The Heavy sucks part 2

So, the Heavy is out in left field when it comes to the other combat classes. He is both slow and short ranged, which are huge disadvantages. How does the heavy make up for this apparent lack of combat ability? Lots and lots of health.

Props to Open Office

 

I am going to posit a hypothesis that giving a class in an fps double health is a terrible idea. Many people out there are going to disagree with me on this and say stuff like "I don't want to play a game with a lot of identical characters." To which I would reply "Having double the health of the average class is not interesting or fun, so lets come up with something better."

Spies, while suffering from the same problem of slow speed and short range have a cool advantage in cloaking. Pyros, another short range and slow class, get the airblast. Engineers can throw down sentries. All cool abilities that add to the depth of a game. Having a lot of health does not add anything to TF2 besides a roadblock.

Having lots of health is the most boring advantage ever. It doesn't take any skill to move around slowly while eating rockets to the face. The majority of the heavy skill set is to find a good place to stand and shoot at people until he dies because the heavy isn't going to be able to retreat or once he spins up.

This is boring for the heavy, because he has no interesting decisions to make, and boring for anyone shooting at the heavy, because it isn't hard at all to shoot a heavy. For most good players the biggest deterrent for engaging a heavy is that it takes so much ammo to kill one the enemy team can come in and kill you while you reload. I used to play on a 6v6 team that would run double heavy on the last point of gravelpit style maps because it was literally impossible for your average team to kill two heavies without wasting time by having someone switch to sniper or spy. While it was funny seeing the other team rage it wasn't actually fun to execute.

I will go more into health and how it affects balancing in part 3.

Why the Heavy is a terrible class - part 1

The Heavy. He typically flies under the radar of most people when it comes to balance. He rarely gets used in 6v6 so some people think he is underpowered. Yet, those who have been playing for a while know that few things can win a 12v12 harder than multiple heavies on the same team.

So you might be asking, who's viewpoint is correct? Is the heavy overpowered or underpowered? Where does the heavy store all those sandviches? The correct answer is none of the above because the Heavy is terrible game design and here's one reason why.

A Graph

Range is arbitrary from 1 to 4 representing short to long ranges and is basically the range at which a class is best at dealing damage and speed includes stuff like rocket jumping. For example, the scout is fast as heck and deals damage best while he is right next to someone.

The red line is what I call the combat class line, combat classes being classes whose only way to interact with the game being trying to kill people. If you take your two most outlying combat classes and draw a line between them, it should slope downward and every other combat class should be at least somewhere near it. Why? Because the line creates a what I call 'zone based specialization'.

How does zone based specialization work? Imagine you have two classes, the soldier and the scout. The soldier is slower than the scout but deals damage at a mediumish range, so if he is engaging properly he can move himself to an ideal position before the scout can close the distance and kill him. Meanwhile the scout is so fast no other class can catch up to him, so if the scout wants to engage a soldier class he must first make his way through his opponent's ideal range to get into his ideal range, which is done by skillful players by waiting until the soldier is in a disadvantageous position or by waiting until the soldier is preoccupied. This creates a balance between a class having range, and a class being able to choose where the engagement will happen.


The heavy, by being a combat class not on the combat class line, can't choose where to fight and doesn't have range advantage either. So, he must now be balanced in a completely different way, which means that he is going to be a problem for designing anything from new maps to new weapons as he will create large anomalies, such as being the least used combat class in 6v6 and being crazy good in 12v12.