The beggar's bazooka is a fantastic sidegrade to the rocket launcher, in which all consistency and skill is taken away from the soldier's primary. We should test this weapon to see if it's a good addition to 6s gameplay.

begga'rs is dumb yea but i don't think it's a big problem, random rocket spread + 20% less explosion radius + maximum of 2 rockets loaded after a bomb, also they give up basically all flank presence

It's not always a problem, but shit like the process mid bomb linked in the other thread is just stupid. If you don't end up killing the enemy, you'll end up dead and can swap. If you do manage to live, then you can just grab something else off the floor.

Edit: this https://youtu.be/TN32M5I_18w?t=22

The core problem is the fundamental and arbitrary decision by Valve that they want competitive TF2 to be played without any restrictions on any of the weapons they've added over the past 8 years. There are so many weapons that fundamentally do not fit into competitive 6v6 TF2- in order for them to be "fixed" for competitive they have to be ruined for casual play or completely redesigned. Even with this very liberal whitelist, there are still 22 banned unlocks, not counting cosmetics, noisemakers, taunts.

Why does it have to be this way? Sure, in a perfect world, every weapon would be balanced for competitive play and fun to use in casual, but various iterations of the TF2 team have, for the past 8 years, set the game up in a situation where that simply isn't possible.

Reaching for this perfection when it's simply unattainable puts a massive, massive roadblock in the road for competitive TF2 to grow and be legitimized, while still being actually worth playing. The whitelist is a great improvement, I think, because it emphasizes the weapons that truly cannot be reconciled with competitive play. It's up to Valve to accept competitive TF2 cannot coexist with some of the fundamental designs in that list.

I want to point out that nobody thinks a global whitelist is a bad thing, it's that this whitelist is actually just horseshit. I can't believe people actually think that because we unbanned a lot of things suddenly that valve will do what they should've already done to help the scene and the game. CW is right, if valve wanted to help the game, they should have done a LOT more during the MM beta. It's like honestly mind bending how delusional some people are being. It seems like they think making it so people don't want to play the game (because that's a pretty obvious and evident result) will help the scene because you think all of a sudden it means valve will give a crap?

It just doesn't making any sense to me.

I haven't played with the beggar's bazooka in a while, but if it how it was when I used to use it for pubs, oh boy...The spread isn't that bad, especially once someone gets used to it. The way it fires rockets allows for a good BB jumper to literally fly across the fucking map and be the most mobile person in the game. The single load mechanic allows you to spam rockets out in fights versus a scout faster than the stock, and you don't have to worry about reload. If the roamer has to bomb, he can literally sync rockets from the start of the jump and load three rockets in the air and obliterate a combo when he gets in close, though he'd have to be strafing well to avoid rockets and the aim of scouts/shotty pocket. The main three cons to the BB are the explosion radius (kind of cancelled out when you can fire three at once that spread out anyways), the spread (once a player gets used to it, they're probably only going to be useless at long range), and the ammo management (honestly the biggest problem of the beggar's. You run through ammo faster than a fat guy runs through fries and diet coke)

A lot of you guys are saying that valve balanced these weapons for 12v12 play but weapons like the soda popper, atomizer, and reserve shooter are still broken beyond belief even in a shitfest like 16v16. That balanced for pub argument just doesn't stand up.

i remember reading something before on how valve's weapon balancing methodology is solely based on pub usage stats (feel free to correct me on this)

it would explain why in the last patch they buffed both the quickiebomb and the sydney sleeper, both weapons that were very good but not used much in pubs (at least from my experience) and were going to buff the reserve shooter until b4nny told them not to

this disconnect between the game developers and actual players is slightly frightening. What they don't seem to realize is that some weapons like sydney sleeper/reserve shooter are used less in pubs simply because there's such a bad stigma that surrounds the weapon. I guarantee you using either unlock will usually result in you getting flamed in a pub. Not to mention that balancing via pub usage stats is a horrible idea to begin with given how good the average pub player is at this game...

Also soda popper/atomizer aren't as great in pubs because people can't aim well enough to really abuse soda popper and minis/natascha/sentries exist for the atomizer

if valve balanced on pub usage rates then youd see more nerfs to things like sniper, soldier, and engie, as well as buffs to demo or heavy

if valve is balancing solely for pubs then they certainly arent doing a good job of it.

Funny thing is, a lot of the weapons like BB are rarely used in pubs.

When they are, it's usually just to fuck around.

What's even more painful is how there are way to many threads on this site that actually have gone into what can be done to some weapons to make them a little less awful to play against. For example:

That solves the now awful winger + triple jump thing that scouts could take advantage of. There was someone in the initial global whitelist thread that actually put together a list of places that you could reach as scout with winger + atomizer. It was honestly disgusting at how long the list was.

But the point is there: The only way to actually "balance" some weapons is to straight up remove them. For example, let's take the sandman. But valve can't (and won't) do that because then they would be inevitably destroying someone's collector's professional killstreak sandman that is their entire pride and joy.

I will agree though that unbanning some things such as the gunslinger and having it be basically a counter to a cow mangler soldier creates an interesting environment that is similar to the theory of heroes in overwatch: all heroes have a counter. Maybe in the future we might see one or 2 "dedicated specialists" that offclass to counter a certain class that's running a certain loadout. I'm not sure where things are going honestly and with some of these changes (considering I'm also playing in a lower division) I'm both curiously piqued and scared at the exact same time.