Enter a ripped-off door from a high security vault. It’s alt-fire lowers it in front of the Heavy, protecting him from all projectiles except explosives aimed from the front. This slows him to about the same speed as he would be when firing his Minigun, and he can only see through a small viewing slit at the front.

This could be a replacement for the fists, where it never scores crits but sends targets flying upwards/back, or have the shotgun or a rilfe wedged into a slit at the front, so he can fight back whilst protected.

Or, better yet, he could have a small sheild on his minigun, so he is protected from shots from the front, but the fact that the sheild is bolted onto the rotating drum means that the bullet dispersal is increased slightly. Or maybe it doesn’t score crits. Whatever.

That aside, I’m really liking the “Burst-fire” idea from the Steam forums. Since the heavy’s personality will probably limit the change to an attachment/adjustment to Sasha, a burst-fire mode would fit well.

Roller-skates that allow him to travel quickly, but not to stop quickly. In effect, I would recommend turning him into a vehicle with momentum. Medics won’t be able to keep up with him at full speed, so this doesn’t stack with the medic. It makes him more effective without the medic because he can escape from battle more quickly. There is also the basic novelty of the different mode of movement, with the player having to keep track of speeding up and speeding down, so that he doesn’t fly right past the point into the group of defending enemies. It would be easy to use, but hard to master, increasing the necessity of knowing just when to pull out of the battle; you’re more likely to survive if you have enough time for your skates to accelerate. Also, if the heavy hits a wall or solid object at a certain speed, he will suffer damage akin to that received in a fall from height. The downside of the skates would be the skill required in maneuvering with them, and that the minigun recoil would propel the heavy backwards, so that he cannot effectively fire the minigun unless he is against a wall. However, this recoil could be used to the heavy’s advantage, as if he fires the minigun while retreating, he could go very fast.

Perhaps if we had something that re-routed medic power to something a heavy can use later for solo-ing…?

Sorry Pentadact but as much as I enjoy your idea, I think your edited idea is going too far. He should just drop his weapons, say something like “FORGIVE ME SASHA, I RUN NOW!”, and have increased speed. He could pick his gun up again, but only has the same amount of time to fetch it as when guns are usually left on the ground.

Some sort of helmet or face mask that physicall impairs your vision (have to look through eye-holes of some sort that block a small part of the screen) but protects you from all critical hits. Has no effect when being healed. Arguable whether this can be taken off/on during a round.

Minigun has vampiric bullets that return small amount of health after you have been continually firing (and hitting enemies) for several seconds. Has no effect when being healed.

Minigun slowly builds up a charge of (something) after firing (and hitting enemies) that builds up over time to give the heavy a small armour boost. Up to a maximum. Charge doesn’t build up when being healed and any built up armour is ignored when being healed.

That and more automated melee taunts and we’re set. “SASHA WOULD BE WASTED ON YOU, LEETLE MAN!”

About the weapon recovery thing though: there are 3 options.
1. Heavy can recover weapons by picking up any ammo
2. Heavy needs to pick up a dropped minigun (doesn’t need to be his, it could be a dead enemy’s)
3. As a corollary to option 2: Heavy must recover Sasha within N seconds or he needs to pick up a dropped minigun.

The aim is to boost his solo effectiveness so that it doesn’t lag so far behind that of a Heavy Medic pair. In my opinion there should still be a benefit to teaming up with a Medic, otherwise you’re actually discouraging teamwork and confusing the Medic.

Also, Pentadact: POW! HAHA!

Perhaps the same model with an addition: a little note that says “No touch”?

Lulz, J3553, the site you’re talking about is chris’s

What we need is something that makes him average with a medic and average without one.

The fist taunt should do some damage. An instant kill if valve’s willing to risk it.

This may make Heavies think they don’t want a medic, but there is no damage penalty or nerf for getting healed. The Heavy is simply more powerful doing what he does: taking the hits.

The ammo box thing is not that overpowered, in my opinion. You get less ammo if you quick-release from spawn to get to an ammo box, and at the very least I’m sure if they can program a speed boost for the quick-release rather than just using all of your ammo, they can program the Heavy getting less ammo from an ammo box coming off of a quick-release if need be. As for sneaking behind enemy lines and picking up an ammo box there, I think that would both be really cool and difficult to actually pull off; even at Demoman speeds, he’s still a Heavy, and it would be particularly hard to miss a Heavy trying to dash past your defenses. There might be some balance issues as well if a Heavy uses the quick-release to speed from ammo box to ammo box, but I think it wouldn’t be too overpowering and would also be pretty cool.

That said, you’re right, the personality issue is the biggest problem. Of course, you could say that it’s probably the biggest problem with the quick-release in the first place; the Heavy is not really the type of person to drop Sasha just to run away.

Punjab – funny you should mention that, I did originally link to them too, but then I noticed they still don’t have a post about this.

Neoviper – the problem is not so much realism as personality. The Heavy’s relationship with Sasha is too personal to find her in every ammo box, and as roBurky notes, it’d encourage Heavy’s to simply discard her right out the gate and get a new one closer to the front lines.

Obviously there’s a milder version of that conceptual difficulty in him grabbing one from the supply closet, but for some reason that doesn’t feel wrong to me – it’s presumably where he gets her in the first place. Also, look over there! A badger!

It’s an ace idea, but I don’t think it’ll work.

Another idea is you could have the heavy take normal damage from crit shots when he’s below 25% health, it gives him a higher probability of getting to a health source before death, and you could combine it with the quick-release bandolier.

Alternatively, you could allow him to take less damage from everything when he’s below half health, although that does make things easier for the medic-heavy combo, because things like crit rockets and stickies will bring a heavies health below that even while he’s being healed.

I’d like to see an improvement/replacement for his shotgun, because it seems like once a heavy runs out of ammo for sasha, he’s pretty much done. His offensive capability is severly decreased at that point, and with his current weapon set he has virtually no medium to long range capability at all, which makes him easy prey for even the slowest of snipers, and his slow movement speed just makes that even more so.

I play the Xbox 360 version myself, but the biggest problem with the heavy is that without medic backup he tends to get anihilated quite quickly, especially with the sheer amount of snipers and soldiers that get used on maps like 2fort (my usual stomping ground). I’d probably come up with more ideas if I were a regular heavy player, but I favour scouts and demos mostly, with the occasional spy or soldier as necessary.

http://www.filecram.com/files/ctf_2fort0046.jpg

Thanks for the suggestions. As for when/how the uber chance is calculated, I was thinking it would be at most once per second. I think that’s how crits work: with automatic weapons, you don’t have an independent chance to crit with every bullet, but each second of fire has a 5% chance to be critical. So this check would be made each time you’re hit, unless you’ve already been hit this second. I wanted to tie it to incoming fire rather than outgoing so that you’ll sometimes see an incoming rocket trigger the uber exactly as it hits, which would look kind of cool.

Anon: Yeah, I thought about that. I didn’t want the Heavy to be able to use this ability to dash past enemies using his enormous health as a buffer, then nab an ammo back behind their lines and come out blazing. Of course, now that I write that, it sounds awesome. But probably overpowered, right?

The other option is not to allow anyone to steal Sasha – they get ammo for walking over it, but it doesn’t vanish from the ground. I didn’t go with that initially because it has understandability issues – or more work, if you want to give Sasha a different appearence on the ground to indicate that she’s not stealable. I also wanted this to be a less attractive gambit the further from your own base you are, so that sometimes you really don’t want to do it. And I want a voice sample along the lines of “I COME BACK FOR YOU!” as he drops her.

anyway, onto the suggestion. my idea is a minigun, that once you’re almost dead, will heal you back up at about dispenser speed. the catch is you have to not get hurt for 5 seconds before it starts healing you, and if you get hurt during the heal it stops for another 5 seconds without being hit. this would perfectly boost up solo heavy ability, but not at all impact medic and heavy pairs. It would probably have to cost ammo to heal, but heavy generally swims in ammo from all the kills he gets, so shouldn’t duly affect him.

had several other ideas, but most of them weren’t really applicable to the heavy. on the steam topic about this, there were a lot of good ideas, one in particular i liked was the heavy jamming minigun ammo into his shotgun, to do more damage, but slow reload time or something like that.

Which I think brings me to an improvement on your idea, that instead of being forced to pick up Sasha or go to the Resupply Closet to regain the weapons, you simply need to pick up an ammo box. If the Heavy actually chooses to drop his weapons, then the firefight in that area is getting so fierce that he is not likely to come back and get his gun, and running back to the spawn and then coming back at normal speeds is not much better than just dying and respawning. Conversely, ammo boxes are generally much closer to the action, making the Quick-Release more likely to happen, while also giving a disadvantage in that [I believe] ammo boxes give relatively pitiful amounts of ammo for the Heavy’s weapons. Even better, this encourages Heavies who have quick-released to hunt down and punch out an enemy so that they can pick up the fallen weapon for the ammo, and who wouldn’t want to see that?

If it happened on incoming fire, the heavy would become more powerful with more people shooting at him, which is a bit counter-intuitive for dealing with a heavy.

I wouldn’t have the healing beam simply fail to work at all on the heavy, though (you say not while he’s firing, but that’s pretty much the same thing). I really don’t think that was what was meant when it was said heavy+medic shouldn’t be made more powerful.

I think your uberminigun should simply stop healing effects on the heavy for the second he has his miniuber. So when fighting with a medic buddy, it becomes a pause in the tug of war with the heavy’s health, rather than an opportunity to heal up.