Why the Back Scatter may be best Scout weapon

Something has intrigued me.

Simple put no one on the Daily SPUF has written a single article on The Back Scatter and the only time it is mentioned at all is as a passing reference in the article Stop saying I’m a good medic! Of course one may be inclined to say that “the Daily SPUF hasn’t posted content about many things” and “what makes the Back Scatter so special”. I will tell you what makes the Back Scatter so special and article-worthy. The Back Scatter sucks… like really sucks and The Daily SPUF has a penchant for writing about sucky things, not that there is much else to write about. Now on to the stats.

The stats are currently as follows

Mini-crits targets when fired at their back from close range
-34% clip size
No random critical hits
20% less accurate

Ever heard of the phrase “______ is in the eye of the beholder”? In this case we can replace ______ with value. The value of the Back Scatter is very low in the eyes of many Beholders due to people seeking out weapons that band-aid their class’s weaknesses. But if a person wants to purposefully gimp themselves as a way to train themselves then the value of the Back Scatter goes through the roof, past the clouds, past the stars, and eventually out of the Milky Way to infinity and beyond.

Currently the stats of the Back Scatter encourage the development of two skills flanking and DM (DM stands for DeathMatch which also serves as a nice broad term for battle skills). Flanking is very straightforward and is encouraged by every stat on this weapon. DM on the other hand can be divided into 3 skill sets, with their own individual sub-skills.

• Movement: Dodging, Manipulation of the environment, Mirroring enemy movement.
• Aim: Hitting shots.
• Gamesense: Knowing when to engage/disengage in battle, Management of stress under battle.

First Stat first

1. Mini-crits targets when fired at their back from close range: When was the last time you tried flanking regularly as a scout? Aside from when it was necessary or fitted well into a strategy I don’t think it would be ludicrous to say that most scouts tend to just go for the front lines. Scout is already a very good front line damage class despite his low health, low clip, and low long-range capabilities, so trying to be stealthy seems almost pointless. But let’s make a hypothetical situation in which Valve decides to give scout mini-crits on backshot on all of his primary weapons. First off we would all be raging at the possible 1-shot capabilities of the force-a-nature and we would see a large amount of scouts either flanking much more or pulling of fancy dodging techniques perhaps even modifying spy strategies for their own use. Now use your imagination to picture how this could build up your skill… done? no? done now? yes? Ok lets move on to the next stat then.

Skills Encouraged: Manipulation of environment, Knowing when to engage/disengage in battle, Management of stress under battle.

2. -34% clip size: A very straightforward statistic. Simply put having less shots in your clip is going to put stress on your DM and movement including yourself. Without the high damage, suppressing power and  forgivability of a six shot clip you can imagine that it is going to put some extreme emphasis on landing those shots and reducing the amount of damage taken by as much as possible. Now for this next part lets say you can consistently land all of your shots and obtain sixty to eighty damage per shot, which is what most scouts tend to aim for. Dealing the maximum of eighty damage per shot with the stock scattergun will give you 480 damage points per clip. Dealing eighty damage per shot with the back scatter will give you 320 damage points per clip, less than a full scattergun clip of only sixty damage shots.

Skills Encouraged: Dodging, Manipulation of the environment, Mirroring enemy movement, Hitting shots

3. No random critical hits: I think we can discount this stat, but hey at least you can’t rely on random crits anymore so I guess that could be good.

Skills Encouraged: N/A

4. 20% less accurate: At a mere glance a gentleman such as yourself would surmise that this is the worst of all of the other stats, But upon closer inspection with a clean monocle and perhaps a solemn removal of your top hat you would begin to behold the sincere possibility of their being an upside to this stat. Now that I have that out-of-the-way I can speak of the downsides and the upsides of this stat.

Downsides:

• Even less of a long-range presence
• Mid-range combat suffers
• The possibility of several bullets flying past the enemy
• Need to move closer to the opponent in order to do viable damage, allowing their more accurate weapons to slice your health

Upsides:

• The increased spread of the bullets can allow you to hit multiple enemies
• The increased spread can help you miss less

As you can see the downsides far outweigh the very situational upsides. But hey at least we didn’t get a stat like 20% less damage and can do just as much damage as the stock scattergun, even though you need to be closer to the enemy.

Skills Encouraged: Hitting shots, Management of stress under battle, Mirroring enemy movement,

With every single statistic dissected and broken down in-depth its easy to see that The Back Scatter is a very situational weapon and no amount of rhetoric is going to change its current state of suckiness. But that doesn’t mean it does not have a place in your primary slot. Hopefully whoever somehow reads all 1027 (Really?)  words in this article will see that even the worst and most useless of weapons such as the Back Scatter can be used to great effect and eventually cause you to transmogrify your self into a better player.

…WHEW… I never thought it was possible to go so in-depth about such a seemingly simple weapon. Well I hope you enjoyed my first article in all it’s 1027 word count glory. I will be looking forward to providing even more immensely in-depth articles.