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I feel like talking about the buff banner, let’s talk about the buff banner. I’ve been using the banner, fairly unashamedly, in mixes for a good while now and would like to give what I think to be the strengths and weaknesses on the weapon in the hope that discussion on whether or not it should be banned next season will not progress in ignorance. That said, I should preface my opinions by saying that I am obviously biased towards the weapon because it fits my playstyle as soldier pretty much perfectly and enjoy playing with it a lot and I am not saying that playing in mixes (either against teams or other mixes) or mercing for teams in pcws is wholly representative of what teams would be able to do with tactics + team practice.

With that out of the way, let’s begin by outlining what the buff banner is for those that don’t know (lookin’ at you Rafe). It’s a secondary weapon for the soldier that builds a meter based on theoretically inflicted damage (so if you damage a scout for 100 but he only has 1 health, you’ll still build the meter by 100). The meter takes 600 damage to fill, that’s roughly 12 long range direct hits or 6 close range direct hits with the rocketlauncher, and is then ready to deploy much like an ubercharge. It takes ~2 seconds to deploy, making the characteristic a-woo a-wooooooo sound, and lasts 10 seconds, giving minicrits to the user and everyone around him in a fairly big raidus as well as making everyone in range glow. Doing damage during an activated banner does not prolong it and you lose any charge you have upon death.

Right so that’s how it works, but what’s so good about it?

It actually promotes teamwork: That’s right, the buff banner is probably the only unlock apart from the kritzkrieg that actually focuses on the team aspect rather than solely on the individual. While it allows the user to output significant damage by himself, it also allows everyone else on your team to output just as significant damage and there is no penalty for buffing multiple people like there is for multi-ubering. Factor in that it can be tactically used to discourage the other team from pushing, used to turn the odds on overwhelming numbers or as the centrepiece of a push and you can see that smart use of a buff banner can be a game changing thing.

It gives the solly a role of importance: Sure, the idea that soldiers have little impact on the game is a bit of an outdated one mostly touted by soldiers with no idea about teamwork. However, it’s still the case that soldiers, nor individual soldiers, are never really an important target; that honour always falls to the medics and demomen. The buff banner gives the soldier something akin to the uber, that should make him a higher priority target depending on how long he’s been alive and how much stuff he’s killed in that time as the chances of him having a banner increases. Playing smart to stay alive long enough to get a banner and then using it effectively can have a huge impact on rounds and games.

It rewards good play: You won’t get a buff banner through missing a lot or repeatedly dying. Doing lots of damage is the only way to build it and staying alive is the only way to keep it.

Minicrits? More like megacrits: Doing minicrits for 10 seconds is kinda a lot of damage by yourself and is even better when applied to anyone on your team nearby. while activated, it really gives you such a massive edge 1on1, in team situations and even makes long range spamming incredibly lethal. When you consider spamming a medic long range without buff banner, they have to do something seriously wrong to die to a single soldier even if they caught offguard by the spam. With the buff banner, those 48 rocket direct hits are turned into glorious 122 damage direct hits, due to the partial negation of damage fall-off. Splash damage similarly can deal values like 61/81 damage at long range depending on how close the rocket was.

Better at juggling than your local circus clown: Minicrits make it incredibly easy with the increased knockback to juggle ubered opponents and non-ubered opponents alike. A decent attempt at this can almost single-handedly, and fairly easily with 2 soldiers, stop an ubered demo if you knock him straight up and repeatedly do so (providing there is space for to get juggled into). The increased knockback also makes it a lot easier to stop people retreating, at range or otherwise, providing you land a good rocket.

The edge in uber vs uber: Often you can time the buff banner so that it will persist at least several seconds after the enemy’s uber has worn out which gives you a good opportunity to kill them as they retreat or deal lots of damage while still invunerable. It can also be really effective in picking off non-ubered targets, which should force the medic into multi-ubering to make sure his teammates that have pushed with him don’t die and further gives you the advantage in uber vs uber situations.

A defensive solly’s best friend: This really isn’t a weapon suited to the more aggressive type of soldier and as such should only really be used by a defensively-orientated pocket soldier. A roaming soldier will often have to jump into or place himself in situations where he’s probably going to die going for crucial picks, which isn’t good if you’ve got 90% of your buff banner meter charged! However if you’re somewhat like me and prefer to protect your medic moreso than suiciding for medic picks, it’s a fairly amazing unlock.

It’s ok medic, it ain’t the gunboats: I don’t know if you’ve ever run out of rockets while wearing both the gunboats and the equaliser, but it can be pretty hard to explain to some medics that no, you literally cannot switch from the equaliser so they can heal you and get the last few % for uber no matter how much you genuinely would like to. The buff banner doesn’t suffer from this scenario in virtue of being able to pull out your trumpet at any time, even if it is just for uselessly waving about until you get some more ammo.

The buff banner sounds amazing, what’s so wrong with it then?

Where did my loaded damage go?: Let’s pretend for a second that you’re a solly with a pretty sick hitscan aim. You don’t need to pretend? Ok, I’ll just pretend then. Losing the shotgun can be pretty devastating in both 1on1 and group fight situations. Assuming you’re fighting another solly+medic combo, chances are that you’ll both run out of loaded rockets attempting to kill each other (or you might not have had many loaded in the first place). At that point in time, he whips out his shotgun while you’re left attempting to dodge while painstakingly reloading one rocket after another trying to finish him off. Some situations, like vs scouts and especially when the terrain doesn’t favour rockets, are just more shotgun-friendly than rocket-friendly and often against pushing onto multiple distracted opponents you’ll run out of rockets long before you run out of an advantage.

Sometimes, it just needs a delicate touch: You’ve just reduced that medic’s health to 5. You’re out of loaded rockets. Your last rocket sent him flying back and now he’s running away towards some health. All you can do is cry and curse his name. “I bet you wish you had a shotgun now” is a commonly heard phrase in these situations.

It feels like 2008 all over again: Remember a time when you couldn’t destroy stickies, you had to kinda just shoot them all over the place until you felt satisfied that you probably weren’t going to die when you run through that area? Well unless you feel pretty good about running up to several stickies with your equaliser out and trying to individually kill each one, you’ll be able to relive a time which you may or may not have experienced.

Buff banner solly + Gunboat solly = Disaster: Mostly for the reason above, I’m sure you can work out why.

“I’m just going back for ammo”: 4/20. That isn’t really a lot of ammo, loaded or otherwise, to be dealing with. Then take into consideration the fact that both the most effective way to ensure you get a buff banner before you inevitably die at some point is to build it a fair amount through spamming AND that as the pocket soldier it is your job to build ubercharge. Splitting 24 ammo between spamming, building uber and actually fighting is no easy feat, so you better know where the ammo packs are and be alert as to how much ammo you have.

It’s a slow build: Let’s face it, 600 damage is quite a lot of damage to do at any given point without dying. Sometimes you get lucky and do a lot of damage in one go, but the majority of the time you’ll be hard pressed to get even halfway after a middle fight. The conundrum is that, especially with no shotgun, the best way to reliably do large amounts of damage is up close but you need to maximise your chances of survival in order to use the buff banner and jumping in close aggressively is not the best way to stay alive most of the time.

In some ways you could say that the buff banner discourages smart, aggressive play by putting a huge emphasis on survival but you could also easily construe it as changing when it is actually smart play to go aggressive. It’s not really uncommon, even when playing really well, to get less than 5 buff banners over the course of a 30 minute match because sometimes you die, sometimes you have little opportunity to do large amounts of damage and other times you’re just holding onto a charged banner waiting for the right moment to use it. Compare this with ubercharge where it’s fairly standard to uber at least 10+ times in a 30 minute match even if your team isn’t doing that great, as long as you don’t drop a few. That’s not to say that when you’re playing badly or getting rolled, you might not even use buff banner once and the shotgun tradeoff is one that persists throughout.

Unpredictable: Valve really didn’t help in this case. For me at least, the buff banner backpack doesn’t even show on other player models until the banner is used and there are no pre-activation visual or audio cues to help both teammates and enemies know when the buff banner is ready or even equipped. There is also, due to the way that the buff banner meter builds, no real way of knowing exactly how far along the soldier’s buff banner is unless you have impeccable communication on the enemy team. This all leads to situations that are frustrating for both the user, his team and the enemy team.

Again, contrast this with the ubercharge which has both a persistent visual + audio cue on the gun + the medic’s cry when uber is ready to be deployed and the medic’s information box contains the current ubercharge percent. This is also helped by the fact that it is very easy for the enemy team, when they know about timing tricks, to tell roughly when an enemy medic will get uber. I for one would love my teammates to be able to just look at see what % buff banner I’m on and also some added visual/audio feedback for the enemy team to get a better idea of how my banner is progressing so it’s not just out of nowhere like it is now.

“Er…what?”: It’s also kinda like ubercharge in that sometimes you think enemies are somewhere, or pushing you, and for whatever reason you decided to pop your charge. It happens to the best of us. The thing about buff banner though is that it’s a lot harder to build, meaning that those times that you do waste it (or spend the entire banner trying to kill one guy you’re failing to hit) really suck a lot more than times when you waste uber.

And away they go!: As awesome as the buff banner is for juggling people, it can take a bit of getting used to the increased knockback from the minicrits. Not only do they seem to end up in weird places, often you can get unlucky by sending them flying well out of the range you want them in or helping them to escape. This can often lead to the above situations, where you spend far too much time trying to hunt down that person in order to reclaim your dignity. It rarely works.

Top tier failure: I can’t really see, at the very least, div1 soldiers using this weapon simply because the shotgun is too much of an asset to them and also because of the favouring of vanilla + medic (which I’m personally cool with, I’m just saying).

One hit skill: Probably the biggest problem with legalising the buff banner is that at close range, minicrits deal enough damage to one shot a large number of classes. I’m not really too concerned about scouts, if a scout wants to try and take on a buff bannered solly who just one shots him with a direct rocket then that’s their problem. With minicrits though, a direct rocket at close to pointblank range will deal 150 damage, which is pretty fucking insane.

Of course the same effect comes from Jarate, but team co-ordinated attacks just don’t happen that often with Jarate and a buff bannering soldier guarantees a minicrit on anyone that he fires on, not that the soldier needs to be close to the medic who needs to be jarated on. Of course for every medic that gets 1 shotted by a rocket (I can’t remember doing that very often over many months of buff bannering) there are 5 that escape on 5hp, but that doesn’t make 1 shotting a medic itself any less lame.

So yeah, I’ve just written a lot of words which you may or may not have skipped over in getting to this sentence. You may also be skipping over these sentences too! At any rate, I admit that I’ve rarely been on the receiving end of a banner while regularly dishing out minicrits and so I’d be very interested in hearing some intelligent discussion on it. Overpowered or misunderstood? In my opinion it can be, when used properly, a real gamechanger but one that comes at a pretty hefty price all the time.

tl:dr

vali it appears to me you have way too much time.
Go make a summary!

i believe the buff banner should be banned because,

you made some really good points which have made me think otherwise of the buff banner for the better. I don’t think it ever did get a proper trial run but I have used it in mixes and have quickly been asked by the other team to stop… :)

As you said, since the enemy has no idea when the player has buff banner until it actually happens is a downfall, if it had something where the soldier made some sort of noise that he’s got 100% banner… it would be alot better. I’d like to see more people give it a go because Ive rarely gotten a chance to play against it!

I agree with everything Vali wrote. Ideally, the buff banner would start off inside the backpack and would gradually extend itself as it gets charged, then when fully charged the banner would crackle like the medic’s fully charged kritzkrieg. Or something like that. There’s still plenty of ways it could be tweaked even if it was too powerful in terms of damage output, like reducing the time depending on how many people are inside the radius (e.g. similar to swapping ubers between players reducing the overall time of an uber).

You really really miss the shotgun though and realise just how much you use it when you swap back. Dicking around at sticky traps is a nightmare.

Good post.

To be honest, Jarate is extremely powerful. One might say too powerful. The problem with Jarate is the fact that you still need to run a sniper in order to execute a Jarate based tactic. While snipers are common, it’s not quite a staple class in any TF2 setup (TEAM A Recruiting a sniper… doesn’t happen).

Made some good points in your post, I don’t see buff banner as a bad thing really. It just adds more ‘Woahhh run awayyy!’, and ‘Pushhhhhh!!’ moments to the game.

I quite like how the buff banner adds a secondary charge to the game. The game at the moment is so dependent on the single player that is running medic. While I do think that that is actually a good thing because it sets some clear, simple goals (kill the enemy medic, fight head on, backcap), it does add another dimension.

The problem I find with the buff banner though, is it is more than likely going to favour the winning team. Buff banner would be a great secondary uber charge that could keep you in the game if you’ve lost your uber, but in 99% of cases, it’s going to be the team that has the advantage, won the last battle and has their uber charge that is going to get the benefits of the buff banner. The game, by design, allready slightly favours the attacker in every situation in order to prevent stalemates but still allow a chance of defensive come backs. With the buff banner, I think it’s going to be even harder for a defensive team to come back when they don’t have uber and the enemy does, along with a buff banner push.

Obviously if you kept a soldier alive when your team died then it would give you a chance, but I think it will happen more for the attacking team.

Summary: I have no problems with the buff banner; can make for some exciting moments in play but could also favour the winning team resulting in less close games and more walk overs.

Quoted from dougiie

As you said, since the enemy has no idea when the player has buff banner until it actually happens is a downfall, if it had something where the soldier made some sort of noise that he’s got 100% banner… it would be alot better. I’d like to see more people give it a go because Ive rarely gotten a chance to play against it!

Tbh a soldier dealing 600 dmg without a single shotgun shot fired should indicate that the other team is either using banner or gunboats.

If you get utterly surprised by the buffbanner, your teams comms isnt good enough.
(not directing this towards you Dougie)