Gimmick, only ppl who are good at the game r good with it and if u took it away they would still be good. Ppl are sheep tho, so now DM servers are full of hardstuck mid/d2 players thinking they're jay/nubbi/soundsmith/whatever when they have worse rocket jumps than me. Rough!!

edit: Also people get punished for using it all the time, including the really good players using it when they're too optimistic with it.

i don't think its a gimmick, its just a free kill if you ever manage to jump in someones blind spot and its really not hard at all to use

For me, it's in the same tier as the DH. If you're the chosen one, like Waldo, use it. If you aren't, it's best not to.

Meta once you're good enough. Takes a lot of practice / time to get good enough though. Probably only invite soldier whos gotten past that line is jay atm though i expect many others to follow in the coming years

The only three people to make it work so far have been Jay, Nubbi and dd5f. If you're not one of those people and it isn't a pug, you're most likely better off with Escape Plan.

its a gimmick unless ur good with it, which means its a gimmick for 99% of the mid level players who think whipping it out means they're not gonna get instagibbed by any scout with a working mouse

Unironically its a better weapon on many maps and its nowhere near as hard to use as most people make out. Also if you're good with it, there's situations where it's almost impossible to do anything to prevent yourself from being killed by it. People are going for gardens they shouldn't be though.

My teammate from the past 2 seasons Fletcher literally would not bomb with rockets and exclusively market gardened people. He was really good at it, but in any situation where he killed someone with a market garden he probably could have killed them with rockets and all the times he got denied by scouts and did zero damage during his bomb, made the market gardener either equal to or detrimental compared to the escape plan. Jay only runs it because 1. he's good with it. 2. he knows his team froyotech isnt going to lose. The argument is basically equivalent to saying pan is meta because shade ran it for a full season. However I'd also say market gardener is equally viable while using a reserved playstyle, but most people go for too many unreliable kills with it like blaster said.

jay doesn't do his mg damage during sacs, he does it during chaos team fights when everyone is having to focus b4nny/habib

I don't think the pan on medic or the dh on soldier are a fair comparisons, because the market gardener is at least a sidegrade if not an upgrade over the escape plan and pain train in most situations- it comes down to what zesty said, it's not that the weapon isn't clearly useful, it's that people go for it in situations where rockets would be more reliable.

that being said off the top of my head market gardener is objectively the best play for both 1) bombing healthy but relatively isolated demos or meds where you can't risk them surfing (demos especially), and 2) when you're already like 50 hp and you know you won't have enough time to get multiple rockets off

hot take: equalizer is worthless for gullywash rollout and u should run pain train (or mg) on that map

MG is the most unfun thing to play against as a medic, idk if it's OP or meta or shitty but it is unfun

"EQUALIZER"

this is how u know that this guy is old

He's not wrong: Equalizer is quite worthless for gullywash rollout

Agreed. Guy can look like they are going to fall several meters short and still instakill you. The chances of getting killed by it are low but it always feels cheap and like a gimmick when it does happen. I don't think a instakill mechanic should be tied to something as inconsistent as TF2 melee.

chill dude

Would be funny if it did like 149 damage. Watching meds frantically run for a pack while the enemy team scrambles to do like 10 damage, with regen.

And full charge bodyshots.