I agree that they don't care and they never have. However Custom huds fps configs and anything else you use to customize your game(viewmodel visibility/crosshairs)use things valve allowed us to customize using commands/tools that they added with the intent of allowing players to use what they like. You are however asking for a plugin which makes a weapon behave differently in any server not using the plugin which is an awful idea.
Whos to say they're done changing stickies or that they aren't about to change various weapons/classes?

You realize the meta has shifted before right. Before b4nny carried tyrone to an ESEA Championship, most medics were playing off their soldiers a lot more.

Every team plays to its strengths. If your demoman can hit pipes, you uber your demoman. If your soldier has good shotgun aim and ammo management, you uber your soldier, and if you're pyourr in season 5 you blow your ubers letting enigma and carnage meatshot everything.

This game evolves every year.

Why should demo kritz surprise be an auto win? Are you serious? That's an argument? I really don't understand.

The biggest issue that i am finding is that higher division players, players that have an impact in the community are not acting responsively and are just flinging shit around. Casters are talking beyond logic and making people that watch the stream to see competitive TF2 question what is going on. I am honestly quite annoyed that people are acting as if it's the fucking end of the world, when it's literally the same game, but the demo can't be as caught out as before.

People are talking about Promods, Cvars and what not, but that will create even more distance between Public and Competitive. I also want to see how that would afect LAN and competitions between different Leagues and different Regions. It's really such a short sighted idea... There are more leagues than just ETF2L, and if ETF2L does implement the new Cvar that Annakin created (tf_sticky_fulldamage 1) then it will affect how players prepare for different leagues, or different game modes (6s, Highlander).

Accepting a plugin, a promod or even a cvar is opening a can of worms, people will start asking for other stuff to be changed and or removed. Weapons made in the future might not be accepted. TF2 is about team play, yet a change to a weapon of one class is making people talk about the end of competitive play. Get a grip.

It's honestly great to see that some higher level players in both America and Australia are taking it cool and moving on, it's an evolution, and it might not even be a permanent change, Valve could possibly reverse.

Yet.. we see Epsilon playing a pcw without a demoman whatsoever and instead playing with a heavy. With attitudes like that, of course people will be flinging shit and be scared the meta is gonna change.

I might be a scrub, and my insight might come from someone that plays around the div 4 level, but as it is, as long as certain people (ahum...) continue acting like only and only Prem level insights are welcome then they will be able to pull as much shit as they want, and we have seen the results of that (ESL, others).

I can't speak for UGC/ESEA/CEVO obviously, but things like a promod (obviously kills competitive tf2) and even a command which reverts the change will not be condoned and explicitly disallowed in ETF2L.

Moving competitive TF2 further away from public TF2 with a ProMod or a mechanic as big as sticky rampup will slowly remove any significant number of new players joining competitive TF2. The only viable league to use a ProMod, or a plugin to revert the change would be ESEA since they are not aimed towards new players. However if they would run such a plugin they would completely alienate themselves from all other TF2 leagues. It could work for ESEA, but it's risky in my opinion.

Basically, using a plugin to revert the change or a ProMod is really stupid. We need to go along with what Valve has chosen and embrace it with open arms.

running kritz can tend to be somewhat high risk/high reward. If you increase the risk (less likely to get med before he gets uber), you'll see it less. And I think most people agree that kritz is an exciting part of the metagame.

Again, I'm still not sure how much this update actually affected running kritz.

How is it an autowin? It was high risk, high reward. Your demo could still whiff stickies, or they built their uber while you didn't, or their med is positioned well enough to get out.

Right now there's just no reason to use kritz because it's high risk low reward.

Demo is still a massive damage dealer, you cant suicide as demoman just because your stickies do less damage. Your medic and scouts aren't gonna be like LOL STICKIES JUST WALK THROUGH THEM.

The game shifted toward the scouts and soldiers now to follow up more efficiently on the lessened damage, and change their playstyles to compensate for this change.

I'm not arguing that the game isn't different, I'm arguing that there is no reason to be panicking or calling the demo 'underpowered' or 'gimped'

He still locks down chokes, He still does huge damage, but everyone else needs to adapt as well.

My point is that this patch effects every class (soldier scout medic) moreso than it directly effects the demoman.

Gladly.

I'd like to start narrow, by talking about demoman itself, before I move onto overall balance. I would've thought that, whether we were outraged by this decision or thought it was worth it for the greater good of competitive, that people would at least admit how shitty this made demoman. However, it appears some people are in denial about this fact. When b4nny, the best demoman to ever touch this game, starts literally bottomdamaging for his team, you know something is wrong. The best that even top demos seem to be able to do is match the damage of their scouts and roamer, and go a fair bit under their pocket's damage. However, people saying "so the demo is less OP and is just the same as any other class" are deluding themselves. Demo is by far the class that pads damage stats the most and pumps out the most useless damage; damage that no one can reasonably follow up on, that gets healed off, and that briefly holds someone up from coming through a choke but doesn't take off a significant margin of their health. In almost every log of a top-tier team from before the update, demos regularly topdamaged (as did pockets depending on the map and heal spread), but other classes almost always outkilled the demo. This was sensible; demo did by far the most dps, but had less finishing power and was worse at making its damage count than scouts or even sollies. Now a demo has similar damage output to other classes, but its killing power has dropped even more, being far below scout or soldier. That useless stat padding damage I mentioned before? That's still present, largely unchanged from before. The only difference is, a demo basically needs to go pipes only or bait everyone else on his team to get kills now. In addition, demo is far less fun to play than before, as the only viable way to play it is to hide waaaaay behind your team and chip damage from afar. So essentially, AT THE VERY LEAST the update has alienated 25% of the 6s community. Also, please don't spout that bullshit about "NOW U ACTUALLY HAVE TO AIM". First of all, aiming well doesn't help a ton when a scout is bulldozing into you like a retard and you're forced to quick det. Second, that kind of "heh just deal with it" logic could be used for literally any nerf for any class, no matter how bullshit. Imagine if valve listened to people complaining about soldiers just shooting their feet mindlessly, and made the rocket launcher have the spread of the direct hit, while keeping firing speed and damage the same. People would be outraged, and no amount of "wow now you actually have to aim rockets" would fix it.

Maybe, MAYBE this change would be worth it if it were beneficial to overall class balance and gameplay, but I STRONGLY disagree that it would be. First off, let's talk about the behavior of the three major fragging classes in 6v6. What makes tf2 interesting is that there's kind of a triangle of counters here, but it's traditionally been EXTREMELY soft. Scout counters demo, demo counters soldier, and soldier counters scout. However, any of these relationships can easily be reversed in tons of situations if a player has lots of skill, positions themselves well, gets heals at the right time and works with their team. Now, however, demo no longer has any upper hand on soldier, as the slow moving nature of sollies is a lot harder to punish with the meager damage stickies do now, especially with the high health of soldiers in general and overhealed pockets in particular. Scout v demo, meanwhile, is simply a complete joke. No matter what people say about demos needing to learn pipe aim nowadays, it's pretty ridiculous to argue that a really good scout is beatable with pipes when, 90% of the time, said scout will win that fight. Pipes are too much of a random element, and it's not like they've been buffed to compensate, with more in a clip or higher reload speed or anything of that nature. In short, the class balance triangle has been basically ruined. In terms of the speed of the game, I suppose it's possible that the game will be faster-paced, with running through chokes being easier. However, I don't think this was a good way at all to increase the tempo of the game, as it was done at the cost of tons of strategy. Now a team can just walk right in through a choke, with no sexy roamer distraction, no amazing shots, and no offensive demo spam of their own. Plus, you lose out on offensive demo spam to make room for a team to push, which always had a great element of aggressive focus fire to it. Just give the pocket 300 and he walks right in. That point brings me to what I probably want to emphasize the most. Some people thought demo was too much of a priority class, and that nothing but med should be elevated to that level of importance (why people believe medic deserves that level of esteem but draw the line at demo, I do not know). However, I believe that this update will make pocket soldier ridiculously OP, simply replacing the demo's former role. A pocket can basically go wherever he wants at any time, as long as his medic follows him, with very little risk. Where before we saw pockets with like 35-40% heals, and demos at 25-30%, I believe now pockets will be pushing like 60%, just like at the heart of the quick fix fiasco. Most good pockets will start to play the way Tiger did back in open, just running around with constant 300 doing whatever they want. Scouts will have a much harder time countering this strat, as without as much focus dmg sent the pocket's way it will be much harder to do enough burst dmg to defeat the overheal. Scouts might not complain, as demos will be shitty enough to feed them kills and dmg to make up for this change, but I see it hurting the game overall. In recent years, especially after gunboats became the vogue worldwide, we were nearing a point where every class had something to offer, and the super balanced frag, heal and damage distribution of top teams was very clear. Now, the balance is out of whack. To use a hyberbolic allegory: imagine if, tired of their pesky ways, we killed all the ants in the world, only to find the food chain collapse, and life on Earth end.

I hope I made my point.

I guess going into hl at this point would just be beating a dead horse; suffice it to say it will suffer even more from this change than 6s.

P.S. I refuse to even go into a discussion about "valve's original intent for the class", as that's such a fucking asinine argument for a variety of reasons

Just played Steel and you know how Steel works around Demo and Heavy classes.

Well, we had to play basically a glorified pub, because we couldn't take the sentry down without a Spy, who was the only class able to take a wrangled lvl 3 sentry.

We couldn't hold the connector, because our Demo wasn't dealing enough damage. Walking there would result in Pyro airblasting to the pit.

I'm playing as Medic, got jumped by a Soldier. He would not be able to kill me if my Heavy could kill him first, but with 50% less damage in the 1st second it was enough for him to send 3 rockets instead of 2, and the 3rd one finally got me.

Now tell me how this update only ruins Demo's and Heavy's life. Whole combo stops being a combo, this powerful unit, because it lacks... Power.

I genuinely think that Valve just wanted to make classes more balanced for the pub play and they don't give (as usual) jack shit about competetive. And if competetive, HL in particular, looks like a pub after those nerfs, then I think they are even more happy.

Lol hl

http://youtu.be/EMfLZ-cOvbI?t=2m37s
kritz the soldier

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enGJME5age0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NL48BdjS8v4

the return of enigma engi mid on badlands

who the fuck are you and why do you think you could ever add anything to a discussion like this

why didn't you respond to mustard's book?

This is one of the more logical pro-update points in this thread.

However I still have a couple problems with it.

First off, recently scouts and roamers, traditionally the most "disposable" classes, have been throwing their lives away much less often, for two reasons: a) they figured out they could get a lot more done for their team by staying alive in the fight for longer, and b) good teams can push off of a player advantage even with the other team's demo and medic alive, so losing your own life is still risky.

Second, even if a demo can just go for nuts bombs and suicides, I don't see him having the same efficacy in doing so that, say, a roamer might have. He can't do the burst damage with stickies anymore, it's a lot lot lot harder to hit pipes while in midair bombing down onto something than it is with rockets, pipes don't splash, the self damage is much greater than a gunboats solly, and it's a lot harder to bomb around multiple times avoiding damage because you need to wait till a sticky can be det. It might be more fun for some, but wouldn't it be more fun still to just roam, where your bomb is probably twice as effective?

So what would be your argument against limiting demos to 2 again?

Because I really dont see the point in perfectly balancing classes in a class based team game, that's exactly how its supposed to work, classes arent supposed to be equally balanced across the board, some will have counters, some will not, some will have core attributes totally different from other classes, some will be more valuable in some situations, some in others, bottom line is, in a class based team game the point shouldnt be to equally balance the classes across the board but instead the interactions between them. And I think tf2 had that quite well put with demo.

on the bright side i think it's safe to give demos 8 stickies in dm again.

I like the change, it nerfs demos who tend to overextend. Hit some pills and/or wait 1-2 seconds before you det. Doesn't affect killing heavies at all because even if you just leave your sticks laying on the ground he's not going to be able to dodge them if he's spun up... Or again hit some fucking pills.

Ubers and transition fights are going to benefit from this change. Sure your stats might not look as good as they did before but you minimize that with smart play. The game overall will be more enjoyable for your team.

Because theres nothing to be said.

The game isn't ruined. His points about soldiers becoming overpowered is not true. The game wasn't made for a triforce of classes to be countering eachother.

Scouts can kill soldiers, scouts can kill demomen. Scout is the most 'overpowered' in 1v1 with overheal assuming movement, aim, terrain, etc.

Saying that demos needed to be the counter to soldier is just not true. Im not even sure what point he's trying to make. Soldiers aren't going to become this unkillable tank just because demomen aren't pumping out an AOE 800 damage per clip.

Scouts will be able to get maybe 1-2 more shots off before dying now, as will roamers, and pockets are going to have to do more. Nobody is unkillable, its just everyone is in a sense 'tankier' as a result.

This doesn't ruin the game. It shifts its gameplay mechanics, which again, does not make it 'broken' or 'imbalanced'

I'd even make a case that this might be a better time to run kritz because it'll be easier to live through ubers just with regular heals.

at the end of the day as long as the sticky nerf doesn't affect the creation of "the legend of ________" videos we can all be happy right fellas?

that eu game tho

i cant tell if it's really fuckin bad or that eu tf2 is in a bad place right now

#598

It's the same reason you couldn't have 2 demos before this change....

You can't have 2 demos per team because you can lock out every choke the other team can push through with stickies that do they're full damage potential... It's not like they do the reduced damage permanently. You can't just walk through them knowing... Oh yeah I think that sticky is going to do 30-60 damage.

In the words of bl4nk: "in the words of memphisvon 'you people are too fucking sensitive'"

I'll address these points one by one.

1. More about aim and positioning for whom? If you're implying that neither is required to play demo on a mid fight, then you're a moron. If mid fight demo were so straightforward, then anyone would be able to do it, and people like kaidus and b4nny who are able to, through a combination of super fast rollouts and really strong aim, dominate early mids more than anyone else, wouldn't be nearly as valued. Anyways, even in situations where a demo can feasibly hit every sticky on a mid fight, there's a huge element of aim involved; imagine if you hit 80% of your shots and your opposing demo hits 100%, and that tiny disparity loses your team a mid. I guarantee there are plenty of mids as scout where you've hit 80% of your shots and gotten like a 5k, while an opposing scout hit every shot but died without a single kill. Mids are about teamwork and focus fire most of all, and demoman has always been a big part of that equation.

2. Why is this better? Is it better for soldier to now be the best at what it already did, AND a demo's former strength? How the fuck does that improve anything, unless you're a soldier who doesn't give a shit about balance as long as your class gets buffed?

3. I'd like to amend this and say "more aggression being possible for scouts with mediocre movement". Or perhaps "more aggression being possible for scouts who want to go lone wolf and not play off their team".

4. Again, how is this in any way an improvement? Like I said, hello 60% heal pocket soldiers again.

5. See above.

6. More defensively when alone, but also more defensively in general, as there's no longer much of a point to getting close, as your damage output is basically the same from further away with the rampup.

7. Yes, but sticky traps aren't really what demo should be about.

8. Yes, but pipes are pretty unreliable no matter who you are.

9. So you're dumbing down what is already by far the easiest class in 6s even further?

10. Yes, they'll be TOO strong, as the opposing team's demo can't stuff the kritz with sticky spam, and an enemy soldier will never be able to burst damage a kritz down without getting a perfect bomb on the kritzing medic.

11. Again, dumbing down the easiest class.

12. I'd argue that this is a huge exaggeration as, ever since gunboats and the equalizer/escpae plan/whatever you wanna call it, the advent of fast 300 hp sollies has made the early 3v3 on mid less important overall (something that many people complained about as well, I should add). Even if it's true, however, why take away something that a) demos have always been specialists at, and b) takes quite a bit of skill?

13. I don't think this change will actually happen, but if it did it would be a negative for roamer players as well.

As for your argument on damage and reliance on aim, I think that's total horseshit. It ignores the possibility that demo itself takes aim to do that initial damage, as well as the fact that medic being able to heal off the main damage source of a team easily can make fights last forever and be super derpy, and that focusing meds early on mid fights and playing heals is now much more viable (a bad change as killing meds on mid is super easy and takes a lot less skill and coordination than pushing together as a team and focusing fragging classes).

this didn't nerf traps and having more traps will slow the game down. You could literally have a trap on every entrance to most points

You guys keep yelling at each other I'm gonna be over here having fun with my parachute

Everyone says that valve wanted to cater to pubs and fix pub balance. While this might be true, they also gave soldier an automatic rocket launcher that can hold 8 rockets. Am I missing something?

The meta shifts before were due to the skill of players. b4nny and others of his ilk (numlocked, kaidus, maybe platinum) were much more skilled than demos before them, proving that playing around the demo and going off uber with raw dmg output was often better than playing the uber game and hoping your pocket soldier got a .5 second advantage to hit 1 extra rocket. We don't need valve to make changes to the game to improve the meta for us, nor have we ever. The amount of legit sidegrades (gunboats, kritzkrieg) that have improved the game is reaaaally small. Forcing meta changes by raping classes is not at all the same thing.

No amount of pipe aim will ever make a demo uber remotely close to as good as a soldier uber with this update, it just won't happen.

The kritz argument you make is so boneheaded and has been shredded by enough people already so I see no reason to respond to it as well.