Beggin’

The Beggar’s Bazooka baffles me to this very day. Why? I’ll get to that. But the other night, I did something strange and loaded up TF2 and started actually playing. Yeah, seriously. After a while, I ended up in a glitched Mann VS Machine mission, someone had put Wave 666 on Decoy and it just bugged out the whole thing. There was a never-ending stream of Scouts, Soldiers and Demomen, with the occasional random Spy or Sniper. The round never actually ended, so I decided to practice my rocket launcher aim. After enough time, someone did a restart and we tried again. Someone suggested I use the Beggar’s Bazooka.

Well, so much for aiming.

Now, you all know that I am bad at aiming. I’ve said it a billion times. So hand me a weapon that has a random 3 degrees aiming problem and you can tell nothing good is going to come out of it.

I really don’t get the hype about the Beggar’s Bazooka. It flies over my head far more efficiently than the twentieth Trolldier on a TDM_Hightower map. It flies higher over my head than a damn sticky jumper (RIP 8 sticky jumps) Demoman on a low gravity Orange server. I just don’t get it at all. Actually I take that back. I do get the Beggar’s Bazooka in some ways but not all ways.

What do I get? The ‘infinite clip’ idea. Firing 3 rockets at once is awesome, especially into a crowd of enemies, whether they’re robots or humans. It’s a huge amount of power and in the right hands it will destroy pretty much anyone. In the wrong hands, it just decimates. Decimates as in it will only kill one in ten enemies. Because that’s what the word means. Ten in Greek is δέκα. Fun facts, yay.

But there’s so much other stuff that comes with the ability to look like a badass and fire three rockets at once. I suppose, obviously, they’re not going to all fly in a straight line, because there’s not enough room in the barrel to do that, but since the random variation and arc affects even single rockets, it is incredibly limited to people who struggle with aiming in general. Alright, the accuracy isn’t THAT bad but it certainly throws you off. It’s nowhere near as bad as the shotgun I had in Borderlands 2, which had an accuracy of 14.4 and could barely hit anything. The Beggar’s Bazooka’s power is at least usable. The thing is designed for spamming at robots, I think. Heck, I don’t know how the pros do it.

That’s when it hits me. The pros don’t do it. They’re using the Beggar’s Bazooka for things other than precise aiming. Plus, that’s what the Direct Hit is for. They’re using this hideously inaccurate weapon for something else. In comes the strange form of explosive jumping called overload jumping. You see, you can load as many rockets into your clip as possible, but anything more than three and you start exploding and taking damage. Skilled players can use this to move themselves around and remain airborne, before unleashing a barrage of rockets at that poor Medic there who just respawned. I get it now, it’s a pick weapon. And a scary one too.

Speaking of which, there was a hilarious bug at release which allowed you to randomly hurt enemy players just by overloading your Bazooka. Luckily that was patched. But still, hilarious. Except for the victims.

There is a downside to all this. You don’t really have a rocket loaded at all times. Use any other launcher and you have a clip of 3 or 4, in case you miss. You lose this completely with the Beggar’s Bazooka. You also start off with less ammo. Normally, Soldiers start off with 20 rockets in reserve and 3-4 in their clip. Beggar’s Soldiers? They miss out on the rockets in their clip. Not that much of a big deal, especially if you’re good with ammo (which I’m not), but still. Thing is, that inaccuracy, it really puts me off.

I feel I should give it another go, but oh well.