TF2 What If? Det Jumper and Gunboats Demo

Evidently, making edits to the item text file in your TF2 folder allows one to play around with the stats of the various weapons.  Today, I experiment with two fairly commonly suggested/asked about weapons for Team Fortress, both specializing in mobility: A detonator jumper for pyro, and a gunboats-like grenade launcher replacement for the demoman.

For the det jumper, I modded the entry for the detonator so it would have zero self-damage.  I tried it out on Viaduct with a bunch of bots.  Tecnically this detonator still damages other players, but for the test I only used it for jumping, as if it did no damage (I could have modded that also, but I’m a lazy lad).

It was actually a lot of fun to use.  Infinite mini-hops everywhere, whenever I want.  It also seems somewhat balanced, as going with the jumper means having almost no ranged option, which means being better at reflects, or making heavy use of your new jumps to get more ambushes.  However, easier ambushes will probably annoy some folk, what with raining pyros everywhere.

For the next experiment, I changed the bootlegger’s health bonus to 55% (Gunboats have 60%) resistance to explosive jumps.  For this one, I tried it on Upward (on blu).

Gunboats are very powerful on demo.  With these, using multiple stickies to jump becomes much more useable.  In fact, I could use 3 bombs to jump and still have about half health to spare, which quite obsoletes the sticky jumper, that for whatever reason is limited to two bombs.

While giving up the grenade launcher is a bit much, the stickybomb launcher is still a powerful and versatile gun.  Sticky jumping is still impractical in the middle of a fight, but in rollouts and out of fights, you mobility would be unparalleled, and very little offensive cost.

I’m thinking that concept would be hard to tweak, too small a bonus and it would be too insignificant for no secondary, and at a bit under gunboats bonus would be too much and overshadow the jumper of all things in mobility.

So that kinda answers those questions.  I may play with other stats to see what happens, but the process is slow and buggy, and keeps resetting my loadouts to default.  Oh well.