The Crusader’s Crossbow is now the least viable Medic primary

After a mere 48 hours of giving us the perfect Crusader’s Crossbow, Valve followed up by nerfing it’s damage by 33%. As someone who has spent hundreds of hours perfecting my skill with this weapon, and considers it my favorite weapon in TF2, let me say that the weapon is now useless.

Let me rehash the same reasons I enjoyed the previous crossbow and show how none of them apply any more.

1) Long-Range sentry picking. Nope. The new crossbow takes 4 bolts to kill the weakest building, a mini-sentry. Because buildings are immune to damage falloff, you will always deal 25 damage a shot, not nearly enough to be worth exposing yourself to being flanked and focused on a faraway building. Your frontline teammates will just have to spot the mini-sentry themselves.

2) Spy-checking. This still works, but good luck using that information to kill him. The previous crossbow was guaranteed to kill in two shots, and you’d already landed one. Now a spy can take up to five bolts at full health, which means you might as well switch to melee and risk getting trickstabbed. Equip the syringe gun to spycheck suspicious teammates, at least that has a chance of killing them.

3) Healing teammates you can’t normally. Fun fact: the crossbow heals by calculating the amount of damage it would have dealt at that range, and then doubling that. Which means it now heals less at every range!

4) Self-Defense. No. If anyone gets close to you, you are screwed. It deals pitiful damage, which is saying something considering the previous crossbow could barely persuade enemies through burst damage, it didn’t kill often either. Now it just doesn’t kill period. I don’t get why it was so bad that the previous crossbow rewarded medics who could land a single-shot projectile-based gravity-affected bolt that doesn’t penetrate teammates.

Several people are saying, “Look, it’s a very versatile weapon, so it’s fair that it sacrifices self-defense.” But what I’m trying to show you is that it is not versatile anymore. It can long-range heal, and that’s IT. All the other functions it used to offer are gone. You are straight gaining longrange heals, and sacrificing any chance whatsoever of protecting yourself when you equip this, and that tradeoff is not worth it if you do not have 100% faith in your entire team to defend you. Medics must be able to defend themselves, they have the highest cost of any class to dying and they cannot rely fully on teammates all the time.

My favorite weapon in the game is now collecting dust in my backpack. And unless Valve reverts this nerf, it’s going to stay that way.

Update: Valve reverted it! We’re good everybody!