Because people seemed to agree with me in the previous thread: Can we discuss the Solemn Vow? Or at least the reasoning behind keeping it banned?

Pros:
- Gives medics more power to call targets
- Encourages teamwork between Medic and damage dealing classes

Cons:
- Solemn Vow would probably become meta when unbanned. Ubersaw is powerful but less reliable

I personally wouldn't mind it being meta though. I'm all for encouraging teamwork.
Opinions/thoughts?

edit: I haven't used the Solemn Vow in 2 years. I completely forgot it also allows you to see ubercharge percentage on other medics. I guess that's a good reason to keep it banned

Rescue ranger is pretty much a straight upgrade and 100% shouldn't be allowed at this point. There's no actual consequences to being able to heal your sentry from far away., and like literally everyone else, engis will easily tank their sentry with it from spawn.

we e-sports! :D

clearly the vow is less broken than the atomiser which I reckon is all people were agreeing with in that post

This is the issue it's just so much better than anything but the vitasaw. It would be the only weapon ever run. And giving all that information to teams is so broken, people wouldnt even need to call damage and the med would still be able to tell everyone who to focus all the time.

i mean if ur teamates are calling their dmg why the fuck would u need ur med to call who s weak and who s not using the vow ? i m probably wrong but i think most medics would stick to the ubersaw anyways.

LBTF2 staff was reluctant yesterday due to the atomizer, but I think they might approve it now.

http://whitelist.tf/6363

There is FaceIt

The Cow Mangler is stupid.

it's time for the vac med/scout pocket/pyro pocket/utility demo/aggro scout/roamer meta to ARISE

The tanking ability with the rescue ranger is pretty poor compared to the wrench. Definitely won't tank very much before the engineer is forced to pick it up, at which point you might as well switch to another class if they are pushing because you are useless as an engineer if you don't have your sentry up, especially if you don't have the shotgun. It does provide more options but it's not really that OP.

I would play with the solemn vow, simply because it's not actually possible a lot of the times to know if the enemy has built poorly. A lot of the times you are with the mindset that you have equal ubers, but you might actually have a big uber advantage, or maybe you have a disadvantage because they have been arrow building. You don't get ubersaws that often so it's not worth running it if the solemn vow is allowed.

but repairing with a wrench puts you at risk for being killed along with your sentry and it takes a few seconds to run back to spawn and switch classes, now you can repair the sentry from literally inside spawn with zero risk and then switch the instant it goes down

plus there would also be certain situations where you could repair with wrench, run to spawn and then also repair from spawn to keep it up a bit longer before switching classes

You won't risk dying while repairing with the wrench if you aren't a complete fucking moron. The risk of dying as engineer while repairing the sentry with the wrench as opposed to the rescue ranger is so low that it is negligible.

@Ondkaja, it's more that if the sentry is far from spawn the risk is far lesser with RR than melee

As for unifying ruleset it seems like the next logical step but there is advantages to both systems and so it's a pretty tough consensus to agree on

Counter it with the gunslinger
EleGiggle

Which is a good thing imo, you can place a sentry outside the standard spot if you have time. It's pretty dull that the sentry will be on the same 3 spots every single time.

You can see the other medics ubercharge from across the map

why is the cow mangler not banned

It's like barely an upgrade

Imagine how fun can it be to (for e.g.) try a drypush trough a chocke and getting spammed by a double cow mangler alt fire

New mid meta: Soldiers jump the enemy demo to kill/force him to go back. Then your gunslinger engineer builds minisentries so enemy scouts and these new cow mangler sollys cant do shit about it

In my honest opinion, crossbow should be banned as well. It's a horribly designed weapon and I feel it does more harm than good.

With that said - I love using it. It adds lots of depth, challenge and fun factor to the medic class.
Unfortunately the ability to instantly heal teammates for +100 hp at medium-long range is simply broken. It's even gotten to the point where its better than using medigun; pulling out the crossbow at close-medium range heals more and faster than using the medigun.
Considering the wonky hit detection/netcode/whatever as well, using the crossbow at close range during combat can be the most painful experience in this game. Yet that is by far the most rewarding and simultaneously most punishing situation to use it.

It needs to heal way less and/or over time before it should be allowed.

of course the concept of the crossbow is terrific and it will never be realistically banned but it definitely needs a big fat nerf

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the counter: your soldiers switch off cow mangler after this works once

I might actually run the stock full time on roamer anyways, at least on maps where the flank areas have ammo packs

for pocket probably not since I'd want my demo to get as much ammo as he wants

Scrims yesterday were the best thing ever as Demo, since I didn't have to worry about sharing ammo packs with my pocket since they were on Cow Mangler.

Also the loch n load being able to 2 shot sentries is something I haven't seen anyone mention yet. And since they travel farther and faster it can be possible to destroy a sentry before you even uber in

thank fuck lol you should have seen how much I embarrassed those soldiers in the dmix with my triple jumps smh

whitelist looks better, but there's still some areas to address

pocket pistol: honestly not that bad, the +5hp on hit looks good on paper but coupled with the 20% damage vulnerability while deployed means you can only use it at long range to regain hp, which unless your heals are down and there's no health packs up, you wouldn't do

air strike: still a really strong rocket launcher, the damage and radius debuffs don't mean much if you're raining 5 or 6 rockets down when you bomb someone; i will say it's significantly weaker without the parachute, but it will still have to be looked at

cow mangler: again, stock rocket launcher with infinite ammo and an alt-fire that fires a mini-crit that lights players on fire, it needs to be removed imho

battalion's backup: this coupled with uber means a successful last push almost all the time with the fact that it reduces sentry damage by half and all other damage by 35% to those in the aura

quickiebomb: still a really strong weapon and shouldn't be allowed imho: you can blow up enemy stickies, you can deal more damage on charged up stickies, you can det stickies faster, the 15% damage penalty really doesn't mean much, if you charge up a quickiebomb sticky, even with the 15% damage debuff, you still do 20% more damage at the end of damage calculation

machina: penetrates players and does additional damage when fully charged, with very bad downsides (you're not going to be going for no-scopes if you're looking to get a pick, and if someone hears a sniper shot, they're gonna be paranoid, don't need tracer rounds to tip them off)

rescue ranger: allows for engies to keep their sentry alive much longer, which on paper is a good thing, but it causes the last push stalemate top become even longer because that sentry is staying alive

tomislav/natascha/brass beast: one is an lg that spins up really quick, the other completely stops all movement if you're hit at least once within good range, and the last just has more damage, which honestly isn't that, it's the built in damage resistance of the natascha and the brass beast that make them slightly broken

sandvich: being able to give your medic a health-kit is pretty stupid

If you can't see the difference between unbanning something like the candy cane or panic attack and unbanning something that gives scout 3 jumps or lets soldier hover in the air I think you may actually be brain dead.

Not to mention it's a week before the season and the one night of scrims testing this shit was the most aids tf2 I've ever played

At this point we should all be pretty happy and thankful; remember, we were living in a world with Atomizer and BASE recently.

Still,it seems like a disconnect for a skill game to be able to fire a weapon in to a crowd from 400' away and know you simply can not miss. (damage or healing, either way im helpin)

But man it's so sick to see that green +150 come up

pocket pistol is ass wall to wall and there's no way around it

air strike: start as the weakest class in the game, except now you're even weaker. You have to get kills as this weak class before you can do anything anyways

cow mangler: I think this is really fucking powerful, I would have liked to see it banned but it does counter

the rescue ranger: also very good, allows you to put an aggro hidden sentry, heal hit a fuck ton and pull it at the last second.

batt's backup: i mean any banner is a 100% succesful push with uber ad, but how often do you have full uber ad and a banner? you would have to run it to mid and live though mid without gunboats or a shotgun while dealing 600 damage. most of the time you get it in a stalemate anyways

machinca: i think it's really good, euros have had it allowed for a while now and say that it's fine tho

heavy guns: damage resist on natascha and BB is only when below 150 HP, it doesn't change much, i agree the tomislav is dumb and gay tho

sandvich: maybe the med needs a sandwich now that every force involves a charge mangler shot and a bomb