The Big Earner: Not that much of a Big Earner

When the Uber Update came out, it gave everyone except Engineer a set of weapons to work with. Pyro got shafted a bit by getting just one weapon, but it opened up a whole new strategy of det jumping, which is kind of big. But the downside of getting a whole new array of weapons, is that they all suck! Maybe they don’t. For this article, I’ll focus on the Spy sector. More specifically, his knife, the Big Earner.

The Big Earner
+30% cloak refilled on kill
-25 HP penalty

It doesn’t look like the penalty wouldn’t do much harm, but it’s just large enough to do more than enough. Spy’ll die in one hit now from a Scout, Soldier, and Demoman. Had the Spy been penalized for 15 HP instead, he would be able to survive the first strike from these assaults.

It doesn’t stop there. The upside isn’t even that significant. When one plays spy in a competitive scenario, most spies will fail to escape alive after a kill, if he even succeeds in said kill. This is why most spies will prioritize medic over anything else, as the tradeoff is worth it. Not only that, a dropped weapon will resote the spy’s cloak by 50%. Thus in the Big Earner, not only does the bad negate the good, but the good isn’t even good enough to start with.
What it lacks in balance it also lacks in creativity. Much like some of the other Über update weapons, the Big Earner is lackluster in its attributes. Being one of the plus minus stat weapons, it doesn’t introduce much of a different playstyle, making it an overall unoriginal weapon.

Many people consider this weapon in need of a dire buff. However, it’s never been touched, who knows if Valve even knows of its existence? But they did make changes to the stickybomb launcher, maybe they’ll touch this weapon one day…