what, no ?
heavy already does an absurd amount of damage once fully spun up, the damage reduction doesn't make as much of a difference as the fact that if you hit a scout he's not gonna be able to move and then you're gonna be able to hit him more, it also lets you stop people from escaping. I think a lot of people would argue that maybe tomislav is better but because of the damage ramp up, the extra deploy speed is largely irrelevant. I always thought minigun was only better because it let you outdps some things that you don't really need to outdps in a 6's environment. The natascha is straight up the best weapon in the slot, it's just not as obvious and not as greatly abused as the jarate.

collaterals aside, the body shot damage this thing does is insane, you'll almost always be able to kill a scout (at least 95% of the time) and most of the time you'll kill a jumping soldier. Obviously you can argue that hitting a full charge body shot means they're probably gonna die anyway but that's just not true. You can fully shut down aggression with a bodyshot but it's pretty hard to get a kill without team assistance/ other team just being dumb. The machina is only a downgrade if you're trying to do some sneaky shit and you miss a shot, you get a much better opportunity at a second/third one and if you're not playing with your team and you need to noscope something, which you can just avoid altogether.

just because something doesn't matter every push doesn't mean it should matter on any push. A charge shot can literally destroy a full advantage push, and it's not something that happens once in a blue moon, it happens fairly regularly. Regardless of whether the shot hits, if the enemy team is aware of it, they're forced to wait for the shot, which slows down the game and since you're never going to use the charge shot in a place that will increase the tempo of the game and instead only as a spam tool that's basically entirely dependent on whether the enemy team is aware of it and therefore pretty random.
The damage to sentry's is largely irrelevant because on quite a few maps having one player with the cow mangler makes ammo management significantly easier and often times one soldier is enough to kill a sentry and then on top of that the number of situations where a chargeshot + 1 soldier spam wouldn't have accomplished what double soldier spam would've is basically zero.
I also don't think really understand how important ammo is in tf2, like obviously if you're low you're going to need to pick some up but having an infinite amount basically means you never have to stop spamming and you never have to hold rockets. If there isn't spam it's pretty easy to run through a choke and take a fight, not even necessarily as a team. For instance, sometimes you could run a scout through granary garage to take a 185 v 200 hp 1v1 in left yard when the soldier stops shooting. If that soldier has infinite ammo that's basically impossible because he's never gonna stop looking at it.

obviously the changes to the whitelist were, at least in some ways, motivated by community opinion but if you're gonna not ban weapons that the community favors banning at least have solid and accurate reasoning, which doesn't seem to be the case.

holy fucking shit

for long term and for extended gaming sessions it's not just preference

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7ngNOsGPSI

I thought this was already a rule ?

unless you force your team to play really stalematey or you're in a stalemate situation banners are not usually a --sidegrade--, especially on roamer. Paintrain isn't really useful at all besides a few cases on gullywash and badlands.

There are a fuckton of weapons in this game that basically aren't usuable, people don't complain that they can't use those. Just because an item is stock doesn't mean it's the best designed item in that slot. That tends to be the trend but it's not necessarily true.

vaccinator and rescue ranger should be banned because they actually slow down the game and punish people for trying to push

I think the decline of TF2 has had very little to do with how the community has handled itself recently. TF2 peaked right before the csgo skins update and before the first international, after that there's been a slow decline because TF2 isn't it the only game in existence. Overwatch has introduced a true competitor to tf2, something that didn't exist before. Through all this tf2's playerbase has declined a bit and it's competitive community has also declined a bit, especially since it's been painfully obvious that to many people that the game isn't going to suddenly blow up.

Tf2's decline has nothing to do with the crossbow "slowing down the game" (which it doesn't). I think it's important to remind people that correlation does not mean causation.

I want to also state the only thing close to a valid argument for crossbow being banned was one of Marxist's posts, which in itself was anything but convincing. I think at this point it's really difficult to argue that crossbow makes the game worse, certainly different but this whole "ban crossbow" thing really seems like a matter of opinion. It also seems like the majority of people would prefer the crossbow unbanned, especially for those who have actually played since the crossbow was released.

A lot of these "ban crossbow" posts show fundamental misunderstanding of how the game works and how one play is not always THE play. So if everyone could chill with spamming the forums with these threads that'd be great thanks.

I thought we dispelled this myth
the strawberry mangoes roster finished 5th (free, paddie, muma) which is the only set of "good-but-not-top-invite" b4nny has picked up recently
arekk finished 4th on luca goers and 3rd on bird noises
nursey finished 4th on luca goers and 2nd on ascent
habib finished 4th on luca and 3rd on froyo black
blaze was in a somewhat comparable situation when he was picked up
4th on area 51, 3rd on br0 x2, 3rd on tri hards

unless you classify "top invite" as being on teams placing 1-2, in which case blaze does not qualify, b4nny has picked up top invite players that just happen to not be on the top2 teams

yo 4 real tho freestate's a fucking homie
gl in your life dan you're awesome af

gnome

I'm glad I didn't decide to stay up for hte second set
was super hype to watch tho

https://clips.twitch.tv/DependableFineHamsterTinyFace

The cow mangler and the jarate are straight upgrades and straight dumb

having infinite ammo is straight up dumb on a large number of maps (for instance, if you don't run it on granary you are at a MASSIVE disadvantage). On top of all that, the charge shot is just unnecessary and janky. It's just free spam unless you're doing it at dumb times and it can literally decide fights as all it takes to eat one is a minor fuckup because oftentimes you can't see/hear it.

The jarate just slows down the game, oftentimes if you're jarate'd you just have to wait for it to go away.

I really wanted both of these to be banned last season and I still want them banned.

I've been around for awhile, I'm familiar with the mechanics of the game with/without the xbow. (I started out playing roamer when shotgun was still a thing)
I'm not particularly advocating for or against the crossbow, I think the game is fantastic both with and without it but I do think a lot of the arguments being made on both are quite shortsighted.

To start, obviously crit heals are one of the best mechanics in the game, for obvious reasons and there should almost definitely be some sort of mechanic to make crossbows affected by crit heals. In the current state however, crit heals still play a huge in buffs, and I think some people are gonna argue that because you can get arrowed, you don't need to get buffed but that's distinctly false. For instance, on scout, although a quick love tap when you have crit heals gets you to 185, I think any scout main could attest to how powerful a 185 health scout is compared to a 125 health one. On roamer, 300 hp at the beginning of a fight can help you push spam or win a 1v1.

The amount of healing that crossbow puts out is actually absurd for the most part. You can fully heal a team at close range significantly faster and obviously arrow building adds a layer of unpredictability to the game that just shouldn't exist (often times the only way to know if a team has been arrow building is them to counterpop an uber on you). Despite all this, in most of the "important" situations to hit an arrow, it's actually pretty damn hard, obviously takes quite a bit of skill and oftentimes involves making a decision on whether to give out guaranteed heals to a target that may actually need it, or to take the risk to shoot the arrow, which is something that people seem to be ignoring. Obviously there are arrows that are just free that can save a player/team with bad coordination and decision making but, in general, that's what good aim in tf2 does. Arrows actually give medic a much greater ability to carry based on their mechanics just like any other class can.

I hope everyone knows that the crossbow is pretty damn complicated and I don't feel like I can really give a coherent argument one way or another in a forum post but I really hope people don't just attribute something to being dumb because it's mechanically based or rewarding coordination.

When it comes to soldier, I think it's pretty much inarguable that they're the class that receives the most arrows by a large margin. In combination with gunboats they can actually reenter a fight, obviously without a buff, which is something that only scout could really do at all before the crossbow. I see a couple of people arguing that damage you do has less meaning because of arrows and I really disagree with that, I just think that it means you need to be more on your toes as a team if you want to full commit in one moment, or play fights in a way that you, as one player, can follow up rather than initiate (which is something a lot of roamers have done regardless of xbow -> ma3la, purpleshirt, seagull, drack). Basically what I'm saying if you think that crossbow makes your damage more meaningless, and I know people might present some salt to this, but maybe, just play better? I know I'm not everyone but as every class in the game I've never personally felt like I was being ineffective and completely powerless as a player simply because the unlock made my damage worse. I've always felt like I could play in a way that circumvents the xbow, just as you can play in a way that exploits the medigun in the way you listed.

Like I said, I don't think I'm doing this argument justice. I guess to some up my overall opinion though, the crossbow in its current form is quite powerful and needs some adjustment but I don't know if it's so powerful that it breaks the game like some people think it does because it definitely adds quite a bit to the game and it's by no means a skill-less, brainless weapon like some people think it is. If anyone has any questions or like counterarguments to anything I've said, I'll try to address them because I want people to understand the game well enough to make accurate opinions about the crossbow.

Direct hit