i did not submit that question to habib

im sorry

Bowl of mayo subbed me in with these guys as something of a birthday treat. We lost, which is fine because I'm used to it, but then half the team just silently left the server and was apparently shittalking me behind my back. They wouldn't say anything to my face though. Definitely two faced and from the way I see it a little toxic.

Why does spy lose long range capability, but sniper can still instant -150 at point blank? It seems more consistent with this whole separation of roles thing to create ramp up damage for sniper headshots almost like a reverse amby.

At point blank, 2 revolver shots accomplish the same thing as a headshot plus some damage. What made the ambassador, in my opinion, better than the revolver was the ranged burst potential. Close ranged bursts weren't the focus but rather skill-indexed downside mitigation because the revolver was always better up close. I have one experience in memory where I thought "this is a little insane," and that was against a top(?) prem spy abusing dr on koth_highpass for a highlander region wars cup, but even then I was fine with it because he was good. The spies of old like acooma and co. used it extremely effectively because they were among the best of the class to ever touch the game. If you're getting destroyed by an amby, its because the spy is owning you. I don't think anyone has ever been double -102'd and thought something along the lines of "wow, what a bad player." The real problem was dr/amby being abused on maps with high ammo pack density. There is no sense in destroying both weapons just because the combo is annoying to play against when it's in capable hands. The amby would have been completely fine, untouched, with the current dr nerf. At the very least, the crit falloff could be at a significantly farther threshold range. I think that if anything at all, the gun should -102 at every range until the current point where it stops critting for 54, and then minicrit from there on. As it stands, there is really no situation where the revolver doesn't out-dps the ambassador.

I can't speak for EU (it's generally said that EU spy meta is gun-heavy) but in NA there isn't a single full-time gun spy in plat currently playing. This sort of goes hand-in-hand with the dr in that while they may be annoying to play against, they aren't really effective. Pre-nerf, the combination of the two was (1) broken in pubs, (2) abusable in HL on maps with high ammo pack density, but at the cost of a less effective playstyle, and (3) untouched in 6s. Now that the dr is removed from the game, it seems silly to also remove one of the most fairly balanced weapons in the game (which has remained untouched for around 8 years). The "if you want to snipe, play sniper" argument falls flat when you recognize that the ambassador is not a sniper rifle. Spies don't play like snipers, even with the amby. If a spy used a sniper playstyle, then that spy would be severely limiting his effectiveness to the detriment of his team. The ambassador cannot 1-shot any class in the game. Every class can walk through the amby sightline and, if headshot, can quickly take a pack or an arrow to mitigate the damage.

Here are some numbers. At long range, the (pre-nerf) amby headshot required 2 more follow-up bodyshots to finish a 125 class without a buff. Take, for example, a sniper being actively healed. With a full buff at 185, the headshot brings him down to 83. The medigun heals at 24hp/s before crit heals. The amby spread/crit recovery is 0.95s. In 1 second, the sniper will be back at 107. In 0.95 seconds, when the amby can headshot again, the sniper will have been healed 22.8hp to a total of ~105hp, enough to tank another headshot. This is not to say the sniper is invulnerable, because the medic will probably take heals off of a full buffed sniper to buff others, but to show how small of a window the spy realistically has to actually get a kill with the second headshot if the sniper is protected (in HL, this means nearly always). Every other class that isn't 125 or the medic, with any amount of buff, will survive a double -102.

The spy is an extremely weak class. In terms of 6s, I guess it's a general sentiment that he should stay weak. I've never personally seen the amby/dr combo used in invite, ever. That fact alone should prove that it's not a powerful playstyle. To my knowledge, the l'etranger is the most frequent spy item in 6s paired with either IW or cnd, meaning these nerfs changed next to nothing about spies in 6s. If the goal is to balance the game around 6s, this update turned an annoying yet weak item combination into an unusable one. In HL, the spy is an extremely weak class that must rely on gunplay to smooth out the inherent inconsistencies with the class. In the absense of a gun, a full time spy rolls a dice with his target every decloak and the winner gets the instakill, though the skill comes from stacking the dice in his favor. In pubs, the amby/dr was broken but mostly because of the dr. I'm not sure what the tf2 team is appealing to with these nerfs other than vague sentiments of "spy should not snipe" which isn't really an argument and affects 6v6 in nearly no way. Anyone running the ambassador right now is shooting themselves in the foot because the revolver both out-dps's and out-ranges the amby.

if you are making the claim that sigafoo is harming 6s by hosting a different format then anyone who is not hosting a $2000+ 6s tournament right now is effectively harming 6s in the same way as sigafoo.

trapster

http://saloon.tf/match/189

received no winnings on my bet?

edit: 2 weeks pending support ticket