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It’s time for some division 5 insight

Gunboats are NOT op, this is the short answer

This is the long answer:

Gunboats do not bestow amazing medic slaying superpowers upon soldiers, at best it gives soldiers 30 hp more in a medic bombing situation (or around 50-60hp in double jumps) since that teams playing at a high level in, say, a situation were fighting has briefly paused, are already highly aware and attuned to the sound of a rocket hitting a surface – and immediately reacting to said sound and assuming a soldier is in flight towards their medic – this 30hp bonus makes LITTLE TO NO DIFFERENCE

Now lets say this soldier has 200hp, 1 rocket jump and he is down to roughly 175~ with gunboats and fall damage will account for lets say another 25 or so so hes immediately down to 150 hp before he has even been hit with anything the team has fired

Mow lets do some maths, 150hp is two bad stickys, two pipes, 2 decent scattergun shots, 2 good rockets, that is how far 150hp stretches

now the counter argument to this would be: surely 150hp is better than 125hp~ without gunboats?

True, 30hp more is better than nothing, but this brings me to my main point as to why gunboats are NOT op; you don’t have a shotgun

I have experimented a lot with gunboats in the past and i can honestly say the loss of the shotgun HURTS, most medics have very predictable movement (the see you RJing on them and they start moving backwards then move forwards at the last second..) and thus 2-3 rockets is usually more than enough but at high level medics actually have a brain, scouts track you in the air almost perfectly, soldiers hit airshots etc. so its more of a complete gamble as to whether you are going to succeed with 2-3 rockets; this is were the shotgun comes in to play, more often than not i only try and bomb medics in double RJ situations for two reasons; the first being your airspeed is a LOT faster meaning its much more difficult to hit you in the air and that you will land on the medic faster, and the second being it is highly unpredictable – medics would not expect you to try something so unusual

My point being, after doing the double RJ onto the med i’m left with two rockets, with medics at high level having good movement (and good teammates..) the first rocket is usually followed by the medic getting launched high up and then the medic does some strafing so the second rocket is hard to land or do a decent set of damage with; this is were the shotgun is particularly useful; reloading your rocket launcher is painfully slow so pulling out the shotgun is much quicker as in these sort of situations you will be the focus of the enemy team; you will die quickly and you will not have time to reload a rocket in most circumstances

Gunboats allow soldiers to adopt a different style of play; if you ever watched how Jaeger from complexity played (or any decent american soldier for that matter, but not Harbleu Lol) then you will know that he adopted the ‘aggressive’ style of play gunboats allowed; being the first into fights by RJing in, adopting the many hiding spots on maps to force ubers or get picks, utilizing the slight health advantage gunboats bestowed to attempt trickjumps for agressive picks etc.

Now this may seem a good argument as to why gunboats are op – an item that lets him do all these things? – but let me make something clear, Jaeger is/was perhaps one of the most skillful & intelligent soldiers TF2 has ever had and has the playstyle i’ve been trying to emulate for a long time (without gunboats..) what i mean by this is that the percentage of soldier’s capable of pulling off half the things he could is very, very minimal

This does not simply mean that gunboats are not op simply because there aren’t enough good soldiers to use them to their fullest, i simply mean that complexity and jaeger had molded the gunboats to fit their style of agressive play, jaeger still could have played exactly the same way without gunboats – he would just have slightly less hp in certain situations – BUT have a shotgun so balance would be there

Gunboats just provide soldier with utility; a different approach to situations; you will play more with scouts and less with your demo/medic/soldier partner, you will be more inclined to be the first into an uber fight, you will be more inclined to make a clutch play on their demo or medic, you will be more inclined to use hiding spots, basically they give you a different playing mentality

What does this mean? it means that a soldier adopts the american ‘roaming’ style; not tied to the medic and trying to solo around and get picks for his team, this is balanced by the fact that in certain situations the enemy team will have the spam advantage (2 soldiers compared to 1..)

Now my last argument is against what etf2l’s admin team considers the ‘counter’ to gunboats; the direct hit

I’m going to go back to one of the first things i mentioned in this thread:

‘Gunboats do not bestow amazing medic slaying superpowers upon soldiers, at best it gives soldiers 30 hp more in a medic bombing situation’

Why has the direct hit suddenly become necessary to kill a suicidal soldier? because he has 30 more hp? seriously? how many times in the history of tf2 have suiciding soldiers been dealt with by simple good dm skills, communication, positioning and medic movement? I cannot figure out how having a 30hp advantage deems the use of the direct hit to be able to counter the soldier, sure the instagib abillity of the weapon would be an effective instant counter, but then so is a normal rocket airshot? a scattergun meatshot? a pipe airshot?

No offence to the etf2l admin team, but this screams of division 5 insight (soldiers have terrible aim and their medics are brainless etc.) ‘we cant kill the suiciding soldier because we cant aim! if only we had the direct hit we’d airshot him everytime and save our medic!’

Two other things, the first is something quite simple; you cant charge uber with gunboats – this is actually a pretty huge drawback – if your soldier partner is dead you simply cant charge uber unelss you want your demo to be useless, this can make a huge difference in a game where you are at an uber disadvantage

The other point being you are much less effective at defending your medic without your shotgun, he will most likely die a lot more with you using gunboats

tl;dr

– loss of shotgun hurts and balances gunboats
– 30hp extra does not make soldiers an unstoppable killing machine
– medics need to learn to dodge and soldiers need to learn to aim
– soldiers will be more active with their scouts than their heavy class teammates
– cant charge uber or defend your medic as effectively with gunboats on
– loss of spam advantage in certain situations as you will either be dead or out of position, possibly with your scouts
– fuck the frying pan it has the most annoying sound effect

And thus ends my wall of text which is most likely complete bullshit and will likely be trolled to hell and back by xzar / or locked by byte because there is another gunboat thread, i hope you enjoyed reading this as much as i enjoyed eating my cold kebab djc

thanks.

Gunboats are overrated.

Nevermind banning gunboats, how do you feel about this hat:

http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070506070129AAGMpjg

+1. agree with everything, all these points have been raised before but you summed it up really well in delicious tldr format.

also, yes jaeger best player ever

I love Hat.

Quoted from Hat

Gunboats allow soldiers to adopt a different style of play

That there is the real reason they, like many unlocks are banned, because they allow a different style of play.

This season the ETF2L admin team have done a good job with the unlocks, and have found a reasonable balance.

You could write a similar wall of text in support of every banned unlock (apart from Natasha), and it would probably be spot on.

Can only hope for a day when the only reason unlocks are banned is through availability (now with shop+trade+craft this should be less and less).

You could also add the FaN knock-back can potentially counter a dive bombing soldier (most soldiers fire as they reach the ground (not at peak of jump), 40 damage from FaN screws soldiers landing). Again that adds to my belief we should get the game to a stage where we are not picking and choosing unlocks allowed, as we risk banning a potential counter.

Which goes back to either allow all or Ban all, or go through the hard task (like done now) where the admin team try to make sure that weapons are not allowed where the hard counter for it is banned

Quoted from Tikcus

[…]

That there is the real reason they, like many unlocks are banned, because they allow a different style of play.

I take it you did not actually read what I posted

I posted that gunboats allow you to adopt a different style of play .. HOWEVER

And I then pointed out the ways in which this is balanced