revert loose cannon

What's important to remember is that there's nothing inherently good or bad about the 'stock' game. For instance, Valve set the max scattergun damage to 105 and the max rocket damage to 112. There's nothing inherently good or special about these values - there's no particular reason why the game would be significantly worse if rockets did only 111 damage at max, or scattergun did 106 (other than the effect of the tiny nerf/buff this would create). Just because this is the ‘stock’ level Valve set the game at, doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good or balanced.

The question you have to ask then is not "is IB better than stock?" (it is) but "is the current level of demo power (with IB) balanced?". If you think demo is generally overpowered, then it may make sense to favour nerfing the IB. If not, simply the fact that IB is better than stock doesn't necessarily mean it requires a nerf. Indeed, if you don’t think demo is overpowered currently, you could just as easily argue to increase the hitbox of stock to make the two comparable.

Personally, I think the meta is fine as it is. This year we’ve already had a push to plugin our way out of medics running at scout speed, largely based on the idea that scout, not demo, is too strong in the current meta. I think the current meta is fine; but if there is a problem, it's certainly not demo. In fact, good IB pipe aim is currently one of the most important counters to the massive power of a beam pocket scout.

Whether it’s a direct upgrade is irrelevant. We allow many direct upgrades (we’ve just unbanned the overdose!). They are a problem not when they make the class more powerful, but when they make it unfairly or unskilfully powerful. Even if it is somewhat easier to use than stock, the IB is hardly an unskilful weapon to use. And the medium-range direct pipes that it facilitates are a key part of why demo is needed in the current meta, to be the best counter to a heal hungry beam scout.

plz dont ban iron bomber, they should just fix the stock pipes

ok I take it back, ban all euros except eemes

well put

I think people are overreacting to this announcement, if we didn't know this for another year I guarantee a lot more discussion would be given to scout being too good or soldier being too bad than demo being where he is right now. I don't care if the weapon is banned or not but I don't think banning it really makes sense given how the meta is right now.

lukas never broke character, glorious joke, sadly nobody got it

Just make a plugin that makes the iron bomber pipe model large enough to match the hitbox so people don't feel bad for getting hit by pipes that "went over their shoulder" on their screen, it'll also solve the issue with IB pipes being harder to see coming at you

^ And please ban wrap assassin that shit is actual cancer the 1 in 20 mids where u actually hit it, I have no idea why it's even whitelisted

btw the other weapon that actually needs to be banned is scorch shot, it's obviously situational because people aren't running around on pyro all the time but in most situations where a pyro is good it's absolutely absurd

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if your argument is that any weapon that 1) is a direct upgrade, 2) dumbs down the role, and 3) prevents what would be an interesting sidegrade meta from existing needs to be banned, literally every single one of those points applies to gunboats too!

also I am aware that the scorch shot is banned in europe, believe it or not I would like our whitelist to be more like eu in that regard because I believe in taking wisdom from all sources!

I'm even a fan of the 2 map 30 min matches, if you can believe it!

Gunboats doesn't dumb down the role of soldiers though.

You are still assuming that stock pipes have perfect balance and that any buff to that is overpowered. Sure it's easier to hit and mostly just a direct upgrade but you need to explain why that is a bad thing for the class/game. Everyone using it/meta being stale isn't a reason either, because that is the case for basically every unlock slot on the game, with the exception of a few melees and the winger/pistol choice.

I would contest that, but either way I don't agree that iron bomber dumbs down demo as much as people say so it's kinda moot

I think people are more concerned that because IB is just better for directs, when it shouldn't be, people are going to have no choice but to go with it in most situations because of the hitbox. Whereas it shouldn't be the hitbox size that determines what to pick, but the behavior of the rollers. And now that this is becoming common knowledge, IB is just going to become the definitive pick rather than something most people use because it feels better but they don't exactly know why they use it.

Veering off into discussion about base Valve balance and if it's legitimate is irrelevant in this discussion. The fact is Valve did add a hidden stat to the IB which makes no sense for it to be different and on its own, isn't an interesting part of the unlock, and isn't intended. The discussion is purely about the existence of a difference, not if the base value is good or bad. There unequivocally should not be a difference in hitbox size for stock and IB. The base value can be up for debate.

So, this discussion about demoman buffs or nerfs is kinda irrelevant. Pick which one you want, and make the rest of the GLs on the same level as the IB, or the IB the same level as the rest of the GLs.

well,

is actually does matter if the base value is good or bad, because whether you reduce the radius of the iron bomber or increase the radius of stock pipes is a MASSIVE difference, and part of why I've been defending the iron bomber is that I don't like the idea of the direct radius being lowered in the first place, which I'm gonna say more about in a giant wall of text that I was writing before I read this post.

yes fix it

I mean within the context of changing/keeping ONLY the Iron Bomber being our sole balancing tool, which is what I understood #92 to be saying. Being that if we think Demoman needs a nerf, nerf the Iron Bomber, if we think Demoman is fine, keep the IB how it is.

But the balance is much more complicated than that. I see this more of a discussion about GL balance as whole, rather than just about the Iron Bomber. At this rate, Demoman is going to become an IB only class, so talking about the IB in vacuum vs the other grenades is not useful. I think the two valid sides to this discussion are either you think what the IB has in radius is good for the game, and should be applied to the other GLs, because it makes no sense to force everyone to pick a single GL when there would be some valid choices all other things held equal. Or you can think the IB radius is bad for the game, and in that case, it should be the same as stock.

I don't think there is a valid argument for keeping them different, but hopefully recontextualizing the debate into two sections: should they be different, and then if not, should we use the stock or IB hitbox, will produce better discussion.

i can't wait to hear everyone in scrims say everytime they get piped "this is bullshit that wouldn't have hit me if he was using stock" as a direct result of this thread

That's fair. I'd like to talk a little bit about why I think an increase in direct pipe radius is good for the game, and I also think there's a broader lesson about the evolution of games and metagames to be gleaned from this discussion, using the overall change in demo pipes as a lesson. Here are two thing that I'm not sure everyone knows/remembers:

1) the iron bomber, while having a larger projectile hitbox than stock pipes, has a smaller blast radius (at least according to the weapon description)

2) the demo nerf of 2014 didn't just nerf stickies, it also nerfed the blast radius of pipes by reducing them to the same as rockets

What do these two facts mean? Well, Valve clearly intended demoman to be a defensive, zoning, artillery based class, and the stock pipes of the time reflected that. Old pipes would hit someone and splash anyone even remotely in the same zip code (as would stickies), and the relative unpredictability of rollers would further punish teams that were clumped too much together. On the flip side, demos could be vulnerable if you closed the distance (especially back then before so many pipe savants existed), and thus Valve figured that their glass cannon, area denial class was balanced.

However, the developer's intentions don't always square with the realities of the ever-changing metagame. It may seem obvious now, but when players discovered the power of the left-click-right-click, the ability for demoman to impact the game as the aggressor in fights went massively up. Couple that with pipes that could splash wide radii, and rollers that could det perfectly on retreating players, and a demoman exhibiting well-timed aggression could sway a fight almost single-handedly. Of course, we play with demo limit 1 for a reason, which somewhat balanced things, but it was still pretty clear that demoman was the most powerful combat class in the game. It was still god-tier at what Valve had originally intended its purpose to be, but it was good at so many other things as well, and was just completely centralizing the meta.

However, when Valve decided to nerf the class, and to buff scout a couple of years later, the balance of power massively shifted. With the reduced blast radius of stickies in general, and quick-fired airstickies in particular, it became much more difficult to reliably lock down an entire zone of the map, allowed scouts in particular to move wherever they please (because they are lower hp than soldiers and don't have the tool of the rocket jump to circumvent a particular area entirely). Coupled with the med movement buff, scouts became what demo was a few years prior- still the best class at cleanup and selecting its own targets, as well as less interesting things like capping, but now the best direct offensive class in the game as well with its ability to chase (and arguably the best defensive class with its ability to give meds easier ability to dodge damage). Of course, that's not even to mention the fact that scout limit is still two, and that the medic's ability to keep up with scouts, coupled with the demo's reduced ability to deny an entire area has made double scouts near the med in dry fights much more powerful. There are lots of consequences to this meta that I don't love (like the loss in specialization between pocket and roamer, positional play of meds becoming too forgiving, the utter mindlessness of the double combo scout strat on mid or dry fights, etc.), but that's for a different time.

Still, tf2 players are adaptable, and eventually demos realized that, to have a larger impact on their game, they had to focus more on single-target dmg. That's not to say spamming an entire team has no purpose or anything, but a demo's ability to precisely hit charge stickies or direct pipes on a single target became more necessary, particularly when those targets are either scouts or feeding soldiers (now that both soldiers are freed up to play roamer a decent percentage of the time).

This is where we come back to the iron bomber- with its larger hitbox and smaller radius, not to mention more 'direct' but also more predictable rollers, its purpose seems tailor-made for the new way of playing demoman- it may not be as good as old stock pipes at killing 4 people at once in badlands choke, but it's a hell of a lot better at directing a lone scout on the top of process mid. To me, this represents a positive overall shift in the metagame- demoman might be EVEN FURTHER from what valve intended it to be, with greater 1v1 ability, but it still fits a specific niche- the best midrange class in the game, with the lack of damage falloff, that can still be vulnerable at extreme close range but only in the form of soft counters.

To be clear, I'm not saying Valve intended any of this; they might not even realize the iron bomber hitbox is so different, and if they do I'm sure they think pubbers are too dumb to notice so they don't have to update the stock pipes. However, this point doesn't matter to me- lots of the best metas that develop in games are not intended by developers, and may even come from bugs originally (see: all of SSBM). I also highly doubt Valve intended scout to be so strong, because I'm sure they were doing the demo nerf more to appease engies who like to build giant sentry nests on badwater than to appease 6s players.

Now, if we somehow got to go to a pre-demo nerf and pre-scout speed time, then yeah, the direct pipe upgrade (or maybe just the rise of better pipe aimers- remember, a metagame can change despite ZERO actual changes to the game itself) would be too broken, because the demo would just go back to having almost no weaknesses. However, I'd say that scout today doesn't have strong enough weaknesses, and a demo with really good pipe aim is one of the few things keeping them in check. We may have even entered an era where the soft counter rock-paper-scissors is reversed. Years ago, it was somewhat accepted that scout soft countered demo, which soft countered soldier, which soft countered scout. This made sense when demos were worse at defending themselves directly, and when soldiers had a) more heals than scouts and b) a shotgun (not to mention scouts having worse movement, and the map pool having more badlands/granary style maps). Now, it seems like almost the opposite- gunboats soldiers, freed up from as many med responsibilities, can land on demos ad infinitum, while 185 scouts can kite them endlessly, and demos can kill a scout from any distance beyond close range more efficiently than a soldier can. To see scouts whining about iron bomber pipes, therefore, seems pretty myopic to me.

I realize that this is the biggest tl;dr in a thread full of tl;drs but what can I say I love theorycrafting.

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id rather see valve make all grenade launcher projectile hitboxes the same as iron bomber as oppose to making the iron bomber hitbox smaller

Hasn't your whole argument centered around how the IB is OP ez mode and should be either banned or changed to same hitbox as stock? That's essentially saying that stock pipes are what's balanced and other things should be balanced around them.

I agree that they should both have equal hitboxes to allow for a more meaningful choice, just that it should be the IB hitbox instead of GL.

You could argue that the model needs a slight increase in size to reflect the hitbox but it's honestly pretty in line with how most projectiles are in terms of hitbox/model ratio. Look at xbow, huntsman, etc. The stock pipes are the real offenders in this regard, with the hitbox being only about 1/3rd the size of the actual model.

if they fix the fact that u still hit even when u miss its ok

also its not even a scout main thing. shooting a soldier with iron bomber is like shooting a pootis with stock lol. the most free airshots of all time and if the soldier is on the floor its also free and again. TSM demo shooting Greggs (Med) when hes last one standing and his crosshair 10000km away

To me it's really simple, pipes that look like they miss but hit shouldn't be a thing

Also I disagree with Habib, I think the soldier, the slower moving class, is more hurt by big demo pipes than he is helped out by scouts getting hurt more by them simply because of his lower movement speed and thus lower ability to dodge

Make iron bomber projectiles comically big to match their actual hitbox

I'd be fine with the IB existing as it is right now if the stat description read that it had +150% projectile size. The fact that it's a hidden stat is objectively unhealthy since the information is not available to all players looking to choose a primary

something else i haven't seen anyone mention/ i don't even know if its a real thing or not - but do you have a harder time seeing the iron bomber pipe as opposed to the stock? like i cant even see it unless im really far away. is it faster?

also mustard is right about what hes talking about and the gun does make sense it just - as silentes is saying - feels cheesy and in my opinion not optimal for the game, however we have limited control over what we can and cannot do. i guess for this reason, it should remain unbanned but its annoying and it shouldn't be like that

I agree with the idea that just because its better than the stock doesn't mean it should be banned and that taking into account how strong demo is as a class is more important but I can understand why people want to ban it. For me the worst part about this weapon is that it feels wrong or cheesy to be hit by projectiles that are no where near you and yeah you can say that its just the nature of projectiles in this game but none are as egregious as the iron bomber. I wouldn't care as long as it was consistent in its hitbox and vfx whether you increase the vfx to match the hitbox or make the hitbox smaller because as it is right now the extra power and utility in consistent pipe jumping are healthy for the game but not when it comes at the cost of other players feeling robbed because of a hitbox.