Four Things You Can’t Do With the Syringe Gun
Recently I wrote an article on Four Things You Can’t do With The Crusader’s Crossbow, because the crossbow is amazing and complicated and lends itself well to causing exploits and that sort of thing. But the design of the Syringe Gun is no slouch in that regard either. Face it; we Medics have a pretty complicated and unique primary with those rapid-fire hitscan projectiles, and that’s caused some trouble for Valve in the past. Here are some things that have been deemed Too Awesome for the poor syringe gun:
1. You can’t boost teammates on a sea of needles. The most famous feature removed from the Syringe Gun. Back in the early days of TF2, the Syringes had knock back, and that knock back could affect friendlies. The next logical progression is to blast your teammate’s feet out from under them and send them flying to all sorts of wonderful places. This was most popularly used with Engineers ready to drop teleporter exits. Valve was not amused and removed this feature on the last day of 2007.
2. You can’t destroy friendly teleporters. This was one was very, very recently discovered, and it’s likely that some other projectile can still do this. Delfy is a popular Youtuber who specializes in releasing videos of abusive exploits in the hopes of getting Valve to fix them once he makes them become well known. This video shows that firing a Syringe Gun at a friendly teleporter exit can cause the exit to detonate if a teammate tries to teleport at the same time. This is because exits are programmed to detonate if the game discovers physics props colliding with a player upon teleportation, to avoid the teleporting player becoming trapped in a map piece.
3. You can’t drain a Short Circuit engineer of metal in milliseconds. The Short Circuit is so dastardly that were I to write an article of this nature for it, “piss off almost everybody” would not be one of the items on its list. And I must add that despite the other Syringe gun features on this list being dummied-out uses, the Syringe gun has never countered the Short Circuit in any way. But let’s look at the stats of TF2’s favorite lightning gun:
On Fire: Generates an electrical field that destroys
projectiles and damages enemies in front of the player.
Consumes 15 ammo per projectile destroyed.
No reload necessary
No random critical hits
Per Shot: -5 ammo
Uses metal for ammo
No metal from dispensers when active.
Yeesh, talk about CowMangler syndrome. Anyone remember when the stats were so pleasant and simple on release? Those were the days. Anyway, as I’ve mentioned before the syringes are actually projectiles. Projectiles that fire 10 per second and 40 to a clip. If you were to fire this at a Short Circuit Engineer with full (200) metal, you would remove 150 metal in the very first second of the encounter. I’m not surprised Valve didn’t respect this interpretation of the syringe’s status as a projectile (everything in the game treats syringes like they’re hitscan) but it would certainly be fun to completely wreck an Engineer’s day with one salvo of pointless projectiles. We can spam left mouse key too, Short Circuit!
4. You can’t destroy rockets in mid-flight. Speaking of destroying projectiles, Syringe guns used to be able to destroy rockets if they collided in midair. Unlike the Short Circuit, however, these rockets would explode, meaning that if you were a very, very lucky medic like the one in that video you might even earn yourself a frag. This is quite similar to the related ability the Crusader’s Crossbow has, but because the cross bolt is based on the Huntsman projectile, it can still do this. I don’t think Valve intentionally removed this feature of the Syringe Gun, it just happened at some point. Possibly when they fixed the aforementioned teleporter exploit.
Final note: This glitch didn’t make the cut because I’m not even positive what he’s doing, you can’t third-person except in Medieval Mode, and God knows if Valve ever ‘fixed’ it.