New Soldier Weapon Pack Released: Dr. Grordbort's Infallible Aether Oscillators

[Dekstar]

[br]

[br]Were you wondering why rockets were scattered around maps recently? Well this comic explains almost everything![br]Yes, the Soldier has found some pretty nifty new weapons, a helmet, and a beard in a crashed space rocket; new weapons that I think solve one of the Soldier's main problem points: Lack of ammo.[br]The Cow Mangler 5000

• Focused Wave Projector
• Doesn't require ammo
• Fires a charged shot that mini-crits players and disables buildings for 4 seconds
• No random critical hits
• Deals reduced damage to buildings

[br]The Righteous Bison

• Indivisible Particle Smasher
• Doesn't require ammo
• Fires a projectile that can penetrate through multiple targets
• Projectiles cannot be deflected
• Deals reduced damage to buildings

[br]The weapon designs actually come from WETA Workshop, who do all manner of physical costumery and items for various media, including big film companies.

Luckily Greg Broadmore, WETA Workshop's mastermind behind Dr. Grordbort's Infallible Aether Oscillators, sent us over a bunch of concept art for cool-looking space guns, which cheered us up immediately. We asked if he could redraw the art so Burt Reynolds and Tony Danza were having a gunfight in space over who would be our best friend. He said sure. Then he never did.

The weapons of course are available from random drops, crafting, or alternatively the Mann Co. store. Those that buy the full pack will also get a bronze medal, apparently made from real bronze.[br]
For the full post, head on over to the Team Fortress blog right now.

 

[DEATHMASTER]

Pretty...random. Like most of it, but this time it feels random too.

 

[StarBob]

Fighting against them I don't find either to be all that brutal. The Cow Mangler is kind of blinding but it doesn't seem to be all that more intimidating than any other rocket launcher. I guess it's all about disabling turrets...

 

[Naph]

Transforms the soldier into a support class.

 

[Edeslash]

Soldier found one rocket, 2 remain. Do you think other classes will get items from those? Engineer is a pretty obvious option.

 

[ríomhaire]

The wave launcher thingy shoots five pulses without having to "recharge" (read: reload). That alone seems like it makes it overpowered already. A extra rocket is just brutal and it has an on-demand mini-crit function to! That said one of it's disadvantages says it does not randomly crit, but that's underselling it. It actually cannot crit at all, even when a Medic uses the Kritzkrieg on you. Apparently is only does 16 damage to buildings though so a Sentry is going to **** you up. But of course you can also diable it with this gun so if you have a single compotent teammate you can take it out even easier by working together.

I also don't like that it can ignite people. That's the Pyro's job and if people are being ignited the Pyro should be involved (I don't mind about the torches in Degroot but that's different). BTW you can also get the Pyro's Pilot Light achievement by just rocket jumping with a fully charged shot and setting yourself on fire.

The disintigration effect is cool, now all five Orange Box games have a version of it

I expect nerfs for it next week or the week after to be honest. We'll see how it goes.



Edit: Edeslash, it's also worth noting that they haven't removed the rockets from the game yet, so it's highly possible this is ongoing.

Edit2: I also think the 50s laser pistol would have suited the Scout better style-wise.

Edit3: The Soldier just has too many weapons at this point compared to almost everyone else. They should really put an embargo on any more Soldier weapons.

Edit4: There's an awesome bug that lets you shoot a charged shot while using the Director's Vision taunt:

Edit5: People are saying this weapon has downsides that aren't listed. That the projectiles are actually slower than normal rockets and do slightly less damage. I really wish Valve would just give us all the numbers instead of vague statements on how the weapons work.

Edit6: It occurs to me that a good balancing move might be to nerf the hell out this weapon's knockback, making it useless for juggling and rocket jumping but just allowing a higher damage output.

 

[DEATH eVADER]

And here I was hoping that the Grockets had something to do with Raid Mode, lets just hope the last rocket to be open will release an endless wave of aliens and monsters

 

[Lobster]

I love the predictable reaction to new weapons in the game chat. Giant red clouds of pew pew appear and people act like a bunch of communists stole their children.

 

[Edeslash]

Wait, what is this Raid mode that everyone is talking about and I've never heard of?

 

[ríomhaire]

Edit: I should have remembered to never trust the Steam forums (or Hammer). There's a bug in the model viewer that makes it claim models have double the amount of polygons they actually have. Actual counts are 7,013 and 6,528 though they are still the first and third highest polycounts of all weapons and they do have LODs as it turns out. So yeah I'm an idiot for trusting SPUF and Valve are idiots for giving their users tools that lie to them about how many polygons are in a model.

 

[Dekstar]

Ok what the hell Robin? These polycounts are ridiculous:
Cow Mangler: 13,056
Righteous Bison: 14,026
The Cow Mangler's projectile: >4000 according to the forums

The Soldier himself: 8,310

The previous highest weapon (Sydney Sleeper): 6,623

And no detail scaling for any of them, so it's at full detail no matter how far away from you it is. That's just ****ing retarded. There is no excuses for this shit. It's a mistake a bad mod team shouldn't make. The gun has five thousand more polyguns than the person using it and shoots projectiles with half the polygon count of the shooter. This is just dumb as shit.

No doubt this will be fixed very soon.

 

[ChiliFan]

I think the 4000 poly projectile is just something that the Steam Forums have pulled out of their collective ass without checking the models.

 

[ríomhaire]

*delete this post because it was stupid*

 

[Hectic Glenn]

The scaling problem has existed for a long time. For a very long time a vast majority of hats and weapon unlocks had no distance scaling and TF2 performance on lower end machines was unplayable. The TF2 team did fix those issues eventually but after a couple months. I guess it's the Valve mantra of 'not enough time to do everything' so they get around to it when they can, otherwise the stream of new content would be throttled. A good or bad thing? It's debatable...

 

[ríomhaire]

Model optimisation is still lacking for a lot of weapons and all but five hats. If you're on a bad PC you're just better off blocking hats entirely.

 

[Shem]

Wait, hold on. How do these new weapons even fit the style of TF2? This is just getting silly. I find the comic more of an excuse than an explanation.

 

[Edeslash]

Yeah that's the reason why I really don't like this update. I hope the other classes' weapons will have less laserz.

 

[Lucid]

Well, this is absolutely terrible.

TF2 has once again jumped the shark.

 

[mrmrmr8]

Another thing that isn't in all of the numbers, like you said how the rockets are slower, but there is more that makes them easier to dodge. One obvious thing is that they are flashing blue and red. I don't think you see that in a battlefield that often -__-. Also, it has an extremely large tail. If you were behind cover, you would know that a projectile is coming. The problem with it is, that even though you have a crit, because it is so easy to dodge, you could just run out of ammo because you missed, and be put into a tight situation. I do agree that fire is a pyro thing. I think its balanced in a more practical way, but if your just looking at the numbers its unbalanced. I actually tested it against the default rocket launcher. Try comparing it instead of just using the weapon alot. I do agree that soldier is getting way too many weapons. It seems that this weapon is somewhat an opposite of the direct hit. The direct hit makes it easier to get a direct hit, and if you do, you do more damage. On the cow mangler its harder to get a direct hit, but it is capable with splash damage. If you nerfed splashed damage, then you would take away alot of the effectiveness of the cow mangler.

 

[Slug Advisor]

The new weapons are awesome and you people are stupid for not liking them. They have the first (free) new animations in I do believe over a year, they actually look and sound good, one of them has a new taunt, the retro-futurism thing fits the art style much better than a goddamn golf club, and they actually manage to be (more or less) balanced compared to the originals while actually being somewhat different. There is no possible excuse for not cheering this update on over the countless redundant melee weapons the game gets filled up with when the dev team is feeling lazy. Now I'm counting on the pyro and the engi getting some new weapons as well, and maybe a fancy Jetsonsesque lazer pistol for the scout and this is actually going to be one of the best updates the game's gotten so far.

 

[ríomhaire]

Although I haven't gotten a chance to play since the update (and these particle effects will probably murder my already terrible framerate) on paper the thing still sounds very OP. A fifth rocket is just a huge resource and according to the wiki the damage doesn't seem to be much different from the rocket launcher (slightly less at medium and long range, slightly more at close range). Five rockets really does not justify a downside of "it's crap against buildings" which is pretty much entirely neglected by having any other person on your team playing a combat class because you can just shut down the Sentry for them have them mop it up.

And I stand by that letting the Soldier ignite people is a terrible terrible idea.

Also this weapon introduced another bug that lets you detect the Dead Ringer.

 

[MFL]

A blind retarded paraplegic orphan can dodge the waves. The projectiles move slower. It also has a longer reload time. When you do the charge attack, you move quite a bit slower and are completely telegraphing what you are doing.

 

[Lucid]

The new weapons are awesome and you people are stupid for not liking them. They have the first (free) new animations in I do believe over a year, they actually look and sound good, one of them has a new taunt, the retro-futurism thing fits the art style much better than a goddamn golf club, and they actually manage to be (more or less) balanced compared to the originals while actually being somewhat different. There is no possible excuse for not cheering this update on over the countless redundant melee weapons the game gets filled up with when the dev team is feeling lazy. Now I'm counting on the pyro and the engi getting some new weapons as well, and maybe a fancy Jetsonsesque lazer pistol for the scout and this is actually going to be one of the best updates the game's gotten so far.

It'd be even better if they ****ed right off with these content updates and actually fixed what's already in the ****ing game.
And never mind that these new weapons make no sense in the time period and look insanely out of place with the game's art style.

 

[Wang Tang]

The real problem with the two new weapons are their tails. When you have >2 soldiers on the server using the lasers, you can't see shit.
This is especially bad for snipers.

Overpowered they are not, though, as stated above the projectiles are really slow and easy to dodge.

 

[Acepilotf14]

The real problem with the two new weapons are their tails. When you have >2 soldiers on the server using the lasers, you can't see shit.
This is especially bad for snipers.

All the better if we can get snipers to change to a more useful class.

 

[ríomhaire]

It'd be even better if they ****ed right off with these content updates and actually fixed what's already in the ****ing game.
And never mind that these new weapons make no sense in the time period and look insanely out of place with the game's art style.

I figure 50s retro-futuristic fits with 60s spytech.

 

[Lobster]

Yeah TF2 was so true to its time period before this update, they completely ruined it with these crazy energy weapons!

I would agree that the particle effect on the Cowmangler is much louder than any other weapon, even a missed shot can drown your view significantly more than a standard explosion usually does. I wouldn't say the weapon is overpowered myself, a lot of soldiers have been spamming them today, but they don't appear any more threatening than a normal launcher. (though this may change as people learn how to use them)

 

[Lucid]

I always felt that they meant to mimic the spytech of the 60s and not the 50s, especially considering the 50s really didn't feature anything spy related in popular fiction afaik.

But whatever, it's all fair game now I suppose.
The game is a shadow of what it used to be.

Back to playing TFC and yelling at kids to get off my lawn etc

 

[StarBob]

I never knew people were so sensitive to something so mundane...

 

[Shem]

Whatever, I probably shouldn't fret with these inaccuracies. I've seen hats from as far back as Ancient Egypt in a game that claims to be set in the 1960s.

 

[ríomhaire]

Whatever, I probably shouldn't fret with these inaccuracies. I've seen hats from as far back as Ancient Egypt in a game that claims to be set in the 1950s.

Actually it's set in 1968.

 

[StarBob]

I got the Cow Mangler randomly last night when I logged in. I guess I had received it the day before and it just didn't get to me until last night. I think it's decent... but really only effective at shorter ranges because it's so ridiculously slow. I was doing a push match and doing repeated charge shots near the cart and around the spawn exit and managed to get only one indirect hit. Plus you can't "hold" the charge... you just right click and 4 seconds later it fires. The only thing that I think is really bothersome about it from all perspectives is that it's much more visually intense than anything in the game. Plus the explosions sort of stick for a seconds or two and you can't see through them. It's a neat thing but not really attuned to my style of play as a soldier. Black Box is more for me.

There are more weapons right? I haven't seen the pistol at all and there's a rilfe and another pistol coming along soon? Aside from engi stuff I'd like to see a pyro kind of alternate playstyle weapon. A primary that sort of brings them in to the mid range instead of being so exclusively short range... sort of like the huntsman brings the sniper in to the mid range better than the sniper rifle. Maybe something with a napalm launcher alternate fire that shoots a fireball glob that sticks to surfaces for a few seconds? That'd be neat.

 

[lord_raken]

For the Pyro I'm hoping for a high damage plasma thrower that shoots in short bursts (a few seconds). A longer range napalm weapons would be cool too.

 

[ríomhaire]

Rocket Launcher - Cow Mangler comparison:

Now I just want to know exactly the difference in projectile speed.

Edit: Actually this chart may be bullshit. I'm not sure.

 

[StarBob]

What does the distance have to do with the damage? How is a rocket not universal damage over distance?

 

[Naph]

This a game, Starbob, that I assume you need to spend more time on.
The scaling of the damage over distance with the Mangler is so obvious if you ever play the class regularly. That lesser damage output is the sole reason I don't use it.

 

[StarBob]

This a game, Starbob, that I assume you need to spend more time on.
The scaling of the damage over distance with the Mangler is so obvious if you ever play the class regularly. That lesser damage output is the sole reason I don't use it.

Ok the Mangler just came out and I only used it for like ten minutes... didn't notice anything like this. The point remains that the chart shows a decrease in damage over range for the normal rocket launcher as well. I don't recall ever seeing that.

 

[Absinthe]

All weapons in the game have damage dropoff. Or most of them at least.

 

[StarBob]

That makes sense for most things, but not for a rocket??

 

[Absinthe]

I think it's to prevent soldiers from constantly instagibbing players with long-distance rocket spam. It's cool, bro.