Sniper Versus Machine: The Post Dualcity
Valve have recently rolled out an awesome MvM update – Two Cities. For most part it’s great – Medic and Soldier buffs, killstreak weapons (that don’t look too good in most occasions but some are really awesome), Rottenburg. On the downside there is Empire Escalation Wave 4. But that’s later.
Since it’s a blog, it’s kinda logical for someone to get their opinion here, or maybe a story, if they have anything to share, so I’ll do exactly this thing.
I started up MvM as the update rolled out. I even got some Mann Up tickets because, yeah, loot is cool and I was really curious to see if I’ll find anything good. Got into the first game fairly quickly and as I had a choice of class, I, just because of habit, picked sniper. And to my amusement, no one minded. Everyone was cool with that – somehow MvM people on the server were not a bunch of dumbasses that could barely accept any news. That was good. I grabbed my Heatmaker, Jarate and Bushwanka (that I should probably rename into Tankwanka) and went on.
My first map was Rottenburg. A nice, cheerful, green map, with pleasant aesthetics and layout. People were nice as well – we got an engi, a heavy, a soldier, a scout, a medic and a sniper (that’s me!). I got explosive headshots, as I always do, people got their usual upgrades as well and medic got shield and quickly figured out how to use it. Then the wave started. The robots were shred to pieces – they went down easily under our bullets, explosives and explosive bullets. After a while giants arrived and the medic got his time to shine.
Giant amount of critical explosive spam came our way and medic used his shield. Everyone got behind him and I started laying down headshot after headshot. Robots went down and I noticed one thing – the shield, damnit, was too awesome. It covered the entire team. It even removed all the spam that I usually have to dodge in such occasions. I got into Focus mode and didn’t miss a single shot or unscope before the robot was done with – it’s head took the full strength of my bullets. That was amusing. Medic’s shield didn’t just make the medic himself powerful. The shield helped his other teammates – even Sniper, usually a loner, could do quite well in tandem.
The tanks deserve a little note here – a classic of such events – fully upgraded bushwacka and soldier with buff banner worked well together. I managed to do highest damage to tank among our whole team – and they say sniper is useless against Tanks, huh. The waves went on smoothly and the mission was done with quickly. Everyone got their loot, scout even got lucky enough to get a killstreak kit (maybe lucky, maybe tour completion, I am not entirely sure). I went on with another group – accepting and cooperative. With them I breezed past the second Rottenburg mission. I was about to call Mann Up people “Nice people” already. After some time Mannhattan’s first mission got down as well – not without some hiccups, but still, quite smoothly and interesting.
And then Empire Escalation arrived.
On the first server I arrived to I got kicked instantly. On another one I had to switch to engineer because our engineer left the team and we couldn’t really go on without one. Finally, I got to a server that could let me play my class and after a while of struggle we reached up to 4th wave of Empire Escalation mission.
It all started relatively simple. Just a bunch of demomen raining critical death on us. After a while I got to good positions against them and they went down faster than they could get close to the camper van. Then there were some annoying bodyshot snipers and another bunch of spamomen and an army of heavies. And then… 3 Giant Soldier/Giant Medic pairs. I kept keeping Medics down as much as I could, but the team was wiped out before they could turn it into advantage. When they finally managed to wipe out these bastards, we got another low blow – 11 FaN giant scouts. Of course no one was prepared for that and the only one who was on the base when the team was shooting up easy targets and letting the fast one slip by was me. I could not stop 3 giant scouts at once without help and we had to start all over again.
Needless to say, we didn’t make it through that. The team disconnected, and I went on in a long search for a bunch of decent people to play with. And this is how I ended up with a matchmaking penalty…