Declined More FF2 suggestions.

Please see this as an alternative suggestion thread to this one by Enrimeus.

First of all, I might be a bit biased. I used to play FF2 a lot (and when I say a lot I mean a lot) on a different community, which has since then shut down its FF2 server due to lack of players. Some of the most fun I have had in TF2 was on that server, so I have seen these suggestions in action for a very long time.


1. Taunting for crits
It feels like this mechanic makes no sense. You get approximately 2 seconds of crits after taunting, which is not even enough to fire 3 shots for most classes. The only class that gets a real benefit from this is the Demoman to lay down crit stickies. Everyone else is kind of left out.

Note: the following notes for each class assume that you're not suicidal and wouldn't taunt right next to a boss.

• Scout can shoot approx. 2-3 shots with the Scattergun halfway over the map. Deals about 90 damage if you're lucky. You're better off just spamming your pistol or getting close to the boss and shooting him with "normal bullets".
• Soldier can shoot ~2-3 crit rockets. Good luck hitting the boss unless he's stunned.
• Pyro. You can shoot a few crit pellets with your shotty or shoot about 2 flares.
• Demo can lay sticky traps. Actually useful for protecting Sentry nests unless you're playing against one of the mad spies.
• Heavy only semi-benefits from this. He can MAYBE deal about 100 damage if you're lucky with the bullet spread.
• Again, you're better off just getting close to the boss and shooting him directly.
• Engineer doesn't benefit at all. Just use your 100%-crit Pistol and spray the boss from afar.
• Sniper doesn't benefit at all. Just use your 100%-crit primary.
• Medic doesn't benefit at all. You don't shoot the boss unless you're trying to get uber in a messy situation.
• Spy doesn't benefit at all. Your Revolver has permanent mini crits and you're better off just using those and spamming shots instead of taunting for a second and then missing most of your shots because bullet spread.

In addition, taunt crits made for a more fast paced gamemode, as the boss had to quickly start getting kills on important targets, since he would take heavy damage from just blindly running into groups of people when some would have guranteed crits.

Suggestion

• Increase the duration of guranteed crits after taunting and increase the health of all bosses. This way you can encourage taunting for crits and even make the heavy without a pocket Medic a somewhat valuable class.
• Increase the boss health to make up for the additional damage taken.

2. Bullet spread
This is a more personal suggestion, because I personally dislike random spread.
Disabling random spread would benefit all classes that use hit-reg weapons with random spread. It would make them more dangerous at mid-range and ever so slightly more effective at long range.

Suggestion

• Disable random spread.
• Slightly increase boss health to counter the additional damage taken.

3. Infinite Ammo
Again, this is a personal suggestion. Infinite ammo makes the Engineer basically obsolete. You don't need a Dispenser unless you don't have a Medic. Solo Pyros can airblast the boss infinitely (yes, the boss gains rage from this, but even wht rage, you can still get airblasted for ever) and there is no reason to think about spending your ammo wisely for any class, since you can just spam 24/7.

Yes, I know, it is not impossible to kill Pyros if you want to spend 2 minutes jumping and circling in the air to get a Pyro, but they are by far the most obnoxious class.

Suggestion

• Disable infinite ammo. This way you encourage playing Engineer and players to actually work in a team with Engineers, because they have to rely on them. You also counter the 24/7 airblast spam.

4. Pyro's Airblast
It is undeniable that the Pyro's airblast is both one of the best utilities and at the same time the most obnoxious ability in the gamemode. His ability to just plain deny a full rage and save his teammates from the boss is unmatched by any other classes (except maybe Medic).

Even though getting airblasted grants rage to the boss, it is still extremely overpowered. Removing unlimited ammo would already counter this, but this would be a good alternative.

Suggestion

• Add a plugin to limit them amount of times Pyros can airblast. Let every Pyro start with a limited amount of Airblast charges which can be replenished by dealing damage with your secondary / melee, replenishs over time, and are consumed upon airblasting.

5. Heavy's and Engineer's Shotgun
The Shotgun for both Heavy and Engineer is a terrible sidegrade. There is absolutely no reason for both classes to use the Shotgun.

Suggestion

• Allow the Heavy to steal health by shooting the boss with shotguns (stock and Family Business). This way the Heavy can become a dangerous tank if ignored until he's the last player alive and can also survive on his own.
• Allow the Engineer to gain Metal upon shooting the boss with the Shotgun. This way you encourage using the Shotgun over the Widowmaker, the Rescue Ranger and the Frontier Justice, as you can now rather safely gain Metal by shooting the boss instead of running off to get an Ammo box, which are sometimes very scarce.

6. Fluff suggestions
These suggestions include features which are by no means necessary, but add additional fluff to the gamemode.

Sugestions

• Add the Goomba Stomp plugin to make just Goomba Stomping a boss a valuable alternative to Market Gardner-ing.
• Add a plugin that allows Heavies to shoot a rocket by using the Showdown taunt. This way Heavies are granted more mobility and may even be able to escape from certain situations they weren't able to escape before.
• Enable a damage display command like /haledmg. I haven't seen any option to enable this kind of feature and would like to see it.
• Add a plugin that sets the boss on fire if a Pyro deals more than 90 damage with the Shotgun.

Endword
I am aware that some of these changes may seem overpowered, but I can tell you that they work great. I have played months with these settings and the gameplay was more fun than VSH, mostly because of the amount of different bosses and strategies you could develop to fight against them.

Here is how all classes played on these settings and how I experienced them.

Scout wasn't really different from how he plays now. You'd annoy the boss as much as possible, and if you were a F.A.N. Scout, you'd maybe try to help your team by just pushing the boss away on occasion.

Soldier was a major damage dealing class. With both crit rockets due to taunt crits, the ability to goomba stomp and buffing your team with your secondary, Soldier's were the backbone of your teams offensive abilities.

Pyros were a class that was both support and offensive at the same time. You would stay far off and deal damage with your Shotgun, waiting until the boss used his rage. Then you'd run to your team and airblast him off until the stun wore off.

Heavies were actually a force to be reckoned with due to their ability to push the boss back (and also deal damage without having a Medic stuck up their bum) with the taunt crits, while at the same time putting themselves at risk since there wouldn't alway be a Pyro around to airblast the boss away from the Heavies. In addition, you would never let a Heavy be the last one alive, since they could overheal themselves by shooting you with a Shotgun. Fighting against a 100% crit Heavy was difficult, but doable.
TL;DR Heavy was a big guy (for you).

Engineers were a necessity for the RED team, as Pyros, Heavies and Soldiers would require a steady flow of ammo. A team without an Engineer was crippled and was a lot easier to deal with than those with one.

I used to only play Demo in two ways - melee or helping my teams Engineers by covering their nest with crit stickies to blow the boss away should he come close. It was one of the most satisfying things to do, blowing the boss away by detonating 14 crit stickies under a Sentry and dealing 5k damage at a time to those careless enough to not check for stickies.

Sniper didn't play much different from how he plays now. If you were a good Sniper, you'd deal an incredible amount of damage on bigger maps if the boss didn't focus you right from the start.

Medic wasn't much different either. I remember that they added the ability to revive teammates like in MvM by "healing the boss" and gaining "revive charge" that way, but that was added during the last weeks of FF2.

Spy, you guessed it, wasn't different either. You run around invisible and wait to stab the boss.

If you were playing the boss, you'd first go for the core classes: Medic, Pyro and Engineer.
Since you'd get stronger pushback from the taunt crits, you were actually required to utilize the brave jump ability which the majority of bosses has to get into the main group of people and fight them head on. You couldn't just stupidly run at people in the hopes of eventually getting close enough to punch them.
The meta was fun and the best players would win without using the rage ability, even against 31 players.


Those were my 2 cents on FF2. I know it's quite a read, so thank you for bearing with me on this.
Looking forward to discussing these suggestions.

 

My opinion:
1.okay
2.I don't see a reason why this should be disabled while the classes like the scout are already dangerous
3.okay
4.Thats a great issue i believe that having a amount of airblasting would make the pyros using them on a bad situation and would not waste them all at once
5.In my opinion thats unnecessary heavy's usually use a sandwich or something like that and the engies can use the rescue ranger to repair their sentry or even the frontier justice to get crits
6.All seems great but i dont know about the showdown taunt

 

About taunting for crits:
I absolutely disagree about the sticky launcher being the only ''good'' weapon to use it on. I use it ALL the time for scout, soldier and as you said demo with stickies.
Heavy doesn't need more crits (more damage).

About infinite ammo:

Building buildings still uses up metal.
Disable infinite ammo and you need an engineer on most maps with not much metal. It's extremely frustrating to play the only engineer when people always take all the metal packs like idiots and yells at you for not building a dispenser. Setting up can take a stupid annoying time.

Goomba stomp was already suggested and denied/didn't work. Either way I wouldn't like it to be added, because it's too easy damage.

!haledmg on
!haledmg off

The pyro-shotgun-fire plugin doesn't seem very useful, but I'm not sure.

All I didn't mention from your beautiful fat post I am neutral or positive about.

 

Spoiler

Thanks for this sidethread and I'll consider this input also, so far I've planned and hope to keep FF2 mostly similair to VSH based on stats and stuff (only difference in amount of bosses and selection). I'll make a post later explaining and criticising stuff.
Also the weapons should had been covered already with me, Enri, Hanto and I thought some others. (You can always join the VSH/FF2 server at discord where we kept track of the changes we considered to add your input)

 

Bullet spread wouldn't make the majority of classes more dangerous. It'd make some weapons more accurate at distance while maintaining a spray pattern for shotguns.
Weapons that would benefit from this are the SMG, Miniguns, Pistols and generally hitscan weapons that don't shoot pellets.
Here is a video showcasing how this would affect the Scattergun: [video=youtube;zXlbdaJC-nQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXlbdaJC-nQ[/video]
TL;DR makes some bullets actually go to where your crosshair is pointing on longer distances.

The Sandvich doesn't allow for quick in-combat healing, which the shotgun alternative would.
Gaining metal through shooting the boss with shotguns would provide an alternative way of playing to the rescue ranger, as you could potentionally gain the metal to repair / rebuild your Sentry Gun much easier.

As stated, this is just fluff. It's not the main point of this post, but would make for some more interesting gameplay.

The point is that it's not really worth it most of the time. You have to essentially perma-taunt in order to make proper use of the crits, and considering that not everyone has a short taunt like the Conga, High-Five or similar, it's simply not worth the risk.

I understand this point, would like to point out the suggested Shotgun change though. With additional ways of attaining Metal, setting up a base would become a bit easier. Also, if infinite ammo would no longer be a thing, people would get used to playing around the ammo limitation and leaving the ammo boxes to Engineers.
It's just like in normal Pub games. If you see an Engineer nearby, you won't run to the nearest ammo package, but will instead go to his Dispenser.

Oh, okay. Didn't know that it was already suggested.
I see how it can be seen as too easy, which is why I put it under fluff.

I tried just !haledmg and it didn't work, which is used to. I'll try it again with those commands.

It would provide an alternative, less airblast intensive way of playing for the Pyro where you can still deal damage while saving your airblasts / ammo.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Thanks for the feedback.

 

Neat, looking forward to it.

I'm afraid I haven't seen the invite floating around if it was made public somewhere :/

 

https://discord.gg/JUCWxYu
For the ones interested.

As about the suggestion:

1. Crit taunting I'm not sure yet, it's sometimes used (even I do it as soldier for long range crockets (works well if predicting right))
2. I've never been digging into bullet spread and unsure how it would affect the gameplay (needs testing propably)
3. Engineer shouldn't have infinite metal currently and about the ammo for classes, it's horrible to cope with once the engineers are dead because they're a primary target for bosses. "Cover them!", bit hard if the teamwork isn't really happening sometimes, there's no engineer (especially at low amount of players) or nobody covers you.
4. Airblast will propably get a larger delay based on earlier discussions
5. Heavy's shotgun has been a hard point to discuss, Enri, Hanto and I've been discussing it and have a possible stats (posting them into the suggestions channel at discord). As about engineer, can't recall if we covered it (widowmaker got covered).
6. As about goomba, honestly I don't prefer it myself, if done properly as Scout or Soldier it can result in chaining which results in very high dmg. This could create trouble for bosses like HHH Jr. which lacks the mobility to escape this situation.
7. The other 3 I've got to think about before trying to cover them.