Pro scout sheepy dog's hand here, gonna get banned on this as well but before I do i'll post this. Excluding medic scout is the strongest class and that's why you now see top teams running a scout with the medic taking a good chunk of heals because a scout with heals is the best at focusing down single targets in pushes, protecting your medic and demo against bombing soldiers ect so this is why playing pocket scout gives you lovely logs if you play it well. It also gives the pocket the freedom to use gunboats and it helps your medic stay alive. So in my opinion it's good to give a balance of heals between the pocket, demo and 1 scout in the combo but every team is different.

Still someone needs to watch the flank and cap points (always me nowadays but I still wreck) and the roamer can do this but most roamers i've played with are just doing roamer things and i'm usually alone on the flank. In my opinion because of this having a good scout who can play with little heals and still do work with only buffs on the flank and making sure people don't get behind because your roamer is dead or by getting behind and being annoying is really tricky to do well and i've seen a lot of scouts who are used to playing the more pocket scout role struggle when needing to play like this, I think there are very few scouts in europe who can do this well and I think one of the reasons Reason (nameless) did and still do so well is because of the way they set up their scouts with haffi playing the pocket style role and stark playing the flank scout role so well and thats probably why Stark is the best scout in Europe for sure. sorex is amazing at it as well but from what i've seen LEGO do it a little differently so I can't really tell. I think i'm pretty solid at it as well and when I did play that role on Planet Express (where raptor got cut) I feel I played it really well on a very disjointed and miserable team.

MM scout is absolutely insane. Mad Milk lets you tank like a motherfucker (and your whole team), Crit a Cola is obviously broken and pairs really well with the shortstop, Atomizer is a free win against soldiers. The only thing missing is pre-nerf Pocket Pistol for 225 HP triple jump scouts

Not so much that scout is OP as much as explosions don't work the way the should in this game. Nothing more infuriating then splashing a rocket 1 inch from a scout but he takes no damage because there was a penny on the floor or a crack in the sidewalk.

Now scout with unlocks is definitely OP but not the base scout class.

What about upping the base explosive jump resistance of the soldier by like 15-20% and leaving the gunboats the same by changing them to 40-45%? That might make some other secondary unlocks more potent without gimping the traditional gunboat soldier too much. (except for more shotguns)

if I understood you correctly it sounds more like a gunboats nerf.

What about giving the normal shotgun the same ramp-up as the scattergun, in addition to lowering self-damage? Removing the rampup altogether would be nerfing scout a little but not really helping soldier at all. Could be a nice buff to the other shotgun classes, too. How much would be acceptable to lower self-damage by, though?

It nerfs gunboats with respect to a bunch of secondaries that the gunboats outclass, it doesnt nerf gunboats with respect to the game as a whole (with the exception of fighting shotgun soldiers but thats been meta before so its probably fine).

Yeah, technically you're right. It's a passive buff to every other secondary unlock without nerfing gunboats into obscurity. Values might be a bit high anyway, don't play enough soldier to say.

there's a reason the demo nerf was the single worst thing to ever happen to this game and it's not just how it made demos feel

I'd disagree but I'm an open player. At least at lower levels the game feels way less combo-centric and it actually feels like you need to coordinate your combo and flank to succeed against open teams now. Compared to like 4-5 years ago when I started playing and I liked pocket because you got 30% of the heals but topfragged and got most of the attention on pushes I feel like my role has been humbled to be more in line with the rest of the classes.

~~~~
I don't see why gunboats couldn't be buffed along with the stock jump damage? If 5 health per jump is what's keeping you from using the backpacks I think that's more of a problem with the backpacks

Kinda wish they would reduce the amount of health it takes to sticky jump aswell, would be a small little upgrade for demo and maybe a slight change on the pace of the game

The only thing is if they give soldier better self damage resistance for rocket jumping the 6's meta would become more soldier centric because every soldier could effectivrly run shotun including roamers and then scouts would be a lot weaker,cause doesnt s soldier with the shotgun would beat a scout in a 1v1, correct me if i am wrong.

Valve has thought and still thinks scout is a shitty class since his inception and keep giving him shitty gimmick weapons like the sandman, bonk, crit-a-cola, and soda popper to "balance him out". Realistically hes ALWAYS been like top 2 classes in the game and I hope Valve has figured that out by now.

Might be an unpopular opinion but I'd fucking LOVE to have demo's sticky nerf removed so he can actually have some sort of counterplay to scouts again. Only problem is /r/tf2 STILL thinks demo is OP to this day even after he was absolutely slammed for pub players.

funny, the sacrifice and opening the pawn gives would suit solly better IMO :>

Yeah. It used to be the Medic was the King and Demo the Queen. I'd say Snipers and Spies are Knights, Soldiers are Rooks, Scout is the new Queen, Demo is the Bishops, and Engi and Heavy are pawns

pyro is the chessboard cause everything else walks all over him heh

im not very good at chess could you elaborate on this?

no, soldier is the easiest and most powerful class in the game. absolutely baffles me whenever i see people claim scout is easier or more powerful.

I mean what are the odds that valve would actually give soldier a buff though. They still think pyro is op :/

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

prototypestf

Making it easier for the other team to push is not a bad thing, considering the pace of 6s. The game is slow and has a ton of stalemates, because people are still afraid of spam to get forced or die. I don't understand what tf2 players want. They complain about tf2 being boring to watch because there's nothing happening half the time, and then the same people complain about the demo nerf which most definitely helped teams be able to push a lot easier. The whole way 6s works, demo is a bit complicated to balance properly because if you buff it too much, the game is slow, but if you nerf it too much, demos are a lot less impactful. Overall, it's fine the way it is, because demos can still carry games, can still shut down scouts in a team fight if they have good aim, and can still single handedly shut down a push, but at the same time, the team pushing into a demo can peek more without too much risk.

spoken by a 5 ping scout main on snooze noises

http://image.prntscr.com/image/ebaa816a99e64fb59bd6bb449440a00b.png

it's not a bad thing, but considering the fact that demo has 2 projectile based weapons, one of whom is affected by ping when being shot, and when trying to deal damage with it (detonating stickies), making the splash distance smaller made demoman even more frustrating than it already was if you play with 80-100 ping.
demo was never suppose to be a 1v1 class and if they nerf the spamming cabalities, maybe they should buff him in other aspects.

if rikachu had 5 ping no one would call demoman weak ever again

keep in mind im a chess neophyte at best so this all probably wrong

King = the piece that the entire game revolves around. Has basically no way to attack or move quickly
Queen = Strongest piece in the game. Most mobile. You only get one and much of the game is controlled by queens
Knight = Piece with a very odd movement pattern. Used to corner in other pieces without being able to be hit itself. Not strong individually but works well with other pieces
Rooks = Horizontal and vertical movement across the board. Basically a worse version of the Queen but still very important for locking down the game
Bishops = Diagonal movement over the board. Individually difficult to use but combined w/ other pieces can lock down the board easily
Pawns = Very little movement and diagonal attacks. Usually not very useful but important for controlling the flow of the game and can be used to bait and corner other pieces

Chess is a good example of how individual balance per class/piece isn't nearly as important as overall game balance and flow
~~~~
As far as demo goes: the original balance problem was related to traps and multiple demos meant multiple traps so the game was AIDS to play. As people started mastering soldier and scout (and demo) movement, people moved faster through the map and traps weren't such a stonewall. Now a days, traps are a LOT less important in 6s than they used to be and overall the demo is a lot more of a support class than he was in 2011 because he went from being the backbone of individual holds by forcing people to avoid a particular choke and the primary damage dealer to a class that does decent damage but does it differently than all the other classes. You don't need a demo to do 350 DPM to win an Open match anymore because the game moves faster and the combo is no longer the primary unit of where the team is.

It used to be pushing into a demo was basically impossible because you wouldn't be fast enough to get in and he'd drop stickies on you for 60 damage each. Now pushing a demo isn't particularly different from pushing a pocket. Its now actually possible to justify pushing the enemy team if they've lost a roamer or scout because the team fight meta has evolved from "stickies -> clean up" into focus firing as a team. De-emphasizing a single class is a good change for the game and the goal should be to make scout follow a similar path as demo rather than buff demo back so that he covers up the game's balance flaws by slowing the pace of the game down again

When valve nerfed demo they reduced the radius from 159 hu (hammer units) to 146 but if the sticky has been in the air for less then 2 seconds its like around 139 hu I think the one where its smaller in the air is really unnecessary at least have it be 146 the whole time http://imgur.com/a/vF3E2

its way more balanced at LAN when any primate is able to direct scouts

it depends what you mean by op
they get the best KD and win in 1v1 fights vs the other classes but they cant make space as well as a soldier or spam out a choke point

stickies that touch the world have full radius (regardless of the radius ramp-up). the only part of the nerf that affects close range stickies is the change to make their radius match rockets which was pretty minor iirc