CommunityFortress

Holiday greetings, everyone! It's Mutated, back for another round of breakdowns! With the first update with new weapons in quite a while, our minds turn once again to ritual slaughter - uh, competitive play!

First up is our new Scout weapon, the Wrap Assassin! This guy works in a similar manner to the Sandman - alt-fire launches a bauble that inflicts bleed damage on any sucker it hits. However, a swing of the wrapping paper proper only deals 30% of the Bat's damage. Hardcore Pyros will complain about even more infringement on their damage-over-time territory (it's like a Flare Gun that you can't put out!), but the damage is only about 2/3 a full-damage Flare shot, and that's without those fantastic crits. It allows the Scout to benefit from having another ranged weapon with no cost to his general combat abilities, but if you're caught without Scattergun shots in close range, you'll be wishing you had your bat back. It seems like a solid sidegrade if you can rock it!

Next is Pyro's new flamethrower, the Phlogistinator! This contraption has no airblast (sit back down and hear me out) and no random critical hits (irrelevant). But! Every point of fire damage you do will add "Mmmph" to a recharge bar... and once the bar is full, taunt, and you get all your health back (plus 90% damage resistance during the taunt) and guaranteed criticals for the next ten seconds! I think that the Pyro now has slightly more of a competitor with the Degreaser for most useful flamethrower - outstripping the unreliable Backburner and the outmoded Flamethrower. It fails whenever you need to airblast, which is often... but it succeeds when you can play offensively or near a Medic to keep you alive until your Flare shots add up. It could be a worthy weapon.

Up next is the Pyro's mysterious new flare gun, the Manmelter. It fires unreflectable projectiles that deal the same 30 damage + 60 afterburn as a Flare shot, but you can right-click to extinguish teammates, storing a crit for later use. This somewhat makes up for the lack of airblast on the Phlogistinator - you can't protect yourself, but you can save your teammates - and the ability to gain unrestricted critical hits is comparable to Flares always critting on their targets. It feels gimmicky, though, and not worth it unless you're defending with the Phlogistinator - just set things on fire, airblast them, then pull your Flare Gun for ensured crits every time.

The last Pyro weapon is the Third Degree. It's an axe that damages all players connected by Medigun beams. The intelligence of the strike is actually brilliant, as damage will travel through other Medics and other chains of players, if they are all indeed linked together. It's a straight upgrade over the Fire Axe (a minor concern for some of us), but once again you simply cannot topple the mightly Axtinguisher. Not a bad concept anyway.

And now we have the Engineer's new shotgun, the Pomson 6000! It's a weapon in the vein of other Grordbort weapons, being capable of firing four lasers before reloading. Damage calculations are now much different, leaving Engineer conceivably without a hitscan weapon, but any shot landed on a Medic or Spy will suck 10% ubercharge and 20% cloak right out. The deciding factor on this weapon will not be its damaging properties (which are decent at best), but will instead be how much it is spammed and taken advantage of to inturrupt Medics and Spies trying to do their jobs. Infinite ammo probably won't help with this problem either, but it has the potential in its current state to be a game-changer.

Engineer's other new weapon is a new wrench, the Eureka Effect. No longer can you haul your buildings around, but a right-click will thrust your wrench in the air, sending you back to spawn for an instant resupply. Really, this is just like playing old-school Engineer, but with a new added effect. Something that is a bit concerning is the technicalities of it: it works as a full respawn in situations where it ought not to, namely Arena and Sudden Death modes. Sure, you still have to taunt, but duck around a corner and get a little lucky and you're home free. It'll definitely see playing time, particularly for Engineers who want to quickly rebuild teleporters on moving-spawn maps.

The Heavy also picked up a new pair of gloves: the Holiday Punch, a festive set of winter mittens! These babies will always crit in Spy's backstab range, forcing the enemy to laugh (a la the Schadenfreude), but will deal no critical damage. It also crits on any enemy player holding their own Holiday Punch. The Heavy once again suffers from his slow speed, but managing to sneak up on a heavy class could be more devastating than simply minigunning him down. It's no GRU, and it's no FoS, but it's certainly something to think about in close-range games.

Finally, we have the Spy-cicle, the most unimaginatively-named weapon Valve's ever spit out. It's a silent killer, and it turns your enemies into ice sculptures! Whenever you're hit with fire, you gain 2 seconds of total fire invulnerability, but you lose your knife for a full 15 seconds. Let me just say: what a totally bizarre concept for a weapon. Fireproofing in exchange for losing your best weapon? Okay? It might be a boon for Spies that are good with a revolver, but the gimmicks continue to pile up, and a vanilla loadout (or a DR-centric one) remains the best Spy loadout. Don't count it out yet, though!

So, we as a community have quite a few weapons to keep our eyes on, with a few potential game-changers stuck here among the goofy alternatives. Agree, disagree, have other speculations, hard evidence, or just an agenda and desire an audience? Comments, if you please!