Ban the Flying Guillotine
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The cleaver is too overcentralizing. It is by far the best available secondary and every scout player who doesn’t use it are gimping themselves. With this weapon, the optimal play style for scout is to spam it off cooldown across the map and we should not encourage that type of degenerate gameplay. Highlander does not need another spam class.
Sure, it gives scout something to do during downtimes but it’s so brainless and too effective for the effort it requires. I think if scout players learned cleaver spots (akin to lining up your crosshair to throw a nade in CSGO) people will learn how truly oppressive it truly is.
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Hard agree. With double bleed you get a low risk, high reward playstyle that allows scout to be powerful at every range, which IMO goes against his core design of being a class that excels heavily in CQC due to his high damage and mobility, while being weak at a distance.
Like wish said, it is WAY too spammable and easy to hit, unlike the wrap assassin which has a higher CD, breaks at a certain range, and is slightly more difficult to hit due to the way it travels in the air. I could be wrong but can’t you also one-shot medics with a long-range guillotine?
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@wish said in Ban the Flying Guillotine:
The cleaver is too overcentralizing. It is by far the best available secondary and every scout player who doesn’t use it are gimping themselves. With this weapon, the optimal play style for scout is to spam it off cooldown across the map and we should not encourage that type of degenerate gameplay. Highlander does not need another spam class.
there was a point in time where i advocated for banning it quite a bit but didn’t receive any real agreement and nothing came of it, eventually i stopped caring about the gamemode and stopped trying
my one note to this is that you could argue that by using the Toys in general, you are losing potential DPS, since the scattergun is absolutely busted and the best weapon in the game, but yea, ban the cleaver already
Sure, it gives scout something to do during downtimes but it’s so brainless and too effective for the effort it requires. I think if scout players learned cleaver spots (akin to lining up your crosshair to throw a nade in CSGO) people will learn how truly oppressive it truly is.
i actually did also go through a time (right before I quit) where I hunted around product for this exact thing, csgo smoke setups for the wrap assassin and cleaver, specifically for standard sniper spots (on rock, on china, on porch, cliff, bottom cliff, concrete), some of these were pretty easy to find, others had too much variance (rock is too big, personally couldn’t find an angle that hit a good region of porch / next to porch), the rest were pretty fuckin easy to find, and if there were any actual scouts that cared enough about HL to lab it hard enough, cleaver would have been banned already for this exact reason imo
invite players be complaining about the invite meta of highlander for ages but refuse to vote for bans on the CC / spam weapons plaguing the gamemode, get the cleaver out, the scorch shot out, wrangler (koth specifically, wrangler has an excuse on pl and ad), banners, shields, etc and you’d actually have something considered competitive maybe
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@wax said in Ban the Flying Guillotine:
can’t you also one-shot medics with a long-range guillotine?
No, but I also had to stop and look it up. WA has crit on long-distance hit, but cleaver just has recharge shortened on long-distance hit.
October 20, 2017 Patch (Jungle Inferno Update)
Changed attributes: Removed crit vs stunned players. Removed mini-crits at long range. Long range hits reduce recharge (by 1.5 seconds). Distance considered "long range" reduced by half of the previous value when determining mini-crits.
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I personally don’t think the Guillotine has enough impact to really warrant a ban. Sure its a little annoying when you get hit by one.
With the Flying Guillotine you’re basically forced to use if it the other scout is.
I’ve seen plenty of really good scouts not run the cleaver and do just as good, sometimes even better than the other scout who is running the cleaver. The cleaver does not give such a distinct advantage that you are basically forced to run it just because the other scout is.
I feel that compared to something like the Scorch Shot the cleaver takes a fair bit more effort to be effective. It doesnt have a splash like the scorch shot, you have to actually land it on the target. Scorch shot you can use it like a rocket launcher and just shoot surfaces near your target to hit them.
Just my two cents.
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Guillotine is fine imho. It’s strong, sure, but it’s not nearly as impactful on the game as the scorch shot. The scorch shot is just on a different level of meta changing and extremely annoying. Being able to one shot a spy/scout/engie/sniper is such a stupid thing and the damage over time for how easy it is to just fire it off and forget about it is dumb.
Detonator is fine in my opinion because it takes more skill to get a bunch of people on fire, you need to pay attention to it to right click at the right time, it can’t funny one shot players, and it doesn’t stun.
Darwins is fine as it is; it’s literally just an unlock that prevents sniper from using cozy camper or smg so I don’t see the problem with it.@JohhnyFromCali said in Ban the Flying Guillotine:
The scorch shot splash is the size of the direct hit. I don’t care for the weapon but if scorch is banned then the det should be as well and the Darwin’s danger shield since the det is the same as the scorch but you jump a bit higher and the Darwin’s fire counter play would be too much since the spam fire weapons are gone and no longer needed.
why would u need to ban the darwins if it would get no usage -_-
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I forked the Scorch Shot discussion into a new topic. You can continue that topic here: https://forums.rgl.gg/topic/685/forked-scorch-shot-ban-discussion
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Pistol on average does 300 damage per half. Sometimes even less.
The logs where I use the cleaver 20% of my whole damage is from just spamming it into groups of people. It’s degenerate.
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Perhaps I’m in the minority but I don’t think cleaver is by any means “oppressively degenerate” so much as “annoying at best.” Certainly unlucky when I peek an angle and get hit by a cleaver, but it doesn’t define Scout gameplay; it basically just gives him something to do during downtime.
It also has a somewhat interesting interaction with the Scattergun in which since it can’t fill the same role as the pistol for spam clean up, it means your Scattergun shots have to be more accurate to clean up.
Degeneracy by itself is not a good measure for banning because it doesn’t say anything about how good the degeneracy is. Sniper’s piss rifle is degenerate but not oppressive.
Cleaver is maybe degenerate but doesn’t degrade the skill of Scout by itself. Scattergun is still the defining weapon for Scout and it still requires a lot of skill. Cleaver is also (imo) not oppressive.
Scorch shot is degenerate, oppressive (forces enemy Sniper to use darwin’s), and degrades Pyro’s skill (shotgun and other flare weapons definitely require more skill).
Just my thoughts.
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My only issue with the guillotine is that I feel like scout doesn’t need it. He’s one of the strongest classes in the game. Why give him secondary alternatives that attempt to cover up one of his only weaknesses?
One of the reasons we keep the wrangler unbanned is because engineer needs it to have more impact in-game, but scout doesn’t have this issue.
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It really comes down to theory. I absolutely fucking despise the toys, they’re so fucking rancid and degenerate gameplay to this insane degree without even labbing for them like asher said. Long range is something that scout does not need given it’s current strength.
That being said, despite how fucking badly I want them gone, I don’t think they’re strictly overpowered in the traditional sense, with the exception of product. Given the prominence of the map I think a lot of people conflate “the cleaver is broken and a straight upgrade all the time” with “the cleaver is better than the pistol on product.” I’ve watched syath 1-clip enough scouts with the pistol to know that the weapon is insane, but only a handful of players are good enough to warrant it. If you’re taking a top-down approach on balance, though, that’s enough to keep it unbanned following “the traditional sense”.
Which is why these bans come down to the theory of what a whitelist should be. There’s been a prevailing school of thought that “comp should be kept as similar to pubs as possible to encourage new players to join.” I understand the reasoning for it well enough, but I really don’t know if it’s been effective and how players in NC/AM/Open feel about having certain weapons allowed. I bring this up because under this principle, the I don’t think the cleaver is bannable.
Under the ideal that “a whitelist should exist to enforce competitive integrity and balance,” the cleaver should absolutely be banned, as should the wrap assassin. I, for whatever it’s worth, think this is a better system to move towards. I honestly doubt there’s a meaningful amount of pub players that are interested in comp, who still haven’t played it, that would cite the cleaver of all things as the breaking point for why they don’t play comp. That entire argument is based on the old 6s whitelist policy of ‘ban everything that doesn’t actively enhance gameplay’ instead of ‘only ban the things actively disrupting gameplay’, and applying it to HL as a reason to keep dogshit like the sandman back when it stunned in the game always felt like a misuse of argument.
Under the traditional system, you could actually make the argument that the wrap assassin is better than the cleaver because the pistol has a ton of uses whereas the basher (tradeoff for the WA) is a lot less necessary in HL than in 6s, and I think that’s dumb. Although if you banned the cleaver, I think there’s a decent amount of other weapons that’d be worth looking into banning under the same principle (starting with, but not limited to sniper secondaries).
I made this exact thread a season or two ago and nothing came of it. If you really want to see the cleaver removed, you need to make an argument for a different ban policy that marks the cleaver as banworthy, because the current framework doesn’t.
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While I think balance is important, past a basic level of balance, I think it’s much more important to pay attention to the long term implications of certain weapons and the playstyles they result in, as well as interactions with other weapons that are considered unbalanced.
In the case of the cleaver and wrap assassin, I do think they promote an unintuitive sort of play, by providing an easy and ticking damage source without as much need for direct exposure. Akin to the pyro, the scout is a lot more focused on cleanup and close range combat. If the argument is made that the pyro should not have an easy and low risk long range spam option (scorch shot), then the same should be applied to scout. A skilled scout can still get value out of the pistol at a mid-long range distance, but it also requires a certain level of mechanical investment, and doesn’t serve as a potentially indirect spam option.
Let’s take the darwins. It completely nullifies the ability of pyro to pressure the sniper. In response to the scorch shot and it’s uncanny ability to spam with very little mechanical investment and risk proportional to the value, I’d argue it’s fair. I think the scorch shot results in more generalized playstyles, with less focus on individual mechanics that are necessary for a pyro player to improve. It is also extremely unfair and unfun to fight against the stuns provided by the scorch shot.
By removing the scorch shot and the darwins, you would see more dynamic interactions, with a lot more room for human error; while still allowing the pyro to have impact versus the sniper. This results in much more engaging play and counterplay, as the pyro would have to either have to time something such as a detonator shot, or open himself up to more exposure to the sniper with a wider peak to flaregun him.I think these sorts of contrasts help to paint a clearer image of what is and isn’t intuitive towards the development of a class, which also somewhat ties in to the relative balance of a weapon. There tends to be a correlation between how directly unintuitive and easy a weapon is to get value out of, and how balanced it is.
More than that though, I think it’s important to contrast it with the other weapons of it’s slots, as well the individual playstyles that they each promote, and then make a decision on how balanced a weapon is primarily based off of that.Weapons that promote healthier playstyles naturally result in a smoother transition from casual to competitive, as players become less reliant on inherently unbalanced and broken mechanics while they learn the competitive roles of their class. So I think the argument of comp being kept similar to pubs is an argument that lacks depth, as it hurts the long term growth of a scene. In most games, you’re going to see some balancing problems, and tf2 is no exception. I do not think that there will be anything close to an ideal level of balance in most cases. So I think the focus should be on how the weapon(s) influence the dynamics of the class and dynamics with other classes as a whole; rather than how fun or unfun they are to play with and against, or how balanced it is on paper.
After quarantine ends, I think it’s fair to assume that there will be a decent share of returning players that will have more real life obligations again, or younger players freshly losing interest due to all the possibilities that they realize and may then start to pursue. So I think it’s better to nip some of these weapons that can be clearly seen as harming the development of classes sooner rather than later; and to focus on the developmental aspect of balance.
So let’s say we get rid of scorch, we get rid of darwins as well
We get rid of the bleeds, we get rid of cozy as well etc
I was gonna type up a bit about cozy but this post is already long enough as it is so I’ll just use it as an example of something that would demonstrate this sort of balancing
Take out an unintuitive weapon, take out it’s unintuitive counterplay, and you solve two issues at the same time. -
I take this thread back. After playing again and looking at logs (not one of the top 3 scouts last season used it on a map other than Product/Steel) from last season I can safely say it’s just a crutch for inexperienced players and doesn’t deserve to be banned