It seems little disappointing that the Huntsman doesn’t do anything with the pin except on death. It’d be neat if having the arrows sticking out of them would, for example, decloak spies by leaving a blood trail, or something like that.
I guess it’s tradeoff is lower range / arc vs. quicker crit charge? They did say they wanted to get the Sniper a little more engaged with his enemies, a little less long range insta-kill, so I guess this makes sense. Maybe the bow will also have less slowdown / zoom when zoomed, making it more reasonable to try to go closer as well.
I’m not seeing a scope on that thing, so my guess is at least some of the tradeoff is a lack of zoom. On the other hand, that probably means no giveaway dot, so that’s awesome too.
Day 2 of the Sniper Update is up, showing off the Payload Race tease given during the Scout Update.
Also, two new Arena maps for BobJustBob.
Day 3: The Razorback, a 1 use anti-backstab shield. I assume this replaces the machine gun, sort of like the sandvich trades off with the shotgun.
Very interesting. For one, it looks like this might be a passive item, that doesn’t get equipped, but instead is active any time you’re carrying it. That would be a totally new use case. I can’t really see it working otherwise (the whole point of a backstab is you don’t know it’s coming, so having time to switch to it seems unlikely). But the sniper would still be vulnerable to the Spy’s handgun, which does reasonable damage on its own, so snipers aren’t totally immune to their sneak attacks, and without a machine gun, the sniper’s now bringing a knife to a gun fight.
Edit: Also, it disables the spy’s knife for a while, so that’s another new behavior. Interesting stuff.
I really hope that shield doesn’t replace the machine gun. If so: Not good enough Valve.
sluggo
2948
That Payload race looks SWEEEET.
Hunty
2949
So what does everybody make of the spy popping up on the update page? RPS has further details - I’d link but am posting from my phone. Seems to be something afoot. Perhaps a stealthy double update?
As said in the comments on RPS:
“The update is a spy!”
Had I not seen the image without him, I’d assume it was a joke about the one-stab nature of the shield (I wonder, can it be replenished in the armory? Or is it one per spawn?).
But if he’s just popping up randomly, well, who knows? I doubt it’d be a feign death clue, though, which is, let’s faceless, useless in TF2. People will shoot any corpse until it explodes, and when DON’T you explode on death?
I could see it used as a combination effect. Drop a decoy as you cloak, perhaps? That would actually do something useful.
Also, as required by memetic law, “SPAH’S SAPPIN’ MAH UPDATE!”
I could see them releasing a simultaneous sniper/spy update. The two classes kinda go together. And unlike the other updates where the page was formatted with blank days so we knew exactly how it would be before the update, this one isn’t. So they could roll out the spy stuff after we’ve seen all the sniper stuff.
Andrew
2953
Spy update!
http://www.teamfortress.com/spyupdate/
fake corpse, permanent invisibility (when you don’t move)
Insane theories one, regular theories a billion.
Infinite cloak and an automatic feigned death on hit? That’s awesome. Plus Valve has avoided the insanity of having everyone play sniper post-update by making sure every server will be half sniper and half spy.
Yes. I cannot wait to see the other Spy stuff. What a great way to balance out the numbers of snipers on normal servers when the update drops. Kudos, Valve!
Although, the jury is still out on whether or not this update will have longevity. All the others have brought me back to the game for maybe a day before quitting again.
I’m going to assume that spy page was written by Chet, because it’s fucking hilarious.
Sounds like he has the longevity problem, if you know what I mean.
Ridiculous, maybe. But I want a camera beard now.
