good if you dump heals into scouts

Jump soldiers heal scouts ez game

Gunboats pocket is very powerful, especially in the current, highly aggressive meta. It does, however, cause notably weaker ubers.

If someone else hasn't echoed my thoughts, I'll go a little more in depth when I get home by editing this post.

edit:
Most of the points have been hit and I'm lazy so this'll be super brief. If you think about how soldier can take damage, there's (should) really only be two sources, the enemy and a rocket jump. Gunboats lesser the amount of damage from rocket jumps. This has two major effects, soldiers can move from place to place faster by using more rocket jumps for the same amount of health and soldiers have more opportunity to rebomb and reposition (counter jump). With gunboats, soldier is significantly more heal efficient in providing both space for his team and damage in overly long team fights. The heals that would have been given to a shotgun soldier can instead be given to a demo or scout, who can in turn play significantly more aggressive and as a result the whole team tends to be more aggressive when pushing. With gunboats, if played properly, there is more space, more available heals and more aggression.

This season in invite, I would venture a guess and say at least half will use gunboats regularly on certain maps, because it is map dependent. Even heal heavy players, like goldfish, take significantly less heals when running gunboats and can be surprisingly more aggressive. It is map dependent, for maps like sunshine, viaduct and process, gunboats are especially effective because of how much space there is to bomb in general and how open the chokes are to jump through. For maps like granary and metalworks, and to a much lesser extent badlands, shotgun is stronger for most of the map simply because of how the chokes slow down the game and how separated the flank and the combo will become from each other. As for shotgun pocket, it provides a lot more opportunities to take 1v1's and be successful and lends to much stronger solo ubers if not all ubers.

As for the demo nerf, demo is still capable of an extremely high damage output, especially if they're given the space to walk into the other team shooting stickies. If anything I would say the nerf actually helped this playstyle because scouts can chew through things just as quick and without as much threat from a demoman who is playing safe because longer range stickies are harder to hit (which I wouldn't say is a bad thing :D).

@i52 only lansky really ran it
mike, zebbo and yuki all ran shotgun significantly more than gunboats, if they ran gunboats at all

there is no reason not to run gunboats pocket on viaduct

post #5 smh

There isn't any reason to run shotgun on viaduct.

to contribute: u can play more aggressive with shotgun

pretty good if your scouts are willing to carry the shit out of you

Either or has its ups and downs, It all really depends on how your team plays.

Doesn't it make more sense that you could play more aggressive with gunboats tho?

Edit: ignore me, i thought you were specifically talking about viaduct

aim is bad at pocket his opinion is nullXD

I find it pretty map dependent, on maps where it's easy to kite ubers I like to use gunboats for mobility after the uber, and for maps where it isn't as easy I like shotgun to kill shit with my ubers.

Allows pocket to do more bombs with the roamer, focus damage and cover more ground during midnights or even pushes. Scouts can get more heals and allows your demo to become more of a tank and focus on holding chokes, preparing traps and distributing damage from distances while the soldiers are focusing on their combo. However this can leave the medic more vulnerable if the demos pipe dm isn't reliable. That isn't exactle a bad thing, it forces the demo to get better with pipes and honestly they should be doing that no matter what.

Hell, experiment with one soldier running blackbox and letting the other get heals at rollout like how the roamer does, the blackbox soldier makes the first move at mid, throws some damage down at the combo and backs out. Aka firing a rocket at the target while bombing in, then landing on them and using one rocket to jump away while Inflicting damage on said target. Meanwhile the 2nd soldier follows up (I mean they are jumping together so it's like a split second for them to react) and follows up the damage already done.

There is tons of room for experimenting with this stuff

Its becoming more meta if you look at i49 and i52 a few teams ran gunboats on pocket quite a lot to varying degrees of success, but when teams play really close to each other (pretty much always 5 players within sight/heal range of the med during holds in a lot of tournament competitions) you don't really sacrifice much by not having shotgun on pocket as scouts literally do that for you.
Honestly think it's pretty underrated, in some teams I think it might just be straight up better to do full time if you're confident enough in your scouts/demo and they play certain roles and it makes your pocket a lot more flexible in what he can do. You're giving that up for the ability to finish players off quickly.

omnific i was being a grammar nazi

and i decided to put some sort of input

i cant explain why, but results show that shotgun is better than gunboats

inb4froyotech

but aim!
FROYOTECH!!

the three best pockets at i52 all ran gunboats pocket so that should be hard to prove

then again that was pre-demo nerf but still

aggressive = good
gunboats = aggressive

-> gunboats = good

always gunboats pocket

:)

If your scouts are good and you're in the habit of taking one in almost every uber then it's a good thing imo. If your pocket wants to try it by all means give it a go.

I don't think the demo nerf really made that much difference to this discussion either, because the demo's short-range pocketing ability wasn't really hurt that much. It's still as viable as pre-nerf imo, and a good strategy to try out if you want to play with two more aggressive soldiers and a real pocket scout.

Really? I can only think of lansky and mike that mostly used it, and I'm pretty sure even Mike used shotgun on a couple maps.

Yeah I didn't think Yuki ran it heh

dont think zebbo did tbh but might be wrong there...

If your rockets are as good as Tri, you can gunboats. Who need a shotgun when you hit all directs bro.

=)

It is entirely dependent on the situation.
Full time gunboats can lower your damage output and make solo ubers weak, however, solo ubers are becoming less common since pocket scouts are becoming more common. Almost all middles are playable with gunboats since soldiers are usually distractions and meat shields. Perhaps granary is a solid exception to that rule.
In general though, it would seem that shotgun is the "maybe" for the current meta.

http://i.imgur.com/1to0Beb.jpg

I remember Yuki running it on at least one Snakewater match.

Also Zebbo may not have run gunboats while pocket, but he did off class to spy, so I guess that's where he got his roamer skills in.

its good if u/ur team know how to play that style correctly

It lets you tank your scouts more which is good, I don't see any reason to not run them on midfights at least.

Especially with a new skin incoming.

double gunboats was the only way japanifest destiny/S&S could function as a team

it's really fun to play =DD

r/truetf2 comment lansky wrote about this subject