Planetside, too

In the interests of expanding our horizons, Medic and I are doing an exchange where we take turns picking a free-to-play multiplayer game that one of us hasn’t tried. Last week we played Warframe, which Medic wrote about, and this week we were gonna try my old college love, Planetside 2, but then the game didn’t work on Medic’s computer. (Update: It eventually fixed itself, and our co-op adventures will be chronicled in Medic’s upcoming article!) However, this did cause me to reinstall again, and soon I was teleported back to my 2013 dorm room–running through Auraxian landscapes, solo-capping control points and constantly reviving corpses. I don’t… [Continue Reading]

Read more

Concepts

Valve doesn’t like adding new concepts to the game, which is why there are so many +/- weapons, even the ones that don’t look like they are. The Airstrike for instance, is entirely +/- but the description doesn’t show it as such. Anyways Valve occasionally figures out they can change around a concept for new weapons and balancing, and then do it to a bunch of weapons (cough, switch speeds in tough break getting added to like 30% of melee weapons, cough). This seems like a new thing but switch speed has been around for ages in the Degreaser and… [Continue Reading]

Read more

Wrap Assassin updates

The updates hardly did anything, but I’m still immensely satisfied with the changes Valve made to the Wrap Assassin. Since my last article on this weapon, there have been two buffs. The first turned the ornament into a pseudo-explosive that deals area-of-effect but only bleed on a direct hit, which was driving me nuts because I didn’t actually know that when I recently picked the weapon back up, so I couldn’t figure out why I frequently got a hitsound but no resulting bleed hitsounds. But now that I understand it, I’m 100% okay with the entire concept. After all, previously nothing happened… [Continue Reading]

Read more

Giving melees a league of their own

Many have their opinion when it comes to the worse weapon in the game. Some will argue Classic, others will argue Manmelter, and so on. While those are fairly bad, none of those come close to worst weapon of all-stock melee weapons. In a game where 5 out of 9 classes have a shotgun (and one has a Minigun), stock melee weapons can come across as bit redundant in close-range combat. This isn’t even mentioning how awful hit detection for melee weapons but if you’re interested in that this article pretty much covers that aspect. Although some will bring up… [Continue Reading]

Read more

Five Things Valve Didn’t Intend for the Sandman to Do

When the Sandman debuted during the Scout Update, Valve broke new ground regarding ranged melee weapons. Not since the Direct Hit has Team Fortress 2 been given a more spammable immediate-range weapon that crits like crazy, since the Sandman’s baseball shares the bat’s increased melee crit chance. However, perhaps because of its unusual design, there have been a number of bizarre exploits associated with this weapon over the years and a few of these are still in the game today. 5. Hitting the ball through thin walls. Setup gates, windows, just random walls that happen to be narrow enough; the scout… [Continue Reading]

Read more

The Ullapool got Cabered

So I was playing on sd_doomsday, as I am wont to do, attempting to revitalize my old Sticky Jumper spark. For a weapon that hasn’t changed, it’s amazing how different it feels having to play with the new roster of available melee weapons. ‘Head Launcher‘ my beloved Persian Persuader is still deceased and all of the swords have become less attractive with the new draw times. My other favorite the Scotsman’s Skullcutter is still too slow and sets my teeth gnashing every time I die because my Demoman was taking his sweet time switching to it. When you’re switching to your… [Continue Reading]

Read more

The Only Weapon Removed From TF2

I know I already wrote an article on this, but the Persian Persuader has become the first weapon removed from Team Fortress 2. I’ve searched my memory banks and the TF2 Wiki and I’m almost positive the Tough Break Persian Persuader is the first weapon ever to have every single one of its stats removed and replaced with new ones. (I’m not counting the generic sword stats that every bladed Demoknight melee shares, those are inherent in the classification.) For comparison, we went from this: +100% increase in charge recharge rate All ammo collected becomes health Cannot pick up ammo To… [Continue Reading]

Read more

Persian Persuader’s Not Looking too Peachy…

The Tough Break update was amazing. I love almost all of the balance changes, especially because pretty much every class was buffed in cool ways. Especially my Medic! Holy crap! Ubercharge on Crossbow and Amputator? I’m so excited, except that part of me that fears a complimentary nerf now that those wholly-unneeded buffs were added. Thank god for the alt-fire addition to the Amputator, by the way, now I don’t have to juggle stupidly around with the taunt menus to use my AoE heals. But this article isn’t about Medic. As great as the majority of changes were, the only… [Continue Reading]

Read more

Random Crit Balance

Random crits favor not just the people already doing well, but also certain classes, or more accurately, they don’t favor certain classes. It will never feel fair to drop a hype bar, banner, mmmph, heads, ubercharge, while moving a sentry, while being spychecked, or just die in general to a random crit in general, but some classes get more use out of random crits than others. Information on crits in this article come from the 2009 TF2 Blog Post on the same, and the TF2 Official Wiki entry on crits. Random crits scale from 2% to 12% as a function… [Continue Reading]

Read more

The Amputator: Not Really for Amputating

I was looking over my favorite two loadouts in TF2 and realized I’d dedicated articles to every individual weapon except the Amputator. Well, that’s just weird, so let’s just fix that right now. The Amputator is not an unpopular weapon but it’s certainly not the average Medic’s first choice. I know of far more people who main the Ubersaw, and after that I’m pretty sure the Solemn Vow is second place. I totally get that; the Ubersaw’s reward for landing even a single melee hit is incalculable, and if you’re going to sacrifice that you might as well grab a… [Continue Reading]

Read more