One game I would have mentioned is Splatoon. Since everyone has effective invisibility, the game was balanced around it. Swimming in your ink is not only a useful stealth tool, but also a mobility tool, allowing you to move faster and climb up walls. It does break 2 of your rules, those being instant invis and no time limit, but the game balances the feature in other ways, the most important being you can only swim in your own ink. This means your invisibility can be easily taken away just by shooting the ground, and since everyone WILL be doing that, your cover can easily be blown. It creates some interesting mind games between the two teams. There is an ability, Ninja Squid, which removes the ripples you make when swimming, but it also comes at the cost of a slower swim speed, so it remains balanced.
@@insignificantduck313 True but, it defently feel into "Overused" territory befor the nerf. Not like unbeatable or OP to the point of breaking anything but defiantly above the power curb.
there's some parts of the map that either don't allow you to ink it (aka you can't hide there) or make you phase trough (grates and such), forcing the player to looks if they're on a safe spot to hide, wich IMO sometimes makes kinda tricky to find safe spots with ease or so they don't catch you when trying to do it.
I think sombra's infinite invis makes more sense when you think about how she differs from most other invis characters. She has no high burst damage ambush combo/stun/backstab, so along with her tp it's a very different playstyle of being hard to pin down, annoying, and supportive of teammates with hack, but rarely an anxiety-inducing lethal threat to any but the weakest support hero.
Sombra is a pest, she'll show up do some damage and piss off and her real effect is her hack which sets up other teammates to more easily take you out. However back when I was a zen main there was no being more terrifying than a sombra
I support this argument. At least in her OW1 form, she was perfectly balanced to be an intel-based hero with good survivability & the ability to hack or deal small bits of damage at key moments. And that was important, because her lack of burst DPS kept her from nuking anybody without help.
Her passive does make her threatening in certain situations, allowing her to show up and randomly pick off low health enemies without too much issue, but I mostly agree that she's a balanced but annoying character
Splatoon has a really fun take on this. Everyone has the ability to essentially go invisible, from fast frontlines to backline snipers and support. Not only that, the invisibility mode also heals you, replenishes your ammo and lets you move faster than you can on foot (usually with subtile ripples but with a certain ability- not even that), the only thing you can't do is shoot, and that is only a single press of the trigger and 4 frames away, with little to no cooldown when you're done with it (even the slowest weapons in the game still take less than a second to unsquid- fire- squid, fastest shooters can do that 5 times a second if they wish to). You would think that it would be frustrating to have an ability that strong even if it is universal, but it isn't because of the game's turf mechanics- you can only get those buffs on your territory. You get an invisible opponent, but his positioning is limited, and if you played your cards right, that limitation usually means they can't be behind you. If they attempt to get behind you, they essentially lose their invisibility, because while you might not see the player themselves, a suspiciously placed puddle of enemy ink in the sea of yours can only mean one thing- the invisible guy is there. Essentially, you can hide in plain sight better than you can in usual hiding places.
Splatoon is one of the most interesting games I haven't played yet and intend to try. It's always awesome to see interesting, different, yet balanced mechanics in games.
If we're talking about good examples, here's my take on what you totally shouldn't do when designing cloak. Planetside 2 has an infiltrator class with a long range weaponry available by default, and cloak with 8 seconds by default. While map is immense, and there's crap ton of hiding points literally anywhere, it's really easy to hide in pain sight and get 10-15 cheeky kills before somebody finally decides to go after you. Yet another reason to hate Amerish even more, with those giant ass trees, people get int planes and then stay invisible on giant trees for hours, while leafs quite literally make it impossible to find out exact location. It's possible to unlock smgs and other cqc weapons, but you will be playing spy at this point
@@dannadx3840 Ikr?! It was so fucking frustrating when myself and a whole fucking army were making a push on Amerish and those GIANT FUCKING TREES- SOMEONE GOT A FUCKING SUNDY UP IN ONE! HOW?! AAAAA!
4:34 the cloak and dagger is actually a very good sidegrade for the stock watch if used properly. And by used properly I mean, not standing in one place for 20 minutes. It's good for timing your decloaks, which is actually a very strong ability. And the l'etranger almost completely negates its downsides. It should ideally be used similarly to the invis watch and not as the _super sneakily crouching from point a to point b for an hour_ watch.
For example, one time that I feel the cloak and dagger may be superior is when you just got off a backstab and are trying to hide from the enemy team as you are trapped in a room with no real way out. With the default watch, you're on a time limit to escape or else be detected, while with the cloak and dagger it gives you some breathing room so you can hide in a corner for a while even if you get reduced movement
It’s balanced. A good player isn’t effectively countered by spy but a good spy will still catch him out every so often during the heat of combat. I feel the tf2 devs did a decent job balancing spy in the base game of tf2. All the other gimmicks are still not OP. Especially the dead ringer nowadays lol
I feel like it works more in tf2 since the game is based around playing objectives and the spy isn't very good at that past thinning out numbers and supporting pushes.
The main issue with the dead ringer rn is becuase you use it once and you have to sit there and wait, like nobody gonna sit in a corner for 30 seconds to recharge the dead ringer. the invei/cloak and dagger is just way better.
I'm not sure if this is relevant, but in League there's a difference between invisible and camouflage, both of them are in the game. The difference is that with Camo you're actually revealed-ish when you're within a certain range of champions, towers, or wards. And invisibility.... Is invisibility. They both have the things you've mentioned already, getting hit reveals you, and there is an indicator when you got invis, and there's also Sound. So yeah
and invisibility is usually a lot more limited than camouflage, either in terms of how/where you can use it, or in terms of for how long you can use it. take akali's twilight shroud for example, she becomes invisible for like, 7 seconds, BUT she is only invisible when inside her shroud and the moment she gets out of it or it disappears, she is instantly visible again
I'd like to shout out the other TF2; Titanfall 2. There is an invisibility class but the invisibility is near on useless against other pilots, no matter the distance you are pretty obvious. AI opponents however ignore you, and Titans cannot directly see you. This can help balance a very one sided fight as pretty much all Titans can one shot pilots. Titans still have a chance as the cloak isn't instant, glow effects such as jump jets (the thing that lets you double jump) and any batteries you are carrying are still visible, as are your footsteps depending on what sort of ground you are on. You don't shimmer but you opponent gets hit markers and the cloak deactivates during certain actions such as rodeoing a Titan. I know it's a rather different sort of game, but still one worth shouting out I think : )
Titans can see cloaked Pilots, but it's ridiculously hard to see them because their silhouette is completely clear and only slightly pixelated. The only way I've managed to catch cloaked Pilots is: guessing where they are seeing the odd lighting of the silhouette seeing the flicker electric smoke
The invisibility is by no means useless against other pilots, and I’m tired of people pretending it is. While sure, it’s relatively easy to spot, that split second it takes to realize it’s a cloaked pilot is often all the time they need to gain the advantage.
Kinda wish you brought up titanfall cloak as well- having the invisibility function differently vs different types of enemies is also pretty cool, with pilots seeing a shimmer (basically the active camo), but Titans not seeing anything at all.
@@KnightandDay33 it makes it so you can become a camping pick class in a movement shooter, doing it with kraber is funny But I don’t do it often because it kinda goes against the point of TF|2
You are not completely wrong about mobas, but there is a "sneaking around" aspect that you missed. I play heroes of the storm and perhaps the most important use of invisibility in that game is that it removes your marker from the minimap. In mobas map awareness is key, and denying the opposing team the ability to track your position on the minimap can help you immensely.
Also in Heroes, stealth characters are very clearly shimmered unless they stand still for a few seconds, where they become invisible, so honestly the mechanic is just a “Can’t be targeted” in most situations.
in mobas specifically vision is already extremely limited, not like you can see where every enemy is on the map just because your player models line up, you need to be close enough first.
Balancing invisibility in Paladins is really weird because of the existence of illuminate. It feels like a less extreme version of the razorback, screwing over a specific ability. Also you bring up Sha Lin and Skye but I personally think Seris' invisibility is more controversial due to it making her invisible and invincible, with no visual cues.
Good point. There are actually only 4 examples of invisibility in the whole game, I don't play too much paladins but I never personally found Seris' invis to be that annoying, but yeah it is an example of adding no clues at all.
Skye is the most annoying Champion in Paladins for me. Yeah, let's give Full Invis to the Champion with a bloody Machine Gun and a fucking nuclear bomb as her Ult
Another thing to note: how many, and how effective, are the countermeasures against invisibility? For example, the Spy's shimmer by itself is a good downside, but there needs to be weapons that can capitalize on the shimmer. If everyone had slow firing weapons, then the shimmer would be overall less effective. By having rapid fire weapons, the player has an opportunity to extend the duration of the shimmer. Then there are specific counters. The Pyro's flamethrower sets the Spy on fire for a good while, revealing him to everyone. Jarate and Mad Milk do the same, but slightly less effectively. In Dota 2, there are not a lot of clues that someone is invisible. There often isn't a shimmer, they aren't revealed when taking damage, and sound cues are basically null and void. However, there are two extremely cheap and efficient items that directly counter invisibility: Sentry Wards and Dust. One is a proactive solution that passively reveals hidden units (and also doesn't tell them they are visible) and one is more active item that is used for chasing down invisible units. Also, the game itself can be built around everyone being invisible. Screencheat is a game where literally everyone is invisible. You have to be able to find and shoot your opponents by looking at their screen. It's a really interesting concept, although I haven't played it myself.
@@MosheGames yeah, rikimaru has a talent that let's him attack without revealing himself, it's hot garbage unless the other team doesn't use anything to counter invis
@@andrewgreeb916 riki has a talent that lets him attack while invis?i call that bs Unless it's a recent addition to his talents,you might just be confusing the talents tree with one of his abilities that makes him disappear while attack one random target in a very specific area.
@@thiagonet2 Also the talent has been removed a while ago. It was a polarizing option that made the game extremely frustrating at low levels while also being completely worthless at high levels of play. It was replaced with a bigger Smoke Screen AoE, which is actually more irritating.
I really like the Invisibility in Fortress Forever. (It's free on steam, fanmade TF2 because TF2 was taking so long) When you're running you're somewhat distorted and people can see you if they are looking for you. But you have the option to walk slower and crouch and the slower you walk the harder to see you are. Standing still being completely invisible. And remember, before TF2, spy was able to use a Super Shotgun with 16 shells at a time and a Nailgun. Also, I'm really confused why Fortress Forever is so dead right now when TF2 is so popular. I figured there would be like one server online per usual but no it's almost completely forgotten somehow. But it's really fun.
@@stop4781 I get that but it's been so long since then and with the game being ovverun with the bot crisis and people asking for TF3 you'd think like anyone would give it a chance now.
As a pyro main, I love invisibility. The simple fact that I can counter this ability naturally has helped me learn where to expect certain classes to go, because a spy will want to avoid certain players’ attention and try to mimic my own allies. Being able to figure out a spy’s pathing plans is super rewarding, even if I’m not perfect at it. :)
LoL does actually have one character that can use invisibility to "sneak around" - Evelynn. She's almost permanently invisible, so a lot of her gameplay is lurking around the map looking for lone enemies to kill.
Great analysis! I used to work on the gameplay team on LoL, and a lot of your "guidelines" were echoed by the designers. One notable omission is RTS games. Dark Templars from Starcraft and the Blademaster from WC3, in particular. Dark Templars in Starcraft are in gross violation of the "attacking removes invisibility" rule. Blademaster was given this extra limitation, but his ability to attack and instantly re-cloak was a major source of frustration that eventually got patched out... ~15 years after release.
Glad to hear that, funny you mention rts games since I've never really bothered with them until very recently with games like starcraft and AoE series.
I personally enjoy invisibility, both using it and fighting against it, I find it fun catching a spy that was about to backstab me, saving a teammate from getting backstab, or just hunting one down by predicting their movement, and honestly I never hear them coming, I'm not sure if it something with my sound but I never really hear the uncloaking sound but still avoid getting stabbed by just knowing how a spy thinks and outsmarting someone is always fun, I think that something unique about the spy and invisibility in general, it all about tricking your opponent
I just get mad/worried when a Spy kills me with the kunai, then he's virtually immortal. But the worst active cammo I can think of is in Halo 4, if you move without crouching it deactivates, so you either have to stand still on a corner or crouch and try to get somewhere at 1 mph, if you activate it then everything sounds like if you were underwater, in previous Halos you could be invisible until you shot and there was no weird ambience sound changes.
I agree, I hardly use active camo in halo 4. Then again, that is an armor ability as apposed to a map pickup, so they need to be nerfed because anyone can be invisible at anytime.
I think games like The Stalker or The Hidden from Gmod have good invis mechanics. The invis is faintly detectable, especially when the invis player moves, so the effectiveness largely depends on the environment the players are in. If someone invis moves in a close space with you, it's immediately extremely obvious they're there, and even if they're still you can still pick them out of the background pretty fast. The invis can obscure their presence and exact position for a short delay and throw off the human player's aim for the first few shots, and that's largely how the fight is decided. Open areas by contrast allow more movement for the invis player where they might be more undetected, but also don't have as much cover and can be easily picked off by the human players if they know the invis player is there.
The Hidden is more like, your attention snaps to the doorway on the other end of the map. Was that The Hidden, or was that a fucking vents heat shimmer? You don't know and you're paranoid. The Hidden has a shimmer like very faint heat shimmer. Thus you can get confused for it. It's both keeping you on alert - "AAH THERE HE IS oh no that's vent heat" - or makes you not alert - Ignoring a shimmer, assuming it's vent heat, then getting stabbed.
Got an amazing idea Go into tf2 with spies invis sound effect in your soundboard, go into a match and occasionally play the sound and see how many people turn around in fear
I can't speak for League of Legends but there is a 3rd use for invisibility in Dota: information. While risky, often invisible heroes will use their invisibility to find where the enemy heroes are from relative safety. This especially applies to Bounty Hunter, who I believe is the only hero who can use an ability from invisibility and stay invisible. That ability is called Track. Track is on a very low cool down and allows him to mark an enemy, causing them to be visible to Bounty Hunter's team even if invisible or in the fog of war as well as giving Bounty Hunter a speed boost and bonus damage against the target. The target will also give bonus gold to Bounty Hunter and any allies in the area if they die while under the effect. This sounds overpowered and it is very good, but it is balanced by the fact that the enemy gets an indicator on their HUD that they are being tracked and the track can be purged by a basic dispel which is offered by multiple items and abilities. Overall a very balanced invisibility hero. He provides great information and utility but lacks the ability to contribute control during team fights like so many other heroes in his role are able to.
Unlike bounty hunter, rikimaru can cast all his spells from invis without revealing himself and his spell smokescreen is an absolute pain in the neck. He's what I'd say is an example of invisibility done poorly
The thing is that it's mainly useful due to the speed boost it gives which is why his "Windstorm" addons that give extra speed while cloaked are considered his best ones
@@javonyounger5107 Well the main reason those are so good is because you can rotate between gens much faster, not really because it makes killing survivors easier
First time I played tf2 back in 2013, I got so freaked out when I played spy for the first time because I couldn't believe the spy could actually become invisible for real unlike other multiplayer games
Spy wasn't initially designed with straight-up invisibility in mind. Disguise kits and backstabs were already part of his kit. But when they scrapped smoke grenades, Spy needed a method to be hidden, so they gave him the Invis Watch and tweaked him a bit to fit it.
I think that Dead by Daylight has a pretty interesting spin on the invisibility mechanic when it comes to one of the playable killers, being the Spirit. Her power allows her to do something called "phase walking", which is an ability which lets her leave her physical body and turn into a sort of ghost, moving at insane speeds, then she can stop phase walking to instantly return to the physical world in where she stands. While she is using this power, she is completely invisible to survivors, and since she leaves her body behind, she gives no indication that she has turned invisible except for the fact that her previous body is standing still. However, the catch is that while she is using this power, survivors will also appear invisible to her, and she can only tell where they are based on how they effect the environment, such as leaving marks in the environment when they sprint, moving objects that they are touching, and also sounds they produce. I think it's quite an interesting power as both sides technically get invisibility when she uses her power. Unfortunately, it's quite horrendously balanced since survivors have no tell to her general location while using her power, or if she's even using it at all. Since survivors have to try and stay silent whilst she is phase-walking to remain undetected, often the person playing killer can just straight up stand still and survivors will just have to guess that she's currently zooming towards them whilst invisible and that they have to get out of there quietly, at least until they see her body moving again and running straight at them after they already left some safe area they were in. Still a neat power, but I think that considering the way DBD works, both sides should get a tell of where the other side is. (they also have the Wraith who is another killer who can turn invisible by going bing bong on his bell he has but that's just basic invisibility really, nothing omega interesting)
Destiny 2 has a good mechanic for this, invisibility is visible but it's flowy and splotchy making it less effective at closer ranges while also removing you from enemy radars (not in destiny 1 tho, that blue color is straight impossible to notice for me)
In my opinion tf2 perfectly balanced invisibility You're going to pop up behind someone and stab them, but it's too late until you remember you're using the dead ringer and decloaking sounds like a bass boosted taser
it's been a while since i played any halo game but i fondly remember that if you go invisible, the radar just adds a lot of "enemy dots", so the enemy knows there's a sneaky guy in the area
"i can never tell if a dead ringer spy is dead or not." once they've either died or feigned their death, look at the top of the screen at the players, and see if a spy is dead on the enemy team. to go into more depth if there is more than one spy, look at the name of the spy you killed in killfeed, and press tab to show the scoreboard, look for the spy's name on the enemy team, and see if they're dead or not. this strat is really good and can save a mans life if you point out if they've feigned and where they did so to your team. (also, tommy gun, use it, bhop with it, abuse it, will help agents spies more than you think.)
Or, on the other hand, have such horrible aim so that when they do die I can be sure it was a deadringer because no spy would ever die to me without cloaking
Invisibility is not the same thing as camouflage or “active camouflage” if it was real. Invisibility means you literally cannot properly be seen by people Camouflage means you can be seen, but you are wearing something that blends into the environment around you. The best example of the difference is Chameleons, in most portrayals of chameleons they are able to turn completely invisible, which is not how they work, instead they can change the color of their skin to blend into the background.
I think one of my favorite things about the spy is that he isn't just "statistically worse class with added invisibility", but his strengths are designed to synergize with and complement his invisibility (and to a lesser extent his disguise). It makes the class far more interesting than if he was just "Yeah he's just a worse scout but you can cloak with him."
when you go “invisible” in terraria it’s practically worthless, it actually doesn’t even work except in multiplayer, but in multiplayer it makes it so enemies and bosses are less likely to target you (which I guess is helpful if you can’t take hits)
Yeah it's really helpful for ranged and magic builds to have invis potions during bossfights so the melee build with the best armour can aggro the boss
I feel like spy is fun to play to the point that removing him would hurt the game more than it would help it. Like spy is purely annoying when you're a different class but since he's underpowered it's only ever just annoying and not game-ruining. Meanwhile spy has one of the most unique playstyles of any fps class and imo is one of the best executions of the invis mechanic. Like in mobas like league, none of the characters who can turn invis are really centered around invis, it's mostly just an ambush or escape mechanic like you said. But for spy his invis is the core of his kit.
Honestly; I agree with this video almost entirely. The only thing I can say is that at 10:23 you say it's hard to tell when a spy is dead or not. There are two ways (I've found) to tell if a spy dr'd or not. Firstly is looking at their team next to the timer (forgot the term for it), if they spy dead ringered, they wont appear dead on there. Second is if tthey're using a killstreak weapon and have a killstreak, their killstreak will still be present if you hold tab.
Both league and dota have allowed you to attack while invis at one point. I used to troll new players in league in 2010-2012 by purchasing multiple sunfire capes, an item that radiates damage in an area around your character(evelynn or twitch) and just follow them while they somewhat slowly cooked alive. Dota's hero "riki" at max level can choose a talent that allows him to remain invisible while attacking enemies from behind, but becomes visible if he ever attacks from the front.
Oh, another fun one for league. The champion mordekaiser used to have a spell called creeping death that he could cast on any non-building friendly unit or ward. Wards were permanently invisible. I used to build mordekaiser as a caster to beef up his creeping death's damage aura buff spell to decent damage levels and chuck out wards whereever there would be a fight, then poke with this invisible damage radiation on my wards.
in league invisibility is also pretty useless for the purpose of sneaking around, because there is an item that drops a ward that reveals stealthed units and it costs 75 gold (granted you can only have one down at any time and two in your inventory, but there are only so many places where it matters), for context killing a minion gives you roughly 20 gold and in a minion wave there is 6 of the bastards. The rest of the message is now for people crying about invisibility in league, most of you are in Bronze and never buy control wards, buy two, put one in the place you would normally and then when fighting something like, Pyke, Evelynn, Twitch ect. put one down and they are fucked, don't say the champ is unbalanced when you are not utilizing all of your tools correctly.
League definitely has a lot of tools to help with counter play both on a macro level (ex., map awareness, warding, and red trinket) and micro level (basically everything outside of AAs being a skillshot nowadays, some even with revealing properties). But when things break the established rules of gameplay, and I 100% am referring to the initial Akali rework (tldr for those who didn’t play, allied structures which normally reveal invisibility did not reveal Akali’s invisibility - pretty sure it ran deeper but I also stopped playing for a while after the fact), there’s definitely cause for being frustrated. Not so much on sneaking around since there’s literally a map in the bottom corner of the screen, but in a fight? I still hate the champion for it even though it hasn’t been in her kit for over a year.
@@BG-3496 oh yeah old akali is an exception, fuck old akali, anyone who defended the design decision needs to be fired, how did no one see issue with that.
@@Krugster You get a notifaction for all of those, I admit shaco Q is an oversight on my part but when you get the notifaction they are near you, and you can just pop one down. Also no? You can have 2 control wards in your inventory at any time so you put in river and the other you keep in your inventory for when fighting that champion.
I like Titanfall 2 camo because it's transparency for pilots (normal players) but full invisibility for titans (players in their mech). The fast pace of combat makes them very hard to spot, giving them the first shot most of the time, but whenever they use their double jump, a jet trail gives them away even for titans. However, this can be counteracted with a certain perk. If you stand still, you probably won't be spotted, if you run around pilots might spot you and if you jump around even titans might see you, but a secondary perk can make you even stealthier. Plus, in order to be invisible you have to trade in any of the other tacticals, like speed bost, grappling hook or local wall hax
Good video bud id like to point something out. In league of legends there is invisible and camouflage. Camouflage makes a radius around you that if a player is in will reveal you to them and vision and items will also meanwhile invisibility will make you unable to be seen at all. Also leagues invisibility is more used as a repositioning tool or for preparing to go back into a fight
Hold on, none of the champions in paladins can attack WHILE invisible, attacking instantly removes it and in most situations you won't get it back immediately. The only situations where you DO is when skye is standing in her smoke bomb and during Sha-lin's ultimate. In those cases, you know the small area Skye is standing in, and Sha-lin's is an ultimate ability so it's supposed to be powerful. And of course there's an item in game which completely negates invisibility all together.
I never realized it until I watched this video, but every single character in Splatoon has invisibility and the whole game seems to be balanced around that fact. Maybe that's why Splatoon is such a frustratingly poor casual experience to me, because it's like every single enemy is a scout + spy hybrid, or a sniper. Not to say it isn't well balanced around this fact. It's just... stressful. Excellent video man. Love your essays!
That comes back to the biggest part of Splatoon, map control. You can only be invisible in terrain you control. It plays into what makes Splatoon Splatoon, and not any other shooter.
@@Tom-vx7qh I agree. Many modes in Splatoon specifically play around the design of map control and inking the ground. It's what makes the game fun, at least for me.
I'm at the point where a friend brushed against their couch making the spy's decloak noise, and I legit muscle-memory flicked the finger I use to switch to melee.
Nobody seem to remember that, so i'm going to do. In Planetside 2, there's a very good way of balancing cloaking: First, cloaking and de-cloaking make unique sound for each of three sides, which makes it way easier to distinguish allies from enemies. Second, all of three cloak options have downsides, as follows: cloak duration, ability to only use your sidearm or cloak that is way easier to see. And, the most important, the cloak doesn't give you 100% invisibility and it becomes more visible the faster you move, so you can't run into enemies with all guns blazing or hide in plain sight. Unfortunately, it doesn't balance Infiltrator as a class...
i was heavy main for some time, and i gotta admit, when i see a heavy just pushing a cart, while 3 people behind him die, i just gotta ask... how? i learned fast to spy check, and hear decloaking and stabs as heavy
6:14 a game that uses this well is r6s with the operator nøkk, she goes invisible to cameras. But anything she touches moves so if you see random broken stuff on the ground move you know she is there
This is truly so dense npt just in the application of invisibility but the tradeoffs you've gotta make for every ability and weighing that when in design. Very helpful for anyone looking to get into that sorta thing
I highly disagree with the end part about invisibility taking "full focus" to fight and how u cant turn ur brain off and relax, Spy in TF2 is EXTREMELY easy to defeat and not hard to keep track of unless the enemy team has like 3+ spies I unironically have beat stabby stabby o spy as heavy in highlander b4 like u literally just have to have a pretty basic understanding of how spy works and you can singlehandedly reduce him to a useless player slot on the enemy team UNLIKE FUCKING SNIPER
"No, you don't understand, sniper is extremely well-balanced because some people have bad aim and this means nuking half of the class roster without charging is not an issue in any way, shape or form, so just git gud."
Spy is very well balanced. Even with how easily Spy can be caught out, patience is the name of the game for him. When you're busy beating a pyro to death or something, that Spy is suddenly right behind you and driving six inches of steel between your spinal discs. Spy, while not the fastest, is in the top three I believe. As someone once said "While you're busy, that's Spy's time to shine." You can't ever multitask with everything, no matter how good you get. Unlike MOTHERFUCKING SNIPER. You can't EVER catch him out. All the fastest classes capable of closing the distance are one quickscope from death. All the heavier classes that are capable of handling more than one are too slow to close the distance in any meaningful way. Caber, Base jumper, and sticky jumper made for a great counter to Snipers, then Caber apparently got a nerf because the snipers bitched about it. The only other real counter is Spy, but even then they have to go through the entire enemy team without getting caught, and quickscoping and the Razorback counters that. Sniper can be a fun class, and I do enjoy playing him, but the imbalance is immense. Then there's the sheer amount of bullets he can carry in reserve, and he can position anywhere for 25 quickscopes.
@@thatguythere6161 spy sucks at destroying buildings if the engineer has any type of shotgun, and as sniper u can kill the engi in 1 shot and the engi most of the time can't do anything about it, and theres 100% chance a soldier or demo are in ur team and are gonna blast the engis buildings
Titanfall 2 cloak is pretty useless, but I think it is more from the speed of the game rather than the invisibility being bad. The invisibility is actually pretty well implemented, it is only somewhat effective against pilots and doesn’t work well in dark areas as well as having a slight humming sound and full footstep audio, but when placed against a brighter light source (say the sun/bright ambient light) it becomes essentially impossible to see. The user also still has these little fire jets whenever they jump unless you pick a specific “Kit” (perk). When you shoot you instantly lose cloak and it goes on full cool down (which I think it should just start cooling down from wherever it was in its duration instead). It’s real use is against titans, as seeing them in a titan is really REALLY hard, and it the only way to get them is using your built up game knowledge. All that would be great except for the fact everyone can move so fast you don’t get to catch other players completely off guard, and catching up to players/competing with their movement options makes it’s completely useless unless you have the jump on a player in near point blank range. The speed of the game is what makes it my favorite FPS, but cloak players really get shafted and basically end up using it to camp with OP long range guns so you can’t spot them in their camping spot until they are shooting at you.
I've not used cloak that often, but I recall making a cqc rodeo loadout for the cloak ability. Only made it so I can somehow support my teammates titans since I just generally suck at the game. Can't remember the exact loadout but I think it was EVA8 shotgun, whatever the semi auto pistol was, firestar (I throw it on the titans face as I run to help prevent them tracking me as I cloak) and the kit to remove jump trails. I do this because I don't get many kills in a round and would rather help keep the better player(s) alive.
The invisibility for the infiltrator class in MGS5 online is genuinely worthless because you leave shimmers when you move and skillful players instantly know when a pixel on the opposite side of the map looks weird, headshotting you immediately.
Fun fact: Halo CE's flashlight is helpful to find invisible enemies in both campaign and multiplayer. Even when highlighted, the cloaked target can slip out of your light and reposition. There's also a battery on the light as well as the cloak, so things get tense when you keep that on for too long.
So, for the Moba thing, you're mostly right. I only have experience with DOTA, and so I can't speak for all Mobas, but it's mostly like that. With that being said, there is some utility with being able to invis around the map to put wards (basically little spy cameras) down in cheeky spots. Not much, but it's there.
He sort of did, the reason is that it’s annoying, and it fucking is, it’s really annoying to have to focus a good portion of your time on trying to find where she is with infinite cloak.
@@gardevoid8412 but with Sombra you don't need to know where she's at when she's invisible, you only need to care about her when she appears because that gives you an incredibly good window to kill her. When she was first released her invisibility was on a timer, but it was very weak.
15:00 I actually hate sniper more spy is actually big risk and big reward but sniper he just in the back without any real threat other then another sniper
It’s key to note that you made the poll on Scrap.tf a nearly all TF2 based website. The users will be more exposed to TF2’s more friendly invisibility instead of invisibility in video games generally. The poll information would then be pretty biased. Otherwise good video :)
@@P-Bean no worries, the video was very enjoyable and informative, a minor slip up is no biggie. it’s quite evident how much effort you put into making the video, you have my full support! keep it up :)
10:22 a couple ways to tell if a spy is really dead: The ammo box he drops on dead ringing doesn’t actually give you any ammo The thing at the top of the screen that shows your team and what enemies are dead doesn’t show a spy as dead (really easy once you get used to it) Footsteps (but you mentioned that already and it’s hard to do)
I thought that Siren's phasewalk in Borderlands slowed down time to a halt, because the AI just has the enemies stop moving, as they can't see you, and have no alert idle actions.
i remember when i used to play rainbow six siege there was an invis bug that also gave players godmode but because of how good the sound in that game is in the kill cams i could see if he hadn't been god mode i would have still won against his invisibility
My favorite take on invisibility in a multiplayer game by far is World of Warcraft, specifically the Rogue class. Rogues in WoW can go invisible at any time out of combat and stay invisible for as long as they want. Taking any damage or performing almost any action while invisible will pull the Rogue out of invisibility automatically, but there are also special abilities Rogues can do only while invisible, such as a silencing ability or a four second stun. The thing is, this take on invis doesn't have a time limit, has only a single quiet audio queue, usually doesn't have a visual queue, AND allows the Rogue to attack from invisibility, so why is this a good take? The reason is that Rogue can't go invisible while in combat (with the exception of the Vanish ability, but it has a 2 minute cooldown). Because the Rogue can only go invisible outside of combat, the fun for the Rogue player is derived from downing opponents fast enough to take as much advantage of your invisibility as possible for the next fight. The fun for the opponent is aiming to exhaust the Rogue's resources and out damaging them. WoW's Rogue class only accounts for 1/5 of your guidelines for invis in multiplayer games, but it's still the most fun imo.
It's worth noting some classes have abilities that counter Rogue's invisibility in one way or another so there's good outplay potential on both sides. WoW's Rogue only becomes broken when it's killing you way too fast.
Honestly Sha Lin isn’t that hard to track because he usually leaves mirages of where he was, so the area where he could be is usually limited around the mirage he left. Skye makes a really loud sound when she breaks her invisibility, too. And she’s considered one of the worst flanks because she’s quite easy to track, doesn’t have any mobility skills and illuminate counters her kit. And also because illuminate exists, if someone thinks his invisibility is too oppressive they just have to buy it.
IMO the dead ringer is balanced by its sound. It's loud as hell, you know there's a dead ringer, or any team mate near knows its a deadringer and can tell that information ot the team. Since the DR can't use ammo packs, if you hear a spy DR ing, you pretty much have the kill free.
@@M4x_P0w3r and being worthless for like what, 8-15sec to use your cloak again, that loud ass decloak sound is a huge que for you to get him, and even if he escaped he need to play very carefully since he is just a walking stickman with below 125hp depend on his knife loadout
@@tonylin2 Well, I would say that the 8 to 15 is not that bad compared to just dying and waiting for respawn. Although it actually is 10 -20 to recharge, but even then, a good spy doesn't only rely on invisibility. You can use the speed boost to run towards the nearest health kid or in fact away from it to trick whoever's chasing you. It's loud, but loudness doesn't mean shit if no one's nearby to hear it. Plus, if you use this with the kunai you become much more durable, between the 200hp overheal and the 75 - 65% damage resistance
haven't watched the video all the way, but planetside does a great job with invis imo. Then again, I last played it a long while ago and haven't even touched implants. But it was good then, right when and a while after the dark light was released.
In my own personal opinion, Spy gets given too much unwarranted hate regarding his invisibility. Most classes have ways to spot you out: Scout's Mad Milk, Sniper's Jarate, Heavy's Minigun spread, weapons with bleed effects, literally everything on Pyro; then there's bumping, mindless spam, a plethora of audio cues, practically being stripped of using voice chat; and let's not forget the terribly heavy cooldown you get between wearing the invisibility off and being able to take any action. The only thing keeping you from stopping being backstabbed, is either your lack of awareness, or the fact that you still insist on melee-dueling the Spy when we already know how messy the hitboxes are.
I really like invisibility in starcraft 2. The trichotomy of the races with the different ways to attain detection(a slightly expensive unit that is invisible its self, an upgrade to an already necessary and vulnerable but also normally semi expendable unit and one can use a time regenerating resource for temporary detection ANYWHERE but difficult permanent detection), and The different types of invisibility available(forever invisibility on two units one melee one non combat, invisibility that uses a per unit resource that is gained over time and starts low andBurrowing which has a different visual que and requires an upgrade to use and/or move during.) This makes for 9 different Invisibility/Detection dynamics, unfortunately not all of them are interesting. 😕
im curious if you ever played halo? from my experiance, the active camo is pretty tough in specific situations, if your focusing some one, or doing something specific, it can be hard to see the translucent blob running by, and is almost impossible to spot next to rocks
@@bugsmith9751 I haven't, but I just wrote that because I never succeed at sneaking around, I'm spotted even if I'm 80% hidden, mostly camouflaged, and a quarter of the way across the map.
I’m going to correct you when you said you can’t tell if a dead ringer spy is dead or not. You always can. The dead body drops their weapon which I believe is now is changed to an ammo box, I don’t play TF2 anymore, and you can pick it up. If your ammo doesn’t increase, that means he’s alive. If you picked up the ammo and you got ammo then you confirmed he died. That is all.
@@sire6265 Well previously they did drop ammo in some form but if what you said is true then that’s also a way to confirm a dead ringer spy kill. Dead ringer was pretty busted before they nerfed it. I remember when it used to let you survive backstabs and full charged headshots lol or when set bonuses were still in the game and you could use that one set with the fez hat to make your decloak sounds nearly impossible to hear with the only downside being you were stuck with Your Eternal Reward as your knife. Good times
tbh ive never thought spies were the most annoying class to get killed by; getting sniped is equally jarring/surprising, and feels more stressful then a backstab because there's the risk of the sniper's sight line hanging over you. knowing there's a spy harassing the team makes me feel like an on the fly detective trying to hunt him down.
Paladins' characters with invisibility aren't overpowered. If one really bothers you one would usually buy the Iluminate card. Also, they can be normally seen from up close and most of the limitations you said about good stealth characters apply to them.
Yeah, whenever I have issues with invisibility on a character in Paladins, taking illuminate makes it so easy to find and shred through them, and the majority just don't seem to realize what's going on or how to adjust their playstyle
Unintended side-effect: invisibility is the funniest thing in multiplayer games. Accidentally dropping a random spy you had no idea was in your way or accidentally splattering an active camo Spartan with your Warthog will never not be hilarious.
dude i noticed this the first time i watched it after uploading still annoys me so much hahah i rewatched it a million times before publishing and showed friends and no one cought it it wouldn't be so bad if not for the fact that i copied that same text all throughout the video, oh well, because of the font i hope not many people realized it
No offence meant, just as constructive criticism; I found this video difficult to watch and your points difficult to understand, largely, I think, due to the amount of editing the video has. Watching it I felt like at some points editing was done for the sake of having lots of editing, rather than to improve the pacing or watchability or information provided by the video. He's another video for comparison: ua-cam.com/video/es17FTuMipU/v-deo.html This video has maybe one editing effect every five minutes or so, but I found it very enjoyable to watch and very easy to understand because all of the edits it did have were very deliberate, each with a distinct purpose in mind. I think it would be a useful exercise when you make a video to go through each of your editing effects one by one and ask yourself what purpose each of them serves in the video, and consider removing the ones that don't serve any purpose. I'm personally much more likely to finish a video that's easy to watch with few edits rather than one that has tons of edits and feels somewhat confused.
Phantom from dirty bomb. It is 100% possible to pinpoint his exact location with audio only. And He's probably the most fun character of any game I've played with "invisibility mechanics"
One game I would have mentioned is Splatoon. Since everyone has effective invisibility, the game was balanced around it. Swimming in your ink is not only a useful stealth tool, but also a mobility tool, allowing you to move faster and climb up walls. It does break 2 of your rules, those being instant invis and no time limit, but the game balances the feature in other ways, the most important being you can only swim in your own ink. This means your invisibility can be easily taken away just by shooting the ground, and since everyone WILL be doing that, your cover can easily be blown. It creates some interesting mind games between the two teams. There is an ability, Ninja Squid, which removes the ripples you make when swimming, but it also comes at the cost of a slower swim speed, so it remains balanced.
They had to sepfically nerf speed ups when used in conjunction to Ninja Squid because of how important the speed decrease was in its balance.
I wish I saw this before writing my massive paragraph on ninja squid.
@@Left4Cake to be fair, you have to sacrifice a large chunk of your ability slots just to even out a ninja squid's speed.
@@insignificantduck313 True but, it defently feel into "Overused" territory befor the nerf. Not like unbeatable or OP to the point of breaking anything but defiantly above the power curb.
there's some parts of the map that either don't allow you to ink it (aka you can't hide there) or make you phase trough (grates and such), forcing the player to looks if they're on a safe spot to hide, wich IMO sometimes makes kinda tricky to find safe spots with ease or so they don't catch you when trying to do it.
I think sombra's infinite invis makes more sense when you think about how she differs from most other invis characters. She has no high burst damage ambush combo/stun/backstab, so along with her tp it's a very different playstyle of being hard to pin down, annoying, and supportive of teammates with hack, but rarely an anxiety-inducing lethal threat to any but the weakest support hero.
Sombra is a pest, she'll show up do some damage and piss off and her real effect is her hack which sets up other teammates to more easily take you out. However back when I was a zen main there was no being more terrifying than a sombra
@@SkunkfapGaming Yeah sombra used to be a lot more powerful, now she's really situational and requires a good team
I support this argument. At least in her OW1 form, she was perfectly balanced to be an intel-based hero with good survivability & the ability to hack or deal small bits of damage at key moments. And that was important, because her lack of burst DPS kept her from nuking anybody without help.
Her passive does make her threatening in certain situations, allowing her to show up and randomly pick off low health enemies without too much issue, but I mostly agree that she's a balanced but annoying character
@@SkunkfapGaming what about a doomfist?
Splatoon has a really fun take on this.
Everyone has the ability to essentially go invisible, from fast frontlines to backline snipers and support. Not only that, the invisibility mode also heals you, replenishes your ammo and lets you move faster than you can on foot (usually with subtile ripples but with a certain ability- not even that), the only thing you can't do is shoot, and that is only a single press of the trigger and 4 frames away, with little to no cooldown when you're done with it (even the slowest weapons in the game still take less than a second to unsquid- fire- squid, fastest shooters can do that 5 times a second if they wish to).
You would think that it would be frustrating to have an ability that strong even if it is universal, but it isn't because of the game's turf mechanics- you can only get those buffs on your territory. You get an invisible opponent, but his positioning is limited, and if you played your cards right, that limitation usually means they can't be behind you. If they attempt to get behind you, they essentially lose their invisibility, because while you might not see the player themselves, a suspiciously placed puddle of enemy ink in the sea of yours can only mean one thing- the invisible guy is there. Essentially, you can hide in plain sight better than you can in usual hiding places.
Splatoon is one of the most interesting games I haven't played yet and intend to try. It's always awesome to see interesting, different, yet balanced mechanics in games.
This exactly what I was thinking watching this lol
If we're talking about good examples, here's my take on what you totally shouldn't do when designing cloak. Planetside 2 has an infiltrator class with a long range weaponry available by default, and cloak with 8 seconds by default. While map is immense, and there's crap ton of hiding points literally anywhere, it's really easy to hide in pain sight and get 10-15 cheeky kills before somebody finally decides to go after you. Yet another reason to hate Amerish even more, with those giant ass trees, people get int planes and then stay invisible on giant trees for hours, while leafs quite literally make it impossible to find out exact location. It's possible to unlock smgs and other cqc weapons, but you will be playing spy at this point
@@dannadx3840 Ikr?! It was so fucking frustrating when myself and a whole fucking army were making a push on Amerish and those GIANT FUCKING TREES-
SOMEONE GOT A FUCKING SUNDY UP IN ONE! HOW?! AAAAA!
only problem is splatoon is terrible
4:34 the cloak and dagger is actually a very good sidegrade for the stock watch if used properly. And by used properly I mean, not standing in one place for 20 minutes. It's good for timing your decloaks, which is actually a very strong ability. And the l'etranger almost completely negates its downsides. It should ideally be used similarly to the invis watch and not as the _super sneakily crouching from point a to point b for an hour_ watch.
Exactly. It hinders your ability to move while invisible while giving you greater control over when you go invisible.
It’s made for a more defensive, communication oriented play-style.
yeah, it's part of the reason why it's used a lot more in competitive lobbies.
For example, one time that I feel the cloak and dagger may be superior is when you just got off a backstab and are trying to hide from the enemy team as you are trapped in a room with no real way out. With the default watch, you're on a time limit to escape or else be detected, while with the cloak and dagger it gives you some breathing room so you can hide in a corner for a while even if you get reduced movement
Its very similiar to wraith's power in dead by daylight.
It’s balanced. A good player isn’t effectively countered by spy but a good spy will still catch him out every so often during the heat of combat. I feel the tf2 devs did a decent job balancing spy in the base game of tf2. All the other gimmicks are still not OP. Especially the dead ringer nowadays lol
so, you could say that bad players... got caught lacking 💵💵😎😎drip
I feel like it works more in tf2 since the game is based around playing objectives and the spy isn't very good at that past thinning out numbers and supporting pushes.
i don't fucking use dead ringer no more, well - i rarely do when i lean into disguise play a lot and need an escape button
I just wish he was a tiny bit faster
The main issue with the dead ringer rn is becuase you use it once and you have to sit there and wait, like nobody gonna sit in a corner for 30 seconds to recharge the dead ringer. the invei/cloak and dagger is just way better.
I'm not sure if this is relevant, but in League there's a difference between invisible and camouflage, both of them are in the game. The difference is that with Camo you're actually revealed-ish when you're within a certain range of champions, towers, or wards. And invisibility.... Is invisibility. They both have the things you've mentioned already, getting hit reveals you, and there is an indicator when you got invis, and there's also Sound. So yeah
Also league has those "someone who you cant see is nearby" indicators for certain champs which makes them a lot less annoying to deal with
Notably; Camo tends to be for longer-duration 'roaming' invis, and invis is for short-duration in-combat invis.
and invisibility is usually a lot more limited than camouflage, either in terms of how/where you can use it, or in terms of for how long you can use it.
take akali's twilight shroud for example, she becomes invisible for like, 7 seconds, BUT she is only invisible when inside her shroud and the moment she gets out of it or it disappears, she is instantly visible again
Pyke has kind of a theme sound that changes when he is near you
@@crazybunny1134 and sharks
Never change ur pfp
Glad you respect the finer things in life
PLEASE
@@davidroman252 PLEASE 2
@@theteardrop615 _PLEASE 3????_
@@P-Bean don't turn into oversimplified icon
I'd like to shout out the other TF2; Titanfall 2. There is an invisibility class but the invisibility is near on useless against other pilots, no matter the distance you are pretty obvious. AI opponents however ignore you, and Titans cannot directly see you. This can help balance a very one sided fight as pretty much all Titans can one shot pilots. Titans still have a chance as the cloak isn't instant, glow effects such as jump jets (the thing that lets you double jump) and any batteries you are carrying are still visible, as are your footsteps depending on what sort of ground you are on. You don't shimmer but you opponent gets hit markers and the cloak deactivates during certain actions such as rodeoing a Titan. I know it's a rather different sort of game, but still one worth shouting out I think : )
Titans can see cloaked Pilots, but it's ridiculously hard to see them because their silhouette is completely clear and only slightly pixelated.
The only way I've managed to catch cloaked Pilots is:
guessing where they are
seeing the odd lighting of the silhouette
seeing the flicker
electric smoke
The invisibility is by no means useless against other pilots, and I’m tired of people pretending it is. While sure, it’s relatively easy to spot, that split second it takes to realize it’s a cloaked pilot is often all the time they need to gain the advantage.
@@henryrothert6160
the amount of times ive died because i didnt realise a cloaked pilot was there and they got the jump on me
Kinda wish you brought up titanfall cloak as well- having the invisibility function differently vs different types of enemies is also pretty cool, with pilots seeing a shimmer (basically the active camo), but Titans not seeing anything at all.
damn i wish i did too after looking it up
The titans and pilots will still see jump jets firing and even while on the ground if you have a battery titans can see it’s glow
@@KnightandDay33 it’s also decent for sniper play styles if you don’t have the greatest aim
Titanfall 1 it was decent
@@KnightandDay33 it makes it so you can become a camping pick class in a movement shooter, doing it with kraber is funny
But I don’t do it often because it kinda goes against the point of TF|2
You are not completely wrong about mobas, but there is a "sneaking around" aspect that you missed. I play heroes of the storm and perhaps the most important use of invisibility in that game is that it removes your marker from the minimap. In mobas map awareness is key, and denying the opposing team the ability to track your position on the minimap can help you immensely.
oooh, thanks a lot for that
i honestly had no idea about how important tracking in the minimap was but that totally makes a ton of sense
Sneaking around is not always applicable, as some enemies will put detectors around to find where the sneaks are
Also in Heroes, stealth characters are very clearly shimmered unless they stand still for a few seconds, where they become invisible, so honestly the mechanic is just a “Can’t be targeted” in most situations.
in mobas specifically vision is already extremely limited, not like you can see where every enemy is on the map just because your player models line up, you need to be close enough first.
Well in Dota you can get map vision from skills or from placing wards (which are basically mandatory) so it does play into that a lot I think.
Balancing invisibility in Paladins is really weird because of the existence of illuminate. It feels like a less extreme version of the razorback, screwing over a specific ability. Also you bring up Sha Lin and Skye but I personally think Seris' invisibility is more controversial due to it making her invisible and invincible, with no visual cues.
Good point.
There are actually only 4 examples of invisibility in the whole game,
I don't play too much paladins but I never personally found Seris' invis to be that annoying, but yeah it is an example of adding no clues at all.
Skye's invis is the most annoying for me. Especially as a tank. But then again there is Raum. (Just run at the smokebomb)
Strix ended up being the most annoying one due to the fact that he's a sniper.
Skye is the most annoying Champion in Paladins for me.
Yeah, let's give Full Invis to the Champion with a bloody Machine Gun and a fucking nuclear bomb as her Ult
I think Seris would fall under the ghost category that he said he'd not talk about here.
Another thing to note: how many, and how effective, are the countermeasures against invisibility?
For example, the Spy's shimmer by itself is a good downside, but there needs to be weapons that can capitalize on the shimmer. If everyone had slow firing weapons, then the shimmer would be overall less effective. By having rapid fire weapons, the player has an opportunity to extend the duration of the shimmer.
Then there are specific counters. The Pyro's flamethrower sets the Spy on fire for a good while, revealing him to everyone. Jarate and Mad Milk do the same, but slightly less effectively.
In Dota 2, there are not a lot of clues that someone is invisible. There often isn't a shimmer, they aren't revealed when taking damage, and sound cues are basically null and void. However, there are two extremely cheap and efficient items that directly counter invisibility: Sentry Wards and Dust. One is a proactive solution that passively reveals hidden units (and also doesn't tell them they are visible) and one is more active item that is used for chasing down invisible units.
Also, the game itself can be built around everyone being invisible. Screencheat is a game where literally everyone is invisible. You have to be able to find and shoot your opponents by looking at their screen. It's a really interesting concept, although I haven't played it myself.
In Dota 2 invisibility's strength directly scales with the amount of brain cells the enemy team possesses.
@@MosheGames yeah, rikimaru has a talent that let's him attack without revealing himself, it's hot garbage unless the other team doesn't use anything to counter invis
@@andrewgreeb916 riki has a talent that lets him attack while invis?i call that bs
Unless it's a recent addition to his talents,you might just be confusing the talents tree with one of his abilities that makes him disappear while attack one random target in a very specific area.
@@razumikhim lvl 25 talent totally countered by a 80gold item or a support dewarding
@@thiagonet2 Also the talent has been removed a while ago. It was a polarizing option that made the game extremely frustrating at low levels while also being completely worthless at high levels of play. It was replaced with a bigger Smoke Screen AoE, which is actually more irritating.
I really like the Invisibility in Fortress Forever. (It's free on steam, fanmade TF2 because TF2 was taking so long)
When you're running you're somewhat distorted and people can see you if they are looking for you. But you have the option to walk slower and crouch and the slower you walk the harder to see you are. Standing still being completely invisible. And remember, before TF2, spy was able to use a Super Shotgun with 16 shells at a time and a Nailgun.
Also, I'm really confused why Fortress Forever is so dead right now when TF2 is so popular. I figured there would be like one server online per usual but no it's almost completely forgotten somehow. But it's really fun.
people play pickup games on fortress forever but im too shit for them
This invis mechanic reminds me of halos. More specifically halo 3.
fortress forever is dead because it was released one month before the offical tf2 sequel
@@stop4781 I get that but it's been so long since then and with the game being ovverun with the bot crisis and people asking for TF3 you'd think like anyone would give it a chance now.
Thanks for mentioning the game, I just looked it up and it looks quite interesting. Looks to be a little more modern version of Tf:C
As a pyro main, I love invisibility. The simple fact that I can counter this ability naturally has helped me learn where to expect certain classes to go, because a spy will want to avoid certain players’ attention and try to mimic my own allies. Being able to figure out a spy’s pathing plans is super rewarding, even if I’m not perfect at it. :)
As a engy who moves around THANK YOU
And fuck you to
LoL does actually have one character that can use invisibility to "sneak around" - Evelynn. She's almost permanently invisible, so a lot of her gameplay is lurking around the map looking for lone enemies to kill.
It's important to distinguish she is Camoflauged and revealed to enemies when close
@@milkjug4237 "close" people can see you from the enemy side of the river it feels like
Great analysis! I used to work on the gameplay team on LoL, and a lot of your "guidelines" were echoed by the designers.
One notable omission is RTS games. Dark Templars from Starcraft and the Blademaster from WC3, in particular. Dark Templars in Starcraft are in gross violation of the "attacking removes invisibility" rule. Blademaster was given this extra limitation, but his ability to attack and instantly re-cloak was a major source of frustration that eventually got patched out... ~15 years after release.
Glad to hear that,
funny you mention rts games since I've never really bothered with them until very recently with games like starcraft and AoE series.
The Blademaster harassing my workers was surely an git gud experience, also an reason to build arcane towers
I personally enjoy invisibility, both using it and fighting against it, I find it fun catching a spy that was about to backstab me, saving a teammate from getting backstab, or just hunting one down by predicting their movement, and honestly I never hear them coming, I'm not sure if it something with my sound but I never really hear the uncloaking sound but still avoid getting stabbed by just knowing how a spy thinks and outsmarting someone is always fun, I think that something unique about the spy and invisibility in general, it all about tricking your opponent
If you don't hear it coming you're against a decent spy. Decloaking around a corner mostly blocks the sound.
"Skills always beats luck"
©Sniper
I just get mad/worried when a Spy kills me with the kunai, then he's virtually immortal.
But the worst active cammo I can think of is in Halo 4, if you move without crouching it deactivates, so you either have to stand still on a corner or crouch and try to get somewhere at 1 mph, if you activate it then everything sounds like if you were underwater, in previous Halos you could be invisible until you shot and there was no weird ambience sound changes.
I agree, I hardly use active camo in halo 4.
Then again, that is an armor ability as apposed to a map pickup, so they need to be nerfed because anyone can be invisible at anytime.
@@halosnova1604 Reach had Active Camo that worked well.
I think games like The Stalker or The Hidden from Gmod have good invis mechanics. The invis is faintly detectable, especially when the invis player moves, so the effectiveness largely depends on the environment the players are in. If someone invis moves in a close space with you, it's immediately extremely obvious they're there, and even if they're still you can still pick them out of the background pretty fast. The invis can obscure their presence and exact position for a short delay and throw off the human player's aim for the first few shots, and that's largely how the fight is decided. Open areas by contrast allow more movement for the invis player where they might be more undetected, but also don't have as much cover and can be easily picked off by the human players if they know the invis player is there.
wait, the hidden's on gmod now? what other old sourcemods did they add in?
@@KringleDingle If it was in CS:S it very well might've gotten a gmod port. Zombie Survival comes to mind.
The Hidden is more like, your attention snaps to the doorway on the other end of the map. Was that The Hidden, or was that a fucking vents heat shimmer?
You don't know and you're paranoid.
The Hidden has a shimmer like very faint heat shimmer. Thus you can get confused for it. It's both keeping you on alert - "AAH THERE HE IS oh no that's vent heat" - or makes you not alert - Ignoring a shimmer, assuming it's vent heat, then getting stabbed.
Got an amazing idea
Go into tf2 with spies invis sound effect in your soundboard, go into a match and occasionally play the sound and see how many people turn around in fear
I can't speak for League of Legends but there is a 3rd use for invisibility in Dota: information. While risky, often invisible heroes will use their invisibility to find where the enemy heroes are from relative safety. This especially applies to Bounty Hunter, who I believe is the only hero who can use an ability from invisibility and stay invisible. That ability is called Track. Track is on a very low cool down and allows him to mark an enemy, causing them to be visible to Bounty Hunter's team even if invisible or in the fog of war as well as giving Bounty Hunter a speed boost and bonus damage against the target. The target will also give bonus gold to Bounty Hunter and any allies in the area if they die while under the effect. This sounds overpowered and it is very good, but it is balanced by the fact that the enemy gets an indicator on their HUD that they are being tracked and the track can be purged by a basic dispel which is offered by multiple items and abilities. Overall a very balanced invisibility hero. He provides great information and utility but lacks the ability to contribute control during team fights like so many other heroes in his role are able to.
Yes! But fuck Bounty Hunter tho, all bounty players do is steal my hard earned, creep blood soaked gold.
Unlike bounty hunter, rikimaru can cast all his spells from invis without revealing himself and his spell smokescreen is an absolute pain in the neck. He's what I'd say is an example of invisibility done poorly
The wraith from dbd is a perfect example of balanced invisibility with great counterplay
The thing is that it's mainly useful due to the speed boost it gives which is why his "Windstorm" addons that give extra speed while cloaked are considered his best ones
@@javonyounger5107 Well the main reason those are so good is because you can rotate between gens much faster, not really because it makes killing survivors easier
First time I played tf2 back in 2013, I got so freaked out when I played spy for the first time because I couldn't believe the spy could actually become invisible for real unlike other multiplayer games
Great video quality, editing on point and you clearly did a lot of research you’re a criminally underrated channel good work
Mentioning permanent Sombra invis in the "it needs timers" section and not mentioning that it WAS timed in the past
Spy wasn't initially designed with straight-up invisibility in mind. Disguise kits and backstabs were already part of his kit. But when they scrapped smoke grenades, Spy needed a method to be hidden, so they gave him the Invis Watch and tweaked him a bit to fit it.
I think that Dead by Daylight has a pretty interesting spin on the invisibility mechanic when it comes to one of the playable killers, being the Spirit.
Her power allows her to do something called "phase walking", which is an ability which lets her leave her physical body and turn into a sort of ghost, moving at insane speeds, then she can stop phase walking to instantly return to the physical world in where she stands. While she is using this power, she is completely invisible to survivors, and since she leaves her body behind, she gives no indication that she has turned invisible except for the fact that her previous body is standing still. However, the catch is that while she is using this power, survivors will also appear invisible to her, and she can only tell where they are based on how they effect the environment, such as leaving marks in the environment when they sprint, moving objects that they are touching, and also sounds they produce.
I think it's quite an interesting power as both sides technically get invisibility when she uses her power. Unfortunately, it's quite horrendously balanced since survivors have no tell to her general location while using her power, or if she's even using it at all. Since survivors have to try and stay silent whilst she is phase-walking to remain undetected, often the person playing killer can just straight up stand still and survivors will just have to guess that she's currently zooming towards them whilst invisible and that they have to get out of there quietly, at least until they see her body moving again and running straight at them after they already left some safe area they were in.
Still a neat power, but I think that considering the way DBD works, both sides should get a tell of where the other side is.
(they also have the Wraith who is another killer who can turn invisible by going bing bong on his bell he has but that's just basic invisibility really, nothing omega interesting)
Destiny 2 has a good mechanic for this, invisibility is visible but it's flowy and splotchy making it less effective at closer ranges while also removing you from enemy radars (not in destiny 1 tho, that blue color is straight impossible to notice for me)
9:27 Insert, *Perfect movement* Lazypurple reference here
Y E S
In my opinion tf2 perfectly balanced invisibility
You're going to pop up behind someone and stab them, but it's too late until you remember you're using the dead ringer and decloaking sounds like a bass boosted taser
One of the best executed invisibility in a game I've ever seen is the infiltrator in Planetside 2.
Arguable. Up close? Maybe, sure. but cloaking from afar with the sniper is very boring to play against
it's been a while since i played any halo game but i fondly remember that if you go invisible, the radar just adds a lot of "enemy dots", so the enemy knows there's a sneaky guy in the area
"i can never tell if a dead ringer spy is dead or not." once they've either died or feigned their death, look at the top of the screen at the players, and see if a spy is dead on the enemy team. to go into more depth if there is more than one spy, look at the name of the spy you killed in killfeed, and press tab to show the scoreboard, look for the spy's name on the enemy team, and see if they're dead or not.
this strat is really good and can save a mans life if you point out if they've feigned and where they did so to your team.
(also, tommy gun, use it, bhop with it, abuse it, will help agents spies more than you think.)
But is that really "fun"? I'd argue it isn't.
@@MattisticStatistic No, but it definitely puts into question if it should considered as "cloaking with no visual cues"
Or, on the other hand, have such horrible aim so that when they do die I can be sure it was a deadringer because no spy would ever die to me without cloaking
Invisibility is not the same thing as camouflage or “active camouflage” if it was real.
Invisibility means you literally cannot properly be seen by people
Camouflage means you can be seen, but you are wearing something that blends into the environment around you.
The best example of the difference is Chameleons, in most portrayals of chameleons they are able to turn completely invisible, which is not how they work, instead they can change the color of their skin to blend into the background.
I think one of my favorite things about the spy is that he isn't just "statistically worse class with added invisibility", but his strengths are designed to synergize with and complement his invisibility (and to a lesser extent his disguise).
It makes the class far more interesting than if he was just "Yeah he's just a worse scout but you can cloak with him."
"collective 3 hours on league" Oh, so you played 2 games and the tutorial
when you go “invisible” in terraria it’s practically worthless, it actually doesn’t even work except in multiplayer, but in multiplayer it makes it so enemies and bosses are less likely to target you (which I guess is helpful if you can’t take hits)
Yeah it's really helpful for ranged and magic builds to have invis potions during bossfights so the melee build with the best armour can aggro the boss
I love the way invisibility is used in SCP secret lab
New pb let's goooooo
Good job you are the 1st comment and are not one of the people who try to be first
your videos are literally crazy bruh this is like the third time uve come up in my recommended and i enjoyed it every single time
I feel like spy is fun to play to the point that removing him would hurt the game more than it would help it. Like spy is purely annoying when you're a different class but since he's underpowered it's only ever just annoying and not game-ruining. Meanwhile spy has one of the most unique playstyles of any fps class and imo is one of the best executions of the invis mechanic.
Like in mobas like league, none of the characters who can turn invis are really centered around invis, it's mostly just an ambush or escape mechanic like you said. But for spy his invis is the core of his kit.
Honestly; I agree with this video almost entirely. The only thing I can say is that at 10:23 you say it's hard to tell when a spy is dead or not. There are two ways (I've found) to tell if a spy dr'd or not. Firstly is looking at their team next to the timer (forgot the term for it), if they spy dead ringered, they wont appear dead on there. Second is if tthey're using a killstreak weapon and have a killstreak, their killstreak will still be present if you hold tab.
Also calling C&D annoying. Its decloak is louder than stock's and makes the spy slower. How's this weapon annoying?
Still surprised you aren’t a top tf-tuber
Both league and dota have allowed you to attack while invis at one point. I used to troll new players in league in 2010-2012 by purchasing multiple sunfire capes, an item that radiates damage in an area around your character(evelynn or twitch) and just follow them while they somewhat slowly cooked alive. Dota's hero "riki" at max level can choose a talent that allows him to remain invisible while attacking enemies from behind, but becomes visible if he ever attacks from the front.
Oh, another fun one for league. The champion mordekaiser used to have a spell called creeping death that he could cast on any non-building friendly unit or ward. Wards were permanently invisible. I used to build mordekaiser as a caster to beef up his creeping death's damage aura buff spell to decent damage levels and chuck out wards whereever there would be a fight, then poke with this invisible damage radiation on my wards.
in league invisibility is also pretty useless for the purpose of sneaking around, because there is an item that drops a ward that reveals stealthed units and it costs 75 gold (granted you can only have one down at any time and two in your inventory, but there are only so many places where it matters), for context killing a minion gives you roughly 20 gold and in a minion wave there is 6 of the bastards.
The rest of the message is now for people crying about invisibility in league, most of you are in Bronze and never buy control wards, buy two, put one in the place you would normally and then when fighting something like, Pyke, Evelynn, Twitch ect. put one down and they are fucked, don't say the champ is unbalanced when you are not utilizing all of your tools correctly.
Found the stealth main
League definitely has a lot of tools to help with counter play both on a macro level (ex., map awareness, warding, and red trinket) and micro level (basically everything outside of AAs being a skillshot nowadays, some even with revealing properties). But when things break the established rules of gameplay, and I 100% am referring to the initial Akali rework (tldr for those who didn’t play, allied structures which normally reveal invisibility did not reveal Akali’s invisibility - pretty sure it ran deeper but I also stopped playing for a while after the fact), there’s definitely cause for being frustrated.
Not so much on sneaking around since there’s literally a map in the bottom corner of the screen, but in a fight? I still hate the champion for it even though it hasn’t been in her kit for over a year.
@@BG-3496 oh yeah old akali is an exception, fuck old akali, anyone who defended the design decision needs to be fired, how did no one see issue with that.
shacos q makes him invisible and not camouflaged meaning that red trinkets dont reveal him which is exactly why i hate that little fucker
@@Krugster You get a notifaction for all of those, I admit shaco Q is an oversight on my part but when you get the notifaction they are near you, and you can just pop one down. Also no? You can have 2 control wards in your inventory at any time so you put in river and the other you keep in your inventory for when fighting that champion.
I like Titanfall 2 camo because it's transparency for pilots (normal players) but full invisibility for titans (players in their mech). The fast pace of combat makes them very hard to spot, giving them the first shot most of the time, but whenever they use their double jump, a jet trail gives them away even for titans. However, this can be counteracted with a certain perk. If you stand still, you probably won't be spotted, if you run around pilots might spot you and if you jump around even titans might see you, but a secondary perk can make you even stealthier. Plus, in order to be invisible you have to trade in any of the other tacticals, like speed bost, grappling hook or local wall hax
Good video bud id like to point something out. In league of legends there is invisible and camouflage. Camouflage makes a radius around you that if a player is in will reveal you to them and vision and items will also meanwhile invisibility will make you unable to be seen at all. Also leagues invisibility is more used as a repositioning tool or for preparing to go back into a fight
thanks for the input dude
Take a shot every time he says spy
Hold on, none of the champions in paladins can attack WHILE invisible, attacking instantly removes it and in most situations you won't get it back immediately. The only situations where you DO is when skye is standing in her smoke bomb and during Sha-lin's ultimate. In those cases, you know the small area Skye is standing in, and Sha-lin's is an ultimate ability so it's supposed to be powerful.
And of course there's an item in game which completely negates invisibility all together.
Editing is so clear and the videos itself are so cool to watch, it gains my attention for the whole video. You earned a like and a sub :D
I never realized it until I watched this video, but every single character in Splatoon has invisibility and the whole game seems to be balanced around that fact. Maybe that's why Splatoon is such a frustratingly poor casual experience to me, because it's like every single enemy is a scout + spy hybrid, or a sniper.
Not to say it isn't well balanced around this fact. It's just... stressful.
Excellent video man. Love your essays!
That comes back to the biggest part of Splatoon, map control. You can only be invisible in terrain you control. It plays into what makes Splatoon Splatoon, and not any other shooter.
@@Tom-vx7qh I agree. Many modes in Splatoon specifically play around the design of map control and inking the ground. It's what makes the game fun, at least for me.
I'm at the point where a friend brushed against their couch making the spy's decloak noise, and I legit muscle-memory flicked the finger I use to switch to melee.
Fun fact if you left the game you can go invs immediately
Nobody seem to remember that, so i'm going to do.
In Planetside 2, there's a very good way of balancing cloaking: First, cloaking and de-cloaking make unique sound for each of three sides, which makes it way easier to distinguish allies from enemies. Second, all of three cloak options have downsides, as follows: cloak duration, ability to only use your sidearm or cloak that is way easier to see. And, the most important, the cloak doesn't give you 100% invisibility and it becomes more visible the faster you move, so you can't run into enemies with all guns blazing or hide in plain sight.
Unfortunately, it doesn't balance Infiltrator as a class...
Can't forget you can slap on a flashlight to help with spotting them, as well as being a little useful if you're not familiar with the dark maps.
Average League of Legends Fan vs Average Dota 2 Enjoyer
I can confirm as a medic main that the sound of spies de-cloaking is but ed into my memory as the, "OH SHIT TURN THE HELL AROUND."
i was heavy main for some time, and i gotta admit, when i see a heavy just pushing a cart, while 3 people behind him die, i just gotta ask... how? i learned fast to spy check, and hear decloaking and stabs as heavy
6:14 a game that uses this well is r6s with the operator nøkk, she goes invisible to cameras. But anything she touches moves so if you see random broken stuff on the ground move you know she is there
This is truly so dense npt just in the application of invisibility but the tradeoffs you've gotta make for every ability and weighing that when in design. Very helpful for anyone looking to get into that sorta thing
I highly disagree with the end part about invisibility taking "full focus" to fight and how u cant turn ur brain off and relax, Spy in TF2 is EXTREMELY easy to defeat and not hard to keep track of unless the enemy team has like 3+ spies
I unironically have beat stabby stabby o spy as heavy in highlander b4 like u literally just have to have a pretty basic understanding of how spy works and you can singlehandedly reduce him to a useless player slot on the enemy team
UNLIKE FUCKING SNIPER
"No, you don't understand, sniper is extremely well-balanced because some people have bad aim and this means nuking half of the class roster without charging is not an issue in any way, shape or form, so just git gud."
Spy is very well balanced. Even with how easily Spy can be caught out, patience is the name of the game for him. When you're busy beating a pyro to death or something, that Spy is suddenly right behind you and driving six inches of steel between your spinal discs. Spy, while not the fastest, is in the top three I believe. As someone once said "While you're busy, that's Spy's time to shine." You can't ever multitask with everything, no matter how good you get.
Unlike MOTHERFUCKING SNIPER. You can't EVER catch him out. All the fastest classes capable of closing the distance are one quickscope from death. All the heavier classes that are capable of handling more than one are too slow to close the distance in any meaningful way. Caber, Base jumper, and sticky jumper made for a great counter to Snipers, then Caber apparently got a nerf because the snipers bitched about it. The only other real counter is Spy, but even then they have to go through the entire enemy team without getting caught, and quickscoping and the Razorback counters that. Sniper can be a fun class, and I do enjoy playing him, but the imbalance is immense. Then there's the sheer amount of bullets he can carry in reserve, and he can position anywhere for 25 quickscopes.
@@maxwellsterling just flank lol
@@cinemalazare4850 engineer
@@thatguythere6161 spy sucks at destroying buildings if the engineer has any type of shotgun, and as sniper u can kill the engi in 1 shot and the engi most of the time can't do anything about it, and theres 100% chance a soldier or demo are in ur team and are gonna blast the engis buildings
Damn, for such a small channel this vid looks suuupee high effort. Take my sub good man
Titanfall 2 cloak is pretty useless, but I think it is more from the speed of the game rather than the invisibility being bad. The invisibility is actually pretty well implemented, it is only somewhat effective against pilots and doesn’t work well in dark areas as well as having a slight humming sound and full footstep audio, but when placed against a brighter light source (say the sun/bright ambient light) it becomes essentially impossible to see. The user also still has these little fire jets whenever they jump unless you pick a specific “Kit” (perk). When you shoot you instantly lose cloak and it goes on full cool down (which I think it should just start cooling down from wherever it was in its duration instead). It’s real use is against titans, as seeing them in a titan is really REALLY hard, and it the only way to get them is using your built up game knowledge.
All that would be great except for the fact everyone can move so fast you don’t get to catch other players completely off guard, and catching up to players/competing with their movement options makes it’s completely useless unless you have the jump on a player in near point blank range. The speed of the game is what makes it my favorite FPS, but cloak players really get shafted and basically end up using it to camp with OP long range guns so you can’t spot them in their camping spot until they are shooting at you.
I've not used cloak that often, but I recall making a cqc rodeo loadout for the cloak ability. Only made it so I can somehow support my teammates titans since I just generally suck at the game.
Can't remember the exact loadout but I think it was EVA8 shotgun, whatever the semi auto pistol was, firestar (I throw it on the titans face as I run to help prevent them tracking me as I cloak) and the kit to remove jump trails. I do this because I don't get many kills in a round and would rather help keep the better player(s) alive.
this entire comment section is full of hardcore essay writers
wouldn't want it any other way to be honest
Splatoon best game
The invisibility for the infiltrator class in MGS5 online is genuinely worthless because you leave shimmers when you move and skillful players instantly know when a pixel on the opposite side of the map looks weird, headshotting you immediately.
Fun fact: Halo CE's flashlight is helpful to find invisible enemies in both campaign and multiplayer. Even when highlighted, the cloaked target can slip out of your light and reposition. There's also a battery on the light as well as the cloak, so things get tense when you keep that on for too long.
So, for the Moba thing, you're mostly right. I only have experience with DOTA, and so I can't speak for all Mobas, but it's mostly like that. With that being said, there is some utility with being able to invis around the map to put wards (basically little spy cameras) down in cheeky spots. Not much, but it's there.
This was a awesome video! Nice job man
Are uh, are you gonna give a reason as to why Sombra needs invisibility to have a timer?
No?
Okay then.
He sort of did, the reason is that it’s annoying, and it fucking is, it’s really annoying to have to focus a good portion of your time on trying to find where she is with infinite cloak.
@@gardevoid8412 but with Sombra you don't need to know where she's at when she's invisible, you only need to care about her when she appears because that gives you an incredibly good window to kill her. When she was first released her invisibility was on a timer, but it was very weak.
@@gardevoid8412 so what's your verdict on my response?
@@gardevoid8412 coward
I saw the video title and immediately thought of Neotokyo, really surprised to see it actually mentioned here
3:40 at the time that looked like such an epic play but looking at it back now holy shit that's scripted as fuck
6:43 as someone who likes to play engineer, this SINGLE sound effect activates my fight or flight
15:00 I actually hate sniper more spy is actually big risk and big reward but sniper he just in the back without any real threat other then another sniper
Alternate title: my favourite class is the spy, thanks! And have fun.
but... hes heavy main?
It’s key to note that you made the poll on Scrap.tf a nearly all TF2 based website. The users will be more exposed to TF2’s more friendly invisibility instead of invisibility in video games generally. The poll information would then be pretty biased. Otherwise good video :)
This is a good point, thanks
@@P-Bean no worries, the video was very enjoyable and informative, a minor slip up is no biggie. it’s quite evident how much effort you put into making the video, you have my full support! keep it up :)
“Spy can’t attack when invisible” laughs in 2007 tf2
the good ol days huh?
10:22 a couple ways to tell if a spy is really dead:
The ammo box he drops on dead ringing doesn’t actually give you any ammo
The thing at the top of the screen that shows your team and what enemies are dead doesn’t show a spy as dead (really easy once you get used to it)
Footsteps (but you mentioned that already and it’s hard to do)
I thought that Siren's phasewalk in Borderlands slowed down time to a halt, because the AI just has the enemies stop moving, as they can't see you, and have no alert idle actions.
oh pls tell me more about paladins dose not having 5 things to shut you down on tdm
i remember when i used to play rainbow six siege there was an invis bug that also gave players godmode but because of how good the sound in that game is in the kill cams i could see if he hadn't been god mode i would have still won against his invisibility
My favorite take on invisibility in a multiplayer game by far is World of Warcraft, specifically the Rogue class.
Rogues in WoW can go invisible at any time out of combat and stay invisible for as long as they want. Taking any damage or performing almost any action while invisible will pull the Rogue out of invisibility automatically, but there are also special abilities Rogues can do only while invisible, such as a silencing ability or a four second stun.
The thing is, this take on invis doesn't have a time limit, has only a single quiet audio queue, usually doesn't have a visual queue, AND allows the Rogue to attack from invisibility, so why is this a good take?
The reason is that Rogue can't go invisible while in combat (with the exception of the Vanish ability, but it has a 2 minute cooldown). Because the Rogue can only go invisible outside of combat, the fun for the Rogue player is derived from downing opponents fast enough to take as much advantage of your invisibility as possible for the next fight. The fun for the opponent is aiming to exhaust the Rogue's resources and out damaging them.
WoW's Rogue class only accounts for 1/5 of your guidelines for invis in multiplayer games, but it's still the most fun imo.
It's worth noting some classes have abilities that counter Rogue's invisibility in one way or another so there's good outplay potential on both sides.
WoW's Rogue only becomes broken when it's killing you way too fast.
Pyro's have no such weakness(Spy checking the hell out of people)Screams internally
Honestly Sha Lin isn’t that hard to track because he usually leaves mirages of where he was, so the area where he could be is usually limited around the mirage he left.
Skye makes a really loud sound when she breaks her invisibility, too. And she’s considered one of the worst flanks because she’s quite easy to track, doesn’t have any mobility skills and illuminate counters her kit.
And also because illuminate exists, if someone thinks his invisibility is too oppressive they just have to buy it.
They took away mirages awhile ago I'm pretty sure
6:45 I turned around IRL so fast I bonked my head on my bed and now I have a headache
IMO the dead ringer is balanced by its sound. It's loud as hell, you know there's a dead ringer, or any team mate near knows its a deadringer and can tell that information ot the team. Since the DR can't use ammo packs, if you hear a spy DR ing, you pretty much have the kill free.
But the spy that deadringers gets a speed boost and a damage resistance. They can just run half across the map for basically for free
@@M4x_P0w3r and being worthless for like what, 8-15sec to use your cloak again, that loud ass decloak sound is a huge que for you to get him, and even if he escaped he need to play very carefully since he is just a walking stickman with below 125hp depend on his knife loadout
@@tonylin2 Well, I would say that the 8 to 15 is not that bad compared to just dying and waiting for respawn. Although it actually is 10 -20 to recharge, but even then, a good spy doesn't only rely on invisibility.
You can use the speed boost to run towards the nearest health kid or in fact away from it to trick whoever's chasing you. It's loud, but loudness doesn't mean shit if no one's nearby to hear it.
Plus, if you use this with the kunai you become much more durable, between the 200hp overheal and the 75 - 65% damage resistance
PBean: plays spy decloak sound
me(an engineer main):DAMN SPYS SAPPIN MA SENTRY
Holup
I already commented
I already watched the video once
Jee i have crap memory
haven't watched the video all the way, but planetside does a great job with invis imo.
Then again, I last played it a long while ago and haven't even touched implants. But it was good then, right when and a while after the dark light was released.
better tf2 does a good job with cloak too.
(titanfall)
In my own personal opinion, Spy gets given too much unwarranted hate regarding his invisibility. Most classes have ways to spot you out: Scout's Mad Milk, Sniper's Jarate, Heavy's Minigun spread, weapons with bleed effects, literally everything on Pyro; then there's bumping, mindless spam, a plethora of audio cues, practically being stripped of using voice chat; and let's not forget the terribly heavy cooldown you get between wearing the invisibility off and being able to take any action. The only thing keeping you from stopping being backstabbed, is either your lack of awareness, or the fact that you still insist on melee-dueling the Spy when we already know how messy the hitboxes are.
You know potions of invisibility don't work on enemies if you're wearing armor, right?
UhOhslater jump scare did not expect that
I really like invisibility in starcraft 2.
The trichotomy of the races with the different ways to attain detection(a slightly expensive unit that is invisible its self, an upgrade to an already necessary and vulnerable but also normally semi expendable unit and one can use a time regenerating resource for temporary detection ANYWHERE but difficult permanent detection), and
The different types of invisibility available(forever invisibility on two units one melee one non combat, invisibility that uses a per unit resource that is gained over time and starts low andBurrowing which has a different visual que and requires an upgrade to use and/or move during.)
This makes for 9 different
Invisibility/Detection dynamics, unfortunately not all of them are interesting. 😕
If there’s a constant visual cue, there are going to be players that can see that just as well as if you weren’t invisible.
im curious if you ever played halo? from my experiance, the active camo is pretty tough in specific situations, if your focusing some one, or doing something specific, it can be hard to see the translucent blob running by, and is almost impossible to spot next to rocks
@@bugsmith9751 I haven't, but I just wrote that because I never succeed at sneaking around, I'm spotted even if I'm 80% hidden, mostly camouflaged, and a quarter of the way across the map.
I’m going to correct you when you said you can’t tell if a dead ringer spy is dead or not. You always can. The dead body drops their weapon which I believe is now is changed to an ammo box, I don’t play TF2 anymore, and you can pick it up. If your ammo doesn’t increase, that means he’s alive. If you picked up the ammo and you got ammo then you confirmed he died. That is all.
they do not drop ammo if they feign, they do drop ammo if they die.
@@sire6265 Well previously they did drop ammo in some form but if what you said is true then that’s also a way to confirm a dead ringer spy kill. Dead ringer was pretty busted before they nerfed it. I remember when it used to let you survive backstabs and full charged headshots lol or when set bonuses were still in the game and you could use that one set with the fez hat to make your decloak sounds nearly impossible to hear with the only downside being you were stuck with Your Eternal Reward as your knife. Good times
@@tonyngo1885 yeah, the past was hell.
well put together video, very concise and stylistic, felt very pollished. also your outro is a banger
tbh ive never thought spies were the most annoying class to get killed by; getting sniped is equally jarring/surprising, and feels more stressful then a backstab because there's the risk of the sniper's sight line hanging over you. knowing there's a spy harassing the team makes me feel like an on the fly detective trying to hunt him down.
The Hidden is a good example of an entire game built around competitive invisibility.
Paladins' characters with invisibility aren't overpowered. If one really bothers you one would usually buy the Iluminate card. Also, they can be normally seen from up close and most of the limitations you said about good stealth characters apply to them.
Yeah, whenever I have issues with invisibility on a character in Paladins, taking illuminate makes it so easy to find and shred through them, and the majority just don't seem to realize what's going on or how to adjust their playstyle
Unintended side-effect: invisibility is the funniest thing in multiplayer games. Accidentally dropping a random spy you had no idea was in your way or accidentally splattering an active camo Spartan with your Warthog will never not be hilarious.
"Ignoring my typo that scrap dot tf didn't let me fix"
[Entire video includes 'Mechanis']
dude i noticed this the first time i watched it after uploading
still annoys me so much hahah
i rewatched it a million times before publishing and showed friends and no one cought it
it wouldn't be so bad if not for the fact that i copied that same text all throughout the video,
oh well,
because of the font i hope not many people realized it
The word that I usually hear get thrown around for "invisibility with constant shimmer" is usually either "partial invisibility" or "predator cloak"
No offence meant, just as constructive criticism;
I found this video difficult to watch and your points difficult to understand, largely, I think, due to the amount of editing the video has.
Watching it I felt like at some points editing was done for the sake of having lots of editing, rather than to improve the pacing or watchability or information provided by the video.
He's another video for comparison:
ua-cam.com/video/es17FTuMipU/v-deo.html
This video has maybe one editing effect every five minutes or so, but I found it very enjoyable to watch and very easy to understand because all of the edits it did have were very deliberate, each with a distinct purpose in mind.
I think it would be a useful exercise when you make a video to go through each of your editing effects one by one and ask yourself what purpose each of them serves in the video, and consider removing the ones that don't serve any purpose.
I'm personally much more likely to finish a video that's easy to watch with few edits rather than one that has tons of edits and feels somewhat confused.
good advice,
my editing style has adapted to be really hard to watch for some people,
I'll try and tone it down
Phantom from dirty bomb.
It is 100% possible to pinpoint his exact location with audio only. And He's probably the most fun character of any game I've played with "invisibility mechanics"