Engineer

Thoughts On Current Design

Sentry knockback. It's something that has paired so well with the damage output of sentries to the point that extraneous buffs like Ubercharge or the Battalion's Backup have been necessary to get remotely close to them. Yet even these can fall off when more than one sentry gun is on the field. I think it's fair to say that reducing their knockback has been something a long time coming. Though, I do also have a couple buffs to hand leveled sentries in the meantime.

Reasons For Changes

The 50 health when constructing is a nice change that allows you to actually construct non-minis and not have them die immediately to a single bullet from across the map. As for the sentry knockback, halving it would make sentry bullet knockback fightable to an extent while still keeping it strong enough to slow down enemies and not impacting its kill time and thereby its area denial impact. Additionally, Level 3 sentries' rockets are unaffected by this nerf, so Wrangler jumps are kept the same and can still launch enemies effectively. As for leveled sentries costing 125 metal, it's annoying that it's the only time a building cost is not divisible by 25, and making this change has almost no ramifications outside of allowing you to build a dispenser, get the instant 25 metal from it, and now have enough to build a sentry rather than needing 5 more metal... which is honestly just better than now. Lastly, and definitely least, is making sentry bullets fully accurate. I'd bet 99% or more of TF2 players wouldn't even know that they weren't fully accurate, even professional players. This is now a fact rather than fiction.

Thoughts On Current Design

Dispensers are Engineer's version of the sentry gun for his team. Instead of making sure the enemies can't progress past a given area, the Dispenser makes sure the Engineer's teammates aren't pushed too far back when they need to retreat from the fight. I only have a few changes to share here.

Reasons For Changes

The doubled tick rate change is mostly a bug fix, and the 50 health on construction is going to be a universal change to buildings for the same reason as the sentry guns. The more impactful change here is the ability for dispensers to actually construct sometime this century, as the base build time has been cut nearly in half. Being as a Level 1 dispenser is not really all that effective in both healing and metal output (especially when freshly built), I think this is a fair buff for Engi to have.

Thoughts On Current Design

Teleporters are arguably Engineer's single most powerful and impactful tool in his kit, allowing the Engineer to make sure his team can keep up the pressure by skipping the walk back to the frontline from the spawn room. It can also be used to give his team positional advantages otherwise impossible (known as "ninjaneering"). Quite a handy, and sometimes even necessary tool to have!

...And that's the problem. Many maps, especially of the older and nonsymmetrical variety, tend to rely on the existence of teleporters quite a bunch. So when a player dedicates themselves to making sure the other team's teleporter remains down as often as possible, it can spark the start of that player's team snowballing the other team all the way back to their spawn room. Quite the high reward, but one that is not exactly the most risky, because of how little Engineer is able to stop it. Targeting the teleporter entrance is a surefire way to either completely distract the Engineer into needing to whack it as long as you keep up the pressure, or accept defeat and need to retreat aaaall the way back to spawn to replace it, leaving their other buildings unguarded in the meantime. Engineer's best option to counter this is with the Eureka Effect to be able to easily replace both entrance and exit, but being how easy it is for a Spy or Rocket/Sticky Jumper player to get behind enemy lines to enact this strategy, I don't think it's for the best that Engineer is effectively forced to forgo their desired wrench just to do their mandatory duty of saving the team major time getting back into the fight. Here are my proposed changes.

Reasons For Changes

Aside from the teleporters receiving similar buffs that the dispenser got for the same reasons (50 health on construction, base build speed buff), and removing the weird altered healing rate, the other two changes here are here to help Engineers combat enemy players attempting to destroy their teleporter entrance. Allowing the Engineer who built it to use it to teleport back to the entrance allows him to put up some sort of fight to the player damaging the entrance, or at the very least get him near the spawn so that he can replace it once they're dealt with by the Engineer's teammates. Mind, I have set a 20 second cooldown for it so that the Engineer player can't just repeatedly use it to access their spawn room and the resupply cabinet, and disallowed Engineers from using it while hauling a building since that would make relocating your nest when being pushed back far too efficient. Similarly, I also made it so that the teleporter properly gets disabled after being unsapped (outside of the Engineer player themselves using it) so that the Engineer can take the fight to the Spy, but not the other way around. The Spy is still able to attempt to sap and gun it down, but it's no longer super one-sided.

Thoughts On Current Design

I don't have any direct thoughts. Let's get to changes since they have more to say.

Reasons For Changes

These changes make cooperative Engineering less effective by making only your own dispenser available as a metal source, which should help reduce how powerful stacking Engineer can become. It also makes it so that other Engineers can't steal from your own dispenser outside of that fact. Oh, and consistent metal from dead players is neat? Not sure why it varied to begin with.

Thoughts On Current Weapon

Many consider the Frontier Justice to be one of the least problematic unlocks in the game. I can't blame anyone who thinks that, it's surprisingly balanced for a weapon that grants full critical hits that can be stored indefinitely, as it requires the destruction of your sentry gun to actually use the critical hits, leaving yourself and potentially your whole team vulnerable to being pushed. However... I cannot say I completely agree with its current design. See, the Frontier Justice has a couple problematic pieces. I'll lay them out in a list just to make things as clear as possible.

1.) The Frontier Justice still can gather benefits even while not equipped. Almost certainly the biggest flaw with its current stat makeup is the fact that Engineer can simply choose whatever primary he wants to use for the situation, get kills/assists with a sentry gun, and then go back to spawn to cash in on the Revenge crits despite never having engaged with the -50% clip size penalty in the meantime.

2.) -50% clip size means nothing when you have guaranteed crits. If you don’t manage to take out your target despite dealing upwards of triple damage with your shotgun? You shouldn’t be winning that fight in the first place. Fighting an enemy’s crit boosted Fronter Justice is nearly impossible, as the downside of only having 3 shots to work with doesn’t matter when they can (and will) win the fight. Mind, the clip size DOES prevent that Engineer from using their crits to wipe out the entire enemy team, but that’s just preventing what’s inexcusable, not what’s excessive.

3.) Full crits are excessive. As I’m sure most players can agree, fighting an enemy that has the ability to always do incredible damage, let alone enough to potentially one-shot you, doesn’t exactly have much counterplay to it. It feels more reasonable on the Kritzkrieg since the effect would otherwise be total invincibility, but due to #2? There’s not exactly much to do when you’re the enemy fighting the Engineer using this weapon. If you happened to look at my balancing philosophy on the home page, you might remember that I judge weapons by their fairness. Weapons that provide too extreme an upside in a given situation were listed as one of the few examples that makes a weapon unfair - and I’d say the Frontier Justice is unfortunately fitting to that definition.

4.) Engineer can hide the Frontier Justice’s crits. One of the most classic strategies to employ with a weapon that screams with its visual, “I will kill you if you fight me!” is to muffle its screams by stashing it in your pocket, going into a fight against an enemy who thinks you’re an easy kill, and swapping back to the real weapon you want to use and completely dominate the fight. TF2 has an admittedly fast default weapon switch time of just a half second, and especially when combined with usual FPS tactics to hide yourself around cover for a short period, there is no real time for the enemy to react to the sudden threat you’ve become. That’s quite the issue in my books.

5.) Engineer doesn’t have to play any differently than normal to get Revenge. Although not as bad as Spy’s counterpart in the Diamondback in this department, it still certainly applies to the Frontier Justice. Getting kills and assists with sentries is simply what Engineer already strives to achieve. Mind, this isn’t to say that this is entirely a bad thing on its own, there are plenty of weapons that reward doing well in the game, but when combined with my other points, especially #2, this is yet another reason why the Frontier Justice feels like it doesn’t really have as many drawbacks as it should.

Whew, that was a bit long! Apologies for the wall of text that may have been. However, I felt it was necessary as a precursor to what may end up being viewed as drastic changes to an otherwise beloved weapon in this game. I’ll elaborate on the changes themselves and how they apply to these points in the Reasons For Changes section.

Reasons For Changes

The biggest balance problem that the Frontier Justice is facing is the ability to... not use it. No, really, the strongest part of the Frontier Justice is simply using some other primary and then swapping to it when it happens that your sentry gun got kills, allowing you to easily avoid the weak period of not having crits. With this tactic no longer at play, I gave it two buffs aimed at helping the Engineer play more around his sentry gun, either by comboing off its damage for 2 crits or granting a bonus crit for having it be destroyed mid-fight. However, I also made the deploy time longer while crits are active to allow for more reaction time while "hiding" your crits by having a different weapon deployed. This will allow the Frontier Justice to feel more of a separate unlock rather than just something that you can switch to in spawn for a temporary shotgun upgrade.

Thoughts On Current Weapon

The Pomson is fundamentally flawed as a weapon. The only purpose it serves is to counter Spy and Medic as the Engineer, and... it sucks at it. Reducing Ubercharge doesn't prevent it (when you could just run a regular shotgun and do the tried and true method of killing them), reducing cloak isn't helpful when it requires hitting the Spy (and thereby knowing where he is already), and on top of all that it's outright annoying on the receiving end to have these drained. In addition, it's nothing but horrific in combat, especially considering that it’s a super slow projectile. This one’s going to need lots of changes to be useful on the battlefield.

Reasons For Changes

Seeing as the main gimmick of this weapon needed to be removed, I needed to find a new one to replace it with, as a simple laser weapon that does nothing but damage people isn’t interesting nor effective. I turned to a semi-similar weapon, the Rescue Ranger, and came up with a new idea. This design here lowers the Engineer’s ability to defend himself like the Rescue Ranger, but gives him the ability to boost his buildings when the time arises or simply to make his nest slightly more powerful, for 50 metal and 3 shots in the clip apiece. For the capable Engineer, these building boosts could be quite useful, even compared to the Rescue Ranger.

Thoughts On Current Weapon

The Rescue Ranger is the best example of a class-exclusive shotgun in the game, hands down. It finally allows the Engineer to not have to be glued to his buildings all the time and still be able to heal them from a distance, and even move them from long range to get them out of sticky situations or to move them into clever areas. However, it absolutely contributes to the problem that is Engineer stacking.

Reasons For Changes (Idea #1)

When stacking engineers and being spread out, the Rescue Ranger becomes an outright unfair tool, allowing you to keep your fellow engineers’ buildings alive while not even having to move from the comfort of your own nest. I have removed this ability while keeping the rest unchanged.

Reasons For Changes (Idea #2)

This copies the first idea, but removes the long range haul and MfD while hauling and supplants them into a new Pistol secondary. Engineer is certainly lacking secondaries in current TF2, especially in the Pistol department. The upsides to doing this besides giving Engineer more secondaries are to improve loadout variety - being able to use whatever shotgun you want alongside the long range haul without having to go all the way with the Rescue Ranger as a weak primary (making the Rescue Ranger less of a catch-all utility), and disallow usage of the long-range haul with the Wrangler to make it so Engineer can no longer sentry jump and haul their buildings to the new location. However, it does reduce the appeal of the Rescue Ranger, and can potentially the secondary itself can be a bit too strong (hence the slower firing speed, but it could be increased if needed). I'm not 100% on this idea, but that's why I have it as a secondary idea rather than the ONLY one.

Thoughts On Current Weapon

The Widowmaker is mostly fine. The most it needs is as follows.

Reasons For Changes

Besides removing some of the fluff from the stat page, let’s be real - the sentry target upside is completely pointless and will NEVER change the outcome of a fight, and even if it were always in effect, it’s only 10% extra damage. In turn though, it's now possible to gain back more metal per shot.

Thoughts On Current Weapon

The Short Circuit is one of the weirdest weapons in the game and has been changed so many times over the years it's hard to remember what it first was. However, in the current day and age, it's managed to make itself pretty balanced! For the most part.

Reasons For Changes

These changes are relatively simple enough. Spammablity in general, especially via using dispenser metal, is now much less, the projectile now lasts for less time, has downtime due to the reload time, covers less space, and can now be seen through. The payload cart spam problem is already taken care of by the Base Class changes luckily, so this should now make the Short Circuit less busted, but still strong in the right hands.

Thoughts On Current Weapon

This is undoubtedly the strongest tool in any Engineer’s hand with its ability to TRIPLE the health of your sentry. That makes your sentry go from 216 health at level 3 to a stupidly absurd 648! A mini-sentry become as tanky as Heavy while still remaining tiny! Combine this with a helpful team, and that sentry will not go down without the combined teamwork of almost the entire enemy team! And what kind of effort does it take to access this tripling of health? Pressing 2 on your keyboard. This shield is going to need to be severely lowered in effectiveness.

Reasons For Changes

It is pretty obvious that keeping the shield resistance and repair rate at the same number is never going to work, no matter what number it is. Therefore, the conclusion must be that the shield must be removed… right? Turns out, not quite! By making the repair rate higher than the Wrangler's resistance, it no longer becomes free health! I decided that keeping the repair rate at -66% was fair while reducing the resistance to a sizable but not unsurmountable +33%. As for the reduced self-damage, I really think that the health cost of sentry jumping is too high, and that it would be a good idea to reduce it a bit. Finally, it is no longer possible to begin hauling an unwrangled sentry while it is disabled, making tank, haul right before destruction, get behind cover and repair require waiting for the sentry to become undisabled - forcing the repair penalty to matter.

Thoughts On Current Weapon

The stock wrench is... a bit hard to talk about. It's definitely a solid choice and gets the job done, but at the same time there's no situation where it, specifically, is the best choice. This is mostly due to the Jag finally getting the buffs it needed to not be an effective straight downgrade and rather the opposite, but simply adjusting the other wrenches to be on stock's level will make him kinda boring. To spice things up, I'll be giving stock a buff and nerfing something else that has needed nerfed for a long time.

Reasons For Changes

Stacking Engineer has been an incredibly strong tactic every since TF2's beginnings, and one of the reasons why is that Engineers are able to interact with other Engineers' buildings just the same as their own outside of not being able to haul them. By reducing this to half, it will be much harder to a Engineer to maintain buildings that don't belong to them, making taking out groups of Engineers and their buildings easier. As for the upgrades at 35 metal per swing at all times, this allows the stock wrench to share some of the use that the Jag has by allowing you to upgrade buildings 33% faster, given enough metal to do so. With some spice applied to stock, it's time to address the unlocks!

Thoughts On Current Weapon

The Eureka Effect is a strong tool for the Engineer who wants to build in less traditional spots, quickly setting up at the start of the round, or going for a little ninjaneering hunt. These are all fine and dandy, making the current implementation is incredibly balanced. However, being as a little bit of the value of teleporting to spawn has been lost by the new reverse-teleport, I think it deserves just a little bit of extra attention.

Reasons For Changes

This essentially keeps most of the Eureka Effect the same while fixing its interactions with the Widowmaker, makes teleporters not keep their 100 metal cost when swapping wrenches, improves dispenser upgrade rate, and reduces the construction speed penalty since stock is no longer as much of a worry.

Thoughts On Current Weapon

The Gunslinger is an interesting weapon that allows for yet another Engineer playstyle and essentially acts as its own unlock outside of the other wrench choices. Honestly, it's pretty balanced, but I do have a few fixes to bring to the table.

Reasons For Changes

Are these really changes worth talking about? The first of these is expected of all weapons, and it's strange that the Gunslinger is an exception.

Thoughts On Current Weapon

The Jag is a pretty useful tool for almost any Engineer, but considering that stock is going to be a direct rival when it comes to upgrading buildings, the Jag's going to need adjustments to make that a reality rather than tarnishing it.

Reasons For Changes

This Jag finally gives up its exclusive faster upgrade rate (and instead matches the new stock, give or take a tiny fraction of a second in favor of the Jag) and makes mobility its main upside. This wrench will not only construct fast, but it will also allow you to bypass the movement speed penalty while hauling and even let you continue boosting building speed during upgrade animations, making the redeployment of leveled buildings much faster than before. The downsides are basically the same as before, though with an actually meaningful repair rate penalty in comparison to the swing speed, so you'll definitely want to be on the move and aggressive with your buildings if you want the most use out of this Jag.

Thoughts On Current Weapon

Let’s be fair, the thought of an anti-spy wrench for the Engineer sounds like a good idea on paper (if you completely ignore class-counter weapons being an affront to class-to-class balancing), but in practice with the Southern Hospitality… it’s really not all that great. I mean… fire vulnerability? No random crits? What was Valve thinking?! Oh, not to mention spies have the ability to reduce debuff times in half by cloaking (or can't bleed in the first place if we consider my Spy changes)! This wrench needs to do something new, and I've got just the idea.

Reasons For Changes

This version of the Southern Hospitality, accurate to the name, is essentially the dispenser-focused variant of the Eureka Effect, boosting Engineer's versatility with it. He is now able to dedicate one for himself and one for his team - especially handy when a compromise spot for both purposes is not available, such as when a one-way gate stands in your way. This does come at the cost of a worsened repair rate, but being truly able to have freedom regarding dispenser placement is an upside worth having.

Thoughts On Current Weapon

They allow you to build and destroy buildings. Neat! How's about making them less prone to mistakes, yet less abusable, eh?

Reasons For Changes

I have thousands of hours in this game and still from time-to-time while playing Engineer will I accidently deploy the Destruction PDA while attemping to build something, and then mistap which building I'm attempting to build and destroy one of the buildings I already had on accident. This new system prevents that altogether. Along with that is the new description for new players to get a more immediate grasp of Engineer's buildings, which is always nice.