Forum

Lower damage output when equipped (so always, even when not in use) by 20%.

I really like the GRU as it provides the heavy with a bit mobility, but I do think it could use some improvements. Once in postition a heavy is quite dangerous and he forces the opponents to take him out asap or give up their position/middle. Normally this is not so much of a problem and players learned to adapt to the heavy. With the GRU however the effect becomes much bigger as the heavy is much faster on mid which makes it hard for the team without a heavy to get a terrain advantage before the heavy arrives. And the downside of the GRU, health drain, is not really that relevant with the presence of the medic/sandvich. You can run halfway trough a map and drop a sandvich for instant full full hp.

A better downside would be to solve the above situations by making the heavy slightly more vurnerable (with -hp or higher vulnerability to certain damage). This way you could speed up the gameplay even in relation to the normal heavy.

Maybe something like increased spin-up time for a few seconds after changing from the GRU, so that a Heavy caught running with them will be at a disadvantage?

I’d like to test the GRU as follows (some suggestions taking from above)

1, heavy max health – 50 HP No self bleed/damage effect
2, Self Bleed/damage 10 hp a second
3, Slower weapons switch (reverse degreaser effect) lowering the ease of swiching from GRU – Sandvich dropping – switching to minigun and firing
4, As is (all the above may make the heavy too weak)

The The Buffalo Steak Sandvich + GRU is potentially a problem, as the Heavy gets to mid at scout/demo speeds, however after initial testing it is proving to be of little use compared to just running GRU + Sandvich, as on most maps the demo and scouts had no problems killing heavy as he was still taking mini crit damage, and unable to self heal or switch to minigun till the effect had worn off, meaning he was waiting at choke points for the medic and the minicrit effect to wear off, so may aswell have just ran the standard GRU+Sandvich

Quoted from RaCio

You can drop the buffalo steak and it will become a sandvich. Probably a bug, but it’s more useful then the sandvich atm.

What happens if you drop the chocolate bar?

It shouldn’t be a melee weapon for a start. It should replace something that’s actually of some consequence to the heavy (so secondary slot as without minigun its pointless). Whenever classes get improved melee weapons, they instantly jump up a notch in power because default melee weapons are like “lol joke kill” and serve no real balance purposes.

Quoted from kaidus

It shouldn’t be a melee weapon for a start. It should replace something that’s actually of some consequence to the heavy (so secondary slot as without minigun its pointless). Whenever classes get improved melee weapons, they instantly jump up a notch in power because default melee weapons are like “lol joke kill” and serve no real balance purposes.

This makes some sense, the steak fixes this as the heavy loses a lot for eating it
1, he can only use mele weapon
2, he can’t switch weapon till after effect is finished
3, he takes mini crits so is much easier to kill whilst being more mobile

However I don’t want to see the GRU fixed so they are both very similar weapons

I’d really like to see a GRU heavy having a base health of 250 not 300, and no self harm/bleed effect.

Running a Heavy would stay be viable (375 max health overheal), and it means the soldier would actually have to learn the jumps (which improves the skill required) as uber would not be charging at the fastest rate by healing the heavy alone.

on a separate note, why hasn’t the equalizer got a topic, the single biggest upgrade to any class which has reduced the skill required to play soldier