If you've played against a Spy, you've probably seen the Diamondback. It's an awesome-looking revolver that stores crits with each backstab or sapped building.
Diamondback
(+) Stores 1 guaranteed critical shot for each backstab or building destroyed with Sapper attached
(-) -15% damage
(-) No random critical hits
I've also noticed that it's sometimes received with frustration by many victims. Why's that, and does it need a change?
The Diamondback provides a powerful positive feedback system for its users, who are rewarded handsomely for playing well.
It's possible for enemies to guess how many Diamondback crits a given Spy has simply by watching the kill feed (although this does require a high level of attention and/or good team communication). This transparency is good and lets all players understand the capabilities of the Spy wielding the Diamondback.
The reduced damage makes it so that even critical shots are not one-hit kills, which is important to give players a chance to fight back.
On the other hand, the Diamondback can fire a perfectly accurate shot at any range, pinning enemies with 102 damage from across the map. In 2017, the Ambassador was reworked (see Spy section) to keep the Spy's range more predictable, but the Diamondback wasn't.
This is compounded by the Diamondback being hidden from enemies while the Spy is disguised, meaning that shots can come with very little warning.
I'd argue that the chief issue with the Diamondback is how suddenly it can strike enemies for large amounts of damage. To ameliorate that, I'd suggest adding the following to its attributes:
(-) Critical damage is affected by range
One other thing I was considering would be a more complex attribute affecting how easily a Spy could camouflage themselves:
(-) Holding a crit-boosted Diamondback causes your current disguise's weapon to appear crit-boosted
This is a nicely versatile attribute that can affect gameplay in so many situations!
Most often, it's a liability for the Spy, who will appear more suspicious if they're actively holding the Diamondback while disguised. This gives them a choice to make, and opposing players have a chance to capitalize on the information they receive.
In some cases, this can even add authenticity to a Spy's disguise - for example, if they're disguised as an Engineer with the Frontier Justice.
If you want to play mind games, disguising as a friendly class with a crit-boosted weapon can be fun. Watch enemies run from a crit-boosted "Soldier."
However, we should acknowledge that there are a few semi-common visual glitches related to crit-boosting, which can make some people's weapons appear boosted when they really aren't. This is more an annoyance than anything, but does make identifying Diamondback users a little more unpredictable.
It does not do very much to prevent sudden Diamondback attacks, since it's possible to swap to the gun and then fire. This takes very slightly longer than just having the gun out, but it's not a lot of time.
This is very minor, but it might encourage more Spychecking of teammates who appear with crit-boosted weapons, making Frontier Justice users and the like stoke paranoia in their allies.
These are reasonable pros and cons, although I find myself really liking the mind games of the whole thing. If we're focusing mostly on ameliorating the "surprise Diamondback" factor, it might be best to stick with the range-falloff attribute. But that's not to say this other one isn't worth discussing!
[Image description: a graph with a beige background, reading “G.R.U. vs Eviction Notice.” The horizontal axis is measured in seconds from 0 to 40, while the vertical axis is measured both in HP, from 0 to 300, and distance covered, from 0 hammer units to 14000 hammer units. If a Heavy pulls out the GRU, his max health will decay to 100 in about 18 seconds. The Eviction Notice will cause his health to decay to 100 in about 36 seconds. If a Heavy runs for 40 seconds with the GRU, he will cover about 14000 hammer units. With the Eviction Notice, he will cover about 12000, and with neither item, he will cover about 10500.]
The Gloves of Running Urgently and Eviction Notice are basically just two gradations of the same item. Both increase your movement speed while draining your maximum health. This graph is an illustration of that, meant to provoke some discussion. Note that this does not mean one or the other is flat-out “better” - I’ll discuss why later in this post.
Mechanical stuff
These are the unsimplified equations for the graphs, with the letter t standing for time in seconds:
Hammer units can be a little difficult to visualize, so I’ll give you a few in-game references:
- First blue spawn to first red spawn on Upward: ~6700 HU
- Third to fourth point on Upward: ~2700 HU
- Spawn to spawn on Viaduct, shortest route: ~6700 HU
- Blue spawn to second point on Badwater: ~4150 HU
- Full Doublecross bridge: ~2600HU
- Spawn to spawn on Granary, shortest route: ~12800 HU
I also want to clarify a few mechanical questions:
- As soon as you start to switch to either weapon, your max HP drops by 20 and immediately begins to drain. As soon as you start to switch away, your max HP begins to regenerate.
- Regeneration occurs at exactly the same rate it drained: 5 per second for the Eviction Notice and 10 per second for the GRU.
- Healing does not affect the drain rate. Overheal is always capped at 150% of what your current max health is.
- If you have taken damage, your health will drain proportionally: if you are at 30 health when you pull out the gloves, your health can drain down to 10, but no further.
And now, on to the analysis:
Analysis
Some people have suggested that this means the GRU is less efficient than the Eviction Notice. This is, well, kind of true, but that does not mean that the EV is flat-out better. It is more efficient at using your health to boost your movement speed, so if you want to get to a place as fast as possible while losing as little health as possible, it’s your best option.
By contrast, the GRU is good for getting you places as fast as possible. For example, I like to use it to roll out if I know my team is waiting for me - I can give them support but not commit to the fight until my health is back to full. There are definitely scenarios where speed is more important than having your health high, and the GRU works well for those scenarios.
I get the impression that a lot of people think of these gloves as rollout tools, used when you need to get to the fight and never after. But you can also use them to reposition in combat zones. If your Medic wants you to take an Ubercharge, you can swap to the gloves to gain some ground before you start shooting. And if you need to retreat, it’s better to lose some max health than lose all your health. That’s one scenario where the GRU far outshines the EV: when you’re running away, moving at “regular class” speed is definitely preferable to moving slower than most other classes.
This is kind of a cursory overview of the gloves, I’ll admit. And it doesn’t change the fact that they’re entirely too similar to each other, making both of them less interesting. That’s something I plan to tackle in a coming post, but for now, enjoy the graph!
Firing the Sniper's SMG usually feels a little bit like you're a faceless soldier in a horror movie, frantically and erratically spraying bullets at an implacable foe. Hand me a submachine gun, and I will instantly turn into an Imperial Stormtrooper.
But what if you could miss more dramatically instead? I want to convert the Huntsman into a secondary weapon.
Secondary Huntsman
Stats relative to vanilla Huntsman
(+) +33% reload speed
(+) +50% ammo carried
(-) Cannot headshot
(-) -30% damage
(-) Affected by damage falloff
It has nowhere near the stopping power of the regular Huntsman, but it's an acceptable self-defense weapon. Actually, we have to make sure "acceptable" isn't too powerful, since SMGs are usually around "mediocre" instead.
The real hurt here is the ranged damage falloff. At best, you'll be doing 84 damage on a fully-charged shot at close range. Uncharged shots can do up to 35. That's generally weaker than a shotgun, which is what we're aiming (pun intended) for.
With all the work I'm doing to make this a weak weapon, you might be thinking, why bother making this? Couple reasons:
Slow-firing weapons often feel better to use and play against, especially when fast-firing weapons would feel weak or impotent (see: the SMG).
Projectile physics give an inherent learning curve (pun also intended), especially with the charge mechanic of the Huntsman. This gives players more depth than your average SMG. (This is why I don't just give the Sniper a nerfed shotgun).
Granted, these may not seem like solid justifications to you. But I think I might enjoy using this secondary in tandem with my rifle. Am I underestimating the number of people who like to use the SMG? If you're an SMG enjoyer or Huntsman hater, I'm sorry.
...So, last question: do I tag this as secondary, primary, or both?
A recent post on charge meters has given me an idea for a new type of charge bar: one that controls ammo for a weapon, specifically a flamethrower.
Charge Flamethrower Iteration 1
(*) Uses a charge meter instead of ammo. Continuous firing will drain the meter in about 5 seconds, and airblasts will subtract 20% of it. The charge meter regenerates fully in about 8 seconds when not firing.
(+) Damage increases as charge decreases (up to +50%)
(+) Airblast refire rate decreases as charge decreases (up to 50% faster)
(-) If the meter is completely drained, it takes 3 seconds before it starts to recharge.
By itself, the way the charge works is a little bit restricting, since the regular flamethrower can fire for a lot longer than five seconds. The good news is that the numbers can be tweaked and adjusted to make the flamethrower more comfortable to use.
The increasing damage (plus faster airblast) is the main draw of this flamethrower and gives you choices to make regarding how much charge you’ll consume. There’s a fine line to tread: you can only use this flamethrower’s benefits for a little while before you lose them entirely, but if you’re careful, you can extend that window of time where you’re most effective. Your enemies are also encouraged to keep the pressure up to see if they can get you to burn out your flamethrower, giving them a clear goal to work toward.
There are just a few things that I want to worry about:
1. Flamethrowers can be frustrating weapons to die to because of how quickly they kill and how hard they are to avoid once you’re in range. This increases with damage boosts - see how people react to dying to a Phlogistinator, for example. Would this weapon cause that kind of frustration? (Of course, this is no longer a problem if we make the weapon give a benefit other than increased damage.)
2. It’s hard for the enemy to properly judge how much juice is left in the Pyro’s flamethrower. I would like there to be some kind of visual indicator - possibly a change in the flame particles? - but I can’t think of a way to make it intuitive to viewers that the Pyro is working with less charge. Would this cause confusion and/or frustration?
Frankly, these are relatively minor concerns to have; I can’t see either of them causing a huge amount of trouble. I’m very pleased with the elements of pacing, risk, reward, and counterplay that this relatively simple idea introduces. Happy flaming!
Long ago, I discussed the idea of a Eureka Effect-like portal for the Spy. With this, I want to sort of elaborate on that idea, but for the Scout instead.
Scout Portal Iteration 1
Secondary
(+) Allows you to build a respawn anchor, which has 100 health and cannot be upgraded. When you die, you instead return to the respawn anchor with 1 HP.
(-) Requires 10 seconds to recharge after being used. If you die while it is recharging, the anchor is destroyed.
(-) Leave a glowing trail after using the anchor, as if you had just used a Teleporter
I’m immediately suspicious of this idea for a couple of reasons. For one, it gives you and your enemy fewer choices than the version I talked about in the aforementioned post (though that was for the Spy). For two, a good Scout can already seem to be everywhere at once, even after you could swear you just killed them.
But at the same time, this does give the Scout an interesting new way to play. There’s strategy involved in placing this portal, as well as in using it in a way that won’t give yourself away or get your anchor destroyed. That’s good!
On the flip side, I fear that 10 seconds may not be a very long time to wait. Although it might be boring to the Scout (not ideal), enemies don’t have much time to recover, especially if the portal is placed near a health kit and/or in a place that they might not look. There are ways that we could make it less frustrating to enemies, but those would risk making it unusable for the Scout, who can only wait so long for a recharge before they lose interest.
I don’t want to harsh this idea too badly, though. It’s the kind of item that would need a lot of playtesting, but opens up cool new avenues of play that help keep TF2 feeling fresh. That’s the core of why we make weapons. And who knows: it could be a cool item for another class, or maybe even a way to reimagine the Dead Ringer. Even if this exact idea might be a bust, that doesn’t mean we can’t explore similar things in the future.
Last month, I posted an idea that I liked quite a bit, talking about a flamethrower that would only fire for a short while, but would give benefits the closer you got to an empty fuel tank. Building off that, I want to make a minigun that works similarly.
Charge Minigun Iteration 1
(+) Uses a charge meter instead of ammo. Continuous firing will drain the meter in about 8 seconds. The charge meter regenerates fully in about 10 seconds when not firing.
(+) Damage increases as charge decreases (up to +50%)
(-) If the meter is completely drained, it takes 3 seconds before it starts to recharge
(-) -25% damage
My first impression is that, unlike the flamethrower discussed previously, a minigun is a little trickier to fire on a whim; you can’t just tap the mouse to drop some of your charge. Whether that’s good or bad is up for debate: while it makes the gun easier for enemies to play around, the user has some difficulty using the gun “pre-drained.”
This is a pretty minor concern, all things told. The only other things I worry about are 1) how it would work with nonstandard mouse designs or other control settings and 2) how strong it can be to give a minigun extra damage.
The former is a user interface issue that can come up a lot with the Heavy simply because some people can’t hold their secondary and primary fire at the same time. I don’t have a great solution for that, despite the fact that I’ve played on a Magic Mouse for years now.
The second one is something we deal with whenever miniguns are involved. Because they output such incredible damage, it seems that some folks react to them with frustration, perhaps because it feels like there’s nothing that can stop the Heavy from mowing them down. I don’t think it would be that much worse with this weapon, especially because the bonus damage can’t be sustained for very long.
Other than that, one thing I’m wondering is what other effects we could give this minigun; we don’t necessarily have to have charge affect damage. I briefly revisited my minigun with firing modes, but couldn’t find a good way to integrate that with the charge meter. Frankly, the charge meter itself is interesting enough to stand on its own, but I feel like there’s many other ways it could adjust the weapon’s functionality. Thoughts?
All of the Medic’s Ubercharges are seriously limited in that they only affect one target at once, and even swapping targets reduces their overall duration. I want to experiment with changing that, building an Ubercharge that affects every teammate in a radius.
Group Medigun Iteration 1
(*) Ubercharge provides 50% damage resistance and regular Medigun healing to yourself and all teammates in a radius
So, it’s kind of like the Battalion’s Backup, but more so. And like the Backup, it has upsides and downsides, especially when contrasted with the other Ubercharges.
Exponential utility
It’s always good to have teammates supporting each other, but this Ubercharge takes it to the next level by requiring that teammates stick close to the Medic. Depending on how large the radius is (I’m imagining it roughly equivalent to the Amputator’s taunt), quite a few teammates can benefit from it at once. That can be a huge asset that a single Ubercharge target, no matter how invulnerable, might not be able to match. We’ll explore best- (and worst-)case scenarios further down in the post.
Exponential danger
50% resistance doesn’t equal invulnerability, and any time a bunch of players cluster up, they’re at increased risk of splash damage. Soldiers, Demos, and Pyros can output large amounts of damage against a clustered group despite the damage reduction. Moreover, because teammates can sometimes block their allies’ shots, there are real dangers to clustering up, just as there are advantages. This is a good thing; we want this weapon to have reasonable counter-strategies.
Communication requirements
Because it requires that the team move and act as one, this charge’s effectiveness can be very different depending on how willing and able teammates are to play along. This will make it complicated to balance, since we need to account for the best- and worst-case scenarios.
On a related note, I’d like there to be a “forgiveness” period when you walk out of the resistance radius - say, half a second where your resistance stays the same, allowing you to move back into the circle without being penalized. This is just a simple anti-frustration feature designed to account for the fact that teammates won’t always move in the exact same way.
Healing through walls
One thing that’s worth mentioning is that, for the Amputator’s taunt, it will continue healing a target within the radius as long as that target had line-of-sight to the Medic when the taunt started - even if they move behind a wall during the taunt. For the purpose of this charge, I’d like it to not affect targets behind walls. This forces the Medic to put themselves in danger and is more intuitive for both the users and the enemies.
Against other Ubercharges
More than any other charge, this one can range between incredibly powerful and barely noticeable, simply because it depends so much on how many teammates are using it. But we’ll have to play out both situations to determine if and when the weapon is fun for both teams.
Against the stock Ubercharge, a well-coordinated team can’t outright kill the Medic/pocket pair, but they will almost certainly be able to survive the duration of the Uber with minimal losses. Classes like Pyros will have an easier time pushing the invulnerable duo around, too.
But in the worst case, this is just a worse version of the stock Ubercharge, since it charges no faster and doesn’t give total invulnerability. Barring an extraordinarily bad class matchup and skill differential, the stock Ubercharge will likely stall this Uber in its tracks.
The Kritzkrieg is probably the strongest charge to use against this. 50% damage resistance is a lot, but it won’t stop a sustained critical barrage, especially from area effects. The worst-case scenario for the Kritz pair is that they die prematurely, but they’ll likely be able to do serious damage to the enemy - and because they charge faster, they’ll be able to do it before this group-Uber is ready. Infinitely more so if the resistance Medic has few people to give resistances to.
The Quick-Fix runs into similar problems as the stock Ubercharge, but those are exacerbated because a coordinated team can easily put out more damage than the megaheal can recover. It’s very likely that the Quick-Fix duo would find themselves unable to kill any of the buffed team and be dead in short order. On the plus side, they do charge faster, but it can be hard to pick off a Medic while you’re using the Quick-Fix.
In the best case, most Medic heal targets wouldn’t be able to kill a Quick-Fix duo if they were all alone. There are exceptions, though, such as a skilled Demo or Heavy. I predict a two-on-two would be a roughly even fight depending on who each Medic was charging.
As usual, the Vaccinator would have problems facing a “real” Ubercharge of any kind. But even if they had all four charges ready, the Vaccinator Medic would have serious problems facing a coordinated assault with multiple damage types.
On the other hand, a good Vaccinator duo can easily pick off a Medic with an uncoordinated team, and three or four charge bars would 1) completely shut out most opposing duos and 2) charge considerably faster than this gun.
What does this mean?
Overall, I think this medigun would contribute to a slower game where defensive positions are trickier to dislodge. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but for classes who do best as shock troops, it can be a little discouraging to be unable to push forward.
It’s also worth noting that, because of the relatively slow charge time and vulnerability of the Medic, this gun does have reasonable counters. A blitzkrieg (or Kritzkrieg) offense is a great way to deal with it. We’d have to playtest to make sure, but for now, I’m very pleased with how we’ve created a unique Ubercharge that can bring a lot of options to the game.
I’m so sorry to have to tell you this, but I’m going to be taking a hiatus from TF2Workbench starting this month.
I’ve been working at a new job recently, which is honestly taking almost all of my time and leaving very little to either play TF2 or come up with good new discussion points. I love my work, but it definitely takes a lot of time.
However, I don’t want to just say “hiatus” and have it turn into an indefinite absence. I’ll be checking back in on April 1 (not a prank) and giving an update on my situation, as well as when you can expect new material.
Again, I’m sorry to depart now, but I also need to strike a balance of work and fun. Hope the month goes by quickly!
