The no disguise kunai rebalance is actually crazy good, it not only fixes everything in a simple manner but also fits the theme as you are more of a ninja instead of a spy
However, that 15 health bonus is on a weapon that isn't always active. Weapons in TF2 that give extra health or damage resistance are always visible (see the battalion's backup and gunslinger).
So on the one hand, historically Ninjas did actually disguise in a sense- I remember something about blending in with crowds I think-, but on the other hand... A: Game balance, B: Anime.
Your weird buff idea would actually be a fun one, although I'm not sure if it fits the Kunai's identity. I feel like it'd be best to design a wholly new knife for that idea. Speaking of new knives, I always found it strange how only the Spycicle encourages heavier gun use and also I like the idea of butterknifing someone to death instead of backstabs, so I feel like the Rusty Butterknife (my placeholder idea for a name) would be a fun little concept.
ive thought a rapier would be fitting, as well fit the theme well. maybe borrow something from the FGC and have it have a sweetspot that encourages staying at a specific distance?
@@ChaoticCocoa I have been thinking about it to. Here is my concept The Rapier +25 base health + longer reach + on hit : gain a speed boost + Third successful hit in a row always crits +/- X% firing speed (for balancing) - Cannot backstab May also include + heal on kills - slower deploy speed
@@Loyde06 I really like this idea for the Rapier! As a suggestion, rather than the three-hit-crit mechanic like the Gunslinger uses, why not make it so that any hit that would normally backstab would land a crit instead? Meaning 120 damage instead of an instant-kill. Also, rather than a slower deploy speed, why not add the Honorbound mechanic to this sword? It'd fit thematically.
I’m so glad Uncle Dane makes a point I always agreed with, the fact that the brain rot combo of the dead ringer and Kunai promote such straight forward targeting, makes spy’s ability to take out someone who could wipe out the team less present, and instead rewards spy for targeting the closest person rather than the most dangerous or important
Not going to lie, pairing Kunai with ringer always sucked for me. With stock watch you don't have to worry about health whatsoever and every escape you make has more chances of being successful. Or you die to crocket
The Kunai in the Roblox-ripoff is actually better. You only steal the exact health that an enemy has and not their full HP (if a Scout has 20 HP, you'll only gain 20 instead of 125), and the overheal drains within 6 seconds. It does come with a new buff: overheal doesn't decay when cloaked.
I had an idea to make kunai to literally steal enemies health, so instead of killing them instantly, tou swap health with them, so if you had 5 health and you stab full-health heavy you get permanent 300 health and heavy is left with 5, allowing you to either let your teammates finish him off, or proceed to do so yourself with revolver, it also obviously makes it so if you swap health with someone who has little to no health, you basically gave them free health and signed your death certificate
Then isn’t there a priority on stabbing that overly-safe low priority target instead of going for useful assassinations who might not have that much health at a given moment?
@@DevtheViolinist if high priority target is at low health then either your team doesn't need your help with said target, or, you know, use the gun spy has. I think it instead insensifies you to go for targets your team struggles to kill, like medics or their overhealed pockets
@@CoolGirlAyden I feel like using the revolver at the front lines with 70 health is a bad idea for spy. When I said “low health target”, it doesn’t just refer to a heavy at 54 instead of 300. Spy is no longer incentivized much to go after snipers, engies, etc.
Here's the thing that I've discovered about Spies who play with DR/Kunai: they don't like playing Spy, they like trying to get clips for a frag montage. How do I know this? Simply put, both of these weapons encourage doing things that you SHOULDN'T be doing as Spy. With the Kunai, as you and Dane said, you're incentivized to prey on the weak, when Spy's whole schtick is reminding the strong that they're anything but invincible. With the Dead Ringer, you're incentivized to just brute force your way in and out of situations and throw all caution to the wind, when the point of Spy is that he's not supposed to get caught. So when you put this playstyle together, you have a belligerent damage sponge that absolutely obliterates anything that gets too close to it. My brother in Christ... _THAT IS A HEAVY._
i think thats why these are called sub-classes to begin with? Same logic can be applied to Demoman and Demoknight, they're completely different playstyles that the only thing they share in common is being black
@@KannaDHD Except Demo and Knight aren't really that different in game plan, however with the Dead Kunai setup and normal spy their game plan are so different they're night and day, Normal spies rely on being able to fool the enemy and getting rid of problems, DK on the other hand is just go in head first pop DR and then just kill everyone in sight, And that's the main issue with DK it's FAR TOO DIFFERENT AND FAR TO PUNISHING TO DEAL WITH, with either demos you can deal with them and not be shooting your team in the foot or really any of the subclasses in the game, DK is the only outlier and an annoying one at that. If people want to be aggressive on spy yeah fine but the fact that DK just allows for spies to just make the other team into a lose-lose is unfair
Can't wait to see the your eternal reward video though a suggestion I've always mentioned to people when talking about buffs for the weapon was causing the backstabbed target to not be able to use voice chat for 3 seconds effectively making spy somewhat better in competitive and it helps with the weapons unessasary cloak drain nerf
Preventing people from using voice chat is a wholly useless undertaking, because people in casual won't use their mics anyway, and competitive players use discord, not in game voice chat. If valve's competitive actually worked, it would be more useful, but not make any real difference in the long run
@@warmongerous Way to be so negative towards this but isn't this knife supposed to be the most stealthy weapon in this game? One of the spy's biggest counters is the voice chat system which can be heard across the map, works while dead, and is as easy as pressing a key on your keyboard. Sure Valve's competitive sucks and people who play competitive money matches/tournaments will be using Discord but what about text chat as well then? It's not that slow to type out "spy pyro" or "spy medic" in chat for the non-mic people and hell they are probably used to doing so since they have no mic.
Man I really appreciate response videos like this. No weird drama, no over-the-top unnecessary anger. Just a reasonable follow-up discussion thingy with more insight and community ideas and stuff. Very pleasant to see sometimes.
Just take the cloak drain from the yer, the afterburn extinguish on kill of the kunai, and swap them. Yer is much more consistent against pyros, and kunai is less effective with the whole “just dr and run for the hills” thing.
An idea for a rework for the Kunai I thought of was something like Performing backstabs gives you 3 seconds of invincibility Trying to attack while invincible removes invincibility Damage lowers the time of invincibility you have left (Example: 3 seconds left, 65 damage dealt to spy while he's invincible, 2.35 seconds left of invincibility)
my personal nerf for the kunai would be to have a 30 second heal cooldown and if you miss a stab, you get bleed. keeping trickstabbers at bay for the most part due to how inconsistent trickstabs are. as for a buff? it would be this: for each successful backstab, get a slight bit of extra cloak.
I think it could be cool to make it like a knife equivalent of the letranger. On backstab, it instantly fills your cloak meter to full and automatically cloaks you with no cloak noise or animation, plus clearing any visible rebuffs you have. It’d be a good way to force the player to use their protection defensively as a mechanism to get away, since they obviously can’t go for chainstabs while cloaked, preventing the weapon from being abused and preserving the Big Earner’s identity as “the chainstab knife”. Replace the downside with a removal of the damage resistance you get in your cloak, and it becomes a much more spy-like weapon that can increase survivability when used well but decrease it when used poorly.
Kind of off topic, but after rewatching your videos, i started to not use the kunai and actually get good with stock spy, helped me alot to fool my enemies and now i'm the sneaky sly i've always wanted to be :)
I think the biggest change the Kunai needs is lowering the minimum health on kill. I think it fits in perfectly with that uncle Dane quote because a low health target is low priority, not a free 70 health pack
I think the buff to 70 hp and 210 max are good quality of life changes. MAYBE 210 is a bit high but being able to survive a random melee crit is worth it IMO but I'll stick by the nerf I proposed. I feel like that will make it far less effective for lesser skilled spies while not making a huge difference for good ones
If the Big Earner punishes health for a speed boost, maybe the Konniver's Kunai should do the contrary: max health at 125 with the on-kill mechanic but your movement speed is at 97%
My main problem with removing the overheal decay along with the guaranteed 210 health, is that it feels like it would reward the Spy too much for literally doing his job, similar to the Diamondback.
One ideas I have for a balance rework, is make the Kunai work the same, but with a meter related to it’s curse aspect, because after every stab it will fill up quite a bit, and if it is full, spy will have to fully wait for it to drain in order to still get overheal, if he keeps stabbing after filling it up, he won’t be able to disguise, and one more time will mark him for death, but it will take 1.5-2 stabs close together to see it full, and it drains much faster if you haven’t filled it yet, meaning spy can still stab close together if he needs to while still getting overheal, but he cannot be too aggressive to prevent the full punishment from being active
Honestly, I was just thinking about putting the health boost concept onto a Syringe that you can use to fill up on the Enemy's health, and be able to give that health back to your teammates or enemies at the cost that anyone who's overhealed by this health will have their speed lowered. However, this thing allows for a lot of classes to have a lot of health, it still needs to backstab enemies, the speed penalty does nothing for Snipers, Soldiers, Demomen anf Demoknights, and Heavies, while it could potentially assist Turtling Engineers and give better survivability for Medics. Scouts would probably be the last class you would ever want to overheal with this syringe weapon, because a Scout's speed is incredibly important, and as for Pyros, meh? I mean, if they have mobility (Which they will, there is literally no reason for them not to have stuff like the Powerjack) then it could help offset the overheal speed penalty, but if they don't, you basically have created a stationary flaming sentry. Maybe also provide an attack speed, reload speed, switch to and from speed penalties for the overhealed targets and cap the maximum overheal at 500? Also, allow for Spies to use it on themselves or to store it for later despite the stored health decaying over time and being lost upon death, meaning speed is something you'll need with this knife. For the Kunai though, just make it into a lighter, weaker stock knife with it having 3 throwable 100 Backstab damaging knives, and for their main stabbing mode, just make them into 150 damage dealing knives.
People tend to forget the mouse has 2 buttons. Maybe for the Kunai do “left click only backstabs, right click takes health off” and then the right click is the one with the countdown. I'd get your proposed ideas for a completely different knife suggestion. That'll be a balancer rather than re-formulating the gun
As a spy main while i do frequently run kunai dead ringer, i find that cloak watch is a much stronger pairing. While the dead ringer can get you out of trouble when you put yourself in a bad spot i find that the default watch can often entirely prevent me from getting into the scenarios where i would need a dead ringer.
Going back to the old Kunai sounds like the perfect rebalance to me. No minimum health would force you to pick targets that are going to be a detriment to your team.
Exsept the old one is worse for both as it means killing high priority targets suck as they will have lost hp in the front lines but the low priority who stay back have the hp Sure it makes killing heavy’s less annoying for the other team but the weapon also would suck
I'm glad you love the YER too, because it is also my favorite knife. I cannot bring myself to use the kunai because the YER just makes me feel so big brain. People look behind them and see the guy they just spy-checked 3 seconds ago and are met with a knife in their back. Engineer and Medic swarms see their fellow Medic or Engineer and just think "oh he's here to heal me" or "get some metal" and then they get some DEATH.
That goofy buff made me think of a stupid name for a knife like that The BackBlower, although I think it's debuff should be a tighter backstab radius and a cool down before it can push others away again
My favorite idea for the Kunai is making it just set your health (or overheal) to the class you stabbed. Specifically current health, so that you get benefit from stabbing targets being pocketed or heavies
The change i was most happy to be suggested was removing the overheal decay. Which is my main gripe whenever using the kunai And the idea of being the knife with bad cloak makes way more sense on it
I had this idea where on backstab, your max hp becomes 210, but slowly goes back down to 70. Your hp stays as a percentage of that max hp. Like how the gru changes your max hp. However, this basically only covers criteria 2. And, depending on balancing, it could easily slip into 'basically straight upgrade' like the bazaar bargain or 'really underwhelming' like the baby face blaster
The kunai having no overheal decay would make it a cloak and dagger combo and I would expect to see a lot of spy's hanging around flanks with this targeting alone flankers to get the buff.
I really like the 360 airblast idea as a separate knife idea. Maybe the form a Dr. Grordbort weapon. The victim gets vaporized and releases a huge shockwave. Highly disruptive to pub pushes, and in competitive would force enemies into disadvantageous positions.
Dude, I finally started getting on my spy grindset, using trickstabs, being sneakier and smarter with escapes, and pissing off the enemy. Since then, I've started using more risky weapons like the Kunai and DR and I finally know why they are so overused. Sometimes, it feels like spy can't get shit done cause the enemy makes it down right impossible for him and he struggles to keep up with his team and start pulling his weight. All this to say I've lost my hate of the Kunai and it is the most reliable knife to use once you get good and allows for a more aggressive play style than stock spy ever gave. Sure, the YER is good for sentry nests, the big earner is a shit ton of fun to get chainstabs with, the spy-cicle is nice to avoid a cautious pyro, but im now of the opinion that the Kunai is the best knife and has become my personal favorite knife.
Overheal is a Medigun mechanic. I know Kunai also deals with it but you need to consider that a Medic is going to always overheal a spy at spawn before he goes on his merry way. The Spy will always have 150 hp without the decay and no Medic related downsides. No overheal at all may make him the best to collect uber from.
I've had a kunai rework I've thought about, trying to set it more inline with its actual physical design of being a "Ninja weapon" where instead of providing health on kill, it instead makes you instantly invisible with the same 2 or so seconds of decloak time. I feel this still needs another rewarding feature, and I wanna say a speed boost, but these are both attributes directly tied to the current Dead Ringer, but I just feel like there's great use in going instantly invis after a stab and having a drawback of that being how long it takes to decloak so you can't chain stabs
Your previous kunai nerd proposal is eh, Cyber had the best one without nerfing Kunai too hard and taking it's identity but your previous one can still work, in order to buff spy specifically for comp settings. As for the "no disguise" kunai rebalance, nah dawg, that's overnerfing it for comp and will be a pointless nerf in casual since modt kunai spies don't use disguises too often
yea, there's a reason why the YER was changed to still allow disguising years after it's added something akin to a high cost to actually set up for a stab would probably be better, like a cloak cost for disguising, longer disguise smoke duration, or longer cloak transition duration would be pretty fair
@@artifactU What are you on? Spies are almost always disguised, unless going for a surf of some sort or avoiding post-spawn wall hacks. There is a hige difference on running towards your enemy as an undisguised spy and as an enemy scout
Random half-thought: What if instead of overhealing and the max health penalty, it had the cloak drain rate penalty from the Y.E.R. and had the full heal upon backstab that was suggested?
Honestly that loud noise, 360 airblast thing may as well be it's own knife. If it were on the kunai, that messes with the main point of the weapon, which is health on kill.
One idea I had regarding this is instead of healing why not damage resist with 100 health (I have no idea how long the resistance should be), I understand that the Dead Ringer already does this but it doesn't regain health at all. No infinite health but it does help the spy survive afterwords. Possible to chain stab but at a limit because eventually the health will run out unless they run to a medpack. They could also add the removal of damage resist during cloak (before the stab, after the stab the resistance for the kill would be there for the determined duration) or no picking up health packs during cloak (both before and after stab) for the "mega dead" factor
I think a potential rework for the kunai would be to have it gain an instant cloak with a fog cloud effect on stab (only activates with dead ringer if it has 100% cloak. This would strengthen non-dead ringer spies’ chance to make it out alive while making dead ringer spies have to chose between going in without a feign for chainstabbing or being only able to pick off one enemy before escaping
Your weird buff actually reminds me a bit of a rework idea I had for the Spycicle. The goal of the rework was to essentially make it so the Spycicle wasn't a direct counter to Pyro anymore, but improving its versatility. To do this, I'd start with making it so it doesn't melt to give you massive resistances to fire. Instead, the Spycicle would shorten any debuff/DoT effect on the Spy, similar to the one gained on cloak (they would stack). Additionally, hits would slow the target and backstabs would set off an "explosion" that would slow nearby enemies (instead of damage). The downside would be that the Spycicle would get damaged each time you hit a target, and would become unavailable if you broke it (similar to if it had melted). It would regen its durability over time, and metal wouldn't restore it anymore (perhaps health kits would instead), with it requiring the current 10 seconds to restore when completely broken. If this is too strong, perhaps when it breaks, you'd lose the debuff shortening bonus. If it's too weak, then it could potentially cleanse any debuffs on backstab, or simply give a couple seconds of debuff immunity on backstab. When it comes to the Kunai though, I've been of the weird opinion that it should be reworked into an "eyelander" style weapon. You'd start at 100 hp, with each backstab increasing it by 10, capping at a +50 bonus (150 hp total). However instead of it giving you an incremental speed bonus per stack, the Kunai would give you incremental bonuses when disguised and cloaked. Though admittedly, this idea could probably just be its own unlock.
though whenever we talk about rebalancing i think a bit of caution is needed, because some changes are way more complicated to code in than others. though that knockback blast is probably still pretty easy to implement because the jet pack already have code that can be appropriated to make some kind of all around air blast
An idea I had while watching this video was that the Kunai would function like the Eyelander, in that you start with 70 health and gain 35 max health for every backstab until you reach a max of 210, with no speed boost. It's a fun idea and it turns the Kunai into more of a snowball weapon. Just like the eyelander, killing someone at 4 "heads" while not at max health (maybe like 110/210) would heal some HP, in this case 35 HP (145/210). Sure it invalidates it's own downside, but it takes some time and you only heal 35 hp per stab so chainstabs are harder. Feeding off bad teammates will still happen by nature of the snowball design, but after every stab you'll be less incentivized to go after them, taking your high HP and going after the good ones. It keeps you alive after a kill by high HP, but the low stab healing (35 hp) will make chainstabs harder. What makes this design good is that it's balanced. If you fall for the spy curse and only get 1 or 2 stabs, you're just using a worse stock knife. If you get 3 or 4, it's better. I like Speyelander.
You could make it, so that the next time you decloak after a stab you get a temporary damage vulnerability. So you couldn't decloak right behind your target and get away with it, if the team saw you. This would nerf the dead ringer kunai combo and it would require you to akt more, because you might need to wait for you damage vulnerability to run out, while uncloaked. Combined with the idea of the gained health being permanent would make for a great weapon.
This sounds like something only sensei wu from ninjago would say but I think the only way reach spys full potential is amby + dead ringer and kunai often referred to as the tryhard loadout. I just think that if there was a robot playing the game absolutely perfectly it would give the most kills in a minute
So I have no idea why, I woke up early and started watching this video like half asleep still. In the midst of him talking about the nerfs and buffs, my brain thought "A smoke bomb would be a cool dead ringer reskin!" to which it promptly followed with thinking about the body being replaced with a cloud of smoke. No idea why I felt the need to share this here but ninja spy go hard!
Very good ideas here! And once again, I've come up with my own dumb little proposed change, except it's for the Dead Ringer as opposed to the Kunai. A simple one; a 50% decrease to all healing recieved... Including from Kunai backstabs. One of the main reasons the combo, and the Dead Ringer in general, is so powerful, is the fact a feigned death Spy can just run to the nearest health pack and revert all damage taken, or simply backstab some hapless sap and get all his health back. With this change, the only way you're getting ALL your health back's from killing a Heavy at max health, plus it makes it so you're more inclined to use the Dead Ringer for its intended purpose of slinking behind enemy lines because the enemy believes you're dead... Or as a nice little safety blanket to get past tough-as-nails defenses. Without a heal-up afterwards, you're vulnerable, especially with the Kunai, so making that regaining of health a bit more lengthy, you've really gotta pick when you decloak and where, as even chip damage is lethal without the means to get all your health back nearly as quick. Large Medkits become Meds, Meds become a bit better than Smalls, and Smalls are your last resort for healing, meaning you have to either try and get to high foot traffic areas and risk getting discovered, try and find a Dispepnser to sit on and pray noone finds you, or hope the HP you get back from a stab'll sustain you in the Kunai's case. Plus, it's really an underutilized stat. This, plus a Kunai change, would really make the two more difficult to use together, but not impossible, and definitely more fair.
Just seems like the knife should be reverted back to now it was. Only heal the amount of health you take from the enemy. U kill someone with 10 health u gain 10 health. U kill a full heavy u gain 150 max
i think if the no overheal decay were to be added, it should make you unable to be overhealed by medic or at least decrease the amount, since your point is that it should be a reward
Not gonna lie, Jon’s weird buff reminded me of the Kai feat from For Honor, for those who don’t hate themselves enough to play for honor, it’s a level one feat on that some of the samurai faction can use that removes everyone’s stamina in a small area around the user, preventing them from attacking or running away.
Given that disguises are one of the spy's main tricks, I think that disabling it entirely is a bit harsh. It would be quite difficult to get the first stab with a kunai if you not only have lower health, but no disguise. That's one reason why I used to not use the YER at all. Instead, maybe mirror the downside of the YER, so that you can disguise, but it consumes a full cloak meter. As stated in the video on knives, that means careful thought to your disguises.
I have an idea, let's make kunai 100 base health and after each backstab, spy's max health will increase with 20 more hp, with five backstabs and 200 hp cap
While we're at it, something that I think would be really sick alongside removing cloak DR is giving the spy its own damage reduction on backstab kills. This would mean that, while they can't run faster like the Big Earner, they could potentially damage surf explosives or a sentry away from the enemy team and rely on the spy's ability to do so instead of just "lmao infinite healing". Even if you do refresh the damage reduction, you don't heal back damage taken and tie it directly to spy's high risk instakill move instead of right-clicking whenever.
You can change the shockwave idea into something like making enemies let out agonized scream and propel themselves away from backstabbed victim. It's more of visual change but I really want the idea to be more comical. Just imagine playing and your character let out a scream then jump away like a scared Looney toon characters xD
Jonto what if the kunai makes you have 220 hp but on backstab you lose 40 hp you cant go lower then 70 hp and you cant heal by medipacks or your medic but the enemy medic CAN heal you simply rewarding good acting and thinking
By "no overheal decay" do you mean it would be like the dolokos bar in which a backstab just temporarily increases your max health? I mean that would be interesting. Though the more I think about it I realize this wouldn't help much
The way i would change the overheal buff of the kunai would be the same as the eyelander but with a twist, with each stab you increase your maximum hp and you heal up to that maximum hp from whatever hp value you have, but the downside is you cannot be overhealed by this mechanic, nor by medics and the health packs give slightly less hp
If I had to rework the Kunai I would change it's effects to instantly trigger your cloak on backstab, and lower your hp to 100 instead of 70. The instant cloak fits the ninja theme of the knife, contributes to the idea of being a survivor knife without making you tanky, and the forced cloak activation is a both a benefit and a downside, as you have to take the time to manually decloak before you can stab again which prevents chain stabs. Making it effectively the opposite of the Big Earner.
I personally would make the Kunai's health on kill scale with how many kills/assists/damage the killed enemy dealt that life; the specifics of how this would be calculated are kinda up in the air, but it'd completely flip the script on the Kunai's current design incentivizing low-priority targets while encouraging the Spy to be more observant as to who is doing the best on the enemy team so they can maximize their health gain. If you want to be really generous, you could let the Spy see on their hud the enemy's kills/assists/whatever that life as a way to help prioritize targets.
The no disguise kunai rebalance is actually crazy good, it not only fixes everything in a simple manner but also fits the theme as you are more of a ninja instead of a spy
@@Lawlz4Dayzz not every knife should/has to work with every watch. discouraging players to use the kunai and ringer together is actually pretty good.
However, that 15 health bonus is on a weapon that isn't always active. Weapons in TF2 that give extra health or damage resistance are always visible (see the battalion's backup and gunslinger).
So on the one hand, historically Ninjas did actually disguise in a sense- I remember something about blending in with crowds I think-, but on the other hand... A: Game balance, B: Anime.
the nik
@@Lawlz4Dayzzhow about disguising is disabled for a few seconds after backstab
Your weird shockwave concept should probably be a different knife entirely.
on final point cap it would be a free win.
A space knife that vaporizes on kill and has a small shockwave
Fat weeb spy gets flatulence after every stab
@@Bradorksas a joke it should say..
“it has infinite ammo… apparently.”
@@DareDevil_00I "despite not being a gun or anything similar"
every knife is still easily outclassed by the disguise kit,
identity crises are the best method to kill
But it's overshadowed by the Ambassador.
chances are your target is numb to identity crises and decides to kill the clone anyways
@@AfterthymeGamingprejungleinfernal
unless pyros counter you
Your weird buff idea would actually be a fun one, although I'm not sure if it fits the Kunai's identity. I feel like it'd be best to design a wholly new knife for that idea.
Speaking of new knives, I always found it strange how only the Spycicle encourages heavier gun use and also I like the idea of butterknifing someone to death instead of backstabs, so I feel like the Rusty Butterknife (my placeholder idea for a name) would be a fun little concept.
ive thought a rapier would be fitting, as well fit the theme well. maybe borrow something from the FGC and have it have a sweetspot that encourages staying at a specific distance?
@@ChaoticCocoaAnime Swordfighter Spy let's goooo
@@ChaoticCocoa🅱️ean 🅱️ierre 🅱️olnareff
@@ChaoticCocoa I have been thinking about it to. Here is my concept
The Rapier
+25 base health
+ longer reach
+ on hit : gain a speed boost
+ Third successful hit in a row always crits
+/- X% firing speed (for balancing)
- Cannot backstab
May also include
+ heal on kills
- slower deploy speed
@@Loyde06 I really like this idea for the Rapier! As a suggestion, rather than the three-hit-crit mechanic like the Gunslinger uses, why not make it so that any hit that would normally backstab would land a crit instead? Meaning 120 damage instead of an instant-kill. Also, rather than a slower deploy speed, why not add the Honorbound mechanic to this sword? It'd fit thematically.
The shockwave one scares me, just imagine the U bend on upward
5x kill in one stab because half the team just got ejected off this plane of existence
Ye the shockwave buff will probably be like the force of nature knockback like how the force of nature is better on some maps but sucks on others
Kind of the specific scenario I imagined when coming up with that dumb idea
I adore the thought of Spy having a more crowd-control-y playstyle for a weapon, it sounds like it opens up so much potential for him.
he clearly needs others ways of playstyle considering chainstabs not always possible
I’m so glad Uncle Dane makes a point I always agreed with, the fact that the brain rot combo of the dead ringer and Kunai promote such straight forward targeting, makes spy’s ability to take out someone who could wipe out the team less present, and instead rewards spy for targeting the closest person rather than the most dangerous or important
playing spy has always seemed like a strange case to me
on one hand, its fun that you can backstab and insta kill people
@@GeebagninjaOn the other hand, people hard counter you just by turning around.
@@mrstudent9125 And on the third hand its really handy to check suspicious people to check if they are cheating
@@defenitelyhuman5380And on the fourth hand, the amount of dopamine from Spy is one of the highest, on par with Double Donks
@@defenitelyhuman5380and on the 4th hand, airblast.
Not going to lie, pairing Kunai with ringer always sucked for me.
With stock watch you don't have to worry about health whatsoever and every escape you make has more chances of being successful.
Or you die to crocket
@@Lawlz4Dayzz there’s an achievement for taking 3 direct hit crockets in a row as heavy
I get option B every time
Its a meme loadout
@@drogoz4042 i’d say it’s more of a gimmick loadout
I didn't realize that the dead ringer thumbnails matched each another, that's so cool
The Kunai in the Roblox-ripoff is actually better.
You only steal the exact health that an enemy has and not their full HP (if a Scout has 20 HP, you'll only gain 20 instead of 125), and the overheal drains within 6 seconds. It does come with a new buff: overheal doesn't decay when cloaked.
The initial change is how the kunai initially was. There is a reason they changed its health gain to be more consistent.
we love tc2 kunai
Just got nerfed again, now chainstabs give less hp each kill
NEW VIDEO AT 3AM EST HELL YEAH
OH BOY 3AM!
The shockwave idea is interesting, but really seems like a way to make the entire enemy team aware of your presence - the best counter to spy.
I had an idea to make kunai to literally steal enemies health, so instead of killing them instantly, tou swap health with them, so if you had 5 health and you stab full-health heavy you get permanent 300 health and heavy is left with 5, allowing you to either let your teammates finish him off, or proceed to do so yourself with revolver, it also obviously makes it so if you swap health with someone who has little to no health, you basically gave them free health and signed your death certificate
Good concept, though it'd probably be hell to code.
Then isn’t there a priority on stabbing that overly-safe low priority target instead of going for useful assassinations who might not have that much health at a given moment?
@@DevtheViolinist if high priority target is at low health then either your team doesn't need your help with said target, or, you know, use the gun spy has. I think it instead insensifies you to go for targets your team struggles to kill, like medics or their overhealed pockets
@@CoolGirlAyden I feel like using the revolver at the front lines with 70 health is a bad idea for spy. When I said “low health target”, it doesn’t just refer to a heavy at 54 instead of 300. Spy is no longer incentivized much to go after snipers, engies, etc.
Here's the thing that I've discovered about Spies who play with DR/Kunai: they don't like playing Spy, they like trying to get clips for a frag montage.
How do I know this? Simply put, both of these weapons encourage doing things that you SHOULDN'T be doing as Spy.
With the Kunai, as you and Dane said, you're incentivized to prey on the weak, when Spy's whole schtick is reminding the strong that they're anything but invincible.
With the Dead Ringer, you're incentivized to just brute force your way in and out of situations and throw all caution to the wind, when the point of Spy is that he's not supposed to get caught.
So when you put this playstyle together, you have a belligerent damage sponge that absolutely obliterates anything that gets too close to it.
My brother in Christ...
_THAT IS A HEAVY._
Cuz those good spies find trickstabbing much more consistent then stealth, which is known for being basically rng
Why is that a problem that weapons incentive different playstyles? Each class has such weapons
@@gekohno If you actually believe that backstabbing is rng, you suck.
i think thats why these are called sub-classes to begin with? Same logic can be applied to Demoman and Demoknight, they're completely different playstyles that the only thing they share in common is being black
@@KannaDHD Except Demo and Knight aren't really that different in game plan, however with the Dead Kunai setup and normal spy their game plan are so different they're night and day, Normal spies rely on being able to fool the enemy and getting rid of problems, DK on the other hand is just go in head first pop DR and then just kill everyone in sight, And that's the main issue with DK it's FAR TOO DIFFERENT AND FAR TO PUNISHING TO DEAL WITH, with either demos you can deal with them and not be shooting your team in the foot or really any of the subclasses in the game, DK is the only outlier and an annoying one at that. If people want to be aggressive on spy yeah fine but the fact that DK just allows for spies to just make the other team into a lose-lose is unfair
Can't wait to see the your eternal reward video though a suggestion I've always mentioned to people when talking about buffs for the weapon was causing the backstabbed target to not be able to use voice chat for 3 seconds effectively making spy somewhat better in competitive and it helps with the weapons unessasary cloak drain nerf
Preventing people from using voice chat is a wholly useless undertaking, because people in casual won't use their mics anyway, and competitive players use discord, not in game voice chat. If valve's competitive actually worked, it would be more useful, but not make any real difference in the long run
@@warmongerous Way to be so negative towards this but isn't this knife supposed to be the most stealthy weapon in this game?
One of the spy's biggest counters is the voice chat system which can be heard across the map, works while dead, and is as easy as pressing a key on your keyboard. Sure Valve's competitive sucks and people who play competitive money matches/tournaments will be using Discord but what about text chat as well then? It's not that slow to type out "spy pyro" or "spy medic" in chat for the non-mic people and hell they are probably used to doing so since they have no mic.
Man I really appreciate response videos like this.
No weird drama, no over-the-top unnecessary anger. Just a reasonable follow-up discussion thingy with more insight and community ideas and stuff.
Very pleasant to see sometimes.
Just take the cloak drain from the yer, the afterburn extinguish on kill of the kunai, and swap them. Yer is much more consistent against pyros, and kunai is less effective with the whole “just dr and run for the hills” thing.
And everyone can stop complaining
I couldn’t have described the Kunai better than an “Us Vs. Them” opinionated weapon.
I wonder what other Spy weapons fall into that criteria?
idk maybe like the diamondback i guess
YER
the old ambi
An idea for a rework for the Kunai I thought of was something like
Performing backstabs gives you 3 seconds of invincibility
Trying to attack while invincible removes invincibility
Damage lowers the time of invincibility you have left
(Example: 3 seconds left, 65 damage dealt to spy while he's invincible, 2.35 seconds left of invincibility)
my personal nerf for the kunai would be to have a 30 second heal cooldown and if you miss a stab, you get bleed. keeping trickstabbers at bay for the most part due to how inconsistent trickstabs are. as for a buff? it would be this: for each successful backstab, get a slight bit of extra cloak.
I think it could be cool to make it like a knife equivalent of the letranger. On backstab, it instantly fills your cloak meter to full and automatically cloaks you with no cloak noise or animation, plus clearing any visible rebuffs you have. It’d be a good way to force the player to use their protection defensively as a mechanism to get away, since they obviously can’t go for chainstabs while cloaked, preventing the weapon from being abused and preserving the Big Earner’s identity as “the chainstab knife”. Replace the downside with a removal of the damage resistance you get in your cloak, and it becomes a much more spy-like weapon that can increase survivability when used well but decrease it when used poorly.
Kind of off topic, but after rewatching your videos, i started to not use the kunai and actually get good with stock spy, helped me alot to fool my enemies and now i'm the sneaky sly i've always wanted to be :)
I thought this was a kunai diss track from the title. The kunai response about to be fire.
I think the biggest change the Kunai needs is lowering the minimum health on kill. I think it fits in perfectly with that uncle Dane quote because a low health target is low priority, not a free 70 health pack
I think the buff to 70 hp and 210 max are good quality of life changes. MAYBE 210 is a bit high but being able to survive a random melee crit is worth it IMO but I'll stick by the nerf I proposed. I feel like that will make it far less effective for lesser skilled spies while not making a huge difference for good ones
If the Big Earner punishes health for a speed boost, maybe the Konniver's Kunai should do the contrary: max health at 125 with the on-kill mechanic but your movement speed is at 97%
Another video THIS QUICKLY is crazy.
I love this channel.
I also love how SPY HAS A GUN!
My main problem with removing the overheal decay along with the guaranteed 210 health, is that it feels like it would reward the Spy too much for literally doing his job, similar to the Diamondback.
One ideas I have for a balance rework, is make the Kunai work the same, but with a meter related to it’s curse aspect, because after every stab it will fill up quite a bit, and if it is full, spy will have to fully wait for it to drain in order to still get overheal, if he keeps stabbing after filling it up, he won’t be able to disguise, and one more time will mark him for death, but it will take 1.5-2 stabs close together to see it full, and it drains much faster if you haven’t filled it yet, meaning spy can still stab close together if he needs to while still getting overheal, but he cannot be too aggressive to prevent the full punishment from being active
I watched the podcast with you and uncle Dane and it’s handsdown the best podcast I’ve ever watched. Amazingly entertaining
I don't even own this weapon
I own WITH this weapon
I don’t even play the game
being f2p is awesome!!!
I only play tf2 every Thursday and the day after until I get bored and then repeat
Honestly, I was just thinking about putting the health boost concept onto a Syringe that you can use to fill up on the Enemy's health, and be able to give that health back to your teammates or enemies at the cost that anyone who's overhealed by this health will have their speed lowered. However, this thing allows for a lot of classes to have a lot of health, it still needs to backstab enemies, the speed penalty does nothing for Snipers, Soldiers, Demomen anf Demoknights, and Heavies, while it could potentially assist Turtling Engineers and give better survivability for Medics. Scouts would probably be the last class you would ever want to overheal with this syringe weapon, because a Scout's speed is incredibly important, and as for Pyros, meh? I mean, if they have mobility (Which they will, there is literally no reason for them not to have stuff like the Powerjack) then it could help offset the overheal speed penalty, but if they don't, you basically have created a stationary flaming sentry. Maybe also provide an attack speed, reload speed, switch to and from speed penalties for the overhealed targets and cap the maximum overheal at 500? Also, allow for Spies to use it on themselves or to store it for later despite the stored health decaying over time and being lost upon death, meaning speed is something you'll need with this knife.
For the Kunai though, just make it into a lighter, weaker stock knife with it having 3 throwable 100 Backstab damaging knives, and for their main stabbing mode, just make them into 150 damage dealing knives.
People tend to forget the mouse has 2 buttons. Maybe for the Kunai do “left click only backstabs, right click takes health off” and then the right click is the one with the countdown. I'd get your proposed ideas for a completely different knife suggestion. That'll be a balancer rather than re-formulating the gun
Thank God you didn't rep the terrible idea I've seen floating around to make the kunai a throwing weapon.
As a spy main while i do frequently run kunai dead ringer, i find that cloak watch is a much stronger pairing. While the dead ringer can get you out of trouble when you put yourself in a bad spot i find that the default watch can often entirely prevent me from getting into the scenarios where i would need a dead ringer.
Going back to the old Kunai sounds like the perfect rebalance to me. No minimum health would force you to pick targets that are going to be a detriment to your team.
Exsept the old one is worse for both as it means killing high priority targets suck as they will have lost hp in the front lines but the low priority who stay back have the hp
Sure it makes killing heavy’s less annoying for the other team but the weapon also would suck
I'm glad you love the YER too, because it is also my favorite knife. I cannot bring myself to use the kunai because the YER just makes me feel so big brain. People look behind them and see the guy they just spy-checked 3 seconds ago and are met with a knife in their back. Engineer and Medic swarms see their fellow Medic or Engineer and just think "oh he's here to heal me" or "get some metal" and then they get some DEATH.
That goofy buff made me think of a stupid name for a knife like that
The BackBlower, although I think it's debuff should be a tighter backstab radius and a cool down before it can push others away again
your eternal reward and cloak and dagger are still my favorite items in the game after all these years
Jonto's Really Weird Buff just sounds like a new knife idea that's actually cool.
>move the YER cloak downside to Kunai
Would be the best Spy change of all time, Jontohil has my vote
I think a really cool weapon idea is a throwable knife.
Spy throwing tomahawks at Heavies would be so hilarious
My favorite idea for the Kunai is making it just set your health (or overheal) to the class you stabbed. Specifically current health, so that you get benefit from stabbing targets being pocketed or heavies
The change i was most happy to be suggested was removing the overheal decay.
Which is my main gripe whenever using the kunai
And the idea of being the knife with bad cloak makes way more sense on it
I had this idea where on backstab, your max hp becomes 210, but slowly goes back down to 70. Your hp stays as a percentage of that max hp. Like how the gru changes your max hp.
However, this basically only covers criteria 2. And, depending on balancing, it could easily slip into 'basically straight upgrade' like the bazaar bargain or 'really underwhelming' like the baby face blaster
The kunai having no overheal decay would make it a cloak and dagger combo and I would expect to see a lot of spy's hanging around flanks with this targeting alone flankers to get the buff.
I really like the 360 airblast idea as a separate knife idea. Maybe the form a Dr. Grordbort weapon. The victim gets vaporized and releases a huge shockwave. Highly disruptive to pub pushes, and in competitive would force enemies into disadvantageous positions.
Da Goonai
Oh hey you’re here!
90% of the issue with the Kunai can be traced back to a single change in Gun Mettle:
- Minimum Health gain of 75 on kill.
Dude, I finally started getting on my spy grindset, using trickstabs, being sneakier and smarter with escapes, and pissing off the enemy. Since then, I've started using more risky weapons like the Kunai and DR and I finally know why they are so overused. Sometimes, it feels like spy can't get shit done cause the enemy makes it down right impossible for him and he struggles to keep up with his team and start pulling his weight. All this to say I've lost my hate of the Kunai and it is the most reliable knife to use once you get good and allows for a more aggressive play style than stock spy ever gave. Sure, the YER is good for sentry nests, the big earner is a shit ton of fun to get chainstabs with, the spy-cicle is nice to avoid a cautious pyro, but im now of the opinion that the Kunai is the best knife and has become my personal favorite knife.
If they nerf kunai, atleast rebuff ambassador. A revolver can do 120 with a crit alone while ambassador barely surpasses it. 💀
God the second that voice in the beginning started talking all i could think about is castle crashers
Overheal is a Medigun mechanic. I know Kunai also deals with it but you need to consider that a Medic is going to always overheal a spy at spawn before he goes on his merry way. The Spy will always have 150 hp without the decay and no Medic related downsides. No overheal at all may make him the best to collect uber from.
The no cloak resistance ist a very good idea honestly.
I've had a kunai rework I've thought about, trying to set it more inline with its actual physical design of being a "Ninja weapon" where instead of providing health on kill, it instead makes you instantly invisible with the same 2 or so seconds of decloak time. I feel this still needs another rewarding feature, and I wanna say a speed boost, but these are both attributes directly tied to the current Dead Ringer, but I just feel like there's great use in going instantly invis after a stab and having a drawback of that being how long it takes to decloak so you can't chain stabs
Your previous kunai nerd proposal is eh, Cyber had the best one without nerfing Kunai too hard and taking it's identity but your previous one can still work, in order to buff spy specifically for comp settings.
As for the "no disguise" kunai rebalance, nah dawg, that's overnerfing it for comp and will be a pointless nerf in casual since modt kunai spies don't use disguises too often
most spys dont use disguises???what are you on?
yea, there's a reason why the YER was changed to still allow disguising years after it's added
something akin to a high cost to actually set up for a stab would probably be better, like a cloak cost for disguising, longer disguise smoke duration, or longer cloak transition duration would be pretty fair
@@artifactU What are you on? Spies are almost always disguised, unless going for a surf of some sort or avoiding post-spawn wall hacks. There is a hige difference on running towards your enemy as an undisguised spy and as an enemy scout
@@gekohno the original comment said kunai spys dont use disguises often, i was making fun of that. pay attention
Spy should throw the Kunai, which coincidentally removes your melee for a few seconds.
Random half-thought: What if instead of overhealing and the max health penalty, it had the cloak drain rate penalty from the Y.E.R. and had the full heal upon backstab that was suggested?
Honestly that loud noise, 360 airblast thing may as well be it's own knife. If it were on the kunai, that messes with the main point of the weapon, which is health on kill.
Add down side to Kunai: "Become Marked for Death for 3 seconds after decloak". gg done.
Your original rework was a great fix. It would really help players realize that SPY HAS A GUN.
the only acceptable nerf would be forcing spies who equip it to play while in quicksand
ever since i watched that last kunai video ive seen a kunai spy in every server ive played in
One idea I had regarding this is instead of healing why not damage resist with 100 health (I have no idea how long the resistance should be), I understand that the Dead Ringer already does this but it doesn't regain health at all. No infinite health but it does help the spy survive afterwords. Possible to chain stab but at a limit because eventually the health will run out unless they run to a medpack. They could also add the removal of damage resist during cloak (before the stab, after the stab the resistance for the kill would be there for the determined duration) or no picking up health packs during cloak (both before and after stab) for the "mega dead" factor
Channel has become the bad balance suggestion generator.
I think a potential rework for the kunai would be to have it gain an instant cloak with a fog cloud effect on stab (only activates with dead ringer if it has 100% cloak. This would strengthen non-dead ringer spies’ chance to make it out alive while making dead ringer spies have to chose between going in without a feign for chainstabbing or being only able to pick off one enemy before escaping
I love.. the weird buff idea. Fits perfectly!
i don't think i'd like the kunai getting a shockwave, but golly some other knife with something like that would be very interesting.
What are high priority targets? Can we get a list on this, it would be very helpful
Uh, Medics, Really good snipers, and sometimes engies
4:56 yes i do aswell! ive been practicing alot of spy on upwards recently, and as someone quite bad at spy ive been able to utilize it fairly well
Your weird buff actually reminds me a bit of a rework idea I had for the Spycicle. The goal of the rework was to essentially make it so the Spycicle wasn't a direct counter to Pyro anymore, but improving its versatility. To do this, I'd start with making it so it doesn't melt to give you massive resistances to fire. Instead, the Spycicle would shorten any debuff/DoT effect on the Spy, similar to the one gained on cloak (they would stack). Additionally, hits would slow the target and backstabs would set off an "explosion" that would slow nearby enemies (instead of damage).
The downside would be that the Spycicle would get damaged each time you hit a target, and would become unavailable if you broke it (similar to if it had melted). It would regen its durability over time, and metal wouldn't restore it anymore (perhaps health kits would instead), with it requiring the current 10 seconds to restore when completely broken. If this is too strong, perhaps when it breaks, you'd lose the debuff shortening bonus. If it's too weak, then it could potentially cleanse any debuffs on backstab, or simply give a couple seconds of debuff immunity on backstab.
When it comes to the Kunai though, I've been of the weird opinion that it should be reworked into an "eyelander" style weapon. You'd start at 100 hp, with each backstab increasing it by 10, capping at a +50 bonus (150 hp total). However instead of it giving you an incremental speed bonus per stack, the Kunai would give you incremental bonuses when disguised and cloaked. Though admittedly, this idea could probably just be its own unlock.
I still see the promise of after a back stab your hand is slowed like you stabbed a razer back then the knife needs no stat change at all
for the health down sides 2 and 3 might work 2 needs another downside so that's were 3 comes in
though whenever we talk about rebalancing i think a bit of caution is needed, because some changes are way more complicated to code in than others. though that knockback blast is probably still pretty easy to implement because the jet pack already have code that can be appropriated to make some kind of all around air blast
thanks so much for getting my argument out there laddie
I like that idea of a 360 air blast. It would be annoying to play against, but it would be fun to play with
An idea I had while watching this video was that the Kunai would function like the Eyelander, in that you start with 70 health and gain 35 max health for every backstab until you reach a max of 210, with no speed boost. It's a fun idea and it turns the Kunai into more of a snowball weapon. Just like the eyelander, killing someone at 4 "heads" while not at max health (maybe like 110/210) would heal some HP, in this case 35 HP (145/210).
Sure it invalidates it's own downside, but it takes some time and you only heal 35 hp per stab so chainstabs are harder.
Feeding off bad teammates will still happen by nature of the snowball design, but after every stab you'll be less incentivized to go after them, taking your high HP and going after the good ones.
It keeps you alive after a kill by high HP, but the low stab healing (35 hp) will make chainstabs harder.
What makes this design good is that it's balanced. If you fall for the spy curse and only get 1 or 2 stabs, you're just using a worse stock knife. If you get 3 or 4, it's better. I like Speyelander.
Making it a lot louder on backstabs would do something
My idea for a kunai change was to basically make it a knive version of the eyelander
That won't be fun to fight, at all, and the fact Spy can instantly kill you does not help
You could make it, so that the next time you decloak after a stab you get a temporary damage vulnerability. So you couldn't decloak right behind your target and get away with it, if the team saw you. This would nerf the dead ringer kunai combo and it would require you to akt more, because you might need to wait for you damage vulnerability to run out, while uncloaked. Combined with the idea of the gained health being permanent would make for a great weapon.
0.03 thanks John ultrakill
This sounds like something only sensei wu from ninjago would say but I think the only way reach spys full potential is amby + dead ringer and kunai often referred to as the tryhard loadout. I just think that if there was a robot playing the game absolutely perfectly it would give the most kills in a minute
So I have no idea why, I woke up early and started watching this video like half asleep still. In the midst of him talking about the nerfs and buffs, my brain thought "A smoke bomb would be a cool dead ringer reskin!" to which it promptly followed with thinking about the body being replaced with a cloud of smoke. No idea why I felt the need to share this here but ninja spy go hard!
Very good ideas here! And once again, I've come up with my own dumb little proposed change, except it's for the Dead Ringer as opposed to the Kunai.
A simple one; a 50% decrease to all healing recieved... Including from Kunai backstabs.
One of the main reasons the combo, and the Dead Ringer in general, is so powerful, is the fact a feigned death Spy can just run to the nearest health pack and revert all damage taken, or simply backstab some hapless sap and get all his health back.
With this change, the only way you're getting ALL your health back's from killing a Heavy at max health, plus it makes it so you're more inclined to use the Dead Ringer for its intended purpose of slinking behind enemy lines because the enemy believes you're dead... Or as a nice little safety blanket to get past tough-as-nails defenses. Without a heal-up afterwards, you're vulnerable, especially with the Kunai, so making that regaining of health a bit more lengthy, you've really gotta pick when you decloak and where, as even chip damage is lethal without the means to get all your health back nearly as quick. Large Medkits become Meds, Meds become a bit better than Smalls, and Smalls are your last resort for healing, meaning you have to either try and get to high foot traffic areas and risk getting discovered, try and find a Dispepnser to sit on and pray noone finds you, or hope the HP you get back from a stab'll sustain you in the Kunai's case.
Plus, it's really an underutilized stat.
This, plus a Kunai change, would really make the two more difficult to use together, but not impossible, and definitely more fair.
Mad respect for taking constructive criticism in stride and praising it
Just seems like the knife should be reverted back to now it was. Only heal the amount of health you take from the enemy. U kill someone with 10 health u gain 10 health. U kill a full heavy u gain 150 max
i think if the no overheal decay were to be added, it should make you unable to be overhealed by medic or at least decrease the amount, since your point is that it should be a reward
Not gonna lie, Jon’s weird buff reminded me of the Kai feat from For Honor, for those who don’t hate themselves enough to play for honor, it’s a level one feat on that some of the samurai faction can use that removes everyone’s stamina in a small area around the user, preventing them from attacking or running away.
Given that disguises are one of the spy's main tricks, I think that disabling it entirely is a bit harsh. It would be quite difficult to get the first stab with a kunai if you not only have lower health, but no disguise. That's one reason why I used to not use the YER at all. Instead, maybe mirror the downside of the YER, so that you can disguise, but it consumes a full cloak meter. As stated in the video on knives, that means careful thought to your disguises.
I have an idea, let's make kunai 100 base health and after each backstab, spy's max health will increase with 20 more hp, with five backstabs and 200 hp cap
While we're at it, something that I think would be really sick alongside removing cloak DR is giving the spy its own damage reduction on backstab kills. This would mean that, while they can't run faster like the Big Earner, they could potentially damage surf explosives or a sentry away from the enemy team and rely on the spy's ability to do so instead of just "lmao infinite healing". Even if you do refresh the damage reduction, you don't heal back damage taken and tie it directly to spy's high risk instakill move instead of right-clicking whenever.
You can change the shockwave idea into something like making enemies let out agonized scream and propel themselves away from backstabbed victim. It's more of visual change but I really want the idea to be more comical. Just imagine playing and your character let out a scream then jump away like a scared Looney toon characters xD
Jonto what if the kunai makes you have 220 hp but on backstab you lose 40 hp you cant go lower then 70 hp and you cant heal by medipacks or your medic but the enemy medic CAN heal you simply rewarding good acting and thinking
By "no overheal decay" do you mean it would be like the dolokos bar in which a backstab just temporarily increases your max health?
I mean that would be interesting. Though the more I think about it I realize this wouldn't help much
The way i would change the overheal buff of the kunai would be the same as the eyelander but with a twist, with each stab you increase your maximum hp and you heal up to that maximum hp from whatever hp value you have, but the downside is you cannot be overhealed by this mechanic, nor by medics and the health packs give slightly less hp
I like the shockwave idea!... As long as the spy would loudly scream "yyyoooooo" (like in this Japanese meme)
About Jonto's really weird buff....
it's no longer kunai its whole fucking new weapon with kunai things
Spy owns a gun
If I had to rework the Kunai I would change it's effects to instantly trigger your cloak on backstab, and lower your hp to 100 instead of 70. The instant cloak fits the ninja theme of the knife, contributes to the idea of being a survivor knife without making you tanky, and the forced cloak activation is a both a benefit and a downside, as you have to take the time to manually decloak before you can stab again which prevents chain stabs. Making it effectively the opposite of the Big Earner.
I personally would make the Kunai's health on kill scale with how many kills/assists/damage the killed enemy dealt that life; the specifics of how this would be calculated are kinda up in the air, but it'd completely flip the script on the Kunai's current design incentivizing low-priority targets while encouraging the Spy to be more observant as to who is doing the best on the enemy team so they can maximize their health gain. If you want to be really generous, you could let the Spy see on their hud the enemy's kills/assists/whatever that life as a way to help prioritize targets.