Comments on: Valve Decided Against The Overhealer

By: Jason L

Jason L — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:11:18 +0000

Didn’t TF Original have a slow-moving, arcy Syringe Gun which killed slowly but inevitably after one hit? Seems somewhat similar to a Leech Gun, although making Uber work with it might be difficult. Actually, I bet it has at least a conceptual similarity to Action Quake Knife…?

By: Pentadact

Pentadact — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 19:14:48 +0000

Nothing wrong with things that alter the game balance, so long as they don’t… make it rubbish. I’d been thinking about a negative-healer too – it feels like it’d be fun – but not as a replacement Medigun. I’d replace the Syringe Gun with it, so it’s only ever a backup weapon. I hadn’t thought about letting it charge Uber; might be quite a nice risk/reward thing, given that the more Uber you have the less you want to risk your life. But I wouldn’t want to incentivise an alternative to healing people who need it, and it might do that.

One interesting debuff for a Medic unlock would be to prevent it from gaining ubercharge by healing people above their normal maximum, so that it would only get you anywhere when you healed people who really needed it.

By: ChrisL

ChrisL — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 23:43:54 +0000

I was trying to think up some unlocks for medics (and other classes as well). It’s hard to come up with things that wouldn’t fundamentally alter the game balance. Like a Leech Gun, or something, would be fun — sort of the opposite of the medigun, it slowly drains the health of an enemy to fill your uber — but it almost turns the medic into a pyro in a lot of ways.

By: Pentadact

Pentadact — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 23:22:31 +0000

Yeah, that happened while I was away, and I thought the forums would be full of fireworks and bunting. I’ve played Soldier since, though, and it seemed the same to me: I still got an absurd number of crits.

The formula for how crits are intended to work is biased towards the most damaging classes, rather than the most useful or highest scoring, and the stats show exactly what you’d think: Soldiers do the most damage by some margin.

By: WeakLemonDrink

WeakLemonDrink — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 17:35:21 +0000

Haing you seen in the latest update that they’re fixeda bug that means Soldiers and Demomen were getting higher rates of critical hits? This seems to have been skimmed over a little bit, but I think it’s time to shout from the rooftops that us moaning minnies complaining about the Soldier having a near God-like power actually had a point.

By: Pentadact

Pentadact — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 13:01:23 +0000

Er, I may have oversold it a little. Most people focus on the idea that everyone would have been running around with double-health, and that’s my fault: Valve stressed that they hadn’t settled for sure on those figures, and I reported them anyway. There didn’t seem another way of communicating the severity of the changes they were talking about.

My thing about the Medic is, he’s not fun enough for people to play him as often as they play the Engy, but he’s so powerful that he’s every bit as essential to success. So often success is just a case of which side has more people prepared to sacrifice their real class preference to go Medic and help the team.

The Overhealer seemed like it would make him even more essential to the team, and even less fun to play: you lose the one moment of true joy the Medic has right now – Ubercharge – and add a whole lot more holding down fire on friends so they can go out and have more fun than you.

Overall, I’d like to see the Medic become more fun and slightly less essential. In terms of unlocks, I’d like to see some that cater to what roBurky plays – what the Control Point guys call a Shadow Medic (after the more aggressive build of Priest in World of Warcraft). Medics who take breaks from healing to bonesaw the surviving enemies, hunt Spies, pick Scouts out of the air.

I have a couple of ideas for this, actually – there’s a big old Unlocks post in my drafts folder I’ve been adding to for ages, I should probably make it live.

roBurky: I’m assuming people won’t usually want to link to me linking other people, but the Comments link still takes you there, after a fashion.

By: roburky

roburky — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 08:56:22 +0000

But how do you get to the specific page for a blog entry if you can’t click on the title?

By: The_B

The_B — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 06:04:21 +0000

Is it too early to make a ‘Tom Fortress 2’ quip yet?

By: ChrisL

ChrisL — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 04:33:46 +0000

Well, I’d still like to hear your reason and eloquence.

By: EViL HULiO

EViL HULiO — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 23:07:07 +0000

Wow, this is news out of no where. The overhealer sounded cool, if a little over powered. Guess we are going to have to wait even longer for the update now..

By: Pentadact

Pentadact — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 18:53:56 +0000

By the way, I’ve just tweaked James’ master code to make the titles of Link posts links to the links. Because I kept clicking on them, dumbly expecting a behaviour I hadn’t coded.