balance – Page 9 – The Daily SPUF

A Shotgun Update

December 8, 2014 aabicus 0 Comments balance, economy, heavy, MvM, request, shotgun, update

I adore the Team Fortress 2 shotgun. Sturdy, reliable, and intuitive, it’s the only weapon shared by four different classes and until the BASE Jumper was added, the only weapon to occupy different slots on different classes. I consider the shotgun TF2’s tenth signature weapon due to its ubiquity and recognizability. There is a sort of elegance in the fact that Valve has never added any sort of reskin or retexture for the shotgun. Every player since 2007 who’s wanted to make use of its six-clip buckshot backup has used the same simple gun; no golden, festive or botkiller variants… [Continue Reading]

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What if Scout Got a Grenade Launcher?

November 27, 2014 aabicus 0 Comments balance, comparison, demoman, loadout, scout, weapon

Would you be interested in playing the Scout with the Grenade Launcher as your primary? Or perhaps the Loose Cannon for all you Force-a-Nature fans? It might seem a bit different at first, having to rely on explosives instead of hitscan, but I don’t doubt an enterprising player could find a way to make it work. I’ll stop beating around the bush. If you have any interest in playing a scout with a grenade launcher, try the Sticky Jumper. Several users on SPUF have been complaining (again) about the jumpers, claiming that they’re impossible to use efficiently and should be… [Continue Reading]

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Straight Downgrades? In my TF2?

October 18, 2014 aabicus 0 Comments analysis, balance, cosmetics

Weapons that are just worse than their stock counterparts. Not strictly worse like the Big Earner, where the upsides aren’t worth the cost to equip, but literally worse, as in there aren’t any upsides to begin with. Once in a blue moon somebody on SPUF asks for these, and it’s always seen as a bit odd. There are two main flavors to the argument for adding these; the first is that they’d serve as a sort of handicap in situations where a player wants to limit themselves, either for training purposes or when playing with friends who are of a considerably lower… [Continue Reading]

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Straight Upgrades? In my TF2?

October 16, 2014 aabicus 0 Comments analysis, balance, medic, melee, pyro

Weapons with literally no downside. I’m not talking weapons like the Wrangler, where the downsides exist but are negligible in comparison to the upsides (indeed, sometimes the only downside is “you don’t have the stock weapon it replaces.”) I’m talking weapons that literally just don’t have downsides and are just better then their stock equivalent. Not counting ones caused by bugs or bad coding, there have only ever been three straight upgrades added to TF2, and one has since been rebalanced. The Amputator on release granted the healing taunt for free before being changed (for the better in my opinion)… [Continue Reading]

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5 Weapons that Synergize with the Bushwacka

September 1, 2014 aabicus 0 Comments balance, crates, loadout, MvM, sniper, weapon

1. Jarate Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s talk about some more interesting pairs with everyone’s favorite (or least favorite) machete. It’s basically the Sniper default melee of choice these days, just because it’s the only Sniper melee with interesting stats. Even Valve agrees; the earliest ever strange Sniper crate contained a strange Bushwacka, whereas the Strange Kukri had to wait over two years later to exist. Maybe because even without jarate, you can still get the most out of your melee with: 2. The Cleaner’s Carbine: Ever since the stat adjustment where the weakest hitscan… [Continue Reading]

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The Big Earner: Not that much of a Big Earner

August 24, 2014 Odoroki 0 Comments balance, criticism, spy, weapon

When the Uber Update came out, it gave everyone except Engineer a set of weapons to work with. Pyro got shafted a bit by getting just one weapon, but it opened up a whole new strategy of det jumping, which is kind of big. But the downside of getting a whole new array of weapons, is that they all suck! Maybe they don’t. For this article, I’ll focus on the Spy sector. More specifically, his knife, the Big Earner. The Big Earner +30% cloak refilled on kill -25 HP penalty It doesn’t look like the penalty wouldn’t do much harm,… [Continue Reading]

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Altering the Invisible Man.

August 20, 2014 Walsur 0 Comments balance, change, cloak, contest, spy, weapon

The Spy, a class of deceit, subterfuge, and sabotage. He holds in his arsenal: a knife capable of killing anything in one hit, a gun in case he’s caught in a bad situation, an electro-sapper to destroy enemy fortifications, a disguise kit to seamlessly blend in with the enemy, and finally a collection of watches capable of rendering him completely invisible. Those watches are pivotal to everything the spy can do. His disguise kit is useless without being in the right position; a position only reachable by an invisible man. His knife only has strength from behind. How can he… [Continue Reading]

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Balance vs. Novelity: What do we do with the Pomson?

July 31, 2014 Odoroki 0 Comments balance, engineer, pomson

The Pomson is a subject of innumerable controversies, some want it nerfed to the ground, some want it as it is, some want it to be dat Bison reskin, and et cetera. But which one must we run with, and how can we understand which perspective one will prefer? The Issue The Pomson, when first released, was a spammy weapon of mass destruction (not that far to my opinion, but still). One issue was that it was very deleterious to Medics and Spies, removing well-earned (or not so well-earned) Übercharge and Cloak. It was a mundane concept at first, not… [Continue Reading]

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On Love and War Class Nerfs

July 12, 2014 DapperApples 0 Comments balance, criticism, demoman, heavy, history, pyro

The Love and War Update handed us some neat stuff, like a neat-o short film, server-wide conga events, parachutes, and bread. Also with the update shipped three (now two) serious nerfs for three classes. This, I feel, was the weakest part of the update. They were not thought out well, and were in some ways too strong, and in others too unnecessary in a game with bigger problems. Let’s get demoman out of the way. Spuf has probably read ten thousand words on the controversial nerf, so I’m going to make this one short. The sticky launcher needed a nerf,… [Continue Reading]

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Loadout Uncovered

July 2, 2014 aabicus 0 Comments balance, comparison, loadout

Sometimes I get annoyed at how nobody in TF2 is a blanket generalist who has something to do in any situation. Sometimes I don’t want to rely on my teammates for crap, I just want to go be a versatile tanky health-regenerating speedster who laughs at the term “competitive weakness”. Once upon a time, I would then go play Team Fortress Classic and their combat Medic. Nowadays, I’m finding that Loadout has been scratching that itch for me instead. Loadout has done a great job of carving its own little niche out of the cartoony multiplayer FPS genre. (That really… [Continue Reading]