the new sniper rifle reminds me a lot of the quake railgun, and i've been playing sniper like a mid range combat class just getting half charges and smg'ing people in pubs, its fun but i don't think it'd be viable in 6's.

now that stickies are bad the new shield could be viable

traps are still pretty good.

I did 234dpm with the Classic in a 1am pug last night. With 3 reconnects because of crashes too. However, my k/d was horrible and I felt like I wasn't doing that great for my team.

There is a lot of cool things you can do with it, but all those things kind of give a "so what" result.

I am very sad.

The new scatter is dumb as fuck and I like it

The base jumper could be useful for airstalling above a door or something, sort of like the lamp outside granary second, jump up, activate it, and wait.
Although i dont see any roamer worth his salt trade the gunboats for it full time.

parachute is broken, you can control your strafing way too much
new shield isn't too bad kinda silly with the claidehamor or whatever its called
new scatter gun is one of those things that would destroy in the lower divisions if the scouts hide every change they get
new rocket launcher is gimmicky as fuck and I don't see any pocket using it/any roamer getting more than 5 rockets
sniper rifle is terrible

scottish resistance should be used more and more demo knights with the new shield will probably show up in the near future

The Air Strike is really really fun and possibly could be useful as a roamer for bombing etc. It's really powerful once you get the full 8 rockets, but I'm not sure how good it would be in competitive because getting the 5 kills to reach the 8 rocket clip would be pretty difficult.

You didn't kill me, I was disappoint.

The parachute robs you of almost all your forward momentum when you deploy, but you can get it back by circle strafing in place or a d strafing forward. I don't know if many soldiers will be able to utilize it to the max on maps where the skybox is not as high, but it could be a situational unlock for points like gullywash second. Opening and closing it to juke airshots will be interesting, but without either the direct hit or the aerial strike I can't see a soldier being too much of a threat in terms of bombing. Sureshot was doing something pretty cool with it during pugs as a pocket where he'd jump over a choke and float down while spamming, effectively stuffing the choke while avoiding taking ground damage from stickies (heh) and rockets.

The new sniper rifle sucks unless you're a noscope god who has a crippling inability to use the scope of the regular rifle. Also anyone who uses a zoom_sens_ratio that's not 1 will have trouble adjusting.

The backscatter's fire sound is a lot better than the scatter gun imo, and it does something like 147 dmg if you manage to do a point blank shot on the back, if I'm incorrect and it can one-shot a medic it'll be great, but at the moment it seems like it can only be used to punish already damaged people running away, but I suck at scout so 8).

It's gonna be like dota. If you die to it your teammates will yell at you for feeding.

The new rocket launcher is pretty good with the parachute so a roamer using the two could make a ton of room with them.

The demo targe is fun as fuck but I still don't think it's better than stickies.

The new scatter is more of a pug weapon. It's practically pointless if you're playing with any coordinated team.

the rocket launcher parachute combo is so much fun but in 6s it seems pretty hard to get up to 5 or 6 rockets unless you get a lot of clean up kills or bait your team.

They're fun and actually not broken which was a surprise but I'm not sure if any of them would actually be viable. Would be worth trying them out some. I had fun pugging with other people using them last night. I didn't get a chance to try any of them myself until I started pubbing afterwards though.

pls no parachute

In competitive?

Back Scatter: worse than stock, so no.
Tide Turner: if its allowed it could find a small niche in the meta
Base Jumper: give up gunboats, acquire float mechanic, rain down 30 damage rockets as you wait to get killed by scouts, so no.
Classic: tries so hard to be viable, actually one of the worst weapons in the game, change headshot/charge mechanic and it could be viable and great for competitive.
Air Strike: "Clip size increased on kill", 0 kills way underpowered, 5 kills, way overpowered, so no.

Haven't played since my team died at the beginning of the season, but I pubbed a little last night to see some of the new weapons. The parachute is the worst item I've ever seen, including the sandman. I haven't used it yet myself, but from watching literally every soldier in pubs use it I see it has no charge timer and can be used every time you jump. Also, as mangachu said they have way too much control over their movement while using it.

It wouldn't be as bad if you had to reach a certain height to use it, and it had a cool down timer but its annoying as fuck when you shoot feet to pop someone up for a low height airshot, or a finishing rocket as they land, and then they pop the fucking chute, throw off your aim, and seemingly never fucking land all the while basically walking in the air easily avoiding rockets because of the crazy control you apparently have.

This thing should never EVER be allowed in comp unless it gets a major nerf.

conga push on last

conga push on last

CONGA PUSH

Pretty much the new meta.

The Back Scatter
Only 4 Shots, -20% accuracy and the need to be both (I believe, correct me if I'm wrong) behind and near a target for minicrits makes this quite useless for comp in my opinion, would be very situational (if you can get that awesome flank), but not as reliable as the normal Scattergun

The Tide Turner
Might be interesting to see if shields really become a viable alternative to stickies now (I don't think so, let's not dig too deep into this though since this thread is about the new weapons). If however, this is the case, I see this shield being very viable due to the turning ability, although you miss out on the damage resistance of the targe.

The B.A.S.E. Jumper
Seems like a very fun weapon to use in pubs, it's aircontrol might actually make it useful on maps with high skyboxes. I saw a video in the other thread of someone testing it out on granary mid and it seemed kind of viable for midfights. The roamer could use it to just float through the air and do a lot of damage do the people below, plus creating a very nice distraction for his team to capitalize on. Again, this will probably be limited to certain maps and since it is situantional, I'm not expecting to see it replace the gunboats full-time, but it might be actually viable to use sometimes.

The Classic
Does less damage on bodyshots (and can apparently only HS when fully charged, not sure if this is only for unscoped or always). The only benefits I can see from this one are a bit more self-awareness while charging your shot and the rifle turning into some kind of hitscan-huntsman in close range, although I'm not sure how well you can protect yourself with it. I'd say the default sniper rifle is the better option.

The Air Strike
Seems to be a very fun pub weapon, although I think its viability in competitive is very small due to the need to get kills to increase clip size, which makes it inconsistent. Having one rocket less with little to no benefit at first seems like a huge disadvantage and even if you manage to get some kills (which is not a given in comp) you will still have only 75% damage and only 80% splash radius.
Bombing roamers with lots of super fast rockets might be pretty strong, but you'd need to get those kills first and even if your bomb was successful, you'd most likely die and then have to start from zero again.
It seems to me a bit like the Eyelander, which can be a pretty funny weapon in pubs, but isn't used in comp because of its inconsistency.

Just my two cents on the update. Although these weapons all seem very fun, I don't really see their viability in a competitive setting

Either the Classic needs to charge way faster or sniper should keep full movement and use it like a rechargable lightning gun. Which I think sounds fun as hell.

The Classic is really bad, but it makes up for it by being a hilarious weapon. Scoping with the Classic doesn't change your movespeed, so if you run around zoomed in or zoom in and out repeatedly your model slides around.

The rocket launcher seems like it could be a potentially amazing weapon to sac with during a bomb, but the problem lies in the clip size. You need to get at least 3 or 4 kills with it in order to get a decent enough rapid fire, but you'll lose those the minute you die and you'd have to start all over again.

It's reminiscent of the old Beggars in that you can do stupid crazy jumps with it and instantly trade with anything you land on. I don't think that it'll be very popular in 6s without somebody pulling off some cool shit first, but HL soldiers will probably run it often enough.

i used the new sniper rifle all night yesterday

it really needs something to be viable, otherwise you're just gimping yourself as a passive sniper

it either needs minicrits on unscoped headshots (80 damage ping with no charge when fired from hip would be really cool) or faster charge time (expect more bodyshots tho) or being able to charge while moving at normal speed

any of those three would make it viable imo

it's really fun in pubs, but it's probably the weakest out of ALL of the other sniper primaries due to the fact if you don't have a charge, you're probably dead at anything closer than midrange

i could see it working in highlander as a REALLY REALLY passive sniper, but what's the point when all the other rifles are outright better lol

as far as i can see, the only two benefits of the new sniper rifle is that it sounds cool and you can't tell when the sniper is charged or not

the intended benefit of shooting from the hip just makes it bad because of the -10% damage on bodyshots (and since you're firing from the hip, that just makes it more likely to happen); the charge takes too long, and there's a delay when you try to fire it off as a noncharged; another horrible thing is that after firing, you can't change weapons because of the firing animation, so you're pretty much dead if your shot doesn't kill anyone running/flying in at you

edit i just realized i posted the same thing twice

you just need to get your tfc groove back.

its so fucking hard to airshot someone using the base jumper but it looks so easy

Well the base jumper is viable on jump maps...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GOLok-jxVo