Check out Displate's Collector’s Fest sale! Get 1-2 Displates for 32% off and 3+ for 38% off! (Discount automatically applied at checkout): www.displate.com/weezytf2 or use my code WEEZYTF2. Valid until November 24th! Apologies for the long wait, been working on my longest video ever for the past month, will be out in a couple weeks so keep an eye out.
Do you see banana man Hopping over on the white-hot sand Here he come with some for me Freshly taken from banana tree (one, two, three, four) Banana man, me want a ton Gimme double and a bonus one Gimme more for all me friends This banana flow will never end Do you want a banana? Peel it down and go, mm-mm-mm-mm Do you want a banana? This banana for you Tonight, we dance around the flame Then we get to play spirit game Spirit names, we shout out loud Shake the thunder from the spirit cloud All the songbirds in the tree Chant a tune to let the spirits free Then we see them in the night Spirits jumping by fire light Do you want a banana? (Do you want a banana?) Peel it down and go, mm-mm-mm-mm Do you want a banana? (Do you want a banana?) This banana for you Look you, you too uptight, you know You could laugh and kick it back and go (wee!) But without a rhythm or a rhyme You do not banana all the time Fly away from city on the run Try to make a little fun Look you, come to the bungalow African't you tell me told you so Don't you love the bumping of the drum? Make you shake until the bum go numb Let de bongo play you 'til you drop This banana never stop (never stop, never stop) Forget all your troubles and go with the flow Forget about whatever you may never know Like whether whatever you are doing is whatever you should And whether anything you do is ever any good And then forget about banana when it stick in your throat And when it make you wanna bellow, but you stuck in a choke And forget about the yellow from the beckoning man Who make you take another one and make a mock of your plan Bungalay, bungalow Make up your mind and tell me no (Shh) Well, it's nine o'clock, and it's getting dark And the sun is falling from the sky I've never left so early, and you may wonder why Tomorrow morning on the plane No banana make you go insane Floating back to busy town No banana make you want to frown Do you want a banana? (Do you want a banana) Peel it down and go, mm-mm-mm-mm Do you want a banana? This banana for... you
I have met one good MvM Spy player. Dude was baked out of his mind and cracked even more than that at the game. Everyone knew he was the best player on the team and that's saying something when we had a pretty high tour scout and well traveled medic too.
@@pogobod2128worst but not that really kinda worst for me as there are certain missions that involves him being the only class to almostly carry the team up to victory. Well, Engie and other classes can carry everyone, yes. But, not every wave of missions can be carried with simply those set of classes only. Spy would be the "optional" kind of class for me as it depends on the mission wave
It's kind of crazy how you'll get that one stoner playing the backstabbing character that is an absolute god. I once met a good friend I still have who played Shaco like a god stoned out of his mind
Spy is actually quite useful in MVM, this one time some guy joined and picked Medic which I had already picked and he refused to swap so I switched to Spy and it made him disconnect so I could play Medic.
Real gigamedics heal the spy while he's stabbing the giants to aggromaxx the giants towards the medic, while he has his shield or uber canteen in effect and to avoid any damage on the medic and makes every boss on the official valve missions a fucking joke insteead of a threat
I guess one thing that isn't mentioned is that, for every other class, if you're generally experienced, those skills will most likely translate to MVM, just shoot the robots instead of other people. For spy, his skillset does not translate AT ALL. One of the most important aspects of playing spy effectively is learning how enemies react, move around, shoot, and generally behave, both at a macro and micro level. 90% of the work when stabbing is developing a strong intuition for predicting enemy movement, for both backstabs & trickstabs, but in MVM, the robots just lock on to you, with smoothing & a small delay. Learning how to stab bots is completely different to stabbing players, so you need to play in a completely different way in order to be effective.
Yep. In PvP you need to either learn trickstabbing techniques of luring a guy over to you so you can stab them or jumping over them OR learning to get effective with disguise and cloak use to fool distracted enemies. Neither applies here. Trickstabbing a single small robot is nearly useless and robots are 100% fooled by disguises even if you come out of nowhere. In MvM, you need to predict robot AI, and you need to learn to circle strafe stab giant robots over and over for maximum DPS. See Underscore gaming's guide on how to do this effectively. It's actually pretty fun getting the hang of it.
Not to mention the fact that in pvp if you backstab one of the 6 enemies they definitly die no questions asked, in mvm if you stab one of the hundreds of enemies they PROBABLY die, depending on which one it is I know this is just a rephrasing in far less words of what he said in the video but i believe it paints a far easier to process picture of how far removed his viability is in mvm vs regular casual matches
Basically the class based around mind games is utterly terrible against beings who are too stupid to even be lured into an obvious trap that is not within the straight like they usually walk into. Demo makes traps because they know the robots will always follow the same pattern but Spy cannot use mind games succesfully.
What I think would make the spy viable is just "sapper spreads to nearby robots" as an upgrade. It would make the long cooldown more bearable since robots infect each other by walking near one another, making giants giant towers of disables for small robots. In alot of your clips, you can see the sapper being placed and not affecting even half of the robots directly in front of you. Also I would add Red Tape Recorder makes the robots walk backwards and take damage, at the cost of not being disabled.
I like the idea of give the sapper more utility. I want the sapper to have slowing or stopping effects on the tank (I think it would be cool if it also did chip damage too).
So change "Sapper power" so that the second tick causes the sapper to infect robots that pass by robots that have been sapped and then make the third tick introduce an explosion. Got it.
just as a fun fact: robots stunned by the sapper can be backstabbed from all sides. I saw a lot of clips where you tried to backstab a stunned robot, when you could’ve just stabbed them in the face. (Also, this effect applies to the Mannhattan gate stun, too)
My suggestion for Spy: a "Robot Camo" Upgrade that basically lengthens the time it takes robots to notice you after becoming undisguised. Would allow for longer chainstab sprees and also free up his crowd clearing by not having it be strictly tied to the Sapper.
I feel like that would make YER a lot more fun as while it wouldn't be as good vs giants it would make you basicly untouchable by Small Robots as you'd bever be undisguised long enough for them to spot you. Which to be fair: You picked the knife that is about disguise. You SHOULD be good at it.
@@ikiry0830i mean with the YER, there is still quite a delay before the disguise turns on Maybe give the YER a 'disguise delay' upgrade that allows your backstab-disguises to become instantaneous
The summary of this video: • Sniper performs Spy's role, but better. • Spy has mediocre crowd control. • Bots automatically and quickly detect him. • Spy can only be effective against giants if they're alone and have no obstruction in the way. • Spy is actually the worst at tank-busting.
1. Sniper and Spy have very different roles in MvM, those being crowd control and giant damage respectively. Sniper does have good giant damage for sure, but nowhere near the level of Spy. 2. This is true to an extent, but it's to balance out his high single-target burst damage. Spy can generally still get a few chainstabs in a group without getting caught out. In parts of the wave with only small bots, Spy should generally go after the most valuable targets, as in PvP. Small Heavy bots especially are easy for the Spy to stab and strafe around, and are also valuable picks for the team. 3. If this wasn't the case, Spy would be op as all hell. This means you actually have to learn how robot aggro works and how to strafe, duke out and dodge attacks properly. This isn't a bad thing, it just requires practice and experience to get right, more so than most players expect. 4. This is flat out wrong. At worst, Spy can deal nearly 2000 damage to a giant before being locked onto, assuming max Armor Pen. That's over a third of every non-boss giant's health in the game. With practice however, even with surrounding robots, third, fourth and even fifth stabs become possible as long as you keep your circle strafes tight to minimise the chances of running into obstructions. And even if you get stuck, so what? Just pop DR, disguise and go right back in. It only takes ~5s for you to do this. Again, practice is key here. 5. Yes, this is mostly true. As the game progresses, Spy's upgrades do nothing to upgrade his tank dps, which is at odds to basically every other class, making him clearly the worst choice. You can mitigate this somewhat by upgrading your revolver of choice, but this should only be done when you have heaps of extra money, and only after your knife and movement speed are at full power. However, in the early game (i.e. Waves 1 and 2), Spy isn't horrible against tanks, mostly due to the Revolver's fast firing speed, high clip size and the ability to quickly reload all of your shots. Unfortunately, as previously mentioned, Spy does not tend to upgrade his gun very often, so the money you spend over the course of the mission doesn't scale well with tank damage. This is the one area where I think Spy could use a slight buff. If Armor Penetration also increased tank damage alongside giant damage, that would be an acceptable change. Not entirely sure on how much the knife's damage should be increased by though (maybe 40 per tick)?
@@DaniZeAlmightyonly the mini gun damage,his melee is still deal full damage which is where warrior spirit + buffalo streak shines same way sniper does with carbine + bushwacka
Honestly, I think being able to sap the tank would be a good addition. Add it to the sapper upgrade, or ad its own upgrade to the sapper where the tank takes 5% more damage, and moves 5% slow for each upgrade up to 15% for each. That way it helps the team out with tanks a bit faster.
And ideally not make it too expensive because the sapper still needs you to get in melee range to apply and I doubt you can stack multiple sappers on the same tank (as hilarious as that would be)
I like this idea a lot. Naturally, if competent teams do fine with tanks now, they probably wouldn’t get too much from the sapper slow, but it’d be a godsend for lobbies more filled with low tours who aren’t equipped to handle them.
Ah yes, theoretical balance changes, my specialty. Spy Money Magnet would be a genuine upside, and potentially make Scout go from a 100% Pick-rate Staple to just a good pick. Spy wouldn't passively draw aggro and wouldn't have MFD or Mad Milk support, but in exchange Spy could pick up money while disguised, possess an aoe stun+slow on a moderate cooldown, and have significantly increased Giant DPS. Plus it would enable other classes to use alternate options more regularly, like Soldier Conch or Sniper Jarate, without needing to worry about function overlap. Explosive Backstab I also don't think would be good, but a similar type of upgrade that would be really fun could be an EMP Backstab. Basically, backstabbing a target with EMP Backstab active would apply a 25% Slowdown to the backstab victim and all robots in a wide radius (with Giants having a slight resistance), but the Slow effect could stack, and if a robot gets inflicted with four stacks of this EMP, it gets knocked out as if a sapper was put on it. Chainstabs would become more viable and fun, and Giant Backstabbing would have some decent crowd control. Comparing and contrasting with the sapper, you'd need to get multiple backstabs to apply the sapper effect, but it wouldn't need to be on a cooldown. And no matter how OP you think it is, just remember Explosive Headshots still exists. Also maybe tone down the cost of some of his upgrades, but that has some stronger implications.
The money magnet idea sounds really good but it has a possible negative impact in that Spies and Scouts will fight for money for survivability so they'd have some theoretical anti-synergy which is something we want to steer clear from. I mean it is in character..
Having the DeadRinger be basically the only remotely viable option is bad gamedesign, but the explosive backstab could be very good and have spy be the ultimate glass cannon, high-risk, high-reward class. This would be so much more simple is the mvm community was as laid-back as the rest of the tf2 community. 5:33 That's messed up, made me laugh though...
Spy's biggest problem is *cost* , risk and how specific his kit has to be to work, so my idea for a buff would be to reduce the cost of all upgrades just like medic canteens upgrade by a big amount like 30%, not only does it make spy more tanky(consistent) as he doesn't need to waste 450 per penetration up, which also gives him flexibility to branch into more niche options which you couldn't before because of how expensive his useful upgrades were. Also it kinda makes sense because the spy doesn't have any fancy heavy weapons like grenade launchers, mini guns or unique handmade items like a medigun. Which gives him a unique role as a better early game pick because he can afford more with less money.
One thing that wasn't brought up when it comes to how Valve treated Spy during MvM's development. The Your Eternal Reward could mitigate many of the issues when it comes to crowd control as you could stab as many as you like without them responding with the instant disguise mechanic. However Valve thought this was too overpowered (Despite other classes doing it far better) and added a disguise delay to the YER, ensuring the bots will shoot you. This delay is actually patched out in Potato.MVM's community events, and with it removed makes Spy signficiantly more viable.
I think changing MVM’s Your Eternal Reward disguise on kill feature to be instant could help the survivability and chainstab potential of the class, while it would make dealing with ubermedics and small robot groups easier, it would still take proper movement and skill to kill giants, because it would be the only time you are not disguised
Funny thing is, Valve actually nerfed the YER in MvM by making the disguises on backstab not instant anymore because they feared he could clear out groups of small bots easily
I think that could work. Or another solution that solves 2 problems at once is letting the Spy have a money collection radius and money overheal while cloaking with the other watches. This gives them some utility beyond just the ringer. Maybe just smaller than Scout's since he's slower and has less mobility.
@@limpid_runaway1879sometimes the tanks feels like they take wayy too long to kill But a good way to balance it could be that makes the tank slower, both in movement and when deploying the bomb i dunno if that could last forever once you put the sapper but i'll take anything at this point
This might be a stupid idea, but what about making it so that spy has low aggro against most robots? That way, even without a disguise, a spy can make a difference in crowd control and solidifies his role as a giant killer. Maybe make it so that, idk, Pyro robots keep the high aggro so he’s not completely busted but that way he manages to stay in close without getting focused too hard.
@@netnooker Okay, fair point. I am unfamiliar with the actual coding of TF2 AI. It will require SOME SORT of change to TF2 bot AI, which I SUSPECT could get very messy if there's not an easy way to separate MvM bot behavior from regular bot behavior. Based on how niche of a hobby reverse-engineering TF2 is, I wouldn't be surprised if there are less than 100 people in the entire world who could confirm or deny that suspicion offhand.
@@UnderscoreGamingChannel I mean, I don't know shit either, but i dont think its a technical problem, i thik its a "valve doesnt give 2 fucks about tf2" problem
An upgrade for spy that would make him way more efficient in crowd control is the scrapped ”reprogramer” upgrade that turns sapped robots into Red robots for a period of time as long as they aren’t giants.
Here are some of my ideas for Spy: * Have Robot Sapper Power also increase recharge speed by 15% each point * Add a unique upgrade for each invis watch in the Sapper section, each for 400. For instance, DR should get an upgrade to either gain part of its charge back on backstab or refill off of ammo boxes, and the invis watches could get multiple points of speed boost and damage reduction while cloaked to bring it in line with the DR's damage reduction. * Maybe a one-point upgrade that gives the knife the ability of the Third Degree, which scales with Armor Penetration??? * Dumb idea, give the Tank a back hitbox where the back engine is. It doesn't even have to scale with Armor Penetration to be worth it for Spy now.
Make it so that the 2nd tick of Sapper power up causes sapped robots to sap robots that approach them and add "explode on ignite" as a secondary effect of the third tick of sapper power. Sapper power now allows sappers to be applied to tanks and tanks move 10% slower per tick of Sapper power.
Spy gets a fair bit of play in community MvM. When waves have endless streams of giants and lots of shield medics, spy can work better than the usual pick picks (but tbf those waves are kinda designed around making spy work).
True. I play community a lot and classes like Snipers don't do anything against shield Medics because... shield. The only classes that can deal with it would be Pyro, because flames go through shields, Demoknight because he can flank it or Spy for the same reason as Demoknight.
The community MvM mission designs are so much better than normal MvM imo. Really shows the importance of each class, playstyle, role, and of course: Spy. If I'm correct, all expert missions contain an extremely hard to deal with giant quick-fix medic and combo that can teamwipe when there isnt a spy on the team. And it can be any medic too, like a vaccinator medic, armored medic, shield medic, kritzkrieg or a giant uber medic (trickiest to deal with as spy tbh) all can have the team on a roadblock of constant hatch defense failure. Yet those mentioned medics (except for small uber meds or uber canteen meds) can be fucked in the ass hard with spy like they've been wiped out of the mission data.
@@peanutbuttrr8461 Yeah vaccinator medics specifically basically require s Spy or maybe Demoknight to take them out because of that 75% damage resistance and maybe more consider how cracked the robots can be. Also I have no idea how to deal with a giant uber medic.
Community mvm really needs to make missions more and more spy centric to the point of being literally impossible without a spy, then people will stop kicking spies from lobbies just for his class choice regardless of tour count
im guilty as charged for being the community spy lol, hes just really fun to melt giants with is all. tbh i never really thought of the waves being suited for spy, i thought the giant spam was to make medic's shield useful
I know it's not much but something I'm surprised you didn't touch on is Spy's revolvers. The Diamond Back is a no brainier, having free crits isn't something you should ignore. Yes I know it only does 102 damage per shot but that's still damage being contributed to tanks and giants that are too risky to try to stab. It's insane how terrible of a class spy is in MVM, even with free crits and instant kills
@stellarstar6553 Shit I completely forgot canteens were a thing, what do people even do with their canteen on Spy? Best I can think is either using Uber canteens to avoid certain death or like you said, use crits on the stock revolver to try and contribute some damage on tanks
@stellarstar6553 diamondback is my go-to pick for revolver and its better than you would think. most spies completely avoid common bots when you can easily get a couple stabs in a horde and hide. hell, most experienced spies go for the kunai + diamondback, giving you overheal and a stronger revolver. the diamondback's crits are actually pretty useful. you can two-shot snipers and scouts from anywhere. its not crazy (like any revolver) but it's not as bad as you make it out to be.
@@jacobboggs71You are better off temporarily switching to a non upgraded phlog pyro for the tank waves than wasting precious credits on a crit canteen that will still do less damage than the pyro.
You die before getting the chance to use the crits. Even on tanks and potshots on giants and far away snipers, it really doesn't matter. I think the l'etranger is actually better because of the cloak on hit you can get to refill your dead ringer much faster
@@marichanlovesyou if you're starting out as spy, etranger is good yeah but the more you play spy and understand how aggro works with him, the less use you have for the dead ringer, and the more useful the diamondback becomes
Something that may help is after landing an backstab, Spy gets high damage resistances for an small period of time that resets per each successful backstab, so it's harder for the spy getting erased from existence for just doing it's job like in normal gameplay when fighting Kunai users (spy gets backstab, is shot by enemies, get's to escape because of the overheal instead of getting torched in 1 second).
Depends on how much res, like 50% would probably still shred through you and higher would make it not really spy anymore. Also this heavily favors the kunai as the best weapon since the only resource that matters at that point would be health, because the longer he could fight = more dps. Facetanking as a concept in general doesn't really fit spy in the base game and MvM.
So lets think of a more fitting and unique solution The problem: Spy's biggest problem is *cost* , risk and how specific his kit has to be to work optimum. So my first idea for a buff would be to reduce the cost of all upgrades just like medic canteens upgrade around (30%~50), not only does it make the spy less risky and error prone because he can afford his resistances as he doesn't need to waste 450 per penetration up, which also gives him flexibility to branch into more niche options which you couldn't before because of how expensive his useful upgrades were. Also it kinda makes sense because the spy doesn't have any fancy heavy weapons like grenade launchers, mini guns or unique handmade items like a medigun. Which gives him a unique role as a better early game pick because he can afford more with less money.
@@Loguer interesting idea, that can work but in the fight with more that one giant, it would be pretty useless as fights mostly don't end after 1 second, at most he can get out but the downtime afterwards would still be the same.
@@Nitosa You be surpriced how tanky an Deadringer spy with kunai can be, even with crits he manages to eat that easily if he got 1 backstab, thats why they are hated in particular, deadringer kunai with letronger
Its like Valve looked at what bases each class covered, thought they had finished, and called it a day Then they realized there was no giant killing specialisation and said "fuck it, lets make the whole fucking class specialised in giant killing" while giving him nothing else.
@TheDoc_K The problem with that is that there are other classes that are good at giant killing (even if not as good as spy) but can also deal with crowds of small bots and tanks and don't require anywhere as much effort to not suck and die.
@@appelofdoom8211 True. Spy is really good at giant killing but so are other classes and they can also doe AOE and tankbusting. I think buffs like money overheal and maybe time bomb sapper are warranted.
@@dkskcjfjswwwwwws413 MVM as a gamemode in development looked radically different than what we eventually got from the repo-leaks. As to why they scrapped it, we can only speculate. 1. Controlled Robots would easily die from the next spawn-waves of robots. 2. Spy & the team will just want to outright kill the robot, rather than let them live for the minuscule advantage it might have brought. 3. Likely didn't want players to get confused by BLU robots suddenly turning RED. 4. Likely wouldn't work on Boss Robots, Giants, or any special units.
A sort of explosive sap could be helpful. where all bots that have a sapper applied take damage from each one backstabbed. this could be either as OP as explode on ignite where all squishys instantly die or maybe just a 100-200ish damage applied per backstab to others could be done. a thrown sapper could also be helpful for a long range support option for spy. and maybe a upgrade that allows the spy to gain more overheal and perhaps even lifesteal overheal per stab in some way
I think upgrades for the Disguise Kit PDA (Like the Engi's) could be good for Spy. Things like "Damage Resistance When Disguised" or "Decloak Time" or "Cloak Regen Rate" or even "Faster Disguise Time" can all be beneficial. Tone down the cost of every upgrade for Spy and Spy only as well, so these upgrades could, yknow, be purchased before Wave 5.
While explosive backstab could be an overcorrection, I'd say the effort required to even get a backstab warrants a larger reward than just a single pick. Perhaps if it was a smaller radius that didn't clear a whole pack, it would provide just enough leniency to give the spy an out after a backstab.
Also, I think spy having to walk up to a group and manage to get a backstab is more effort (and less spammable) than a sniper moving his mouse 2 centimeters and shutting down the entire map. Like if sniper can be busted with little to no effort, I see no reason why spy shouldn't be able to be just as busted (but it actually requires the spy to get close and pull off stabs). Just to be clear I think neither class should have it for balance reasons, buy spy def needs it more if I had to pick one of the two classes.
If we’re talking giving MVM Spy explosives, Weezy mentioned something about giving the sappers a time bomb upgrade in passing once; not an actual suggestion, just a “these will always be useless unless Valve adds something huge like that” kind of line. Honestly, though, that sounds like a good idea to me.
Forget making a backstab like how explosive headshot for sniper, make it so every bot he successfully kills with a backstab explode and kill other bots
I'm thinking about cloak and sapper. While other classes have an ability to upgrade most of their cooldowns, spy just have to sit and hide when he's out of his tools. So making a way to recharge your sapper or cloak would help a lot. So here some of my concepts. Just keep in mind they're all separate from each other, that means I don't suggest adding all of them at ones. 1. Cloak and sapper recharge rate upgrade. Straight and primitive way to fix the problem. As I said most of the classes have this type of upgrade. Even demoknight has it on his shield, despite it's completely useless. 2. Cloak on damage/kill upgrade. Yes, I know about this upside on some of spy's weapons, but we also have health on kill and kunai with the similar effect, so the player always have choice where they should save money. Same here: do I have extra money to upgrade diamondback or should I pick l'etranger? 3. Sapper refresh upgrade. This idea is kinda weird even to me, but I'll explain it so maybe someone will have a thought on improving it. Kinda same thing as gas passer, but maybe focused on giants, like performing a backstab om giant will refill sapper meter a little, or maybe killing a giant will restore your sapper entirely. This idea came out from refreshing sapper on building destruction because I always felt strange about losing sapper when you're dealing with robot-engineers. You lose your sapper on destroying engi's nest and just have to deal with his teleporter with bare hands, knowing that any second it can spawn binch of new robots. And the situation gets worse when you dealing with swarming engies, where you have to sit and waitafter dealing with the first one, while the others are taking control over the map. But having an entire upgrade just for engies is strange so I decided to combine it with giants. 4. Revolver damage upgrade. This is a completely different idea, that has nothing in common with cloak or sapper but aims on spy's "tankbustingability" and giving reward for risky "up close and personal" gameplay style. The idea is straightforward you store crits with diamondback and now can at least somehow help your team with killing a tank or more reliably fight some robots from the distance, for example one-shot uber-medics without risking of being killed by a giant they're healing.
Buff to spy: Make the YER work properly, instead of that weird five second delay in the disguising. This rewards skillful playing and increases survivability
It also doesn't help that Spy's cloak/disguises have no upgrades, especially considering Engineer's building upgrades are the key to his upgrade route. Explosive Backstabs doing 40 health would just mean uber medics get popped unless you use a sapper. Maybe give the sapper some sort of aim slow, or make it so that sapped bots can't aim at spies properly? Or just introduce the cut spytrap.
The time bomb sapper upgrade would definitely help Spy considerably, but one other change I thought of that would be cool is to have the armor penetration upgrade bypass ubercharged robots, which would be highly effective in situations where the team doesn't have an ideal Medic killer.
MvM Spy Mains: Must master advanced movement techniques requiring precise timing while being aware of their surroundings and planning on when to make a strategic withdrawal. Me, a Heavy Main: Hahaha, minigun go brrrrrrr!
When you made the list and then asked “why tf would anyone want to juggle this many torches on top of all of Spy’s other shortcomings just to make him efficient in the one area he’s not categorically dogshit in?” I couldn’t breathe omg. The whole video was a setup for this punchline. Amazing video.
I main Spy, Pyro and Demo in all modes. And your "copium" speech was quite funny for someone who never saw how spy plays there. I do play him alot on both boot camp and Potato, and sometimes on tours since I rarely play those. All I can say is - teammate Scout who thinks he is supposed to run circles around Giants is your worst enemy. Otherwise it's simple - get in, do according to situation, dead ringer away. Kunai can be easily outpaced by any other knife. You can overheal yourself with any Knife(and even gun!) when using "Health on Kill" upgrade, as soon as you reach the 2nd level of it. I am surprised you didn't know that. And combine that with Crit on kill - and Stock/Big Earner become Spy's best friend.
Also diamondback requiring zero upgrades to work on tanks. l'm not sure what exactly you're talking about with knife crits on kill, but it's definitely true the kunai is overrated in mvm.
@@Brown95P Knife's crits on kill allow you to use YOUR GUN. It turns any gun into a good assistant to Tank-destroying class, and that can come in a clutch when the tank has 10% of it's HP left and is dropping the bomb. Saved quite a few waves like that over 10 years of playing Spoy. And by any gun, that includes even L'Etranger. The weakest gun. Yet with crits from your knife - even this gun can pull off a Combo, especially if you use Dead Ringer. You stab one jackass, you remove a whole row of them with crit shots, you GTFO. Simple as that, just don't forget Projectile Penetration upgrade. One of the first ones you ever buy on Spy, among with aforementioned Crits on Kill(Knife), Heal on Kill(Knife), and Sapper's level 1. Btw, thanks to the penetration upgrade, L'Etranger can also fill your cloak instantly it you shoot a whole group of bots.
Some upgrade ideas I have for spy Weakening stab: Upon stabbing a robat, the robot will get the debuff "Marked for Death." Advantage: Each consecutive backstab does more damage. You're better: Each backstab gives the spy a permanent speed and damage boost. Disarm: Sapping the bomb will temporarily disarm the bomb, and robots won't be able to pick it up
Ok, I didn't know the ammo refill canteen recharges the sapper, but still, I believe it's too high of a cost to just charge something the spy normally has available all the time, unlike the demoman's shields... I would buff the recharge time for the sapper, or at least add an upgrade to improve it, much like the jarate or the mad milk. This would make the spy more viable against big groups without making him overpowered or relying so much on the rest of the team.
As someone who mains Spy in MVM ~30 tours its all about finding the right loadout for you. Except for cloak. I would say always use the Ringer and LEARN TO AIRSTRAFE. THAT WILL SAVE YOU OVER AND OVER! I swap between knives on diff rounds between Kunai and Earner because a lot of rounds are VERY situational for spies. First round is always a bonebreaker for spies but once you get at least 1 of each res and swing speed, you’ll start sluggin!
@@ericneuens the robots will kill you if you get a YER bs kill. Just like cloaks and DR, they continue shooting you for ~1-2 seconds after pop. Do NOT use the YER Hope this helps!
I feel like a good way to buff spy would to just remove the buffer time when you stab with the yer. It sounds overpowered but he’d still have some of the slowest crowd control in the roster
Spy is such a strange class in mvm. He's amazing at giant killing but so are demo and sniper (who is the best class in mvm imo) who have the benefit of being able to shred entire crowds and tanks far better. Sappers cooldown means he also can't reliably deal with engineers either as he has to prioritise sentries or teleporters and he has to kill the engie or else its all for nothing. One good thing about spy is that every enemy spy bot focuses him above everything which is great for that tank section on ghost town.
demo is not an amazing giant killer. he is only used in 2c meta with kritz medic up his ass. i dare anyone who says demo is op to go play mannslaughter as him
I find the idea of Spy disguising as a robot and fooling the robots to be amusing. They’re robots. They probably have software communicating with each unit so they know what is an actual robot and what isn’t.
Rather than a major rework or significant change to one of his mechanics, I think Spy could be made a lot better by a simple change to one upgrade. Armor Penetration, in addition to its regular effects, also adds +25% "butterknife" damage per point. By default you do 40 base butterknife damage, and with this maxed out you would do 80. On the surface, this isn't a big deal, but giving Spy this higher base damage actually affects quite a few things, such as... 1. Doubled Tank DPS. The tank cannot be backstabbed and knives cannot full crit against it at all, so spy's current tank busting can be outdone by just about every class hitting the tank with an un-upgraded stock melee. You won't be melting tanks with this change or anything, but doubling his damage to 80 per swing makes it a lot more respectable. 2. Crits on Kill. Usually ignored since Spy's crits deal 120 which doesn't meet any significant kill threshold, this would make his maxed out crits do 240, one-shotting everything but heavies. While this won't turn Spy into Demoknight it does give him a way to deal with small robots without relying on the sapper. (Worth noting that crit butterknife kills don't give the "On Backstab" effects, so you couldn't go ham with the Kunai). 3. Uber-medics. With maxed out damage, Spy could kill Uber-medics in 2 hits dealing 80 damage a swing, which also happens to avoid the health threshold for Uber-medics to use their Ubers. Additionally a single point of Armor Penetration paired with crits would do 150, just enough to one-shot them.
Since Spy is the only class that can’t do anything significant to tanks, why not give him something to help deal with them? What if you could also place the Sapper on a tank to temporarily slow it down? Or, something more unique, have the Sapper lower the tank’s defense so the rest of the crew can deal more damage? You would be sacrificing the sapper, and potential group kill on some robots, in exchange for helping your team wear the tank down a bit faster.
It's not quite accurate to say "Spy can't do anything significant to tanks". There isn't actually that much variability between classes as far as tank DPS. A Spy with NO upgrades at all can do about 20% as much damage as a Beggar's Bazooka Soldier or Phlog Pyro with maximum upgrades, with most other classes and loadouts falling somewhere in between. Actually, a few classes are worse without upgrades than Spy without upgrades, and a Spy who has a bit of money to upgrade his gun is about half as strong as a Stock Pyro. The Spy is still probably the worst class against tanks, but I think I really oversold it in my video back in 2019 and probably contributed to the spreading of this idea.
My buff would be to reduce the cost of all upgrades just like medic canteens upgrade by a big amount like 30%, like it makes sense because the spy doesn't have any fancy heavy weapons like grenade launchers, mini guns or unique handmade items like a medigun. Which gives him a unique role as a better early game pick because he can afford more with less money.
I would suggest a change to his aggro attraction, scout wants to attract robot attention because he has the mobility to avoid the damage, spy does not, having every robot around you suddenly make you their most wanted seems to be the biggest detriment, I would propose that only the robot you are actively damaging target you, this will still retain the challenge with larger robots, but will stop groups of robots turning you into paste after the first stab.
That'd make Spy easily able to solo any part of a mission until Giants appear, and even when they do, he's already at his best when facing a single giant anyway. I think he should just have the lowest aggro out of any class, just like he has the highest right now.
I remember playing with this spy main named "Revolver Knight" and all he did was play revolver gunspy and he was pretty damn good too. I hope he is still out there slaying robots with his revolver
Why does Spy not have a money magnet already, especially considering he is Scout's dad? Based on what I see in your clips, I want Giant Robots to have a maximum turning speed, similar to a charging Demoman.
I've heard of a tanky distraction strategy that works well with Spy in MvM. The idea is to buy uber canteens, damage resistance, and regeneration, then equip the Dead Ringer and the L'etranger, and you position yourself behind the bots just to distract them and pointing their weapons away from your allies, while they shoot at them, heal up, or set up buildings.
Its generally better to save this for particular robots that your team struggles with. Like giant black box soldiers that heal on kill as well as hit. You can do a little French dance in a far away corner and they will only target you if they can see you undisguised
Ages ago, I mean YEARS, the group I got thrown into had a spy main join for a tour. They were good, but I'm guessing they were experienced player who could of played any character really well. it might have helped we had a high tier medic and demo who really knew their shit.
How about a disguise drop delay, where upon attacking out of a disguise, you have a three or so second window where you retain the disguise in the eyes of the robots?
I actually do play spy in mvm, and one thing I can recommend is getting the crits on kill knife upgrade. Use the stock revolver, big earner, and dead ringer. Go in, get a bunch of stabs, then back off and start blasting. And if we're talking about weapon changes and upgrades to make spy more useful, I say the sapper needs to deal damage to robots like it does to a sentry.
From what I have seen of good spy's in MVM, the only buffs he needs is the money collection overheal, like scout, and making the sapper effect also increase damage to the robots effected by the sapper, giving him some crowd control. Also, make it so that each upgrade of the sapper effectiveness reduces the cooldown. And, yes, I have seen good Spy players in MVM... 2 of them. But they carried the missions on their back, as the group of us they were carrying, they were the only ones to have mann up.
A money magnet ability that heals you depending on the amount you collect would be good, I mean spy does have a expensive taste, or decreased resistance upgrades, or even just simple health increase would do it
I’d like to see scout’s money magnet + healing as an upgrade (not a passive) for Pyro and for Demoman’s boots too. That way there’s 3 money collectors. It would obviously not stack overheal, but that way Pyro wouldn’t die in 0.5 seconds and Demoknightwould have more chances to heal up without the Katana. Scout wouldn’t be outshined because he’s still the fastest class in the game without upgrades, and demoknight and Pyro don’t have access to altruistic / support weapons (not counting the Homewrecker). Spy needs it more than those two tho.
@@minibotas9496 The Scout's money magnet ability would be ridiculously OP on any other class unless you exclude the healing effect. The Scout can be an extremely powerful fighter with all of that healing. You don't want to give that ability to a class with even high DPS. Except I guess maybe it would be okay on Demoknight.
If any class in MvM could use a buff, it's definitely The Spy, BUT... here's my copium: 1. *MvM is a highly customizable game mode.* In the handful of (very old) official Valve missions, sure, The Spy is underwhelming due to the wave and map design, but plenty of custom missions are balanced in such a way that The Spy is arguably better than The Sniper. Conversely, The Demoman, commonly touted as "OP" by people who only ever play the 10 most popular Mann Up missions, kind of sucks on a lot of custom missions and maps. Especially if the Demo hasn't memorized the bot spawns by playing the mission 100 times already. 2. *The Spy got made redundant by the Two Cities Medic buff.* Getting up close to dangerous robots safely and abusing robot AI to support his teammates used to be The Spy's special abilities, but The Medic can do those things more easily now. Well, the first one, at least. The Medic always had the second ability; it just wasn't popular to play Medic. 3. *The Spy isn't THAT bad for tanks.* I was too harsh on his tank-busting abilities in my own video, and I regret it. Tank-busting isn't rocket science, and even "the worst" class isn't that bad. (Sometimes, you should use the Revolver instead of your knife.) P.S. Stock Heavy and Stock Sniper aren't even bad against tanks, either. I'd say they're both better than a Stock Loadout Soldier. 4. *People still play Milk 'n Mark Scout instead of Combat Scout, and nobody complains.* Half of the Spy mains probably got into the class because how powerful The Spy is compared to Milk n' Mark Scout. I wouldn't be against buffing The Spy, but I don't trust Valve to do it, seeing how they made The Medic and The Pyro OP with their buffs. I'd rather have a slightly underpowered class than another OP class. I always prefer tweaks to overhauls. *I'd suggest making the Armor Penetration upgrade affect non-backstab damage as well as Giant backstab damage (this would help a lot with tanks), tweaking upgrade costs, and tweaking Sapper cooldown and radius. And maybe make the Sapper do a bit of damage.* I am technically a Scout main, not a Spy main lol.
Seriously, I hate the "Demo is OP" logic. Imagine if people applied the, "This is OP starting around your 50th playthrough, once you've committed the entire game to memory," logic to every video game. Yeesh.
somehow i sent this comment 4 hours ago and it never to be seen: i dont think he would change his views on spy with his current state in mannup he prob wouldve when he plays custom regularly (aka never lol)
Ever since VHS gamemode (And remembering Spy being in MvM), I thought that having any backstab on giants give the benefits of a successful backstab regardless of if it kills like with Saxton would be handy, especially with the money magnet buff Scout has so that being useful isn't dependent entirely on the knife As for the aoe backstab, I feel like having just something small applied to the nearby robots would be fine, be it a debuff or small damage with a cooldown for each time it triggers would help him compete with Sniper on the priority target vs group elimination aspect
I had come up with a few ideas for spy. A new set of upgrades Stock revolver gaining a ‘crit when it would minicrit’ and ‘damage upgrade’ options Friendly dapper placement. Placing a dapper on a friendly sentry would reduce its ammo consumption rate, on a dispenser would boost its rate of healing/ammo regen, and on a teleporter give a speed boost on exit. And knife gets a gear jammer upgrade. Sides of the tank get a backstab animation. Deal 1000 damage to the tank and jam the tread line, causing that tank to permanently move 10% slower. Requires 20 seconds to recharge. Meanwhile backstab damage is reduced 50%
This might be insane, but what if Spy could pick up the bomb and carry it backwards? It would probably need to be a Disguise Kit upgrade, but it would certainly be a unique one! Another insane idea might be letting the Spy hack a robot with his sapper, somehow, or perhaps even a whole wave. Consider a potential upgrade: >Hacking Mode: "Consume a full sapper charge to permanently hack all robots currently effected by your sapper." You would need to limit the number of of times it could be used in a wave, and combine this with an Ammo canteen (otherwise your sapper's effect will have run out before the bar recharges), but I think those are fair trade-offs for adding a bunch of new team members.
In a different reality where MVM had room for such concepts, that would have been an fun way to play MVM. It is just that as MVM stands; there is hardly any room for the behavior besides killing the robots. Robots against robots are just going to duke it out, and maybe the robots you hacked came up on top if you're lucky. Surely, it won't last long enough against for another spawn-wave that will immediately drop in. Judging from the TF2 Repo-files; MVM was clearly dramatically different to what we eventually got, and it is no wonder why it boiled down to what it is. When you add an PVE Gamemode to an mainly PVP; you are designing around what the classes already do against ai controlled enemies that can do the same. Making it too broad of a scope would have easily alienated the playerbase, which it already done at launch. And this was when MVM was significantly at its hardest; which required basic game sense, knowledge, and absolute strong cooperation at first. As it stands, the gamemode as-is now simply works. Much to the passionate crowd's dismay.
My biggest problem with spy is that he is ironically the worst class to deal with the robo engineers. The sapper gets consumed on mvm when sapping the sentry. If you sap the engie, you can't backstab it or the sentry will vaporise you the next second unless you dead ringer away. Add this to the fact that a lot of the time you are fighting next to a teleporter aka, an ubered robot spawner and you end up making the scout a better sentry buster.
Armor penetration working on tanks could be neat. Make it increase tank damage by say 40 per tick (the base damage of the knife) and you'd be able to match the Bushwhacka, which is clearly fair and balanced on the sniper. A revolver buff might also be nice? Spy gets basically nothing out of most of them, making it essentially a dead slot.
In my investigations of playing Gear Grinder, (the only fucking tour I play), Spy is useful for one wave in Coaltown and Decoy. Someone switches onto Spy for one wave, saps the Quick-Fix Medics, backstabs them, a bunch of times, and then attempts to backstab the giant Heavy before ultimately dying. Or if they're good, they pop a dead ringer before dying to the heavy. And not to sound like a stupid idiot, but I love playing Spy on that one singular wave.
The aggro problems could be alleviated by a "Disguise Durability" upgrade that lets the spy stay disguised for a certain number of backstabs, giving him more time to work on giants, and even giving him more function against small robots, especially stragglers, which would pair nicely with credit overheal.
As a spy main I enjoy this gimmicky playstyle. Even I understand that spy is the worst by terms of efficiency, but it's still really fun to queue for boot camp, put a lot of skill and then to achieve 100+k damage at the end of the mission, while the rest of the team gets between 30k and 70k damage. One last thing nobody ever talks about. The Dead Ringer isn't the only and not even the best get out of jail tool at spy's disposal. I'll let figure out yourself what is actually the best tool, since there is one little MVM feature that is completely forgotten by MVM community. No seriously, nobody uses this. Ever.
The return-to-spawn canteen? Cheaper than buying back if you get trapped without DR charge, and allows you to head off giant scouts if you get unlucky.
I think the problem with spy is that he's a pick class, like sniper. Unlike sniper, however, the spy is always in a state of vulnerability. The whole point of his class is "don't be caught," which is extremely difficult when fighting bots. Double trouble, the high volume of smaller enemies makes picks of any single bot unimportant. Usually. I've been in situations where my team of inexperienced randos (me included) just can't seem to take out a few giant heavies and scouts while juggling the tanks when a spy main jumps in and allows us to secure the mission. In any competitive gamemode, spy is rarely if ever chosen. MVM is just another one of those. So where's the surprise?
The probably is actually that, since the Two Cities update, the big, scary bots that used to warrant "picking" in MvM can be defeated by just standing behind the Medic shield and pressing M1.
When you think of it, all classes except spy can fill in at least 2 out of the many roles an MvM team has (Money collecting, giant killing, medic killing, mobbing, support, etc) Spy can only do one (giant killing) and he's extremely specialized at that yet too frail to be as consistent as demo or sniper. That is his entire issue. Honestly the money magnet thing is an idea I've agreed with for a while but i wouldn't add the HP addition but rather a resistance increase. Still, anything for this guy would do wonders
ESSAY BELOW: 1. "Spy is the only class reliant on close range combat" - Well, aside from Pyro (unless he is using Gas or Flare Gun with overclocks, which aren't common), that is true, but I don't see how that's a bad thing. Spy does INSANE damage to giants, and can 1 tap all medium bots (Samurai Demos, Steel gauntlets, Burst Soldiers, Armored Mediums etc.) so it's a fair-trade off for insane Power. Also fun fact, Spy is actually LOWER on the Aggro list, when being healed by a Medic, which leads to some funny interactions. 1A. Yes Dead Ringer is great, but again, if you know how to play Spy, you can easily play without it, but not using it IS a handicap. ( - Video as an example: ua-cam.com/video/_LEdg-Mgm8k/v-deo.html ). ALSO AGAIN Kunai and Big Earner have drawbacks, but again, just like Spy in general, once you learn how to play him, the strengths are superior and you can easily play around their drawbacks. 2. His Crowd Control sucks sure, but that's not what he is meant to be for, unless there is a group of medium/armored bots he can easily clap. Spy can EASILY top in damage while only going for Giants and Medium/Armored robots, again, due to the sheer powerhouse that he is damage wise. And even then, the damage you do to these is more "valuable" in a sense that you're dealing with a bigger threat (A giant) than something like Engie (who kills lot of the shitty fodder robots) and arguably Soldier. And there is nothing wrong with Spy having to get away while stabbing. A Soldier, Scout or Pyro can't stand in the open while fighting too, they can still get shredded, you still need to dodge as other classes, or know how to skiddadle when need be, that's just a mvm in general thing. And again, you mention how he "can't compete with other 8 classes" when he really can, both in giant and high hp target damaging/elimination. He can be THE BEST at dealing with those, but the fact you can have a Heavy hold M1 behind Med shield (and other classes too) at the FRACTION of the risk, then yeah I can see why you think he isn't great. 2A. Yeah Spy sucks against Tanks. That is true. 2B. Spy being worse at Uber Med takeouts isn't a huge deal either, Since Soldier or Scout also need to risk it (if Soldier doesnt have minicrits/rocket spec that is). Spy however again, isn't meant to take them out if you got a Med Killer anyway (unless he's dead). He can however excell against Vaccinator medics (Where Sniper, Demo or others can suffer) and armored medics, being able to 1 tap them or DPS them down. 2C. The Medium Bot talk: "Heavies aren't that much of a threat" - Sure, in most cases, but they're damage sponges that can buy time to other Robots, or sometimes be an actual pain if they are Steel Gauntlet pushers (50% dmg bonus btw) or crit boosted, or with vacc meds or Big Heal Medics. Being able to blitz them down, is helpful and nothing wrong with doing it, is there? "The Crit Bowmen are better handled by a Demoman" - This is 2 Cities exclusivity issue. And again, Spy can sap them and 1 tap them, or quickly stab them both, or only bowman and then shoot the Med (nothing else around, it will shoot at the Spy and not run away usually). On Community MvM though, or in other cases, they are far too common, or far too deadly (especially if they're spread Bowmen or Homing Arrow Bowmen) to be taken down by Demo's stickies, that will usually be for Meds (and cuz ScotRes on community mvm lacks the strenghts of 2 Cities). "Hard to keep up with G. Scouts" - True, but that's what your team can be for too. You don't need to kill them yourself, you can soften them up (1 backstab removes 900 of their 1200 HP) or finish them off, if they're blocking it. And as a Spy, you should generally stick around near Robot spawn anyway, so you don't have to walk to them too far, or be surprised. 2D. Giant Talk HE IS THE FRONTRUNNER for Giant Damage, and it's not even close. The only reason it's not seen that way by majority of normal players is again... Because of 2 cities. Sticky Demos with krits, Behind Shield BB Heavies and so on, somewhat defeat his purpose, as he DOESNT EVEN NEED to exist while that's the case. But like I mentioned, if you learn how to play Him, you can do just as well as them WITHOUT needing a Medic, or Krits or anything like that. Spy can solo giants for a reason, while a Heavy really cannot, and neither can Demo in most cases. Again, he is considered OP for a reason, borderline anyway. 2Da Your points about his strength #1 SURROUNDING ROBOTS - Yeah that is an issue, and while you can play around it or deal with them yourself if you can, it is a issue. However, I don't agree with the "too much downtime while waiting for stab" thing. Spy again, can 4-5 shot most giants so even if he finishes off a Giant or softens it up, that's still INCREDIBLY HELPFUL, because he can dish out 900 damage minimum depending on how many stabs he gets. #2 MAP GEOMETRY - Nothing to talk about here, because that's just a Map thing, some are better for Spy, some not, that's just the case for all classes too so whatev. #3 KNOCKBACK - Yeah again, fair. Knockbacks fucks you over. Your teammates can make your life HELL but that's honestly only issue with medium bots, as Giants on most missions ESPECIALLY COMMUNITY are not affected by most types of knockback. There is also enemy knockback though and depending on the kind of knockback you can try to surf it to get away or get a better position. Depends on what is knocking you around though. #4 TEAM AGGRO - Yeah, it happens, but this is why in a game called TEAM fortress 2 in a COOP GAMEMODE you usually should talk and coordinate with your Pyro and Scout. Just telling them to not go behind the giant or not rush as often while you're on it, can do wonders. And usually they'll listen so yeah. #5 MUSCLE MEMORY - Depends on everything so can't speak on it much. #6 PING - Yeah, internet and ping can suck. 3. "Why do people put os much effort to play Spy in one thing he isn't dogshit at" - Because he is fun. Same reason you see Vaccinator or Shield Bash Meds, Pipe Demos, or anyone play anything that's not "MUH META" (MvM has no meta btw). Spy is not only strong, but very fun to play when you learn him and can be good at him. I once saw a Spy struggle on a potato.tf mission, so I switched from Soldier to Spy (had like 10-15k dmg at that point max 20 maybe) to show him how to play, and pointed out many tips. Ended up with around 90-100k dmg on top. And also, again, Spy requires more effort to deal with Giants, but he makes up for with the ouput. It's kind of like Ballista vs Cannon from Totally Accurate Battle Simulator. Sure Cannon is overall easier to use and put into your army, as it fires faster and more often, but Ballista, while can be hard to use (as it shoots small useless enemies), when it WORKS it can 1 tap basically everything. For the lower cost and also more efficiently. And also the whole "Spy can be absent and nothing will change" is just, eh, kinda wrong. 4. Before I get to your Spy Buff ideas, if Spy Players, most of which are speedrunners, map makers, mission makers or really REALLY GOOD Spies (Underscore_ for instance) say that he doesn't need buffs, aside from small ones, then I trust them more. They play and make hard missions, usually not designed around SPy anyway, they play in many events, many missions, of various difficulties with different robots and environments. They have more experience than your average 2 Cities MvM-er, and if they say he is fine then I trust them. - MONEY MAGNET like SCOUT - Yeah that is cool, HOWEVER Spy can pick up money immediately due to just walking into it from killing a robot, on top of being able to do it while invisible or disguised. It would be nice and it'd help him but Spy can be a great money collector already, if again, you play your cards right (Overclocks like that exist tho, so some people definitely want it). - EXPLOSIVE BACKSTAB - I mean, I have heard and also played around with Explosive Headshot Ambassador. It has only 2 shots and slower reload, but does 150 dmg like 1st tic on Sniper Rifles. So uh, take that as you will. I personally think it's funnier and better anyway. - BOMB SAPPER - Im pretty sure there is a potato.tf overclock similar to this, or one that makes Sapper more of a DPS tool (it does no damage anyway while used) so eh, MAYBE? - EPILOGUE - In the end it really shows, that it's not only 2 Cities Mentality and exclusivity that can damage the opinion about a class, but also lack of other experiences. Real MvM pros, speedrunners and players, all admit and agree SPy is a powerhouse, borderline OP and in need of a nerf, yet your average MvM player doesn't, but that's nothing new, If more people played community MvM and listened to actual people who play for fun and challenge, rather than loot gamblers (No offense Weezy), then perhaps everyone would get along x1000 better. Before I finish though, I will just post this guide by Underscore_Gaming about Spy: ua-cam.com/video/8uLTixBXTPM/v-deo.html - He is one of the best (or better anyway) MvM guide makers and Spies around. END OF PEPTALK
Finally, someone who understands the power of MvM Spy! It's really sad that people keep regurgitating the myth that "x class composition is the meta and everything outside of that is bad" when really every class is viable if you know how to upgrade well and the general expectations that come along with each class. Even "meta" classes running "nonmeta" playstyles, like pipe Demo and damage (i.e. regular) Scout are shunned by many experienced MvM gamblers. I agree that if more people played MvM for fun, rather than loot, and if community events were pushed into the spotlight more often, the community surrounding this gamemode would become far less toxic and misinformed. Also, props to you for linking Underscore's video, it's borderline criminal that his guides get pushed to the wayside in favour of bigger UA-camrs and their 2C bias. He's the reason I started playing Spy in the first place and he convinced me that Scout actually has a purpose beyond money.
Ah, the 2k word essay Weezy promised not to read. Which is a pity, because it’s well-written and I enjoyed reading your counter-arguments. Thank you for offering your perspective!
"YES HE SUCKS AT CROWD CONTROL, YES HE HAS NO TANK BUSTING CAPABILITIES, YES HE IS A GLASS PEASHOOTER, YES HE IS VIRTUALLY USELESS AND COMPLETELY REPLACEABLE IN JUST ABOUT EVERY ASPECT OF MVM GAMEPLAY. BUT WHAT ABOUT MY FUN?? YOU TRYHARDS KNOW NOTHING ABOUT FAMILY LOVING FUN, LOOK AT ME I AM VIRTUOSO BECAUSE I SPECIFICALLY PICK THE SHITTIEST CLASS IN AN ATTEMPT AT BEING COOL 😎. FUCK YOU IF YOU PAY TO PLAY MVM AND EXPECT TO GET WHAT YOURE BEING ADVERTISED, FUCK YOU IF YOU HAVENT BEEN PLAYING THIS CARCASS OF A GAMEMODE FOR THE LAST DECADE OF YOUR LIFE AND DOESNT WANT TO INVEST YOUR PRECIOUS, FLEETING TIME IN THIS WORLD MASTERING A FRENCHIE"
Valve (or rather 1 guy at Valve) devoted time to change and balance an even more niche mode than MvM, that being the Mannpower mode. So.. there's still a chance changes will be made ^^
Really, it's simple: spy is a high risk pick class in a gamemode where there are a lot of enemies to kill. Why ever pick him when sniper can do his job, but safer? I feel like Valve needed to give him like a "backstab shield on kill" (where he can tank hits for like 5 seconds), something to allow him to soak damage like a deploy-able decoy, or just give him the x10 mode thing of insanely high HP vamp on the kunai (a 9000 HP spy is quite hard to kill...) to make him viable. Really, as you showed in the video, there are many ways to buff the class, be it in survivability or utility. As it stands, it remains a niche pick for high skill spy mains that even still, yeah, is never as effective as any of the other classes. The issue though still stands that he still does have a niche as the giant killer or medic pick class, so doing any of these might also just make him insanely broken. A hard class to balance.
In community missions, every melee including the knives gets overheal on kill if you buy health on kill, which I think is a great idea to help make Spy slightly tangier.
@@dkskcjfjswwwwwws413 I suggested something like this a while ago on the Red Tape Recorder. It had 3 ticks, each corresponding with a bomb buff or something similar, but would only work with 1 robot at a time. The first tick would turn a robot to your side with maybe a 20% damage reistance, but the sapper would eventually kill them. The 2nd tick would turn a robot to your side, and fully heal them to full with the resistance and have health regen, and the sapper wouldn't kill them. Finally the 3rd tick would do all of the above, and also give them permanent crits.
I remember a time where me and a couple of randos were struggling on a mission on Bigrock with a group of giant medics and soldiers. So, as the gamers we are all switched to spy and took turns sapping and stabbing the bots and it worked. We weren't even on a call, I believe that was the most coordination a MvM team will ever have.
a cool upgrade idea would be to make spy's sapper into some sort of *conversion tool.* it would be called "sapper reprogramming" (from the cut reprogram feature of the old MVM) and have 3 ticks, each at like 250 or something. upon use, any sapped robot immediately turns red and starts attacking the other robots for a limited amount of time before they just die and drop money. Converted medics will pop uber and run towards allied players to heal them until they die (reminder uber lasts only 8 seconds). Chances are, one will uber the spy. the three ticks would be 3 seconds, 7, then 10 before they explode. It would not work on giants, busters, or other big guys (duh) only slowing them down and drawing aggro.
Adding money magnet would definitely boost up Spy's viability, they can even remove overheal effect to not completely replicate the effect that another class has. That way, the Spy will be able to effortlessly focus on collecting the money and the team will not have to worry about missing any.
One thing that i always wanted in mvm spy was to be able to upgrade your knife to have other knife's habilities, for example the Kunai's health on kill or Big Earner's cloak and boost for the YER or Spy-cicle. And maybe an upgrade that makes him less targetable by robots or even a dodge upgrade that gives him invincibility when he is low health to give him a chance at actually surviving, remember playing as spy in mvm is already risky since you could be way more useful as any other class (specially against tanks since you basically have no DPS)
My silly ideas: Sapper now converts bots to your side for the duration but they do only half damage. Disguise can be upgraded to not break after a certain number of stabs or X seconds. Cloak can have an AoE effect to mask other players nearby (probably too niche to be useful but could be funny). Something with the revolver, maybe headshots will ricochet the bullet into X number of nearby targets? Basically keep spy feeling like a slippery trickster that's more focused on messing with the enemy than just exploding them.
I've also found spy quite useful on the waves with multiple engi-bots. They can shut down both the sentries & teleporters. It works especially well with the YER to take out the engies first.
I occasionally see spy in community-made MvM campaigns (where, incidentally, the gas passer explosion upgrade is almost universally disabled), but usually only for specific waves that are giving us trouble when we want to try different strategies (particularly with übermedics the others just can't deal with, giant scouts the team's scout can't slowmilk in time, or extra money collection behind enemy lines where the scout can't reach) (or when the mission makes some changes to upgrades or something that makes the class more viable)
I said this in the comments in a past video, but I have a few ideas for Spy upgrades related to his disguises, namely to help improve his survivability. First one is “Timed Disguise” The first tick of this would give the Spy a timer on his disguise, which starts once he does anything that would normally drop it. The disguise could stay up during this time, and resets after each kill. Extra ticks extend the timer, but even a max upgrade lasts barely over a second. Basically the idea here is to make chainstabbing smaller robots less risky. Even if circling a giant is dangerous, it’s still a valid strategy. For small robots, you just have to hope they all don’t collectively lock onto you. With this you can clear out a group at little risk and slip out before things get too hairy. The second is “Disguise Mastery” Like Healing Mastery, it’s just a bunch of minor upgrades together in one. Namely, removes some aggro when a disguise is applied, increased speed at which a disguise is applied, and slight damage reduction while a disguise is active. This is to incentivize disguises as the go-to panic button instead of the Dead Ringer. Since invisibility doesn’t keep alert robots from tracking you, this becomes your alternative to shake off some of that attention instead of duck and cover. Invisibility is your avoidance tool, and disguises become your engage and disengage tool.
Your Eternal Reward or Wanga Prick would be OP with “Disguise Mastery”, you would become unkillable machine that no bots will agro you, you get res for successful backstab, and if you have a dead ringer, if you miss you could safely escape. Game would become a point and click adventure. Same with first suggestion, click on the backs, almost without any risks and clear all the small or mid robots waves. I don't think changes to spy class should be le upgrade that makes you win without any effort
![[TF2] MvM Weapons I Was Wrong About](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/-5QOW7h2Lfo/mqdefault.jpg)
![[TF2] MvM Weapons I Was Wrong About](/img/tr.png)
![[TF2] Mvm's Most HATED Weapon](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/JNUCMB174XA/mqdefault.jpg)
![[TF2] INSANE MvM Player Responds...](/img/n.gif)
Check out Displate's Collector’s Fest sale! Get 1-2 Displates for 32% off and 3+ for 38% off! (Discount automatically applied at checkout): www.displate.com/weezytf2 or use my code WEEZYTF2. Valid until November 24th!
Apologies for the long wait, been working on my longest video ever for the past month, will be out in a couple weeks so keep an eye out.
Spy is better than soldier stfu
hi banan mn
Displate at the time of this video still has no Yakuza/RGG studios plates so big L on weezy’s part
Do you see banana man
Hopping over on the white-hot sand
Here he come with some for me
Freshly taken from banana tree (one, two, three, four)
Banana man, me want a ton
Gimme double and a bonus one
Gimme more for all me friends
This banana flow will never end
Do you want a banana?
Peel it down and go, mm-mm-mm-mm
Do you want a banana?
This banana for you
Tonight, we dance around the flame
Then we get to play spirit game
Spirit names, we shout out loud
Shake the thunder from the spirit cloud
All the songbirds in the tree
Chant a tune to let the spirits free
Then we see them in the night
Spirits jumping by fire light
Do you want a banana? (Do you want a banana?)
Peel it down and go, mm-mm-mm-mm
Do you want a banana? (Do you want a banana?)
This banana for you
Look you, you too uptight, you know
You could laugh and kick it back and go (wee!)
But without a rhythm or a rhyme
You do not banana all the time
Fly away from city on the run
Try to make a little fun
Look you, come to the bungalow
African't you tell me told you so
Don't you love the bumping of the drum?
Make you shake until the bum go numb
Let de bongo play you 'til you drop
This banana never stop (never stop, never stop)
Forget all your troubles and go with the flow
Forget about whatever you may never know
Like whether whatever you are doing is whatever you should
And whether anything you do is ever any good
And then forget about banana when it stick in your throat
And when it make you wanna bellow, but you stuck in a choke
And forget about the yellow from the beckoning man
Who make you take another one and make a mock of your plan
Bungalay, bungalow
Make up your mind and tell me no
(Shh)
Well, it's nine o'clock, and it's getting dark
And the sun is falling from the sky
I've never left so early, and you may wonder why
Tomorrow morning on the plane
No banana make you go insane
Floating back to busy town
No banana make you want to frown
Do you want a banana? (Do you want a banana)
Peel it down and go, mm-mm-mm-mm
Do you want a banana?
This banana for... you
hi banana man
I have met one good MvM Spy player. Dude was baked out of his mind and cracked even more than that at the game. Everyone knew he was the best player on the team and that's saying something when we had a pretty high tour scout and well traveled medic too.
spy still is the worst class
@pogobod2128 the worst but stylish
@@pogobod2128worst but not that really kinda worst for me as there are certain missions that involves him being the only class to almostly carry the team up to victory. Well, Engie and other classes can carry everyone, yes. But, not every wave of missions can be carried with simply those set of classes only. Spy would be the "optional" kind of class for me as it depends on the mission wave
@@BX_TourniaArchive to me hes the worse class
It's kind of crazy how you'll get that one stoner playing the backstabbing character that is an absolute god. I once met a good friend I still have who played Shaco like a god stoned out of his mind
Spy is actually quite useful in MVM, this one time some guy joined and picked Medic which I had already picked and he refused to swap so I switched to Spy and it made him disconnect so I could play Medic.
If you wanted to play medic why didn't you just friendly disguse as a Medic that's like basically the same thing
Real gigamedics heal the spy while he's stabbing the giants to aggromaxx the giants towards the medic, while he has his shield or uber canteen in effect and to avoid any damage on the medic and makes every boss on the official valve missions a fucking joke insteead of a threat
@@elizabethopoussm well its your team not other team. 😂 even you disguise as medic they will see you as spy.
@@CarinoGamingStudio woosh
the hidden usage
I guess one thing that isn't mentioned is that, for every other class, if you're generally experienced, those skills will most likely translate to MVM, just shoot the robots instead of other people. For spy, his skillset does not translate AT ALL. One of the most important aspects of playing spy effectively is learning how enemies react, move around, shoot, and generally behave, both at a macro and micro level. 90% of the work when stabbing is developing a strong intuition for predicting enemy movement, for both backstabs & trickstabs, but in MVM, the robots just lock on to you, with smoothing & a small delay. Learning how to stab bots is completely different to stabbing players, so you need to play in a completely different way in order to be effective.
Yep. In PvP you need to either learn trickstabbing techniques of luring a guy over to you so you can stab them or jumping over them OR learning to get effective with disguise and cloak use to fool distracted enemies. Neither applies here. Trickstabbing a single small robot is nearly useless and robots are 100% fooled by disguises even if you come out of nowhere. In MvM, you need to predict robot AI, and you need to learn to circle strafe stab giant robots over and over for maximum DPS. See Underscore gaming's guide on how to do this effectively. It's actually pretty fun getting the hang of it.
Not to mention the fact that in pvp if you backstab one of the 6 enemies they definitly die no questions asked, in mvm if you stab one of the hundreds of enemies they PROBABLY die, depending on which one it is
I know this is just a rephrasing in far less words of what he said in the video but i believe it paints a far easier to process picture of how far removed his viability is in mvm vs regular casual matches
🤓
@@santiagoduenas2122Least underdeveloped yt kid
Basically the class based around mind games is utterly terrible against beings who are too stupid to even be lured into an obvious trap that is not within the straight like they usually walk into.
Demo makes traps because they know the robots will always follow the same pattern but Spy cannot use mind games succesfully.
What I think would make the spy viable is just "sapper spreads to nearby robots" as an upgrade. It would make the long cooldown more bearable since robots infect each other by walking near one another, making giants giant towers of disables for small robots. In alot of your clips, you can see the sapper being placed and not affecting even half of the robots directly in front of you. Also I would add Red Tape Recorder makes the robots walk backwards and take damage, at the cost of not being disabled.
This was exactly the idea I was going to suggest.
I like the idea of give the sapper more utility. I want the sapper to have slowing or stopping effects on the tank (I think it would be cool if it also did chip damage too).
All of there ideas are great.
Maybe also give a lighter version of Scout's cash overheal?
@@SeymourJones180sapping the Tank is my favorite idea
So change "Sapper power" so that the second tick causes the sapper to infect robots that pass by robots that have been sapped and then make the third tick introduce an explosion. Got it.
just as a fun fact: robots stunned by the sapper can be backstabbed from all sides. I saw a lot of clips where you tried to backstab a stunned robot, when you could’ve just stabbed them in the face.
(Also, this effect applies to the Mannhattan gate stun, too)
omg no way
I had no idea that was even a thing until now
this will clearly make MVM spy 2% more viable :)
My suggestion for Spy: a "Robot Camo" Upgrade that basically lengthens the time it takes robots to notice you after becoming undisguised. Would allow for longer chainstab sprees and also free up his crowd clearing by not having it be strictly tied to the Sapper.
Would make the YER GOATed again so I think it’s a good change. Screw your buffs on backstab I want to look fabulous
I feel like that would make YER a lot more fun as while it wouldn't be as good vs giants it would make you basicly untouchable by Small Robots as you'd bever be undisguised long enough for them to spot you.
Which to be fair: You picked the knife that is about disguise. You SHOULD be good at it.
Also it'd allow knives other than the Big Earner to be more useful.
@@ikiry0830i mean with the YER, there is still quite a delay before the disguise turns on
Maybe give the YER a 'disguise delay' upgrade that allows your backstab-disguises to become instantaneous
The summary of this video:
• Sniper performs Spy's role, but better.
• Spy has mediocre crowd control.
• Bots automatically and quickly detect him.
• Spy can only be effective against giants if they're alone and have no obstruction in the way.
• Spy is actually the worst at tank-busting.
1. Sniper and Spy have very different roles in MvM, those being crowd control and giant damage respectively. Sniper does have good giant damage for sure, but nowhere near the level of Spy.
2. This is true to an extent, but it's to balance out his high single-target burst damage. Spy can generally still get a few chainstabs in a group without getting caught out. In parts of the wave with only small bots, Spy should generally go after the most valuable targets, as in PvP. Small Heavy bots especially are easy for the Spy to stab and strafe around, and are also valuable picks for the team.
3. If this wasn't the case, Spy would be op as all hell. This means you actually have to learn how robot aggro works and how to strafe, duke out and dodge attacks properly. This isn't a bad thing, it just requires practice and experience to get right, more so than most players expect.
4. This is flat out wrong. At worst, Spy can deal nearly 2000 damage to a giant before being locked onto, assuming max Armor Pen. That's over a third of every non-boss giant's health in the game. With practice however, even with surrounding robots, third, fourth and even fifth stabs become possible as long as you keep your circle strafes tight to minimise the chances of running into obstructions. And even if you get stuck, so what? Just pop DR, disguise and go right back in. It only takes ~5s for you to do this. Again, practice is key here.
5. Yes, this is mostly true. As the game progresses, Spy's upgrades do nothing to upgrade his tank dps, which is at odds to basically every other class, making him clearly the worst choice. You can mitigate this somewhat by upgrading your revolver of choice, but this should only be done when you have heaps of extra money, and only after your knife and movement speed are at full power. However, in the early game (i.e. Waves 1 and 2), Spy isn't horrible against tanks, mostly due to the Revolver's fast firing speed, high clip size and the ability to quickly reload all of your shots. Unfortunately, as previously mentioned, Spy does not tend to upgrade his gun very often, so the money you spend over the course of the mission doesn't scale well with tank damage. This is the one area where I think Spy could use a slight buff. If Armor Penetration also increased tank damage alongside giant damage, that would be an acceptable change. Not entirely sure on how much the knife's damage should be increased by though (maybe 40 per tick)?
@@JohnMonash87 skill issue
Heavy actually has the worst damage on tanks, he gets like a 70% dmg reduction on them
@@DaniZeAlmighty
Heavy can just use the warrior's spirit with max attack speed, and he can deal more damage than his miniguns.
@@DaniZeAlmightyonly the mini gun damage,his melee is still deal full damage which is where warrior spirit + buffalo streak shines same way sniper does with carbine + bushwacka
Honestly, I think being able to sap the tank would be a good addition. Add it to the sapper upgrade, or ad its own upgrade to the sapper where the tank takes 5% more damage, and moves 5% slow for each upgrade up to 15% for each. That way it helps the team out with tanks a bit faster.
And ideally not make it too expensive because the sapper still needs you to get in melee range to apply and I doubt you can stack multiple sappers on the same tank (as hilarious as that would be)
@craigkuhlman6869 i could almost imagine a tank absolutely COVERED in sappers just getting shredded
Only the damage vulnerability
Reason: mannworks
I like this idea a lot. Naturally, if competent teams do fine with tanks now, they probably wouldn’t get too much from the sapper slow, but it’d be a godsend for lobbies more filled with low tours who aren’t equipped to handle them.
Ah yes, theoretical balance changes, my specialty.
Spy Money Magnet would be a genuine upside, and potentially make Scout go from a 100% Pick-rate Staple to just a good pick. Spy wouldn't passively draw aggro and wouldn't have MFD or Mad Milk support, but in exchange Spy could pick up money while disguised, possess an aoe stun+slow on a moderate cooldown, and have significantly increased Giant DPS. Plus it would enable other classes to use alternate options more regularly, like Soldier Conch or Sniper Jarate, without needing to worry about function overlap.
Explosive Backstab I also don't think would be good, but a similar type of upgrade that would be really fun could be an EMP Backstab. Basically, backstabbing a target with EMP Backstab active would apply a 25% Slowdown to the backstab victim and all robots in a wide radius (with Giants having a slight resistance), but the Slow effect could stack, and if a robot gets inflicted with four stacks of this EMP, it gets knocked out as if a sapper was put on it. Chainstabs would become more viable and fun, and Giant Backstabbing would have some decent crowd control. Comparing and contrasting with the sapper, you'd need to get multiple backstabs to apply the sapper effect, but it wouldn't need to be on a cooldown. And no matter how OP you think it is, just remember Explosive Headshots still exists.
Also maybe tone down the cost of some of his upgrades, but that has some stronger implications.
The money magnet idea sounds really good but it has a possible negative impact in that Spies and Scouts will fight for money for survivability so they'd have some theoretical anti-synergy which is something we want to steer clear from.
I mean it is in character..
Having the DeadRinger be basically the only remotely viable option is bad gamedesign, but the explosive backstab could be very good and have spy be the ultimate glass cannon, high-risk, high-reward class.
This would be so much more simple is the mvm community was as laid-back as the rest of the tf2 community.
5:33 That's messed up, made me laugh though...
Spy's biggest problem is *cost* , risk and how specific his kit has to be to work, so my idea for a buff would be to reduce the cost of all upgrades just like medic canteens upgrade by a big amount like 30%, not only does it make spy more tanky(consistent) as he doesn't need to waste 450 per penetration up, which also gives him flexibility to branch into more niche options which you couldn't before because of how expensive his useful upgrades were.
Also it kinda makes sense because the spy doesn't have any fancy heavy weapons like grenade launchers, mini guns or unique handmade items like a medigun. Which gives him a unique role as a better early game pick because he can afford more with less money.
I agree that the mvm community suffers from sexual depravation, but how does that affect valve not giving spy explosive backstab?
Meh... you can play Stock Spy. It's like a 10% debuff compared to the Dead Ringer. Hardly the worst loadout downgrade in the game.
Spy needs the money magnet, maybe explosive backstab and will be the meta over scout in any wave that doesn't involve tanks
Explosive backstab...... You could literally play mvm alone, you wouldn't even need a team anymore, just pick spy and insta win
Man I can’t believe Weezy didn’t talk about how the spy class automatically reveals all spy bots wow Weezy WOW
does this even do anything? I never noticed any difference when a spy is in the team
Well when the announcer says they’re spies afoot people usually notice when a heavy is walking towards an engie without your dispenser near them.
Any tf2 player can spot spies without even thinking
And all spy bots agro him which is somewhat useful when swarmed such as in ghost town.
The sentry does the same thing.
One thing that wasn't brought up when it comes to how Valve treated Spy during MvM's development. The Your Eternal Reward could mitigate many of the issues when it comes to crowd control as you could stab as many as you like without them responding with the instant disguise mechanic. However Valve thought this was too overpowered (Despite other classes doing it far better) and added a disguise delay to the YER, ensuring the bots will shoot you. This delay is actually patched out in Potato.MVM's community events, and with it removed makes Spy signficiantly more viable.
“My favorite class is the Spy.”
No
“Because spy is a bad class”
-Uncledane
Gabe is a class
-🤓
But would you play him Man vs machine
“Thanks, and have fun.”
I think changing MVM’s Your Eternal Reward disguise on kill feature to be instant could help the survivability and chainstab potential of the class, while it would make dealing with ubermedics and small robot groups easier, it would still take proper movement and skill to kill giants, because it would be the only time you are not disguised
Funny thing is, Valve actually nerfed the YER in MvM by making the disguises on backstab not instant anymore because they feared he could clear out groups of small bots easily
I think a good buff to spy’s tank busting would be an upgrade to the sappers that makes tanks take up to 20% more damage
Too much I think.
I think that could work. Or another solution that solves 2 problems at once is letting the Spy have a money collection radius and money overheal while cloaking with the other watches. This gives them some utility beyond just the ringer. Maybe just smaller than Scout's since he's slower and has less mobility.
@@limpid_runaway1879sometimes the tanks feels like they take wayy too long to kill
But a good way to balance it could be that makes the tank slower, both in movement and when deploying the bomb i dunno if that could last forever once you put the sapper but i'll take anything at this point
I propose
+ Sapper now slows down tanks
That’s way too little, tanks have how much 20000?
This might be a stupid idea, but what about making it so that spy has low aggro against most robots? That way, even without a disguise, a spy can make a difference in crowd control and solidifies his role as a giant killer. Maybe make it so that, idk, Pyro robots keep the high aggro so he’s not completely busted but that way he manages to stay in close without getting focused too hard.
Regardless of whether that would be balanced, it would require a significant overhaul to the TF2 bot AI coding, so...
@UnderscoreGamingChannel maybe an upgrade of spy being still disquised while x amount of attacks? You could backstab bots while still being unnoticed
@@UnderscoreGamingChannelyou dont know what youre talking about
@@netnooker Okay, fair point. I am unfamiliar with the actual coding of TF2 AI.
It will require SOME SORT of change to TF2 bot AI, which I SUSPECT could get very messy if there's not an easy way to separate MvM bot behavior from regular bot behavior. Based on how niche of a hobby reverse-engineering TF2 is, I wouldn't be surprised if there are less than 100 people in the entire world who could confirm or deny that suspicion offhand.
@@UnderscoreGamingChannel I mean, I don't know shit either, but i dont think its a technical problem, i thik its a "valve doesnt give 2 fucks about tf2" problem
An upgrade for spy that would make him way more efficient in crowd control is the scrapped ”reprogramer” upgrade that turns sapped robots into Red robots for a period of time as long as they aren’t giants.
Here are some of my ideas for Spy:
* Have Robot Sapper Power also increase recharge speed by 15% each point
* Add a unique upgrade for each invis watch in the Sapper section, each for 400. For instance, DR should get an upgrade to either gain part of its charge back on backstab or refill off of ammo boxes, and the invis watches could get multiple points of speed boost and damage reduction while cloaked to bring it in line with the DR's damage reduction.
* Maybe a one-point upgrade that gives the knife the ability of the Third Degree, which scales with Armor Penetration???
* Dumb idea, give the Tank a back hitbox where the back engine is. It doesn't even have to scale with Armor Penetration to be worth it for Spy now.
I have an idea to add on to these, raise the overheal cap for the Kunnaiver's Kunai, and force robots to drop 25 more cash on death for each backstab.
Make it so that the 2nd tick of Sapper power up causes sapped robots to sap robots that approach them and add "explode on ignite" as a secondary effect of the third tick of sapper power.
Sapper power now allows sappers to be applied to tanks and tanks move 10% slower per tick of Sapper power.
Spy gets a fair bit of play in community MvM. When waves have endless streams of giants and lots of shield medics, spy can work better than the usual pick picks (but tbf those waves are kinda designed around making spy work).
True. I play community a lot and classes like Snipers don't do anything against shield Medics because... shield. The only classes that can deal with it would be Pyro, because flames go through shields, Demoknight because he can flank it or Spy for the same reason as Demoknight.
The community MvM mission designs are so much better than normal MvM imo. Really shows the importance of each class, playstyle, role, and of course: Spy.
If I'm correct, all expert missions contain an extremely hard to deal with giant quick-fix medic and combo that can teamwipe when there isnt a spy on the team.
And it can be any medic too, like a vaccinator medic, armored medic, shield medic, kritzkrieg or a giant uber medic (trickiest to deal with as spy tbh) all can have the team on a roadblock of constant hatch defense failure. Yet those mentioned medics (except for small uber meds or uber canteen meds) can be fucked in the ass hard with spy like they've been wiped out of the mission data.
@@peanutbuttrr8461 Yeah vaccinator medics specifically basically require s Spy or maybe Demoknight to take them out because of that 75% damage resistance and maybe more consider how cracked the robots can be. Also I have no idea how to deal with a giant uber medic.
Community mvm really needs to make missions more and more spy centric to the point of being literally impossible without a spy, then people will stop kicking spies from lobbies just for his class choice regardless of tour count
im guilty as charged for being the community spy lol, hes just really fun to melt giants with is all. tbh i never really thought of the waves being suited for spy, i thought the giant spam was to make medic's shield useful
I know it's not much but something I'm surprised you didn't touch on is Spy's revolvers. The Diamond Back is a no brainier, having free crits isn't something you should ignore. Yes I know it only does 102 damage per shot but that's still damage being contributed to tanks and giants that are too risky to try to stab. It's insane how terrible of a class spy is in MVM, even with free crits and instant kills
@stellarstar6553 Shit I completely forgot canteens were a thing, what do people even do with their canteen on Spy? Best I can think is either using Uber canteens to avoid certain death or like you said, use crits on the stock revolver to try and contribute some damage on tanks
@stellarstar6553 diamondback is my go-to pick for revolver and its better than you would think. most spies completely avoid common bots when you can easily get a couple stabs in a horde and hide. hell, most experienced spies go for the kunai + diamondback, giving you overheal and a stronger revolver.
the diamondback's crits are actually pretty useful. you can two-shot snipers and scouts from anywhere. its not crazy (like any revolver) but it's not as bad as you make it out to be.
@@jacobboggs71You are better off temporarily switching to a non upgraded phlog pyro for the tank waves than wasting precious credits on a crit canteen that will still do less damage than the pyro.
You die before getting the chance to use the crits. Even on tanks and potshots on giants and far away snipers, it really doesn't matter. I think the l'etranger is actually better because of the cloak on hit you can get to refill your dead ringer much faster
@@marichanlovesyou if you're starting out as spy, etranger is good yeah
but the more you play spy and understand how aggro works with him, the less use you have for the dead ringer, and the more useful the diamondback becomes
Something that may help is after landing an backstab, Spy gets high damage resistances for an small period of time that resets per each successful backstab, so it's harder for the spy getting erased from existence for just doing it's job like in normal gameplay when fighting Kunai users (spy gets backstab, is shot by enemies, get's to escape because of the overheal instead of getting torched in 1 second).
Depends on how much res, like 50% would probably still shred through you and higher would make it not really spy anymore. Also this heavily favors the kunai as the best weapon since the only resource that matters at that point would be health, because the longer he could fight = more dps.
Facetanking as a concept in general doesn't really fit spy in the base game and MvM.
How about a full uber for 1 second? Maybe only for stabbing giants.
So lets think of a more fitting and unique solution
The problem:
Spy's biggest problem is *cost* , risk and how specific his kit has to be to work optimum.
So my first idea for a buff would be to reduce the cost of all upgrades just like medic canteens upgrade around (30%~50), not only does it make the spy less risky and error prone because he can afford his resistances as he doesn't need to waste 450 per penetration up, which also gives him flexibility to branch into more niche options which you couldn't before because of how expensive his useful upgrades were.
Also it kinda makes sense because the spy doesn't have any fancy heavy weapons like grenade launchers, mini guns or unique handmade items like a medigun. Which gives him a unique role as a better early game pick because he can afford more with less money.
@@Loguer interesting idea, that can work but in the fight with more that one giant, it would be pretty useless as fights mostly don't end after 1 second, at most he can get out but the downtime afterwards would still be the same.
@@Nitosa You be surpriced how tanky an Deadringer spy with kunai can be, even with crits he manages to eat that easily if he got 1 backstab, thats why they are hated in particular, deadringer kunai with letronger
13:39 Wow. That health transition is wild.
how the hell did you notice that
Its like Valve looked at what bases each class covered, thought they had finished, and called it a day
Then they realized there was no giant killing specialisation and said "fuck it, lets make the whole fucking class specialised in giant killing" while giving him nothing else.
Tbh giants are present on 80% of MvM waves and if you know what you're doing you can do a lot.
@TheDoc_K The problem with that is that there are other classes that are good at giant killing (even if not as good as spy) but can also deal with crowds of small bots and tanks and don't require anywhere as much effort to not suck and die.
@@appelofdoom8211 True. Spy is really good at giant killing but so are other classes and they can also doe AOE and tankbusting. I think buffs like money overheal and maybe time bomb sapper are warranted.
they started coding in an ability for the sapper that made robots fight on your side, and then just never went through with it
@@dkskcjfjswwwwwws413 MVM as a gamemode in development looked radically different than what we eventually got from the repo-leaks. As to why they scrapped it, we can only speculate.
1. Controlled Robots would easily die from the next spawn-waves of robots.
2. Spy & the team will just want to outright kill the robot, rather than let them live for the minuscule advantage it might have brought.
3. Likely didn't want players to get confused by BLU robots suddenly turning RED.
4. Likely wouldn't work on Boss Robots, Giants, or any special units.
A sort of explosive sap could be helpful. where all bots that have a sapper applied take damage from each one backstabbed. this could be either as OP as explode on ignite where all squishys instantly die or maybe just a 100-200ish damage applied per backstab to others could be done. a thrown sapper could also be helpful for a long range support option for spy. and maybe a upgrade that allows the spy to gain more overheal and perhaps even lifesteal overheal per stab in some way
backstab all zapped enemies at once...
@@HappyBeezerStudios pretty much
You know. If the YER worked. I bet spy would genuinely be fun.
I think upgrades for the Disguise Kit PDA (Like the Engi's) could be good for Spy. Things like "Damage Resistance When Disguised" or "Decloak Time" or "Cloak Regen Rate" or even "Faster Disguise Time" can all be beneficial. Tone down the cost of every upgrade for Spy and Spy only as well, so these upgrades could, yknow, be purchased before Wave 5.
While explosive backstab could be an overcorrection, I'd say the effort required to even get a backstab warrants a larger reward than just a single pick. Perhaps if it was a smaller radius that didn't clear a whole pack, it would provide just enough leniency to give the spy an out after a backstab.
Also, I think spy having to walk up to a group and manage to get a backstab is more effort (and less spammable) than a sniper moving his mouse 2 centimeters and shutting down the entire map. Like if sniper can be busted with little to no effort, I see no reason why spy shouldn't be able to be just as busted (but it actually requires the spy to get close and pull off stabs). Just to be clear I think neither class should have it for balance reasons, buy spy def needs it more if I had to pick one of the two classes.
If we’re talking giving MVM Spy explosives, Weezy mentioned something about giving the sappers a time bomb upgrade in passing once; not an actual suggestion, just a “these will always be useless unless Valve adds something huge like that” kind of line. Honestly, though, that sounds like a good idea to me.
@@isenokami7810Maybe the supper just turns into a csgo bomb that you plant on robot's and kill them.
Forget making a backstab like how explosive headshot for sniper, make it so every bot he successfully kills with a backstab explode and kill other bots
Give knifes an upgrade "Electric Stab" that deals %HP of damage to giants.
Also a sapper upgrade that does damage to tanks.
“I wonder how scout’s mum is doing” made my head explode
I'm thinking about cloak and sapper. While other classes have an ability to upgrade most of their cooldowns, spy just have to sit and hide when he's out of his tools. So making a way to recharge your sapper or cloak would help a lot. So here some of my concepts. Just keep in mind they're all separate from each other, that means I don't suggest adding all of them at ones.
1. Cloak and sapper recharge rate upgrade. Straight and primitive way to fix the problem. As I said most of the classes have this type of upgrade. Even demoknight has it on his shield, despite it's completely useless.
2. Cloak on damage/kill upgrade. Yes, I know about this upside on some of spy's weapons, but we also have health on kill and kunai with the similar effect, so the player always have choice where they should save money. Same here: do I have extra money to upgrade diamondback or should I pick l'etranger?
3. Sapper refresh upgrade. This idea is kinda weird even to me, but I'll explain it so maybe someone will have a thought on improving it. Kinda same thing as gas passer, but maybe focused on giants, like performing a backstab om giant will refill sapper meter a little, or maybe killing a giant will restore your sapper entirely. This idea came out from refreshing sapper on building destruction because I always felt strange about losing sapper when you're dealing with robot-engineers. You lose your sapper on destroying engi's nest and just have to deal with his teleporter with bare hands, knowing that any second it can spawn binch of new robots. And the situation gets worse when you dealing with swarming engies, where you have to sit and waitafter dealing with the first one, while the others are taking control over the map. But having an entire upgrade just for engies is strange so I decided to combine it with giants.
4. Revolver damage upgrade. This is a completely different idea, that has nothing in common with cloak or sapper but aims on spy's "tankbustingability" and giving reward for risky "up close and personal" gameplay style. The idea is straightforward you store crits with diamondback and now can at least somehow help your team with killing a tank or more reliably fight some robots from the distance, for example one-shot uber-medics without risking of being killed by a giant they're healing.
Buff to spy: Make the YER work properly, instead of that weird five second delay in the disguising. This rewards skillful playing and increases survivability
YES.
the YER nerf is reverted in potato.tf missions, i've tried it a couple times and its a fun sidegrade
It also doesn't help that Spy's cloak/disguises have no upgrades, especially considering Engineer's building upgrades are the key to his upgrade route. Explosive Backstabs doing 40 health would just mean uber medics get popped unless you use a sapper. Maybe give the sapper some sort of aim slow, or make it so that sapped bots can't aim at spies properly? Or just introduce the cut spytrap.
I was more thinking of disguise upgrade where one could get away with more stabs before undisguising along with money regenerating cloak perk.
It would help a lot if they made the cloak actually fucking work against robots, even without upgrades
The time bomb sapper upgrade would definitely help Spy considerably, but one other change I thought of that would be cool is to have the armor penetration upgrade bypass ubercharged robots, which would be highly effective in situations where the team doesn't have an ideal Medic killer.
MvM Spy Mains: Must master advanced movement techniques requiring precise timing while being aware of their surroundings and planning on when to make a strategic withdrawal.
Me, a Heavy Main: Hahaha, minigun go brrrrrrr!
I'll fix that last sentence: More like "any other fucking class".
The scout circling around the giant purposefully trying to get me killed before I can stab:
When you made the list and then asked “why tf would anyone want to juggle this many torches on top of all of Spy’s other shortcomings just to make him efficient in the one area he’s not categorically dogshit in?” I couldn’t breathe omg. The whole video was a setup for this punchline. Amazing video.
I main Spy, Pyro and Demo in all modes.
And your "copium" speech was quite funny for someone who never saw how spy plays there.
I do play him alot on both boot camp and Potato, and sometimes on tours since I rarely play those.
All I can say is - teammate Scout who thinks he is supposed to run circles around Giants is your worst enemy.
Otherwise it's simple - get in, do according to situation, dead ringer away.
Kunai can be easily outpaced by any other knife. You can overheal yourself with any Knife(and even gun!) when using "Health on Kill" upgrade, as soon as you reach the 2nd level of it. I am surprised you didn't know that.
And combine that with Crit on kill - and Stock/Big Earner become Spy's best friend.
Yeah as someone who did scout when someone was doing mvm spies, I apologize for blowing your cover.
@@starmaker75 you are unicorn. A Scout among Scunts. You have my utter respect, please continue your existence and take a good care of yourself.
Also diamondback requiring zero upgrades to work on tanks.
l'm not sure what exactly you're talking about with knife crits on kill, but it's definitely true the kunai is overrated in mvm.
@@Brown95P Knife's crits on kill allow you to use YOUR GUN. It turns any gun into a good assistant to Tank-destroying class, and that can come in a clutch when the tank has 10% of it's HP left and is dropping the bomb. Saved quite a few waves like that over 10 years of playing Spoy.
And by any gun, that includes even L'Etranger. The weakest gun. Yet with crits from your knife - even this gun can pull off a Combo, especially if you use Dead Ringer. You stab one jackass, you remove a whole row of them with crit shots, you GTFO. Simple as that, just don't forget Projectile Penetration upgrade. One of the first ones you ever buy on Spy, among with aforementioned Crits on Kill(Knife), Heal on Kill(Knife), and Sapper's level 1.
Btw, thanks to the penetration upgrade, L'Etranger can also fill your cloak instantly it you shoot a whole group of bots.
makes copium speech despite the gameplay footage itself showing he's clearly not good at MvM spy
Some upgrade ideas I have for spy
Weakening stab: Upon stabbing a robat, the robot will get the debuff "Marked for Death."
Advantage: Each consecutive backstab does more damage.
You're better: Each backstab gives the spy a permanent speed and damage boost.
Disarm: Sapping the bomb will temporarily disarm the bomb, and robots won't be able to pick it up
Ok, I didn't know the ammo refill canteen recharges the sapper, but still, I believe it's too high of a cost to just charge something the spy normally has available all the time, unlike the demoman's shields...
I would buff the recharge time for the sapper, or at least add an upgrade to improve it, much like the jarate or the mad milk. This would make the spy more viable against big groups without making him overpowered or relying so much on the rest of the team.
17:05 ofc french guy talks about maining spy
As someone who mains Spy in MVM ~30 tours its all about finding the right loadout for you. Except for cloak. I would say always use the Ringer and LEARN TO AIRSTRAFE. THAT WILL SAVE YOU OVER AND OVER! I swap between knives on diff rounds between Kunai and Earner because a lot of rounds are VERY situational for spies. First round is always a bonebreaker for spies but once you get at least 1 of each res and swing speed, you’ll start sluggin!
OH and go behind walls, barrels, and fences. Like Minecraft, losing eyesight will lose aggro if you disguise
Thanks for the tips for when I inevitably try and get the achievement that requires you to use only one class for an entire tour, for all 9 classes
As a Spy MvM main, does the YER work on backstabbing but not killing, and is it good?
@@ericneuens the robots will kill you if you get a YER bs kill. Just like cloaks and DR, they continue shooting you for ~1-2 seconds after pop. Do NOT use the YER
Hope this helps!
@@ericneuensno the yer is worthless
That transition into a sponsor was SMOOTH
I feel like a good way to buff spy would to just remove the buffer time when you stab with the yer. It sounds overpowered but he’d still have some of the slowest crowd control in the roster
YES.
“It is not the class, is your experience”
- Each class has its own function, equipment, limits and others things.
Spy is such a strange class in mvm. He's amazing at giant killing but so are demo and sniper (who is the best class in mvm imo) who have the benefit of being able to shred entire crowds and tanks far better.
Sappers cooldown means he also can't reliably deal with engineers either as he has to prioritise sentries or teleporters and he has to kill the engie or else its all for nothing.
One good thing about spy is that every enemy spy bot focuses him above everything which is great for that tank section on ghost town.
demo is not an amazing giant killer. he is only used in 2c meta with kritz medic up his ass. i dare anyone who says demo is op to go play mannslaughter as him
Bold of you to assume you can play ghost town long enough as spy without getting kicked
I find the idea of Spy disguising as a robot and fooling the robots to be amusing. They’re robots. They probably have software communicating with each unit so they know what is an actual robot and what isn’t.
Rather than a major rework or significant change to one of his mechanics, I think Spy could be made a lot better by a simple change to one upgrade.
Armor Penetration, in addition to its regular effects, also adds +25% "butterknife" damage per point. By default you do 40 base butterknife damage, and with this maxed out you would do 80.
On the surface, this isn't a big deal, but giving Spy this higher base damage actually affects quite a few things, such as...
1. Doubled Tank DPS. The tank cannot be backstabbed and knives cannot full crit against it at all, so spy's current tank busting can be outdone by just about every class hitting the tank with an un-upgraded stock melee. You won't be melting tanks with this change or anything, but doubling his damage to 80 per swing makes it a lot more respectable.
2. Crits on Kill. Usually ignored since Spy's crits deal 120 which doesn't meet any significant kill threshold, this would make his maxed out crits do 240, one-shotting everything but heavies. While this won't turn Spy into Demoknight it does give him a way to deal with small robots without relying on the sapper. (Worth noting that crit butterknife kills don't give the "On Backstab" effects, so you couldn't go ham with the Kunai).
3. Uber-medics. With maxed out damage, Spy could kill Uber-medics in 2 hits dealing 80 damage a swing, which also happens to avoid the health threshold for Uber-medics to use their Ubers. Additionally a single point of Armor Penetration paired with crits would do 150, just enough to one-shot them.
Since Spy is the only class that can’t do anything significant to tanks, why not give him something to help deal with them? What if you could also place the Sapper on a tank to temporarily slow it down? Or, something more unique, have the Sapper lower the tank’s defense so the rest of the crew can deal more damage? You would be sacrificing the sapper, and potential group kill on some robots, in exchange for helping your team wear the tank down a bit faster.
It's not quite accurate to say "Spy can't do anything significant to tanks". There isn't actually that much variability between classes as far as tank DPS. A Spy with NO upgrades at all can do about 20% as much damage as a Beggar's Bazooka Soldier or Phlog Pyro with maximum upgrades, with most other classes and loadouts falling somewhere in between.
Actually, a few classes are worse without upgrades than Spy without upgrades, and a Spy who has a bit of money to upgrade his gun is about half as strong as a Stock Pyro.
The Spy is still probably the worst class against tanks, but I think I really oversold it in my video back in 2019 and probably contributed to the spreading of this idea.
My buff would be to reduce the cost of all upgrades just like medic canteens upgrade by a big amount like 30%, like it makes sense because the spy doesn't have any fancy heavy weapons like grenade launchers, mini guns or unique handmade items like a medigun. Which gives him a unique role as a better early game pick because he can afford more with less money.
Plus he's a very sophisticated agent, so he probably has some connections which helps him get info or discounts.
I once played a match where everyone locked in spy. We didn't get past the first wave.
I would suggest a change to his aggro attraction, scout wants to attract robot attention because he has the mobility to avoid the damage, spy does not, having every robot around you suddenly make you their most wanted seems to be the biggest detriment, I would propose that only the robot you are actively damaging target you, this will still retain the challenge with larger robots, but will stop groups of robots turning you into paste after the first stab.
That'd make Spy easily able to solo any part of a mission until Giants appear, and even when they do, he's already at his best when facing a single giant anyway. I think he should just have the lowest aggro out of any class, just like he has the highest right now.
@@manologamerss5801 You managed to better articulate what I was trying to say. Thanks.
I remember playing with this spy main named "Revolver Knight" and all he did was play revolver gunspy and he was pretty damn good too. I hope he is still out there slaying robots with his revolver
Why does Spy not have a money magnet already, especially considering he is Scout's dad?
Based on what I see in your clips, I want Giant Robots to have a maximum turning speed, similar to a charging Demoman.
I've heard of a tanky distraction strategy that works well with Spy in MvM. The idea is to buy uber canteens, damage resistance, and regeneration, then equip the Dead Ringer and the L'etranger, and you position yourself behind the bots just to distract them and pointing their weapons away from your allies, while they shoot at them, heal up, or set up buildings.
Its generally better to save this for particular robots that your team struggles with. Like giant black box soldiers that heal on kill as well as hit. You can do a little French dance in a far away corner and they will only target you if they can see you undisguised
Ages ago, I mean YEARS, the group I got thrown into had a spy main join for a tour. They were good, but I'm guessing they were experienced player who could of played any character really well.
it might have helped we had a high tier medic and demo who really knew their shit.
Could have
Shoutouts for the passer Mario origami king ost, that game goes so unappreciated
How about a disguise drop delay, where upon attacking out of a disguise, you have a three or so second window where you retain the disguise in the eyes of the robots?
the robots are stupid, they need 3 seconds to understand that the guy who just stabbed a buddy isn't on the same team.
I actually do play spy in mvm, and one thing I can recommend is getting the crits on kill knife upgrade. Use the stock revolver, big earner, and dead ringer. Go in, get a bunch of stabs, then back off and start blasting. And if we're talking about weapon changes and upgrades to make spy more useful, I say the sapper needs to deal damage to robots like it does to a sentry.
From what I have seen of good spy's in MVM, the only buffs he needs is the money collection overheal, like scout, and making the sapper effect also increase damage to the robots effected by the sapper, giving him some crowd control. Also, make it so that each upgrade of the sapper effectiveness reduces the cooldown. And, yes, I have seen good Spy players in MVM... 2 of them. But they carried the missions on their back, as the group of us they were carrying, they were the only ones to have mann up.
I think those lag spikes you mentioned regularly occur when large groups of crit enemies spawn
A money magnet ability that heals you depending on the amount you collect would be good, I mean spy does have a expensive taste, or decreased resistance upgrades, or even just simple health increase would do it
Something that Scout has built in. Which is to say I agree, given Spy can function pretty well as a money collector as well in my experience.
I’d like to see scout’s money magnet + healing as an upgrade (not a passive) for Pyro and for Demoman’s boots too. That way there’s 3 money collectors.
It would obviously not stack overheal, but that way Pyro wouldn’t die in 0.5 seconds and Demoknightwould have more chances to heal up without the Katana.
Scout wouldn’t be outshined because he’s still the fastest class in the game without upgrades, and demoknight and Pyro don’t have access to altruistic / support weapons (not counting the Homewrecker).
Spy needs it more than those two tho.
like son like father
@@minibotas9496 The Scout's money magnet ability would be ridiculously OP on any other class unless you exclude the healing effect. The Scout can be an extremely powerful fighter with all of that healing. You don't want to give that ability to a class with even high DPS.
Except I guess maybe it would be okay on Demoknight.
21:26 this sentence lives rent free in my mind
If any class in MvM could use a buff, it's definitely The Spy, BUT... here's my copium:
1. *MvM is a highly customizable game mode.* In the handful of (very old) official Valve missions, sure, The Spy is underwhelming due to the wave and map design, but plenty of custom missions are balanced in such a way that The Spy is arguably better than The Sniper. Conversely, The Demoman, commonly touted as "OP" by people who only ever play the 10 most popular Mann Up missions, kind of sucks on a lot of custom missions and maps. Especially if the Demo hasn't memorized the bot spawns by playing the mission 100 times already.
2. *The Spy got made redundant by the Two Cities Medic buff.* Getting up close to dangerous robots safely and abusing robot AI to support his teammates used to be The Spy's special abilities, but The Medic can do those things more easily now. Well, the first one, at least. The Medic always had the second ability; it just wasn't popular to play Medic.
3. *The Spy isn't THAT bad for tanks.* I was too harsh on his tank-busting abilities in my own video, and I regret it. Tank-busting isn't rocket science, and even "the worst" class isn't that bad. (Sometimes, you should use the Revolver instead of your knife.) P.S. Stock Heavy and Stock Sniper aren't even bad against tanks, either. I'd say they're both better than a Stock Loadout Soldier.
4. *People still play Milk 'n Mark Scout instead of Combat Scout, and nobody complains.* Half of the Spy mains probably got into the class because how powerful The Spy is compared to Milk n' Mark Scout.
I wouldn't be against buffing The Spy, but I don't trust Valve to do it, seeing how they made The Medic and The Pyro OP with their buffs. I'd rather have a slightly underpowered class than another OP class. I always prefer tweaks to overhauls. *I'd suggest making the Armor Penetration upgrade affect non-backstab damage as well as Giant backstab damage (this would help a lot with tanks), tweaking upgrade costs, and tweaking Sapper cooldown and radius. And maybe make the Sapper do a bit of damage.*
I am technically a Scout main, not a Spy main lol.
Seriously, I hate the "Demo is OP" logic. Imagine if people applied the, "This is OP starting around your 50th playthrough, once you've committed the entire game to memory," logic to every video game. Yeesh.
somehow i sent this comment 4 hours ago and it never to be seen:
i dont think he would change his views on spy with his current state in mannup he prob wouldve when he plays custom regularly (aka never lol)
I feel like when a spy back stabs a giant, it should give the effect of what that knife does, like with Saxton Hale
Ever since VHS gamemode (And remembering Spy being in MvM), I thought that having any backstab on giants give the benefits of a successful backstab regardless of if it kills like with Saxton would be handy, especially with the money magnet buff Scout has so that being useful isn't dependent entirely on the knife
As for the aoe backstab, I feel like having just something small applied to the nearby robots would be fine, be it a debuff or small damage with a cooldown for each time it triggers would help him compete with Sniper on the priority target vs group elimination aspect
I had come up with a few ideas for spy.
A new set of upgrades
Stock revolver gaining a ‘crit when it would minicrit’ and ‘damage upgrade’ options
Friendly dapper placement. Placing a dapper on a friendly sentry would reduce its ammo consumption rate, on a dispenser would boost its rate of healing/ammo regen, and on a teleporter give a speed boost on exit.
And knife gets a gear jammer upgrade. Sides of the tank get a backstab animation. Deal 1000 damage to the tank and jam the tread line, causing that tank to permanently move 10% slower. Requires 20 seconds to recharge. Meanwhile backstab damage is reduced 50%
I play spy in mvm occasionally for fun. The fun comes from everyone else yelling and screaming at me for playing spy
Most of spy’s unlock knifes buff you when you get a backstab kill, yet he’s designed to fight giants, who can’t give you the buff till they die
This might be insane, but what if Spy could pick up the bomb and carry it backwards? It would probably need to be a Disguise Kit upgrade, but it would certainly be a unique one!
Another insane idea might be letting the Spy hack a robot with his sapper, somehow, or perhaps even a whole wave. Consider a potential upgrade:
>Hacking Mode: "Consume a full sapper charge to permanently hack all robots currently effected by your sapper." You would need to limit the number of of times it could be used in a wave, and combine this with an Ammo canteen (otherwise your sapper's effect will have run out before the bar recharges), but I think those are fair trade-offs for adding a bunch of new team members.
In a different reality where MVM had room for such concepts, that would have been an fun way to play MVM. It is just that as MVM stands; there is hardly any room for the behavior besides killing the robots. Robots against robots are just going to duke it out, and maybe the robots you hacked came up on top if you're lucky. Surely, it won't last long enough against for another spawn-wave that will immediately drop in.
Judging from the TF2 Repo-files; MVM was clearly dramatically different to what we eventually got, and it is no wonder why it boiled down to what it is. When you add an PVE Gamemode to an mainly PVP; you are designing around what the classes already do against ai controlled enemies that can do the same. Making it too broad of a scope would have easily alienated the playerbase, which it already done at launch.
And this was when MVM was significantly at its hardest; which required basic game sense, knowledge, and absolute strong cooperation at first. As it stands, the gamemode as-is now simply works. Much to the passionate crowd's dismay.
My biggest problem with spy is that he is ironically the worst class to deal with the robo engineers. The sapper gets consumed on mvm when sapping the sentry. If you sap the engie, you can't backstab it or the sentry will vaporise you the next second unless you dead ringer away.
Add this to the fact that a lot of the time you are fighting next to a teleporter aka, an ubered robot spawner and you end up making the scout a better sentry buster.
Armor penetration working on tanks could be neat. Make it increase tank damage by say 40 per tick (the base damage of the knife) and you'd be able to match the Bushwhacka, which is clearly fair and balanced on the sniper.
A revolver buff might also be nice? Spy gets basically nothing out of most of them, making it essentially a dead slot.
Spy's knife already has a general damage multiplier upgrade, it's just not shown in the shop. Adding that to the game would probably help a lot
Revolver is a good supplementary. I mostly use it when running for cover to disguise. Usually take out 1 or 2 robots every time
Another upgrade that would make spy reliable would be silent backstabs that makes it take longer for robots to aggro when you backstab
In my investigations of playing Gear Grinder, (the only fucking tour I play), Spy is useful for one wave in Coaltown and Decoy. Someone switches onto Spy for one wave, saps the Quick-Fix Medics, backstabs them, a bunch of times, and then attempts to backstab the giant Heavy before ultimately dying. Or if they're good, they pop a dead ringer before dying to the heavy.
And not to sound like a stupid idiot, but I love playing Spy on that one singular wave.
The aggro problems could be alleviated by a "Disguise Durability" upgrade that lets the spy stay disguised for a certain number of backstabs, giving him more time to work on giants, and even giving him more function against small robots, especially stragglers, which would pair nicely with credit overheal.
As a spy main I enjoy this gimmicky playstyle. Even I understand that spy is the worst by terms of efficiency, but it's still really fun to queue for boot camp, put a lot of skill and then to achieve 100+k damage at the end of the mission, while the rest of the team gets between 30k and 70k damage.
One last thing nobody ever talks about. The Dead Ringer isn't the only and not even the best get out of jail tool at spy's disposal. I'll let figure out yourself what is actually the best tool, since there is one little MVM feature that is completely forgotten by MVM community. No seriously, nobody uses this. Ever.
Uber canteen?
@@Don_Porculio not that canteen
The return-to-spawn canteen? Cheaper than buying back if you get trapped without DR charge, and allows you to head off giant scouts if you get unlucky.
@@khaahrncakes yep, exactly that one.
@@khaahrncakes not only that, but recall canteen also allows spy to spam sapper stuns, which is especially useful when dealing with semi-giant robots.
I think the problem with spy is that he's a pick class, like sniper. Unlike sniper, however, the spy is always in a state of vulnerability. The whole point of his class is "don't be caught," which is extremely difficult when fighting bots. Double trouble, the high volume of smaller enemies makes picks of any single bot unimportant.
Usually.
I've been in situations where my team of inexperienced randos (me included) just can't seem to take out a few giant heavies and scouts while juggling the tanks when a spy main jumps in and allows us to secure the mission.
In any competitive gamemode, spy is rarely if ever chosen. MVM is just another one of those. So where's the surprise?
The probably is actually that, since the Two Cities update, the big, scary bots that used to warrant "picking" in MvM can be defeated by just standing behind the Medic shield and pressing M1.
When you think of it, all classes except spy can fill in at least 2 out of the many roles an MvM team has (Money collecting, giant killing, medic killing, mobbing, support, etc)
Spy can only do one (giant killing) and he's extremely specialized at that yet too frail to be as consistent as demo or sniper. That is his entire issue. Honestly the money magnet thing is an idea I've agreed with for a while but i wouldn't add the HP addition but rather a resistance increase.
Still, anything for this guy would do wonders
What is mobbing? Crowd control?
@ basically yea
Dude, your music picks for these vids are always fantastic. I love Freedom Planet and hearing its OST made me smile.
ESSAY BELOW:
1. "Spy is the only class reliant on close range combat" - Well, aside from Pyro (unless he is using Gas or Flare Gun with overclocks, which aren't common), that is true, but I don't see how that's a bad thing. Spy does INSANE damage to giants, and can 1 tap all medium bots (Samurai Demos, Steel gauntlets, Burst Soldiers, Armored Mediums etc.) so it's a fair-trade off for insane Power. Also fun fact, Spy is actually LOWER on the Aggro list, when being healed by a Medic, which leads to some funny interactions.
1A. Yes Dead Ringer is great, but again, if you know how to play Spy, you can easily play without it, but not using it IS a handicap. ( - Video as an example: ua-cam.com/video/_LEdg-Mgm8k/v-deo.html ). ALSO AGAIN Kunai and Big Earner have drawbacks, but again, just like Spy in general, once you learn how to play him, the strengths are superior and you can easily play around their drawbacks.
2. His Crowd Control sucks sure, but that's not what he is meant to be for, unless there is a group of medium/armored bots he can easily clap. Spy can EASILY top in damage while only going for Giants and Medium/Armored robots, again, due to the sheer powerhouse that he is damage wise. And even then, the damage you do to these is more "valuable" in a sense that you're dealing with a bigger threat (A giant) than something like Engie (who kills lot of the shitty fodder robots) and arguably Soldier. And there is nothing wrong with Spy having to get away while stabbing. A Soldier, Scout or Pyro can't stand in the open while fighting too, they can still get shredded, you still need to dodge as other classes, or know how to skiddadle when need be, that's just a mvm in general thing. And again, you mention how he "can't compete with other 8 classes" when he really can, both in giant and high hp target damaging/elimination. He can be THE BEST at dealing with those, but the fact you can have a Heavy hold M1 behind Med shield (and other classes too) at the FRACTION of the risk, then yeah I can see why you think he isn't great.
2A. Yeah Spy sucks against Tanks. That is true.
2B. Spy being worse at Uber Med takeouts isn't a huge deal either, Since Soldier or Scout also need to risk it (if Soldier doesnt have minicrits/rocket spec that is). Spy however again, isn't meant to take them out if you got a Med Killer anyway (unless he's dead). He can however excell against Vaccinator medics (Where Sniper, Demo or others can suffer) and armored medics, being able to 1 tap them or DPS them down.
2C. The Medium Bot talk:
"Heavies aren't that much of a threat" - Sure, in most cases, but they're damage sponges that can buy time to other Robots, or sometimes be an actual pain if they are Steel Gauntlet pushers (50% dmg bonus btw) or crit boosted, or with vacc meds or Big Heal Medics. Being able to blitz them down, is helpful and nothing wrong with doing it, is there?
"The Crit Bowmen are better handled by a Demoman" - This is 2 Cities exclusivity issue. And again, Spy can sap them and 1 tap them, or quickly stab them both, or only bowman and then shoot the Med (nothing else around, it will shoot at the Spy and not run away usually). On Community MvM though, or in other cases, they are far too common, or far too deadly (especially if they're spread Bowmen or Homing Arrow Bowmen) to be taken down by Demo's stickies, that will usually be for Meds (and cuz ScotRes on community mvm lacks the strenghts of 2 Cities).
"Hard to keep up with G. Scouts" - True, but that's what your team can be for too. You don't need to kill them yourself, you can soften them up (1 backstab removes 900 of their 1200 HP) or finish them off, if they're blocking it. And as a Spy, you should generally stick around near Robot spawn anyway, so you don't have to walk to them too far, or be surprised.
2D. Giant Talk
HE IS THE FRONTRUNNER for Giant Damage, and it's not even close. The only reason it's not seen that way by majority of normal players is again... Because of 2 cities. Sticky Demos with krits, Behind Shield BB Heavies and so on, somewhat defeat his purpose, as he DOESNT EVEN NEED to exist while that's the case. But like I mentioned, if you learn how to play Him, you can do just as well as them WITHOUT needing a Medic, or Krits or anything like that. Spy can solo giants for a reason, while a Heavy really cannot, and neither can Demo in most cases. Again, he is considered OP for a reason, borderline anyway.
2Da Your points about his strength
#1 SURROUNDING ROBOTS - Yeah that is an issue, and while you can play around it or deal with them yourself if you can, it is a issue. However, I don't agree with the "too much downtime while waiting for stab" thing. Spy again, can 4-5 shot most giants so even if he finishes off a Giant or softens it up, that's still INCREDIBLY HELPFUL, because he can dish out 900 damage minimum depending on how many stabs he gets.
#2 MAP GEOMETRY - Nothing to talk about here, because that's just a Map thing, some are better for Spy, some not, that's just the case for all classes too so whatev.
#3 KNOCKBACK - Yeah again, fair. Knockbacks fucks you over. Your teammates can make your life HELL but that's honestly only issue with medium bots, as Giants on most missions ESPECIALLY COMMUNITY are not affected by most types of knockback. There is also enemy knockback though and depending on the kind of knockback you can try to surf it to get away or get a better position. Depends on what is knocking you around though.
#4 TEAM AGGRO - Yeah, it happens, but this is why in a game called TEAM fortress 2 in a COOP GAMEMODE you usually should talk and coordinate with your Pyro and Scout. Just telling them to not go behind the giant or not rush as often while you're on it, can do wonders. And usually they'll listen so yeah.
#5 MUSCLE MEMORY - Depends on everything so can't speak on it much.
#6 PING - Yeah, internet and ping can suck.
3. "Why do people put os much effort to play Spy in one thing he isn't dogshit at" - Because he is fun. Same reason you see Vaccinator or Shield Bash Meds, Pipe Demos, or anyone play anything that's not "MUH META" (MvM has no meta btw). Spy is not only strong, but very fun to play when you learn him and can be good at him. I once saw a Spy struggle on a potato.tf mission, so I switched from Soldier to Spy (had like 10-15k dmg at that point max 20 maybe) to show him how to play, and pointed out many tips. Ended up with around 90-100k dmg on top. And also, again, Spy requires more effort to deal with Giants, but he makes up for with the ouput. It's kind of like Ballista vs Cannon from Totally Accurate Battle Simulator. Sure Cannon is overall easier to use and put into your army, as it fires faster and more often, but Ballista, while can be hard to use (as it shoots small useless enemies), when it WORKS it can 1 tap basically everything. For the lower cost and also more efficiently. And also the whole "Spy can be absent and nothing will change" is just, eh, kinda wrong.
4. Before I get to your Spy Buff ideas, if Spy Players, most of which are speedrunners, map makers, mission makers or really REALLY GOOD Spies (Underscore_ for instance) say that he doesn't need buffs, aside from small ones, then I trust them more. They play and make hard missions, usually not designed around SPy anyway, they play in many events, many missions, of various difficulties with different robots and environments. They have more experience than your average 2 Cities MvM-er, and if they say he is fine then I trust them.
- MONEY MAGNET like SCOUT - Yeah that is cool, HOWEVER Spy can pick up money immediately due to just walking into it from killing a robot, on top of being able to do it while invisible or disguised. It would be nice and it'd help him but Spy can be a great money collector already, if again, you play your cards right (Overclocks like that exist tho, so some people definitely want it).
- EXPLOSIVE BACKSTAB - I mean, I have heard and also played around with Explosive Headshot Ambassador. It has only 2 shots and slower reload, but does 150 dmg like 1st tic on Sniper Rifles. So uh, take that as you will. I personally think it's funnier and better anyway.
- BOMB SAPPER - Im pretty sure there is a potato.tf overclock similar to this, or one that makes Sapper more of a DPS tool (it does no damage anyway while used) so eh, MAYBE?
- EPILOGUE - In the end it really shows, that it's not only 2 Cities Mentality and exclusivity that can damage the opinion about a class, but also lack of other experiences. Real MvM pros, speedrunners and players, all admit and agree SPy is a powerhouse, borderline OP and in need of a nerf, yet your average MvM player doesn't, but that's nothing new, If more people played community MvM and listened to actual people who play for fun and challenge, rather than loot gamblers (No offense Weezy), then perhaps everyone would get along x1000 better. Before I finish though, I will just post this guide by Underscore_Gaming about Spy: ua-cam.com/video/8uLTixBXTPM/v-deo.html - He is one of the best (or better anyway) MvM guide makers and Spies around.
END OF PEPTALK
Finally, someone who understands the power of MvM Spy! It's really sad that people keep regurgitating the myth that "x class composition is the meta and everything outside of that is bad" when really every class is viable if you know how to upgrade well and the general expectations that come along with each class. Even "meta" classes running "nonmeta" playstyles, like pipe Demo and damage (i.e. regular) Scout are shunned by many experienced MvM gamblers. I agree that if more people played MvM for fun, rather than loot, and if community events were pushed into the spotlight more often, the community surrounding this gamemode would become far less toxic and misinformed.
Also, props to you for linking Underscore's video, it's borderline criminal that his guides get pushed to the wayside in favour of bigger UA-camrs and their 2C bias. He's the reason I started playing Spy in the first place and he convinced me that Scout actually has a purpose beyond money.
Ah, the 2k word essay Weezy promised not to read. Which is a pity, because it’s well-written and I enjoyed reading your counter-arguments.
Thank you for offering your perspective!
Yup@@Dash123456789Brawl
"YES HE SUCKS AT CROWD CONTROL, YES HE HAS NO TANK BUSTING CAPABILITIES, YES HE IS A GLASS PEASHOOTER, YES HE IS VIRTUALLY USELESS AND COMPLETELY REPLACEABLE IN JUST ABOUT EVERY ASPECT OF MVM GAMEPLAY. BUT WHAT ABOUT MY FUN?? YOU TRYHARDS KNOW NOTHING ABOUT FAMILY LOVING FUN, LOOK AT ME I AM VIRTUOSO BECAUSE I SPECIFICALLY PICK THE SHITTIEST CLASS IN AN ATTEMPT AT BEING COOL 😎. FUCK YOU IF YOU PAY TO PLAY MVM AND EXPECT TO GET WHAT YOURE BEING ADVERTISED, FUCK YOU IF YOU HAVENT BEEN PLAYING THIS CARCASS OF A GAMEMODE FOR THE LAST DECADE OF YOUR LIFE AND DOESNT WANT TO INVEST YOUR PRECIOUS, FLEETING TIME IN THIS WORLD MASTERING A FRENCHIE"
No notifications, don't try
To summary this video: Anything spy can do, Sniper does better
Too bad they didn't let you upgrade the sapper recharge rate. (yet, you can on the Gas Passer with explode-on-ignite.)
17:12
"So why the fuck are you putting my hairy French ass into these goddamn servers?!"
Thanks Weezy. That's the mental image I needed.
Valve (or rather 1 guy at Valve) devoted time to change and balance an even more niche mode than MvM, that being the Mannpower mode. So.. there's still a chance changes will be made ^^
Props for using the Freedom Planet boss theme
Spy _needs_ and _SHOULD_ have the same money healing as Scout.
That souts mom line was EVIL
Really, it's simple: spy is a high risk pick class in a gamemode where there are a lot of enemies to kill. Why ever pick him when sniper can do his job, but safer? I feel like Valve needed to give him like a "backstab shield on kill" (where he can tank hits for like 5 seconds), something to allow him to soak damage like a deploy-able decoy, or just give him the x10 mode thing of insanely high HP vamp on the kunai (a 9000 HP spy is quite hard to kill...) to make him viable. Really, as you showed in the video, there are many ways to buff the class, be it in survivability or utility.
As it stands, it remains a niche pick for high skill spy mains that even still, yeah, is never as effective as any of the other classes. The issue though still stands that he still does have a niche as the giant killer or medic pick class, so doing any of these might also just make him insanely broken. A hard class to balance.
In community missions, every melee including the knives gets overheal on kill if you buy health on kill, which I think is a great idea to help make Spy slightly tangier.
just rework the sapper and make it turn robots against themselves
@@dkskcjfjswwwwwws413 I suggested something like this a while ago on the Red Tape Recorder. It had 3 ticks, each corresponding with a bomb buff or something similar, but would only work with 1 robot at a time. The first tick would turn a robot to your side with maybe a 20% damage reistance, but the sapper would eventually kill them. The 2nd tick would turn a robot to your side, and fully heal them to full with the resistance and have health regen, and the sapper wouldn't kill them. Finally the 3rd tick would do all of the above, and also give them permanent crits.
16:48 I always have three-digit ping numbers. LOL
I remember a time where me and a couple of randos were struggling on a mission on Bigrock with a group of giant medics and soldiers. So, as the gamers we are all switched to spy and took turns sapping and stabbing the bots and it worked.
We weren't even on a call, I believe that was the most coordination a MvM team will ever have.
it is truly
I always find it funny to see the *most replayed* thingy right after the sponsor
a cool upgrade idea would be to make spy's sapper into some sort of *conversion tool.*
it would be called "sapper reprogramming" (from the cut reprogram feature of the old MVM) and have 3 ticks, each at like 250 or something.
upon use, any sapped robot immediately turns red and starts attacking the other robots for a limited amount of time before they just die and drop money. Converted medics will pop uber and run towards allied players to heal them until they die (reminder uber lasts only 8 seconds). Chances are, one will uber the spy.
the three ticks would be 3 seconds, 7, then 10 before they explode.
It would not work on giants, busters, or other big guys (duh) only slowing them down and drawing aggro.
Adding money magnet would definitely boost up Spy's viability, they can even remove overheal effect to not completely replicate the effect that another class has. That way, the Spy will be able to effortlessly focus on collecting the money and the team will not have to worry about missing any.
21:07 This B-roll footage was so unbelievably clutch, you have no idea.
One thing that i always wanted in mvm spy was to be able to upgrade your knife to have other knife's habilities, for example the Kunai's health on kill or Big Earner's cloak and boost for the YER or Spy-cicle.
And maybe an upgrade that makes him less targetable by robots or even a dodge upgrade that gives him invincibility when he is low health to give him a chance at actually surviving, remember playing as spy in mvm is already risky since you could be way more useful as any other class (specially against tanks since you basically have no DPS)
2000 word essay
My silly ideas:
Sapper now converts bots to your side for the duration but they do only half damage.
Disguise can be upgraded to not break after a certain number of stabs or X seconds.
Cloak can have an AoE effect to mask other players nearby (probably too niche to be useful but could be funny).
Something with the revolver, maybe headshots will ricochet the bullet into X number of nearby targets?
Basically keep spy feeling like a slippery trickster that's more focused on messing with the enemy than just exploding them.
I've also found spy quite useful on the waves with multiple engi-bots. They can shut down both the sentries & teleporters. It works especially well with the YER to take out the engies first.
I just wish the YER worked in MVM, that's all I want for Christmas
"Spy is a bad class."
-Uncle Dane, 2022
Uncle lame
I occasionally see spy in community-made MvM campaigns (where, incidentally, the gas passer explosion upgrade is almost universally disabled), but usually only for specific waves that are giving us trouble when we want to try different strategies (particularly with übermedics the others just can't deal with, giant scouts the team's scout can't slowmilk in time, or extra money collection behind enemy lines where the scout can't reach) (or when the mission makes some changes to upgrades or something that makes the class more viable)
I said this in the comments in a past video, but I have a few ideas for Spy upgrades related to his disguises, namely to help improve his survivability.
First one is “Timed Disguise”
The first tick of this would give the Spy a timer on his disguise, which starts once he does anything that would normally drop it. The disguise could stay up during this time, and resets after each kill. Extra ticks extend the timer, but even a max upgrade lasts barely over a second.
Basically the idea here is to make chainstabbing smaller robots less risky. Even if circling a giant is dangerous, it’s still a valid strategy. For small robots, you just have to hope they all don’t collectively lock onto you. With this you can clear out a group at little risk and slip out before things get too hairy.
The second is “Disguise Mastery”
Like Healing Mastery, it’s just a bunch of minor upgrades together in one. Namely, removes some aggro when a disguise is applied, increased speed at which a disguise is applied, and slight damage reduction while a disguise is active.
This is to incentivize disguises as the go-to panic button instead of the Dead Ringer. Since invisibility doesn’t keep alert robots from tracking you, this becomes your alternative to shake off some of that attention instead of duck and cover. Invisibility is your avoidance tool, and disguises become your engage and disengage tool.
Your Eternal Reward or Wanga Prick would be OP with “Disguise Mastery”, you would become unkillable machine that no bots will agro you, you get res for successful backstab, and if you have a dead ringer, if you miss you could safely escape. Game would become a point and click adventure. Same with first suggestion, click on the backs, almost without any risks and clear all the small or mid robots waves. I don't think changes to spy class should be le upgrade that makes you win without any effort
@@BNBartemOK I hear you but counter point, explosive headshot, gas passer and Scottish resistance exist
@@Eddie-yv1ix explosive sapper would be good for a spy, maybe with some minicrits on a sapped targets