While Team Fortress 2 is holding its annual Scream Fortress event, it’s been years without any major update. The last one, Jungle Inferno, focused on the Pyromaniac, and at the time it was expected that the Heavy would be next. It probably won’t happen, but here are some ideas all the same.
Behind every set of unlockables, there’s an answer to the question: what does this class need? How would changing this class make the game more fun?
In Heavy’s case, one of the big ticket items is mobility. The game is dominated by mobility and healing. Soldiers and Demomen have the most mobility, followed by Scouts. Pyros gained some added mobility in Jungle Inferno. The Heavy Weapons Guy doesn’t have much mobility. The Gloves of Running Urgently do help a bit, but that’s speed which isn’t equivalent to mobility. Mobility in TF2 involves being able to get places as much as getting to them quickly. Mobility is synonymous with versatility, because being able to show up in unexpected ways is essential to breaking a standoff in the game.
The second factor is countering Sniper. An earlier unlockable, the Fists of Steel, grant some protection to sniper fire, but the Heavy has no offensive counter. In general, unlockable counter-weapons tend to be defensive rather than offensive. When they also have an offensive component, it is general rather than being a class-specific counter.
The Ball and Chain
A melee weapon with two attacks. The primary attack swings it close, with limited range. Having the B&C out slows Heavy by a third.
The secondary attack lets Heavy throw it about half the distance of a Demoman charge. He can then switch weapons and at any time he can pull himself to the position of the ball quickly. A mobility tool of sorts.
Implementing this should be fairly straightforward, as the Mannpower mode already features a grappling hook, and this would be a modified version. It might need a cooldown, and there’s a question of how to handle bad throws. Can the Heavy cancel a bad throw, possibly incurring the cooldown time as though they’d reeled in?
The main goal of this item is adding a mobility option to Heavy that expands the playstyle without being too powerful.
Can you imagine TF2 with Heavies throwing big heavy balls around and pulling themselves over?
The Counter-Sniper
Tight-spread, slow-firing abomination consisting of six standard sniper rifles frankensteined together with a rotating ammo feed and fixed trigger. Fires a burst of six rounds in a second with high accuracy, minimal spread, and high power. But it has a two second cooldown between bursts and is limited to 60 rounds of ammo. Features a loud discharge but otherwise silent operation.
At a distance, this weapon is capable of suppressing a single target, particularly a sniper who’s caught off-guard. It would take a lot of skill to kill the sniper, but this bad boy will definitely slow them down.
The main goal of the weapon is to provide a way to focus snipers (and to a lesser extent sentries). A weak weapon for close and medium range combat, stinging but not high-damage, Heavy should carry a secondary weapon. At close range it also has a weak airblast-type effect when fired, capable of reflecting projectiles but not pushing enemies quite as much as the Pyro’s does.
Can you imagine TF2 with Heavies having a slow blast cannon?
The Disc of Throwing
A secondary weapon, throw the frisbee and watch as it follows a shallow ballistic trajectory. On contact, it marks enemies for mini-crits. A rechargable/ammoless item, it can ricochet off of enemies and bounce between multiple in a group.
It also distracts sentries. When sentries spot a frisbee, they give it priority and lock on. Until the frisbee is destroyed, the enemy has a chance to sneak past or attack the sentry. It can withstand only a brief attack, whether from a sentry or a player.
Enemy airblast changes ownership of frisbee/sends it back as expected. In addition, both friendly and enemy melee attacks on a flying frisbee will redeploy it (similar to airblast). A five second cooldown penalty is added if the frisbee lands outside of reachable parts of the map.
The frisbee will encourage Valve to add the tenth class: Dog.
Can you imagine TF2 with a bunch of frisbees flying around?
The Communists’ Can o’ Pesto
What Heavy update would be complete without a new lunchbox item? Not this one, that’s for sure! The Communist Can o’ Pesto is a saucecan that even the Spy would kill for. Dropped, it acts as a small healthkit, but when consumed by Heavy, it drops his health down to half of normal, shrinks him to half-size, and triples his speed. He is small-Italian-Plumber for ten seconds!
An alternative to the Ball and Chain, if small-Heavy gets touched by an enemy it’s insta-death, but if he lands on their head, they die! (Might need tweaking—make it damaging but not lethal?) Has the ability to jump slightly higher than mercenary-height.
Can you imagine TF2 with a bunch of small Heavies running around trying to jump on each others’ heads?
There are other possibilities. What new weapons do you think the Heavy Weapons Guy should have?