I thought about this because I came up with an ‘interceptor gun’ as a possible unlock, interestingly I dismissed the idea of a slowdown gun as being really annoying for all the other players.

Thanks for the tip, Dzamir – looks like they’re all either what we thought, or the most obvious explanation. Rasputin is superb, though.

Look at comment 109 of this 1fort post: http://www.1fort.com/blog/my-commenters-ruin-tf2/#more-226

“Unlockable Number One:

Natasha: A little while ago Robin Walker posted a blog (entitled “A Heavy Problem”) that asked readers to come up with a weapon that would make the Heavy more effective when no Medic is availible . My suggestion is Natasha (ideas for other names would be appreciated), an alternative Minigun which drains health from enemies it hits. It is unable to fire critical hits and also has a slight damage reduction.”

As you can see, I suggested that the minigun replacement should be named Natasha. I also posted a thread on the official Team Fortress 2 forums: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=709534

I’m realy pleased by this and honoured that Valve used my idea.

By the way, Andrew, when I came across your site in my Incoming Links stats a few days ago, I couldn’t figure out where you’d linked me. Just curious.

I suspect, based on the above evidence, that this ability will be to destroy stickies – either placed or in flight. This may also be extended to rockets and/or grenades.

This gives the HWG an increased measure of defense against Demos (and maybe soldiers), while still leaving his vulnerability to snipers, spies and pyros with Backburner intact.

Eye of the Tiger training montage of the Heavy learning to use his Killing Gloves of Boxing.

I hope you aren’t suggesting the Heavy is a newbie’s class LITTLE MAN

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism

As for the “Sypalectical Materialism” thing I think it is just a fancy way of saying kill X amount of invisible spies. I prefer my “If it bleeds we can kill it” title for that achievement though…What does Sypalectical even mean.. I understand it’s a play on a word but I can’t figure out what that word is.

“Think Ghostbusters” The new gattling gun is like some sort of ray gun like in Ghostbusters, perhaps even “trapping” (Tom’s hobbler thing) the victim by slowing him down, or your secondary weapon is Peter Venkman.

“Think Popeye”.. maybe the sandwich thing is coming true and the heavy gets more powerful or something like when Popeye eats his spinach. Which sounds lame in my opinion.

Some anti-spy measure would actually be nice for the fatty… but it seems to me he’d have to suffer greater vulnerability to straight combat classes to make that worthwhile.

“Crock block”.. hah.. i like that.

It’s one of the early Heavy concepts, which had a mullet. So that’s either a throwaway reference or they’ll be bringing in alternate skins, maybe?

Also, good to see the “Pow!” taunt is getting the insta-kill treatment.

Probably the shot-unlock will be a sandwich (i saw that suggestion on the steam forums) that heals the HW when he eats it! (or NOT!) :b

The new game mode is capture the sandwich???

People, like me, want to give him an anti-headshot shield – either a mask or helmet applied to the headbox, or a hitbox that can be put in front of the head along a certain vector. The whole idea is to give him some way of stepping out a door or walking past a window without dying instantly to a person in a known or cliched position. Again, something like holding Sasha up in front of his head – can’t shoot, can’t see well, still sucks up damage to his legs or exposed parts of his body if anyone’s around, still gets blasted if a Sniper’s someplace clever, but he can make the one-second trek across a window without getting plinked again by that camper his teammates won’t turf out.

I don’t know where you speculated that before, Doc, but if it was here I probably replied saying “Yes! Exactly!” Even if he weren’t more vulnerable to the two assassin classes, the fact that he’s so much less vulnerable to the others increases the percentage of his deaths that make him pound his mousemat with rage. And people want to give him a shield?

Dante: you’ve hit the nail on the head. The skill/deadliness curve on the demoman is all out of whack. At low skill, you’re useless, then at high skill, you’re unbeatable. The stats are thrown off because there are just more low-skill players out there than high-skill players. (This also explains why heavy is on the top of the chart.) So Valve is faced with quite a problem: how to nerf the demoman for skilled players WITHOUT making him even more untenable for newbies.

It’s a shame there’s no percentage of total kills chart, by class or by weapons. The only useful chart is the percentage of total damage, which is predictably topped by two classes that tend to do damage to everyone they fight, whether they win or not: Soldiers and Pyros.

Demomen, on the other hand, tend to either kill their opponent or be killed before they can bring their weapons to bear. Certainly more so than Pyros, Soldiers or Heavies, so their chunk of the total /kills/ will be higher relative to their chunk of the total damage.

But look at their total damage. This is done by weapon, not class. Grenade Launcher plus Sticky Bombs comes to 21%, beating even the Soldier’s Rocket Launcher. His shotgun adds less than one percent to that figure, so overall Demomen are doing more of the total damage than any other class.

As I say, the Soldier and Pyro are constantly damaging people they don’t kill, so their kill counts are far lower than their damage counts suggest. I don’t think that’s true of the Demoman – I’m hurt by them only slightly more often than I’m killed by them. And still, their damage count is higher than either of the two Kings o’ Damage.

Not that it really matters. Even if the stats didn’t show the Demoman to be devastatingly powerful, what I’d like to see a change to is how he delivers that damage.

Edit: You replied making pretty much the point I started making to you, so I’ve snipped that from the top of this comment. And: pics lol!

As for the ubercharged guy, the way he falls flat is with: “The demoman is a master class-and that’s how it should be.” I’m sorry, no, there shouldn’t be one class which dominates with experience and is rubbish to noobs, that’s not balanced, not fair and not interesting. It makes the game more exclusive, and one of the thing I love about TF2 is that you can get into it without having the insane twitch reflex skills so many other online shooters require.

As for the stats, well they just confirm that the Heavy is awesome, fine by me if no-one else wants to play him, then I have him all to myself.

I like this quote: “The demoman would then be forced to use the sticky launcher to set up traps all the time”.

I’m against a damage nerf for fireworks (Stickies detonated mid-air) as it stands, because I don’t think the same explosion should do different damage amounts in different circumstances.

What you could do is have Stickies that grow in size and power during the second or two after they leave the barrel, with an escalating hum, until they are MAXIMUM POWERFUL.

Edit: Duhh. That’s, like, the second comment on the Ubercharged.net article.

Also! I’ve just remembered I can edit comments.

http://steamgames.com/status/tf2/tf2_stats.php

They don’t really tally with the general feeling of the community. The demoman is firmly in the middle in terms of kills, and oddly enough the Heavy, who even Valve think is underpowered tops both the kills and points per hour charts.

Of course he’s still one of the least played, something I can’t adequately explain myself.

Also, any timesplitters players remember the virus mode? I’d love to see something that captured the terror of rounding a corner to see a monkey on fire rushing at you in TF2. It’s a pity it wouldn’t really fit with the team aspect. Still….BLU are infected and must besiege RED. RED can do 125% damage BUT if a BLU player touches them they are infected and will change teams after 30 seconds unless they get to a health pack or a friendly medic. I’d remove the spy, scout and medic class from BLU because scouts and medics are faster than all the other classes and spys can just cloak and bump into everyone. RED loses when all the team are in BLU. BLU loses after a time limit is up. Also, to prevent spawn camping, BLU can enter the RED spawn. Hmmmm….could be a little complicated making it fair….Still love to see the virus mode though….

Confession: normally I quite like ubercharged.net. But this article is very poorly thought out, almost to the level of commentary on the steampowered forums. So I’ll say this quite slowly:

That situation you describe, where you launch a sticky straight at someone and detonate it in their face?

THAT’S WHAT YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO USE THE GRENADE LAUNCHER FOR.

Stickies, as the name implies, are defined by the fact that they stick to things. If you think the “core mechanic” or “fundamental technique” of the sticky launcher doesn’t involve sticking the bombs to things, that just proves that there’s a major flaw in the weapon design. It’s on the shotgun slot; it’s supposed to be a secondary weapon for laying traps and annihilating fixed positions, NOT a direct fire device.

The suggestion of nerfing midair damage is actually a good one. For good or ill people are used to midair stickies by now. But “10%, tops” is a retarded, arbitrary number, and he should have just said what he was thinking: “It better not actually change anything.” NO. It should be nerfed to a point where playtesters go for the grenades rather than the stickies in a direct combat situation.

I would have thought that posting a few of your stats for each class would be obligatory when writing an article of that type. Apparently I was wrong.