Why? For fatalistic Engies bored of baby-sitting. It can also add a much weaker shield to the buildings of friendly Engies. The Spanner can remove them, but again, not repair the damage. Sappers take a very long time to eat through the shield, and don’t disable the building until they get through it. The Spanner can repair neither the shield nor your buildings, so once they’re up, there’s no point hanging around. Shield Spanner: when whacking your own full-health structures, this thing builds up an uber-like protective shield around them that can absorb a few hundred points of damage before the structure itself is damaged at all. I also have some ideas about how this stuff should be unlocked, but they tie in to another major change I’d like to see, so that’s for another post. They’re wrong, but still: there’s no substitute for trying this stuff. If I’d never played TF2 and you just described it to me, I would have said the Spy’s near-perfect disguise system was absurdly overpowered, but today people groan that it’s virtually useless. Partly because this is more interesting to talk about, and partly because I don’t think you can just intellectualise about balance and call the problem solved. I’m more interested in ideas that would make you think about and play a class differently, than in trying to ensure everything is perfectly and exactly balanced. I hadn’t originally planned on illustrating them – for reasons I hope will be obvious once you see my illustrations – that just kind of happened. Then I realised there are 29 of them, and did it anyway. I thought the most interesting way of doing it would be to think up just one alternative to every weapon, device and ability in the game. Obviously we’ve all thought about this a bit at one point or another. Valve even gave me a special sparkly Equalizer (similar to the Last Ditch Digger here) and a lovely shoutout in the Solider update. Since then, some weapons have been added that have similar concepts to these. Update: This post was written in May 2008, when only the Medic had new weapons.
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