The New Eureka Effect

Edit: Written before the new update, because Valve won’t let me write about the Eureka Effect without immediately changing the weapon.

I remember being awe-inspired by the rebalances of the Eureka Effect. You can teleport directly to your exit now! No more waiting for your idiot teammates to stop hogging your teleporters, now you can take your battlefield transportation into your own hands!

Then I basically tried to play with the Eureka like I would the stock wrench and quickly got bored like I always do. The real kicker didn’t come until a friend let me know that it works even if there’s no teleporter entrance! Being the selfish bastard that I am, I immediately started thinking of ways to manipulate this for ninjaneering purposes. My first thought was that if you can reach a teleporter there, you can almost immediately get there yourself. For example, that trick to get to the roof of Gravelpit B just skipped a particularly time-consuming step. But the real excitement began when I realized what this could mean for maps like Badlands with an instantly-cappable last.

Here’s my new 5cp playstyle: As soon as the round starts, take the paths less traveled and sneak your way to enemy last (on Badlands for example, I had the most luck running under the mid bridge and then slipping through the doorway under spire). Plop an inactive exit directly on the last control point and then get out without being seen.

Now just play normally. Perhaps you want to leap into the fray, or you want to camp spire in the hopes that your team can take mid and you can steal two backcaps for the price of one. Either way, whenever the second-to-last point gets capped, teleport immediately to last and win the game for your team in under a second. This works because nobody looks at last when there are other points in contention. And once all the other points are capped, its too late.

It might not be the most teamly way to play Engineer, but its a hell of a lot of fun and comes with a suprising success rate. What’s funny is, if you read Robin’s Kritzkast interview on the Instant Teleport, he talks about how the weapon concept got scrapped because it encouraged Engineers to place teleporters that benefited themselves instead of the team.

But that’s part of why its so fun. You’re more of a lone wolf than the Pomson-Short Circuit-Gunslinger Engies who don’t build dispensers. You’re like a Spygineer, using your tech to penetrate deep behind enemy lines and pop up in all sorts of places aren’t supposed to. Combine it with the strategies in Reima’s bush sentry article (since with that upgrade speed you aren’t getting any level 2s) and it’s like you’re playing as an entirely new class.