Demoman

Thoughts On Current Weapon

Grenade Launchers work entirely fine, though there is some room for refinement.

Reasons For Changes

Yay, no more randomness on the weapon that demands direct accuracy to be effective! And making grenades have consistent logic with the Gunboats! Oh, and... a description too! Wahoo. (What's that? Pyro says "Mmphm~~ 😳"? Never talk to me again.)

Thoughts On Current Weapon

The Booties are not nearly as impactful to a hybrid knight as a shield is, though this is partly deserved since the power of the stickybomb launcher is more than the Grenade Launcher, especially when each are considered from being used solo. However, I think it's time that we start acknowledging that both forms of Demo that use the Booties are generally on the weaker end.

Reasons For Changes

These changes aren't that big of a difference for sticky hybrid, mostly just regaining the speed bonus he had for a week. Competitive players at the time were rash to judge (as usual) during the time and Valve similarly caved quickly even though it didn't radically break any balance. Moreover, the knockback resistance is particularly aimed at mitigating full knight's distinct weakness to any and all knockback sources, in addition to a few seconds taken off of the shield recharge time. As for the critical melee swing, see the shield changes below.

Thoughts On Current Weapon

The Iron Bomber is among the biggest offenses (if not the most) when it comes to being an unlock that plays no differently to stock. Though the idea is to have mostly stationary rollers and allow firing it at the ground to be more consistent, this strategy is rarely done since stickies were made specifically for that purpose. Rather, the remaining two stats of a faster detonation time and slightly reduced explosion radius is clearly favored in the positive direction and makes it just better than stock without changing anything about how you use it. Being as I value weapons being unique from each other, but also want to lean on the careful side when it comes to total reworks, I have two very different ways of taking this weapon.

IDEA #1 - Rework With New Stats

Reasons For Changes (Idea #1)

This new design works by taking the name literally. It encourages blast jumping with stickies or using a shield charge to get high damage and faster firing grenades while being slightly worse while grounded by increasing Demoman’s weakness to self-damage at close range and adds a small bit of damage fall-off for long range. In addition, since mini-crits are immune to fall-off, the aerial bombing won’t be affected by that downside. This should make it an interesting side-grade to stock!

IDEA #2 - Original-Style Simplification

Reasons For Changes (Idea #2)

Being fair, these two stats rarely change anything, and removing them can work to make it officially Stock 2 with a minor change based on preference, just like how the Original is on Soldier. This ultimately is boring, but it's not unheard of.

Thoughts On Current Weapon

I like the Loch-N-Load as it stands today, with it being a different tool besides the Direct Hit to take down buildings, especially those from farther away. However, the projectile speed is a little jarring to get used to for those who use the other grenade launchers frequently, and Engineer doesn't need his hard counter to have a weapon that makes him an even harder counter. For these balance changes, I'll be more experimental.

Reasons For Changes

As the name implies, the Loch-N-Load is meant to reward players for accuracy, and that is what my redesign here is exactly for. By landing a direct hit, you’ll be able to refund your shot into your clip instantly (from your reserve) at the cost of only having three shots in the clip, no rollers, being unable to stop firing until you’re out of clip, and being unable to fire until you’re fully reloaded. This would allow experienced Demomans (Demomen?) to garner rewards for their accuracy, and be useful as a training tool for hitting those direct shots one after the other.

Thoughts On Current Weapon

The Loose Cannon is an incredible weapon that rewards either staying at the perfect distance or having great on-the-spot timing to hit targets closer than that distance. It just has one (or three) particular issue(s)...

Reasons For Changes

Let’s be fair: the knockback helps nobody. It’s annoying for the person fighting the Loose Cannon user, and for the user, double donks are made rather inconsistent. With it gone, it becomes better suited as being the skilled primary it was meant to be, especially since the self damage is now reduced properly to allow cannon jumps to be more viable.

Thoughts On Current Weapon

I'm not the first to admit that the stickybomb launcher is strong, overpowered even. Not only do stickies provide massive area denial when grouped together, but their direct combat via sticky spam is one of the strongest offenses a single class can output. Not only that, the stickybomb launcher has an unusually high clip size of eight. That's twice more than the Grenade Launcher and Rocket Launcher, while still letting Demo hold onto his Grenade Launcher! Really, this thing has it all for Demo outside of close range, but that's always going to be a core weakness of Demo. I think it's time it gets a firm tap on the shoulder and both address its overwhelming offensive capabilities and lack of counterplay potential.

Reasons For Changes

Random spread on stickies has been removed to let charged stickies actually have reasonable accuracy. Cool! Now for the nerfs. Though plentiful, they are anything but undeserved - stickies promote a really lame playstyle with sticky spam that is nigh impossible to counter and traps, though stationary, are also really oppressive and easy to replace after use. Here's what my nerfs address:

Having six stickies to work with rather than eight will force Demo to engage in his long reload weakness more often when spamming stickies and limit how many consecutive traps he can make quickly. Additionally, to really hammer down on sticky spam, I also made airborne stickies no longer immune to explosions, bullets, and the like, making counterplay by shooting them out of the air a possibility when you aren't a Pyro with airblast, which is further made easier by their hitboxes not being the tiniest thing known to man. On top of this, damage ramp-up is removed to prevent one-shots against light classes at close range (considering stickies already have 120 base damage, ramp-up on top of that is just plain excessive). Soldiers, Pyros, and other Demos are now also able to interact with stickies more meaningfully by letting them reset the arm times with explosions and airblast. Lastly, stickies now operate under the same rules as the Gunboats to make Demo's close range weakness further felt by making it so that simply jumping doesn't let you resist the damage you should take. This should keep Demo's power more level vs other classes and encourage more use of the Grenade Launcher by proxy.

Thoughts On Current Weapon

The shield of choice for the Demoman who wants the most defense out of their shield… though it hardly provides any stronger defense than the Splendid Screen. However, making that stronger is going to make Chargin' Targe users even more unbearable to kill - so these balance changes will have to take a different approach.

Reasons For Changes

If there was one thing that I could name as a big annoyance to shield users (especially to full knights), it’s getting knocked around. This doubly applies to charging, where getting knocked about can completely ruin your approach. Knockback resistance would greatly improve the Chargin' Targe's uniqueness over the Splendid Screen and make the choice between the two not so one-sided. I also made the damage resistance more universal since, with the knockback resistance, the explosive classes and Pyro are no longer such high counters and it can be spread evenly as it should be. Additionally, the Booties cover the nerf of no melee crit by giving it right back, allowing Demoknight to remain as strong as he is now while maintaining the nerf for hybrid. Finally, as for the change to being a stock item... I think that speaks for itself considering how much the Chargin' Targe changes Demo, the fact there's two unlocks that base themselves off of it, and that it's relatively simple in function.

Thoughts On Current Weapon

Remember when this thing had their stickies fizzle out after 2 seconds and had no damage bonuses to speak of? Those were some rough times for this weapon alright. Nowadays, the Quickie sees some rare use when you want to up the range of your sticky spam and don't care much about the spam duration or for assisting close range combat with its short arm time. Considering the changes I just made to all stickybomb launchers, this niche is a little more useful, though there are adjustments to be made.

Reasons For Changes

These changes raise the damage a tiny bit while maintaining the 4 sticky clip. It's not much, but it'll undoubtedly help.

Thoughts On Current Weapon

The Scottish Resistance is not my preferred way to play Demoman, but that doesn’t mean it’s unbalanced. Though...

Reasons For Changes

Faster reload speed would help make the utilization of 14 stickies faster, and is more handy than having more reserve ammo. Being as the arm time is now more significant when encountering other explosions or airblast, I think the buff is justified.

Thoughts On Current Weapon

The Splendid Screen is a very strong shield for any purpose, be it for a full knight or a hybrid. I believe it's relatively balanced, just in need of similar changes as with the Chargin' Targe.

Reasons For Changes

These changes aim to diversify the Splendid Screen more from the Chargin' Targe while keeping it at about the same power level for full knight (as the Booties revert the lack of full crits from shield charging), while again nerfing hybrid the same way as the Targe.

Thoughts On Current Weapon

The Sticky Jumper and the Rocket Jumper go hand-in-hand, so it’ll be getting the same changes.

Reasons For Changes

The world is a better place with less Sticky Jumper stats! I don’t see why there to be an ammo limit to the jumper weapons when they don't do damage and are meant for training purposes. Additionally, though it makes sense to make the Jumper weapons not allow you to fly across the map with the intel in Capture The Flag, other modes—namely Player Destruction, Pass Time, Mannpower, and Special Delivery—shouldn't be affected by such a penalty. I have replaced the old penalty with one that only affects CTF (and the reactor core in Robot Destruction as it functions identically to CTF) and fixes the problem these objectives had with the Jumpers directly rather than disallowing Jumper users from doing the objective altogether.

Thoughts On Current Weapon

The Tide Turner is mostly designed for the hybrid lifestyle by allowing for full turning control without requiring boots. Considering the changes I just made to the Booties, it's time to turn the tides on that.

Reasons For Changes

Considering that it already has low resistances compared to the other shields and no critical melee hits at the end of the charge, it doesn’t need that final downside that reduces charge time for getting hit, especially since it can ruin getting the timing for the mini-crit at the end of the charge for both the enemy and the Demoman using it. Past that, I evened out the melee kills refilling charge with other kills and make the damage resistance a global 10% with some added knockback resistance for the same reasons as the Targe. With the Booties now being responsible for granting the full critical melee swing, this should hopefull now make the Tide Turner in-line with the other Demoman shields!

Thoughts On Current Weapon

I’m quite glad we’re (mostly) back to the best version of this sword. However, even this design is not perfect, requiring the user to have a shield to ever see any upsides, in addition to being one of the worst swords to use for full knight. I'm of the opinion that it's best if all forms of Demoman should at least be able to use most, if not every melee and have some use to get out of it, so let's make that the case for this one.

Reasons For Changes

These changes all are to boost the effectiveness this sword has overall, though particularly more aimed towards full knight by essentially removing the downside and doubling the charge regain upside for them, and giving a Demo with a stickybomb launcher instead a use through taking no damage from their first stickybomb per detonation.

Thoughts On Current Weapon

The Eyelander is one of the most iconic TF2 weapons by now. The premise is simple: the more sword kills you get, the stronger you become, but you start out with less health. A fun premise, but it has three critical flaws - 1.) Getting enough kills means you no longer have a downside, resulting in the Eyelander being by far the best choice for Demoknight. 2.) Heads that are easily gained with a full knight loadout can leak into other loadouts since you keep your heads between loadout switches. 3.) If you are unable to get the heads to snowball the effects, it becomes such a major detriment by reducing your max health all the time. Let's solve all that.

Reasons For Changes

By taking away the decreasing and increasing of your max health, the Eyelander now isn't immediately the king of all swords while still feeling strong. The change to also make loadout switches drain heads makes it so that you can't just farm the heads with Demoknight and swap loadouts to have all the benefits with much less of the risk. Finally, I removed the head-stealing from killstreak weapons and other kill-storing weapons (besides another Eyelander) to make it so that those weapons aren't such hinderances to use when the enemy has a Eyelander user.

Thoughts On Current Weapon

The Persian Persuader being for the Demoman who wants to charge extremely often is a cool design, and it works well. However, its downsides and upsides make it limited to only a full knight loadout, which is less than desirable. Here’s what I’ve got.

Reasons For Changes

Outside of giving a general buff via ammo kits giving a small bit of health (since this sword isn't Demoknight's best cup of tea), I also made the Persian Persuader now be a viable choice to use with other loadouts by offering free clip refills on kills in trade for having half the normal ammo in reserve. Neat!

Thoughts On Current Weapon

The Scotsman's Skullcutter is... kinda bad. Its main upside is pretty tiny compared to other Demoman melees, yet the downside is pretty large and is one of the few to still affect Demoknight. The only aspect that keeps this weapon in play is the fact it is able to roll for random crits... which are being removed. So yeah, this thing's gonna need to get buffed.

Reasons For Changes

Considering that the Skullcutter is a pretty poor choice all around even with random crits, I decided that it was time for it to axe (haha) the downside. Not only do most Demoman melees not have their downsides apply to Demoknight, but it already has downsides baked in on other forms of Demo with the generic sword stat that makes them slow to deploy and holster. This, in addition to a mostly Demoknight buff via the critical kill speed bonus, will greatly help this weapon on its journey to a random crit-free environment.

Thoughts On Current Weapon

As the only Demoman melee with unique stats that isn’t a sword (besides the Pain Train), you’d think that the Ullapool Caber would be useful for the Demoman who doesn’t do hybrid and just wants to use their melee for the sake of a melee. Evidently from the 100% slower deploy, this is definitely not the case. In addition, the strange damage falloff makes the explosion damage rather random, sometimes failing to kill a light class or not depending on circumstances beyond your control.

Reasons For Changes

With this new design, the caber now pulls out in a more reasonable amount of time and can be useful for finishing off foes or making that one cocky Scout history, dealing a consistent 55 damage on hit and 70 explosion damage for a total of 125 combined. I also added the hit yourself mechanic; the caber is one of the few melees that I feel makes good use of the stat, adding a bit of risk by requiring you to hit the enemy first try, otherwise risk hitting yourself and wasting the explosion, plus it makes caber jumps more available.