- Out in the open theres a p good chance of getting 1 shot by this thing as medic -- it v frequently sends you high enough to take fall damage (141 + ~15 fall damage)
- while you're airborne with 8 hp you can contemplate how much you hate this game
- pipes are more fun to use imo, but i am not a demo main
- RNG of where exactly pipes hit on your hitbox makes you fly really far in the opposite direction (most of the time they hit your front)
- hitbox is LARGE
- it does take skill to use, there are undeniably some players that are much better than others at it, similar to pyro

not game breaking, just annoying

pipes are cleaner and more intuitive from a gameplay standpoint

whether to ban? not sure

some of the things that annoy me most about the loose cannon:

1) some people are better at timing it to double donk than others, obviously, but there are so many places on maps that seem almost designed to make them easy by just tap spamming as kaidus said (for instance, gullywash choke to big door, roughly the length of the point on viaduct, mid to saw room entrance on snakewater, etc.)

2) the effect it has on ubers is so ridiculous, plus it's really arbitrary based on map/whether u get a double donk or not, plus it does just enough dmg to make it where a medic can't even choose whether to milk or not because no medic will milk that hard, PLUS you can't even reach the demo with hitscan like you can a pyro so it doesnt have the same level of counter

3) any weapon whose principle effect is to stall someone's movement is detrimental to fun a lot of the time

4) combined with the nerfs to stickies, demos who run the loose cannon are massively rewarded on damage stats. I have yet to determine how much this translates to a substantive difference in gameplay (ie if that free extra 2000 dmg is useful dmg). if it is, then the weapon is too much of an upgrade to pipes. if it isn't then demos who use it will be fellated without merit and elevated to better teams than they deserve because so many people look at stats to judge someone's skill whether they admit it or not

I personally believe it should be banned, adn I'm a Demo main

Double Donks in competitive play, both 6's and HL, are mostly luck from what I have seen and when I have gotten them. You have to get the direct hit to even think about getting the double donk and outside of spamming chokes getting direct hits against players who have good movement is extremely difficult even for really good demos such as Kaidus, Duwatna, Bdonski, etc.

So let's say you do get the direct hit now you have to get the direct hit within half of a second of the cannonball exploding. The timing changes at every range, having to charge it for almost the full time at close range or just tap shooting it at longer ranges.

Thirdly the charge timer is affected by your ping. As someone who mains Demo and regularly plays with 80-90 ping it explodes anywhere from 1/3 to 1/4 of the meter left on my screen. This makes double donks for me a mostly luck based mechanic. While I'm sure it explodes much closer to the 0 meter left if you have lower pings such as 5-20 not every one has low ping. Because of this I only run the loose cannon on maps where I know I can tap shoot and get double donks while being at a safe raneg

There is also the problem of knowing where to stand on certain maps to just tap fire the Loose Cannon and get double donks such as on Viaduct under your cliff to the enemy cliff, Gullywash from left spawn to shutter, or Badlands upper right to the main choke. I'm not 100% sure if the knockback scales with range but if you are getting directs when they are coming through a choke point which isn't hard seeing as it's a chokepoint they will get knockbacked while the demo is in relative safety. With Pyro you risk getting killed because you have to be up close to actually knock the uber back. As far as I have seen no NA demos do this, but a lot of the EU demos will switch to the loose cannon on last holds to knockback players.

The damage as well isn't always the same, it can do 30, 60, 90 or 141 damage and you never know how much it will do it until you hit someone with it or someone gets hit with it. With pipes you know you will be doing 100 damage on a direct pipe and 30-40 damage on a roller.

I don't think Medics should have to pop even earlier because when they are coming through a choke they don't know if they'll take 9 chip damage and get double donked and die or take 60 damage and get hit by a sticky. With the grenade launcher they know if they are going to have to pop or be able to milk. With the Loose Cannon there is no telling

I think a good start would be lowering the overall damage and knock-back but giving the charge time a ramp up that would increase the damage to its current state if held long enough so that randomly getting hit from long/mid distance isn't as punishing. Perhaps increase the projectile speed or knock-back with that ramp up too so that the projectiles don't become a pointblank one hit wonder and can still offer a way for the demo to deny provided enemies get close up on him so that the weapon still retains its perks.

what we need is a scout nerf so they can't just buttfuck an entire team so hard they might as well not even leave spawn

slight exaggeration but scouts are pretty damn good outside of in a LAN environment

I don't use Loose Cannon or like the weapon but I am against banning it, think about MM, think Valve want to support competitive in any way if we keep banning their weapons? It's slightly irritating to play against but less so than playing vs Pyro's or Engineers with Wranger sentries/Mini sentries...

Stop banning stuff, embrace it then you'll learn the little details about the weapon it took us years (You ever see soldiers rocket jump like they do today 5 years ago?) and become better against it.

back when the loose cannon had a 4 sec timer instead of the 2 sec timer it has now, getting mid range double donks actuallly took time to charge and do, so there was an obvious attack speed and damage tradeoff compared to pipes.
The short timer also allows you to get a consistent 40 damage explosion in front of you.

Even in HL the Loose Cannon stands out as a dumb and broken weapon. Kind of a poor excuse, considering that even MM won't make playing 6s against minis remotely fun.

Also the natasha

not really applicable here but fuck that noise man

if u know someones gonna shoot beach balls at a choke and u walk thru it anyways and get mad that u died u probably deserved it, and I've literally never been pushed forward by a double donk in my life so I have no idea what people are talking about with that one

dying "randomly" to the loose cannon is about as warranted a complaint as dying to random rollers, nobody gave a shit about the weapon for years until it turned into one of the only worthwhile ways to spam chokes after the sticky nerf. The weapon isn't a blatant upgrade to pipes or else literally everybody would be using it, and i can't think of any times off my head where teams won matches that they shouldn't have because they used loose cannon instead of pipes (like when teams were winning retarded matches using the gunslinger just for an old case for reference). The biggest factor at play here seems to be emotional trauma moreso than one of actual game mechanics.

actually hildreth valve accepts that we have a whitelist and understands why
keeping something unbanned for the sake of MM would be a mistake

Nerfing it is a fine idea. But you have to play with a thing to know how. The divergence between comp and other TF2 is so appalling today because of the decisions made years ago to adopt the "ban it now, wait for fix later" mentality. Not only does that starve the weapon of the competitive context needed to see a meaningful fix, it sends the weapon to the grave yard as those that are eventually fixed in some way, almost never (is there even 1 example?) make it back into the whitelist.

Those who so optimistically look ahead to MM as the savior of comp TF2 must espescially come to terms with this. We've built an airtight meta-wall in 6v6 and we've hid behind it for many years. The truth is, the powers that be shaped the game to allow the cookie cutter lineup to thrive because of a communial holier-than-thou idea that it was the best/most competitive. There's good argument for that, and it worked because we were on our own and could make that decision. If it was annoying, seemed to threaten that meta, of empowered a non-standard class to the point where it seemed we might have to look at it more than we wanted; it got banned. Bonk, jarate (i argued against it myself), GRU (and we helped design that one), the banners, loch n load, all got the axe because they are...too good? Too annoying? Meta ruining?

There have been awful unlocks (phlog). There have been unlocks we've given a shot and had to abandon (quick-fix). But the majority get a ban first ask questions never treatment, and all I'm saying is that if the comp TF2 community expects MM to save the day, they need to expect being "annoyed" at some unlocks.

The day is coming when you're going to see a 4 scout with bonk, 2 quick-fix medic rollout to mid vs. 3 GRU heavies and 3 meds of varying ubers. If we can't cope with the damn loose cannon, we screwed, team.

This, opting bans for weapons at this stage is really dumb.

All the loose cannon does is slightly slow your firing speed and increase potential damage. It is an upgrade, but with a higher skill curve.

i basically solely used the loose cannon for an entire season, and i think its too easy to drop meds with it

the loose cannon is a straight upgrade to pipes at high levels, even a fucking retard like me can have huge game impact because of that stupid shit
look at this shit
https://youtu.be/ThctPQyX-hQ?t=34m40s
please ban it

nope

I'll tackle the ending part first just because it seems to be bait and has nearly no purpose in this discussion. It affects the mechanics greatly, but even emotional trauma is a reason to take a second look at a weapon. Clearly it's just not fun to play against, even if the mechanics are balanced (which they aren't).

Onto the actual discussion on mechanics, the point you bring up in the beginning is actually just completely ignoring the issue. If you're trying to rush a push on an uber advantage, you have to take the fastest route. Most of the time the team will scout your push out pretty quickly, which is why uber advantages commonly turn into a game of leapfrog. You push on 30% advantage so you rush the push through, let's say, saw on snakewater. They see it, and adjust accordingly. What's great about TF2 without the loose cannon, is that a pocket with good movement, intuition, and aim can still have a successful uber, in which he either kills the medic before uber, or gets a lot of frags on entry, which can change the entire rest of the leapfrog game. With the loose cannon, all a demo has to do is shoot cannonballs that bounce ubers and send the pocket, demo, scout, whatever, flying through the air without any way to combat the pushback. It kills your momentum and leaves you basically helpless in the air. Yes, that is a HUGE deal. Pipes are very different, easier to dodge, and more intuitive when it comes to pushback. Same with stickies.

Even aside from the uber problem, you can read a post by seagull on reddit that perfectly explains how much of an effect it has on the game. https://www.reddit.com/r/truetf2/comments/1pkzqw/loose_cannon_vs_grenade_launcher/cd3kwmi
. While trading burst damage and clutch moments for consistent damage throughout the game seems like a solid and fair tradeoff, the arbitrary donk damage and the effect on movement it has for just about every class is huge. Shade walking into lower lobby on gullywash with 130 health just to drop to bdonski who threw a donk into lobby is just stupid. It just is. If it were a pipe it leaves him at 30 health, and requires teamwork from another teammate to coordinate a drop. A sticky trap is also an entirely different, far more consistent and acceptable means of dropping a medic. A donk just isn't.

You can continue to think people are just bitching, like everyone loves to think when the balance of any weapon is brought to the forums, but thinking a new weapon is perfectly balanced and acceptable for top play is just blind idealism. The mechanics behind these weapons are barely taken into consideration before they're put into the game. I have a feeling that making sure the weapon doesn't crash the server is the only thing Valve will test before they put the weapon in. They aren't going to get it right on release.

For people that make the MM argument: If we want to make 6v6 more like pubs we should change pubs, NOT the other way around. Anything else is just a waste of time.

If the loose cannon isn't banned now we will have this exact same discussion for years to come. It isn't a weapon that gets better with time. Demos will learn how to deal more damage and other players will what? Learn how to not get hit with random double donks?

The problems with the LC aren't THAT big of a deal right now but they aren't going anywhere any time soon.

say what you want about the loose cannon good/bad/otherwise but I guarantee 100% of the time someone complains about it, it's because of the fanfare and confetti that comes with eating a donk
I'm positive that if it didn't announce to the whole server you just got fucked people would be less upset about it

I've never really had absolutely terrible experiences on either end of the loose cannon but that's probably just me

Does it actually "randomly launch people forward", or does it rather propel you the opposite direction? E.g. if you got hit by it and it blew up just behind your player model, wouldn't it bring you forward?

Pretty dumb weapon, though. On the other hand, the donk sound effect is hilarious

My god there's so many characters on this thread. It can't be this difficult

i dont understand why people connect dealing 141 to killing a med instantly, in a perfect world sure you could double donk a med while holding second and spamming choke sure, but i personally find it retarded when a med or something whines when getting double donked into the air and takes fall damage and dies due to shit positioning

I love the loose cannon and I think it's the best weapon idea valve has had in years in terms of being a unique alternative to stock

I think it just needs tweaking, less knockback on a direct and less randomness with the vector of the bounce after hitting a player would make doubledonks more consistent but potentially harder (like 50% of my donks are where the person flies backwards with the cannonball and it's inescapable)

I'd also like to see bouncing them around corners and shit become actually useful but I have a feeling it won't happen

edit: some rng things that I find annoying about it:
- the knockback can be slight or huge
- sometimes it just knocks them up slightly and stalls them, sometimes it send them flying backwards
- directs sometimes do as much knockback as a donk and it should never do even close to that much
- sometimes the cannonball flies through them after hitting them, sometimes it flies back towards you, sometimes it just stalls

I personally haven't ever been in a scrim/match/pug where I thought "WOW that weapon is unfair and needs to be banned". Any time me or my teammates die to the loose canon it usually is something that we did wrong, not some random luck of the loose canon one shotting them

The "launch people forward" thing happens when you strafe into it and it's hitting the back corner of your collision hull. That, or it hits the left side of someone peeking badlands choke from mid, tossing them towards the barrels, which might count as "forward".

It pushes you in the direction opposite where on the hull it hits.

.

I think it does need a little bit of nerf. Being able to 1 shot medics/scouts in a choke is silly. But other than that, I think the mechanics in general are great.

Prob would vote to ban until changes are made.

I think the Loose Cannon should be nerfed so to make double donks tougher (require priming of 1 second or something), but I'm wholly against banning the weapon.

It's been used for a couple of seasons now. It certainly creates an annoyance (especially on choke-y maps like gullywash), but it does not break the game in any manner. Some demos run the Loose Cannon. Others run the regular Grenade Launcher. No one has a decisive advantage over all aspects of a map or game.

Banning weapons that are viable sidegrades is silly.

i don't even think the donks are the problem. if the projectiles weren't faster and the knockback wasn't so crazy it might not be so bad, but its really easy to just put your crosshair in one spot and just fire it as people try to push. even if they pop uber the juggles it can do are retarded. to juggle someone with pipes or rockets takes a fair amount of skill and its not nearly as strong as just hitting someone with the loose cannon, which is not difficult at all.

its not the damage it does that really annoys me, its the knockback.

I think you are missing the bigger picture here. When VALVE releases MM it will eventually be a success or failure (in terms of revitalizing the game). The comp community wants it to be a success so that heaps of people will care about a structured form of TF2, thereby bringing support to our game in a similar (albeit diminished) way CS and DOTA have support. If at such a time, the comp community's dreams come true and MM is a success, the success will be in the MM version of structured TF2. Not our current 6v6 meta. The 2 can probably (and ideally) work to meet somewhere in the middle, but if this community decides "Valves Game" is too foreign from "our" current meta to be taken seriously, this community will be left by the wayside. Players will quit. 90% of the scene could quit and refuse to play, and it wouldn't matter. If we are pulling for MM, and MM succeeds, then MM is the new meta, the new 6v6, the new comp.

I don't think people realize the cake they're trying to hold on to is the cake they're also trying to eat.