[TF2] The Stun Wars 

This video feels like watching a Family Guy episode.

kaluka is the only RU-vidr I actively laugh at anymore. Mainly because he put a Sumerian curse of laughing on me 3 years ago

thank you for the 18+ warning i was not ready to see tf2 footage

As a Soldier main who gets salty and cries from air blast, I still actually really like interactions with Pyros in pubs. It's like a mind game, having to mix up my timing for when I shoot rockets at them, maybe sometimes even pretend I'm retreating and then flick a rocket onto them really quickly. Only thing I don't like is how I can't airstrafe out of the air blast lmao You notice this in competitive a lot too. Pyros being able to deny ubers really makes people have to think about who they use their ubers on. Hitscan (usually Scouts) need to be in on it or else the Pyro can deny them really well, and if the Pyro is dead then explosive classes (and Spy) can have a much easier time. It's a really good RPS system that makes the flow of gameplay interesting

I like the direction that tf2 went focusing more on knockback and how you can control it to be in your favor rather than hard cc

Please refrain from putting Paladins gameplay in your videos so that I may watch them in public without fear of someone thinking I play Paladins. Thank you.

I fucking set this video to the highest quality I could just to read the tiers of the “which celebrity could survive on Venus?” Only to be met with a big “who fucking cares” I waste my time on the stupidest shit.

"pushing people into traffic is a lot of fun" -Kaluka

0:35 hold your horses honcho, i LIKE crowd control. i love it in MMO's like Everquest and city of heroes where it's a dedicated role and support classes are not just another healer.

Isnt... being dead already a stun basically?

Airblast definably needs the mini-crit boost. Besides a reward for timing / predicting an incoming projectile and managing to actually hit someone with it (Which is much harder then it looks as the consistency between projectiles are numerous), damage falloff would negate any meaningful impact it would have on the attacker / defender. Otherwise, good video! The animated bits are top notch.

I love watching what i think to be a harmless tf2 video and then suddenly getting blasted by something so out of pocket it puts ME to shame

Heros of the storm mentioned !!

I was quite stunned to see a Kaluka upload timed perfectly with my food.

nice thumbnail and sandman intro is also good

You've stated a big part of my opinion on stuns/CC, they should feel like a valid punishment for the player making a mistake or playing like an idiot. I treat stuns the same as instakills - getting headshot by a sniper can be annoying because it often happens out of nowhere, but if you get backstabbed or blown up by a sticky trap it's your fault for not maintaining the situational awareness to catch out the spy/trap and kill/defuse them/it.

this truly is a kaluka klassic (patent pending)

i feel like this video perfects the impression of not giving a shit with the most tightly written shit-giving behind the scenes, phucking phenomenal

You are consistently one of my favorite TF2 youtubers. Really, every video you make is just well thought out, everything you bring up is relevant, and you have a great voice. Keep up the awesome work.

I love this guy and his vids. The fact that you put genuinly good jokes in your vids rather than just go full video essay is so nice. Your channel feels like the best version of all the "tf2 discusion channel"s out there. Keep making concent, I've watched every vid even if I dont know what I'm getting into!

Ridiculously long respawn times also feel the exact same. For Honor is the worst offender for this, having respawns going into 50 seconds when your average life is around 30-120 seconds.

You know what else is not fun? Stunning viewer's ears with sudden, ridiculously loud noises

19:30 dont have sounds that are this loud please man, you scared the shit out of me

Sandman was sacrificed on the altar of casual-sweats, not even pickup-sweat, just common public sweat without a mic.

Honesty, if I joined TF2 nowadays I wouldn't care about sandman, but I had two years of memories before it was nerfed forever, and I miss it. I would love to use it somewhere on Class Wars tbh

5:20 why is this not a complaint about fighting games too, that's a perfect definition of what a combo is?

"Players can't just throw their entire decks at each other" I miss Alteil

The editing in this is so great

Thank you so much for your videos! The moment I start to feel sane and normal, I watch one of these and I'm right back to being miserable and mentally ill!

This is actually one of the bestest most insightful videos I have ever seen and I am not being sarcastic, holy shit dude this is so perfect. Using multiple medias to instill points, great examples and diving deep into them. It keeps me engaged with jokes. This is perfect I am amazed.

Make the ball go 5-10% slower, give it REAL stun back. If you get a hit, it recharges a little bit faster but cant pick up the ball..ever

25:20 I was thinking about that for my whole life

Came for the discussion, stayed for the guitar solo

They should make sand man able to reflect projectiles instead of launching the ball, it would be interisting skill based mechanic as long as its not spamable, and hey it still fits the base ball theme

There are 3 more stuns in TF2, but they're all taunts. Skewer (Huntsman taunt/stab stab stab), Spinal Tap (Ubersaw taunt/ I'm going to saw through your bones) and the Organ Grinder (Gunslinger taunt) are able to stun victims for 2.5 to 3.5 seconds, however the time to stun can range from 1 second, to 3 seconds depending on which taunt you use. Not to mention, all taunts can stun victims at 128 hammer units, making them quite short ranged.

6:35 it gives you a permanent friendship debuff

18:00 shout out to this fun fact: If you crouch you take more knockback, this is most effectively seen in the air, but it's due to the fact that when you crouch your hitbox shrinks changing the calculation for your mass making you lighter. If you crouch on the ground and approach a sentry it will attempt to knock you more down into the floor, but if you are in the air you are now Air-Heavy 1 lifting off.

I love your voice, i could listen it for hours on the backround while im doing stuff on my pc, try expanding to video essays on other topics, love from germany !

This is a really good video, the only time I can think of where stuns are directly needed is when the game features select characters with significantly better movement options than anyone else to the point where you almost can't hurt them without hard CC. This is a rare case thou. I completely agree that knockbacks are way more interesting than stuns or slows.

simply do not get hit by the stun and you can continue to have "fun"

Tf2 is smart enough to acknowledge that getting dicked over from range with little to no counterplay is violently unfun. Unfortunately, that means we got a stun removed while the class that gets to get a free kill from crossmap/spawn every .3 seconds largely remains a problem.

19:31 GODDAMN THAT WAS SO LOUD I JUMPED OUTTA MY SEAT

that was a sick guitar solo kaluka can you come play at my middle school please

I'm not going to adopt your definition of "crowd control" but I agree with your points duder

that el maxo impression was spot on

Hey man are you MisterCaption?

Awesome editing in this one. Even the really small details.

Stuns are pretty good in garden warfare, I think it's because they're more of a boop

I'd personally take a stunlock over just being sent straight back to respawn. Hell, least if I'm a motionless punching bag I'm distracting somebody from doing something more useful than hitting me.

I really felt that guitar solo

This entire video went without mentioning a certain _other_ duo of Valve FPS games that have the best implementations of stunning players ever done in gaming. You could've even connected a section about one of these games' particular stun methods to Demo's shield charge knockback.

This reminds me of a hilarious moment I had last year where I was playing on a server and me and 2 other heavies on my team were running Holiday Punch. And we kept owning this noob on the other team who was screaming in text chat stuff like "WHY AM I LAUGHING?!" And I would respond like "Because we tickled you" and he would say "NO! tell me the real reason!" I agree that Crowd Control isn't necessarily bad. In-fact, TF2 without crowd control would be a less interesting game. Bad Crowd Control is one that removes all agency and it makes no difference if you just take your hand off the keyboard. Good Crowd Control limits some options but leaves others open. For example, in TF2 a soldier turns a corner into an enemy. The Soldier hits the target in the feet knocking them into the air limiting his options, but every class can dodge the incoming follow-up shot with good airstrafing, and some classes have an additional option: Scout's doublejump, Pyro's airblast, Engineer's Short Circuit, Heavy's Fists of Steel, etc. Not only does TF2 give you options against all crowd control, it also sometimes can be used to your advantage. Medics can surf an enemy rocket away from danger. An even more impressive feat is surfing off a Lvl3 Sentry Gun's damage to rocket across a big map. Not to mention the rare but hilarious CC strat of body blocking a jump over a death pit as a cloak and dagger spy. The reasons stuns are so popular and even necessary in MOBAs and Fighting games is because of the slow TTK. That means, getting a followup attack isn't the end of the fight. But in a game like TF2 where the game is balanced around 2-hit ideal ttk, then one hard stun completely shuts down the fight.

Nice Emrakul "sealed in the moon" reference at the start there.

it's part of why i enjoy FFXIV's PVP- moreso the 5v5 Crystal Conflict instead of the cluster fuck that is Frontline (3 teams of 24 players) where many classes have a stun, but every class has access to a skill called Purify which not only removes most of the stuns upon use, but gives a 5 second window in which you cannot be stunned by one of those types of stuns. The limiting factor is that it has a 30 second cooldown so if you manage to escape 1 stun, then you have 25 seconds where you cannot escape another, and in the small maps of Crystal Conflict, the chance are high that you'll get fudged by another stun. Given this, I'd say stuns can be balanced only if there are plenty of ways to stun as well as a dedicated, all class method, of removing a stun with a cooldown. In the heat of battle, you can still get stunned and be ganked before you can hit Purify or Protect, so it does not invalidate them outright, you can also use stuns on fleeing players, and if you are a fleeing player, you better have not used purify before or else you're slurping up that Dark Knight's salted earth.

I like watching a Kaluka video and seeing the crack wear off as he gets closer and closer to the point.

One thing as well with the holiday punch: jumping makes it much harder to get hit with since you can't be forced to taunt while jumping

19:40 control when designed well never makes a player more powerful than geometric hazards. as control basically is in fps games the ability for a player to edit the map. that's what building in fortnite, viper in valorant, and chess have in common. also one of the biggest parts of the controller arcetype that's missed is that it's so bad because it requires better game sense to win. it's not make an exploit and abuse it that's cc; but instead find an existing exploit and nest in it so the enemy always has to work with less resources from the start, essentially building a base under their skin like a parasite.

0:33 Phoenix in dota2 is literally the epitome of that and i fucking love playing him because of it

I didn't mind being stunned.

Doesn't crowd control usually refer to things that affect large amounts of people at once? (Hence the 'crowd')

We know it's you, Caption. We need fallout 76 and starfield reviews from you

The last section reminds me of some guy I saw, who made what felt like an _hour long video_ screaming shitting crying about how pyro is OP because airblast "hard counters" soldier. Like, people forget that juking, timing your shots, and _the shotgun_ exist. I also recall that instead of responding to criticism of the video, he spent the next few months furiously yelling nonstop at furries & queer people in the comments section who were making fun of him for skill issue

Heroes of the Storm mentioned, today is a good day.

4:08 jokes on you I have ad block

Sandman cleaver was my fave combo

1:30 Grohk shown, video good, new subscriber gained

I kept seeing Palidans and could only think Seris.

wouldn't a combo count as a cc chain? cuz y'know, you get hit so that means you can't avoid what comes next.

23:37 I was Not expecting a OPTCG Reference in this video! Good shit! Anyway, 7k face.

Great video, love the mtg shout out! I’m a stax player and I think control is so important when playing against a cedh deck

13:00 this is why we should remove the air-strafing stun on airblast thank you for coming to my ted talk

1:35 crowd control is bad for shooters but right at home in genres like tower defense or even board games

I would agree about airblast if valve didnt give it an infinite movement stun for the entire duration of you being airborne. pre-2017 it stunned you for .5 seconds, meaning that you could air strafe away from their flares like you can dodge every other airshot in the game. but these days pyro right clicks and disables your ability to air strafe. it feels like a step back in what was a more nuanced interaction

19:25 This goes into the "funniest jokes made in a tf2 video" section 😂😂😂 So underrated too man!

24:23 good point. controller design that works great is called utility and you know which kind of players love utility most? low tier heros!

22:10 good zoners can either cover half the options all at once or all the options but only some at the same time. good examples being lucas former type in smash ultimate, zelda latter type in smash ultimate, sylvannos former type rivals of aether, absa latter type rivals of aether. also want to clarify I don't find pac man a zoner cause his tools don't punish or restrict but only boost his advantage making him closer to a hit and run character choosing wisely when to use resources. in rivals I would say forsburn isn't a zoner because his game plan and tools revolves don't affect opponents at all only him feigning options which actually can punish zoners welll, making him more of a bait and punish character with hit and run aspects; waiting and playing reactively.

IMO, the sandman was perfect when it was a long-range stun, it was dodgeable and not that easy to hit and thus not that much of a threat. At most they could adjust the time you get stunned for, giving the scout only a really tight time window to close the distance and get something off of the stun in the first place. Now it's just useless, literally just a meme weapon that not only does not add anything to your favor, it actually just handicaps you because of the max HP cost. Or, they could keep its current slowness mechanic and amplify it so you're so slow you're practically a still target, which would help with landing the guillotine followup, and allow for easier meatshots (with the thing that you can actually defend yourself unlike with the stun)

A game that does CC good is the finals Example is the stun gun Put on basically scout tf2. Weak (low health) but fast and nimble character. Yet you need to be up close. But the enemy can still spray their gun at the same speed (just can’t aim and random jitters in the camera) I feel like it works. It’s a fast paced game and if you play slow while using it you might still get hit in the crossfire or die to someone else

Just Christ man, the gunshot at 19:30 was waaaay too loud. Scared the shit out of me.

And here I am playing godforsaken Minecraft PVP which is entirely, fundamentally even, based on using knockback to control your opponents. Lmao I also think you need to tune your guitar, man. Good solo tho

this dude is ADHD the content creator, and I approve. Also, buff caberknight. make the booties have some sort of knockback resistance.

19:30 That gun sound scared the shit out of me

3:38 rainworld in chat spotted

Great vid, covers exactly why stuff like the Sandman and Natascha are frustrating and unsatisfying compared to other, more interactive forms of crowd control.

i know this little game called "Roboquest", great PVE high paced FPS with stuns. and "stuns" in question can be negated through build in mechanic of "MASH 1 RANDOM BUTTON 3 TIMES AND YOU WILL REGAIN CONTROL FASTER" which is already some form of counter play to stuns

1:31 I hate raising canes I’ve been there multiple times and their chicken is wetter than my homies sloppy toppy in the back of math class

I like this video more than the last one, the jokes felt like they tied into the script and topics better.

Loose cannon knockback is worse to a few classes then an outright root or even stun sometimes. Pyros becoming an instakill at campable area is also even more dumb.

After watching the video for roughly four minutes, I can say that the Holiday Punch is okay and was not nerfed because it's funny

0:37 the sandman makes you are a sad man

Missed the chance to put Master Duel footage when you said "You can't just throw your entire decks at each other"

3:21 holy shit that scared the fuck out of me

bro is the dr. house of tf2 holy shit

tl;dr: Dealing a stun shouldn't just take a single button press, it needs to take effort, duh.

thanks for putting the mod list in the description!

3-26-24 The idea of people not liking stun mechanics reminds me of the reason why Masahiro Sakurai made Super Smash Bros the way he did, except replacing "stun mechanics" with "combos".

I found a hidden gem channel here

What about fighting game combos those are all about stuns

I love CC in videogames and I think it's one of the best mechanics, I stopped playing Overwatch after they removed CC. I'd rather be stunned than instakilled, but even that I don't mind much.

You’ve convinced me that the stun shouldn’t exist on the sandman anymore. I just missed how it was used for a clever combo now.