New update.

Jinsei Zetsumei said:
Since I am one of the few who learned to live with Sandman and love it for what it is, with out playing nothing but scout during this whole time, I will say.

That this is a fail change. The distance change, sure fine, that works, but the damage reduction on top of that? they is fail. The sandman made scouts OMG!!! useful, I know aginst the laws of nature right? takeing that from him will make, for one, the F.A.N alot harder to use and almost pointless now. Valve forbid, that the scout be able to do something other then run in and die.

Play as a team and the sandman would have meant nothing to you, if you got bonked and you were ubered, your medic better be smart enouge to grab the next best class that is near by to continue the push.

50% less damage? that is a bit to much. I hope F.A.N users notice this before they continue to base their attacks on the sandman to get a free kills.
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seriously, this class did much more damage than it should of....not only did it stun your victim, but it gave you an near 100% chance of killing him, no other class can do that. Now I for one wasnt for nerfing the bat, but I wasnt against it either way. personally I felt that scouts didnt kill me to often for me to complain about it.
 
Captain Kraken said:
Yeah, how dare Valve take away your ability to completely destroy heavies at a close range! Seriously.... Chill. This update keeps the stun at the same length witch is useful for your average scout, this isnt made for the scout to be "OMG I AM SUPER" it is made to bring him up to par with other classes. Witch it does. Charging head on into a heavy should be a suicide mission for a scout. Period. No buts. And this makes it that way again.

EDIT: your last 4 words in that post pretty much solidified my argument.
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You know, Heavy is my second most played class and I never ran into an issue where a Scout could completely destroy me. I was Bonked quite a few times, and I took a lot of damage, but I could always recover. And usually I would still recover in time to kill the Scout.

I don't see where all of these disaster scenarios people are saying happened to them ever occured. I never saw any, never had any happen to me, and I can't figure out where some of them would happen at. If you are referring to when there were ten Scouts at a time on a map, things that happened during that time period don't even apply. Acheivment rush time doesn't even count, it never does.

Like Jinsei said, if you play as a team the Scout can't even phase the overall performance of the team. They may be annoying at times, but never overpowered.
 
Captain Kraken said:
Yeah, how dare Valve take away your ability to completely destroy heavies at a close range! Seriously.... Chill. This update keeps the stun at the same length witch is useful for your average scout, this isnt made for the scout to be "OMG I AM SUPER" it is made to bring him up to par with other classes. Witch it does. Charging head on into a heavy should be a suicide mission for a scout. Period. No buts. And this makes it that way again.

EDIT: your last 4 words in that post pretty much solidified my argument.
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That is incorrect, my last 4 words were actully directed to free kills, people who are alone and do not work as a team. Anyclass acting as that is a free kill as any class, as it should be.

As for the heavy thing, I rarley saw this happen, so I do not feel the same way. Playing heavy I was always with my team so if I got hit by the ball the rest of them defended me, becasue it is a team game.

Let us face some facts, the scout was a free kill before the update, enless in the hands of a really skilled player, now that the update came out and he has become useful and people are yelling for nerfs. I think that is silly, the scout is fine the way it was, and as you said it was meant to bring them up to being on par, to which I feel it did a great job at. But I do not get killed by scouts enouge to be bothered by them so I have a completely diffrent opinon then the mass who scremed for a nerf and got it.

Getting hit by the ball does not bother me, I rarley get killed after it happens.
And I do not play scout that often, I play medic, solider, and recently, heavy. So I was not looking to be, as you put it, "OMG I AM SUPER", my arguement is it makes the scout a credit to the team, and since I play the game for the team work involved in it and not spend the entire match trying to score kills like some people do, I fealt it was wrong to nerf it. So forgive me on my much diffrent veiw on the matter, I shall do as you say now and 'Chill'.

Edit: as for dingo's comment on 100% chance to kill, that is untrue as I was rarley killed after getting stunned. Only when I was alone was it a 100% chance.
 
I'm not sure if this was the best thing to do, but time will tell. I'm glad they changed the minimum stun range, that was needed.

I'm also fairly glad about the damage reduction. you go into vents in black mesa or walk to action in warpath, you meet scout. He hits close range with sandman. You watch as he kills you. You wonder how fair a one hit kill (basically) is.

Situation 2:
same as above, but there is a teammate around. You watch in 3rd person as your teammate ignores the scout destroying you and wonder why valve took control from you and placed it in someone who doesn't care about what happens to you.

With the teamwork stuff, it applies to both sides. A scout going alone shouldn't be automatically more powerful than any other class. He should have to rely on teamwork as well.

One thing I really want to see is giving the pyro the ability to actually stun the scout or at least hurt him when reflecting the ball.
 
The scout isn't meant for direct combat. The sandman is for support and for getting away with intel which is how the class is meant to be played.

This nerf has made the game MUCH more bearable and I am really happy about it,
 
If you look at the scouts weapons that were released with the patch, you'll notice they are meant for really 1 thing. Survivability. This is to turn the scout from a pesky gnat that will do hit and run tactics and can be a formidable foe in the right hands, to a defensive, or objective based class.

What I mean is, the scout can stop ubers from a distance. This prevents your team from having to rely on a good demo man to split the uber (if possible) or a pyro to blast them back and ultimately suicide the uber. This scout update has only served to give the scout a different class role than to just run in and fight. With the addition of the sandman, there needed to be a drawback, and there was none to this weapon over the regular bat.

If you want to be thick in combat, the sandman is not your weapon. Use the original 3 weapons for that. These unlockables are not to be seen as "upgrades" but as alternatives. Keep that in mind.
 
Valve can't make everyone happy but I like how they listen to petitions! I for one never complained about the sandman and if you know me I'm at 2 fort doing my demo thing but everytime I get stunned im pretty much dead maybe now this will better my odds.
 
That -50% is great, IMHO.

I liked the aspect of being able to interrupt ubers and whatnot, I just saw too many Scouts using it too well or taking advantage of stunning, then scattergunning.
 
As soon as you accept an ability as part of the game it no longer bothers you.

Example: The medic can heal people, this was decided right away from the getgo of the game and you accepted it, you never questioned how cheap it was that you could get someone down to one health and then they could just call for a medic and be healed and then kill you. You never asked for the medigun to be nerfed because it can make someone invincible. No, you knew it was part of the game as soon as you saw it the first time.

Now for the sandman here you have a weapon introduced after you have been playing the game for a while, people are naturally afraid of change, they do not like that they can be stunned when they lone wolf it. Now imagine a player who bought the game a week after the scout update, not to many scouts in the servers now and its about back to normal, the first time he sees a person stunned he does not think of it as overpowered, he develops ways to overcome it and counter it.

Side note: The sandman was designed to make scouts more useful on linear maps like goldrush, not to help him retreat although it does help with this.

You people need to stop getting so worked up over a weapon that encourages teamwork on the enemy's part. It is not an instant win button, if you are good you will best the scout, you have just been too blind to accept the weapon as part of the game and valve has given into your blind pressure.

If valve is reading this (Which I doubt but still): The majority is not always in the right, do not give into community pressure to change a perfectly tested and balanced weapon.

I think I'm just going to have to go back to using double jump now. For shame, for shame.
 
Im so pissed off right now, I loved sandman, now it's dead... I blame valve...
 
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The Sandman did NOT make the Scout more viable. The entire point of the viability of the Scout is the ability to use his speed to hit-and-run an opponent or group of opponents until they die, hitting them from multiple angles to confuse them.

All the Sandman did was give a Scout a tactical option at the cost of another, imo much more valuable, tactical option. It did NOT make him more viable because at the end of the day the Scout still must depend on his sheer speed and ability to confuse and outwit an opponent to win a fight, not a gimmick that only works on lone victims who really shouldn't have been alone to begin with.

The FAN, on the other hand, DID add more viability to the Scout because it encourages the hit-and-run style of gameplay the Scout does best. A nearly instantaneous blast of damage pumped into an opponent along with knockback that throws the opponent away to give yourself the chance to escape, regroup, and attack from another angle? Hell yes, that is exactly what the Scout should be about. The fact that you have to reload only discourages you from maintaining sustained combat with an opponent, which is a situation a Scout should avoid to begin with. Plus, if the Scout needs to sustain an engagement, he always has his trusty pistol to fall back on, since the Bonk! is absolute rubbish.

In short, dependence on the Sandman does not a good Scout make. Good understanding of the survivability of a situation as well as the terrain and your ability to exploit it to confuse an enemy is the order of the day.

EDIT: I'm not saying I'm for or against the nerf in any way. I just find it very frustrating that people think that the Sandman somehow fixed the Scout. The FAN does much more for the Scout than the Sandman does, nerfed or not.
 
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This is a sad day.

I will be careful in the way I write this, as I lambasted the NURF NOW! crowd, so I don't want to sound like a BUFF NOW! crowd member.

First: Players who are stunned by a Scout now take 50% less damage

As this does nothing about my only complaint about the sandman (stopping ubers), it doesn't really excite me.

But, you see, I did what the poster before said; I accepted the Sandman into my game mechanics. When I ubercharged somebody, I started looking for and alerting to scouts. I no longer stopped zigging and zagging with my medic just because I was invincible (actually, I never stopped zigging and zagging, even when ubered :D). It made my medic job more interesting.

I got bonked maybe 10 times after the initial week of heck? And when I'm not Engie (which you would expect not to be bonked) I'm Medic, Heavy, or Pyro.

But because I'm not a lone wolf, I didn't suffer. If I got bonked with anything but Pyro, I had friends around to save me. As Pyro, I tend to charge through tunnels like the hand of <insert deity here>, shoving back the attack to the detriment of my health. But in that case, I expected to die anyway.

See, there are two aspects of TF2 that people seem to forget:

* TF2 is TEAM fortress 2
* TF2 is not Counterstrike

If you die, you don't have to sit out a round. You respawn relatively quickly. If youre an instant gratification type of person, you play 2.0FORT Insta. Dying isn't that bad. That's the first habit somebody has to break when they play TF2. Sometimes it's worth while to charge the tunnel, only to be shot by the sentry to give your team medics another 10 seconds to prepare for the charge from the other side. And you'll be back in the action before the charge regroups.

Sorry, I digressed a bit.

The difference, however, between the Spy and the Scout and the rest of the classes, is that the Spy and the Scout ARE LONERS. The Spy sneaks around the back of enemies, spies out their base, sends in reports, saps sentries, and backstabbs people. He's not supposed to play in the group. Is he still part of the team? Yeah: he saps sentries so other people can pass, he backstabbs chargers so they can't do too much damage, he reports on the other base camp so their players can be prepared.

What about the Scout? How about a quick story:

During the Revolutionary War here in the good ol' U S of A, the British attempted to fight wars as they had always fought wars: ranks of men marching shoulder to shoulder, putting up a wall of shot, generals sitting on horseback so they could watch the battle.

See, in Europe, it was expected for the two fronts to meet, and fire. Then each side decided to advance or retreat, then fire again. It was like chess; my turn, your turn. And Generals were not to be shot. They were to be captured and bargained for, or captured and executed, but not SHOT like a common soldier!

But then they came to America. The American Militia had a different strategy. They'd lay in ambush for soldiers to walk by in ranks and shoot at them and then run away. They'd sneak up to camps and pick off a few people on the edge and leave. They'd fight in groups of two or three, they wouldn't line up in ranks (ranks are only really useful for shooting broad sides of barns or other ranks). And eventually, despite being outnumbered, low on ammunition and supplies, ill equipped for the war, they won.

MORAL OF THE STORY: The Scout is a hit-and-runner. Sure, his tricks are a bit unfair. But it's supposed to be him vs. a soldier, heavy, and medic. He runs in front of the rest of the team, causing mayhem and confusion, even more than the Pyro. He runs up, jumps in, BONKs the medic, hits the heavy a few times, puts two FAN shells into the soldier, and then disappears before the other team can cause repraisals.

THIS IS WHY TF2 GIVES ASSIST POINTS. You're supposed to work together. The Scout softens the heavy, the Soldier gibs the heavy.

The Scout with his sandman was no more OP than the camping Sniper or the Spy or the Engieer.

* Scout has the sandman and can bonk people.
* Sniper has the sniper rifle and can one hit kill people with headshots or charged bodyshots.
* The Spy just has to flick his wrist at people's back and they die to death.
* The Engineer has a frickin' Heavy/Soldier Aimbot and a Supply Cabinet AND a team-no-clipper-warp-device that he can build wherever he wants

Why are none of these OP? Because all of these people end up being left alone. The Sniper has to look through a scope that restricts his field of view if he wants to do damage; he has to balance his power with looking around and protecting himself AND countersniping, as in TF2 almost all good sniping positions leave you open to countersniping. The Spy has to sneak into your base and get behind you to kill you. The Engineer is usually all alone in the Intel room, or on some back corridor; he can't leave his equipment too long or it's spy bait. So he needs local supplies and an able-bodied assistant to shoot for him.

In the case of the Sniper, Spy, and Engineer, we gripe but don't CRY LIKE LITTLE BABIES because, as was also said before, we expect those. They've been here all along. But you finally give one class the ability to strike out on their own without being cannonfodder (the Scout is fast, but has the least health in the game, is constantly out of range from team Medics, and is obvious when bouncing around to boot). He was the balance to lone wolfing. Sure, you can strike out on your own if you want... but you have to watch for scouts now! Because he WILL bonk you and beat you to death.

It's not all loss, though. Scouts who like to walk slow and hang out with the team can still bonk people with the sandman to prepare them for bullety-death from a Heavy or what not. It's just sad that CRYING BABIES griped about a bonus for the Scout. I can't wait to hear the sad, sad songs sung by people when Engineers get new toys for their aimbots, or Spies, say, earn the ability to walk through the enemy team.

REMEMBER, VALVE! It's always OP if it's a bonus for the guy fighting against you. It's always fair play when you've got it.

WHO SENT BABIES TO FIGHT ME?
 
Sandman was not meant for a scout to stun anybody they want and kill them in 2 shots. Sandman was made to hit people and make them sitting ducks for your sniper. Sandman was made to hit an engineer and prevent them from repairing their sentry so anybody can get it easy enough. Sandman was made to prevent ubers from doing anything useful(which is still overpowered). Sandman was made to hit spies that were about to back stab a team mate and then alerting that player so they turn around. Sandman was made so that team mates could step up and protect there team mates while they're stunned. The sand man was made to promote team work, not promote being a lone wolf.

Making a class that can do whatever it wants by itself goes against the whole purpose of TEAM Fortress 2. I'm not saying that it means they're not helpful when they run by sentrys and then come up behind people and kill them, but it's still not team work, which is the whole basis of the game. To be honest, we're already lucky enough to see any teamwork at all on pub servers.
 
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Meh. I've long since switched back to the default Scout weapons; I love me those double-jumps! The Sandman was a cool idea, but it doesn't really suit the way I play Scouts. I feel like I'm more of an asset to the team as the super-fast-double-jumpy-hyper-caffinated turd in the clothes-hamper than the guy who may occasionally stun someone for a couple seconds (if the ball doesn't go sailing uselessly into the distance) and spend half his time reloading.
 
AutoDMC, great tought, totaly agreed, altough I am sad about it being nerfed.

P.S. epic line :* The Spy just has to flick his wrist at people's back and they die to death.
 
Sorry, but when I play as scout if I use the sandman and land a direct hit with it, I can usually kill most classes with the shotty...Im pretty glad that they nerfed it as they did and by the looks of it most are as well.
 
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