to the point it was a royal pain to get through the area.

Did you just skip over my post where contra and I literally said almost all of this

tbh we need more "team" paints.

what about a paint color that matches the sniper's vest

I read it, but there is a little bit of a difference as I was more talking along the lines of balancing around current stock melee's and you two were talking about buffing or changing them directly. I also included a tiny bit more input reguarding sniper and demo's melee's.

I would very much like a Lilac (light purple) paint. Also tweaks to Cream Spirit (to make its red team variant a bit darker and more distinct from Mann Co. Orange), Slate (to make it a bit more grey and less of a potential team problem for Red teammates), and Waterlogged Lab Coat (to make the red a bit more vibrant).

Difference is that the huntsman and crossbow are medic and sniper weapons, and the direct hit and rocket launcher are soldier weapons. When you are spamming chokes, splash reigns supreme and is 100% more reliable than the DH. Not only that, but splash also allows you to spam it from different angles which DH limits you massively. Is it good to spam chokes? Probably. Is the Rocket Launcher twice as good as it is? Yea, deffo.

The fact that we don't have a Balloonicorn paint is criminal. I also still want a paint that actually is the opposite of the After Eight; a light grey that isn't pure white. Think of the default color of the All-Father vs. white for example.

Every weapon is good If you learn how to use it at it's full potential imo. Most of the times people just have this mindset : Use a weapon for 10 minutes, think It's bad, never use it again. That's what I always though of Loch n' Load, I thought It's fucking shite since you can't splash with it or anything, but after using it for like 50 hours, It's kinda aight. DH is imo a great weapon, not better than rocketlauncher in a competitive sense, but it's good.

Perhaps I shouldve worded myself more clearly; I meant that at specifically spamming chokes, the Rocket Launcher reigns supreme. In actual gameplay, I consider the DH and the Rocket Launcher in the same boat. A Soldier that's good with the DH can be very scary, but it requires a decent amount of skill to consistently hit people that aren't heavies or sentries with it.

Waterlogged labcoat is perfectly fine as it is because it works as a decent white that isn't searing like fucking Abundance of Tinge

That doesn't mean its red could actually read as red instead of slight off-white with a tinge of brown.

RL is good at everything, that's the point of stock pretty much, the point of unlocks is that they have a downside

It's a little annoying how there's three seperate space aesthetics in the game. Raygun gothic for the Grordbort stuff, b-movie for the Invasion update, and then Valve's own space theme with Asteroid.

dh can't do anything complex like syncs but it can do any single jumps just the same. there's nothing different.