TF2: Delivering YOUR Hottest of Takes 

"Nerf" is truly the most offensive N word to a TF2 player.

Cold take: We need a strange dragon's fury

Meanwhile in Overwatch: “In order to break the latest competitive meta, our sequel will remove an entire player from both teams. Tell your sixth friend to sit on a cactus.”

"Church of Uncle Sound Purple Dane" I nearly Spit out my Drink!

UncleSoundPurpleDane sounds like he would be on a registry.

Hey glad I could make you have a meltdown mid-video Zesty! Now make sure to get back in your box and talk about why you think the Bazaar Bargain is the worst thing since rotten eggs ;)

The mechanics just being fun was proved this week when people were all stuck with stock

The clip of that spy as the medic is way too funny 28:05. Even I felt betrayed.

As a sniper player, I truly think just adding a fairly decently long reload, perhaps with a new reload animation over the garbage we have now would be incredibly balancing for the class, as well as less max ammo. I find that in most of my matches I forget I even have ammo in the first place as I can almost always shoot forever and by the time I take some sort of damage and go heal I get my ammo back too. 25 is just far too high, 12 or 10 would work better but it could be argued for slightly more.

Twitter's going to be fun for a couple of days

Here's my hot take: The community isn't enough to keep the game alive. Some of us probably don't deserve Valve's attention, but we really need it.

If a youtuber has influence over you, like they say jump you say how high, you shouldn’t be on the internet. When I watch zesty and hear a take from him, I’ll either agree or disagree with it all depends on his argument. I should not be saying this kindergarten levels of lessons in a RU-vid comment

"To be honest, not enough people are like, stealing." -ulcer danial

I don't think Dane is necessarily *wrong* in saying "Valve is 100% to blame for any 'bad' cosmetics/maps being added to TF2. They hold all the power. The workshop is a wide spectrum of talent, artistic integrity, and gameplay awareness. It's Valve's responsibility to sort through it and choose the appropriate content." In all honesty, I think he's completely right! But I think saying that "It's Valve's fault" and ending right there is kind of missing the point of the overall discussion surrounding community cosmetics. I feel like where we should have the goalpost is getting overall higher-quality stuff overall, rather than just begging Valve to do stuff for us. This can be achieved in a myriad of ways, but the first and most obvious way to get this done is of course having overall community review and going off the stats of how people rate items. ...which, if I'm not mistaken, are only viewable by the creator for cosmetics and war paints. For maps it's a bit of a different issue (level design is a lot harder than creating cosmetics, trust me). I don't believe I'd be mistaken in saying though that people would rather have things that the majority likes, rather than something that 5% of players will like.

When people discuss Sniper balance they always forget the one thing that he has had since the beginning and they NEVER consider tweaking it. The Charge mechanic on sniper rifles is already a perfect method to nerfing his quickscope potential - just make it so shots under 30% or so charge don't do crits. No more quickscopes, people actually have to setup and plan ahead before sniping instead of running in guns ablaze. Whats more, is you could add that little laser everyone talks about. The dot sucks. too easy to miss. Make it a laser that increases in opacity the more its charged. You can setup a shot while being relatively hidden but as you keep a closer eye on targets their awareness of you increases. Whats EVEN MORE is add a "Sniper!" callout. How come the Spy gets a callout but the Sniper doesn't? Both are the assassin classes, and while there is plenty of counter play to Spy because fuck him in particular(?) there is no meaningful way to address a Sniper in his nest unless your teammates have more than two brain cells.

I'm already 10,000 Picoseconds in and I can already confirm this is a ZestyJesus classic.

I have a feeling that Twitter will not be happy with this. I don't use Twitter, so I don't care.

45:34 Hot take: it wasn't Valve's intention to fight the bots by restricting chat and voice commands, but to ensure each of them payed.

As a member of the 'Official' Mercenary park enjoyers steam group, zesty we are pleased to hear about your open declaration of appreciation to Mercenary Park. We would love to see you within the group so that you can further more express your love for Mercenary Park.

If competitive players were complaining about certain weapons in competitive then Valve should've made competitive play with just stock weapons.

9:32 Sentient is giving the average TF2 player a bit too much credit

I wish Valve did a reprint for the overpriced strange weapons. The huntsman, kritzkrieg and gunslinger cost $80, $170 and $340 respectively. That's a lot for a kill counter. To preserve the rarity they could make the existing ones vintage, release the new ones as australium or make them paintable to apply a stat clock.

30:21 that heavy looked so sad! He really hated his life as we see what happens after

8:21 I actually wholeheartedly agree with this. It's significantly easier for people to subconsciously be swayed by someone merely expressing an opinion than you might think. In my opinion, forming your own opinion rather than absorbing one you're exposed to is a skill that has to be learned and practiced over time, whereas if it was something we were all inherently capable of, it'd be a lot harder to spread misinformation, conspiracy theories, extreme political or religious views, prejudice, dumb internet trends, and other things that thrive on a lack of critical thinking than it currently is. It also certainly doesn't help if you're like me and don't play the game enough to have a grasp on various aspects of the game and have to rely on secondary sources (namely content creators) to fill in those knowledge gaps 43:57 "Maining a class" doesn't mean "exclusively playing one class unless forced to play another". Most people will be more drawn to a select few classes because they facilitate playstyles they like, but that doesn't mean everything else is off the table; this applies to just about any game with multiple characters or playstyles. Obviously playing a wider variety is good because you experience more of the game's content and it gives you valuable experience, but maining is still a natural thing to do and serves a good purpose

7:00 Counter argument Deep Rock Galactic, even when the season ends, all items are put into rng drops when exploring the caves, that way EVERYONE still has a chance to get the items. It's worked pretty well so far, although it's a game about working together and most of those items are cosmetics and not new weapons so there is a difference. If I had to give my own hot take, the Sydney sleeper is the most balance sniper rifle. Plus I like the new G.R.U though the eviction notice could've stayed the same before the Jungle Inferno update.

What really confuses me about this admittedly extremely stupid competitive debate is that I don't think I've ever seen either side stop and ask themselves WHY competitive is so different from standard tf2 in the first place, things like no random crits and to an extent no random bullet spread are understandable, but things such as cutting the number of players in half and having only 5 cp maps seem completely and utterly unnecessary, I think the biggest mistake when it came to the completely failed competitive transition of tf2 was trying to balance weapons for both when the real answer all along was to make competitive more like casual

The church of unclesoundpurpledane has done more damage to this game then most normies realize, these 3 have to realize how much toxicity there fanbases spew out on a daily basis right? Oh and god forbid you say anything slightly negative about them.

41:57 Not even tf2 community know what tf2 need (we got too many tourist and old players who are the embodiment of apathy)

I know how to balance the Kunai: So basically, you add a bar and if you get a backstab, it depletes the bar but however large the bar was, the more health you get. The bar can be passively recharged or using the revolver will help recharge.

Regarding "give TF2 to a new developer": *_LOOK WHAT THEY DID TO HALO_* 😢

What if the Kunai’s overheal grew over the course of a second after a stab instead of immediately?

Im not afraid to say that zesty is right about sniper

One Spy change I thought of that would somewhat nerf the Kunai is to add a stat to the Dead Ringer that causes you to lose all your over-heal upon activation.

"the church of uncle-sound-purple-dave" did crack me up i must admit 25:40

I love how the Southern accent slips out for no discernable reason at 38:26

Hot take: Creators should start using RU-vid's community tab for video idea posts because there's a large segment of us that just don't use the emotional cesspool that is twitter.

Well womans with abs are hot, so it IS hot take.

The Azumanga Daioh edits were hilarious and I loved especially the takes on sniper and random crits tbh. Cant wait part 2!

Sometimes I forget about what Zesty was talking because of the clips. In one clip he butterknife'd soldier and pyro with one hit each, soldier blew him self up whilet running and shooting at dancing soldier and demo. Btw my take is that Big Joey should bring Slap Nuts back in his nickname

also maps can be made heavy dominated if they are too close quartered, but this usually never happens because people build maps that enable rocket jumpers Single control point maps are good maps because they allow areas to change team control to prevent any class from dominating, exceptions of huntsman sniper hitbox BS (scout) and darwins danger shield BS (pyro).

I may not always agree but I always love your vids man! Keep up THE EPIC UPLOADS

I genuinely believe the Classic should be how the stock Sniper Rifle functions.

You forgot to mention that the Direct Hit is almost always worse for advanced rocket jumping because of its projectile speed. Not that you can't get good with it, but it messes with your muscle memory so bad compared to the other launchers, even the Liberty Launcher.

10:20 what is that video?

Just nerf sniper lol

I'm glad that all the shit you got for just expressing your thoughts didn't change your values for the sake of complying with the masses. Respect. Have a great year Zesty

love how the video description was instantly immediately proven wrong by Nobody's Home

I generally find that most TF2bers act extraordinarily differently to actual players in game. They're very whitewashed, very "silly" and whimsical, all use Twitter, try to make out that this game has a very comforting and accepting community. They act very positive, but deep down, they're just as toxic as they claim not to be, people like Shork, Soundsmith, etc. They're allowed to just get away with it, as long as they take the moral high ground. Something about that just urks me the wrong way, they act like they're mightier than all, because they have a "platform" They're better than us normal casual players, who I guess are all just racist, evil people for exercising non-consequential harmless free speech. Zesty is the only TF2ber who's just a normal, honest guy, with opinions. He gets hate for it, but he deals with it very well. He's strong and doesn't give in. Normal RU-vidrs would BOW DOWN and BEG to their KNEES for forgiveness over their own genuine opinions, but Zesty stands up for himself. I'm thankful for a TF2ber like Zesty, compared to people who wear a faulty fake mask, covered in tape.

For rare items to be re-added, I suggest making them drop from the item drop system but a little bit more rare than before, and or adding them to the mvm drop system as season base drops.

I was discussing Counter-Strike, TF2, Overwatch and Valorant with a friend of mine, while having this video on the background, and somehow we often bringed TF2 when discussing all of these games. It is really awesome how often the gameplay changes here! From Soldier to Spy to Heavy and so on! brb gonna rewatch it thoroughly this time!

Hey Zesty, great video as always. I remember you talk on one of your streams about background footage, and man, that's some of the best Team Fortress 2 gameplay I've seen. It really goes a long way to serve the video

I think this video could be a spring board for some more discussions in their own videos. Such as the "Random crits should be completely random" comment could be a video on how that could be implemented in a server etc.

Damn I’ve misunderstood you. You seem cool.

Hot take: I just stole your torch.

Holy shit I watched a 50 minute video and never once realized it was 50 minutes until it was over, good shit Zesty

Great video as always, dude. Your editing has gotten a lot better.

25:42 "The Church of Uncle Sound Purple Dane" 💀

I wonder if nerfing the Kunai's overheal depletion rate to be the same as a Medic could be a good nerf. You're still rewarded but you have to act quickly to benefit from the bonus health and otherwise you'll more quickly return to your more vulnerable base form

Finally someone said it about the Direct Hit. LP really gave it a reputation as an anti-scout gun, but it really isn't warranted. As the titles of his videos suggest, he's a very emotionally driven player, and I'll agree with him, landing a Direct Hit on a Scout is deeply satisfying as a Soldier. It's also terribly frustrating as a Scout. However, at the end of the day, rocket+panic will kill faster and more reliably than the Direct Hit, and as a Scout as unfun as it is to fight the DH soldier, once they whiff a rocket, I've basically won, without losing a sliver of health.

The reason why competitive sucks is because meet your match was a crap update. This wasn’t due to the concept being crap; but rather because it was handled like my penis when I realized I had a testicular torsion

#GlockForDemoman

11:05 I don't know bout other TF2ubers but believe me I could be negative bout the game and talk about it. I have no fear of being open about this bullshit. Why though? What is there to say that isn't already blatantly obvious? 1 Dev, bots everywhere, yeah games shit. The entire community has been an echo chamber of the same grievances they have with Valve since 2017. There is nothing I could announce that hasn't already been repeated 100 times already so I don't bother. I don't need to "inform" the community about the bullshit. It's constantly thrown in their face everytime they play the game.

Hot take Pomson should have kept the damage, penetration, and big hitbox, but no cloak or uber drain

What if the Pomson functioned exactly like the Righteous Bison (fast reload, penetrating projectile, same damage, etc), but instead of the cloak/uber draining stuff, it just caused spies to have an electrified effect similar to the visuals of afterburn that'd be visible while cloaked? It's not negating the Spy's skill because he has to get hit by the Engineer for it to apply, which means he either approached through spam or got caught and is retreating, but it rewards the Engineer for hitting the Spy by making it easier to track him down and finish him off.

All these hot takes makes me want to go back to 2007 TF2 on my PS3. Such good Times.

@24:06 "Likely the biggest reason for the Cow Mangler's ban is one-tapping Scouts peeking a choke with the charge shot, and god forbid we have anything that makes Scout anything other than overly oppressive." *_AMEN._* The absolute simping for Scout in 6v6 like he's the next coming of Melee Fox is precisely why I gave up on competitive in general, as if the removal of random bullet spread, one of the *_very few_* limiting factors of the class, wasn't already bad enough as it is; TF2's core balance barely hangs on with the thinnest of threads to begin with, as evidenced with Sniper's quickscoping and Medic's crossbow to a slightly less oppressive extent, and these community choices only make it come apart at the seams -- especially when the only way to play the game now is through said community. Also, yes, the game needs team scramble back badly; not autobalance, *_TEAM scramble._*

I’m at the part where you’re talking about how sniper’s limiting factors are too easily overcome by skill. I think a neat change that could be made alongside some numerical tweaks would be making sniper take minicrits for 2~3ish seconds upon scoping in. This would encourage snipers to charge up their shots more often from behind cover, slowing down their kill rate, as well as making the act of entering scope itself a weighted decision with downsides that can’t be overcome by just aiming better. Additionally, since minicrits remove damage falloff, the enemy will have an easier time fighting back against a sniper that’s going too fast. Plus, sniper can have spy-like moments of bad luck where they scope in at a bad time and get obliterated, which can be funny and gives tf2’s two ‘assassin’ classes a shared identity in that sense.

34:01 is Zesty's foreshadowing of a Raiden vs Sam representation with Dane

yooo Zesty Jesus tf2 now has 64 bit updates !! 😊 🙏

the amount of times someone has gone direct hit to counter me when i’m scout just to get absolutely destroyed is hilarious

My idea for balancing sniper is to make the sniper rifle have damage falloff that the scope charge negates, meaning a 100% charge having 0 damage falloff and an un-scoped or quick-scope shot having normal bullet damage falloff.

i killed 4 people with a direct hit crit. direct hit has a splash damage, thus it is op (i am joking, alright?)

I just want to say thank you for your videos, I feel like a lot of tf2 players/youtubers need a reality check and there's few things I hate more than toxic positivity.

I wonder if bringing Sniper's melee damage down to that of Spy or Scout would be enough, just such that a crit wouldn't kill most classes on it's own. Hey that might even end up fixing the Bushwacka by proxy.

14:37 Y'know it boutta get good when the Metroid Prime _Phendrana Drifts (Depths)_ theme plays.

zesty never fails to be entertaining

The take about the current state of TF2 hit me like a brick. For a long time I have been parroting this idea that yeah, TF2 doesn't need Valve, the community is better at managing TF2 than Valve, and the content they create is more important than the content that Valve creates. But a number of community servers I used to play on went to shit recently with bad staff, most of the fan projects have either had dwindling playerbases that only get replenished when an occasional video about them goes viral, and now they're getting slapped with DMCAs. The only thing that I even have a sliver of positive feelings towards is the custom games. I know you hate them, but to me they hearken back to the days when Valve would add a new item and everyone would be running around trying it out, it may not have been balanced, but nobody cared! The game was really badly balanced in general back then, like, what's a little more bad balance gonna do to the game huh? Unless something was truly centralizing or gamebreaking. Nobody really cared that degreaser+axtinguisher was basically demoknight but somehow even more braindead, people loved it.

I was the medic in some of the clips, so fun playing on stream. But great vid man, love the content.

i love your content and ideas, keep making cool videos

Happy new year! hope you can hit 100k

As part of the Masses, this has been delivered to me, thank you Jesus Christ tf2

Maybe the kuni (idk how to spell it nor do I care) for spy should only give a little bit of health on a successful backstab ( like maybe 30 health) and then the rest of the health you will slowly gain at the speed of a medigun’s healing. That way you still get the same amount of health you normally would, but you get the health slower so that if you are spotted people still have a better chance to kill you.

The thing I actually took away from the cow mangler part, was that players drop ammo packs now. Which lead me down a rabbit hole to find out that you can pick up and use other players' weapons now, and somehow I missed ever hearing about that being a thing. I hadn't realized it had been *quite* that long since I played much. Also, nice dispenser-chan.

I wish the cow mangler was just a simple reskin the only reason why I use the darn thing is because it looks cool and shoots lazers

the fallout from this video will be biblical

I'm glad you liked my take man, but what can I say? It's true! your editing, passion, and drive is admirable

Nice soundtrack choice Zesty!!!! Also, very spicy takes!!

I think the kunai should have had the inverse of what it had. It gave you the amount of health missing from the enemies. So like a scout has 100hp if you backstab you get 25 + some low base hp added to every stab for ensurance when backstabbing high health targets

i know ppl dont agree w/ this but sniper tends to be hard to counter because of bad map design, especially asymetrical maps where a defense sniper can sit right next to spawn and/or a sentry nest, in symetrical gamemodes sniper acts more like an engineer, denying a certain area or supporting the mid fight, and the constant movement of the frontlines stops him from getting too well setted up, plus good symetrical maps tend to have lots of flank routes, multiple main routes, angles, cover (especially on capture points) all of this making sniper more like a very far but narrow sentry. I know this is long but I just wanted to put a small opinion on the table.

Hey zesty, did you know you can extinguish with the Sydney sleeper? I saw a clip with a teammate on fire but you didn’t extinguish him with the piss rifle. Just an fyi!

"People are just nostalgic for arena, they didn't actually play it for more than a few minutes!" Explain why I spent 99% of my TF2 playtime in the late 2010s on the Randomizer Arena server (back when the original was still up).

Add a cooldown to being able to headshot with sniper, aka it takes a second after charging to be able to get headshots, you know, to make him weak at close range

My idea that I’ve always had to for putting old content back in the game is some contract or trade up that allows you to give a certain amount of ref for a chance at any crate in the game. It would work similarly to how the Halloween items work in which you place say 3-5 ref and you have a chance at any crate in the game (excluding one you can’t open) not only would this fetch valve hella money. It would also help the key inflation issue immensely. Also it would allow for older hats (like ones in the gargoyle case) to actually have a legit chance to now have new effects on them as cases won’t be an obscene 10-20 dollars per pop

Both sniper shields are obviously a mistake, but I thought it would always be funny to give sniper a bullet proof vest that gives damage resistance against body shots from enemy snipers. Also just dynamically tying damage falloff to the snipers scope charge would massively hinder the sniper without being massively intrusive.

I already know this is gonna be a classic video; This is gonna blow up. (In a good way-)

Also I had a fantastic idea for a Scout taunt- I call it Three Strikes! You can use this taunt three times consecutively; Scout will go Strike One! whole holding up one finger, Strike Two! with 2 fingers, and Strike 3, ya out! which is when he just points back with his thumb. Comes out fast, is baseball themed, lasts all of like 1-2 seconds. The thirs is hilarious on a domination or revenge or even a killbind.

big man has been playing on koggy lately, was pleasantly surprised to see myself in the gameplay footage

finally! i had been waiting for this vid since you made that twitter post!

I think the pompson could use a complete redesign. Personally, I'd like to see the draining stat removed entirely and replaced with this idea I've had for a while. Basically, the pompson will 'hyper-charge' your buildings if you shoot them, making turrets fire 15% faster (but use 25% more ammo while hyper-charged), teleports recharge 15% faster, and dispensers heal 15% percent faster and recharge their ammo/metal stores 15% faster. If you target enemy buildings with this weapon, the building goes haywire, making all the listed attributes 15% slower/less effective. The effect lasts for 5 seconds, renews with another shot, and you cannot wrangle a turret that has been hyper-charged by you. As for everything else about the weapon, I'd probably make the projectile pierce, but other than that I think it's fine as is if you give it this. Giving it anything else after this change would probably overpower it. I'd like to hear more of your thoughts on this though, Zesty.

those were some pretty good sprays through the gameplay my guy