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
@@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
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.
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.
@@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?
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
Balancing weapons between 6s and Casual is a fool's errand cause the modes are different to the point of being different games. 6s is class-restricted coordinated 6v6 and Casual's 12v12 class-unlimited with randoms, so it's interesting that any unlocks carry between the 2 modes at all given just how different they are. Honestly many of the bans discussed in the video are reasonable for the game that 6s is. The problem is that Casual players assume that statements on weapons are in the context of their gamemode since it's the most popular TF2 has a unique problem with its competitive and casual modes being different games. Other games play similarly with their respective casual and competitive options, thus the games have consistent and approachable identities. I think the biggest factor that feeds vitriol towards competitive TF2 from casual players is that, because competitive TF2 is a different game from Casual clusterfuck TF2, calling 6s "competitive TF2" implies that it's the definitive version of the game and that it's more important than the version a majority of players experience. The game's marketing with equal focus on all 9 mercs simply never advertised that the "best" way to play the game is with 1 med, 1 demo, 2 soldiers, and 2 scouts, specifically on a handful of 5cp and koth maps. Competitive games especially thrive on simplicity. CS:GO is good guys shoot bad guys. It's simple and marketable for your average person that doesn't care about games but wants to watch something or follow the personality of a specific competitive player. TF2 traded its simplicity in favor of character and fun, which are both factors that are unattractive for the giant formless audiences that competitive games require to prosper Another reason for the massive player gap between comp and Casual is that TF2 was advertised as the "everyman's FPS", which isn't what 6s is. TF2 has classes for sniping, Quake movement shooting ( scout, soldier, demo ), building management, healing, stealth, and getting easy frags ( pyro and heavy ). Whatever mood of FPS you feel like playing, TF2 has an option. 6s is very specifically optimized to make the Quake aspects of TF2 as enjoyable --> to play
@@lancergt1000 Looks more convenient to set up games for since it needs 4 less players overall, but I reread this essay I wrote and my thoughts on comp TF2 are the same for now. I imagine that the 2 classes that leave in 4s are the flanking soldier and scout. That probably makes the mode feel more focused, but the image of all 3 teammates being glued to their med I find even less interesting to watch than my already low interest in 6s
One thing that baffles me: if 6s are a quake team deathmatch simulation, what's up with required medic? This unspoken hypocrisy annoys me because medic is not a combat class so it would be only logical if 6s didn't rely on medics too and ban him outright or maybe prefer him as a "off-class" pick if they want to.
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.
@@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
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 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.
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.
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 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
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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 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
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.
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
04:02 I wouldn’t say “as a community”, only the prem players have any say in what’s getting banned and they only consist of a small number of people. Most players I know are scratching their heads at a lot of bans ETF2L does, especially because they barely give reasoning for bans and experimental cups they organise only ban and remove things, not unban things like in RGL.
Fists of steel are banned for being mechanically broken. I have no clue why they're legal in hl, there are multiple bugs associated with the weapon that are very easy to activate accidentally. Edit: Short Circuit is also considered bannable because it negates the viability of multiple strategies simply by existing.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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
11:53, even though there's multiple bans on weapons. Suuuuuure. 26:00 Got changed and still banned so the change was pointless. Thanks comp. 26:42 did the comp players forget Soldier has fall off on his rockets? He can't do much if he's too far in the sky. 30:20 the charged shot is slower than a normal rocket though? 33:10 Everyone complains about the "effective health" the fists of steel provide to heavy, what they tend to forget is he's the slowest class and once he puts them away that effective health disappears immediately. The only thing that's broken right now is you being able to build uber more than you should. Reference to both Zesty's heavy tier list video and Big Joey's video about it. 39:07 It doesn't "negate" anyone with a projectile like the short circuit does, plus it has a airblast cooldown so you can't spam it AND you have to time it. If you don't you still take the damage. It's a potential soft counter. Best thing they could do to nerf the Diamonback is to not let spy shoot it while disguised, that way you can see the crits coming like the Frontier Justice. Maybe cut it's magazine down to 3 too. There now casual can't complain.
Casual players will complain until Valve takes tf2's servers offline. Nothing's ever enough and nothing will ever be enough. The same people that will fume when someone 'tryhards' when they're playing friendly heavy for 800 hours in a row, or generally be upset when someone is better than them
11:53 I think what he was trying to say here is that if there's an unlock weapon that completely invalidates all other options and on top of that badly breaks the balance of the game, or is otherwise especially unfun to play against, unbanning it doesn't do anything except make the game worse. It won't do anything except subtract 1 from the ban list which already so few people care about. 6s could have 0 banned weapons and be 100x less fun to play because of it and still the people that complain about weapon bans won't play 6s, we've seen that in the past so catering to these people is a lost cause in the first place. 26:00 you're under the impression Valve had any idea what they were doing when changing this weapon. They didn't. 26:42 if you ever play against actual good players in a coordinated setting you would know that people only skybox with it to hide somewhere and drop down to nuke a chokepoint with 0 counterplay. It is otherwise used to get free high ground and unpredictable air movement on players (auto advantage), no skyboxing necessary. It also completely invalidates map design as ledges/sightlines etc are invalidated due to being able to float anywhere. 30:20 if you have ever played against actual good players in a coordinated setting you would know people can coordinate preshots when the enemy team pushes choke points. When the cow mangler was previously unbanned, teams would perma use it and coordinate timed charge shots to oneshot people peeking or trying to push chokes with no counterplay from across the map. Normally the soldier has to get close to do damage (as you so aptly described only a moment ago) whereas this weapon completely negates that by doing minicrit damage. There are actually many more factors and little things about this weapon which we all know about because it was unbanned for an extended period of time. Same goes with items like the Vaccinator and quickfix. 33:10 Heavy can stall super hard using the fists of steel. He's often used in coordinated teams to stall for respawns or waste an enemy uber. Fists of steel have no counterplay and yeah the heavy can't do damage, but if the enemy team is ubered its not like he can do damage anyways. Just stall, bodyblock or block the point until the uber runs out and then mow people down. Though ultimately I think the uber building bug is probably the main reason its banned in RGL. 39:07 Yes thats why airblast is not banned, idk what point he was trying to make here except that the short circuit is a terribly designed item. Just use a pyro.
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.
33:00 The only reason I can come up with for why the FoS might be banned is because you can effectively become a 420 HP wall between your team's sentry and the enemy. I dont play 6's so I dont know how viable such a strat would be in that format, but I do it all the time on Borneo lol.
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
the vaccinator is one of the most unfun weapons to fight against and for me it would be banned on casual too, really thinking about starting to playing comp just to not encounter medics using this thing 😭
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.
It's interesting that spammy weapons are banned except Scorch Shot (sometimes) considering it's the most infamous and hated spammy weapon in casual. And literal direct upgrade weapon such as 3rd degree isn't banned but Cow Mangler in 6s due to spam issues. Also Disciplinary Action (and several heavy's movement boosts weapon) is banned due to making heavy viable in or right outside middle point make the game stally or impossible to push. So instead playing less stally gamemode like KOTH or asymmetrical gamemodes where literally make stalemate win condition for RED team and breaking it is how to get to the win condition for BLU team (with stopwatch mode for each team have same chance to win) and where off-classes is more viable than only defending last point, breaking stalemates or other small niches. Kinda weird how highlander's map pools are that but 6's is fully 5CP only (except Valve's 6's where that 1 unbearable CTF map exist).
The Third Degree isn't banned because it has no use. In 6s, Pyro is an off-class and melee is the least important part of his kit. It might be a "direct upgrade" over stock, but whether an item has red or blue text under it says very little about its role in the game. The Powerjack is much stronger in practice and it isn't banned either.
24:25 You know what I think? This isn't an issue with Heavy's usefulness. This is purely an ego issue for Demos and Soldiers, because they won't be able to just rocket jump where ever they want with a chain gunner killing their air momentum.
27:52 but while in the air they are susceptible to stickies since base jumper is very slow and in the time the sticky is close the arm time is done and you can spam him and the best way for a soldier to counter this is cutting his parachute or slowly descend and a scout can pepper him with his pistol its way more effective bombing and the only real issue is soldier getting into a weird spots i dont see base jumper issue its too situational and in the situations where it holds value it only takes demoman to switch to loch n load or quickiebomb launcher and spam him out you will outdamage him by the time the soldier rocket gets to you you already hit him with at least 2 stickies.
Dude, I play Smash under competitive rulesets and find it to be just as, if not more fun to play than items-on, all-maps-allowed Smash. Don't knock the competitive ruleset until you try it. Get a friend group together and just play casually under competitive rulesets, while still encouraging coordination (also shuffle teams constantly because you can do that), and see how it is.
Im not exactly the most competitive player but Im a heavy main and making heavy get to mid faster doesnt seem like that big of a deal? Heavy's main weakness is his speed but his strengths have quite a few caveats to them. His DPS is high but he lacks burst and most classes can spam him around a corner before he has a chance to deal damage to them, his health is high but not *that* high and every class can kill him without even reloading their primary assuming they dont have falloff and a medic isnt present, and he relies on either a break in combat to heal up or a medic pocket to keep that health high, and his weird ramp-up mechanic makes it so him being faster also lowers his damage. That and if he for some reason had someone "pocketing" with a whip the soldier with said whip can't shoot rockets while speeding up the heavy and is kind of stuck to the heavy.
I think it's more to do with the fact that the whip gives Heavy the biggest speed boost out of any class, and the whip stacks with the GRU - potentially letting Heavy arrive to the starting midfight faster than a Scout, which is overkill and does not make the game better. Heavy is also extremely unpopular among TF2 players and is also not very enjoyable to fight due to how slow and linear he is. If Valve wanted to make Heavy viable on offense, they should have given him a new primary weapon that is actually fun to use and fight against, rather than giving him a giga-speed-buff as a band-aid. I like to draw a comparison to Engi and his mini sentry. They didn't just speed up construction speed, they added new downsides to make mini sentries less good defensively as a compromise.
@@SolarLight I'm surprised people find Heavy unfun to fight (personally he's my favorite to fight outside of demoknight 1v1s) but if that's the general consensus among more competitive players than I can see why being faster than scout could be problematic Though wouldn't the soldier being practically tethered to the Heavy and the heavy's health loss by the time they get to mid make it not the most viable strategy?
@@mrsirdba One of the Soldiers (the "pocket") typically does an Escape Plan rollout anyway, waits for crit heals to build up so that his Medic can buff him up to 300. You can do the same thing by whipping a Heavy, so you don't really lose anything by doing it.
What's the point of playing TF2 when you ban the most wacky weapons and remove half the team? It's not the same game anymore lmao. I'm not surprised no one really cares about competitive TF2.
A whole hour of this? Why? You could summarize this in 20 minutes. And asking for 20 minutes isn't zoomer brain tiktokker mindset, because if it were, i'd be asking for 1 or 2 minutes lol
In my opinion, Sometimes you just need that extra detail and examples to get the point across, if I just say “base jumper is banned because people don’t like it and it’s hard to fight against.” you’ll PROBABLY take it the wrong way and say “they didn’t like it cause it wasn’t fun to fight against.” when in actuality it’s harder to fight against because gaining high ground over someone is always the best strategy of winning especially when it comes to a class with splash damage making it hard for anyone that is slow and has no movement tech to get away easily.
@@bethnicz Can't they accept some weapons have better situational advantage over stock though? You could use a weapon that counters that and viceversa. The real problem would be when a weapon has no real counter like Engineer's Wrangler and probably a really good Medic's Vaccinator with great micro management.
@@damsen978 I’ve actually had debates like these with firesidecasts (I work with them as their editor) and I am with you in terms of some weapons being better than stock, but the main reason why they use stock (mostly scouts) is consistency. All the weapons besides stock have an upside and a downside to it (unless it’s too much of an upside, negating the downside) while the stock weapons.. don’t, they just do consistent damage and reload to do more consistent damage, let’s look at it in a new players perspective, when they join up a game and they get killed by a pretty boys pocket pistol or a loch n load, chances are they are gonna say “this game is pay to win” but everyone in the community will always say “it’s not because every stock (besides a few) are the best in the game in terms of consistency, damage, and having no downsides to it besides your own skill, so it’s the question of why trade off a stock for a weapon that is just good in situations? (Unless they are running base jumper full time all the time and you know it, but you get the point) I WILL SAY ONE THING THO, you can still be the best with different weapons besides stock and the scene has seen it time and time again by many players like antoni with his beggars bazooka, yosh with his baby face blaster, wild rumpus himself being the guy who started the loch n load trend, etc. there is nothing stopping you from wanting to play a weapon that is accepted and you can push it to its full potential. LAST THING the bans I agree can be a bit silly and there are people in the league who wants to unban most items to being just the overpowering stuff like for example the steak sandvich is a weapon that veteran 6s players are constantly scared of because you bring heavy to mid and slows the game down etc. but it’s not hard to beat a heavy if you centralize on him or force him to not even come out and fight cause his mid to long is very bad in my eyes, literally one team tried it when it got unbanned and it failed miserably on mid and never tried it again.
TLDR: stock is consistent and that’s why comp players use it instead of other weapons to win, play what weapon you want to be the best and push the weapons limits like many others had done, and steak sandvich got unbanned and only one team used it to get heavy to mid and lost so hard.
The worst restriction in competitive TF2 is that it's 6v6 to be honest.. Yes Highlander exists but its a shame it's not as popular as the 6v6 game mode, which TF2 was just not functioned to run on. 18 player lobbies would make metas not really work as well. TF2 relies on chaos in its balancing. I also find it funny that there are a bunch of wall clips and exploits being done in videos, and somehow those are not banned, but pyrovision is (which technically makes all cosmetics NOT allowed, so there are some typos here and there). And let's not mention that banning weapons doesn't DISTILL metas, it just shifts them, everyone running around with base kit is less engaging and fun to watch than funny loadouts being used, also banning movement options because of "engagement times" makes the game sound like a tactical shooter which it really isn't, no hero shooters have ever banned characters in the past with different movement kits, so it just really sounds like an excuse to withhold the meta from evolving.
Organizing practice/scrims and tournaments is a big reason why 6v6 is more popular. Highlander teams need 9 players and there has to be a player for each class (that you will play for the entirety of a match.) For 6v6 you only need... 6 players that are much more flexible and have the opportunity to switch up their class mid-match. It's not really a problem if your 6s team doesn't have anyone good at Heavy or Spy, but it is a problem in Highlander. Logistically, 6v6 is way more open. Also, most "funny loadouts" are not banned in 6s. You can play Trolldier in 6s. You can play Demoknight in 6s. You can play Phlog Pyro in 6s. It's actually happened even at very high levels. But it's not common because these strategies aren't actually effective most of the time.
I know that a decent amount of people like 6s but I personally don’t like how it only focuses on only a few of the classes. It’s not really a showcase for the game itself, if most of the characters aren’t viable. If there were many characters like in MVC2, Pokemon, or Smash Bros, I wouldn’t mind, but TF2 only has 9 characters. I don’t really care if Soldiers are doing crazy Rocket jumps, I get bored of only seeing Scouts, Soliders, and Demos.
![[TF2] I played Engineer in 6s](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/X4J8uHLvVFo/mqdefault.jpg)
![[TF2] I played Engineer in 6s](/img/tr.png)
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
"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
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.
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
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.
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
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
I would have never thought that I'd look forward to someone talk about competitive tf2 for an hour but here we are
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.
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.
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
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.
The Pretty Boy's healing is pretty negligible, its only really good for mitigating afterburn.
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.
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
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
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
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
"We have banned all classes from comp on account of them being overpowered."
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
You WILL use the SAME weapons every time you play.
-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.
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 expected to hear the VSauce theme when you started to thoroughly explain why.
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
Balancing weapons between 6s and Casual is a fool's errand cause the modes are different to the point of being different games. 6s is class-restricted coordinated 6v6 and Casual's 12v12 class-unlimited with randoms, so it's interesting that any unlocks carry between the 2 modes at all given just how different they are. Honestly many of the bans discussed in the video are reasonable for the game that 6s is. The problem is that Casual players assume that statements on weapons are in the context of their gamemode since it's the most popular
TF2 has a unique problem with its competitive and casual modes being different games. Other games play similarly with their respective casual and competitive options, thus the games have consistent and approachable identities. I think the biggest factor that feeds vitriol towards competitive TF2 from casual players is that, because competitive TF2 is a different game from Casual clusterfuck TF2, calling 6s "competitive TF2" implies that it's the definitive version of the game and that it's more important than the version a majority of players experience. The game's marketing with equal focus on all 9 mercs simply never advertised that the "best" way to play the game is with 1 med, 1 demo, 2 soldiers, and 2 scouts, specifically on a handful of 5cp and koth maps. Competitive games especially thrive on simplicity. CS:GO is good guys shoot bad guys. It's simple and marketable for your average person that doesn't care about games but wants to watch something or follow the personality of a specific competitive player. TF2 traded its simplicity in favor of character and fun, which are both factors that are unattractive for the giant formless audiences that competitive games require to prosper
Another reason for the massive player gap between comp and Casual is that TF2 was advertised as the "everyman's FPS", which isn't what 6s is. TF2 has classes for sniping, Quake movement shooting ( scout, soldier, demo ), building management, healing, stealth, and getting easy frags ( pyro and heavy ). Whatever mood of FPS you feel like playing, TF2 has an option. 6s is very specifically optimized to make the Quake aspects of TF2 as enjoyable --> to play
building an esports league on top of the most casual FPS of all time, surely nothing will go wrong
Tho what do you think of 4s? I heard that its meta is somehow more diverse than 6s
@@lancergt1000 Looks more convenient to set up games for since it needs 4 less players overall, but I reread this essay I wrote and my thoughts on comp TF2 are the same for now. I imagine that the 2 classes that leave in 4s are the flanking soldier and scout. That probably makes the mode feel more focused, but the image of all 3 teammates being glued to their med I find even less interesting to watch than my already low interest in 6s
One thing that baffles me: if 6s are a quake team deathmatch simulation, what's up with required medic? This unspoken hypocrisy annoys me because medic is not a combat class so it would be only logical if 6s didn't rely on medics too and ban him outright or maybe prefer him as a "off-class" pick if they want to.
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.
Vacc is God's gift to mankind for shutting down sniper.
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
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.
Insane how you're pumping *actually* interesting content every day, keep it up!
"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
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.
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 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
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
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
1:00:48 The metagame shifts? Does it now? What, in the geological scale?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"6s is notorious and often times chastised by casual players for the weapon bans and whitelist used." Good.
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.
Taunts prove that TF2 is P2W
Nah bro it’s Pay 2 Pimp
the sydney sleeper used to have random crits, thats why it was that stat
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
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
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 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.
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.
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
04:02 I wouldn’t say “as a community”, only the prem players have any say in what’s getting banned and they only consist of a small number of people. Most players I know are scratching their heads at a lot of bans ETF2L does, especially because they barely give reasoning for bans and experimental cups they organise only ban and remove things, not unban things like in RGL.
Fists of steel are banned for being mechanically broken. I have no clue why they're legal in hl, there are multiple bugs associated with the weapon that are very easy to activate accidentally.
Edit: Short Circuit is also considered bannable because it negates the viability of multiple strategies simply by existing.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
crit cola shortstop is nasty in a no randomspread setting - still a little niche but it lets the boy up his range
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 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
Majority cope
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
Underrated channel and fantastic video.
11:53, even though there's multiple bans on weapons. Suuuuuure.
26:00 Got changed and still banned so the change was pointless. Thanks comp.
26:42 did the comp players forget Soldier has fall off on his rockets? He can't do much if he's too far in the sky.
30:20 the charged shot is slower than a normal rocket though?
33:10 Everyone complains about the "effective health" the fists of steel provide to heavy, what they tend to forget is he's the slowest class and once he puts them away that effective health disappears immediately. The only thing that's broken right now is you being able to build uber more than you should. Reference to both Zesty's heavy tier list video and Big Joey's video about it.
39:07 It doesn't "negate" anyone with a projectile like the short circuit does, plus it has a airblast cooldown so you can't spam it AND you have to time it. If you don't you still take the damage. It's a potential soft counter.
Best thing they could do to nerf the Diamonback is to not let spy shoot it while disguised, that way you can see the crits coming like the Frontier Justice. Maybe cut it's magazine down to 3 too. There now casual can't complain.
Casual players will complain until Valve takes tf2's servers offline. Nothing's ever enough and nothing will ever be enough. The same people that will fume when someone 'tryhards' when they're playing friendly heavy for 800 hours in a row, or generally be upset when someone is better than them
11:53 I think what he was trying to say here is that if there's an unlock weapon that completely invalidates all other options and on top of that badly breaks the balance of the game, or is otherwise especially unfun to play against, unbanning it doesn't do anything except make the game worse. It won't do anything except subtract 1 from the ban list which already so few people care about. 6s could have 0 banned weapons and be 100x less fun to play because of it and still the people that complain about weapon bans won't play 6s, we've seen that in the past so catering to these people is a lost cause in the first place.
26:00 you're under the impression Valve had any idea what they were doing when changing this weapon. They didn't.
26:42 if you ever play against actual good players in a coordinated setting you would know that people only skybox with it to hide somewhere and drop down to nuke a chokepoint with 0 counterplay. It is otherwise used to get free high ground and unpredictable air movement on players (auto advantage), no skyboxing necessary. It also completely invalidates map design as ledges/sightlines etc are invalidated due to being able to float anywhere.
30:20 if you have ever played against actual good players in a coordinated setting you would know people can coordinate preshots when the enemy team pushes choke points. When the cow mangler was previously unbanned, teams would perma use it and coordinate timed charge shots to oneshot people peeking or trying to push chokes with no counterplay from across the map. Normally the soldier has to get close to do damage (as you so aptly described only a moment ago) whereas this weapon completely negates that by doing minicrit damage. There are actually many more factors and little things about this weapon which we all know about because it was unbanned for an extended period of time. Same goes with items like the Vaccinator and quickfix.
33:10 Heavy can stall super hard using the fists of steel. He's often used in coordinated teams to stall for respawns or waste an enemy uber. Fists of steel have no counterplay and yeah the heavy can't do damage, but if the enemy team is ubered its not like he can do damage anyways. Just stall, bodyblock or block the point until the uber runs out and then mow people down. Though ultimately I think the uber building bug is probably the main reason its banned in RGL.
39:07 Yes thats why airblast is not banned, idk what point he was trying to make here except that the short circuit is a terribly designed item. Just use a pyro.
*clicks video* First thing I see:
Scout: "Hope you like the Winger"
I bet plenty of casual players wouldn't mind Natascha being banned there too
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.
33:00 The only reason I can come up with for why the FoS might be banned is because you can effectively become a 420 HP wall between your team's sentry and the enemy. I dont play 6's so I dont know how viable such a strat would be in that format, but I do it all the time on Borneo lol.
The thing is you don’t really use the soda popper for the boost
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
the vaccinator is one of the most unfun weapons to fight against and for me it would be banned on casual too, really thinking about starting to playing comp just to not encounter medics using this thing 😭
wild rumpus you are a saint - i hope you have your "New Comment" emails turned off because getting all this in my inbox would give me an aneurysm
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.
It's interesting that spammy weapons are banned except Scorch Shot (sometimes) considering it's the most infamous and hated spammy weapon in casual. And literal direct upgrade weapon such as 3rd degree isn't banned but Cow Mangler in 6s due to spam issues. Also Disciplinary Action (and several heavy's movement boosts weapon) is banned due to making heavy viable in or right outside middle point make the game stally or impossible to push. So instead playing less stally gamemode like KOTH or asymmetrical gamemodes where literally make stalemate win condition for RED team and breaking it is how to get to the win condition for BLU team (with stopwatch mode for each team have same chance to win) and where off-classes is more viable than only defending last point, breaking stalemates or other small niches. Kinda weird how highlander's map pools are that but 6's is fully 5CP only (except Valve's 6's where that 1 unbearable CTF map exist).
The Third Degree isn't banned because it has no use. In 6s, Pyro is an off-class and melee is the least important part of his kit. It might be a "direct upgrade" over stock, but whether an item has red or blue text under it says very little about its role in the game. The Powerjack is much stronger in practice and it isn't banned either.
24:25 You know what I think?
This isn't an issue with Heavy's usefulness. This is purely an ego issue for Demos and Soldiers, because they won't be able to just rocket jump where ever they want with a chain gunner killing their air momentum.
tf2 competetive
more like soytetetive
for the fists of steel, they allow to sentry jump, which is very niche, but fucking terrifying
27:52 but while in the air they are susceptible to stickies since base jumper is very slow and in the time the sticky is close the arm time is done and you can spam him and the best way for a soldier to counter this is cutting his parachute or slowly descend and a scout can pepper him with his pistol its way more effective bombing and the only real issue is soldier getting into a weird spots i dont see base jumper issue its too situational and in the situations where it holds value it only takes demoman to switch to loch n load or quickiebomb launcher and spam him out you will outdamage him by the time the soldier rocket gets to you you already hit him with at least 2 stickies.
I have invented a new motto forbm 6v6
Half the game.
Half the weapons, half the players, half the maps, half the fun.
Dude, I play Smash under competitive rulesets and find it to be just as, if not more fun to play than items-on, all-maps-allowed Smash. Don't knock the competitive ruleset until you try it. Get a friend group together and just play casually under competitive rulesets, while still encouraging coordination (also shuffle teams constantly because you can do that), and see how it is.
Of course there is half the map have you seen some of these things, like who the fuck wants to play a match of dustbowl
Im not exactly the most competitive player but Im a heavy main and making heavy get to mid faster doesnt seem like that big of a deal? Heavy's main weakness is his speed but his strengths have quite a few caveats to them. His DPS is high but he lacks burst and most classes can spam him around a corner before he has a chance to deal damage to them, his health is high but not *that* high and every class can kill him without even reloading their primary assuming they dont have falloff and a medic isnt present, and he relies on either a break in combat to heal up or a medic pocket to keep that health high, and his weird ramp-up mechanic makes it so him being faster also lowers his damage. That and if he for some reason had someone "pocketing" with a whip the soldier with said whip can't shoot rockets while speeding up the heavy and is kind of stuck to the heavy.
I think it's more to do with the fact that the whip gives Heavy the biggest speed boost out of any class, and the whip stacks with the GRU - potentially letting Heavy arrive to the starting midfight faster than a Scout, which is overkill and does not make the game better.
Heavy is also extremely unpopular among TF2 players and is also not very enjoyable to fight due to how slow and linear he is. If Valve wanted to make Heavy viable on offense, they should have given him a new primary weapon that is actually fun to use and fight against, rather than giving him a giga-speed-buff as a band-aid. I like to draw a comparison to Engi and his mini sentry. They didn't just speed up construction speed, they added new downsides to make mini sentries less good defensively as a compromise.
@@SolarLight I'm surprised people find Heavy unfun to fight (personally he's my favorite to fight outside of demoknight 1v1s) but if that's the general consensus among more competitive players than I can see why being faster than scout could be problematic
Though wouldn't the soldier being practically tethered to the Heavy and the heavy's health loss by the time they get to mid make it not the most viable strategy?
@@mrsirdba One of the Soldiers (the "pocket") typically does an Escape Plan rollout anyway, waits for crit heals to build up so that his Medic can buff him up to 300. You can do the same thing by whipping a Heavy, so you don't really lose anything by doing it.
@@SolarLight Ah I see
@@SolarLight the only issue is in europe the only good soldier melee is the escape plan, you can't even use the market gardener
....that face when ALL of your secondary options are banned except one...
What's the point of playing TF2 when you ban the most wacky weapons and remove half the team? It's not the same game anymore lmao. I'm not surprised no one really cares about competitive TF2.
Because it's fun
Let’s ban the wrangler in casual too, in fact just ban it from the game.
A whole hour of this? Why? You could summarize this in 20 minutes. And asking for 20 minutes isn't zoomer brain tiktokker mindset, because if it were, i'd be asking for 1 or 2 minutes lol
In my opinion, Sometimes you just need that extra detail and examples to get the point across, if I just say “base jumper is banned because people don’t like it and it’s hard to fight against.” you’ll PROBABLY take it the wrong way and say “they didn’t like it cause it wasn’t fun to fight against.” when in actuality it’s harder to fight against because gaining high ground over someone is always the best strategy of winning especially when it comes to a class with splash damage making it hard for anyone that is slow and has no movement tech to get away easily.
@@bethnicz Can't they accept some weapons have better situational advantage over stock though? You could use a weapon that counters that and viceversa. The real problem would be when a weapon has no real counter like Engineer's Wrangler and probably a really good Medic's Vaccinator with great micro management.
@@damsen978 I’ve actually had debates like these with firesidecasts (I work with them as their editor) and I am with you in terms of some weapons being better than stock, but the main reason why they use stock (mostly scouts) is consistency. All the weapons besides stock have an upside and a downside to it (unless it’s too much of an upside, negating the downside) while the stock weapons.. don’t, they just do consistent damage and reload to do more consistent damage, let’s look at it in a new players perspective, when they join up a game and they get killed by a pretty boys pocket pistol or a loch n load, chances are they are gonna say “this game is pay to win” but everyone in the community will always say “it’s not because every stock (besides a few) are the best in the game in terms of consistency, damage, and having no downsides to it besides your own skill, so it’s the question of why trade off a stock for a weapon that is just good in situations? (Unless they are running base jumper full time all the time and you know it, but you get the point) I WILL SAY ONE THING THO, you can still be the best with different weapons besides stock and the scene has seen it time and time again by many players like antoni with his beggars bazooka, yosh with his baby face blaster, wild rumpus himself being the guy who started the loch n load trend, etc. there is nothing stopping you from wanting to play a weapon that is accepted and you can push it to its full potential. LAST THING the bans I agree can be a bit silly and there are people in the league who wants to unban most items to being just the overpowering stuff like for example the steak sandvich is a weapon that veteran 6s players are constantly scared of because you bring heavy to mid and slows the game down etc. but it’s not hard to beat a heavy if you centralize on him or force him to not even come out and fight cause his mid to long is very bad in my eyes, literally one team tried it when it got unbanned and it failed miserably on mid and never tried it again.
TLDR: stock is consistent and that’s why comp players use it instead of other weapons to win, play what weapon you want to be the best and push the weapons limits like many others had done, and steak sandvich got unbanned and only one team used it to get heavy to mid and lost so hard.
You're annoyed because he goes into detail?
Yes please more hour long videos about competitive stuff!
The worst restriction in competitive TF2 is that it's 6v6 to be honest..
Yes Highlander exists but its a shame it's not as popular as the 6v6 game mode, which TF2 was just not functioned to run on. 18 player lobbies would make metas not really work as well. TF2 relies on chaos in its balancing.
I also find it funny that there are a bunch of wall clips and exploits being done in videos, and somehow those are not banned, but pyrovision is (which technically makes all cosmetics NOT allowed, so there are some typos here and there).
And let's not mention that banning weapons doesn't DISTILL metas, it just shifts them, everyone running around with base kit is less engaging and fun to watch than funny loadouts being used, also banning movement options because of "engagement times" makes the game sound like a tactical shooter which it really isn't, no hero shooters have ever banned characters in the past with different movement kits, so it just really sounds like an excuse to withhold the meta from evolving.
Organizing practice/scrims and tournaments is a big reason why 6v6 is more popular. Highlander teams need 9 players and there has to be a player for each class (that you will play for the entirety of a match.) For 6v6 you only need... 6 players that are much more flexible and have the opportunity to switch up their class mid-match. It's not really a problem if your 6s team doesn't have anyone good at Heavy or Spy, but it is a problem in Highlander. Logistically, 6v6 is way more open.
Also, most "funny loadouts" are not banned in 6s. You can play Trolldier in 6s. You can play Demoknight in 6s. You can play Phlog Pyro in 6s. It's actually happened even at very high levels. But it's not common because these strategies aren't actually effective most of the time.
great video man. Wait a sec. ..OMG ITS YOUU!!! You're the guy from the tf2 coaching discord server HAHAHA hello!!!!!
You're one of the rare people I hear spell "L'étranger" correctly
I know that a decent amount of people like 6s but I personally don’t like how it only focuses on only a few of the classes. It’s not really a showcase for the game itself, if most of the characters aren’t viable. If there were many characters like in MVC2, Pokemon, or Smash Bros, I wouldn’t mind, but TF2 only has 9 characters. I don’t really care if Soldiers are doing crazy Rocket jumps, I get bored of only seeing Scouts, Soliders, and Demos.
The cow mangler is my favorite banned weapon by far most fun i have had in comp in a minute
Also the quick fix was fun it made the med guns like a game or rock paper scissor where you guess what med gun they have and pick around it