General CHANGES

Random Critical Hits have now been disabled at default.

Reasons For Changes

Random critical hits have been in the game since it launched, and the principle behind it doesn't seem all that bad. Rewarding players who are doing well to be able to easily win more fights so that a team can push through a stalemate makes sense on paper, and may have been a good call in 2007 TF2. However, in the modern days of TF2 with hundreds of unlockable weapons and thousands of possible weapon combinations, many of which include their own powerful non-random effects for doing well with them, not only is "randomness" in games already achieved, but it also means that pushing through stalemates is simply not a problem that needs an external system in place to help facilitate. With the primary reasons for random crits existing in the first place gone, it's clear for the sake of moving forward with balance changes that it's a necessity to have them disabled. That said, I'm also in the belief that those who DO enjoy random crits and want the silliness of them should not only be allowed to have community servers that can flip the setting back to have them re-enabled, but also then be able to use any weapon they want and still get random crits. Random crits aren't balanced, so if people want to play with them on, it shouldn't matter that weapons like Demoman's swords deal random crits and break the balance of that slot.

Random Bullet Spread has been completely reworked to more closely resemble fixed spread:

• Added a "Accurate 1st shot" mechanic akin to the Pistol, Revolver, and similar; this will make the first shot fired have all bullets be accurate to their fixed spread positions and will reset after 1 second has passed since the firing cooldown ended.

• Consecutive shots will now have each respective bullet randomly deviate only slightly from their fixed spread position rather than choosing a completely random position from a significantly wider spread area.

• 10th center bullet will follow the above rules instead of always being 100% accurate.

Reasons For Changes

The difference between having random bullet spread and fixed spread is as clear as night and day, but not entirely for the reasons you might think. Obviously there is the RNG factor in random spread that can make your shots go all in wacky places, but the main difference is how much the bullets tend to spread with random spread on. With the way random bullet spread is coded, your weapon's accuracy is nearly 50% worse in comparison to fixed spread and causes you to deal far less damage on average - especially for the mid range weapons like the Shortstop, which makes them obtusely bad at their niche with nothing to show for it. This new system aims to keep the cooldown mechanic that keeps the good part about random spread (encouraging users to not rapid fire their shotgun) while also making it far closer to fixed spread so that you can have an estimate of where your bullets are going to go when firing consecutively.

Random Fall Damage has now been disabled at default.

Reasons For Changes

Even if random fall damage rarely, if ever, makes a meaningful difference in most matches (let alone maps as most tend to avoid such heights when dropping), there simply can't be an excuse to let the Mantreads and weapons like it to have their damage be random. If random damage spread was an issue that Valve sought to remove in Gun Mettle, then the same can be said for random fall damage.

Mini-Crits now work like full crits and are an inate property of a projectile when fired rather than relying on the user/weapon to be mini-crit boosted when the attack lands.

Reasons For Changes

You might have not even known that this wasn't the case already, but it's true! For example, if you fire a rocket with the Buff Banner active and it ends before the rocket hits something, it will no longer count as a mini-crit in current TF2! Vice versa applies as well, you can fire a normal rocket from a distance, pop the Buff Banner, and bam it's now a mini-crit. This didn't just affect mini-crit boosts either, it also affected weapon stats to deal mini-crits in certain situations - if your projectile was supposed to be a mini-crit when you fired it but you are no longer in the situation required to get a mini-crit, it's now a normal damage hit. As you probably agree now that you're aware (if you weren't already), this is rather stupid and fixing it is appreciated.

Damage ramp-up and fall-off is now calculated based on distance from where the attack originated from rather than the distance from the attacker.

Damage fall-off default has changed to 50%, from 52.8%.

Reasons For Changes

The first change has two ramifications. 1.) Sentries (particularly the Wrangler) will now base its damage ramp-up and fall-off from how far away the sentry is rather than how far the Engineer is. 2.) Projectiles will now have a more proper calculation that estimates distance from where the attack was made from rather than the attacker, which will make it so that running towards or away from the enemy you hit won't change the damage anymore. This change is particularly aimed at nerfing the power of Soldier bombing without the Market Gardener and similar by making it impossible to overtly increase the damage of your midair rockets by landing near where they land, but it also serves as a decent check on all projectiles in the meanwhile. As for the change to 50% fall-off... I mean, why is it not that to start with? It'll help round out some weapon's odd extra bit of extra damage (i.e. Revolver dealing 21 damage instead of 20) and that's something I can always appreciate.

Attacking with one weapon, holstering to another weapon, and attempting to fire that other weapon will now check for the attack cooldown of the prior weapon, preventing you from attacking with the current weapon if the prior weapon's cooldown hasn't yet finished.

Reasons For Changes

This is sort of a cheese strat that higher level players (Soldier, Demoman, and Pyro with the Degreaser especially) can take advantage of to allow them to fire two weapons faster than they could otherwise. It goes like this: Fire weapon A, swap to weapon B immediately, fire weapon B, swap to weapon A immediately, and repeat. Doing this allows you to substitute the the short weapon swap time instead of waiting the longer time of firing the initial weapon again. The most egregious example of this is when Pyro utilizes the Degreaser and Panic Attack to fire a few flame particles, swap to Panic Attack to fire that, and immediately back to the Degreaser and effectively have zero downtime with both weapons, feeling as though you're firing both weapons at the same time. By forcing the user to have to wait until their previous weapon would have been able to fire again, this strategy no longer is any more efficient than normal.

EXTRA NOTE!!! This change alone is extremely flawed with some existing weapons, namely weapons that simply have a long firing cooldown instead of a reload, being the Flare Gun, Crusader's Crossbow, and Huntsman. Those weapons will be changed so that they don't prevent you from attacking with different weapons for an excessive time.

Health and ammo packs that are waiting to respawn will now be transparent instead of not being there, and will show how many seconds until they respawn.

Small health and ammo packs will now restore 25% instead of 20%.

Reasons For Changes

The first change is a sizable quality of life change to make it clear what size of pack is waiting for those not familiar with the map and know when it'll be ready, and the second change makes the small kits just slightly more valuable than before, as 20% restored is honestly too small. It also would make a nice line of small packs being half of a medium and mediums being half of a large.

Ammo packs dropped on death now drop and stay in place like other collectables rather than being physics-based.

Reasons For Changes

This change simply makes it so that collecting that ammo pack can't be ruined by map geometry making the ammo pack tumble away, or get affected by explosions to be blasted away from you. Other collectables (i.e. Player Destruction pickups, Candy Cane health packs, etc.) already stay in place once they land on the ground, so I don't see why the ammo packs shouldn't.

Melee weapons will now pierce teammates instead of being blocked by them.

Reasons For Changes

Teammates blocking shots is not something exclusive to melee weapons. Heck, nearly every single weapon in the game can be blocked by teammates when the shot is made far enough away from them. Key point: far enough away. Why should melee weapons, the dedicated close-range weapons, be blocked by your team if they happen to be nearby or even trying to use melee just like you are? Hint: There isn't. This change additionally allows the Disciplinary Action and any other future On Hit Teammate melees to not be blocked by enemies by still prioritizing teammate hits first (granting the speed boost) but pierce through them and still hit enemies.

Afterburn over 5 seconds will now additionally cause the Scorch debuff, which nullifies all damage resistances and makes the affected player unable to extinguish their flames. Scorched players will be coated in blue flames. Scorch debuff ends once remaining afterburn duration reaches 5 seconds.

Lower damaging sources of afterburn will now only contribute potential higher afterburn durations instead of replacing both damage and duration.

Shorter duration sources of afterburn will now maintain the enemy's afterburn time for the next afterburn damage tick and only contribute potential higher afterburn damage instead of replacing both duration and damage.

Removed reduced healing and shield resistance debuffs caused by being on fire.

Reasons For Changes

Valve had a a semblance of a good idea when they were making afterburn partially pierce resistances and lower Medi-Gun healing. They realized that Pyro's damage against targets Medic was healing was not enough and wanted to cut the healing Medic was capable of towards these targets to make up for it. However, not only does the Medi-Gun debuff not work as intended (several sources all have differing effects) and the shield resistance part actually only mean the Vaccinator (it doesn't work on anything else), but... Pyro deserves to have better damage, period. More damage nullifies the purpose this system had, so it doesn't need to exist anymore. As for the new Scorch effect, I plan to standardize most sources of afterburn to a 5 second maximum, save for a few weapons (see in Pyro's page) that can cause Scorch, which makes afterburn less annoying for most weapons, but grants potential for those weapons. I also threw in allowing weaker afterburn sources to not weaken an enemy's afterburn but still contribute their potential positives.

Teammate outlines when spawning will no longer show enemy Spies disguised as your team and will expire after leaving spawn.

Reasons For Changes

Being able to see where your team is right as you spawn is great. It allows you to get a general idea of how much of your team is alive, where they are, and how much health they have. What's not so great is how they indirectly made Spy's life all the more difficult by including him in the outline. Not only do disguised Spies tend to act differently from your own team and can be spotted just with an outline, but being able to see both your teammate and a Spy disguised as them through walls is a dead giveaway that can then be immediately shared with the rest of your team. To rectify this, enemy Spies will no longer be outlined, and outlines themselves expire as soon as you leave spawn to prevent the lack of an outline as its own form of Spy detection.

Bounding boxes on players will now be cylindrical rather than a box.

Bounding boxes on players will now dynamically adjust their height based on player model rather than being fixed and static across all classes.

Reasons For Changes

Bounding boxes are responsible for most jank relating to projectile collisions since they are used instead for hit detection. Though it makes sense for projectile hits to be more forgiving than hitscan, what doesn't make sense is having a huge box that dwarfs most classes' size and doesn't even rotate to accommodate what direction they're facing. Making them cylindrical removes the need for it to follow your rotation and more reasonably approximates a hit more accurately than a giant box. As for the height part - this mostly impacted the Huntsman and allowed Scout and other shorter classes to be headshot far easier than taller ones like Heavy, but any projectile could just as easily hit the hunched over Scout as it could any other class. This has been fixed as well.

Soldier, Heavy, and Spy now have their move speed increased by 105 HUs/sec while under the effects of a speed boost like all other classes.

Speed boosts now act independently of other movement speed-alerting effects, always granting +105 HUs/sec of movement speed.

Reasons For Changes

It seems incredibly weird at first why the % increase a speed boost varies so much between classes, being anywhere from as large as 40% on Soldier and Heavy to as small as 26.3% on Scout. However, after doing the math, the goal is made clear - speed boosts are supposed to boost your movement speed by exactly 105 HUs/sec, regardless of your base run speed. The only exceptions to this rule are Soldier and Heavy who Valve likely shied out on granting more than 40% in fears of making them too good, and Spy who simply got a speed buff in Meet Your Match but didn't get his speed boost % lowered to match. I have evened out these outliers and made it so that other movement speed-altering effects, such as having the Baby Face's Blaster equipped, not alter how much speed a speed boost adds.

Holster penalties/bonuses will persist through additional weapon swaps until a given weapon is fully deployed, instead of being cancelled if a second swap happens mid-holster.

Holster penalties/bonuses will now come into effect when the weapon is fully deployed, instead of assuming the default deploy time of 0.5 seconds.

Reasons For Changes

Regarding the first change, holster penalties have a serious issue where they can very easily be circumvented by using another weapon as a middleman. You first have your holster penalty weapon deployed, swap to the middle weapon, and immediately swap to the weapon you actually want and suddenly the holster penalty is immediately gone. Fixing this issue will allow weapons like the Fists Of Steel and Axtinguisher to have one of their downsides function as intended. As for the second part, this one applies when you also have a deploy speed bonus/penalty. If your weapon took longer to deploy than usual, your holster speed bonus could take effect before being fully deployed, and if it deployed faster you could experience the opposite of having your weapon deployed but get no holster bonus if you did it too early. This has been fixed.

Knockback resistances/vulnerabilities will now work against all fixed knockback sources.

Reasons For Changes

Though fixed knockback (i.e. airblast, Shortstop shove) is meant to be "fixed", knockback resistances/vulnerabilities are also supposed to change knockback taken. The Mantreads have already been able to benefit from this change, and it only makes sense to extend this to all knockback stats.

Renamed firing speed bonuses/penalties to "+/- attack cooldown".

Reasons For Changes

A surprisingly little known fact - firing speed bonuses are worded inaccurately. If you take the Force-A-Nature for example with its +50% faster firing speed, you'd expect it to fire 1.5x as fast, but it doesn't. It fires 2x faster because it actually takes the % (in this case +50%) and directly adds or subtracts it from the cooldown between attacks. This renaming reflects that quirk and makes these stats more accurate to their effects, in addition to making more sense to be a global stat. After all, some weapons don't "fire", like melee weapons. "Attack" is a much better universal term. (Note: Current stat cards for weapons will still list "firing speed" but new cards will list "attack cooldown")

Meters that require damage to charge will now use the actual damage dealt rather than the base damage that would have been done excluding resistances/vulnerabilities.

Finishing blows will no longer count damage that went above the target's remaining health.

Reasons For Changes

This is a relatively simple change that helps prevent farming damage off of high resistance foes (i.e. a Vaccinator Übercharge) or not benefiting as much as you could from hitting an enemy with a damage vulnerability. Additionally, overkill damage no longer counts for obvious reasons.

Renamed status effect to Reinforcement.

General 35% damage resistance now accounts for damage ramp-up and fall-off instead of only reducing 35% of the base damage.

Reduced critical damage resistance to 50%, from 100%.

Reasons For Changes

The name change is purely to allow more weapons to have this status effect and be able to use it by name rather than have to say "the one on the Battalion's Backup", which the player may not even have unlocked yet. More importantly stands the other changes - I can understand blocking 100% of all crit damage to prevent random crits from ruining a banner push, but when that crit was deserved via something like the Kritzkrieg, it shouldn’t treat it as though it were a regular hit, plus 35% resisted. As such, with random crits out of the equation and taking into consideration that banner charge is faster and easier to obtain than most other critical damage sources, the critical damage resistance was lowered. ...Oh, and ramp-up and fall-off are now accounted for, rather than this effect resisting 35% of the base damage every time, regardless of circumstance.

Jingle all the way will no longer be heard from teammates with an item with this stat equipped.

Reasons For Changes

You may ask what the point of this is. My answer is simple. I'm using this stat unironically for the Candy Cane rebalance, so it'd actually be inconvenient if the downside was rendered moot if a few Scouts from both teams started using it and consequently made the sound cue hard to distinguish from whether it's a teammate or an enemy nearby.

Added "Dueler" status as a new attribute for weapons. Weapons with Dueler will deal critical hits against other players who also have a Dueler weapon deployed, or become a one-hit kill if the attack was already a critical hit. Killing another Dueler with this mechanic will grant a 5-second speed boost.

Reasons For Addition

Normally, if I were making a new stat, I'd just list it independently on the change list and New Stats card. However, to improve stat card and balance change length (being that this effect is rather lengthy), I'm making the initiative to attach it the name of "Dueler".

Teammates, friendly sentries, and friendly dispensers will no longer push against you while you stand inside them.

Reasons For Changes

The only use this mechanic has is to push an idle teammate out of spawn, into the battlefield, and watch them die. Though funny, this genuinely has no purpose and hinders other interactions, like taking a teleporter, using a dispenser, or trying to hide in the same place.

Pressing 'H' (default bind) to pick up a weapon now works while standing on top of the weapon without having to be nearby and aiming at it.

Reasons For Changes

This is a simple quality of life change to make the process of picking up an enemy's weapon significiantly less tedious. No more of the awkward walking over to the weapon, crouching down, aiming at the weapon, then pressing H! Just walk over on top of the weapon and press the key, and there you go!

The last priority for scoring an assist by being the most recent player to deal damage to the victim within the last 3 seconds will now instead grant the assist to the player who dealt the most amount of damage to the victim in the last 5 seconds (excluding the killer).

Buildings will now show assists besides the Spy who placed a sapper or for healing the one who destroyed the building. It will use the same priority system as ones against players, although sapping the building takes highest priority for the assist.

Reasons For Changes

The first change is to help prioritize the damage-based assist for the most helpful contributor rather than the one who most recently did damage. The second one is simply to add the assist system to buildings as well. I don't really think I need to explain much, this should be fairly simple to understand and just a decent quality of life improvement.

Interpolation settings now automatically set themselves to ideal values for your system and require sv_cheats to be set to 1 to be modified.

Reasons For Changes

At higher levels of TF2, your interpolation settings are a huge deal, and having them set at the ideal values is critical to allow your attacks to connect as soon as possible. Having them be automatically set would help more players, especially those who don't know about these settings, reap the benefits. Additionally, by locking manual input behind sv_cheats, malicious players are prevented from purposefully setting them to crazy values to cause them to lag and drop packets, allowing for a relatively easy method of lag-based cheating.

Using left-sided viewmodels will no longer change the side attacks are fired from.

Reasons For Changes

Although purely from a logical point of view, flipping your viewmodels to be left-handed should mean your attacks now originate from that side to not look weird, this mechanic isn't something that the game (namely the maps) aren't designed around. Being able to change which side you get a peeking advantage from is, frankly, quite huge. Even worse, this information isn't communicated at all from the third person perspective, making for quite the surprise in some instances where you think the enemy has a disadvantage and can't peek the corner with, say, a rocket launcher, yet they happen to have a flipped first person model and their rocket spawns from the opposite shoulder their weapon is being carried from the third person. Being as adding flipped animations for EVERYTHING in the game would be insane and the fact that this mechanic contradicts map design to give attackers/defenders an innate peeking advantage in set areas, I'm making it so that flipping your viewmodels will not change the side your attack comes from anymore.

Australium weapons will now have unique kill icons rather than using the base weapon's kill icon with a yellow background.

Mini-Crits kills will now use the yellow background in their kill icons.

Added kill icons for afterburn deaths (unique for each weapon that causes it) and added some missing reflect kill icons.

Reasons For Changes

These changes make it so that it's possible to tell when an enemy has died specifically to a mini-crit, or any critical damage at all for the australium weapons. This isn't significant by any means but it's an improvement nonetheless. Also adding in some missing kill icons for Pyro.

Default crosshairs now accurately show the spread of your weapon if it has any, and will dynamically update as it changes.

Reasons For Changes

The default crosshairs are a joke. A majority of them are entirely inaccurate to the spread of the weapon you're firing (miniguns are especially bad), and they don't change whatsoever even when your weapon has stats that affect the accuracy. Implementing a more modern crosshair system has been long overdue and will make it a lot easier to tell whether or not you have a chance at hitting the enemy you're aiming at.

Class Milestone Achievements will no longer grant a bonus achievement weapon...

...But will now grant access to a set of free weapon contracts that allow you to gain a permanent version of each unique weapon that class can equip upon completion, with each milestone granting 1 out of 3 of the total weapon contracts. (See the Weapon Contracts page for more details)

Added a All-Class Milestone achievement for obtaining every class's first Milestone achievement, which grants access to free weapon contracts for the multi-class weapons.

Reasons For Changes

The idea of granting a new weapon to use after getting a few class-specific achievements is a great idea that I'm glad Valve made. However, after the introduction of the reworked contracts system in Jungle Inferno, which added the Pyroland contracts to get ahold of all the new weapons added in that update, a new idea came to mind for me - why not add similar contracts for every unique unlockable weapon in the game? I mixed this idea in with the existing Milestone achievements and here we are. Being that there are 3 milestone achievements per class, I think it's best to adopt that progression system and have each class's weapons be split into 3 chunks for each milestone. This'll finally allow players the chance to obtain every weapon without relying on random chance through the drop system, trading over time, or going through the horribly inefficient crafting system.

Contracts now actively save their progress and can be turned in any time rather than only after a round has been completed.

Removed the Pyroland Contracts.

Reasons For Changes

I get the idea of saving progress on contracts only when you finish the round to encourage players to stay the whole match, but on some maps (Helltower for instance during Scream Fortress), finishing a match can take more than an hour due to the community at large obeying the unwritten rules that CTF and Payload Race matches should be an infinite deathmatch and the objective should never be completed. Although I made a ton of changes to address this in the Gamemode Changes page, this would additionally allow players to complete their contracts and actually turn them upon completion and work on the next one right away instead of having to complete the rest of the match. As for the Pyroland Contracts, they're for an update that happened in 2017 and are rather outdated, and I have a better system anyway (see above with Milestone Achievements).

Added an additional cosmetic slot which only Badge items can be equipped.

Completing the weapon contracts for getting Milestone Achievements (see above) and their associated bonus objectives will give a badge cosmetic emblazed with TF2's icon for each fourth of contracts have been fully completed, starting at bronze at 25% and upgrading to silver for 50%, gold at 75%, and lastly a platinum badge for doing everything.

*Models shown here are the Mercenary, Soldier Of Fortune, Grizzled Veteran, and Primeval Warrior and are being used as examples for the color. The actual badges would have a different model so that they (obviously) don't get confused.

Reasons For Changes

It is my personal opinion that three cosmetic slots are the perfect amount for the game, but with one exception - badges. Most badges serve to showcase that you were there during some event or achieved some goal in the game, yet add very little to the cosmetic look of your character. I think it would be neat to allow you to show a badge off without having to essentially remove one of your cosmetic slots. The new badge on the other hand serves as something valuable for newer players to look towards getting to platinum rank and have something else to showcase besides the Mercenary Badge.

Added a match timer to the Casual HUD that keeps track of the current round's total time passed. Shown in parentheses below the remaining round time.

Reasons For Changes

This is a change that was suggested to me to help counter the loss of a normally functioning timer in some gamemodes, and to give gamemodes that lack a timer the ability to keep track of it in-game. Helps some players determine time-based mechanics, such as approximating an enemy Medic's Übercharge meter.