i like having a graphic! even though i usually use your videos like a podcast where i can just listen, having something i can look at but wont lose out on anything by not looking, that makes it nicer when i have the time to do so
I don't even play competitive, and I can already understand and stand by the Cow Mangler not being allowed: In a _competitive_ setting, where coordination is common, this rocket launcher basically invalidates engineer as a class with a coordinated push, which gives Darwin's Danger Shield vibes
The beef people have about the base jumper is that comp people complained about so much that valve changed it, and then the comp people banned it anyway. The only people that were really affected by the change were the casuals who were not abusing it in the first place.
the design of it is appalling regardless. floating in the air being very hard to hit/see while raining down insane damage, especially with the beggars and airstrike
@@krollic I wasn't addressing the design, I was addressing the reasoning behind the conflict over the item between competitive and casual bases. I didn't claim it was good or bad.
I don't recall comp players complaining about it, it was banned back then and still is now. valve's reasoning for banning it was that it was too hard to hit people who were abusing it's super high air accel strafe values and unlimited redeploys, they didn't specify that the change was for comp or a result of feedback from comp players
@@ammi5311 per the valve blog post that revealed the base jumper nerf: "These changes are based on online community discussions, emails, playtime data, conversations with players of all skill ranges, and play testing. Please continue to send us your feedback through the Contact Form on the right taskbar (under "Contact Us"). Hearing from you helps us prioritize our work and influences the direction the game moves in." in the entire blog post from June 20th, 2017, competitive is not mentioned once.
@@ammi5311 so you're just imagining that back when valve approached the comp scene in 2015 in preparation for MYM, comp players complained about base jumper and so valve waited until over a year after the comp update released (and valve comp was already fully dead) to nerf the base jumper in 2017 and then they hid that the real reason was because a handful of comp players complained? lmao ok
What really gets on my nerves is how many things were hard nerfed or banned under the logic of "it allows Heavy to reach mid faster" (eg GRU, Eviction Notice, Disciplinary Action). If making your game mode fun relies on an entire playable class not being able to reliably participate in the major fights, then maybe the format has some bigger problems that you should be dealing with instead.
Heavy is able to participate in major fights, just the defensive ones. The idea of trying to restrict heavy rushing to mid is that his class role is indomitable CQC that is really slow and he becomes progressively more of a headache to deal with the fewer the number of people there are. There's nothing stopping you from attempting to play him without things that attempt to circumvent his balancing downside. But if heavy becomes obligatory from weaknesses being circumvented, then sniper becomes obligatory, and now things are going to be playing out a lot slower.
@@Yawyna124 It's 6s' fault if something as simple as "Heavy can participate in the initial mid fight" apparently makes it untenable. You don't see this being some huge problem in regular 12v12 or Highlander after all
Banning a weapon thats too powerful makes sense, if a weapon is so strong you feel forced to use it thats a problem, its also boring if everyone is using the same overpowered item. But it feels like europe banned a lot of stuff just for the sake of banning it, not being good is an extremely bad ban reason, youre just removing iptions people may like to have for no reason
Thankfully due to the way TF2 works the only really overpowered weapon is maybe the Uber saw The Uber saw is literally the only weapon in that game that's pretty much needed to play the class it's used for
most of the European weapon bans are not banned for "not being good" they're banned for not being fun to play against, dying to guillotine or loch and load from a scout or demo across the map who cannot be punished or seen at times is not at all fun to play against (where as at least sniper who also at times isn't fun to play against at least has the fact that he has to be within people's sightlines to actually kill people)
"It's boring if everyone is using the same "overpowered" item" So using the same team composition with same loadouts on same maps is not boring, huh? 🤔 Bruh, the game is 16 years old, and haven't received any updates in 6 years. OF COURSE most of the things will be repetitive. Btw I see no overpower in most of the banned weapons. I'm rather surprised that sniper is not banned completely and even allowed to use non-huntsman primaries.
honestly, Europe just hates evolving metas. It's ban philosophy is everything that casual players hate; not open-minded, only factoring the best players, with little justification, and cutting down new shifts in meta.
@@taythinthings im unfamiliar with the 6s scene personally, but isnt it actually popular to switch to sniper/engi/heavy on last? since the main thing holding those classes back is the ability to travel, and being right at spawn negates that?
@@hylianhealer1647 Yes, those classes are better than scout in most scenarios when holding last but if you are pushing out of last, most offclasses switch back to scout (soldiers dont really offclass as you need someone to deny the point) as you need to deny the soldiers bombing and carry your medic out of last and need momentum, some people run heavy on koth, some people bring offclasses when pushing last, i dont know why people think 6s only has 4 classes but you are free to test bringing a pyro to mid then find out why people dont run pyro to mid
While i think a fair bit of the bans are pretty reasonable, it kind of undercuts the whole "bans arent just to enforce a meta" when two subsequent bans are explained by "Soldier (and demo) is really bad at fighting this" (base jumper and reserve shooter)
i think you highlight the point that people use the term "the meta" to mean completely different things at times, but in this case its "meta" classes that are the best abusers of the unlocks, not just the victims, so we wouldn't see a change in class distribution from these weapons but just a degeneration of gameplay
@@Wild_Rumpus fair point that soldier is also the user of both the examples, but the counters to themselves aren't soldier. And also both examples are factors of a meta of action (bombing) as much as they are a meta of class distribution.
Regarding Fists of Steel, I believe it's not so much about damage reduction, but more about medic getting uber faster when healing heavy with fists of steel even when the weapon is holstered (tho heavy has to redeploy it every time the beam disconnects). Big Joey has a video about it.
Its so tragic that Engie only has two secondary unlocks, and *both* of them are some of the worst designed weapons from a game design standpoint in the entire game.
Because the wrangler IS overpowered and deserves to be nerfed 💀 Trippling the health and doubling the dps of a sentry at the press of a button doesn’t exactly scream balance.
the problem with designing secondaries for engi is that hes supposed to be a support class, you cant really give him a purely offensive secondary thats better than the pistol, but you cant give him another support tool to help his buildings because his buildings are already super strong by default and you end up with the wrangler or short circuit
@@oiytd5wugho Have they considered that maybe, just maybe, most classes are much more well suited to using their primary weapons rather than the shotgun due to their slowness compared to scout, and should only use them when finishing off an enemy?
3:30 i think the easiest way to sum up the difference in opinion is that in na items are allowed by default and banned if they become an issue whereas in eu items are banned by default and only allowed after they're proven to add a fair and fun dimension to 6s. the eu whitelist actually reminds me of the new player whitelists that some pug servers use to encourage new players to learn the meta and "rules" before breaking them
To me Heavy is by far the best example of “banned to protect the meta.” Most of the other bans with a few exceptions are very fair. But heavy losing all ways to be viable at all at mid is tragic. It’s not like it’d be crazy OP so you have to choose which meta is more fun. It’d be a fun niche strat that diversities the meta without dominating it.
speeding up heavy would mean removing his sole weakness and fundamentally making him a different class. the heavy is a class who's defining trait is what he CANNOT do (move quickly). so on a fundamental, game design level, this opinoin is misled. but in a simpler more practical sense, heavy getting to mid fast would be totally overpowered and would be the ONLY viable way to play 6s. there is no way to let heavy be that fast and still have an interesting, balanced and varied meta. the reason why non-6s classes are restricted is because they harm gameplay diversity. they lock the game into stalemates. having more classes in the game does not equal more diverse gameplay.
@@ants7219 I definitely agree that weaknesses define characters as much as their strengths do, however I think heavy unlocks that give him situational speed are within the character's design. They don't increase his general or in combat mobility, they're both just for walking back to the fight faster after death. I don't think I've heard a single person claim that the unlocks ruin his design. I am extremely unconvinced that heavy with 0 bans would be the meta. I think it would be a niche or maybe a secondary strategy therefore increasing diversity. If the choice turns out to just be one meta vs the other, then by all means. But I really really doubt heavy would be the default pick.
another thing about the diamondback is when you’re fighting a spy you don’t know they have crits because of their disguise so it really affects how you approach the interaction like you wouldn’t charge a spy with your uber saw if you knew he had a pocket laser beam
@@bruschetta7711if a spy is caught red handed that's (usually) the spies fault and he deserves to die as a result. Diamondback allows spy to just bypass this and, at worse, snipe players with their crits like the old amby. Amby got nerfed but diamondback hasn't even though it can effectively do the same thing which is probably why it's banned. Also dr let's you bypass spy getting punished but it's much more balanced I think. It completely takes your ability to cloak and gather intel and any experienced player will recognize when a dr is triggered and will punish it.
europe has banned the wrap assassin this current season, quoting unhappy premiership players in their news post as to why. they also have reverted the gunboats plugin they were using for a few seasons that made soldiers lose less health when rocket jumping near enemies. they also stated their interest in their latest 6v6 news post about banning the winger, solemn vow and picking up weapons. just some recent additional info i am presenting with no opinion offered.
literally none of these are problematic noone uses the wrap assassin because no more uber building the winger practically gets rid of scouts secondary damage picking up weapons hasnt been useful since they nerfed dropped mediguns solemn vow ok i guess?
It's banned not because it's terribly strong but because it lowers the quality of the game. It's a weapon that overly incentivizes bodyshots, staying scoped in and covering people in stinky piss. It's not fun to have minicrits applied to you from across the map with relative ease.
Have you noticed that in competitive, there are less players and that each is more competent than your regular casual player? 6s specifically is a fast format that can turn around quickly, and the lower playercount makes kills more valuable. Jarate itself is immensely powerful, and considering that it's banned, a tool that would let you coat a player in Jarate IN A COORDINATED TEAM WITH ACTIVE COMMUNICATION is pretty strong if you ask me. You get one kill and the enemy team is immediately at a disadvantage, the condition isn't even a headshot. Ever been in a Casual match with coordinating players? They stomp the other team, especially when abusing certain weapons and maps.
53:15 Not sure if anyone already said this but the Sidney sleeper lists "no random crits" because it originally could random crit, so when they changed it they decided to list that it could no longer random crit
Yeah baby, you boy got a sonic double cheeseburger with bacon, a large strawberry limeade and fries this video is a straight banger. I love how my favorite weapons are banned in a game mode I don’t play.
As a player who always respected comp but never played it, weapons that minicrit seem like a big issue mostly because mini-crits take no fall off. If minicrits took falloff weapons like reserve shooter would be far less oppressive
If crits took falloff across the board a lot of weapons with conditional crits would be less oppressive: The Amby, for example, which could act as an effective mini-sniper, was nerfed for a very specific reason: Controllable revolver crits are fucking insane (of course the Diamondback also should have gotten the same nerf).
I'd lean less towards 'all minicrit weapons take falloff' and more 'make no-falloff extra damage disconnected effects'. So you can have something that doesn't falloff but doesn't get the bonus damage and the other way about too.
No one like weapon that do long range burst damage, loch 'n' load make demoman similar to sniper but you can do reactive dodge instead predict where his shot go and no instakill when being 150 HP or lower but shoot faster before the reload.
@@whirl3690 No because less class variety lead to samey gameplay and sniper is a off class (or not the META classes) in competitive, also sniper require skill (unless cheating) and can be countered by flanking, spamming, dodging which the META classes (scouts, soldiers, demo) can easily or use teammate as meatshield as medic. Sniper only need a nerf or rework to banned weapons in 6's like Jarate, Machina, etc. So sniper is balanced and shouldn't be banned unless using the banned weapon without nerfs or rework which Valve doesn't give anymore now or at huge sightline map like Hightower, 2fort and especially wutville or no / barely any viable flanking routes map like dustbowl or in casual where people doesn't communicate often to do counterplay to sniper.
@@michaeljo9384Sniper is easy to play compared to every other classes in competitive. Every other classes has to worry about their position, their ammo count, their health, along with their aim; should they play slower and aim better or rely on their flicks to land shots while moving around ? Sniper only has 1 thing to worry about : Aiming. And in the vast, VAST majority of matches, you counterpick their Sniper with your own Sniper. Trying to kill the Sniper withour your own Sniper is a very easy way of eating multiple -150 before having the CHANCE to kill him. I am very surprised Sniper as a whole isn't banned.
Just want to say quick-fix only builds 2 seconds faster than stock. Its unbanned in 4s and its really just not good if teams know how to actually shoot players
2s if other medic over healed your teammate or you are gaining uber via self damaging scout, otherwise quick-fix doesn't reach to 142%< over heal of teammate hp which mean it doesn't apply uber penalty after said 142%
In short quickfix us for casual players who think going solo against 2 lvl 3 sentries is easy. As soon as someone plays medic others forget how to stay alive
I always found it funny because most casuals genuinely think we ban like most of the weapons when in reality only a small fraction of weapons are banned, and the vast majority of those are scout/medic unlocks because they're really effing strong classes.
its honestly a bit infuriating sometimes considering that the list is just like there in the open for literally anyone to look up in seconds its not like buried on some old forum page somewhere people are just confidently wrong
I mean, it's not a wrong assumption though. Displinary action, GRU, buffalo steak? All banned to ensure there is a zero percent chance your pocket soldier would have to start playing heavy. The gunslinger used to be banned because it might make engineer ran more often and we can't allow that, then once it was clear that gunslinger wasn't doing shit for engies 6s viability, it was unbanned. Most weapons just don't risk shaking up the 2 scout, 2 soldier, demo medic meta. But any weapon that did risk that was banned. Which i mean, i get it. Just let's not pretend that isn't the case.
@@moonmelons It's about balancing the classes for the format. The way you're framing it makes it seem so much more sinister when in reality, for example, having to take down a wrangled sentry with only 6 players is just infuriating and unfun. The wrangler was intended for a server with double the amount of players and unlimited projectiles.
The thing with this, as far as I'm aware, is that 6v6 _really_ hates anything that shakes up the set-in-stone meta and team compositions. You always have 2 scouts, 2 soldiers, a demo and a medic, at most 1 of the scouts or soldiers swapping to sniper if the enemy team has a sniper. With the power of those classes _heavily_ skewed by the fact that there's 6 less players on each team. Scout for example just ain't as strong in your average 12v12 pubs but then spiking in power when you axe the team sizes in half so he gets free reign over the map. Classes like heavy, pyro and engi get affected more by the team sizes with more interesting interactions in 12v12 as opposed to 6v6. The classes, weapons and the game in general just ain't designed around the lower player counts, with changes meet your match did screwing over casual players without changing anything to the comp players which is prolly the reason for the beef casual players have with the comp scene. Even Highlander suffers to an extent from the lower player numbers in teams and the issues forcing 1 of each class for both teams introduces (spy being godawful to play in that format because everyone knows you're there, you have no surprise factor, you always have that 1 spy on both teams as opposed to casual where you're free to swap classes at any point, there's always a fustercluck happening and nothing's guaranteed to show up, so suddenly 3 frenchmen spawning out of the aether then swapping to whatever other classes they want is much less painful to the spy players)
alright, I get what you mean by spy being hell in highlander, but he isn't nearly as useless as you'd expect. eventually, spy is just gonna get you. you aren't omniscient, you can't turn around while shooting the enemy or else you're just going to get obliterated. that's when spy comes in, attacking people who are currently dealing with something else. this is why some competitive spies will ask for their soldier to bomb in order to go for something (this is a pretty common occurrence, but still works)
6v6 doesn't hate anything that shakes up the meta, it hates rock-paper-scissors swapping. in 12v12 games, you can play literally whatever the fuck you want and it'll still be viable -- but this is a competitive subset and rules were set so that the game is both more similar to quake and more fun for both teams. example: the wrangler wouldn't automatically make engineer a good pick since he would still be largely awful when attempting to push. engineer would still only be picked on last, but now he'd be even better there. the same goes for other bans to non-"meta" classes. also, if there wasn't a set-in-stone team comp of 2 scout 2 soldier 1 demo and 1 medic you'd see 2 meds, since medic is hands down the best character and needs a hard limit to prevent the game from being stalematey hell and it's not even that the power of these classes is significantly higher in 6s, my bet is that in competitive "12s" if that were ever a thing, you'd still see a majority of people play flexible characters on control point maps, since, yknow. you need to rotate from defense to offense, and like 4 medics or something crazy like that. the only reason heavy, spy, sniper, pyro, and engie can be played with success on 12s is because the skill floor is so low that it does not matter what you play; most of the damage you take is undirected spam as opposed to focused, communicated shots. basically, team comps in 6s are a result of the gamemode played more than the number of players; if they played comp payload or a/d then you'd see engie, heavy, sniper, and pyro; but they don't, so you don't.
@@lucastran5583 6v6 is cursed by being made by people who played quake and wanted quake again - if a comp game mode was designed from the ground up today with all the history of eSports we have today, it'd look radically different.
Another thing about the bonk is that for a flank scout, it allows you to play far more aggressively, since it is very easy to use like a dead ringer and escape their back line
i thought the bonk was banned because of the 3rd person camera while under its effects btw you only get hit by mini crits with the crit a cola if you shoot once, if you drink it and never shoot you don't get hit by mini crits
also the natascha, i remember playing in a custom maps cup that had almost no weapons banned and i used the natascha to hold and, if the point is closed enough, you can make any escape almost impossible because they walk so slowly they can't even reach a safe zone before dying, and even if they do escape it will be easier for your teammates to chase them down
@@abictoIt's surprising how many people don't know you can wiggle on the strafe keys to make its effects almost negligible. It's a much bigger impact in the air than on the ground for sure, where you really can't just use that trick. This is also another reason why the sandman has literally nothing going for it lol
@@OmegaRC59 i guess the fact that it's an automatic makes people forget idk, although even if you strafe you're still taking a little bit of slow and it's harder to fight while doing this
i will say for a lot of these, they were banned for a reason at some point, either for being strong or having a bug, and when they got nerfed or patched, no one bothered to un ban them
Why 6v6s became the standard match setup for competitive TF2, I'll never understand since it was painfully obvious that the developers of this game built the games core balance around the 12 unique classes all being used in tandem with each other during a match. It's like if they halved the number of pawns in competitive chess. All of these weapons and "problematic" playstyles become benign once you have more than like four people running around a point.
Play one season of highlander and you’ll change your mind. TF2 was balanced around people doing very limited teamwork and strategy, since it was never intended to be a serious game. If you somehow got a team of 12 to coordinate perfectly your match would be absolutely miserable.
I remember when the BASE Jumper was first released and most players did not understand the nerf that came down on it. Then we saw clips of the 6s unhittable soldier dancing around in the sky using the unlimited redeploy.
@@derp6443Imo it still needed a nerf, infinite redeploys essentially means you had 3 different directions to throw off a sniper's aim, as well as the ability to stay in air, well out of the effective range of the other 8 classes. Sure, the chip damage of an entire casual team is going to kill you anyways, but in a smaller match, you basically get to dominate the enemy team with minimal damage in return
@@concerningindividual629 It was a perfect case of a weapon they should have left the same in casual and just left banned in 6s. The same point this video makes about mad milk.
@@derp6443 The problem wasnt that it was nerfed, its that it was nerfed in a way that didnt really fully address why it was hated in comp (the sheer power of dodging and changing your momentum to mess with people's aim, while also affectin the reasons people liked it in casual, the ability to use it for avoiding fall damgee, float around for market kills and to pair with the base jumper. The nerfs it has were meant for comp but I feel much more affected its casual uses instead. THATS the nerf's problem. People in casual never used it for movement dodging, they used it to slow down fallin so that air aim was easier and the one time open and lack of air control more so hurts the casual's ability for aiming and gardening with it. I feel if the nerf was that it slowed ALL momentum gradually instead of just fall speed abruptly and you had to keep it out to get its affect, it would not have affected casual nearly as much while still nerfing its viability in comp. Casual uses may even apprecialte the slowing effect for the airstrike aim I bet at leasts to an extent. Just one idea.
Thank you for this video! I know Woolen made a vid on this, like, 6 years ago so it's good to have a new video. Not a lot has changed. I think I wanna voice an opinion here. I've been following comp TF2 since i55 grand finals, and I hear & see the opinion that if a better weapon would get unbanned, then everyone would be forced to use it. That is a valid stance to take, because sometimes some tools are just broken (Vaccinator). But - isn't that the case already? People utilize the Three Rune Blade or Wrap because they are super powerful niche tools. For sure they allow for more interesting gameplay strategy overall; quicker Uber-charging and all that. ...But couldn't that be said about most of the banned unlocks as well? Like let's say the Crit-a-cola gets unbanned. Neat, now Ubered Scouts are broken as all hell - people would be "forced" to use it on last pushes... just like Gunboats in general gameplay, as they allow for faster heals for your team. I just find it a little bit obtuse, however yeah "fun" triumphs "unfun" I guess
I mean this is always how comp tf2 has worked and felt for years. It's what's "fun" under someone's definition but never the collective. You wonder why the RGL cup he referred to didn't change anything because the only demographic that matters is invite; nothing else. I think the critocola would add some interesting dynamics since a scout wouldn't full time run it. It's complete ass without being ubered so you'd be down a secondary. But if a scout died for the push into last teams would have that scout come up on it. I always enjoyed the niche weapons where they were good in a situation or two. That's personally my problem with competitive at the moment.
Stickybomb launcher is annoying for some players but then Scorch shot, Machina, Natasha exist (and other annoying weapons). Also stickybomb launcher is countered by not being in medium range, shooting the sticky before walking though even at chokepoint and practice dodging unlike Machina's annoying 173 bodyshot from very close / far away, scorch Shot & Natasha's removal of your dodging skill after being hit briefly.
It's crazy to me to think that my favorite weapon in TF2 of all time, the Reserve Shooter, ends up being too oppressive in 6s it has to be banned, when (as a casual player) I've always felt the spread could do with being tightened slightly to actually land those mid-range pop-up shots better. I find great joy in denying bombing soldiers if I'm lucky to be good enough with it, but I'm not a bomber myself, so I suppose I can see why swapping for the mantreads isn't a feasible or enjoyable enough solution, or that doing so can break down into rock-paper-scissors between soldiers.
In casual you're way less likely to randomly encounter jumping Soldiers (trolldiers aside) and Demos. In 6s, they're half the standard lineup and those classes do explosive roll-outs pretty much 100% of the time. For Soldiers especially, rocket jumping is at the core of their offensive abilities. The Reserve Shooter just fundamentally fucks the 6v6 gameplay loop up by forcing explosive classes to stay grounded more or risk getting shut down. By equipping it, you also lose the blast damage resistance of the Gunboats, which means the Reserve Shooter user can't be as mobile as they otherwise would. The effect of these in combination is slowing the pace of the mode down to its detriment, when the high speed is one of the big appeals of 6v6. In casual, since you're not seeing high level Soldier/Demo movement tech with nearly the same frequency, the Reserve Shooter is much less oppressive. It ends up just being a sidegrade to stock with a faster switch speed and (if you're playing Soldier) a decent combo weapon to pair with your rocket launchers.
33:25 probably because of the Uber charge glitch. Healing a heavy with the fists of steel out charges Uber twice as fast as normal, and this effect persists even when they switch weapons unless you break your beam
I don't play 6's but the diamond back even in the environment of getting a stab causes you to die no matter what... it will still take some time and that can be enough time for the spy to pull out the 102 crit (possibly even another shot) for whoever's in LOS for your team to get an easy clean up because I would at least think spy is more of an opener for a full on push.
I’d like to see the ban format reworked a bit with a smaller global list and giving each team a set number of bans. I think this would lead to a more fine-tuned ban system with players banning weapons that are currently frustrating them rather than weapons they haven’t even seen for a long time. There’d also be some strategy to the bans, if your team has the better mid, you’d wanna prioritize banning weapons that stall out the game and if your mid is worse, you’d probably want to ban weapons that allow the enemy team to snowball their advantage.
Pick/ban systems have been (and I believe still are) done for competitive TF2 tournaments on occasion instead of whitelists. The standard whitelist seems to be much more popular though.
Yeah some of these weapon banned I understand. Stuff like mad milk and jarate are already pretty strong in casual given in last point defense, you can spam the one of the liquids and make holding the point easier. Banning the Nash alone for annoying factor is understandable Find it funny that the gru and eviction notice were nerf were nerf specifically because heavy can go quicker to go to mid. However it turns heavy going to mid is not that powerful. So that nerf was for nothing(if only vavle did weapon balance updates but at last)
I feel a major reason why there's such a disconnect between what's good in comp vs what's good in casual is that 6v6 and highlander GREATLY change the fundamental way TF2 is played. Restricting the number of players to 6 will of course lead to deaths becoming a way bigger deal than if you were just playing a 12v12 casual game. 6v6 doesn't have the spam to deal with a heavy or wrangled sentry so naturally the bans and meta is going to reflect that. If you change the way the game functions, then some things that work completely fine may become busted in the context of dealing with only 6 players.
The issue people have with the Diamondback is that it is pretty much a strict upgrade over any other revolver, and is just a better Ambassador in most circumstances since you don't have to deal with damage fall off or have to headshot people. So with it legal, there would be almost no reason to choose any other revolver since the damage penalty can be negligible without crits, and is non-existent with them. On another note, I am really sad Engi's unlocks are so horribly designed because the rest of his kit is pretty well put together, but then Valve dropped the ball with the secondaries and made them infuriating. I just want something cool to have as a secondary in the main slot, not "Press 2 to win" or "Screw you in particular" the weapon
You spoke about heavy to mid being a less-than-desireable gamestate, but do you think it would become normal to see if disciplinary action were unbanned? I feel like heavy's strengths would be under-utilized for a majority of the team fight at the cost of soaking up way too much damage. Do you think it could incentivize the other team to run sniper to mid, causing a rock paper scissors effect?
10:52 No, it's AFTER your first shot, or even your first melee swing. There was one small period of time between this iteration of the weapon and it's most broken state where crit a cola acted same as now(aka you only start getting mini crit weakness after your first shot) BUT you could use it with melee and melee won't activate the mini crit weakness, now even using melee instantly activated the mini crits weakness.
6v6 with actual comms is just a very different dynamic than 12v12 with random swearing and since you can't change the stats of weapons between modes, you have to change what weapons are allowed. That seems reasonable enough. You could argue this makes modes with more people better, but more people means comms are more cluttered and its harder to organize a group. I guess 6v6 is a doable amount of people to get together for a match, but not so few it completely negates all the normal dynamics of the game. I think it's a reasonable compromise, and bans do have to be part of that. I can see why some balance changes feel annoying to casual players, and I think that 6s is so different from casual that valve shouldn't make balance changes based on that, but also that bans are what allows 6s to exist without balance changes having to be made to accommodate it. Then again, I don't play much TF2 in the first place.
It's worth keeping in mind that banned weapons aren't necessarily banned because they're too strong (though they often are) but there are also banned weapons that make combat unenjoyable and lower the quality of gameplay. Disciplinary action, wrangler, rescue ranger, madmilk are examples of weapons that are combination of either too powerful and/or unfun to play against and are banned. Weapons like (imo) the cow mangler, base jumper, natasha, sydney sleeper are not very strong but are very unenjoyable to play against and not particularly interesting to play with either. I don't think pubbers realize that something like 95%+ of unlocks are permitted.
Yeah, but also, casual players don't understand under what conditions the different competitive formats work and how the average skill level is higher and the player count lower (so that weapons like the Kunai and Bazaar Bargain would be considerably weaker as the enemy team is not made of fodder but of competent players who would want to prey on your weaker starting point).
i don't think most pubbers realize weapon bans exist at all. And even those that do don't care at all anymore. The days of people caring about comp who don't play comp are long gone.
@@krollic These video get almost no views. Almost no one is seeing videos about comp. The people people commenting on these videos are not anywhere close to average pub players. Most pub players never give comp a thought. Sure back in the era of the match making updates more people cared. I remember people fighting about this stuff on r/tf2. But these days? No. No one cares(on average).
Cow mangler is crazy overpowered, you can delay pushes by a significant amount by just spamming the charge shot at the door their combo is coming, if both soldiers do it you can buy so much time or do so much damage for basically no risk, crazy risk vs reward when holding a point on Uber disad. There’s also a crazy risk vs reward imbalance on certain mids, namely metalworks which make it stupid.
Super glad for this video! (Actually surprised you took my suggestion if you were already planning for it) so I'll likely comment on some stuff you mention with regards to certain unlocks (As a Medic player mostly) Guillotine/Cow Mangler: I'm super in favor of like you say, anything that just makes Medic not as much of an annoying or even potentially miserable class to play due to randomly getting one shot by essentially; a free spamming tool (I'd dislike Loch & Load for similar reasons, as well but at least that has ammo as it's semi downside). Crit-a-Cola: Actually somehow never thought about giving a Scout who used the purple can uber (Considering if they are good with meatshots) to actually be rather deadly (especially in context of 6s where most Scouts can aim pretty good) So I might try that now in casual lol. Short Circuit/Wrangler: Even in a casual play setting, I'd find both of engi's secondaries to be (not only a bit strong) but just makes Medic's job a lot more boring and painful with trying to make a push into last, Wrangler is for sure much worse in a smaller play experience like 6s. Most sacks for a Wrangled sentry I imagine would take out 2 of the attacking team's players (maybe a third if there's a Spy sap sac). Quick-Fix: Ah yes my wheel house, Quick-Fix is for sure stronger on defensive holds (Saccing for a med is almost impossible and just allows for cheeky escapes even if you are caught out with help via your Soldier/Demoman). Along with that the play of uber add/dis which is about all you have on Medic to make it interesting just throws it out the window as you both just basically rub against each other and spam super fast build rate ubers that are just way less interesting then stock. Vaccinator: Sorta similar to Quick-Fix (Easy as hell to hold last for a long time, I know some team in EU would have a temporary medic they swap to if their main med died and they used Vac till the real one respawned forget the name thou), I'd argue however arrow tanking via healing someone while they got a bubble on em is insanely strong (Even in casual since you out heal with arrow tanking compared to beaming em while still building uber & you can just chain bubbles), It might struggle a little if you use it offensively into last against stock uber, but even then keeping your Demoman or someone else valuable alive with the push via arrow tanking is absurd. Machina/Sydney Sleeper: One shotting Medic via body shots that charges faster, just annoying in same way as Guillotine/Cow Mangler. Plus as far I know, there's not many 5CP/Koth maps where you actually hit the max range for Sniper being unable to hit you compared to something like most Payload maps. Jarate: I'd say it's like Wangler in the sense that it's strong and even broken in both casual and 6s, the main appeal is for sure just allowing easy pushes for his team in trade off for Sniper's SMG by making him a weird semi support character that really shouldn't have it, plus I'd add in that you can just keep spamming it from spawn room from last to keep a constant debuff on the enemy team or even choking off an area with followup spam from your Soldier/Demoman (Same with Mad Milk).
I wonder how jarate and mad milk would be if they had the same charge meter as the gas passer and maybe the gas passer could get their meter I am not sure about this one, on the one hand that would make it spammable on lasts and stuff but on the otherside that wouldnt be much more effective than spamming the scorch shot, maybe even less
I think if the Reserve Shooter only had mini crits on targets you launched it’d be fine. I don’t know why it isn’t like that to begin with. I thought that was the entire point of it.
I don't understand many of the reasons behind these bans Like flying guillitone, ask anyone and they'll say it's infinately more interesting and rewarding to hit someone with it than shooting the pistol, it's not even easier unless you expect someone to come out of the corner, then you say it would make things more "spammy" despite other classes being a lot more spammy by default and the fact guillitone has to recharge whereas pistol is just spammable even if not effective at range
" it's not even easier unless you expect someone to come out of the corner," There's your answer. It's long range harassment that does not need LoS from your side of things nor even necessarily risk to deal damage. Pistol is hitscan, so you need LoS to deal damage. You very much expect people to come around the corner on the opposite side of rollouts or during respawn waves, so you can, indeed, expect someone to come around the corner. "despite other classes being a lot more spammy by default" Rockets travel at 1,100 hammer units, grenades at 1,200-1500, and uncharged stickies at 900. The guillotine travels at 3,000 and is nowhere near as loud and colorful as rockets, grenades, and stickies, and is therefore far harder to dodge. Unlike rockets, it does not have fall-off, and unlike grenades, which also do not have fall-off, it travels a lot quicker with far less aggressive arc. Charged stickies come closer to their velocity, but also need charged to fire and then need to be detonated. It is also incentivized to use at long range since it gets 1.5 seconds removed off cooldown at long range. "pistol is just spammable even if not effective at range" There's your answer between those two: guillotine is spammable, effective at close and long range, and, in fact, gets more effective from exceptional range. Overall, it's 90 damage that is hard to dodge, relatively easy to hit at long ranges, and is incentivized for longer ranges.
Balancing what is allowed in Competitive so that it won't become boring is so weird. With how TF2 weapons are, it feels to me like the perfect middle ground is so small that you can easily miss it. I haven't seen much of Competitive tf2 myself anyway, so idk. I like TF2 for being wacky and that's why the only competitive I have ever seen was from Salty Phish's series, which is absolutely hilarious
39:08 putting airblast on the same level as the razorback, the short circuit, or ESPECIALLY the danger shield, is exceedingly silly. with the sniper equips you nullify a whole class's main damage source in exchange for pretty much nothing, and engi can replenish metal for the short circuit very easily, not counting how much better it is at neutralizing projectiles than airblast. you have to time airblast properly, predict when and where a projectile, and who fired it came from, and on anything but stock its very costly on ammo, uses the janky pressure mechanic for the dragons fury, or doesnt exist at all on the phlog (not a defense of the phlog but still). moreover, airblast isnt a be all end all no projectiles allowed mechanic, its a skill-based interaction. if the soldier or demo can juke the pyro into mistiming their airblast, the pyros probably dead. conversely, if the pyro both predicts the projectile and properly times their airblast, the pyro was the better player in that interaction and deserves to dodge the projectile, and maybe even hit the enemy if they were too predictable. obviously you cant ban a stock weapon so airblast is here to stay but, if you do ban airblast, youre left with a world where by default the only pyro primary allowed is the phlogistinator. i dont wanna live in that world.
I think the Fists of Steel are banned because of a bug that abuses the lesser overheal on wearer to let uber build at full speed as long as the beam doesn't disconnect, you don't even have to keep the fists out, Heavy can play as normal and medic gets max uber build.
So yall think the base jumper is op, if only medic had weapon that does more damage the farther away the enemy is, if only there was a class that could easily kill a stationary or slowly moving target in the air with a head shot, if only soldier had a rocket launcher that has faster projectiles and mini crits on airborne targets, if only competitive players could hit their shots, if only there was a class that can reflect projectiles. It’s such a shame none of these things exist … oh wait they do if only you used them it’s not like sniper has a (practically) infinite range hitscan sniper rifle with the highest burst damage in the game or a bow that can one shot all classes except for a overhealed heavy thats very easy to use and also has high sustained dps.
Fantastic video! It's rare to see someone who is both well spoken, as well as knowledgeable about the game - I'd love to see more long form discussion/podcast videos like this.
RGL 6's ban reasons Looping taunts: 3rd person abuse Pyrovision: Annoying. Massive in-game advantage by removing lots of clutter Noisemaker: Annoying. Gives away player's position Scout Elf Set: Gives away player's position Bombinomicon: Obstructive. Gives away DR Spy's position Soda Popper: Higher damage output than Stock Scattergun. Artificial splash damage immunity Bonk: Get out of jail free card. Downsides are negligible and easily diluted Cola: Free damage boost. Downsides are negligible if you camp with it Milk: Life steal. Spammable with locker PBPP: Higher damage output than Stock Pistol with life steal Guillotine: Promotes being overly campy. 5.1 second recharge that can deal up to 90 damage Cow Mangler: Stock Rocket Launcher with Infinite ammo Disciplinary Action: Gets Heavy to mid too easily Natascha: Completely neutralizes Scout, Soldier and Demo Fists of Steel: Too good at tanking. Stalling on last Rescue Ranger/Wrangler/Short Circuit: Stalling on last Quick-Fix: Uber ramp up. Pocketing Vaccinator: Overpowered. Can cap under Uber Machina: Free damage boost Sydney Sleeper: Used for spamming body shots Jarate: Free damage boost. Spammable with locker Diamondback: Snowball effect. Preys on bad teams B.A.S.E Jumper: Inherent Air Strike/Stickybomb Launcher synergy. Honestly more of a skill issue than anything That's what I at least know about for the bans. I'm sorry I keep editing this and making you re-apply hearts to this comment
@@ynwl-e4bThat is what they are. They convinced Valve to arbitrarily nerf weapons because they were interrupted during their epic frag comp by someone having fun.
I used to joke that Heavy was going to be blanket banned outright because "Heavy to mid" was such a Boogeyman. Glad to know that stigma is slowly going down
I think people don’t like heavy to mid because on certain maps (snakewater and sultry come to mind) heavy would just be a glorified anti-air gun, denying bombs and making soldiers even more miserable. Not super strong, but not fun either.
Gru and whip weren't banned because heavy to mid was good, they were banned because heavy to mid forces both teams to do it, and that results in both teams just looking at each other across the point waiting for picks because you can't push into a heavy. It made the game extremely boring to play and even less fun to watch. The vast majority of the og bans from a decade or so ago, the mixup days I guess you could call it, were because they made the game a boring stalemate and slowed it to a crawl. I do agree that allowing the gru but not the whip doesn't make sense because they both facilitate the same thing and were originally banned for the same exact reason.
Casual only player here, im going to try and give my opinion on every weapon for fun! Soda Popper: Too powerful for killing medics. Reducing the already pretty brief timeframe for medics to die, to a single person? Pretty frustrating to face. Like, the only advice i can see being valid is "dont let the scout reach you" and if i have to explain why thats bad advice to you, i dont want to explain it to you. Bonk! Atomic Punch: Wasnt sure on this one, but i totally agree with the sentry thing. Going spy in sixes, i imagine to be tough. SaltyPhish's recent Comp videos are the only thing i see of competitive, and biengspy even in say highlander is rough. Sure fewer players means less eyes to look for you, but it also means much less cover. Unlike highlander, there's less expectation for a spy to appear, but that doesnt mean its going to be easy. the optimal situation is stab and sap of course, in which case id be willing to bet 7/10 times you just win the game, but theres almost no chance that spy lives. Bonk! gives the scout too high a chance of surviving, with too little consequence. Crit-a-Cola: didnt even think of the uber thing, that would be crazy busted! my were similar to my previous statement on the Soda Popper. too much medic killing potential, making the damage a medic has taken to one-shot lower, and i believe minicrits are only partially effected by fall-off or something? idk, but extra damage when a bullet connects, is still extra damage at any range, which is.... Something to be heavily considered i feel. Flying Guillotine: yeah, the range and recharge on it are far too strong, especially for its crazy initial damage. Mad Milk: Just is busted. It's so strong, id say easily Scout's strongest secondaries, and he has ONLY good secondaries. only the Winger and Bonk! are mid imo. Even in casual its terrifyingly strong sometimes. Sure, you may not hit many enemies, but if your pushing heavy lives from the one guy you milked, and gets another kill, that's two kills that happened only because of the milk. Even just using it to prevent afterburn can be valuable, to get your team into gaining crit heals sooner. Pretty Boy's Pocket Pistol: It's busted. Its OP. It's literally better than stock for 9 shots. Maybe 6's scouts shoot their pistols a lot, but honestly that sounds crazy to me. If i want chip to prevent crit heals i use my scattergun to ensure i hit, maybe getting two or three people if im lucky. If i need damage and aren't out of bullets, there's only a specific range where your going to get much use from the pistol compared to your scattergun. And, while strange to consider, shooting 15% faster, means you reload 15% sooner, which slows you down, giving an opportunity for the other scout to shoot you (which is partially negated by your slightly improved health from the Pocket Pistol) but afterwords you get to start shooting while the other guy reloads most likely. And then, you have another nine shots to load into him! It's insanely good. Okay, im sleepy now, so ill have to stop here, its late and my meds are kicking in, but its pretty late. So, i hope any who see this comment enjoy hearing my perspective!
One of the only honest casual player perspectives I've read. And yeah minicrits are not affected by damage fall-off so it turns the Scout into a low-medium range class into a medium-high range class which is hilariously overpowered
@@realdragon that's arguable for heavy, pyro and sniper lol, spam spam and spam is the name of the game. Though listing the others with pyro is a crime as airblast spam is absolutely goofy and shouldnt exist
People really underestimate natascha heavy, most heavies don't use it because they don't know how or they actually have compassion. Nastasha's slowing down and 20% dmg resistance is pure evil, had a game with a vacc medic and a natascha heavy... those two would refuse to die nasty combo, and I've been under the care of vaccinator, dat thing is broken, it makes the heavy a true tank, but I rewards you with questionable positioning. Now thankfully in casual most people are either goofin around or just suck, which thank god I don't want to encouter that combo in my life ever again e.e It's not impossible mind you, but it's the ulitmate bullet soak in the game and it's not punished by snail movement unlike the brass beast. But I wouldn't want 3-people focusing down two enemies while he rest are still active in killing our team.
@@Grapevin Yikes! wouldn't want to play agaisnt something like that, I mean it's not so bad if you focus down the heavy, but as long as it doesn't have a vac medic should be manageable. But yeah that gun is stupid and not fun if you are a mobile class.
Most heavies will only ever use the Natasha if the enemy's scout(s) or soldier(s) are overly annoying to deal with for one reason or another, that's it, that's all natasha exists for to your average heavy player. And both of those classes are meta in 6v6. In 12v12 the tank thing barely matters, if you're not dying as that combo you're prolly gonna be curbstomping the enemy regardless, otherwise the larger team size allows the enemy to focus you down much more easily.
Hot Take: TF2 was NEVER meant to be competitive. It was clearly meant to be a casual game, yet it was turned into one by the community anyways. Same for Left 4 Dead 2.
i think most of the playerbase has the same sentiment as you, me included. the majority hated mym when it dropped i don't dislike THE competitive part (leagues, prem) of tf2 though, and competition is very much an inevitable part of games in general (third party hosted comp, leaderboards, speedruns)
People always say hot take and then say the most milquetoast generally agreed upon sentiment. The people who play comp tf2 are so many magnitudes less than people who play casual
On Sap and Sack 1. I think most players not being good at spy results in a lot more spy deaths than usual. There are definitely a lot of missed trades, don't underestimate revolver. 2. Since Gunslinger isn't banned, maybe engis could try just switching to gunslinger if it feels like you're sentry is gonna get destroyed (i'd have to see it in practice.) 3. If BONK's only ban is regarding a strat to break up last stalemates that is certainly a stretch IMO, but I only watch 6s so IDK this is just me armchair QBing
in the world of fighting games, something is considered ban worthy if its deemed overcentralising (good to the point where it has a stranglehold over the metagame) or degenerate (makes the game overall less fun and/or trivializes skill). Overall I think Rgl's ban list is very well done but etf2l's bugs me a bit since I really dont think being annoying is equivalent to being degenerate sodapopper(overcrentalising) bonk(a bit of both) crit o cola(overcentralising) flying guillotine(overcentralising) mad milk (overcentralising) pbpp(overcentralising kinda) i could see it being allowed if people wanted it. its allowed in ugc cow mangler(degenerate) its a weird case where it isnt that much better but all of its advantages lead to lameness. fun fact i played in the experimental cup and one shot a scout with the charge shot while they were building. Thats why you always stay above 160 while building kids. base jumper(Both) reserve shooter(both) Ironically it would make soldier worse disciplinary action(overcentralising?) after the steak and gru unban ive never actually seen heavy to mid so it might be ok for an unban i dunno natasha(degenerate) textbook example of an option that causes you to win my limiting your oponents options for counterplay. fists of steal(overcentralising) a fully overhealed fos heavy has 630 effective health which is as the wrangler has shown us, a lot for a team to get through. Last points give holding teams great positional advantage but they will often have to throw it away in order to physically shot the cap in scramble situations. the fos allows teams to take better advantage of positioning since they have this giant wall on the point that cant be killed without diverting the potential damage of most of the enemy team. rescue ranger(overcentralising) short circuit(DEGERNERATE) wrangler(overcentralising) quickfix(both) vaccinator(both) machina(overcentralising) sydney's sleeper(degenerate) sniper doesn't need an easy mode jarate(overcentralising) diamondback(might actually be ok) In the same experimental cup i played the diamondback was allowed and weirdly nobody used it. spy is usally just used to get one pick so most people would prefer the letranger. The diamondback would make it a bit harder for spy to get in but he would be able to do a bit more once he is in. Unlike in casual the crits arent exactly free since you cant get any before an encounter and you do have the legitimate downside of having to give up the letranger
I haven't played any competitive tf2 since 2014 but judging from just how casual plays, I perfectly understand why no one wants full time heavy to be a thing. It's a non interactive class, unless you're a demo or sniper who can easily out damage their health. I also think heavy is the easiest class in the game to fully grasp
I think the main issue casuals have with Diamondback is the same issue casuals have with Bazaar Bargain. In a pub environment, they are just straight upgrades from stock. Your comment on spies immediately dying is just not really applicable to a pub environment. The spy with a half functioning brain cell is going to farm your freshly installed Sniper/Engie sitting on last and you are going to get pelted by what is functionally a slightly lower damage stock revolver with 100% crit rate. Same with Bazaar Bargain snipers getting two headshots on a random casual standing still and would you look at that it's just the stock sniper now, except that one random getting farmed a couple more times and you have an even more egregious body shot machine than the piss rifle. These kinds of instances will never come up in 6s because the moment a spy or sniper is discovered, they will die on sight, on top of the fact that they have to work harder to get the kills against people who have more than 1 firing neuron. I will say that Diamondback still feels kinda dog to deal with in 6s because a Spy getting a stab off and then immediately swinging around to slam you in the face with a crit before they go down still feels shit, but I also understand that they are giving up some crazy utility like the L'etranger to even do this. This is in stark contrast to stuff like Air Strike, which has very noticeable downsides over stock even at max stacks, and Eyelander, which has some noticeable downsides on top of requiring you to go into melee to even accrue those boosts. Now don't get me wrong, the argument people make for nerfing them because "they reward you for playing the class" are dumb. Like, wtf do you want them to do? Is rewarding people for playing the class correctly not good game design? Would you rather reward people for playing the fucking class how they weren't meant to? And these are the same people who complained about Ambassador because "uh but spy now just sniper" That's not the problem with Diamondback or Bazaar. The issue is that they are considerably better than stock and have no real downsides in a pub environment.
I think more weapons would be viable if every class would be restricted to 1 slot, allowing variety in classes used and weapons. It is so weird that competitive developed into 2 soldiers and 2 scouts and now every ban has to cater to maintaining this convention
Also, I recognised that most of sniper players are bots with autoaim AND a bad spy recognition, they don't shoot a spy under disguise, when he starts sapping. P.s. Used that today several times and it helped to win in casual
May I ask about other game modes like koth, payload race, payload? With different game modes comes with different dynamics and play styles like pyro can be more viable in koth rather than 5cp as an example and what about changing the winning requirements to help make some weapons or classes more viable. ( know it’s a big stretch but it’s a food for thought more than anything)
This is just a guess but playing payload in 6’s would mean that the pushing team is always gonna be down a player due to the cart needing to be pushed, and being down a player in 6s is a lot more debilitating than highlander/pubs. It’s also definitely boring to be the cart bitch for the entire round.
All of the other gamemodes had been experimented with earlier on in the game, but slowly phased out as people realized their flaws. koth remains a staple, and because of its symmetrical/mirrored nature it encourages a lot of dynamics shifts and back and forth gameplay. The most popular koth map is Product (viaduct), Payload was tried, but it ultimately slows the pace of the game down to the speed of the payload. It always forces one person to stay on cart, so attacking makes things difficult. PLR just creates the same issues. Along with the lack of maps for the gamemode, now you have to have at least TWO people standing. So now it's closer to a 5v5 or 4v4, which kind of defeats fhe purpose of a more deathmatch-specialized gamemode.
The same people who run etf2l and ban these weapons are open/low in 6's and prem in highlander, they have no right to judge what should and shouldn't be banned
"The base jumper is so broken" is something I never would have expected to hear, and yet after a year and a half of comp I completely understand why and that brings me SO MUCH PAIN
@@ammi5311 itss op becuse it makes you literally near impossible to shoot out of the air if you're actually good at the game and not using it for its intended purpose of funny air strike kills, stoppin fall damage, and crutched market gardens. Its literally awful to play agaainst for similar reasons OW pre-rework pharah was agony to play against. Even very talented direct hit users often cant hardly hit a good base jumper. Its fundimentally unfair. It has nothin to do with "It denials your circle jurking montage", its that it feels horrible to play against and generally isnt something people like using neither.
@@ammi5311i think the comp scene is right on this one, its not healthy for the game to force players to pick an entirely different class they might not even be good at because 1 guy on the enemy team wanted to use 1 of several other more balanced and interesting secondaries. The whole point of having multiple classes is to let players with different skills contribute to games. Why should someone who's not good at hitscan be forced to permanently swap off because 1 guy made their whole class unviable?
@@lt2660 Well you see in, the very experimental Valve format of "12s" you just get out of the way while your two heavies play anti-air. Then you use the remaining 99% of your current life to play the game as you would normally. I wonder if in the world where engi is 6s meta, spy has his toolkit crippled because he can just turn off engi. Makes him "unviable" after all.
Usually these weapons degenerate the game into a game of rock-paper-scissors. Oh, you used a weapon to get heavy to mid? Now soldiers can't bomb, and now we counter the Heavy with a sniper. Oh, now they have a sniper? Now we'll run the sniper to counter the other sniper. It becomes a lot closer to what happened with OW and the strange balalancing designs. "The script" has changed a lot, despite what many have believed because people have experimented with items and done small competitions like no-restrictions, which either means the weapon is unbanned, or it is further cemented as being broken.
53:07 Ok so back in the day when the Mann-Conomy Update released, because the old Sydney Sleeper could not headshot AT ALL, it had random crits for whatever reason.
The thing about the Diamondback in casual has a lot to do with the lower skill floor. A Spy who gets a stab will often still die, but not die quickly enough for him to be unable to belt out his 102 damage crits because he won't be instantly called out, focused and gunned down by the entire team. Also with the lower skill floor and greater amount of players, a Spy could theoretically just farm criticals off bad players and buildings and be able to freely cloak and walk around disguised sniping players off with crits (can't tell a Spy has crits while he's disguised). And it's just unfun to be punished for bad teammates who enable some guy to snowball off them. I feel it's just a strangely designed weapon in general. Not even taking into account of the fact that it's extra reward for Spy's already instant kills. Then there's the synergy the Diamondback has with the Kunai, which opens up a whole other can of worms in a low skill, high player-count setting.
You gave the arguments for a couple of weapons that they are banned because if they weren't, no one would use anything else or would make an already powerful class more powerful. But a lot of classes ( Medic in particular) have options that dominate their peers so much that you are pretty much throwing if any other item was picked.
In this video I learned that pyro, my main class, has no banned item. Like, seriously? Not even the scorch shot? The detonator? Thermal thruster? "Oh pyro is a bad class" really? That's the argument comp have? The team has 3 projectiles classes and a medic. How can pyro be bad against that composition? Not that I care, like 95% of the people that are actually playing TF2, I don't care about 6s. I can't even believe I sit through a 1 hour long video about banned items in 6s. Maybe it's the lack of updates o.o small edit: ok so I think most people didn't understand my comment, and I am to blame for it. the major point of this comment is to say that I'm surprised that pyro has literally no banned items, not even the ones that are unfun to play against like the scorch shot. I don't see the argument of pyro being a bad class for 6's as an excuse to not ban some of its items.
pyro doesnt have good mobility or damage, and entirely relies on reflects. he cant really do anything against scout, and its better to just have another soldier instead of having a guy that sometimes reflects rockets
If Pyro was good, people would be playing Pyro more often. Pyro absolutely sucks against the two 185 HP Scouts that are almost always present on the enemy team. Pyro just gets shredded by unreflectable Scattergun shots from outside of flamethrower range, and if the enemy Soldiers refuse to send rockets to the Pyro, Pyro lacks ranged options. It gets even worse if one of the Soldiers switches to a shotgun in response to your full-time Pyro shenanigans. Pyro's main upside is the ability to deny uber with airblast.
I think the quick fix is the perfect example to why its impossible for 12 v 12 casual and 6v6 competitive to work under the same weapon stats. Fundamentally there is less damage going around in 6v6 vs 12 v 12 so a weapon like the quick fix whos uber relies on out healing most but not all damage cannot work in both because one has half the damage going around you HAVE to change the stats for it to continue working as intended.
A lot of the TF2 playerbase nowadays is just kids with sub 200 hours. Since they're kids and don't know any better they think they know it all and can post the most absurd bs and get all the other kids to upvote their comments. Remember that seeming confident in your shitty unsubstantiated opinion is more convincing to others who don't know something than someone accurately and succinctly laying out reasoning. That and the other people writing these comments are pubbers with thousands of hours who just want to stomp little timmies in pubs over and over. They think that all these banned weapons are completely balanced and that TF2 functions better as a 12v12 pub because they've never played coordinated games. We've seen that 12v12 coordinated games completely vanilla is an absolute stalemate shitshow, but these people don't realize that. It works versus little timmy with 20 hours who loves playing spy, so that means it applies to competitive setting as well. On a last note these people keep parroting the same opinion "TF2 wasn't meant to be competitive" when the game originates from one of the most competitive arena shooters of all time, and copies or is inspired by many of its mechanics (Quake). Although its true that the game never released as a competitive game, many other games with competitive scenes (especially grassroots ones) were not released and marketed as a competitive game but evolved that scene when people realized its potential. TF2 has some of the highest competitive potential of any shooter ever released but these pubstompers are just throwing it under the rug with some backwards logic. TL;DR: kids, salty pubstompers, parroting
![[TF2] Valve Comp Is A Complete Joke](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/d-8PPlw4eTA/mqdefault.jpg)
I know it's probably less interesting to watch visually, but I figured it was a useful graphic to include regardless. Hope you enjoy!
i like having a graphic! even though i usually use your videos like a podcast where i can just listen, having something i can look at but wont lose out on anything by not looking, that makes it nicer when i have the time to do so
Having a graphic is better than no graphic, I may be listening to most of the video, but I appreciate that you did this for anyone watchin
I like this format
I don't even play competitive, and I can already understand and stand by the Cow Mangler not being allowed:
In a _competitive_ setting, where coordination is common, this rocket launcher basically invalidates engineer as a class with a coordinated push, which gives Darwin's Danger Shield vibes
take off your adblocker mang
The beef people have about the base jumper is that comp people complained about so much that valve changed it, and then the comp people banned it anyway. The only people that were really affected by the change were the casuals who were not abusing it in the first place.
the design of it is appalling regardless. floating in the air being very hard to hit/see while raining down insane damage, especially with the beggars and airstrike
@@krollic I wasn't addressing the design, I was addressing the reasoning behind the conflict over the item between competitive and casual bases. I didn't claim it was good or bad.
I don't recall comp players complaining about it, it was banned back then and still is now. valve's reasoning for banning it was that it was too hard to hit people who were abusing it's super high air accel strafe values and unlimited redeploys, they didn't specify that the change was for comp or a result of feedback from comp players
@@ammi5311 per the valve blog post that revealed the base jumper nerf: "These changes are based on online community discussions, emails, playtime data, conversations with players of all skill ranges, and play testing.
Please continue to send us your feedback through the Contact Form on the right taskbar (under "Contact Us"). Hearing from you helps us prioritize our work and influences the direction the game moves in."
in the entire blog post from June 20th, 2017, competitive is not mentioned once.
@@ammi5311 so you're just imagining that back when valve approached the comp scene in 2015 in preparation for MYM, comp players complained about base jumper and so valve waited until over a year after the comp update released (and valve comp was already fully dead) to nerf the base jumper in 2017 and then they hid that the real reason was because a handful of comp players complained?
lmao ok
What really gets on my nerves is how many things were hard nerfed or banned under the logic of "it allows Heavy to reach mid faster" (eg GRU, Eviction Notice, Disciplinary Action). If making your game mode fun relies on an entire playable class not being able to reliably participate in the major fights, then maybe the format has some bigger problems that you should be dealing with instead.
Heavy is able to participate in major fights, just the defensive ones. The idea of trying to restrict heavy rushing to mid is that his class role is indomitable CQC that is really slow and he becomes progressively more of a headache to deal with the fewer the number of people there are. There's nothing stopping you from attempting to play him without things that attempt to circumvent his balancing downside. But if heavy becomes obligatory from weaknesses being circumvented, then sniper becomes obligatory, and now things are going to be playing out a lot slower.
You say that like slower isn't better.
@@Yawyna124 As I said, it sounds like that's more of a problem with 6s as a game mode than an imbalance in items
@@whensomethingcriesagain It's 6s fault that there are a bunch of items that undermine intended balancing mechanisms?
@@Yawyna124 It's 6s' fault if something as simple as "Heavy can participate in the initial mid fight" apparently makes it untenable. You don't see this being some huge problem in regular 12v12 or Highlander after all
It says a lot about the Crit-a-cola when nobody knows how it works.
in fairness it's been changed so much over the years, I still thought it gave scout a speed boost lmao
@@twpsynI mean the last time it was changed was like probably half a decade ago.
@@TJ-hg6opyou haven’t changed your diaper in half a decade
@@TJ-hg6op Newsflash the last time any balance changes at all were implemented was 2017
@@majapaja_ 2018 in blue moon, yknow the update that reworked the short circuit into the current version
Banning a weapon thats too powerful makes sense, if a weapon is so strong you feel forced to use it thats a problem, its also boring if everyone is using the same overpowered item.
But it feels like europe banned a lot of stuff just for the sake of banning it, not being good is an extremely bad ban reason, youre just removing iptions people may like to have for no reason
Thankfully due to the way TF2 works the only really overpowered weapon is maybe the Uber saw
The Uber saw is literally the only weapon in that game that's pretty much needed to play the class it's used for
most of the European weapon bans are not banned for "not being good" they're banned for not being fun to play against, dying to guillotine or loch and load from a scout or demo across the map who cannot be punished or seen at times is not at all fun to play against (where as at least sniper who also at times isn't fun to play against at least has the fact that he has to be within people's sightlines to actually kill people)
"It's boring if everyone is using the same "overpowered" item"
So using the same team composition with same loadouts on same maps is not boring, huh? 🤔
Bruh, the game is 16 years old, and haven't received any updates in 6 years. OF COURSE most of the things will be repetitive.
Btw I see no overpower in most of the banned weapons. I'm rather surprised that sniper is not banned completely and even allowed to use non-huntsman primaries.
Agreed. All it does is remove player's ability to experiment and find niches for weapons which are generally bad.
honestly, Europe just hates evolving metas. It's ban philosophy is everything that casual players hate; not open-minded, only factoring the best players, with little justification, and cutting down new shifts in meta.
"Why does no one watch comp tf2?"
You know the motto of 6v6:
Half the players, half the fun!
@@PineappleDealer37 let’s make changes around a game mode that is only 6v6 and only uses 4 classes genius.
@@Ulysses_-vv5uh It doesn't only use 4 classes, thats just the best option, If you wanna run a sniper to mid fights you are free to do so lol
@@taythinthings im unfamiliar with the 6s scene personally, but isnt it actually popular to switch to sniper/engi/heavy on last? since the main thing holding those classes back is the ability to travel, and being right at spawn negates that?
@@hylianhealer1647 Yes, those classes are better than scout in most scenarios when holding last but if you are pushing out of last, most offclasses switch back to scout (soldiers dont really offclass as you need someone to deny the point) as you need to deny the soldiers bombing and carry your medic out of last and need momentum, some people run heavy on koth, some people bring offclasses when pushing last, i dont know why people think 6s only has 4 classes but you are free to test bringing a pyro to mid then find out why people dont run pyro to mid
While i think a fair bit of the bans are pretty reasonable, it kind of undercuts the whole "bans arent just to enforce a meta" when two subsequent bans are explained by "Soldier (and demo) is really bad at fighting this" (base jumper and reserve shooter)
i think you highlight the point that people use the term "the meta" to mean completely different things at times, but in this case its "meta" classes that are the best abusers of the unlocks, not just the victims, so we wouldn't see a change in class distribution from these weapons but just a degeneration of gameplay
@@Wild_Rumpus fair point that soldier is also the user of both the examples, but the counters to themselves aren't soldier. And also both examples are factors of a meta of action (bombing) as much as they are a meta of class distribution.
while some of the bans are objectively correct seemingly most of the list is pure cope .Comp players want to mangle tf2 into something it is not.
Regarding Fists of Steel, I believe it's not so much about damage reduction, but more about medic getting uber faster when healing heavy with fists of steel even when the weapon is holstered (tho heavy has to redeploy it every time the beam disconnects). Big Joey has a video about it.
yeah it's this, the fact that it basically functions as a medic buff while still being able to use your minigun is wild
Its so tragic that Engie only has two secondary unlocks, and *both* of them are some of the worst designed weapons from a game design standpoint in the entire game.
Equally sad when the engineer mains says one of them is (overpowered and believe it needs to be nerfed)
Because the wrangler IS overpowered and deserves to be nerfed 💀
Trippling the health and doubling the dps of a sentry at the press of a button doesn’t exactly scream balance.
@@eruptorr9103 for real. Like imagine making a sentry so healthy 4 dh rockets don't break it without any repairs.
i think itd be cool if engi could use scouts pistols
the problem with designing secondaries for engi is that hes supposed to be a support class, you cant really give him a purely offensive secondary thats better than the pistol, but you cant give him another support tool to help his buildings because his buildings are already super strong by default and you end up with the wrangler or short circuit
Ok, but europe would bun the fucking shotgun if it came out in an update. Like, etf2l can be ridiculous
I mean, RGL also bans too much but the they don't piss themselves at the thought of a detonator-jump
Wait, why would they ban the shotgun if it wasnt a stock weapon?
@@cubanwargaming4879 "They are literally giving the scattergun to half the classes, this is overpowering soldier" or some shit
@@oiytd5wugho Have they considered that maybe, just maybe, most classes are much more well suited to using their primary weapons rather than the shotgun due to their slowness compared to scout, and should only use them when finishing off an enemy?
@@danolantern6030 who is they. no one is saying this except the person youre replying to lol
I would have never thought that I'd look forward to someone talk about competitive tf2 for an hour but here we are
3:30 i think the easiest way to sum up the difference in opinion is that in na items are allowed by default and banned if they become an issue whereas in eu items are banned by default and only allowed after they're proven to add a fair and fun dimension to 6s. the eu whitelist actually reminds me of the new player whitelists that some pug servers use to encourage new players to learn the meta and "rules" before breaking them
To me Heavy is by far the best example of “banned to protect the meta.” Most of the other bans with a few exceptions are very fair. But heavy losing all ways to be viable at all at mid is tragic. It’s not like it’d be crazy OP so you have to choose which meta is more fun. It’d be a fun niche strat that diversities the meta without dominating it.
speeding up heavy would mean removing his sole weakness and fundamentally making him a different class. the heavy is a class who's defining trait is what he CANNOT do (move quickly). so on a fundamental, game design level, this opinoin is misled.
but in a simpler more practical sense, heavy getting to mid fast would be totally overpowered and would be the ONLY viable way to play 6s. there is no way to let heavy be that fast and still have an interesting, balanced and varied meta.
the reason why non-6s classes are restricted is because they harm gameplay diversity. they lock the game into stalemates. having more classes in the game does not equal more diverse gameplay.
@@ants7219 I definitely agree that weaknesses define characters as much as their strengths do, however I think heavy unlocks that give him situational speed are within the character's design. They don't increase his general or in combat mobility, they're both just for walking back to the fight faster after death. I don't think I've heard a single person claim that the unlocks ruin his design.
I am extremely unconvinced that heavy with 0 bans would be the meta. I think it would be a niche or maybe a secondary strategy therefore increasing diversity. If the choice turns out to just be one meta vs the other, then by all means. But I really really doubt heavy would be the default pick.
He doesn't do anything on mid anyway.
@@ants7219 so instead of the only way being able to play sixes be with heavy, it's without him on mid. got it.
@@ants7219an interesting and varied meta is exactly what you don't have lmao
another thing about the diamondback is when you’re fighting a spy you don’t know they have crits because of their disguise so it really affects how you approach the interaction like you wouldn’t charge a spy with your uber saw if you knew he had a pocket laser beam
Isn't spy super weak and all? I think it's more interesting if the spy manage to get some kills instead of just giving info at best and dying
@@bruschetta7711if a spy is caught red handed that's (usually) the spies fault and he deserves to die as a result. Diamondback allows spy to just bypass this and, at worse, snipe players with their crits like the old amby. Amby got nerfed but diamondback hasn't even though it can effectively do the same thing which is probably why it's banned.
Also dr let's you bypass spy getting punished but it's much more balanced I think. It completely takes your ability to cloak and gather intel and any experienced player will recognize when a dr is triggered and will punish it.
You can stab a player on last and get a 102 on the med quickly before dying forcing the Uber if he coordinated with a soldier or scout
"you wouldn’t charge a spy with your uber saw if you knew he had a pocket laser beam"
Bruh people are charging spy knowing spies can insta kill them
europe has banned the wrap assassin this current season, quoting unhappy premiership players in their news post as to why. they also have reverted the gunboats plugin they were using for a few seasons that made soldiers lose less health when rocket jumping near enemies. they also stated their interest in their latest 6v6 news post about banning the winger, solemn vow and picking up weapons.
just some recent additional info i am presenting with no opinion offered.
I do think it's pretty funny the reason is "players were pissy"
I can't say they're wrong, bleed is annoying, but it's still funny
literally none of these are problematic
noone uses the wrap assassin because no more uber building
the winger practically gets rid of scouts secondary damage
picking up weapons hasnt been useful since they nerfed dropped mediguns
solemn vow ok i guess?
Thats fucking stupid lmfao
At what point do you just go play CoD
Solemn vow makes sense, winger makes a bit less sense but i still get it, but PICKING UP WEAPONS?
The Pretty Boy's healing is pretty negligible, its only really good for mitigating afterburn.
It's funny how Sleeper is banned while most of community sees it as crutch.
It's banned not because it's terribly strong but because it lowers the quality of the game. It's a weapon that overly incentivizes bodyshots, staying scoped in and covering people in stinky piss. It's not fun to have minicrits applied to you from across the map with relative ease.
@@krollicbeing killed across the map is funnier than being covered in piss??????
@@ps-frag read my comment again
its because of the charge rate and makes bodyshotting better than stock
Have you noticed that in competitive, there are less players and that each is more competent than your regular casual player?
6s specifically is a fast format that can turn around quickly, and the lower playercount makes kills more valuable.
Jarate itself is immensely powerful, and considering that it's banned, a tool that would let you coat a player in Jarate IN A COORDINATED TEAM WITH ACTIVE COMMUNICATION is pretty strong if you ask me.
You get one kill and the enemy team is immediately at a disadvantage, the condition isn't even a headshot.
Ever been in a Casual match with coordinating players? They stomp the other team, especially when abusing certain weapons and maps.
53:15 Not sure if anyone already said this but the Sidney sleeper lists "no random crits" because it originally could random crit, so when they changed it they decided to list that it could no longer random crit
Yeah I recall that lasted awhile. iirc it was at least several days
Yeah baby, you boy got a sonic double cheeseburger with bacon, a large strawberry limeade and fries this video is a straight banger. I love how my favorite weapons are banned in a game mode I don’t play.
As a player who always respected comp but never played it, weapons that minicrit seem like a big issue mostly because mini-crits take no fall off.
If minicrits took falloff weapons like reserve shooter would be far less oppressive
If crits took falloff across the board a lot of weapons with conditional crits would be less oppressive: The Amby, for example, which could act as an effective mini-sniper, was nerfed for a very specific reason: Controllable revolver crits are fucking insane (of course the Diamondback also should have gotten the same nerf).
I'd lean less towards 'all minicrit weapons take falloff' and more 'make no-falloff extra damage disconnected effects'. So you can have something that doesn't falloff but doesn't get the bonus damage and the other way about too.
me when 1984 whitelist bans atomizer and not loch 😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊
whats wrong with loch?
No one like weapon that do long range burst damage, loch 'n' load make demoman similar to sniper but you can do reactive dodge instead predict where his shot go and no instakill when being 150 HP or lower but shoot faster before the reload.
@@michaeljo9384 Do you think Sniper should be banned?
@@whirl3690 No because less class variety lead to samey gameplay and sniper is a off class (or not the META classes) in competitive, also sniper require skill (unless cheating) and can be countered by flanking, spamming, dodging which the META classes (scouts, soldiers, demo) can easily or use teammate as meatshield as medic. Sniper only need a nerf or rework to banned weapons in 6's like Jarate, Machina, etc. So sniper is balanced and shouldn't be banned unless using the banned weapon without nerfs or rework which Valve doesn't give anymore now or at huge sightline map like Hightower, 2fort and especially wutville or no / barely any viable flanking routes map like dustbowl or in casual where people doesn't communicate often to do counterplay to sniper.
@@michaeljo9384Sniper is easy to play compared to every other classes in competitive.
Every other classes has to worry about their position, their ammo count, their health, along with their aim; should they play slower and aim better or rely on their flicks to land shots while moving around ?
Sniper only has 1 thing to worry about : Aiming. And in the vast, VAST majority of matches, you counterpick their Sniper with your own Sniper. Trying to kill the Sniper withour your own Sniper is a very easy way of eating multiple -150 before having the CHANCE to kill him.
I am very surprised Sniper as a whole isn't banned.
Just want to say quick-fix only builds 2 seconds faster than stock. Its unbanned in 4s and its really just not good if teams know how to actually shoot players
2s if other medic over healed your teammate or you are gaining uber via self damaging scout, otherwise quick-fix doesn't reach to 142%< over heal of teammate hp which mean it doesn't apply uber penalty after said 142%
@@Jasiuc330 Fun fact valve actually fixed that bug for the quick fix and it made it really shit so they reverted it
@@h20gamezwhich is weird since the weapon is as anti pocket as possible and they couldve just buffed the uber build rate bonus to like 30%
In short quickfix us for casual players who think going solo against 2 lvl 3 sentries is easy. As soon as someone plays medic others forget how to stay alive
I always found it funny because most casuals genuinely think we ban like most of the weapons when in reality only a small fraction of weapons are banned, and the vast majority of those are scout/medic unlocks because they're really effing strong classes.
Unless you're in Europe
💀 @@zigro433
its honestly a bit infuriating sometimes considering that the list is just like there in the open for literally anyone to look up in seconds its not like buried on some old forum page somewhere people are just confidently wrong
I mean, it's not a wrong assumption though.
Displinary action, GRU, buffalo steak? All banned to ensure there is a zero percent chance your pocket soldier would have to start playing heavy.
The gunslinger used to be banned because it might make engineer ran more often and we can't allow that, then once it was clear that gunslinger wasn't doing shit for engies 6s viability, it was unbanned.
Most weapons just don't risk shaking up the 2 scout, 2 soldier, demo medic meta. But any weapon that did risk that was banned.
Which i mean, i get it. Just let's not pretend that isn't the case.
@@moonmelons It's about balancing the classes for the format. The way you're framing it makes it seem so much more sinister when in reality, for example, having to take down a wrangled sentry with only 6 players is just infuriating and unfun. The wrangler was intended for a server with double the amount of players and unlimited projectiles.
The thing with this, as far as I'm aware, is that 6v6 _really_ hates anything that shakes up the set-in-stone meta and team compositions. You always have 2 scouts, 2 soldiers, a demo and a medic, at most 1 of the scouts or soldiers swapping to sniper if the enemy team has a sniper. With the power of those classes _heavily_ skewed by the fact that there's 6 less players on each team. Scout for example just ain't as strong in your average 12v12 pubs but then spiking in power when you axe the team sizes in half so he gets free reign over the map. Classes like heavy, pyro and engi get affected more by the team sizes with more interesting interactions in 12v12 as opposed to 6v6. The classes, weapons and the game in general just ain't designed around the lower player counts, with changes meet your match did screwing over casual players without changing anything to the comp players which is prolly the reason for the beef casual players have with the comp scene.
Even Highlander suffers to an extent from the lower player numbers in teams and the issues forcing 1 of each class for both teams introduces (spy being godawful to play in that format because everyone knows you're there, you have no surprise factor, you always have that 1 spy on both teams as opposed to casual where you're free to swap classes at any point, there's always a fustercluck happening and nothing's guaranteed to show up, so suddenly 3 frenchmen spawning out of the aether then swapping to whatever other classes they want is much less painful to the spy players)
alright, I get what you mean by spy being hell in highlander, but he isn't nearly as useless as you'd expect.
eventually, spy is just gonna get you. you aren't omniscient, you can't turn around while shooting the enemy or else you're just going to get obliterated. that's when spy comes in, attacking people who are currently dealing with something else. this is why some competitive spies will ask for their soldier to bomb in order to go for something (this is a pretty common occurrence, but still works)
@@simplysmiley4670 you know the motto - half the players, half the fun.
6v6 doesn't hate anything that shakes up the meta, it hates rock-paper-scissors swapping. in 12v12 games, you can play literally whatever the fuck you want and it'll still be viable -- but this is a competitive subset and rules were set so that the game is both more similar to quake and more fun for both teams. example: the wrangler wouldn't automatically make engineer a good pick since he would still be largely awful when attempting to push. engineer would still only be picked on last, but now he'd be even better there. the same goes for other bans to non-"meta" classes.
also, if there wasn't a set-in-stone team comp of 2 scout 2 soldier 1 demo and 1 medic you'd see 2 meds, since medic is hands down the best character and needs a hard limit to prevent the game from being stalematey hell
and it's not even that the power of these classes is significantly higher in 6s, my bet is that in competitive "12s" if that were ever a thing, you'd still see a majority of people play flexible characters on control point maps, since, yknow. you need to rotate from defense to offense, and like 4 medics or something crazy like that. the only reason heavy, spy, sniper, pyro, and engie can be played with success on 12s is because the skill floor is so low that it does not matter what you play; most of the damage you take is undirected spam as opposed to focused, communicated shots.
basically, team comps in 6s are a result of the gamemode played more than the number of players; if they played comp payload or a/d then you'd see engie, heavy, sniper, and pyro; but they don't, so you don't.
@@mrdeadmemes also not to mention Spy's biggest strength in Highlander is basically being omniscient about enemy posistioning
@@lucastran5583 6v6 is cursed by being made by people who played quake and wanted quake again - if a comp game mode was designed from the ground up today with all the history of eSports we have today, it'd look radically different.
"We have banned all classes from comp on account of them being overpowered."
Another thing about the bonk is that for a flank scout, it allows you to play far more aggressively, since it is very easy to use like a dead ringer and escape their back line
Scout
5:38 Soda Popper
7:30 Bonk! Atomic Punch
10:38 Crit-a-Cola
12:18 Flying Guillotine
14:13 Mad Milk
16:26 Pretty Boy's Pocket Pistol
Soldier
17:58 Cow Magler 5000
22:51 Disciplinary Action
Multi-Class
26:00 B.A.S.E. Jumper
29:38 Reserve Shooter
Heavy
31:58 Natasha
33:02 Fists Of Steel
Engineer
34:26 Rescue Ranger
38:32 Short Circuit
41:33 Wrangler
Medic
44:18 Quick-Fix
47:25 Vaccinator
Sniper
50:42 Machina
51:30 Sydney Sleeper
53:10 Jarate
Spy
54:26 Diamondback
adding these, thanks!
I expected to hear the VSauce theme when you started to thoroughly explain why.
i thought the bonk was banned because of the 3rd person camera while under its effects
btw you only get hit by mini crits with the crit a cola if you shoot once, if you drink it and never shoot you don't get hit by mini crits
i don't think that's considered bannable, since the only taunts banned are infinitely looping ones that you can cancel whenever you want
also the natascha, i remember playing in a custom maps cup that had almost no weapons banned and i used the natascha to hold and, if the point is closed enough, you can make any escape almost impossible because they walk so slowly they can't even reach a safe zone before dying, and even if they do escape it will be easier for your teammates to chase them down
@@abictoIt's surprising how many people don't know you can wiggle on the strafe keys to make its effects almost negligible. It's a much bigger impact in the air than on the ground for sure, where you really can't just use that trick. This is also another reason why the sandman has literally nothing going for it lol
@@OmegaRC59 i guess the fact that it's an automatic makes people forget idk, although even if you strafe you're still taking a little bit of slow and it's harder to fight while doing this
@@OmegaRC59 the thing is that you can't surf the bullets to escape
Insane how you're pumping *actually* interesting content every day, keep it up!
i will say for a lot of these, they were banned for a reason at some point, either for being strong or having a bug, and when they got nerfed or patched, no one bothered to un ban them
Why 6v6s became the standard match setup for competitive TF2, I'll never understand since it was painfully obvious that the developers of this game built the games core balance around the 12 unique classes all being used in tandem with each other during a match. It's like if they halved the number of pawns in competitive chess.
All of these weapons and "problematic" playstyles become benign once you have more than like four people running around a point.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's just because, getting 12 dudes together to play tf2 is easier than 18/24
Example: Demoknight becomes very strong in formats like 4s unless the other team runs more than one scout
@@Demopans5990 But becomes a meme in 12v12 if there's a single competent pyro or an engineer, or heavy existing.
@@simplysmiley4670
Hence why demoknight isn't viable in highlander
Play one season of highlander and you’ll change your mind. TF2 was balanced around people doing very limited teamwork and strategy, since it was never intended to be a serious game. If you somehow got a team of 12 to coordinate perfectly your match would be absolutely miserable.
I remember when the BASE Jumper was first released and most players did not understand the nerf that came down on it.
Then we saw clips of the 6s unhittable soldier dancing around in the sky using the unlimited redeploy.
no, nerfing a weapon that's only overpowered in the highest level of play is a dumb thing to do.
@@derp6443Imo it still needed a nerf, infinite redeploys essentially means you had 3 different directions to throw off a sniper's aim, as well as the ability to stay in air, well out of the effective range of the other 8 classes. Sure, the chip damage of an entire casual team is going to kill you anyways, but in a smaller match, you basically get to dominate the enemy team with minimal damage in return
@@concerningindividual629 It was a perfect case of a weapon they should have left the same in casual and just left banned in 6s. The same point this video makes about mad milk.
@@derp6443 The problem wasnt that it was nerfed, its that it was nerfed in a way that didnt really fully address why it was hated in comp (the sheer power of dodging and changing your momentum to mess with people's aim, while also affectin the reasons people liked it in casual, the ability to use it for avoiding fall damgee, float around for market kills and to pair with the base jumper. The nerfs it has were meant for comp but I feel much more affected its casual uses instead. THATS the nerf's problem. People in casual never used it for movement dodging, they used it to slow down fallin so that air aim was easier and the one time open and lack of air control more so hurts the casual's ability for aiming and gardening with it. I feel if the nerf was that it slowed ALL momentum gradually instead of just fall speed abruptly and you had to keep it out to get its affect, it would not have affected casual nearly as much while still nerfing its viability in comp. Casual uses may even apprecialte the slowing effect for the airstrike aim I bet at leasts to an extent. Just one idea.
And base jumper is still banned and now we are left with a worthless ''weapon''. Thank you guys.
Thank you for this video! I know Woolen made a vid on this, like, 6 years ago so it's good to have a new video. Not a lot has changed.
I think I wanna voice an opinion here.
I've been following comp TF2 since i55 grand finals, and I hear & see the opinion that if a better weapon would get unbanned, then everyone would be forced to use it. That is a valid stance to take, because sometimes some tools are just broken (Vaccinator).
But - isn't that the case already? People utilize the Three Rune Blade or Wrap because they are super powerful niche tools. For sure they allow for more interesting gameplay strategy overall; quicker Uber-charging and all that.
...But couldn't that be said about most of the banned unlocks as well?
Like let's say the Crit-a-cola gets unbanned. Neat, now Ubered Scouts are broken as all hell - people would be "forced" to use it on last pushes... just like Gunboats in general gameplay, as they allow for faster heals for your team.
I just find it a little bit obtuse, however yeah "fun" triumphs "unfun" I guess
I mean this is always how comp tf2 has worked and felt for years. It's what's "fun" under someone's definition but never the collective. You wonder why the RGL cup he referred to didn't change anything because the only demographic that matters is invite; nothing else. I think the critocola would add some interesting dynamics since a scout wouldn't full time run it. It's complete ass without being ubered so you'd be down a secondary. But if a scout died for the push into last teams would have that scout come up on it. I always enjoyed the niche weapons where they were good in a situation or two. That's personally my problem with competitive at the moment.
Why not ban stock weapons?
Because they aren't busted or unfun to fight against
@@switZ7Qstickybomb launcher
Stickybomb launcher is annoying for some players but then Scorch shot, Machina, Natasha exist (and other annoying weapons). Also stickybomb launcher is countered by not being in medium range, shooting the sticky before walking though even at chokepoint and practice dodging unlike Machina's annoying 173 bodyshot from very close / far away, scorch Shot & Natasha's removal of your dodging skill after being hit briefly.
@@michaeljo9384 sticky bomb launcher
@@michaeljo9384 Scortch shot is countered by not standing in 1 place
literally QUIT HAVING FUN
natasha vaccinator is not fun
- People who use the Natascha, Vaccinator, and/or Crit-A-Cola
If you don't have random crits I'm not interested
@@realdragononly specific weapons should have random crits, VERY specific.
@@Anshhhhhhhhhkexactly lmao, same with buff banner and the wrangler
It's crazy to me to think that my favorite weapon in TF2 of all time, the Reserve Shooter, ends up being too oppressive in 6s it has to be banned, when (as a casual player) I've always felt the spread could do with being tightened slightly to actually land those mid-range pop-up shots better. I find great joy in denying bombing soldiers if I'm lucky to be good enough with it, but I'm not a bomber myself, so I suppose I can see why swapping for the mantreads isn't a feasible or enjoyable enough solution, or that doing so can break down into rock-paper-scissors between soldiers.
Shotguns actually have better accuracy in comp due to random spread being disabled
In casual you're way less likely to randomly encounter jumping Soldiers (trolldiers aside) and Demos. In 6s, they're half the standard lineup and those classes do explosive roll-outs pretty much 100% of the time. For Soldiers especially, rocket jumping is at the core of their offensive abilities. The Reserve Shooter just fundamentally fucks the 6v6 gameplay loop up by forcing explosive classes to stay grounded more or risk getting shut down. By equipping it, you also lose the blast damage resistance of the Gunboats, which means the Reserve Shooter user can't be as mobile as they otherwise would. The effect of these in combination is slowing the pace of the mode down to its detriment, when the high speed is one of the big appeals of 6v6.
In casual, since you're not seeing high level Soldier/Demo movement tech with nearly the same frequency, the Reserve Shooter is much less oppressive. It ends up just being a sidegrade to stock with a faster switch speed and (if you're playing Soldier) a decent combo weapon to pair with your rocket launchers.
if holding last is so much of a problem why not just ban engie
Because stock Engie isn't insurmountable. An ubered or even pocketed Demo can definitely beat him with enough sticky spam.
Because the people in this comments section who never play or watch sixes would get even more mad
33:25 probably because of the Uber charge glitch. Healing a heavy with the fists of steel out charges Uber twice as fast as normal, and this effect persists even when they switch weapons unless you break your beam
And it basically means that you can uber build without sacrificing heals (which you can't do with a Basher Scout or Zatoichi Soldier/Demo)
I don't play 6's but the diamond back even in the environment of getting a stab causes you to die no matter what... it will still take some time and that can be enough time for the spy to pull out the 102 crit (possibly even another shot) for whoever's in LOS for your team to get an easy clean up because I would at least think spy is more of an opener for a full on push.
scout does around the same damage at the range at which you fight diamondback spies and he doesnt need any melee kills for that
I’d like to see the ban format reworked a bit with a smaller global list and giving each team a set number of bans. I think this would lead to a more fine-tuned ban system with players banning weapons that are currently frustrating them rather than weapons they haven’t even seen for a long time. There’d also be some strategy to the bans, if your team has the better mid, you’d wanna prioritize banning weapons that stall out the game and if your mid is worse, you’d probably want to ban weapons that allow the enemy team to snowball their advantage.
Pick/ban systems have been (and I believe still are) done for competitive TF2 tournaments on occasion instead of whitelists. The standard whitelist seems to be much more popular though.
Yeah some of these weapon banned I understand. Stuff like mad milk and jarate are already pretty strong in casual given in last point defense, you can spam the one of the liquids and make holding the point easier. Banning the Nash alone for annoying factor is understandable
Find it funny that the gru and eviction notice were nerf were nerf specifically because heavy can go quicker to go to mid. However it turns heavy going to mid is not that powerful. So that nerf was for nothing(if only vavle did weapon balance updates but at last)
TF2 team trying to turn casual into competitive was the most "Devs dont play their own game" move they made
I feel a major reason why there's such a disconnect between what's good in comp vs what's good in casual is that 6v6 and highlander GREATLY change the fundamental way TF2 is played. Restricting the number of players to 6 will of course lead to deaths becoming a way bigger deal than if you were just playing a 12v12 casual game. 6v6 doesn't have the spam to deal with a heavy or wrangled sentry so naturally the bans and meta is going to reflect that.
If you change the way the game functions, then some things that work completely fine may become busted in the context of dealing with only 6 players.
The issue people have with the Diamondback is that it is pretty much a strict upgrade over any other revolver, and is just a better Ambassador in most circumstances since you don't have to deal with damage fall off or have to headshot people. So with it legal, there would be almost no reason to choose any other revolver since the damage penalty can be negligible without crits, and is non-existent with them.
On another note, I am really sad Engi's unlocks are so horribly designed because the rest of his kit is pretty well put together, but then Valve dropped the ball with the secondaries and made them infuriating. I just want something cool to have as a secondary in the main slot, not "Press 2 to win" or "Screw you in particular" the weapon
You spoke about heavy to mid being a less-than-desireable gamestate, but do you think it would become normal to see if disciplinary action were unbanned? I feel like heavy's strengths would be under-utilized for a majority of the team fight at the cost of soaking up way too much damage. Do you think it could incentivize the other team to run sniper to mid, causing a rock paper scissors effect?
that's the main thing that people don't want but I'm not even sure heavy to mid would be good to begin with
10:52 No, it's AFTER your first shot, or even your first melee swing.
There was one small period of time between this iteration of the weapon and it's most broken state where crit a cola acted same as now(aka you only start getting mini crit weakness after your first shot) BUT you could use it with melee and melee won't activate the mini crit weakness, now even using melee instantly activated the mini crits weakness.
6v6 with actual comms is just a very different dynamic than 12v12 with random swearing and since you can't change the stats of weapons between modes, you have to change what weapons are allowed. That seems reasonable enough. You could argue this makes modes with more people better, but more people means comms are more cluttered and its harder to organize a group. I guess 6v6 is a doable amount of people to get together for a match, but not so few it completely negates all the normal dynamics of the game. I think it's a reasonable compromise, and bans do have to be part of that. I can see why some balance changes feel annoying to casual players, and I think that 6s is so different from casual that valve shouldn't make balance changes based on that, but also that bans are what allows 6s to exist without balance changes having to be made to accommodate it. Then again, I don't play much TF2 in the first place.
It's worth keeping in mind that banned weapons aren't necessarily banned because they're too strong (though they often are) but there are also banned weapons that make combat unenjoyable and lower the quality of gameplay. Disciplinary action, wrangler, rescue ranger, madmilk are examples of weapons that are combination of either too powerful and/or unfun to play against and are banned. Weapons like (imo) the cow mangler, base jumper, natasha, sydney sleeper are not very strong but are very unenjoyable to play against and not particularly interesting to play with either. I don't think pubbers realize that something like 95%+ of unlocks are permitted.
Yeah, but also, casual players don't understand under what conditions the different competitive formats work and how the average skill level is higher and the player count lower (so that weapons like the Kunai and Bazaar Bargain would be considerably weaker as the enemy team is not made of fodder but of competent players who would want to prey on your weaker starting point).
i don't think most pubbers realize weapon bans exist at all. And even those that do don't care at all anymore. The days of people caring about comp who don't play comp are long gone.
@@peterisawesomeplease no. you only have to look through the comments on recent videos to see otherwise
@@krollic These video get almost no views. Almost no one is seeing videos about comp. The people people commenting on these videos are not anywhere close to average pub players. Most pub players never give comp a thought.
Sure back in the era of the match making updates more people cared. I remember people fighting about this stuff on r/tf2. But these days? No. No one cares(on average).
Cow mangler is crazy overpowered, you can delay pushes by a significant amount by just spamming the charge shot at the door their combo is coming, if both soldiers do it you can buy so much time or do so much damage for basically no risk, crazy risk vs reward when holding a point on Uber disad. There’s also a crazy risk vs reward imbalance on certain mids, namely metalworks which make it stupid.
Personally i hate 6v6 and think its inferior to highlander.
Super glad for this video! (Actually surprised you took my suggestion if you were already planning for it) so I'll likely comment on some stuff you mention with regards to certain unlocks (As a Medic player mostly)
Guillotine/Cow Mangler: I'm super in favor of like you say, anything that just makes Medic not as much of an annoying or even potentially miserable class to play due to randomly getting one shot by essentially; a free spamming tool (I'd dislike Loch & Load for similar reasons, as well but at least that has ammo as it's semi downside).
Crit-a-Cola: Actually somehow never thought about giving a Scout who used the purple can uber (Considering if they are good with meatshots) to actually be rather deadly (especially in context of 6s where most Scouts can aim pretty good) So I might try that now in casual lol.
Short Circuit/Wrangler: Even in a casual play setting, I'd find both of engi's secondaries to be (not only a bit strong) but just makes Medic's job a lot more boring and painful with trying to make a push into last, Wrangler is for sure much worse in a smaller play experience like 6s. Most sacks for a Wrangled sentry I imagine would take out 2 of the attacking team's players (maybe a third if there's a Spy sap sac).
Quick-Fix: Ah yes my wheel house, Quick-Fix is for sure stronger on defensive holds (Saccing for a med is almost impossible and just allows for cheeky escapes even if you are caught out with help via your Soldier/Demoman). Along with that the play of uber add/dis which is about all you have on Medic to make it interesting just throws it out the window as you both just basically rub against each other and spam super fast build rate ubers that are just way less interesting then stock.
Vaccinator: Sorta similar to Quick-Fix (Easy as hell to hold last for a long time, I know some team in EU would have a temporary medic they swap to if their main med died and they used Vac till the real one respawned forget the name thou), I'd argue however arrow tanking via healing someone while they got a bubble on em is insanely strong (Even in casual since you out heal with arrow tanking compared to beaming em while still building uber & you can just chain bubbles), It might struggle a little if you use it offensively into last against stock uber, but even then keeping your Demoman or someone else valuable alive with the push via arrow tanking is absurd.
Machina/Sydney Sleeper: One shotting Medic via body shots that charges faster, just annoying in same way as Guillotine/Cow Mangler. Plus as far I know, there's not many 5CP/Koth maps where you actually hit the max range for Sniper being unable to hit you compared to something like most Payload maps.
Jarate: I'd say it's like Wangler in the sense that it's strong and even broken in both casual and 6s, the main appeal is for sure just allowing easy pushes for his team in trade off for Sniper's SMG by making him a weird semi support character that really shouldn't have it, plus I'd add in that you can just keep spamming it from spawn room from last to keep a constant debuff on the enemy team or even choking off an area with followup spam from your Soldier/Demoman (Same with Mad Milk).
I wonder how jarate and mad milk would be if they had the same charge meter as the gas passer
and maybe the gas passer could get their meter I am not sure about this one, on the one hand that would make it spammable on lasts and stuff but on the otherside that wouldnt be much more effective than spamming the scorch shot, maybe even less
The Sydney Sleeper on release in 2010 could actually random crit. Which is hilarious.
I think if the Reserve Shooter only had mini crits on targets you launched it’d be fine. I don’t know why it isn’t like that to begin with. I thought that was the entire point of it.
I don't understand many of the reasons behind these bans
Like flying guillitone, ask anyone and they'll say it's infinately more interesting and rewarding to hit someone with it than shooting the pistol, it's not even easier unless you expect someone to come out of the corner, then you say it would make things more "spammy" despite other classes being a lot more spammy by default and the fact guillitone has to recharge whereas pistol is just spammable even if not effective at range
" it's not even easier unless you expect someone to come out of the corner,"
There's your answer. It's long range harassment that does not need LoS from your side of things nor even necessarily risk to deal damage. Pistol is hitscan, so you need LoS to deal damage. You very much expect people to come around the corner on the opposite side of rollouts or during respawn waves, so you can, indeed, expect someone to come around the corner.
"despite other classes being a lot more spammy by default"
Rockets travel at 1,100 hammer units, grenades at 1,200-1500, and uncharged stickies at 900. The guillotine travels at 3,000 and is nowhere near as loud and colorful as rockets, grenades, and stickies, and is therefore far harder to dodge. Unlike rockets, it does not have fall-off, and unlike grenades, which also do not have fall-off, it travels a lot quicker with far less aggressive arc. Charged stickies come closer to their velocity, but also need charged to fire and then need to be detonated. It is also incentivized to use at long range since it gets 1.5 seconds removed off cooldown at long range.
"pistol is just spammable even if not effective at range"
There's your answer between those two: guillotine is spammable, effective at close and long range, and, in fact, gets more effective from exceptional range.
Overall, it's 90 damage that is hard to dodge, relatively easy to hit at long ranges, and is incentivized for longer ranges.
@@Yawyna124 so it's just a matter of not giving the op close quarter class a realtively consistant long range weapon
Balancing what is allowed in Competitive so that it won't become boring is so weird. With how TF2 weapons are, it feels to me like the perfect middle ground is so small that you can easily miss it.
I haven't seen much of Competitive tf2 myself anyway, so idk. I like TF2 for being wacky and that's why the only competitive I have ever seen was from Salty Phish's series, which is absolutely hilarious
-rep microsoft edge user
I will cope and say that its really good
@@rimanahbvee it's Chromium based, so it's essentially Chrome with Microsoft ads.
39:08 putting airblast on the same level as the razorback, the short circuit, or ESPECIALLY the danger shield, is exceedingly silly.
with the sniper equips you nullify a whole class's main damage source in exchange for pretty much nothing, and engi can replenish metal for the short circuit very easily, not counting how much better it is at neutralizing projectiles than airblast. you have to time airblast properly, predict when and where a projectile, and who fired it came from, and on anything but stock its very costly on ammo, uses the janky pressure mechanic for the dragons fury, or doesnt exist at all on the phlog (not a defense of the phlog but still). moreover, airblast isnt a be all end all no projectiles allowed mechanic, its a skill-based interaction. if the soldier or demo can juke the pyro into mistiming their airblast, the pyros probably dead. conversely, if the pyro both predicts the projectile and properly times their airblast, the pyro was the better player in that interaction and deserves to dodge the projectile, and maybe even hit the enemy if they were too predictable.
obviously you cant ban a stock weapon so airblast is here to stay but, if you do ban airblast, youre left with a world where by default the only pyro primary allowed is the phlogistinator. i dont wanna live in that world.
I think the Fists of Steel are banned because of a bug that abuses the lesser overheal on wearer to let uber build at full speed as long as the beam doesn't disconnect, you don't even have to keep the fists out, Heavy can play as normal and medic gets max uber build.
solution: ban the boston basher
So yall think the base jumper is op, if only medic had weapon that does more damage the farther away the enemy is, if only there was a class that could easily kill a stationary or slowly moving target in the air with a head shot, if only soldier had a rocket launcher that has faster projectiles and mini crits on airborne targets, if only competitive players could hit their shots, if only there was a class that can reflect projectiles. It’s such a shame none of these things exist … oh wait they do if only you used them it’s not like sniper has a (practically) infinite range hitscan sniper rifle with the highest burst damage in the game or a bow that can one shot all classes except for a overhealed heavy thats very easy to use and also has high sustained dps.
Is this bait? Most counterplay suggested either weakens your team or makes it so you must baby the medic or literally does less dps than a bomb
Fantastic video! It's rare to see someone who is both well spoken, as well as knowledgeable about the game - I'd love to see more long form discussion/podcast videos like this.
RGL 6's ban reasons
Looping taunts: 3rd person abuse
Pyrovision: Annoying. Massive in-game advantage by removing lots of clutter
Noisemaker: Annoying. Gives away player's position
Scout Elf Set: Gives away player's position
Bombinomicon: Obstructive. Gives away DR Spy's position
Soda Popper: Higher damage output than Stock Scattergun. Artificial splash damage immunity
Bonk: Get out of jail free card. Downsides are negligible and easily diluted
Cola: Free damage boost. Downsides are negligible if you camp with it
Milk: Life steal. Spammable with locker
PBPP: Higher damage output than Stock Pistol with life steal
Guillotine: Promotes being overly campy. 5.1 second recharge that can deal up to 90 damage
Cow Mangler: Stock Rocket Launcher with Infinite ammo
Disciplinary Action: Gets Heavy to mid too easily
Natascha: Completely neutralizes Scout, Soldier and Demo
Fists of Steel: Too good at tanking. Stalling on last
Rescue Ranger/Wrangler/Short Circuit: Stalling on last
Quick-Fix: Uber ramp up. Pocketing
Vaccinator: Overpowered. Can cap under Uber
Machina: Free damage boost
Sydney Sleeper: Used for spamming body shots
Jarate: Free damage boost. Spammable with locker
Diamondback: Snowball effect. Preys on bad teams
B.A.S.E Jumper: Inherent Air Strike/Stickybomb Launcher synergy. Honestly more of a skill issue than anything
That's what I at least know about for the bans. I'm sorry I keep editing this and making you re-apply hearts to this comment
Isn't provision banned because it removes some stuff from the map that makes it inherently unfair?
@@jadenknott Yes, that too
@@ynwl-e4bThat is what they are. They convinced Valve to arbitrarily nerf weapons because they were interrupted during their epic frag comp by someone having fun.
Except bans are there to make game _more_ fun, because, surprisingly, people playing the game want to enjoy playing the game.
@@AliceLoverdrive "If we remove player choice, then the game becomes more fun!"
I used to joke that Heavy was going to be blanket banned outright because "Heavy to mid" was such a Boogeyman. Glad to know that stigma is slowly going down
I think people don’t like heavy to mid because on certain maps (snakewater and sultry come to mind) heavy would just be a glorified anti-air gun, denying bombs and making soldiers even more miserable. Not super strong, but not fun either.
1:00:48 The metagame shifts? Does it now? What, in the geological scale?
Gru and whip weren't banned because heavy to mid was good, they were banned because heavy to mid forces both teams to do it, and that results in both teams just looking at each other across the point waiting for picks because you can't push into a heavy. It made the game extremely boring to play and even less fun to watch. The vast majority of the og bans from a decade or so ago, the mixup days I guess you could call it, were because they made the game a boring stalemate and slowed it to a crawl.
I do agree that allowing the gru but not the whip doesn't make sense because they both facilitate the same thing and were originally banned for the same exact reason.
Whip is everyone->mid booster, so it’s much more annoying making ground against the enemy
Yes please more hour long videos about competitive stuff!
Casual only player here, im going to try and give my opinion on every weapon for fun!
Soda Popper: Too powerful for killing medics. Reducing the already pretty brief timeframe for medics to die, to a single person? Pretty frustrating to face. Like, the only advice i can see being valid is "dont let the scout reach you" and if i have to explain why thats bad advice to you, i dont want to explain it to you.
Bonk! Atomic Punch: Wasnt sure on this one, but i totally agree with the sentry thing. Going spy in sixes, i imagine to be tough. SaltyPhish's recent Comp videos are the only thing i see of competitive, and biengspy even in say highlander is rough. Sure fewer players means less eyes to look for you, but it also means much less cover. Unlike highlander, there's less expectation for a spy to appear, but that doesnt mean its going to be easy. the optimal situation is stab and sap of course, in which case id be willing to bet 7/10 times you just win the game, but theres almost no chance that spy lives. Bonk! gives the scout too high a chance of surviving, with too little consequence.
Crit-a-Cola: didnt even think of the uber thing, that would be crazy busted! my were similar to my previous statement on the Soda Popper. too much medic killing potential, making the damage a medic has taken to one-shot lower, and i believe minicrits are only partially effected by fall-off or something? idk, but extra damage when a bullet connects, is still extra damage at any range, which is.... Something to be heavily considered i feel.
Flying Guillotine: yeah, the range and recharge on it are far too strong, especially for its crazy initial damage.
Mad Milk: Just is busted. It's so strong, id say easily Scout's strongest secondaries, and he has ONLY good secondaries. only the Winger and Bonk! are mid imo. Even in casual its terrifyingly strong sometimes. Sure, you may not hit many enemies, but if your pushing heavy lives from the one guy you milked, and gets another kill, that's two kills that happened only because of the milk. Even just using it to prevent afterburn can be valuable, to get your team into gaining crit heals sooner.
Pretty Boy's Pocket Pistol: It's busted. Its OP. It's literally better than stock for 9 shots. Maybe 6's scouts shoot their pistols a lot, but honestly that sounds crazy to me. If i want chip to prevent crit heals i use my scattergun to ensure i hit, maybe getting two or three people if im lucky. If i need damage and aren't out of bullets, there's only a specific range where your going to get much use from the pistol compared to your scattergun. And, while strange to consider, shooting 15% faster, means you reload 15% sooner, which slows you down, giving an opportunity for the other scout to shoot you (which is partially negated by your slightly improved health from the Pocket Pistol) but afterwords you get to start shooting while the other guy reloads most likely. And then, you have another nine shots to load into him! It's insanely good.
Okay, im sleepy now, so ill have to stop here, its late and my meds are kicking in, but its pretty late. So, i hope any who see this comment enjoy hearing my perspective!
One of the only honest casual player perspectives I've read. And yeah minicrits are not affected by damage fall-off so it turns the Scout into a low-medium range class into a medium-high range class which is hilariously overpowered
Vacc is God's gift to mankind for shutting down sniper.
And also shutting down any fun you could have when it’s used on defense
in short: we dislike spam.
my solution: fucking ban soldier and demo entirely (and lucksman btw)! demoknight is fine though.
I don't like to insta die out of nowhere, ban sniper and spy too
@@realdragonand crits as a mechanic in general
@@realdragonspy is fine, he actually requires skill outside of maybe diamondback spam and the dead ringer is god awful against experienced players.
@@arbalest327 So does every class
@@realdragon that's arguable for heavy, pyro and sniper lol, spam spam and spam is the name of the game. Though listing the others with pyro is a crime as airblast spam is absolutely goofy and shouldnt exist
People really underestimate natascha heavy, most heavies don't use it because they don't know how or they actually have compassion.
Nastasha's slowing down and 20% dmg resistance is pure evil, had a game with a vacc medic and a natascha heavy... those two would refuse to die nasty combo, and I've been under the care of vaccinator, dat thing is broken, it makes the heavy a true tank, but I rewards you with questionable positioning.
Now thankfully in casual most people are either goofin around or just suck, which thank god I don't want to encouter that combo in my life ever again e.e
It's not impossible mind you, but it's the ulitmate bullet soak in the game and it's not punished by snail movement unlike the brass beast. But I wouldn't want 3-people focusing down two enemies while he rest are still active in killing our team.
It sees a lot of play in Highlander for this reason, you get a lot of control over the game for very little downside in the grand scheme of things
@@Grapevin Yikes! wouldn't want to play agaisnt something like that, I mean it's not so bad if you focus down the heavy, but as long as it doesn't have a vac medic should be manageable. But yeah that gun is stupid and not fun if you are a mobile class.
I have a Hale's Own Natasha and I actually know what I'm doing. Ha ha.
@@ludwigiapilosa508 Yes and u going to hell (no your not but that's pretty evil hahahah)
Most heavies will only ever use the Natasha if the enemy's scout(s) or soldier(s) are overly annoying to deal with for one reason or another, that's it, that's all natasha exists for to your average heavy player. And both of those classes are meta in 6v6.
In 12v12 the tank thing barely matters, if you're not dying as that combo you're prolly gonna be curbstomping the enemy regardless, otherwise the larger team size allows the enemy to focus you down much more easily.
*clicks video* First thing I see:
Scout: "Hope you like the Winger"
Hot Take: TF2 was NEVER meant to be competitive. It was clearly meant to be a casual game, yet it was turned into one by the community anyways. Same for Left 4 Dead 2.
i think most of the playerbase has the same sentiment as you, me included. the majority hated mym when it dropped
i don't dislike THE competitive part (leagues, prem) of tf2 though, and competition is very much an inevitable part of games in general (third party hosted comp, leaderboards, speedruns)
Yep.
That's a cold take, competetive cucks just came in and ruined all the fun
People always say hot take and then say the most milquetoast generally agreed upon sentiment. The people who play comp tf2 are so many magnitudes less than people who play casual
There's comp L4D2?
the sydney sleeper used to have random crits, thats why it was that stat
Underrated channel and fantastic video.
On Sap and Sack
1. I think most players not being good at spy results in a lot more spy deaths than usual. There are definitely a lot of missed trades, don't underestimate revolver.
2. Since Gunslinger isn't banned, maybe engis could try just switching to gunslinger if it feels like you're sentry is gonna get destroyed (i'd have to see it in practice.)
3. If BONK's only ban is regarding a strat to break up last stalemates that is certainly a stretch IMO, but I only watch 6s so IDK this is just me armchair QBing
in the world of fighting games, something is considered ban worthy if its deemed overcentralising (good to the point where it has a stranglehold over the metagame) or degenerate (makes the game overall less fun and/or trivializes skill).
Overall I think Rgl's ban list is very well done but etf2l's bugs me a bit since I really dont think being annoying is equivalent to being degenerate
sodapopper(overcrentalising)
bonk(a bit of both)
crit o cola(overcentralising)
flying guillotine(overcentralising)
mad milk (overcentralising)
pbpp(overcentralising kinda) i could see it being allowed if people wanted it. its allowed in ugc
cow mangler(degenerate) its a weird case where it isnt that much better but all of its advantages lead to lameness. fun fact i played in the experimental cup and one shot a scout with the charge shot while they were building. Thats why you always stay above 160 while building kids.
base jumper(Both)
reserve shooter(both) Ironically it would make soldier worse
disciplinary action(overcentralising?) after the steak and gru unban ive never actually seen heavy to mid so it might be ok for an unban i dunno
natasha(degenerate) textbook example of an option that causes you to win my limiting your oponents options for counterplay.
fists of steal(overcentralising) a fully overhealed fos heavy has 630 effective health which is as the wrangler has shown us, a lot for a team to get through. Last points give holding teams great positional advantage but they will often have to throw it away in order to physically shot the cap in scramble situations. the fos allows teams to take better advantage of positioning since they have this giant wall on the point that cant be killed without diverting the potential damage of most of the enemy team.
rescue ranger(overcentralising)
short circuit(DEGERNERATE)
wrangler(overcentralising)
quickfix(both)
vaccinator(both)
machina(overcentralising)
sydney's sleeper(degenerate) sniper doesn't need an easy mode
jarate(overcentralising)
diamondback(might actually be ok) In the same experimental cup i played the diamondback was allowed and weirdly nobody used it. spy is usally just used to get one pick so most people would prefer the letranger. The diamondback would make it a bit harder for spy to get in but he would be able to do a bit more once he is in. Unlike in casual the crits arent exactly free since you cant get any before an encounter and you do have the legitimate downside of having to give up the letranger
crit cola shortstop is nasty in a no randomspread setting - still a little niche but it lets the boy up his range
You WILL use the SAME weapons every time you play.
"6s is notorious and often times chastised by casual players for the weapon bans and whitelist used." Good.
I haven't played any competitive tf2 since 2014 but judging from just how casual plays, I perfectly understand why no one wants full time heavy to be a thing. It's a non interactive class, unless you're a demo or sniper who can easily out damage their health. I also think heavy is the easiest class in the game to fully grasp
I think the main issue casuals have with Diamondback is the same issue casuals have with Bazaar Bargain. In a pub environment, they are just straight upgrades from stock. Your comment on spies immediately dying is just not really applicable to a pub environment. The spy with a half functioning brain cell is going to farm your freshly installed Sniper/Engie sitting on last and you are going to get pelted by what is functionally a slightly lower damage stock revolver with 100% crit rate. Same with Bazaar Bargain snipers getting two headshots on a random casual standing still and would you look at that it's just the stock sniper now, except that one random getting farmed a couple more times and you have an even more egregious body shot machine than the piss rifle.
These kinds of instances will never come up in 6s because the moment a spy or sniper is discovered, they will die on sight, on top of the fact that they have to work harder to get the kills against people who have more than 1 firing neuron. I will say that Diamondback still feels kinda dog to deal with in 6s because a Spy getting a stab off and then immediately swinging around to slam you in the face with a crit before they go down still feels shit, but I also understand that they are giving up some crazy utility like the L'etranger to even do this.
This is in stark contrast to stuff like Air Strike, which has very noticeable downsides over stock even at max stacks, and Eyelander, which has some noticeable downsides on top of requiring you to go into melee to even accrue those boosts.
Now don't get me wrong, the argument people make for nerfing them because "they reward you for playing the class" are dumb. Like, wtf do you want them to do? Is rewarding people for playing the class correctly not good game design? Would you rather reward people for playing the fucking class how they weren't meant to? And these are the same people who complained about Ambassador because "uh but spy now just sniper"
That's not the problem with Diamondback or Bazaar. The issue is that they are considerably better than stock and have no real downsides in a pub environment.
33:07 there is a bug you can do with the fos that lets you gain full uber at all times on a overhealed heavy
Majority cope
great video man. Wait a sec. ..OMG ITS YOUU!!! You're the guy from the tf2 coaching discord server HAHAHA hello!!!!!
Taunts prove that TF2 is P2W
Nah bro it’s Pay 2 Pimp
for the fists of steel, they allow to sentry jump, which is very niche, but fucking terrifying
This is why I prefer Highlander.
Based HLchad
You're one of the rare people I hear spell "L'étranger" correctly
I think more weapons would be viable if every class would be restricted to 1 slot, allowing variety in classes used and weapons. It is so weird that competitive developed into 2 soldiers and 2 scouts and now every ban has to cater to maintaining this convention
Why *did* they allow doubling up on classes?
@@XdefLovesMinecraft I have no idea. It seems that the decision to allow more than one class actually restricted to variety of play
Because its what players enjoy.
@@Peacock__ Which players and when it was decided?
@@wonderplaceholder the people who play 6s. There's other formats.
Scout on Bonk under a turret and spy+soldier combination is crazy effective
Also, I recognised that most of sniper players are bots with autoaim AND a bad spy recognition, they don't shoot a spy under disguise, when he starts sapping.
P.s. Used that today several times and it helped to win in casual
May I ask about other game modes like koth, payload race, payload? With different game modes comes with different dynamics and play styles like pyro can be more viable in koth rather than 5cp as an example and what about changing the winning requirements to help make some weapons or classes more viable. ( know it’s a big stretch but it’s a food for thought more than anything)
This is just a guess but playing payload in 6’s would mean that the pushing team is always gonna be down a player due to the cart needing to be pushed, and being down a player in 6s is a lot more debilitating than highlander/pubs. It’s also definitely boring to be the cart bitch for the entire round.
All of the other gamemodes had been experimented with earlier on in the game, but slowly phased out as people realized their flaws.
koth remains a staple, and because of its symmetrical/mirrored nature it encourages a lot of dynamics shifts and back and forth gameplay. The most popular koth map is Product (viaduct),
Payload was tried, but it ultimately slows the pace of the game down to the speed of the payload. It always forces one person to stay on cart, so attacking makes things difficult.
PLR just creates the same issues. Along with the lack of maps for the gamemode, now you have to have at least TWO people standing. So now it's closer to a 5v5 or 4v4, which kind of defeats fhe purpose of a more deathmatch-specialized gamemode.
You could make a follow up discussing different regions bans and/or highlander bans too!
The same people who run etf2l and ban these weapons are open/low in 6's and prem in highlander, they have no right to judge what should and shouldn't be banned
"The base jumper is so broken" is something I never would have expected to hear, and yet after a year and a half of comp I completely understand why and that brings me SO MUCH PAIN
@@ammi5311 itss op becuse it makes you literally near impossible to shoot out of the air if you're actually good at the game and not using it for its intended purpose of funny air strike kills, stoppin fall damage, and crutched market gardens. Its literally awful to play agaainst for similar reasons OW pre-rework pharah was agony to play against. Even very talented direct hit users often cant hardly hit a good base jumper. Its fundimentally unfair. It has nothin to do with "It denials your circle jurking montage", its that it feels horrible to play against and generally isnt something people like using neither.
@@ammi5311i think the comp scene is right on this one, its not healthy for the game to force players to pick an entirely different class they might not even be good at because 1 guy on the enemy team wanted to use 1 of several other more balanced and interesting secondaries. The whole point of having multiple classes is to let players with different skills contribute to games. Why should someone who's not good at hitscan be forced to permanently swap off because 1 guy made their whole class unviable?
@@lt2660 Well you see in, the very experimental Valve format of "12s" you just get out of the way while your two heavies play anti-air. Then you use the remaining 99% of your current life to play the game as you would normally.
I wonder if in the world where engi is 6s meta, spy has his toolkit crippled because he can just turn off engi. Makes him "unviable" after all.
@@slyseal2091 I only play 12v12 casual and spy sucks there too lol
@@lt2660 And why is that? Please, don't reduce it to shotgun > revolver, elaborate
What do you do with all the hours you save saying ad instead of advantage
Much quicker to say ad in a competitive match where things are very fast paced and probably just sticks in the muscle memory to call it that
6s players hate anything that changes the meta. something doesnt have to be op for it to be banned, it just has to change the "script"
Usually these weapons degenerate the game into a game of rock-paper-scissors. Oh, you used a weapon to get heavy to mid? Now soldiers can't bomb, and now we counter the Heavy with a sniper.
Oh, now they have a sniper? Now we'll run the sniper to counter the other sniper.
It becomes a lot closer to what happened with OW and the strange balalancing designs. "The script" has changed a lot, despite what many have believed because people have experimented with items and done small competitions like no-restrictions, which either means the weapon is unbanned, or it is further cemented as being broken.
53:07 Ok so back in the day when the Mann-Conomy Update released, because the old Sydney Sleeper could not headshot AT ALL, it had random crits for whatever reason.
The thing about the Diamondback in casual has a lot to do with the lower skill floor. A Spy who gets a stab will often still die, but not die quickly enough for him to be unable to belt out his 102 damage crits because he won't be instantly called out, focused and gunned down by the entire team. Also with the lower skill floor and greater amount of players, a Spy could theoretically just farm criticals off bad players and buildings and be able to freely cloak and walk around disguised sniping players off with crits (can't tell a Spy has crits while he's disguised). And it's just unfun to be punished for bad teammates who enable some guy to snowball off them.
I feel it's just a strangely designed weapon in general. Not even taking into account of the fact that it's extra reward for Spy's already instant kills.
Then there's the synergy the Diamondback has with the Kunai, which opens up a whole other can of worms in a low skill, high player-count setting.
You gave the arguments for a couple of weapons that they are banned because if they weren't, no one would use anything else or would make an already powerful class more powerful. But a lot of classes ( Medic in particular) have options that dominate their peers so much that you are pretty much throwing if any other item was picked.
In this video I learned that pyro, my main class, has no banned item. Like, seriously? Not even the scorch shot? The detonator? Thermal thruster? "Oh pyro is a bad class" really? That's the argument comp have? The team has 3 projectiles classes and a medic. How can pyro be bad against that composition? Not that I care, like 95% of the people that are actually playing TF2, I don't care about 6s. I can't even believe I sit through a 1 hour long video about banned items in 6s. Maybe it's the lack of updates o.o
small edit: ok so I think most people didn't understand my comment, and I am to blame for it. the major point of this comment is to say that I'm surprised that pyro has literally no banned items, not even the ones that are unfun to play against like the scorch shot. I don't see the argument of pyro being a bad class for 6's as an excuse to not ban some of its items.
pyro doesnt have good mobility or damage, and entirely relies on reflects. he cant really do anything against scout, and its better to just have another soldier instead of having a guy that sometimes reflects rockets
If Pyro was good, people would be playing Pyro more often. Pyro absolutely sucks against the two 185 HP Scouts that are almost always present on the enemy team. Pyro just gets shredded by unreflectable Scattergun shots from outside of flamethrower range, and if the enemy Soldiers refuse to send rockets to the Pyro, Pyro lacks ranged options. It gets even worse if one of the Soldiers switches to a shotgun in response to your full-time Pyro shenanigans. Pyro's main upside is the ability to deny uber with airblast.
@@SolarLight I got a response from demoknight tf2 himself. that's it, I just completed life. nothing will peak this.
@@SolarLight In casual or 6s? Because I do just fine with pyro in casual.
@@tttttttttttttttp12Obviously he talks about 6s Pyro is completly different beast depending on gamemode.
I think the quick fix is the perfect example to why its impossible for 12 v 12 casual and 6v6 competitive to work under the same weapon stats. Fundamentally there is less damage going around in 6v6 vs 12 v 12 so a weapon like the quick fix whos uber relies on out healing most but not all damage cannot work in both because one has half the damage going around you HAVE to change the stats for it to continue working as intended.
These comments are giving me brain damage. How is such a large proportion of the tf2 playerbase so dense? Or is it just those that comment?
A lot of the TF2 playerbase nowadays is just kids with sub 200 hours. Since they're kids and don't know any better they think they know it all and can post the most absurd bs and get all the other kids to upvote their comments. Remember that seeming confident in your shitty unsubstantiated opinion is more convincing to others who don't know something than someone accurately and succinctly laying out reasoning.
That and the other people writing these comments are pubbers with thousands of hours who just want to stomp little timmies in pubs over and over. They think that all these banned weapons are completely balanced and that TF2 functions better as a 12v12 pub because they've never played coordinated games. We've seen that 12v12 coordinated games completely vanilla is an absolute stalemate shitshow, but these people don't realize that. It works versus little timmy with 20 hours who loves playing spy, so that means it applies to competitive setting as well.
On a last note these people keep parroting the same opinion "TF2 wasn't meant to be competitive" when the game originates from one of the most competitive arena shooters of all time, and copies or is inspired by many of its mechanics (Quake). Although its true that the game never released as a competitive game, many other games with competitive scenes (especially grassroots ones) were not released and marketed as a competitive game but evolved that scene when people realized its potential. TF2 has some of the highest competitive potential of any shooter ever released but these pubstompers are just throwing it under the rug with some backwards logic.
TL;DR: kids, salty pubstompers, parroting