Team Fortress 2 betatesting going on...

[Purplecat]

It get's a little old when you had a kill spree as a spy, and literally half the other team goes pyro.. :/ (instead of having one or two pyros doing their job). There's no harder counter in the game than the spy vs pyro one., while the Demoman lacks real counter other than the scout... which don't get played too much in large games (plus with good aim, you take down scouts in two hits with demoman, if you can hit him).

And a lot of my games winds up with me playing Demoman, which I'm kinda sick of.

[Nocturnefoxx]

Yeah, but half the team going Pyro because of a pesky Spy is like half the team building Sentries to deal with a pesky Scout, or going Demoman to deal with a pesky Sentry nest.

If Spy MUST get an anti-Pyro suit, I'd rather it be one that needs direct flame contact for several seconds to ignite. That will stop HURF DURF W+M1 ALL DAY LONG Pyros from screwing over a Spy with one random puff, but it will let wary Pyros still weed out a Spy from a crowd.

A Spy suit that replaces the revolver would sort-of buff the Razorback, though. Without a revolver a Spy is going to have a harder time with Razorback SNOIPAHS.

[Ayeaka]

[Kyle]

The spy suits will probably create the most controversy - I remember some people suggested the idea sarcastically a while back. I don't think the spy really needs to get any easier to play - they already took care of that with the Sniper/Spy update. I hardly ever played spy up until the update, and even then there's still quite a learning curve, but this is inevitable given the abilities of the class. The spy will always be the hardest class to play because you have to outsmart the other team rather than outgun them - which is particularly challenging once people know all the tricks spies tend to use.

Ultimately adding in a fireproof suit will just give the spy a better chance at retreating, since spies typically appear in a very crowded base on the other team. I'm not against new items, though - it at least keep things interesting. A good compromise might be to make the fireproof suits one-use only. Similar to the razorback, after a spy has taken a particular amount of fire damage, it burns away and he takes normal damage afterward.

While we're on the subject of spy updates, perhaps he could use a new type of knife that only registers facestabs. That is, he can one-hit kill when stabbing people in the face as opposed to the back. Maybe you could tweak it some more for balance, like reducing the "fire rate" or requiring more accurate stabs, but I think it would be funny to see who doesn't get suspicious when a disguised spy comes running straight towards them.

[Purplecat]

Shows the various stuff in action

You see the spy suit in the video. The spy dosen't catch on fire, but he still goes down fairly quickly in constant fire.

[Stormcaller3801]

Would've liked to have a better idea of how that works with cloaking, and how it affects actual gameplay. Just standing there getting burned to death doesn't really tell you anything about balance.

[Purplecat]

Fire probably still would affect the cloak like the other weapons in the game (shimmering).

[Stormcaller3801]

Agreed- but I was thinking more in terms of how does it affect it in terms of gameplay. Does the lost of afterburn significantly affect matters? Let's say I'm playing a Pyro and a particle of fire tags a Spy for a moment. I rush forward spraying to try and catch the guy. Before it'd be nearly impossible not to burn him to the ground. Now there's a chance he could sidestep and get away, or even sidestep, hide for a second while decloaking, then run up and backstab while I'm still trying to find him.

[pablofiasco]

anyone else notice the heavy seems to be able to toss his sammich now?

[Stormcaller3801]

Yeah, I wasn't sure what that was about. Possibly a trade system?