Juggling weapons: the new TF2 meta?

Red Robot sparked some interesting conversations in various social medias including SPUF when he released this video, commenting on a new ‘playstyle’ he’d discovered:

Using the new weapon-dropping mechanic, he had the very Counter Strike-esque idea to juggle multiple weapons of the same loadout slot and carry them through the battlefield. His first idea was to pair the Crit-a-cola with the pistol, and I can definitely see the appeal in that combo. The pistol’s a half-decent jack-of-all-trades with middling accuracy, firepower, and firing speed, so giving it a damage boost and falloff-immunity could be godly in the hands of a pro scout. But are there any other tricks that weapon juggling can unlock?

He mentioned a few ideas of his own; jarate/Cleaner’s Carbine for the mini-crit boosts, but I can’t see how you’d be able to sustain that, as the jarate respawns every 20 seconds and your Carbine will only stay on the ground for 30 seconds, leaving you a pretty restrictive window of opportunity to keep both alive repeatedly. Another idea of mine is Buffalo Steak Sandvich+shotgun or maybe Family business. You’d have to abuse the weapon switch bug in order to prevent the melee lock, but a shotgun feels like it’d get a lot more done with a speed boost and mincrits than the minigun with its deploy time and movement speed penalty. What about the BASE Jumper? There was a glitch when it first came out that if you could touch a resupply locker while floating without touching the ground, you could snag a grenade launcher and remain floating. While that means in theory BASE Jumpers could probably carry shotguns and grenade launchers with them, I literally think doing so in practice would be impossible.

It could be used to bypass downsides as well as provide upsides. A Demoman who carries along a second melee could constantly ignore the penalty for the Half-Zatoichi. Before it got removed from TF2 the Persuader would have loved a second melee weapon for replenishing ammo. Why not combine both of these tactics?

Just jumped in to test this, and it does appear the downside to the Persian can be completely ignored. I guess weapon switching didn’t stop being useful for the poor sword.

In general, this line of thinking got kinda dangerous as I started debating how to crush downsides with arguably-abusive weapon switching mechanics. As already mentioned, the Half-Zatoichi need not worry about seppuku anymore. Many weapons with recharge mechanics are actually tied to the weapon and not the player, meaning a scout who carries along (for example) two Sandmen can fire baseballs twice as often as a normal scout. What about all the Medigun shenenigans I’ve already talked about?

And oh damn. I just had a great idea.

Yup. You can now disguise once for free every time you spawn with the Your Eternal Reward. Have fun spies! 😀

Starting to think this weapon-switching thing wasn’t a stellar idea. After all, it was designed within a game without respawn, meaning that you couldn’t do all these shifty things without another teammate helping you. How many different weapons must a single mechanic break while offering very few actual benefits before it might be worth considering its removal?