Anything to nerf scout class

from memory, we tried it here and most people hated it.

It's in a weird spot for me, because one of the main reasons for this plugin to exist was so that enemies (especially scouts) couldn't just hug you to either easily kill you or atleast trade with you. It was a valid complaint to be fair, but ironically, the roles are reversed now and good soldiers just kamikaze into you at the right times. This attempt at trying to fix soldiers killing themselves in close quarters shifted so much power into that class that I believe as a result the pace of EU teams came to a grinding halt which is what we have seen at i69 and RCADIA. It's just too risky to walk through small doors and chokes when a single soldier can ruin an entire push by landing on someones head with the right timing. Before the plugin soldier was already very influential despite getting abused by scouts but the plugin made it the best class in the game by a large margin. Demoman is mostly responsible for damage, Scouts are mostly responsible for clean up: with the plugin, soldiers can potentially do all of that and more.

I think there is no real answer to whether it's good or bad, it just turned out to be a massive meta shake-up.

We (witness) play slow because of 5 min timer and banners btw, not because we noticed something about the gunboats plugin. I’d be interested to see how the game feels without the plugin though, but I think soldier would still be played exactly the same way (probably just die in corridors to scouts more).

I still think it's not necessary and too big of a change to the class to stop one specific scenario from happening.

I am completely addicted to rocket-hugging people now however, it's like they hooked me up on their own supply and now I can't stop even if I wanted to, which is messed up and evil.

I think that you'd buff scouts a large amount by removing the plugin, enabling scouts to have an easier time playing aggresive and playing passive against soldiers.

Being able to run at a soldier - esp a unbuffed soldier - tank two directs and hit 1 meatshot to trade would be huge. Big buff in enclosed areas, think about taking gullywash water as a scout vs soldier or lunchbox in granary. Even if you don't hug a soldier, you can bait them into shooting themselves for 30-40s instead of 10-20s.

It would also nerf soldiers, jumping on peoples heads and directing them, since if a soldier bombs your medic/demo and directs them, they take like 50-60 + rj damage, which makes the clean-up easier meaning that soldiers will get their second/third rocket off less.

I'd be interesting in seeing what would happen if the plugin was disabled, would scout players try to abuse self damage more leading to more aggresive plays? Would soldiers need to be more careful about bombs; trying to bomb highground and rain rockets down rather than bombing on/into people? Would the plugin even make much of a difference and would the game feel the same?

Oh sweet summer child