The Fists of Steel have to be among the most busted and boring weapons in the game, and it's honestly surprising how many people sleep on them, since it's so easy to draw many parallels between them and the Wrangler, even in how they got nerfed (also because they both boil down to just gving a big shield to a sentry).
The gargantuan 40% damage resistance translates into a 1.68x max hp increase, which are applied to a target that can get up to 450 health by default so picture that, yeah they gave it a overheal penalty, but it can be pretty much completely mitigated by the Dalokohs Bar and even then it doesn't stop you from getting fully overhealed before switching.
Another factor that many don't mention when it comes to damage resistance is that it does not just multiplicate max hp, but it also effectively multiplicate healing received, this is why the Wrangler got originally nerfed to have the sentry healing be reduced to 1/3rd when active, as the shield basically alowed the Engineer to triple his healing rate with it and that was INSANE.
Eventually Valve acknowledged it for the Fists of Steel too and gave it a heal rate penalty, except unlike the Wrangler they did not decide to go for a 1:1, so while the FoS boost your Medic's healing by 68%, the downside only reduces it by 40%, so you still end up benefiting from it, and it doesn't affect health kits either so have fun watching the FoS heavy walk on top of a small hp kit and have him heal 100 instead of 60, and start praying if it's a medium one.
Oh yeah the thing also has a holster penalty but like, we all know that it's completely exploitable so if you actually want the full slowed animation to play it's more because you want to be nice to your opponent than anything.
I really wish I could say that this weapon is yet another result of post 2014 Valve trying to horribly shift Heavy's design towards damage sponging but this is worse, as this comes from that early era where Valve was somehow even more inept at applying damage resistances and they unironically implemented stuff like the Chargin' Targe with over 50% damage resistances, remember when they said that they take their time testing this stuff?
Have you ever heard of that concept for giving Heavy a riot shield? Yeah, this isn't it, but you can pretend it is I guess.
I almost felt bad for hitting this so hard, I even considered boosting the Damage Resistance a bit, but in my heart the nerf just felt like the right thing to do and it was something that the weapon was missing but always deserved, so I decided not to.
The Damage Bonus and Crit When Mini-crit are there to answer the question of "Nice one smart guy, how am I gonna farm my Strange Fists of Steel now huh?!" so yeah have this funny unapproachoable instakill melee bound Heavy, it should be a fun gimmick for a round or 2.
PRO TIP: Ride on top of moving objects such as bomb carts to still move while the weapon is active, maybe also pretend that you are a wheelchair-bound Heavy and your team needs to push you!
Q: What is KusoMod?
A: KusoMod is a rebalance project that I started out of curiosity and a desire to simply shake things up a little, originally it started as a serie of Google Docs where I would go over every class one by one and evaluate the current state of each unlock and the class itself and then Hideo Kojima'ing a few possible balance changes, but it felt pointless to theorycraft on a game that has not gotten a balance change in years so I decided to learn basic sourcepawn coding to atleast give visual demonstration of them.
Q: Are there any servers running this?
A: Currently there aren't any, hell with how bad I'm at optimizing I wouldn't be surprised if a server would just implode the moment 24 people start playing at once, but once each class gets enough changes to make it worth seeing it in action, I'll try to see if I can host one, possibly also distribute the files.
Q: These changes are terrible.
A: I see a lot wrong with them myself usually, but the advantage of this not being official is that I can just throw whatever and see what sticks, I don't expect all of them to be a hit but to be quite honest, I really want to see each one in action.
Q: What is your criterion for balance changes?
A: My changes are entirely made with 12v12 pubs in mind, sometimes I also look at comp but I find that enviroment to be too different to make something that works fine for both.
There is a lot of "me" in these changes, as the basis for all of them stems from my experience when both using and going against the class/weapon, there have been situations where I made a change, then played a full week of that weapon in pubs and realized just how wrong I was.
I don't shy from applying nerfs either, some weapons have been meta for so long that I don't mind tuning them down, but when I apply nerfs I always try to either compensate it with a small buff or keep the weapon's identity intact, but alas it's not always possible to do that.
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