Why Additional Weapon Slots are Bad

I see this pop up occasionally, mostly from the same person over and over on SPUF but also on SCUD and other places as well. The idea that giving the TF2 classes an additional slot for weapons is a good thing. Or that having an additional slot would open up for more, uh, stuff. Well, here I am, stamping on that idea. Additional weapon slots are a bad idea, and today, I am telling you why. Let’s get the first obvious reason out of the way first. We have a LOT of weapons in Team Fortress 2. Medic, Engineer and… [Continue Reading]

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Torbjörn – Overwatch’s Engineer

God help me, I’ve been playing and enjoying Torbjörn. It’s not entirely my fault, the game loves raining Torbjörn loot box rewards on me. He’s the only character for who I’ve dropped an emote, highlight intro, victory pose and epic-level skin (the Steampunk gold one). It just felt a shame to waste them, so I’ve taken to testing him out on defense when the team consistency calls for it, and I’m actually very impressed with how Blizzard fixed most of the flaws with TF2 Engineer. For one, the resource management minigame is gone; Torbjörn has only one building to place… [Continue Reading]

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The Righteous Pomson

I’d been meaning to talk about this for a while, but back when Tough Break came out, there was an unintended side effect caused by the Flamethrower tweaks, and it doesn’t even refer to the Pyro. Tough Break’s patch notes mentioned that “The base Flamethrower’s damage fall off over distance has been decreased, resulting in higher damage output at range” and I could write a whole article about how all of these stock flamethrower buffs have elevated the weapon back to a surprising level of viability. But this affected more than just the flamethrowers; the Righteous Bison and Pomson 6000 mimic ‘lasers’… [Continue Reading]

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A late look at pass_pinewood

I have had a hell of a time finding a decent game of PASS Time recently. There’s currently a bug that allows a single player to crash a Pass Time server, and Valve’s tardiness at fixing this bug is causing the playerbase for this game mode to wither and die. The few times I’ve succeeded, the map either changed immediately to pass_warehouse or somehow was already on pass_warehouse despite what the server browser would have you believe. It is genuinely possible that people just can’t wrap their head around pinewood, because it’s a more advanced map for sure. It takes… [Continue Reading]

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Gun Mettle Alchemist

Cross-post from my site at and SteamCommunity Guides – Gun Mettle Alchemist A fair amount of time has passed since the release of Gun Mettle. With it came a series of core mechanical changes that made the Engineer dynamic much different than it was in years past. Many of the changes reflect the modern state of the PvP meta–in which speed and mobility are emphasized above all else. Engineer was not alone in these changes. Speed and mobility based changes were also present for the Spy–namely the Dead Ringer & Big Earner. However, that is another article entirely. For now,… [Continue Reading]

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Why ETF2L allowing the Pomson and Short Circuit in Highlander isn’t so insane after all

With Highlander Season 9 coming around, ETF2L has decided to allow a few new weapons – the Pomson 6000 and the Short Circuit. Now, many people think this is rather strange. These are two weapons that really do shake things up. I’m pretty sure that ETF2L has their reasons and they’ve probably already made them public by now, but I’m a lunatic with his own blog so I’m going to write about my own reasons. Let’s start with the slightly less sane one. Originally, the Short Circuit wasn’t an issue. It was a rather quiet little weapon, hiding away in… [Continue Reading]

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A Truly Random Topic of Conversation

I couldn’t decide what to write about, so I hit “Random Page” on the wiki, and I’m gonna write about whatever pops up. Huh. Okay then. Grockets have by and large exited the public conscience ever since Valve removed them from the maps in which they crashed, but for a time they were the closest thing TF2 had to extraterrestrial contact. Birthed from a collaboration with Weta Workshop and Valve, the first Grockets crashed into 2fort, Badwater and Barnblitz on July 18, 2011. Two days later they were revealed to be teasers for the new Grordbort Victory Pack, which came… [Continue Reading]

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Visiting Engineer’s Hometown

As you may or may not know, I recently moved to Texas. Recently I was on a road trip with my father who’d flown in to visit for the weekend, and we passed a road sign for a Bee Cave, Texas. This piqued my memory banks, so I googled the name on my smart phone and found out it was Dell Conagher’s hometown! So we took a bit of a break to zip into town and check it out. And, uh, I’m sorry to report it’s like the most boring town in existence. It’s pretty much just your average suburbia, Vons… [Continue Reading]

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Some other spots to get to (that aren’t that hard!)

This article’s existence is more of the culmination of a running gag than a legitimate article. It’s the Frankensteinian surgery of two articles that both sat laboriously in my Drafts folder for ages, silently judging me every time I opened up WordPress and viewed my dashboard. The earlier article began its life as “Good Offensive Teleporter Spots on Non-Payload Maps”, intended to be a sequel of sorts to this article. It’s only candidate was the first spot on this list, I added it and then continued playing TF2, confident that more would present themselves to me in time. Now here we are… [Continue Reading]

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The Short End of the Stick

Gun Mettle came, Gun Mettle saw, Gun Mettle conquered and then got you to spend a ton of money on crap. At least, that’s the case if you have been playing Medic throughout this update. Medics got the short end of the stick, almost as much as Engineers. But unlike Engineers, Medics didn’t really see it coming. I’ll be blunt, Engineers have had it coming for a very long time. The Short Circuit, the Wrangler, the Gunslinger. All weapons that were hated almost everywhere by competent players. Engineer has always been a speed bump of sorts, but before Gun Mettle… [Continue Reading]

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