why is everyone talking about close range fights and 1v1s?
getting into a lot of those situations is poor play
what we should really be talking about is holding chokepoints and aggressive spam
it'll be much harder to hold a team out of a chokepoint now as once the initial stickies are destroyed/knocked away all a demo has left is continual spam which now does far less damage. whether this is a good thing or a bad thing isnt 100% but i'd definitely speculate that it's bad. i can just imagine a huge clusterfuck all the time if demos cant keep people out of chokepoints. the good maps currently dont let people through chokepoints easily and no-one complains about that (as far as i can tell).
some maps are definitely too chokey but in my eyes the solution to this is with the map itself rather than the sticky launcher.
the demo is also really important in non-uber pushes when he suddenly charges forwards doing a huge amount of damage at the right time. numlocked was really good at knowing when to do this and it was a key factor in epsilon's success and aggressiveness. imagine trying to non-uber push into a heavy without sticky damage, it would be over before it had begun. and i think the fact that demo cant hold chokes reliably coupled with the fact the heavy cant be damaged as easily will mean heavy becomes more viable. again, just speculation.
i've not played scrims with these changes yet and i'll reserve judgement until i do - it just sucks that it came out in the middle of a season and so close to lan.