My initial thoughts on Valve's heavy weapon alternatives.
Melee weapon: Heavy on rye
The heavy on rye halves the rate of fire of the heavy weapon's guys punches but the alt-fire allows him to consume a nutritious sandwich; giving him health up to his regular maximum. The heavy carries 4 sandwiches and they have a low rate of fire and a relatively large cool down preventing other weapons be used. Recharged at regular ammunition dispensers and cabinets.
Advantages: Less dependent on the medic for combat recovery. Re-use existing sandwich assets.
Disadvantages: There is little disincentive to use this weapon over the regular heavy melee weapon.
Secondary weapon: Heavy heavy fuel
Heavy heavy fuel loads the shotgun with fuel pellets. Fuel pellets do much less direct damage, but do moderate splash damage, and more importantly, ignite explosives including sticky mines in the vicinity of the impacting shot, causing them to explode immediately, damaging any enemy in the vicinity.
Advantages: A heavy who wants to advance on a sticky minefield has limited choices. This makes the heavy useful for quickly clearing these fields, and keeps them at the front of the action.
Disadvantages: There is little disincentive to use this weapon over the regular heavy secondary weapon.
Primary weapon: Really heavy weapon
While firing this weapon, the heavy weapon guy cannot move - but equally they cannot be pushed around by turrets or enemy explosives. The weapon incorporates a shield which protects the heavy weapon guy by halving damage to the front 45 degrees, excluding sniper head shots while moving or spun up.
Advantages: The really heavy weapon is a variant of the 'give the heavy main gun a shield' - intended primarily to allow the heavy weapon guy to wade through multiple turrets, and present a front line of defense without requiring a medic.
Disadvantages: Fixing the heavy weapon guy in place makes him more vulnerable to grenades and well-aimed rockets. If necessary, make having this weapon prevent the heavy from being overcharged by the medic.
Also see Tom Francis' Tantyana or Deep Plaid's Vacuum Gun.
Friday, 11 July 2008
Re-use existing sandwich assets
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4 comments:
The sandwich one makes a lot of sense. It solves the problem of the heavy being too slow to retreat to a health pack like other classes will do with no medic around.
I'd tie the healing power to the taunt button rather than the alt-fire, though. Alt-fire is already used on the heavy's fists, and making the taunt do the heal means you won't use it in combat, but you can still retreat round a corner and eat it. It wouldn't make the heavy/medic team any more powerful, as a medic will get you healed up faster than the sandwich anyway.
What is the heavy's melee weapon alternate fire? (http://tf2wiki.net/wiki/Heavy)
The idea with using this as a melee weapon is that the heavy can at least move and use their fists while they are waiting for the healing cool down to take effect.
The heavy uses left click for punching with the left fist, and right click for punching with the right fist.
Introducing a mechanic of a cooldown that prevents weapon change seems to complicate things unnecessarily, to me. Players are going to wonder why they suddenly can't change weapon.
If the purpose of it is to prevent the heavy from eating in normal combat, I think using an uninterruptible taunt animation might work better as players are already familiar with the limitations and dangers of pressing the taunt button.
Plus you get to spin the camera and watch the new sandwich-eating animation the TF2 guys will have had to make for this.
The right punch gets replaced by the right hand holding a sandwich. I don't see a problem with that...
Taunt vs. continued movement comes down to playtesting - hard to do in this instance.
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