Of all the balance changes made in the recent updates, the nerfs surrounding Sparks have by far made the biggest splash, and Sparks mains just love to tell you how much their valued merc has been damaged. Half of the Sparks player base complain about how her ability sucks at range now and how she is no longer viable as a combat medic. Y’all need to slow tf down and look at the facts.
Sparks is by far the most capable reviver of any medic. She can resurrect teammates faster than other medics and can revive from half a map away with no trouble. This is still true, even with the nerfs. So riddle me this: How can you justify having a medic that supremely better than anyone else at reviving teammates and still equally capable in combat?
You can’t. There have to be drawbacks. Old Sparks didn’t have any drawbacks: She matched snipers like Vassili in combat power with her Revive Gun, an ability which even still makes paddles look like pathetic plastic knives by comparison.
Now that Sparks has had her combat abilities weakened, she finally has an actual drawback to justify her absurd revive power, but half of the Sparks users here still want to be a combat medic. Do you realize how spoiled that makes you sound to people who play other medics? You can’t have it both ways.
If you want to play as a medic that is viable in combat, you’ll have to get your hands dirty when you revive like everyone else does. Otherwise, stop taking that Revive Gun for granted. If you play Sparks, play Sparks for the right reasons, and stop complaining about things that Sparks was never entitled to have.
EDIT: My opinions on certain issues discussed in the comments, which I’m putting here to give you Sparks diehards a better idea of where I stand on this whole issue and the kind of progress I’d like to see made.
[quote=“SzGamer227;151474”]I will definitely say that making the heal-on-revive drop off identical to the damage drop off was a lazy and ill-advised decision on the part of Splash Damage. I do think there should be some drop off, but it would be reasonable to have the heal drop off to kick in at a further distance or decline more gradually. Even so, she is still able to revive teammates without jumping into the thing that got her patient killed in the first place, which is still a definite boon that Sparks has over paddles.
As for her Health Packs, I can definitely agree that they need some overhauling. With the amount of health that a medic needs to give to their team all the time, healing a small chunk of health every 10 seconds is far from adequate, and you never see all four health packs ready beyond the very beginning of a match unless you just aren’t using them.
Giving them the same treatment as Fragger’s grenades way back when would be a big help: Cutting the cooldown to 5 or 6 seconds and reducing the max capacity to 3 would be a good start to making up for her diminished healing ability, without turning Sparks into a constant healing-carpet generator. This would also give Sparks’ healing a level of versatility that other medics don’t have, making it easy to regularly distribute small amounts of health in various doses instead of discharging a large amount of healing into just a few people.[/quote]
