3681

Well, soldiers can still use the old gear to spam, so that part of the gameplay won’t be going away immediately. As for the Direct Hit, it sounds like it’ll be less useful in close quarters, where the splash damage is important. Interestingly, it makes the soldier less risky to use against pyros and their airblasts.

The ‘/’ key takes you directly to the loadout screen, but yes, I find mid-match loadout switching to be a bit of a chore.

  • Alan
3682

All the rest.

3683

Achievements look hard in normal play.

3684

Nice to see Pentadact getting some pimpage for his efforts at game design, he’ll cross the battle lines one day.

The demoman’s new sticky launcher seems like it might work similarly to the direct hit for the soldier in that it encourages advanced play over simplicity. I can already envision picking it to cover all entrances while defending in gravel pit. As long as you can be reasonably precise with the regular launcher then I don’t see losing airbursts or the longer priming rate as being too damaging. I wonder how accurate the vison cone of detonation is, people who were hoping for less sticky spam are going to be very disappointed though :) Twice as many bombs!

Equalizer for the soldier sounds great, I love last gasp charges and its going to make the soldier invaluable for suicidal charges on crowded points like gravel pit C. Wonder if that 200 damage works with a kritzkrieg?

Buff banner also sounds great as it gives people another ingame reason to pull together for an assault in the same way that a triggered medic gun does. Got to be more fun to have around than a regular old shotgun anyways, I’d say its a definite take.

EDIT:

Wonder what this soldier achievement is:

Spray of Defeat
Use a grenade to gib a player.

New taunt?

3685

Could just be making the taunt on the rocket launcher lethal. Not sure how it would kill someone to juggle grenades near them, though.

3686

I love the new weapons. They’re trying to make people use the classes more intelligently and as teams, which is great.

Congratulations to Tom/Pentadact. You’ll have to tell us what’s special about your Equalizer now.

3687

Maybe as he’s juggling the grenades he drops one lol.

3688

Given the name, maybe if you use your spray while taunting?

3689

From the e-mail that was sent to the other community member (Jibberish) credited with coming up with the concept for the Equalizer.

This weapon also has the Soldier’s associated kill taunt. When you taunt with the Equalizer he will toss the weapon aside, remove one of his chest grenades, and blow himself and any enemies nearby sky high. (The taunt anim plays at a slow speed like other kill taunts, so it isn’t trivial to pull it off. The damage radius is very tight as well.)

And on another note…

…we meet again Mr. Myre!

-Bert
XOXOXO

3690

Soldier wins! I’m torn between hopping on to check out the new update or cowering away in fear of the free weekend horde.

3691

Ugh. So this is completely useless now, right? Goddamn whiners.

Edit: Whoops, the old truncated patch notes trick again. “All shorter hits now force the enemy into the thirdperson fleeing state (also removed the damage reduction on them)” Still lame, but not nearly as bad.

3692

This update is like a mutated leprechaun surrounded by funhouse mirrors, shitting a rainbow of every imaginable color in 42 different dimensions.

3693

Acquisition rate of items is now through the roof as you use similar weapons of class or slots to craft items (metal to use or special class slots or other goodies). I haven’t gotten to that second level yet but have made a few items (Class Token - Scout or Slot Token - PDA2 or Scrap Metal for instance). When you get enough to move up the tier I imagine you can randomly craft something from those items and maybe get something. So I figure you need certain amount of refined metal (which is in the third tier I think), and a Slot and Class token, to craft something.

Craft server seems to be going up and down though. This may or may not be related to the fact that currently I can’t move items around in my inventory in the crafting screen, use any sorting function, or have the moved about items in inventory save when I leave (I didn’t use any of this before so maybe this was broken for awhile, I dunno).

Oh yeah the sword & shield combo for Demos… holy crap. They can really dominate capture points and the cart like crazy. So far I’ve seen them really dominate rushes.

— Alan

3694

This internet is a small place eh? We really should get around to building an extension out back.

The new maps sound great and I can’t wait to try out sword charging and head lopping. Happy to see that the final item is fairly non-exciting so I won’t be missing out when I run around with my new giant sword.

3695

I played for thirty minutes and I experienced the following:

Cannot change class ("," does nothing)
Cannot change loadout (loadout screen doesn’t save changes)
Cannot join team (says I’m dead, “.” does nothing)
Server lost connection to Steam, then reconnected

All in all, pretty standard for an update weekend. Guess I’ll wait until the usual post update update.

Also, about 3/4 of the players already had all the soldier unlocks, but I saw none of the demoman unlocks (though not for a lack of demoman players).

3696

I saw more than plenty. All my later sessions however the reward rate dropped dramatically.

— Alan

3697

I love this update. Did have some server problems for a bit, then they cleared up. Got about fifteen drops during the night.

This thread gives a few more crafting recipes over the basic ones. Essentially, you need 81 weapons to craft a random hat or 112 to craft a random class-specific hat. Or if you have duplicate hats, you can just craft two of them into a (hopefully) new hat. Or you can turn 11 weapons into a class- and slot-specific weapon to try and get a missing unlock. Like that damn ubersaw.

3698

I saw scrap metal dropping by itself too, so at least you aren’t forced to entirely rely on getting those 3x duplicates.

I never really got into playing pyro much, but it’s hilarious right now and an awesome opportunity to practice airburst skills. Rediscovering a class you thought you sucked at is always a wonderful feeling.

3699

Impossible to get into a game last night, jeezus.

3700

I’m not certain if the crafting materials actually drop or not. If you craft them during a match then they show up in the chat channel as drops.