iReima (Also known as Craylash on SPUF) is a popular Youtuber most well known for his Demoknighting ability. Every time I try to go up against him as any class I quickly wind up beheaded and staring at that Princess Peach spray of his. His most recent video, How to Play the Hybrid Knight, is a great resource for people hoping to go into demoknighting effectively. Today, he’s agreed to answer some questions about life, liberty, and the pursuit of heads. 1. Thanks for agreeing to be interviewed! First and foremost; What attracted you to the Demoknight subclass in the… [Continue Reading]
SPUFblog really likes Medieval Mode. You have plenty of evidence. Even if the gamemode itself is not the most popular one, it is still enough popular that it gets played regularly, and you can pretty much always find a good server where to play (I unluckily can’t say the same for Arena…). And this means you pretty much always have a chance to play the subclass we’re talking about today: The Caberdemo! Or the Handgrenade demo. Caberknight? Democaber? It’s not played that often, and thus people usually just refer to it as “That Demo who is just trying to be annoying”. But the Caberdemo… [Continue Reading]
For those of you who don’t know this game mode, Jailbreak is a psychological experiment disguised as a TF2 game. There are no respawns, and it requires custom specialized maps designed for the mode. Most of the server plays as RED, and begins the round drained of all ammo and clip. The BLU team consists of a few guards and a Warden, who have allcrits. The Warden must order the prisoners around, using his guards’ superior firepower to enforce control, and get them to participate in mini-games, where the players who lose the mini-games often die. When a single RED player is left, they are considered to have won the round, and are granted a “last request”, which carries over to the next round (for example, “next round we play the Soccer mini-game,” “next round I want the freedom to run around and ignore this song and dance,” or “right now I want all the guards to play Nine Square until they’re dead.” That’s it, there’s not much to the game.
UNLESS the prisoners decide to rebel. If anyone can survive long enough to reach the armory, they can refill their ammunition and get working weapons again. If the rebelling RED players can kill all the BLU players, they win in a much more satisfying way.
After a decent amount of playing this mode a few months ago, I’ve found some strategies that work pretty well.
THE TIME: Saturday December 14 at 6pm GMT THE PLACE: SPUF Regular server Who doesn’t love Medieval Mode? I love Medieval Mode. I just get tired of DeGrootKeep after a while. So, this tournament is going to involve non-medieval maps played with Medieval mode enabled! (The theme is “Maps ruined by mini-sentries”) Current Map rotation: koth_king, sd_doomsday, and for the tiebreaker/fun round plr_hightower_event (for those of you who’ve wanted to try Medieval with spells ;). After that we’ll be taking requests for other maps the participants might want to play. More information: -There will be 8 players per team -All… [Continue Reading]
Ever since the Two Cities Update, the face of Mann Versus Machine has been invariably altered. With the obscene buffs the Medic and Soldier received from this update (I’ll complain less about the Medic, because he really needed some love, and now he’s basically indispensable), MvM, for some, has come to an irritating middle-ground, where the older missions, namely Operation Steel Trap (and, to some extent, Gear Grinder. Yeah, remember them? Me neither) have become laughably easy, or something you run through with your friends as six Demoknights for a chuckle, and the newest missions are hair-pullingly difficult. To me, and hopefully at least one of you, this is bogus.
“Ahaha! He thinks he can plant the bomb!” “Dude, that’s enough. He’s only Intermediate, after all.” Picture by Noble Atomic.
As someone who has sunk a considerable part of their TF2 experience into MvM, I remember the soul-crushing agony of trying to find a match on the night the update dropped, those encounters with blokes who had been on the same Expert Mission server for three hours trying to find a winning team, being a bloke who has been on the same Expert Mission server for three hours, and screaming in unison with the Announcer when an Engineer bot showed up (more on them later). And now, after slaving away at Empire Escalation for as many hours as I once had at Mannslaughter, I realized that, with all these updates to the Medic and Soldier, going back to those missions and still expecting a challenge would be impossible.
That being said, there are things that are positively infuriating about the way MvM currently works that could also make the experience more enjoyable. So, I’m going to propose some changes Valve could make to the way MvM works in order to keep MvM (all MvM) exciting for players at all levels, as well as improve the experience over all.
Recently I learned, to my astonishment, that the other people on SPUF actually consist of more than usernames and bodiless personalities.
On October 7th my newlywed wife and I departed on a honeymoon cruise to Hawaii, and on the 16th visited the district of Kona. There, I met up with SPUF’s spy master and Stormy Storm Team Captain-rocker Captain Blades!
Turns out the Macho Mann exists as well. Who knew? I’m the one in the middle with his fly down because I hadn’t learned this trick yet.
The Captain gave us a private tour of the island, which was awesome because we hadn’t the forethought to sign up for any of the guided tours. We couldn’t visit any of the national parks because the American Government was shut down for what I’m sure were very excellent reasons, but we still saw many of the beautiful sites Kona had to offer!
As I posted recently, SPUF had a “Demoknights vs. Demomen” event, where we pit 9 demomen against 9 demoknights in three different gamemodes to see who wins. The result; resounding Demoknight victory, just like last time. pl_badwater: Demoknights capped in 6:20, then held off demomen from second point to the end. cp_yukon: Demoknights won 3 times in a row arena_lumberyard: Demoknights win 3 times in a row. Then the demomen team up and work together and defeat the demoknights in a flawless victory, while James Horner music plays in the background and the corpse of Walt Disney sheds a single… [Continue Reading]
Do you all remember the Demoknights vs. Demomen event back in February? Where the demoknights won in a landslide? Sure you do!
We’ll its happening again! And this time, we’re adjusting the way people can enter the event; there will be no prior sign-ups. An hour or later before the event, add me on Steam if you’d like to join and talk to me. I’ll give the server password to the first 18 people in this fashion, meaning until then anybody has a chance of playing. This is to fix the recurring problem where people sign up a week before the event, forget, and then nobody is available when the event actually happens.
Medieval Mode. You’ve heard of it. Sounds awesome. The Wiki page makes it look awesome. But is it awesome?
Picture by FeelGoodInc.
…
YES!
Ignore the haters, this mode is great. I can have a barrel of fun on cp_degrootkeep (and a lot of custom Medieval maps, but those are way harder to find people playing.) As almost any class.
Medieval Mode gets a lot of flak from most because it’s considered a “melee spamfest”, “void of all strategy” and “a horrific cluster♥♥♥♥ of arrows and demoknights.” And they may all have a point. But there are ways to play the game mode strategically and aid your team in winning the round on a consistent basis.
There are two very distinct types of demomen: good ones and dead ones demoknights and demolitions men. Players have to choose between the two types early on, as it’s laughably easy to get your Chargin’ Targe with 5 demoman achievements, and odds are good that your next demoman weapon drop will be a sword. Lord knows pubs can’t seem to stop spitting them out on both teams, so even if you never play the class you’ll be intimately familiar with hearing the least subtle melee class on the battlefield, whose Tarzan-like cry usually precipitates a critical blade beheading you or one of you teammates in the blink of an eye (and there can be only one eye.)
Picture by FeelGoodInc.
If you’ve visited SPUF, you’ve probably heard the poor demoknight trashed as the weakest possible way to play a TF2 class, that he’s a mediocre midrange picker bested by anyone in any situation, that Valve for some reason continues buffing and releasing unlocks for him despite nobody considering him a valid class. Those people have a lot of clout and their stance is not unreasonable.
You’ve also probably heard SPUF proclaim the demoman as one of (if not the) most powerful and versatile class in TF2, capable of doling out hundreds of DPS, setting lethal traps, rapidly switching from offense to defense, and in general being a golden class that is rightly limited to one per team in any competitive setting. Again, this stance is not unreasonable.
So, when SPUF user “The Pyro King” announced (and later flaked on, forcing myself and thesupremecmdr to pick up his slack) the Demoman Vs. Demoknights fight, everybody on SPUF was quick to predict the event would be an incredibly easy win in favor of the team composed entirely of explosive weapons and bottles. The demoman team filled up almost immediately (including myself initially), and the demoknights became anyone who showed up late and didn’t mind getting curb-stomped if it meant getting to be a part of the event. Anyone who wasn’t in the event loudly questioned why such a one-sided event need bother occur, and there was a large movement demanding that demoknights be allowed to use grenade launchers to give them a fighting chance.
But I stuck to The Pyro King’s original wishes (wherever he disappeared to) and when the first round started (best out of three on badwater), demoknights were restricted to booties, shield, sword/axe.
The end result of Badwater? The demoknights won. Handily. Offense and defense. When round two started (Yukon) the demomen refused to keep playing and the event fizzled out. But it was quite interesting to me why that had happened. (Of course, everyone on SPUF started posting that they knew this was going to happen, and X reason was totally unfair in favor of the demoknights, blah blah blah.) I’d like to spend this post detailing the main reasons why I think the most powerful class in TF2 lost to the least powerful subclass.
