Spark to Comp Level (What would you change?)

[APRenpsy]

I like to chime in as a Sparks player.

Spark greatly depends on the map to perform well.

Terminal is a great example a Sparks sitting in the backline reviving people during the chokepoint that develops when the enemies take out the first objective is better then a Sawbones. You can effectively hold that choke forever unless your teammates are getting instant gibbed which wouldn’t be happening much. Even if you lose that choke there another choke-point you can fall back on right after.

Sparks health pack
Been discussed, use them for yourself or to “bandage” teammates. Your power as a medic comes from your ability to revive at range.

The way I see it Sparks has her place when it comes to competitive games. Her effectiveness however depends on the map.

[Vampwood]

See the problem with Sparks is you either have to run with your EMP 9 out, which with your HP and the weapon itself making yourself not the best combatant at high levels or run with Revivr in which that you have to charge and you HAVE to hit your shot and against better opponents the hit rate drops drastically.

Theres a one of many changes I’d like to see depending on which direction Splash wants to take her, either more of a combat medic sniper or more of a proper support role.

You could pick one and I feel it would make her more interesting and competitive.

1:

Make her Revivr charge not slow her down as much or not at all while this may seem a bit much I feel it’ll make her a solid choice, give a 25% increase in charge up rate but a X% battery decrease. This allows faster reactions to allies going down and gives you much better reaction times possible to headshot and kill certain classes but punishes sitting around with full charges waiting for either allies or enemies. While giving her more problems managing energy and clearing corners with it. At the same time remove access to her machine pistols and require her to use only Pistols to support the Revivr.

2: Increase her speed while charging the Revivr and make the revivrs default move speed higher to work better with her natural speed. 80% of move speed while charging it with an increase to 90% move speed with it out.

3: If you don’t want to change her Revivr focus on making the healthpacks either be easier to land with a small increase in hp healed or reward the increased difficulty significantly with a large boost if you direct hit as well as increase HP to 90, letting her survive 1 more bullet and be a bit more durable to explosives.

These are just my feelings, but honestly it may make more sense to look at why Sawbonez is just so effective and adjust him downwards, rather then make Sparks stronger.

[B_Montiel]

In my opinion, sparks’s weakness is currently the same weakness proxy and aura also have, which is probably higher with those two : they might have a too low health pool to be reliable against good tracking/good explosive skills players. And their speeds do not compensate enough currently.

Their main weapons are not helping either. Blishlok, even though deadly in good hands, has a poor dps output and hochfir is also a medium tier smg, below kek and crotzni definitely. Kira has meanwhile an easy way to deal with this : dreiss/br16/stark plus laser beam which are strong enough on long range to make her decent.

Sparks’s revivr is also quite efficient on long range, which make Sparks a better choice than Aura as a second medic.

Currently, I feel like there’s a bit too much 1 HTK on those nimble mercs. Fletcher, Nader, Skyhammer (indoor beacon) have to be considered as real strong threats that are straight light stompers. As well as semi-auto snipers which 1 HTK on head, or bolt action snipers which will put you between 1 hp and 16 hp on a bodyshot (Aura and sparks will be left at 1 hp against a fel-ix, proxy at 16 hp against moa, no damage drop off considered).

I will also mention that light mercs suffer more from the anti-lag. I won’t discuss this too much, but my idea is that they have a larger health pool fraction unusable in close quarter before going into cover. This strongly contradicts aura and proxy fast hit & run natures. [And the effects from anti-lag are also more noticeable (kills behind objects) as they run faster.]

After all this, I came to the conclusion that, even though I love playing light mercs on pub games, Aura and Proxy are nowhere near of being wise choices in skill balanced mm games or pugs.

[Amerika]

I feel as though mercs shouldn’t have their HP balanced with speed. Instead they should be balanced with the whole package. I would still like to see all the light mercs get at least 10hp buff and see what happens with them. Then adjust HP and speed up or down from there. I agree that HP is their biggest weakness as good players with good aim will quickly offset the speed advantage in most situations. Especially when those characters are typically also saddled with weaker weapon options either in power, range or both.

[B_Montiel]

Yup, that sounds like the best option. An other could be putting all smgs on a strict par, which could also be interesting, but this sounds to me as something impossible to achieve. Making light available smgs or even machine pistols better won’t help, as they’re also available with some medium mercs.

[Why not put enhanced versions of weapons available to certain specific mercs ? (same overall feeling, but slight increase in dps) That’s a totally random idea, but this is how they dealt with secondary shotgun balance between classes in early tf2. Heavy, engineer, pyro and soldier have an exact same shotgun available feeling wise, but the one the two first have is significantly better damage wise.]

[N8o]

They destroyed Spark’s hit detection AGAIN in the last update.

If they can fix that, then yea, she is extremely viable, but “missing” 3 shots in a row and the downed friendly getting gibed makes her extremely weak compared to the other medic’s defibs (since the hit detection on those things are WAY better).