TF2: 100 Days of Spy

let's do it well this is it this is what everything has led to I got myself behind them I fooled them with my disguise and now I'm perfectly positioned for the play of my life there's five of them up ahead all running away not suspecting a single thing to happen this is exactly what I've traded for Showtime [Music] oh this is spy or at least was a spy unfortunately for him he is by far the weakest class in all of TF2 and if I'm going to be honest with you there isn't really much of a competition here even though he can go invisible disguises enemies and instantly kill anyone he wants with a backstab people have sort of caught on to his whole assassin stick over the years and know how to counter him it's common knowledge at this point to turn around every so often so he doesn't sneak up on you you know you gotta spy check every crevice of the map and for the love of God you know you shouldn't carelessly film up a flight of stairs unless you want to end up in his subpar frag movie but look even if he is the weakest class in the game he still does have the potential to absolutely shut down servers if you play your cards right but things like trick stabs strafing good positioning and situational awareness spy can become a very formidable opponent but uh unfortunately for me I can't I can't really do any of that stuff you suck even though I have 4 000 hours in this game I've never really been able to pull off those flashy trick stabs and big brain outplays that all the cool spy Mains can take such a big time investment to learn all the intricacies of spy's kit and up until this point on my TF2 Korea I'd never really given it much attention but I wanted to change that and if you're a long time viewer of the omaxo channel here you'd know that I'm pretty mentally ill when it comes to challenging myself and this 15 year old video game so I actually developed a bit of an idea on how I could make my process of becoming the most elite level spy main a little more interesting and so like any normal person would I decided on the 12th of December 2022 that I was going to dedicate the next 100 days to improving its spy and oh boy was this going to be quite the journey there were going to be some absolutely insane highs some equally crushing lows and got a whole lot of backstabbing ladies and gentlemen Welcome to My 100 days of spy challenge before we dive head on into things there are some parameters I want to implement around this 100 day challenge because admittedly it is a little vague theoretically I could just load into a game filled with Bots select spy for a moment hit One Singular backstab and do that for over three months straight which probably wouldn't make for the most captivating story so there are two basic guidelines I have established to make sure I become the most elite level spy player possible over the next 100 days number one my hours on spy have to increase from 80 to 280 by the end of 100 days any Tales of mathematicians in the audience will know that equates to at least two hours of spy gameplay every day for the next 100 days I figure this is a pretty reasonable amount of time to run with because it's not some insane time commitment that will have me ripping my hair out after a week but it's also not too little to the point where I won't become an absolute gamer God by the end of 100 days we can measure this stat using the in-game tracker which you can access through your Loadout this makes it really convenient to know if we're on target or not now the second guideline I have to accomplish is getting at least 1 000 kills on every Spy weapon and when I say every weapon I mean every weapon now of course this doesn't include the invis watches or the sappers but when it comes to all of spy's knives and revolvers I will have at the very least 1000 kills on each of them once 100 days is up this will allow me to explore all of spy's gameplay variety to its fullest meaning I should emerge from this challenge with a pretty damn comprehensive understanding of how each unlock functions and what scenarios they work best in this does mean I'll need to get a thousand kills on The Enforcer at some point which I I'm sure will be an absolute joy to accomplish but hey it gives me some sub goals to progress through as the days pass in this challenge so hopefully I find that fulfilling in some way now if you don't play much TF2 it's meant I was going to have to buy a strange version for all of spy's weapon which is a type of item in TF2 that automatically tracks your kills it does cost a little bit of extra cash especially when you're a dumbass like me who needs to have a professional killstreet killing everything but hey just like my 500 Vlog from my 10 000 kills video we can probably claim this as a tax write-off too now before we get ahead of ourselves I probably should address the uh slight elephants in the room at this video yeah it's uh it's pretty damn long because there's actually a whole lot of interesting stuff to talk about here but you don't need to worry I don't expect anyone to finish this video in one sitting because I have broken it up into 10 distinct segments which means you are free to leave and come back to the video as you please I hope this means for the next week of your life I can be your choice of YouTuber when you sit down to eat a meal and if that's the case I'm truly honored I know the length might seem a little daunting but trust me I've spent a lot of time making this video as accessible as possible for your viewing entertainment so with all of that out the way it's time we officially begin 100 days of spy I suppose the most logical place to start with the 100 day spy challenge is to well give you a rundown on how spy actually works because this conniving Frenchman has some pretty complex mechanics that probably don't make a lot of sense to someone who hasn't played the game before so it's time we take a quick class into biology 101. compared to every other class in TF2 spy has a really unique play style and if I had to boil it down to one word it would be disruptor this might sound a bit weird but when you take a look at the different tools he has in his Loadout I think it'll make more sense up first we have the revolver this is by far the most normal weapon spy has available to him it has six bullets in the chamber it deals a surprisingly good amount of damage at Mid to close ranges and it can be a good final resort to swap to you ever find yourself in a sticky situation a little spy players neglect just how powerful this thing is and how useful it can be in certain situations but I knew I wasn't going to be one of them and I was fully aware of its potential going into the challenge it's safe it's reliable it's the revolver next up we have the knife this is the weapon which all of spy's gameplay centers around because if we swing this thing at someone it deals oh a very underwhelming 40 damage that's actually kind of boring but if we happen to have someone from behind well we can instantly kill any class in the game without fail this is what makes spy such a formidable opponent as you can completely turn the tide into your team's favor with one well-timed backstabbed on an important enemy player backstabs what makes 5 such an enticing class to play and it's easily the most important mechanic to wrap your head around because all of your utility centers around it the third tool inspires kit is where things start to get really interesting as we have the invis watch this is what allows spy to actually get into a position where he can pull a backstab off as by right-clicking we are granted with 10 seconds of full invisibility this allows us to flank behind the enemy team and make quick escapes at a pinch making it absolutely essential to spy's play style without it we'd be stuck metaphorically slamming our head against the brick wall over and over as we try to slip past the entire enemy Team without them noticing which yeah it doesn't work very well so the envious watch is absolutely vital here the fourth tool inspires kit is the sapper which exists solely to counter saw one class in particular and that is the engineer any of his buildings whether it be a Sentry dispenser or teleporter can be sat which temporarily disables their functionality and slowly decreases their health until it drains all the way down to zero and self-destruct when it comes to being a good team player this sap is absolutely essential as you are the best equipped class in the game to deal with Annoying Sentry Nets that prevent your team from pushing or defending an objective overall the sapper is less impactful than some of spy's other tools but it still has an important job nonetheless the final tool spy has at his disposal is the disguise kit it isn't officially listed in his Loadout when you go to change your weapons but it allows us to disguise as anyone on the enemy team or anyone on our team for that matter which in conjunction with the envious watch allows us to fool our enemies and cause some Mayhem onto backline whilst veteran players will sniff you out pretty quickly if you happen to have a poor disguise Choice it is still great for blending into your environment and can be super effective against newer players too so look in summary we can assassinate single targets really well we have a tool that allows us to sneak behind the enemy team with ease that can disguises enemies to cause confusion fusion and we're able to sap important buildings like teleporters and Sentry or with the goal of making it easier for our team to push the objective and ultimately win the game now if you ask me all that seems pretty disruptive which is why I think the label of disrupter categorizes spy's role on the team pretty damn well keep in mind though that this is a spy at his absolute simplest you start adding things like unlockable weapons and trick stabs into the mix well that's how you end up with a video that's over three hours long but for now and just as a quick little introduction I hope spy makes sense to people who haven't really played all that much TF2 before so okay with that out the way I think it's time I give you a little sneak peek into how absolutely talented I was at spy going into this challenge you know it's time you see the absolute trick stabbing God an elite level gaming master I was on day one of this Challenge and by that I mean oh god oh no I I really sucked hard in the beginning now if for some reason you don't believe me in how utterly garbage at spy was maybe this clip from my literal first game of the entire challenge can help to clarify things we're here on bombers well I'm trying to get behind the enemy team but oh I carelessly bump into the medic before declocking where I then proceed to miss not just one not just two but three backstab attempts in a row before receiving a lethal smack to the face by a VB long neck I think this is a good place to start with the challenge and my spy gameplay more generally because the first of many shortcomings I noticed in my skills was my inability to Lodge a butterfly knife into an enemy Gamer's spinal cord AKA getting a backstab for some reason this was the first major hurdle I ran into and it seems kind of silly to talk about because well surely hitting a backstab is a pretty simple task right you have your knife yeah walk up to their back you press Mouse one and voila that should be a kill a bit no actually it often wouldn't be as failing to hit backstabs was the first major issue I struggled with during this challenge take a look at this clip from day 5 on Snowy Coast where I position myself in this nice little spot next to the barrels where the enemy team won't see me luckily a Demoman comes around the corner so I walk up and oh and oh I absolutely mince my with stabs and [ __ ] die now look there's probably a few key reasons as to why I was failing so spectacularly at the seemingly super easy backstabs early on as one I hadn't played all that much spy before starting this Challenge and was a little rusty two I didn't have a good grasp of how the backstab hitbox worked yet and three I struggled to predict how enemies would move around whilst I was behind them I just didn't have the experience to quickly adjust my own positioning if an enemy suddenly strafed in a different direction as we saw in that last clip so I'd often just end up tickling them with a little 40 damage stabbed to their side or even worse I'd miss the stab entirely meaning I was swinging my knife at literally nothing which if you didn't know is actually the TF2 equivalent of shooting an airball this issue did dissipate relatively quickly though as with each day I'd gain more experience so I'd shake off a little more of that rust and I'd become increasingly comfortable with spies core mechanics meaning that fail stabs like this became much more of a rarity a little bit though that even like 70 days deep into the challenge I still had moments where I would absolutely butcher a backstab attempt but again they were much less frequent than they were in this first week no I [Music] now it would be absolutely lovely if failing the world's easiest backstab attempts was the only issue I ran into in my early days of playing spy but unfortunately I managed to piece together an entire laundry list of things I sucked ass out on spy and introduced you to my next problem just take a look at another clip I got on day one and see if you notice anything strange about it foreign so you might be thinking hold on the clip was a little messy but there was a pretty decent couple of stabs in there and the aim with the revolve was actually on point at the end so what's the issue here well if you take a closer look after my misstab on the sniper you'll notice that I pull out my disguise kit for half a second and then also manage to pull out my sapper before ultimately arriving at My Revolver and actually getting the kill now correct me if I'm wrong here but I don't think that either of these items provide any offensive utility in the middle of combat uh unless I plan to throw them at my opponent so why am I swapping to them in the middle of a battle well that brings us to the next issue in the El maxo's awful lot spy list and this one sounds even more stupid than the last because it seemed I was unable to operate my keyboard like a normal human being when I was playing spy because oh my God was I mispressing keys and swapping to the wrong items in the heat of combat so damn consistently take a look at this clip from day two where I'm on Dust Bowl I'm trying to do a little bit of acting to trick an enemy medic into thinking that I'm actually on his team if you didn't know you can press B whilst holding a weapon as spy and this will swap what your disguise is holding which can help to make you look more believable depending on what environment you're in in this case I press B whilst my sapper is equipped so that my medic disguise swaps to holding their midi gun but instead of doing that I managed to fat finger my keyboard and bring up this notification before being randomly critted and sent to [ __ ] Purgatory I can't really say that I wanted to use my secret Saxton whilst I was trying to convince an enemy that I was on their team but apparently I clumsily pressed the wrong button and got myself murdered as a result luckily this was similar to the fail stabs as after I played more and more and my muscle memory improved I was actually able to start swapping to the correct weapon during combat relatively quickly which to help reduce the amount of embarrassing Clips I found myself ending up in but okay okay it wasn't all bad when it came to my first 10 days of this challenge this is probably a good point to introduce you to one of the most important skills there is to playing spy and that is of course trick stabbing there are a lot of satisfying mechanics in TF2 you got stuff like crit flares Market Gardens crossbows meat shots air shots headshots ooh even saying their name games just has your brain absolutely racing but if there was a mechanic that I could put at the very Pinnacle of that list it'd be trick steps because there is just so much variety to what you're able to pull off as I covered briefly earlier spice whole stick is that he won Gets behind his enemy and two gives him a good old shank to the back however there are situations where you won't be behind your enemy and May in fact be caught out with your metaphorical pants down in scenarios such as this you have to delve into your repertoire of trick stabs which as the name suggests a relying on your ability to trick your opponent into moving a certain way so you can find a way to stab their back there is an ocean of different trick stabs which you can execute including stair stabs jump stabs under stabs Corner stabs blind stabs Matador stabs reverse Matador stabs drop stabs Circle strafe stabs surf stabs stab dab stab rad plaid you just seriously insane how much complexity there is to something which seems so innately simple and if there was one skill I absolutely wanted to master over the next 100 days of this challenge it was going to be my ability to hit any and every time type of trickster because oh does this feel good outwitting your opponent then look a prior to starting this challenge I could hit the occasional trickster I say the one I would most consistently land is a corner stab which as the name suggests is where an enemy is hunting you down as you go around a corner so you vanish from their sight line for a moment just for you to reappear as you loop back around behind them to secure a really nice simple step it's a very reliable trick step and in these early days of the challenge especially I would always try to force myself into situations where I could pull it off because it was the one I was most confident in landing consistently I was getting a fair few of them but uh look when it came to every other type of trickstab I was uh a bit more inconsistent in these early days I think the absolute funniest type of failed trick stab to go back and watch had to be my stair stab attempts because oh boy well there's some absolutely awful Clips to cycle through in case you don't know a stair slab is one of the most quintessential Tools in spy's repertoire so on the porn I break them down for you real quick they are entirely relying on you having a slight height advantage over your opponent so you can jump and Crouch over their head as they approach you leading you straight to their back for one of the more flashy types of stabs that spy can pull off as the name suggests you'll usually do these at a staircase or a ramp as an enemy rushes to get you but you can pull them off from anywhere as long as you have that tiny height advantage over your opponent and when I say tiny I mean it because a teleporter is technically enough of a high ground for you to be able to jump on top of your opponent and get a stab now again these are always super sick to pull off but uh unfortunately in these early days I wasn't all that great at it here on day two I was attacking on Swiftwater when a pyro caught me off guard as I declote so they begin chasing me up these stairs and wow I definitely tried to do something there instead of jumping on top of him to get a backstab as I landed I kind of just jumped away from him which isn't particularly conducive to getting a kill I think I put It Best in my live reaction when I said oh I [ __ ] that tricks up so bad someone put me on a watch list for bats tricks numbers and take a look again here on day two where we are on high pass and I catch an engineer walking towards me there isn't too much time to react so I figure well the stairstep is probably the only thing that will work here and oh okay I jumped away from him and tried to flick back and stab uh nothing just like literally everything I've mentioned up until this point learning to hit trickstabs started off very rough I will admit that there was the occasional glimpse of improvement where I'd whip out some insane stair stab or mad at all that I didn't even know I was capable of hitting but for the most part it was a lot of failure it didn't really upset me or make me frustrated though because I recognized that there was going to be a lot of learning to do so it was inevitable that I was going to jump too soon on a stairstab or strafe too far in One Direction on a matador and find myself getting absolutely destroyed as a result there's definitely a whole lot more to talk about when it comes to trickstubs and it's actually one of the biggest focuses of this entire video but we'll see a lot more of that in the later days as they actually improved because for now well it was by no means a strong suit of mine but look I did realize something pretty quickly in my first 10 days and that was like you don't always have to go for a tricks ever Spike now don't get me wrong they're super fun to execute but one thing I was painfully aware of going into this challenge was that some spy players just overuse them way too much just because you have the option of doing it doesn't mean you should take it and as I realized it's often a lot smarter to forego using your knife entirely in certain situations and instead you really should be using that trusty old revolver luckily one of the transferable skills I had going to this challenge was uh my aim I know it sounds pretty obvious but when you play a game for over 4 000 hours you kind of get good at the whole pointing and clicking at enemies shtick as a byproduct of this I really found myself making the most of my revolver throughout the early days of this challenge because if I wasn't confident in my ability to get behind and actually hit a stab I always had this surprisingly consistent form of damage that I could fall back on I realized that people really underestimate how much work you can put in with the stock revolver as this thing can do up to 60 damage per shot at closer ranges which has the potential to absolutely obliterate opponents who don't respect you in the 1v1 as you can see here on day 9 I find the soldier on Swiftwater who has the Direct Hit equipped uh AKA a weapon which can kill me with literally one rocket but I back myself and end up connecting five shots in a row on him to securely kill and also get this random invisible after in this other clip I got on day one on upward I take a pretty big gamble when I decide to Target this scout coming towards me I'm on 81 HP which is by no means an optimal amount against a scatter gun which can instantly delete me but again because I have faith in my aim I'm able to pick up a kill on the Scout too even though it does go down to the wire look I was definitely having most of my fun while sitting backstabs and they're so much more satisfying when you're playing spy but a common trap I see a lot of newer players falling into is forgetting that their revolver exists entirely it really does deal a stupid amount of damage if your aim is on point and a lesson I learned super quickly whilst playing spy in these early days is that if you don't have full faith in your ability to whip out some super complicated 360 Triple C tap Matador trick stab on an opponent then don't you have a super reliable option in the revolver at your disposal so you may as well make the most of it and look whilst we're on the topic of discussing the tools in our kit I think it's time we shine a bit of a spotlight on the stock knife and how it went during these early days going into the challenge I've honestly never been the biggest fan of the stock knife just because there are so many more fun options like the kunai and big earner which actually rewards you when you hit step I'll talk about these unlocks in depth later on but what I've always found to be so underwhelming with the knife is that you'll head on into a situation secure one stab or maybe two if you're lucky and then you'll be left with your dick in your hands as you won't have a speed boost or bonus Health making it really hard for you to escape and you'll often just be left getting executed on the spot and to be honest with you I experienced this a lot in my early days of the challenge take a look at this clip from day one on Swiftwater where ID click pretty aggressively at their spawn before securing an easy stab on a clueless sniper however because backstabbing has a super loud audio cue of your enemy screaming as they die both the soldier and the enemies fight instantly snap towards me and properly kill me and again look at this clip from day 9 on Thunder Mountain where I get a nice stab on this pyro just for the demo night another pyro to quickly react and prevent me from getting any more kills now yes an element to me dying so quickly here is because they are some fairly aggressive stabs I'm going for in an Ideal World I should be waiting patiently for isolated targets so I can pick them off without anyone noticing and then falling back into the Shadows to repeat the process but come on that's boring as [ __ ] I just want to go on a bloody Rampage through the enemy team in a moment of pure chaos before finally being caught and going out with the bang back to the respawn Cube I will admit that this is definitely something I got better at in the later days of the challenge as I slowly became way more observant in my surroundings and seeing which enemies were nearby before I went for a big play meaning I had more information on hand and could make an optimal decision better but I'm just saying if I had the kunai equipped in either of those clips we just watched I could have a nice little Health boost which makes escaping a much easier task but again we talking about that specific unlock a lot more later on what really solidifies my whole point here about getting one or two stabs with a stock knife and then dying is all of my chain stab clips now basically if I ever hit anything that was even remotely noteworthy for the video I'd make sure to record it and this was the case when it came to chain steps but as I was organizing my footage I realized that in my first 10 days of playing I noticed there literally wasn't a single chain with more than three stabs in it and the vast majority of them were only double kills now I know this probably doesn't sound that insane but when you compare it to the four five and even six kill games I was getting fairly consistently with some of the other knives later on in the challenge I was actually pretty damn surprised now this wasn't entirely the fault of the stock knife as this was also a byproduct of me having less experience on spy this early on I'm sure if I use the stock knife more later on in the challenge I probably would have started getting some of those bigger chain kills too but the lack of utility it provides upon getting a stab it did leave me feeling slightly underwhelmed at times of course though it still did a pretty decent job for the first stretch of the challenge it was definitely a good way to start things off as it didn't have any of the gimmicks that the other unlocks do which helped me to direct my full Focus to the fundamentals like positioning good movement and understanding back hitboxes early on I will admit that it did make me realize pretty quickly that my preferred play style on spy was going to be really aggressive as the prospect of using the stock knife and patiently waiting around for isolated targets it didn't seem as appealing to me as dropping myself into ungodly situations filled with enemy Gamers and trick stabbing my way out with the kunai also we are on the topic of the stock knife though I should let you know that I actually hit the first major Milestone of The Challenge on day six but I secured 1 000 kills on my strange now this was the very first weapon of mine to hit this secondary goal we haven't the challenge leaving me with 9 more weapons to go now to finish off my discussion of the first 10 days of this challenge I want to talk to you a little bit more about the invis watch and specifically my parthing with it the way you maneuver the map whilst invisible is spy is one of the most important skills to wrap your head around as it's crucial to actually getting yourself behind the enemy team so you can start to do all of your disruptive work it's honestly a super underrated element to spy's gameplay loop as people usually over obsessed with practicing all the different types of flashy trick Subs they can pull off being that they Overlook fundamentals such as parfing so with this in mind I decided to make a concerted effort to focus on this part of my spy gameplay from the beginning I want to know the best routes to take on every map find hidden paths manage my cloak time well and know every ammo location to ensure I was getting behind the enemy team in the most optimal way possible but uh yeah like everything in this challenge besides My Revolver Aim so far it started off a little rough take a look at this clip here on day two where count with me I managed to bump into not just one not just two not just three not just four but five people whilst invisible nothing screams good in this pathing like colliding with literally half the enemy team before you manage to get behind now I will admit that some maps do make getting behind the enemy team and spy a pretty big Challenge and talk about that in depth later in the video Don't you worry but for the most part getting better at my interviews pathing was just a case of trial and error to find which routes work best and testing how aggressive I could be whilst I was trying to get behind meaning I found myself getting caught out of one it's also important to note that before going into the challenge I was so used to running the latrage which is a revolver that extends your cloak duration by 40 meaning I was used to having way more wiggle room and extra cloak time to work with when maneuvering the map whilst visible however because I was running vanilla spy for the first 10 day block of the challenge and then I had a lot of adjusting to and found myself needing ammo packs to replenish my cloak meter way more often I would sometimes find myself in pretty undesirable situations where I wouldn't have enough cloak duration left to escape anyway whilst I was failing miserably a lot in these first 10 days of the challenge actually was having a really good time learning through my mistakes and optimizing my gameplay as I progressed day after day I genuinely found myself looking forward to each session as I was slowly improving things like my trick stabs positioning and general game awards I can't lie I'm a big fan of progressing and getting better at things with time so even though there was the occasional frustrating moment here or there I was very much Happy with these first-hand days I was looking forward to the rest of the challenge by the end of day 9 I had accumulated a total of 2082 kills and died 1138 times leading me to a KD of 1.83 which is actually a lot higher than I initially expected I will mention it here because it's pretty important to the video but yes after every single game I played in this challenge I would alt tab to a Google doc and write down my KD for the game which was a slight pain in the ass but it meant we'd be able to look at the different Trends in my performance as I swap between different loadouts and slowly got better at the game probably did screw up the numbers from time to time and might have forgotten to write down my KD from a handful of games but overall this is going to give us a pretty good objective metric for how much I was improving its spy as the challenge progressed my spy time also increased from 79 hours and 39 minutes up to 100 hours and 7 Minutes meaning I clocked in just over 20 20 hours of gameplay in my first 10 days I will say that 2 hours of in-game time on my spy statistics was shaping up to be more like three hours of Total time spent playing which would end up being a slightly bigger time commitment than I wanted later on in the challenge but hey that's something we can laugh at me about when I'm losing my mind on like a day 17. I'm actually so angry I can't do this I can't I'm sick of this game I'm sure he's getting better every day I don't flash five every day so look it was honestly a pretty boring start to the challenge yes it was funny to watch me fail miserably with vanilla spy at times but overall it basically went just as I imagined it would I will say though that the pace of this challenge was about to shift pretty drastically from here on out as moving into the next 10 days of the challenge well we're gonna make some pretty important changes to both my Loadout and play style and this was going to introduce a little more spice into the mix hold on hold on hold on you're telling me you've made it this far into the video and you haven't even joined the official El maxo Discord server yet you're kidding me right one of the single most active TF2 communities on the entire internet and you're not in it well look maybe I can forgive you just this once but you have to join quickly because we are going to be giving away an Australian knife in honor of this video all you gotta do is go down to the description join with the link there or you can go to discord.gg forward slash El maxo and head to the giveaways chat where you literally just have to press one button and you're in the running to win that knife I'm looking either way a bunch more stuff in the future and I'm gonna do it all through my Discord server which is just a cool place to meet people and talk if you want to join there so I'd recommend you do that also before we get back to the video I am I really need you to follow me on Instagram I um I need Cloud I I live for cloud and I need the cloud to pick up Eagles so if you go to Instagram and go at omaxo underscore swag and you follow me there I'd I'd really appreciate that I really am sorry sorry sorry uh let's get back to the video foreign with TF2 culture you'll know that there's a certain archetype associated with spymates they're seen as toxic people think they're big egos they often type in chat a lot they'll usually have an anime profile picture their weapon names will be either esoteric [ __ ] or Japanese characters there were a certain type of cosmetic Loadout and they use graphic configs that make their game look more like Minecraft than a first person shooter but this all doesn't really mean that much at the end of the day it comes down to their gameplay and if there's one knife spy memes can't get enough of it has to be the Cannabis kuna like look if you go into YouTube right now and take a peek at literally any spy Montage that you can find you'll notice two things immediately one are they intentionally making their game's visuals look as dog [ __ ] as possible and two they'll be using the kunai I can almost guarantee it as unless they're an absolute Giga Chad using the big earner it'll be kunai kunai and a little bit more kunai and when you take a look at this weapon stats it becomes pretty clear why the first thing you'll notice is that we lose 55 of our Max Health to bring us from the normal HP of a light class 125 down to a squeamish 70. this is the lowest base Health any class can have in the game and it's a really scary amount to be at because you are so incredibly vulnerable to literally every form of damage there is meat shots dead pipes dead well placed stick your rocket dead I happen to lose like five Health due to full damage whilst you're getting behind the enemy team and now on the receiving end of a melee swing yeah you guessed right dead you're already a glass Cannon as spy so you'd hope that there's a pretty damn good upside to the kunai if we're making ourselves even more fragile and oh boy there absolutely is because for every backstab we get we absorb our enemies Health kinda kinda like we're uh we're a vampire oh my God [Music] sorry I've been wanting to make a Playboy party jerk somewhere in the video for a while now so I'll move on anyway the successful backstab can give us an overheal of up to 210 HP AKA more Health than a soldier now the amount of healing or overhealing you get does depend on your opponent's HP for example if you stab a full health heavy you'll be rewarded with the maximum of 210 HP but if you stab something like a one HP Scout you'll only be rewarded with the minimum amount of 75 resulting in a smaller amount of Overhill this allows for some super flashy plays where we can surf enemy Rockets because the Overhill we can go for hyper aggressive stabs in situations we'd usually die in and we just have so much more sustain in general whilst we're on the battlefield so God okay uh for the next 10 days of this challenge it was finally time to say goodbye to the stock knife and hello to the kuna it sounds like we could have potentially just gone now hands one of the best weapons of the game so let's see how it all goes foreign well it may come as a surprise but there's guys on YouTube pulling off all those crazy ass plays have like thousands of owls on spies and I don't so unfortunately we weren't all that crash hot when I first equipped the Kune on day 10 but they didn't magically gain the ability to perfectly trick stab every enemy I came across overnight I think the first major issue I noticed with the kunai was that it exacerbated my bad pathing issues especially when invisible now it's bad enough when you're using the stock knife and happen to get caught out but with the kunai well we've lost an additional 55 HP making us even easier to be punished take a look at this clip from day 13 where I'm pushing forward on pit I'm invisible no one can see me and oh hello that's just a little unfortunate isn't it 20 damage resistance you get whilst invisible isn't going to be helping you when you cop a rocket to the face at Point Blank and take a look here at this clip on day 19 where we're on harvest where if I had to guess I was trying to get into a position to spawn Camp the enemy but nope uh that's Nostalgia shooting a rocket as they leave spawn for no apparent reason look I realized pretty quickly that I had to be even more careful with my passing last visible if I was using the kunai because the potential to get absolutely shafted by some random explosion and just instantly die was so comically high I had to be even more disciplined with the roots I took I need to be more patient when moving past enemies and I basically relegated myself to the flanks exclusively where it's less likely you'll be randomly greeted by a Max damage rocket from a fresh install Soldier and look a point I'm really going to hammer in throughout this video is that I am just not a fan of all the external factors which are outside of your control when you're playing spy and to me it felt like the kunai just piled on top of this like oh you're about to hit a backstab but the enemy turned around at the last frame well before if you were just using the knife you had a small chance of escaping with your life but now uh no you'll just die in one shot to basically anything a pyro spy checking like a bunch of schizos who haven't taken their arm what medication do schizophrenic stick a hellopyridol well again if you're using the knife you add more wiggle room with that extra HP to escape with some good movement and unpredictable pathing but the kunai oh yeah it just makes all that so much harder but look there's a reason it's the go-to choice for spy mates and I could see the occasional glimpse of this weapon's potential I think the most useful aspect to the kunai in these early days was the fact it gave me a much safer Escape option after I managed to secure a step because it was going to be a while before I could consistently chain together trick stabs and tear through bigger groups of enemies with the kunai and more often than not I just count my lucky stars if I was even able to secure a single stab and then use the additional help to safely exit from a fight take a look at this clip from day 10 on Frontier where I'm approaching this pyro and get taken down to a scarily low amount of HP but luckily secure the stab which gives me a beautiful 162 Overhill meaning I can take a bunch of the extra damage from the enemies behind me and can exit combat safely had I been using the stock knife here I still would have gotten the stab but would have had absolutely no hope of escaping past that and again this clip from the same day on badwater I hit a pretty damn clean drop stab on this heavy which makes me take the maximum Overhill of 210 giving me a massive safety net to escape with but look sometimes I was feeling myself and actually had faith in my ability as a spy player I was like Squidward from that one episode of SpongeBob where the little fish dude asks for extra onions on his Krabby Patty so he says airing today aren't we because we can flip that Health buff from a useful Escape tool into an excuse to try and stab as many people as possible before we kick the bucket I think my favorite clip which exemplifies this so beautifully came on day 15 on bombers where I flanked behind the cart and I'm in position to secure an easy chain step but unfortunately this one sniper with the tribal and shiv wants nothing to do with it so he smacks me and I start bleeding so I stab the soldier to get a massive overheal just for him to smack me another two times before I kill his pyro friend and just for him to smack me again before I kill his other pyro friend then he smacks me again so with my 160 HP overheal I decided to gun him down too and thrown a laugh toward for good measure just a recap there this sniper hit me for a total of five times in this one clip but because I had the kunai and was able to keep refreshing my HP with every stab I got I'm able to just ignore him entirely as I I continue to murder more and more of his teammates take a look at this other clip I got on bombards 2 where I grab a quick stab on the sniper then get the medic and because I'm at the maximum amount of overhealth I managed to tank 200 damage without dying before stabbing these two soldiers it's Clips like these which made me understand why so many people hate playing against the kunai as if you're trying your damn hardest to kill a spy you just for your clueless teammates to continually present their back on a silver platter to him so he can absorb their entire health bar it can get pretty damn frustrating pretty quick I don't want to jump around the timeline too much but on day 69 of the challenge nice yeah I know I was drilling a fully overhealed enemy kunai spy I hate him three times with the diamond back to get him down to well no way 69 HP again oh what a coincidence just for him to get the easiest stair stab of his life on a clueless solder for my team meaning his health is all the way back up to 210 putting me at a major disadvantage from no fault of my own I was definitely understanding why people hate it but luckily for everyone I was versing I wasn't that good with it yet it wasn't causing too much Mayhem this early on a prime example of this lack of mayhem I'm causing can be seen when it comes to harder chain steps as I was saying before if people are simply offering me their back getting ridiculous kill streaks with the kunai isn't that hard but when I have to tricks that my way through multiple competent enemies oh look things came crashing down pretty damn quick in this clip on day 15 I'm on Borneo with a nice Overhill from a stab I got earlier so I say [ __ ] it let's get some trickster I walk up to this demo stab him once straight to the face then again and then I try to Circle back the other way then I give up on the demo entirely and move over to the sniper and I'm promptly put in my place or here on day 13 where we're on the absolute best map in the game CP steel where I pick up three easy stabs in a row then have an absolutely pitiful stairstep attempt before awkwardly strafing towards the medic and having my hopes and aspirations ended by a random crit from the amputator but look even with moments like this I was definitely preferring the kunai to the knife even if I wasn't playing any better there's going to be some Growing Pains as I adjusted to the lower initial Health but I was seeing the insane potential that this weapon had even if I couldn't fully unlock it just yet by day 15 I hit 1 000 kills on the kunai meaning it was second weapon we could tick off the list but similar to how I kept using the knife even after I got it to a thousand kills in that first block of the challenge I decided to stick with the kunai because I was having a great time with it and definitely wanted to improve it using it also before we dive too far into this block of the challenge I want to talk a bit about the revolver here I noticed that the rate at which I got revolver kills reduced dramatically when I swapped to the kunai and it actually makes a lot of sense why going from 125 HP with the knife to 70 HP with the kunai puts you at a massive disadvantage in 1v1s with the revolver because you're just that much more squishy and vulnerable and as a result I didn't find myself going for all that many revolver plays in this block of the challenge you might be thinking well what if you successfully got a stab and have overheal wouldn't you want to use the revolver then and the answer is well no I realize that you want to keep the Overhill chain going for as long as possible with the Kuno meaning as soon as you secure one stab and have a massive overheal you should be hunting down that next stab to keep your HP constantly topped up in perpetuity it's usually just not the most optimal player to swap to your revolver and gun people down when you could be farming as much Overhill as possible to keep yourself alive for as long as possible it was really only in very circumstances that I found myself using the revolver when I had the kunai equipped like when versing a scout a class which is especially hard to trick stab because of the movement speed or if someone was backpedaling as I fought them and I didn't have enough time to strafe into a position to pull off a trickster but that being said it's still a solid option with how consistent it is but I just don't think it synergizes particularly well with the kuna I'd often just feel a lot more pressure to actually land my shots because of how low my base Health was and I just lose 1V once more often but hey this is a problem most of spies revolvers run into when paired with the kunai well except for one but a more on that guy later we also ended up getting a thousand kills with the revolver on day 18 making it the third weapon in our Arsenal that we could officially tick off the list now in a very abrupt change of pace I want to lay you in on one of the biggest discoveries I made during this section of the challenge and that is oh my God are some maps designed horrifically for Spike others getting more and more experience with spy and playing the same Maps over and over I subconsciously take note of the ones I perform well on and the ones I'd get my ass handed to me on for example a map I'll sign to absolutely fall in love with during this challenge was Frontier there's a lot of reasons to this uh firstly I love the aesthetic of the map it's beautiful I love the sections you can fall off I love the idea of pushing up this massive feel and the custom cart is just the cherry on top secondly and more importantly boy are there some beautiful flank paths but just about every section of the map there is a fantastic way of getting behind your enemy without running into too many obstacles on first you can head around the right through the tunnel on second you've got this container and indoor section to maneuver through and on last you probably have my favorite flank path in the entire game and no I'm not even being hyperbolic if you're defending you can get yourself on this rock and jump into this elevated section for perhaps the most useful way of getting behind your enemy in all of TF2 the amount of backstabs I accrued by abusing the [ __ ] out of this flank was absolutely insane especially when I swapped over to the dead ringer later in the video Bronte also has a bunch of verticality to it giving you a lot of spots for drop stabs and stair stabs and to top it all off it's pretty damn long meaning you can get some high scoring games in it it's great it's fantastic it's so much fun it's Frontier and I love it now there's another side of the spectrum you know the maps that sucks [ __ ] the players fight and there are three in particular I want to talk about first off is Gold Rush usually I don't have that much to say about this map it's not great it's pretty choke heavy but if I'm playing soldier or Demoman it can be a bunch of fun to spam it however as I played spy I started to notice some glaring issues if you're defending a spy and the attacking team captures the first point you have absolutely zero flank roots of getting behind there's this elevated section on the left which is obviously too high to get to and there's also this drop down which that lists your Michael Jordan and have a four meter vertical jump you're not going to be getting to it anytime soon that leaves us with one route to get behind and it's this tight ass Corridor that can barely fit three people through it why do you know how hard it is to get to the enemy team's teleporters or just get in a generally good position for some stabs when you have this much room to work with you'll get bounced around like a pinball if you try to cloak your way through this hallway as you usually come across the entire enemy team as they funnel through it but okay whatever it probably gets better on the next stage of the map right well let's say we start the feni again the attacking team captures first so you are left with count with me zero flanks again just like the first stage it's too high to get into this window or onto this balcony I will give credit where credit is due though as if you want to get behind on this map you actually get a choice of two crammed hallways that will lead to your imminent death if you bump into someone rather than just the one we had on the first stage so how good is that okay well surely on the final stage of Gold Rush we'll get a nice route to flank behind from right well let's take a look why don't we again let's say you're defending and the enemy team is captured first uh what do we have to work with well if we go to the Left Flank uh yep that's another drop down we can't access and if we go to the right flank in the cave under the map oh yep another drop down we can't access there is one Saving Grace on this stage of the map as even though the choke point is really tight to get through you do have the added bonus of being able to jump onto these beams which reduces your chance of bumping into someone and makes it a bit easier to get behind but oh my God playing spy on Gold Rush defense is just a pain in the ass it becomes a roll of the dice as to whether or not you get through the choke point without bumping into someone and that's a gamble I don't want to take when I have like a million other things to be worrying about this spot now luckily if you're playing on offense on Gold Rush all these flanks you couldn't reach on defense are now easily accessible making it a much more pleasant experience but honestly I'm not a big fan of having my class suck [ __ ] for half the game whilst I'm waiting to swap team I don't know if it's because my play sound TF2 is always revolved around using flank Roots no matter what class I'm on and I'm just sounding like a massive [ __ ] baby right now but God they were just a handful of maps which I absolutely despised playing on who do had similar issues the dust ball had similar issues bomb Blitz had some sections which were a pain and even a cough map like Viaduct was pretty bad in this regard usually a king of the hill is known for its wide open areas with lots of flank Roots but when you take a look at Viaduct you notice you have to funnel through the center of the map to get behind this is partially fixed in the pro version of the map which has this little connecting hallway on the side but look I didn't manage to play any product during this challenge so I was left with regular old stinky fighter but alright I kind of feel like an old man yelling at Clouds right now so let's quit all the whining about stupid old maps in this stupid old game because it's time to talk about something much more exhilarating much more exciting and much more uh electrifying when it comes to spike as I'd been practicing more my trick Subs were starting to get a bit more consistent at this point in the challenge nothing all that crazy but I did find myself really enjoying a more simple but still super satisfying type of trick stab and that was the drop step as the name suggests a drop stab involves us falling from a higher position down to a lower one to stab somebody it's by no means a mechanically demanding step to pull off as the only score required is to make sure you time your jump right so you don't accidentally fall in front of them but even if it is relatively easier to do that doesn't make it any less satisfying to be honest with you I don't even know what it is specifically that makes them so fun to pull off is it the setup it requires is it the velocity at which you fall at is it the fact that your enemy doesn't see it coming I'm not entirely sure but what I do know is that when I launch myself off the rocks of badwater first down onto some unsuspecting engineer I feel like cuovo watano from Dishonored pulling off a clean ass drop assassination on the gloomy streets of Dunmore now as a drop step can't assure myself who had a whole 20 days of experience under the belt at this point I must tell you that there are two types of drop step one there's the basic type I've been talking about so far but two there's also the more complex drop stab where you have to quickly adapt to the situation at hand for example take a look at this clip on day 10 where one upward and d-click to see if I can get a stab on this heavy eating this sandwich I woke up and uh unfortunately for me that back hitbox is not going to line up so I give them a disapproving shake of my head before retreating to the window and jumping out to escape only to realize there's a pyro below me so I quickly spin around to be facing his back and pull off a quick reactive drop step or here on the same day where we're pushing last on bare water I dropped down from The High Ground only to see a heavy respawning so I quickly readjust to bounce off the railings and there's a sort of drop stab stair stab hybrid there's obviously so much creativity to be had here when it comes to drop stabs with all the spins different heights you can jump from and quick reactive places you can pull off which is what made it my favorite type of stab the spy in these early stages of the challenge it may not always be the most mechanically impressive thing to pull off but that doesn't stop them from being a whole lot of fun now to wrap things up for this second block of the challenge I gotta tell you something because there's an elephant in the room I've been avoiding but things might appear to be going relatively smoothly so far and for the most part they have been however there has been a slight thorn in my sight and when I say Thorne I mean flamethrower to be honest I don't even know where start with the Spy checking I'm going to use every ounce of my self-control I have here to keep this segment short because I know if I were given the opportunity to ramble into my mic about spy checking for three hours I would take it in a heartbeat and this video would be even longer than it has to be so okay let's keep it concise spy checking [ __ ] sucks I know really controversial take when you have to play Spy for 100 days but oh God was it driving me up the walls and we were only 20 days into the challenge so far the first thing to note here is that when you hit a backstab it makes a loud ass audio cue of your enemy screaming which everyone can hear take a look at this clip on upward where we get a nice and simple stab on this heavy just for the pirate to snap around and burn us to a crisp and that's the first problem we run into the next thing to note here is that playing well is actually to your own detriment of spite as any other class in the game the better you play well the better you do more kills more points more assists more whatever it makes logical sense right but playing well spy unlocks something Primal in the enemy team because the more and more backstabs you get the more and more paranoid your opponents will become you kill somebody once no big deal they might turn around a couple times as they respawn you kill somebody twice well now you've annoyed them a little they'll be on the front line minding their own business until suddenly they'll start spinning to check if you're around you kill somebody three times that's the point of no return because that's when you start seeing rage pyros come out take a look at this clip from later in the Challenge on day 70. we're on bomb Blitz and I get behind the enemy team to secure a stock standard stab on this sniper there was no trick stab no taunt nothing that could possibly aggravate this guy in any capacity right well I die respawn get myself behind the enemy team again and look who it is how good sniper friend has swapped to pyro and has now decided his sole mission in life is to burn me to a crisp and look if you haven't played much TF2 before pyro is the go-to class for countering spot because the way fire particles work Pirates can cover large areas with their flamethrower better than basically any other weapon in the game which makes them well suited for checking if there are any invisible spies about you know you'll be minding your own business it's just trying to flank behind whilst invisible until uh-oh some Skitzo pyro has other plans for you and will check every pixel of the map to ensure you are unable to help your team in any meaningful capacity and on top of this I was running the kunai for this Seguin of the challenge which means if I hadn't got a stab yet and was on a very healthy 70 HP a random flame particle touching me whilst invisible was a certain death sentence take a look at this clip from day 18 on Borneo where I am Sim simply minding my own business just for Dumb and Dumber To shops by checking every section of the map they come around the corner my ass is clenched as I'm praying to just about every God that there is that I make it out of this one alive and luckily it appears we will live another day until what there is no way those fire particles traveled that far and actually hit me I just refused to believe for a second that those actually made contact with me and look sometimes the incessant spy checking would just be too much for me as I was in this clip on upward and the only solution was jumping off the map so I don't give them an extra kill for their strange Weapon It's a petty to do that perhaps am I proud about it not really would I do it again though absolutely anyway I gotta keep this section short but this all came to us climax on day 16 where after a flog pyro snapped immediately and burned me to the ground I had enough oh my I mean I'm leaving I'm off I'm like not even bothering with that spy checking was going to be a persistent issue for the next 80 Days unlocks like the dead ringer and even the spicycle which changes dynamic little bit but look I just want to get out my frustration here so we can move forward onto greener pastures by the end of this 10 day block I had accumulated 1812 kills and died 1055 times meaning I had a KD of 1.72 this is still a pretty damn good KD it was a decrease from my first 10 days but honestly I think it makes sense since there is a much sharper learning curve with the kunai and I had to adapt to having a lower base HP my spy time increased from 100 hours and 7 minutes to 116 hours and 17 minutes for a total of just over 16 hours in the second 10-day block this was a decrease and actually put me four hours behind schedule of reaching 280 total hours but given we were only a fifth of the way through the challenge at this point I wasn't really sweating it so for the most part things had been traveling relatively well we were adapting to new challenges and slowly improving so I was feeling pretty good about how things had progressed but for the next 10 day block the things were about to change after one failed stairstep attempt what where where am I finally waking up doctor where are you what's going on in here El maxo can you hear me are you awake yeah who who are you I'm Dr Harrison from the two-fort Private Hospital I'm here to help wait a hospital am I okay what's happened we're not entirely sure there were reports from the scene that you suddenly collapsed after head in an absolutely filthy stair step on bad water nice by the way oh God I blacked out yeah so you were rushed here and we ran some brain scans and well I don't know how to tell you this but we found something slightly concerning what what did you find Doctor what could it possibly be well the CT scans revealed an abnormal growth next to your amygdala talk to no don't don't tell me do I have a tumor no unfortunately it's even worse you have stage one of what we call spy brain rot no no this this can't be doctor please it's it's only been 20 days how can this happen sir please calm down we'll give you the best treatment we have you can make it out of this Max all hope isn't lost yet no no no I don't think you understand I'm a soldier man I love Soldier get me get me out of here I I need to play Soldier now nurse nurse nurse I need your help we have to restrain him no let go hey stop hello no no no moving into days 20 to 29 of this challenge I came to a very very scary realization I was starting to indulge in all the toxic Tendencies of spiders you remember all the way back at the start of the video I talked about the certain stereotypes associated with spy plates and going into the third block of the challenge I realized that I was starting to adopt more and more of these characteristics let me just give you some examples there are two ways specifically that I noticed the Spy brain rot was seeping into my system and the first of which was b-hobby now to be honest with you this isn't a mechanic you hear a whole lot about in TF2 as it's much more prominent in valves less neglected and more popular older brother Counter-Strike where b-hopping has a dedicated Community behind it the tldrb hopping is that it's reliant on two factors about the source engine one you gain a small amount of speed when you air strafe and two if you time your jumps perfectly you can maintain your velocity in game in CS go combining these two mechanics can lead to some absolutely insane frags but on TF2 it's a lot less noticeable if you pull it off the one context it's actually useful in is if your Market gardening a soldier as if you Rocket Jump and pull off perfect b-hop as you land you can trick the game into thinking you're still airborne and therefore hit enemies with a crit outside of this though it's very niche in its application yet for whatever reason spy mates really like to b-hop everywhere they go even if it's serving them next to zero utility and is even potentially slowing them down on their rollouts in the long term it just gives you ADHD brain something to do whilst you're going back to the front line and very very occasionally it can lead to a cool clip but either way I was doing it more meaning the brain rot was slowly infecting my entire body the second way I noticed the Spy brain rot was that uh how do I put this without antagonizing myself too much um let's just say I was starting to get more frustrated with the game you saw a glimpse of this in the previous section on day 16 where I Rage Quit after one too many spy checks but this was going to become a much more common recurrence as the challenge progressed if my team was looking hopeless or the enemy team just had a composition that I was not going to penetrate sometimes I just cut my losses in Riku to avoid the pain of dying on repeat to three Pirates permanently spy checking the engineer's Nest now don't worry too much this is only stage one early onsets by brainrock meaning we still have some time on our hands but let's just say later on in the challenge is my condition worsened uh I may or may not have broken my fan from hitting it too hard after dying one too many times on Dane only two of the challenge but hey that's just some fun that we can look forward to later in the video right so anyway why do I bring up the Spy brain well as we enter the next 10 days segment of this challenge it means I need to swap around my weapons and unfortunately it was time for me to indulge in the quintessential sweaty spy main Loadout for this portion of the challenge and oh God here we go since our revolver hit a thousand kills it was time to try out another option and I decided to go with Camus favorite gun the latranch if we take a look at its stats we can see it increases our cloak duration by 40 overall which is kind of Bonkers to be honest and every time we hit an enemy with it we're also rewarded with 15 of our cloak back these benefits do come at the cost of a 20 damage penalty which whilst not ideal is still a really good trade-off if you ask me prior to starting the challenge the latranch has always been my go-to pick on spy because the additional cloak it provides you with just gives you so much more flexibility and wiggle room to work with when you're in the enemy team's backline you'll find yourself stressing less about having to de-cloke in an unfavorable position or desperately scrambling to find an ammo pack with this thing equipped and oh boy does that relieve you of some of the unnecessary stress and pressure that comes along with playing this horrible class it also synergizes really well with the kunai as it's the only revolver in the game that provides you with a passive Buff when it isn't equipped as you remember from the previous section taking 1v1's with the revolver isn't desirable because one you're more likely to lose jewels on 70 HP against basically any opponent and two if you have overheal from a backstab it's a better idea to go for another stab rather than pulling out your gun so you can keep the check going the kunai wants you to stab as much as possible so an option like the letrans which gives us a flat buff to our cloak without us even ever having to swap to it makes it a super desirable Choice I'll talk about it more later on the video but options like the Ambassador and Diamondback are solid picks with the utility they provide but their benefits only come into play once they're actually equipped and active in battle which is why I love volatrang's passive upsides so damn much I'll talk more about how useful this thing is shortly but for now I want to introduce you to the other new addition to our Loadout but unlike the Lestrange which doesn't have many dedicated hate campaigns towards it this next weapon is slightly more controversial so say goodbye to the invis watch and hello to the dead ringer yeah yeah shut up I hear you okay look even if you try to burn me at the stake for my crimes against humanity by choosing this unlock it doesn't matter because guess what I'll just feign my death the second the flame particle hits me and run away before you even realize now I don't want to unpack every Nuance there is to the dead ringer just yet so for now I'll give you the basic rundown unlike the other watches which allow you to go invisible on command the dead ringer is reliant on us first taking damage once you right click you'll see that the dead ringer pops up in your left hand and if we get hit by a bullet explosion fire particle melee swing or even if we take full damage we will be turned invisible and a fake corpse of ours will hit the ground to fool the enemy team but I'm putting a big asterisk here because it usually won't trick anyone but more on that later for these first three seconds of our cloak we are given some pretty major Buffs such as a speed boost meaning we can move around faster after burn immunity which is a godsend for escaping pyros at 65 damage resistance and we won't reveal ourselves if we bump into enemies this does come at the cost of losing half of our cloak bar immediately and the remaining 50 charged deep plates over the 7 Seconds of a visibility we have because the dead ringer can't cloak on command it does mean we'll need 100 of our charge before we're able to use it again and this was made even more painful because we're actually unable to pick up ammo packs or use dispensers to speed up this process the other important change to the dead ringer is it's comically loud D cloak sound with the invis watch you can usually get away with d cloaking near an enemy as long as the battlefield is roaring with gunfire but the dead ringer if you D cloak in a 20 kilometer radius of your target they'll still probably manage to hear you meaning you often have to travel pretty damn deep into the back line if you don't want to get caught out okay so there's a basic rundown on how our two new additions to the loadout work and I think it's important you have that context going into this next segment of the challenge because I had a very very specific goal for these next 10 days this is the sweaty spy main Loadout for a reason as once you piece these three weapons together you are primed to hit tricksteps these 10 days were going to be solely dedicated to improving my ability to hit trickstabs as up until this point I'd only really been going for them when the situation allowed it if some clueless pyro with their brain Switched Off was chasing me up a ramp then yeah of course I'm gonna go for a stair step but outside of that I wasn't really pushing myself to experiment with more aggressive steps which was halting the progress I was making I really need to start putting myself into those uncomfortable situations where there are multiple enemies around and no clear form of Escape so I could force myself to stay cool under pressure and start connecting some clean trick steps and if there was any Loadout which would allow for this to happen it was gonna be this one I think the first thing that really stood out for me with this new Loadout and fresh mindset shift was the dead ringer as transitioning away from the envious watch was a super giant change to my playstyle and I wasn't really sure how to adapt in the beginning as you'll know in the first 20 days of the challenge I made a pretty concerted effort to improve my pathing whilst invisible I was sticking to the flanks with super conscious of my positioning and finding the most optimal routes to take but when I swapped to the dead ringer well a lot of that fell out the window because of all the Buffs you receive when you activate the dead ringer you can afford to be much more careless with your parting as one you have 65 damage resistance which is actually nuts by the way shoot you have a speed boost and three you don't reveal yourself when you bump into enemies which makes the process of getting behind a whole lot easier at first I was on the impression that the dead ringer was going to be a fantastic choice for fooling my enemies you know they'll attack you you'll fake to death meaning they'll let their guard down because they think you're dead but just for you to emerge moments later from the Shadows inserting your blade of their spine without them ever suspecting a thing but in practice this isn't how it went at all like sure if you want to try and fool enemies this way be my guess if you want to use the believable disguise take a bit of damage first start backpedaling as if you're retreating and then activate your dead ringer it'll probably look like a believable death but honestly why bother if you're successful with this even once and you manage to get a stab on an opponent you deceived well there goes your surprise factor from that point onwards anytime they allegedly get a kill on you they won't drop their guard because they know you have the dead ring equipped making it a lot harder to pull off successive Steps From my experience very early on I found your best bet is to get invisible as quick as possible and by any means necessary which usually means marching to the front line with your dead ringer out copping a stray minigun bullet from the other side of the map for the least believable death ever and quickly repositioning yourself with all those powerful Buffs you get it just isn't worth all the setup of making your death look convincing to the enemy team when it's way more valuable to get yourself behind as fast as possible when you can start to actually do some work it is a little sad that this carelessly hyper aggressive style of play is so popular with the dead ringer but because it's been in the game for almost 14 years it's just really hard to genuinely deceive your opponents nowadays and you're just better off making the most of the speed boost and tankiness it rewards you with rather than praying to God you're able to fool your enemy with the believable death and look I'm not gonna sit around and tell you this made it any less enjoyable to use because God those Buffs you get for the first three seconds were so damn fun especially that speed boost you get half the time I found myself declutting almost instantly with the dead ringer just so I could make use of the extra speed you're granted because it opens up so many doors to you take a look at this clip from day 20 on Mountain Lab where I push aggressively through a choke point and get my dead ringer activated by this demo i d cloak almost instantly throw in a couple bunny hops for style points and loop around to get a drop stab on him that he had no idea it was coming and again take a look at this clip from day 24 on Swiftwater right absolutely butcher two stabs on the sniper so I run away activate my dead ringer d-click pretty quickly and use the speed to loop back around to stab the medic you can even see that they're in the process of chasing me when I'm already behind them which just goes to show the value that extra speed offers when repositioning there's also a ton of extra stuff the speed this allows you to do like access areas of the map you otherwise wouldn't Retreat from the front Lane quickly chase down an enemy far away from you and you can even get some pretty insane trick steps whilst I can't say I hit that many crazy Clips this early on of the challenge as I was one still learning the dead ringer and two was also still learning how to trick stab there were a few moments where I did impress myself but we'll tackle that later on before we move on for the dead ringer for now there is one semi-regular occurrence I noticed when I use this unlock and I'll just show you a clip and see if you catch on yeah for some reason I found that people had the audacity to taunt after killing a Dead Ringer spy look if they don't know I'm using it at first then it's fair game or we all make mistakes but so often I would find myself faking the most unbelievable deaths and some absolute nimwit would actually fall for it think they are some absolute genius for killing me a torn on my fake corpse just for me to reappear behind them and promptly [ __ ] on them one of my absolute favorites happened to you on bad water where I hit this nice drop stab on a pyro taking me all the way up to 210 HP I turn around and this other enemy pyro saw me hit that step he knows I'm overhealed so he fires off a flare I use the dead ringer start to loop back around then oh bro really you think a single flare just killed the 200 hp Spike well Bad News Bears I'm still alive and to top things off he types in chat oh [ __ ] the dead ring then leaves the game look if you know an enemy spy is using the dead ringer put your ego to the side and refrain from laughing at them when you kill them because there is nothing more humiliating than being stuck in a taunt and he hearing that painfully loud D cloak sound and knowing what's inevitably coming for you but all right I've hyped up this block of the challenge as the trick stabbing Arc so I think it's time we take an in-depth look at them and specifically stair steps if you ask me I'd say it's easily the most iconic type of trixab in TF2 as the idea of launching yourself over your opponent's head to stab their back is look you gotta admit it's kind of badass now I know I mentioned this briefly but I want to get this out the way quickly when I say stairstep I basically mean any stab where you're on a point of elevation and are able to jump onto or over your opponent's head to get a step I can already feel the swarm of virgins from the Spy Mains Discord breathing down my neck saying um actually like a jump jab because there's no staircase involved in situations like that but I don't care it could be a ramp it could be a little box it could be a rock whatever if it is a point of elevation and I jump over the head of my enemy to stab them I'm calling it a stair step I will die on this hill I do not care be gone stupid spy mates you can go to something like TR walkway and practice on Bots to get the fundamental movements of a stair stop down but in my opinion it's a lot better to get experience with human players who aren't as easy to predict as a bot walking in a straight line now in the first 20 days of this challenge I was hitting some pretty decent stair steps but the problem I found was that I was often overshooting my jump and Landing too far behind them to hit a stab or I was under shooting my jump and landing in front of them which uh yeah isn't very conducive to hitting a back step take a look at this clip from all the way back on day two we're on pier and I noticed this scout is shooting at me as I'm walking away so I have the genius idea of baiting him into a stair step over here so I walk up jump back and oh that truly was not even close I do appreciate that I had the balls to even try this but yeah uh no we'll take a look at this clip from day three on bombers where I see a demo approaching and decide to go for a stair step which oh my God it actually hits so I think [ __ ] it let's carry this momentum into another one on the medic and I have no idea where that jump was trying to go so I run away like a cow with a bit hey that was all in the past because I was actually starting to impress myself with how consistently I was starting to hit stair steps take a look at this clip from day 28 on my absolute least favorite map Gold Rush where a pyro is chasing me behind get up these stairs wait a moment and predictively jump to hit a stairstep but they honestly never saw coming we'll take a look here on day 23 where we're on Barbers and I managed to hit not just one stairstep not just two stairsteps but three stair stabs in a row which is something I could have only dreamed of attempting just three weeks earlier in the challenge I was even starting to wrap my head around more unpredictable types of stair steps where I'd find a slight High Ground on a prop and use that instead of the more obvious staircases and ramps you can see this on day 24 will wear on bad water and I approached a large group of enemies huddled around a dispenser I get a little bit overwhelmed so I sap the Sentry and get on top of the railing to hit a super clean stair stab onto Soldier and on the same day on Swiftwater I make my way onto this High Ground where there are two soldiers so I jump on the railing get over his head and hit a stab as I fall back down into the low ground and yeah this one felt like it was from a movie trailer or some [ __ ] I can't lie it wasn't all perfect though as I would still occasionally go for stair stubs that look like they should be stair stabs like the blood is literally on their back but for whatever reason it wouldn't register I think this came down to the timing of when I'd crouched as I jumped or maybe it's just source code spaghetti hitboxes not registering but either way I was still slipping up here and there overall though my stairstabs got really good during this 10-day block of the challenge and my new choice of Loadout was definitely helping me out in disregard too so look things were on a pretty good roll for these 10 days their new Loadout was different but I was slowly improving with it my stair slabs are getting better and I was starting to get more and more clip-worthy moments but there was a little problem simmering under the surface yeah I've done my best to hide it so far but it was getting a little ridiculous at this point you see in previous videos you guys know that I like to play on aquatopia I think the rules Uncle Dane has implemented on his servers are great for a more fair and more competitive TF2 experience I know that isn't for everyone but for me it definitely is but because there is generally a higher skill level on the uncle Topia servers and I was going to be playing spy I just didn't really want to have competent Gamers constantly checking for me and absolutely shutting me down at any given moment so the entirety of the challenge so far I had been on valve's official casual matchmaking now this is fantastic because players don't tend to be as good meaning I limit test a bit harder you know experiment with my trick stubs more try different angles to push from discover more aggressive routes anything of that nature now this is all good and well but unfortunately for me if I'm playing on Val's official servers that means I have to adhere to House official mechanics and you probably know where I'm going with this if you have any experience in TF2 but oh my [ __ ] god random crits were absolutely pummeling me foreign I actually have not tied to so many random credits as I was in the last like hour now don't worry I'm not just gonna sit here and whine you about random crits being unfair in a general sense because one we all know they're complete [ __ ] and two much smarter people have already talked about it but what I did realize as random crits continue to ruin my life through the challenge was that they actually disproportionately affect spy players more so than any other class in the game let me explain in TF2 you have a two percent chance to get a random critical hit which triples your damage output in an instant however the more damage you do the higher this chance gets so if you've dealt zero damage in the last 20 seconds you have a two percent chance of random crit but at 200 damage this becomes 4.5 at 400 damage this is 7 and this caps all the way up at 800 damage where you will have a 12 chance to randomly crit this alone is an absolute joke of a mechanic if you ask me but it gets even worse when we look at melee weapons the base chance to randomly crit when you have your melee out is 15 and if you've done 800 damage in the last 20 seconds this goes all the way up to a 60 chance so you might already know these numbers and be thinking well we all know it's [ __ ] though Max's so what in particular is so crazy about this well if I haven't made it obvious enough so far in this video Spy has to stab people meaning he is constantly within melee range of his opponent and guess what classes like medic engineer demo and sniper have a tendency to immediately swap to their melee weapons if they ever catch a spy in close quarter combat meaning life is pain I hate myself you are going to be on the receiving end of so many [ __ ] moments of spy purely because of the absurdly high chance melee weapons have to random crit I can't even begin to explain to you how many times I was trying to pull off a cool trick step just for some cocky medic to put me to sleep with a 195 damage swing from his Ubisoft the worst part about this is that it disproportionately affects spy as other than demo Knight he's the only class in the game who is consistently fighting opponents within melee range meaning you are going to get randomly critted over and over unlike anyone else in the game and you want to know the worst part about it spy can't randomly quit with his knife so he doesn't even get to benefit from this stupid ass mechanic either you might be saying to yourself I'm a kill you can one shot anybody in the game with your back shab so you really need random critics you Noob but that takes skill it's hard the tricks have a competent opponent because they are expecting it whereas a random crit as the name uh the name kind of suggests it comes out of nowhere and annihilates all of your hopes aspirations in one unpredictable quick smack oh my God he gets a random crit again there are even moments where kunai overheal wasn't enough to prevent a random crit like here on day 29 where I'm on harvest I get a quick stab on this sniper giving me a nice overheal then the enemy reacts and oh lovely this sniper executes me instantly I mean God look at his strange weapon where 507 out of the 664 kills are critical hits I know that counts to radi but Jesus man that's three cores of the kills that just that just that just isn't right okay to give you some perspective on how pervasive random Chris were over the challenge by the end of things I had over 13 minutes of footage dedicated exclusively to random crits doing me dirty look all I'm saying is if Marcus Aurelius were alive in the 21st century and had to deal with random crits being in TF2 to be honest I don't know if we'd have stoicism because trying to keep your cool when you continually die to a mechanic that's completely out of your control is the opposite of fun some people might even go as far to call it um bad anyway I won't subject you to the Whole 30 minutes of crying so he's a comically short hyper cut of it all there's like another 100 Clips but I figure we don't need any more hyper Cuts do we I think I think that's enough so let's just move on if you look at that I think it's good I got that out of my system so I think I'm ready to wrap up this section of the challenge now by the end of this turn day block I had accumulated 1969 kills and died 1064 times meaning I had a KD of 1.85 which is an increase of 0.13 or 75 my spy time also increased from 116 hours and 17 minutes to 135 hours and 9 minutes for a total of just under 19 hours in this portion of the challenge things are well and truly underway at this point and I could feel myself getting better day by day when it came to the fundamentals unsurprisingly when you play a class for three hours every day for almost a month you're gonna start to see some progress I think the highlight of this 10-day block definitely came on day 22 where I managed to get 170 points on one half of Thunder Mountain many if the game went to completion I could have potentially closed things off with a staggering 300 140 points in just one game the only issue at this point the challenge was that I was more and more realizing that to reach my goal of 280 hours by the end of 100 days I needed two hours of in-game spy time every day but I was slowly realizing that this translated to close to three hours of TF2 every day which is more than I anticipated going into it currently I was playing just over two hours a day and this meant I was about five hours behind schedule at this point in the challenge which was gonna mean I needed to play even more as I progressed overall though things were still traveling really well I was having a good time I was progressing nicely and I was looking forward to all the new weapons I was going to be trying out and speaking of we're actually going to see a couple of new faces featured in this next part of the challenge and it was going to be some of the most fun I'd have for the past 20 days of the challenge I had been using the kunai and it had racked up a pretty impressive 3015 kills but as you'll remember one of the criteria for this challenge is that we needed to get 1 000 kills on each weapon meaning it was time to introduce a fresh face to the roster and this guy this guy would turn out to be some of the most fun I'd have for the entire 100 days ladies and gentlemen meet the big earner fight the boil down the two most popular choices when it came to spire's knives it would be the kunai and this big fella right here as they both provide you with some insanely powerful Buffs when you hit a successful backstab as I've talked at length so far the kuna gives you that cushy safety net of a massive Overhill when you get a backstab but the big earner well just take a look at this clip and see if you notice anything oh wow honestly I think my reaction to what just happened summarize things pretty nicely because holy [ __ ] did you see the speeds I was traveling at during that four-man chainstop that clip didn't make it obvious enough the major upside there is to using the bigger is the speed boost it grants on kills which is useful for a myriad of reasons but before we dive into that let's actually take a look at the drawback of this knife and that is its Health penalty although this downside isn't as intense as the Kunis we dropped from 125 HP down to 100 if we select a big owner and if you've played TF2 for an extended amount of time you'll know that that is a pretty problematic Health threshold to be at because we can now be one shot by oh God the scattergun force nature Sodapop a baby's face Blaster Backscatter rocket launcher Direct Hit Black Box cow Mangler Beggars bazooka Reserve shooter equalizer grenade launcher Lock and Load iron bomber Huntsman Fortified Compound Ambassador and Diamondback on top of everything that could one shot us before it's such an irritating Health level to be yet but because I was going to be using the dead ringer with it I was hoping that the extra form of defensive utility that provides could reduce the amount we'd be suffering with this lower Health pool it's also important to note that along with a speed boost the big earner also rewards us with 30 of our cloak back on a kill and as you remember we can't actually use ammo packs or dispensers to regen our dead ringer faster meaning these two weapons were going to synergize really nicely together moving into the next 10 days and look yeah I'm gonna cut straight to the chase here I fell in love with this knife basically instantly if there's one thing Funk has deeply ingrained into my psyche over the years is that the combination of one moving at high speeds and two shooting enemy Gamers is like the coolest [ __ ] ever so when you give me a knife that lets me Zoom around the map to change stab after stab after stab yeah I'm probably gonna have a good time by far what I found to be the most useful aspect to the big earner is its ability to Gap close which led to these absolutely filthy chain stabs during the challenge this is one of those things I can't explain to you with words as much as I can show you clip of the clip of the clip where I'd simply get one unsuspecting stab on an enemy and then turn it into a speedy spree of absolute Mayhem take a look at this clip from day 34 on bomblets where I get one quick stab on this Soldier zoom up the stairs to get another Soldier drop down amidst the Spy but then stab this demo then zoom on over to the choke and get a third Soldier before topping it all up with a speed boosted strafe stab on this medic we'll take a look here on day 33 on upward where I get a stab on this first pyro use the speed to go over and stab the second pyro before zooming across the Gap and backstabbing a third pirate I don't even know if the speed boost was absolutely necessary to get all three pyros there but I can safely say it made it feel like 10 times cooler to pull off and that's what had me so enticed about the big earner so quickly after picking it up I will admit that I thought the best use for the big earner going into this block of the challenge was going to be when it came to trick stabbing is having a faster movement speed allows you to strike behind enemies more easily or start stair stabs from even further away but to be honest it was a rarity that I'd ever pull anything that impressive off there was a pretty cool moment on day 30 on Nucleus where I stab a sniper move move on to the Pyro and whilst I have the speed boost do a little Ring Around the Rosie on this column to confuse the soldier and ultimately strafe stab past it or here on Snowy Coast on day 37 I get a bud knife kill on the Scout which surprisingly still gives you the speed boost so I use it to make this jump over onto the heavy where I get a clean little stair step outside of limited examples like those two clips though I gotta be honest I wasn't able to hit that many Speedy trick stabs at all I had this uh interesting moment on Kong King where I get the speed boost off this spy and then start doing circles around this heavy choking the backstab twice before eventually succeeding and then piecing together an absolutely horrific stairstep attempt I don't even know if you can really call that first one a trick stab it just felt like the heavy was more confused tracking me with his minigun than I was running circles around him and that's generally how Speed Booster trickstops went for me in this stage of the challenge a confusing Fury of movement usually leading to nothing spectacular I guess it made sense that there would be a slight adjustment period as my timings for trickstabs would be quite different if I'm moving even faster relative to my enemy but still I was kind of disappointed I didn't get many clip-worthy speed booster steps in this 10-day block don't get me wrong though there were a whole heap of normal trick steps I hit without a speed boost I mean [ __ ] I was starting to get the occasional under stab on a rocket jumping soldier at this point and the consistency of my stair stabs was really starting to impress me at this point but alas none of them were hit with a cool little speed boost but hey that's all right because the big Earnest speed boost can be used for a whole lot of things and it was actually during this block of the challenge that I began to realize what one of those things were as I was making use of a very particular strategy of spy and it's something I coined the loop play style take a look at this clip all the way back from day two of the challenge where I'm on high pass and we can actually see a very early prototype of the loop playstyle here I come from the health pack up to the point to get an easy stab and sap on this engineer before quickly going invis and heading straight back down to where I came from and securing a stab on the sniper admittedly it's not the best example but it shows the early thought process of me realizing hold on you can re-thread the ground you've come from to repeatedly get kills now fast water day 7 where we're on Borneo and they drop down from this high ground to stab the heavy then click away up the staircase face just to get back to my initial position and repeat the exact same maneuver only this time on the enemy medic I don't know why this clicked in my head so early on but I began realizing that a really easy way to rack up kills of spy was looping the same path over and over I don't actually know why this works if anything I thought people would see or hear their teammates die nearby and be extra cautious approaching the area but no I could just do the same Loops over and over to an alarming degree of success take a look at this clip from day 39 on dusbot where I'm defending and dead ringer back behind them start this obvious spy then speed my way up the stairs to get another kill on this demo you might think oh after such a successful play it's now time to retreat and recoup for a second but because I see my dead ringers charged up again I say net [ __ ] it and repeat the exact same path to get another double kill on their medic and heavy before actually retreating to safety and take a look at this clip which I must admit is from later on in the challenge on like Day 70 but oh my God is it good I'm on piano flanking behind where I hit a quick one two on this Demoman and Soldier before you guessed it going straight back to the route I came from just to hit a stab on a mid a stab on this demo and oh my God a clean ass desktop on this demo night I seriously don't understand why this works and maybe my pen recognition brain was just lumping together a bunch of Lucky coincidences and assumed it must be a good strategy but I swear it actually has some validity to it now the reason I decided to bring up this whole Loop playstyle thing in this section specifically is because wow through the big earner and dead ringer synergize so well with it both these options provide us with additional speed which makes closing the distance and actually completing the loop to get back to our enemies so much faster if we rewind and take a look at this clip on pier again you'll see that I hit the two stabs and run away with a speed boost before activating my dead ringer which gives me yet another speed boost which I utilize to chase down this medic faster and God does it just make the full loop so damn fun to successfully pull off although spots like this where you can loop around exist on basically every map some of my absolute favorites had to be on harvest in the the indoor section where you can just keep jumping off the roof at their spawn and going up the staircase to repeat as well as on Frontier first we can use this building in its staircase to farm clueless Gamers again I don't even really understand why the slooping strategy works so well for me but given any opportunity to attempt it you just know I would because it felt like some kind of black magic cheat code for stacking up huge kills and on the topic of big kill streaks uh I gotta admit sign to you guys you know that's so far in this video I'd like to switch up my Loadout in each block of the challenge so I can get closer and closer to a thousand kills on each of spy's weapons well I uh I actually made another change to my Loadout with the big earner on day 30. you see I thought having both the letrans and big earner at the same time would be slightly Overkill when it comes to getting your cloak back as they both fulfill a pretty similar purpose so I took a look at some of the other options we had available in the revolver slot that we hadn't tried yet and there was the Ambassador which I actually planned to use in the next 10-day block there was the enforcer which I was doing everything in my power to avoid for the time being and finally there was um the uh the Diamondback I know I've made a point already that the kunai and the dead ring are pretty hated but this guy this guy feels straight up dirty to use which is why I've tried to keep it under wraps for as long as possible in the section of the video but I think it's finally time for me to come clean with the truth for those who don't know the Diamondback is that one revolver from Deus Ex human Revolution which also happens to sit on Elon musk's bedside table for whatever reason and it packs quite the punch we are forfeiting 15 of our base damage and the ability to randomly crit so that we can store a critical hit for every building we sap where every backstab we get this gives us the ability to launch off 102 damage shots to anyone on the map as critic nor fall off giving us some seriously crazy damage potential before I start using it for the challenge I decided to place the critical kill strange part on it so at the end of 100 days we could see what the ratio of non-crit to crit kills would be and spoiler alert it was about 50 of them and double spoiler alert holy [ __ ] after using this weapon for like a few days I quickly realized just how absolutely disgusting this crit mechanic is the most common critique you'll find about the Diamondback is that it rewards you too generously for playing spy it's just how you're supposed to you know the whole point of your class is to backstab people and zap the enemy and just buildings so buffing spy for doing those two things seems it kinda unbalanced and yeah look it almost definitely is take a look at this clip from day 30 on Powerhouse where I had previously hit two stabs and snapped a couple of buildings meaning I had four crits loaded in my Diamondback so I decided to come up to the window for a vantage point and oh my God I just executed that engineer in two shots and look how far away he was I also get another kill on this demo down below me too but Jesus personally I don't think the guy who can one shot any enemy in the game from close range should also be able to do well whatever the hell that was to that engineer and again take a look at this clip from day 38 on Kong King where I walk around a corner to see a spike get a backstab and he then proceeds to Loft his victim's icy corpse which is very Alpha by the way so I picked myself up a free stab on him giving me a critical hit for my Diamondback meaning I'm able to whip around 180 degrees on this unsuspecting sniper and the one shot him now let me ask you a simple question about what just happened it did this poor sniper called combusting skull truly deserved his fate was there really anything he could do to prevent me from killing him is it his fault his ego Maniac of a teammate felt the need to laugh at his victim's corpse allowing me to get a free stab which all but guaranteed his death well so if you ask me the answer is pretty clear no no and definitely no because God this mechanic sucks ass to play against because it's so damn unfair why do you have to bear the burden of your teammates feeding some 10K hours spy main free backstab kills just for him to run around the map out sniping your team's snipers and yes what I realized very quickly whilst using the Diamondback for this challenge so I think it's effective range and the fact you can launch little nukes across the map at enemy Gamers is one of its biggest issues when it comes to balance as I mentioned before Critical Hits aren't affected by damage 4. if you fire a rocket and hit someone across the map it's doing something like 30 to 40 damage due to this mechanic but if you slap some Crips on that bad boy then you can grab the ability to murder 8 out of the nine classes in an instant without needing to be all that precise often would just find myself scanning the enemy team's front line looking for some poor light class who was unfortunate enough to take 30 damage from a sticky bomb explosion and proceed to cross map Tomahawk them like I'm in Call of Duty with the juicy 102 damage crit I hate the idea that a class like spy who has the ability to instantly end the life of anybody in the game with a backstab at close range can also have the ability to instantly end the life of somebody from longer ranges and you might be thinking to yourself um you can download fight other revolvers the Ambassador can do too and whilst I will be talking about it in depth in the next section I will say here that one the Ambassador got absolutely gutted in Jungle Inferno and had damage fall off applied to his headshot damage and two it actually takes skill to hit a headshot being rewarded for stuff as basic as backstabbing and sapping which are your two primary functions of spy just feels like way too low of a threshold to be able to instantly execute classes so far away from you this is the reason I think the Girardi and Bushwacker on snipe is so broken as well because we have this long range assassin who could drop 5 out of the nine classes in 0.2 of a second from anywhere on the map who can also turn around to a spy at Point Blank throw a jar of piss on them and proceed to shut them down with the 195 damage cream that just ain't right and look don't get me wrong dealing 102 damage at long ranges is absolutely criminal but that shouldn't overshadow how also broken the Diamondback is in normal close range tools take a look here on day 34 where we're on bad water and I get two quick stabs on a heavy and Scout who are pushing the cut which brings me to three Crips in total so I turn around and pop this medic so hard that the damage sends him surfing up the ramp then I kill him and they also kill a sniper who tries to push and yeah a 100 HP sneaky Frenchman just single-handedly denied an entire last push on his own because of this stupid thing right here God look I could keep ranting about how dirty I felt using the Diamondback for this challenge but in an attempt to curb that let's talk about its um downsides for a moment firstly you can store a bunch of crits while you're alive and then die randomly meaning you lose all that potential damage which uh kinda sucks secondly you have to you have to actually hit the crit shots I guess that's not really like a downside it's just just where you're doing a first person shooter and thirdly you lose the passive cloak buff you get from something like the electronic yeah there's also a slight damage penalty but I think there was a total of three moments whilst using the diamond back where it meant I lost a jewel whereas there was like a collective 50 clips of me wanting to hop straight into a warm bath for how dirty I felt after nuking some poor soul from across the map overall a bad bad weapon for bad bad people it probably needs a Nerf I don't really know it's obscenely strong and it was doing a whole lot of work whilst I use it for the challenge but I couldn't shake the feeling of how damn unfair it felt to use but okay now that I've revealed the truth about secretly using the Diamondback I think it's time we move on to greener pastures and when I say greener pastures I mean that up until this point in the video I've kind of overlooked one of spies most foundational mechanics and that is disguises one thing I promised myself I do at the start of this challenge was to watch some guys on YouTube to obtain the wisdom of much better spy plays so I could prevent all the pain of screwing up over and over without even realizing that you know what they say right a smart person learns from his mistakes but a truly wise person learns from the mistakes of others quote the Mr Paladin or something now did I actually adhere to that promise uh no and that was pretty stupid I mean I knew the importance of disguising early on and I don't think I did a particularly bad job at it but I definitely started to learn just how powerful good disguise choices could be as the challenge progressed especially when you make the most of the environment around you take a look at this clip from all the way back on day two of the challenge where we're on Swiftwater and I for some reason think I am an absolutely oscar-worthy actor I pick a sniper disguise because I'm like looking through the sideline like I'm a sniper on the enemy team and I'm strafing all around and then I awkwardly look to get a stab but then turn around back to sniping then everything gets real messy and we get a kill but I'm not particularly proud of it you know I can appreciate the thought here with my acting but oh boy was the execution lacking substantially in these early days things did start to look better over time though as you can see here on day 13. we're doing a much more convincing job with the sniper disguise I'll position better I don't make eye contact with any of the enemies I even commit to the disguise after I go in too early and ultimately my patience is rewarded with a quick little double step this clip highlights something about disguising that I began to learn very quickly in this Challenge and that's how important not looking at your enemies is because it is unbelievable probably oh oh God do I do I really have to use this word yeah whatever it is unbelievably suspicious if you decide to make eye contact with your enemies there aren't that many valid reasons for your teammate to be staring you intensely in the eyes unless they won feel a certain type of way towards you or two happen to be a conniving Frenchman on the opposing team and it's probably the most obvious tell that newer spies give away when they're about to go in for a step now if you're super aware of your surroundings and know that there's nobody around to see you then sure you can glue your eyes to your targets back as you approach them to make sure you don't mess up the step but that isn't a privilege you're always going to have one of the skills you have to learn to master a spy is using your peripheral vision and other environmental factors to know where your opponent is without directly looking at them you can see this on this clip from day 27 or Borneo where I'm in a great position to get a stab on this Soldier however because I don't know if there is a group of enemies coming from behind who would notice my suspicious Behavior instantly I make sure not to stare directly at him and instead look forward towards the cart like one of his teammates would and that way I can safely get the step this was actually funny because as I quickly turn around at the end of the clip here you'll notice that there were two enemies right behind me who would have 100 known I was a spy if I decided to have a staring contest with the soldiers back hitbox as I approached it meaning I almost certainly would have been caught out another great way to trick enemies with your disguises that I learned relatively quickly was using this key right here you see it it's the S key and if you press it in game you walk backwards I know truly revolutionary stuff but seriously this key has been blessed with Eldritch Powers because it is perhaps the most consistent way of fooling literally any enemy ever that you're on their team don't believe me we'll have a look for yourself I'm on bad water I'm disguised as a spy I hold the S keys if I'm retreating from the front line and Yep this Soldier buys the ACT entirely so I clean him up here on Powerhouse I glance back quickly and see the enemies are coming so again I hold that s key and back pedal straight into the Scout for another freestyle and finally here on dos bolt I turn my back so I approach the choke holding my S key fooling everyone as I backpedal and leading to a quick double stab on this pyro and heavy you do need to have good map awareness to pull this off because if you end up backpedaling straight into an enemy and awkwardly bump into them you're gonna get caught out instantly but if you time it well and know what situations to use it in backpedaling will convince your opponents that huh this guy must be retreating from the front line and oh look he can't be a spy because he's not looking at us and he trusts us as his loving teammates that will take care of him but no unfortunately for them you're just a big brain spy player who knows how to manipulate the trust of others like any good human being should this all might seem super pedantic but when you're going up against more confident players I really can't overstate how important I found Small Tricks like avoiding eye contact and backpelling to be when you're trying to blend into your environment any subtle movement or stare in the wrong direction can absolutely blow your cover and that's the last thing you want if you have a knife like the kunai or big owner equipped which lowers your base Health pool already I will admit that later on in the challenge I kinda stop putting in the effort with making it convincing disguise because I found myself leaning really heavily on the dead Ringer's inbuilt resistances which don't require you to pick good disguises when you're trying to get behind but hey for now I was still dishing out some oscar-worthy performances to socially engineer enemy Gamers into giving me their back hit boxes but alright I think it's time we take a recap for this 10-day block of the challenge My Strange beard hit the highest rank at 15 000 points on day 34. my big owner reached 1000 and kills on day 37 meaning we could take another weapon off the list and I even snuck in a 23 kill streak on this great game I had on badwater on day 39 which was very nice accumulated a total of 1853 kills and died 827 times leading to a really impressive KD of 2.24 which was a significant Improvement and I think that's because I was really starting to wrap my head around using the dead ringer and also the Diamondback was just filthy and definitely getting me some extra undeserved kills my spy time increased from 135 hours and 9 minutes to 150 hours and 34 minutes for a total of 15 and a half hours but this actually meant I was well behind schedule it was actually supposed to be at 160 hours at this point of the challenge and I was more and more realizing that two hours of spy time on my stats page was definitely not equivalent to two hours of time in TF2 itself meaning I was gonna have to start playing more each day which is going to be fantastic for my mental health yeah I'm just short of it but look my KD was crazy I was actually starting to get really good at spy at this point and I was still feeling great about the challenge in general I mean I was getting slightly frustrated the occasional [ __ ] move but it wasn't anything too bad unfortunately for me though I'll streak of good times was going to come to an end because For the First Time in this entire challenge so far I actually started to dread logging on the TF2 every day and that's thanks to a news Loadout we were going to be using can I keep a rear with you I was really looking forward to this 10-day block of the challenge because this was gonna be gun spy time I was gonna get out my Ambassador I was gonna hit some clean ass headshots and absolutely dominate every server I touched look you can even see here all the way back on day 12 of The Challenge that I'm excited to start using the Ambassador I got because it's got such nice Parts on it did you get a Aussie yeah it got headshot kills damage dealt and players hit and it's the honest vial no and I mean look at this thing it's australium it's Pro kill streak it's got headshot kills and damage dealt it's beautiful truly a work of art I was so unbelievably excited to shake things up for a little bit by only using my Ambassador and wow it was easily the biggest letdown of the entire challenge but God I think I'm getting a little too far ahead of myself here as you've seen throughout the challenge so far there are many many ways of playing Spike we've seen how your playstyle can switch up depending on which knife you use like with the kunai we're playing a whole lot more aggressive than we are with the stock knife for example but we can actually take it even further than that because we have subclasses if this is your first time watching the El maxo Channel you might not know too much about gunsplay but I have always had a massive soft spot for this subclass in my heart last year in March I released a video called gun spy Unleashed where I ran around the streets of Sydney dressed up as Jon to show the world my unwavering dedication to this beautiful class and really do you want to know how much this subclass means to me well I mentioned it earlier but as a quick reminder John the gun spy is literally permanently etched onto my shoulder and if that isn't dedication then I don't know what is as gun spy we are foregoing the almighty power of the knife and its ability to instant kill in favor of the revolver this transforms us from a short-range melee assassin into a mid-range power class though I will put yet another Hefty asterisk next to power here because you're only going to be putting up Soldier and Demoman type damage numbers if you're capable of Landing literally every shot you fire off it isn't necessarily the strongest subclass out there and critics call it too gimmicky but before we judge it so heavily let's take a look at the loadout involved now I will admit that in my video Guns by Unleashed I did slander anyone who uses anything other than the stock revolver but because I had already reached 1000 kills with it for the challenge and I had this gorgeous golden Masterpiece which was just begging to be used I decided to run with the Ambassador for my guns by Adventures rather than stock which may see me branded as a heretic but you just gotta do what you just gotta do sometimes I also decided that I was going to keep using the dead ringer here because it is such a powerful defensive tool with the resistances and speed it gives meaning you can get yourself out of a bunch of sticky situations and because we don't really need to get behind the enemy team as Guns by the other envious Watchers just aren't nearly as useful the final addition to this gun by Loadout was going to be a new knife and that was the spicycle because we won't be going for backstabs anywhere near as often the extra defensive utility this thing provides against pyro with its fire immunity is just a nice little tool to have in our repertoire if things happen to go pear-shaped but okay you know the subclass you got a brief overview of the loadout you know what we're going to be doing so now now it's time to actually show you how well things went and uh you know as I said it was all very underwhelming and that's mostly thanks to the Ambassador if we take a look at its stats it does 15 less damage it fires 20 slower and it can't randomly crit but that is all a trade-off for the massive upside of being able to headshot your opponents you remember how the Diamondback could fire off 102 damage shots from across the map just because he got a backstab or sap well the Ambassador can do this too the only difference is that it actually takes an enormous amount of skill to line up your Crosshair on an enemy's head at longer distances to secure that big damage reward except wait no I'm straight up lying to you because if the Ambassador could do 102 damage headshots to enemies across the map from you even if it did take a lot of skill to hit it would be broken and it was broken for so long this thing used to be Public Enemy Number One when it came to spy's weapon mounts on Jungle Inferno all the way back in October 2017 valve gave the Ambassador fall off damage meaning at longer ranges your headshots would now only inflict 54 damage rather than 102 AKA and almost 50 decrease in its power this was basically every Spy Mains 911 because the Ambassador went from absolutely busted to basically the worst option to choose from well arguably but it will get to you later so going into this gun spy block of the challenge I knew it wasn't going to be crazy powerful but I thought that because my aim was decent enough I was going to be able to put out some pretty decent damage with it but yeah if I had to use one word to summarize my experience for the next 10 days it would be mid what I found to be the most jarring aspect of the Ambassador when I started using it was how intense the damage falloff was on headshots like yeah I agree that 102 damage is a bit too generous to opponents half the map away from you but even in mid-range combat I found that headshots were doing a pathetic amount of damage take a look at this clip on hoodoo where I head shot a heavy five times from a mid-range distance but he's just able to heal through it with the medic because I'm firing peanuts at his Cranium admittedly my aim was far from perfect here but 71 damage from this range when it would only take him half a second to gun me down with the Tommy slav I don't know about that I'll take a look here at this clip on day 43 on bomb Blitz where I headshot an NG upgrading his tele for 67 and it requires me to follow up with three body shots in a row to secure the kill with the last one doing a measly 18 damage it became obvious to me within the first few rounds of using this thing that I would be much better off just using the stock revolver for its reliability and consistency but given it already had a thousand kills I knew I was just gonna have to make the Ambassador work and look it wasn't all that even though I felt like some pesky little mosquito on the sidelines hitting headshots was still pretty satisfying and there's definitely worse way to be getting kills in TF2 I think my absolute favorite thing to do with the Ambassador was letting my ego take the wheel and what I mean by that was boy did I fall in love with taking the absolute stupidest 1v1s with enemy snipers to see who could win the Precision War now if you're thinking that spy is at a severe disadvantage in a long-range duel against sniper you'd be 100 correct but that didn't stop me from trying to get some clean ass frags take a look here on day 41 on the worst payload map to ever exist Thunder Mountain where sniper spots me in the window so I decide to take matters into my own hands I hit one clean headshot two clean headshots and then finished things off with a nice little body shot and again because my ego is the one in charge here you already know my muscle memory was going straight to a laughter to really rub it in or again here on gorge on the same day I spot a sniper at the choke point so I hit a headshot on him dealing an absolutely pitiful 55 damage but it's enough to make him backpedal a bit before I connect a second headshot for a very satisfying kill I will admit though that not every interaction with snipers would go this smoothly uh in fact I'd argue that most of them ended quite poorly because the Australian assassin man can actually one shot spy in 0.2 seconds which isn't ideal by any means here again on gorge on day 43 I get a headshot on the Scout and then finish him off with a body shot so I'm feeling pretty confident when this sniper turns around the corner so I go to line up the shot and oh uh yep you have to drop a nice shot in text chat and scenarios like that and just move on with your life because holy [ __ ] does it so quickly put you in your damn place so look overall let's try the 1v1 snipers with the Ambassador a good idea no are you likely to come out Victorious with the kill also no but in those rare instances during this block of the challenge where I did actually pull it off it did for just a second make me feel worthwhile even though in actuality I'm just rotting away at my desk in this 15 year old video game and doing absolutely nothing with my life oh okay things got a little real there um okay how about we talk about some funny Ambassador Combos and when I say combos plural I actually mean combo uh singular when using the Ambassador you can't just fire off headshot after headshot in quick succession as there is actually a one second cooldown in between your shots this is displayed to you visually as after you fire a shot your Crosshair will suddenly enlarge and you can only hit a headshot again once it has shrunk back down to normal size now this makes sense as if you're able to hit headshot at the normal attacking interval you'll be able to dish out over 600 damage in like 3 seconds which yeah it could be a little excessive so with this in mind I found that the best way of approaching Jewels with enemies was to lead with the Hedgehog and then start spamming body shops after to finish off the job this worked especially well against light classes as you can execute his super quick combo of headshot into an immediate body shot which usually does enough damage to breach the 125 HP threshold unless you're dueling your opponent from those longer ranges where damage falloff will make you its [ __ ] take a look at this clip and yeah I know at this point in the video I have said to take a look at this clip maybe 40 times but suck it up I've got 600 gigabytes of footage to go through here anyway take a look at this clip on Swiftwater where I catch Jon the fortnite heading to the front line so I quickly pop in with the headshot into a body shot combo before he can even react and then find this other sniper moments later who I also clean up in a similar fashion with just two shots this was definitely my go-to combo whilst using the Ambassador and one of the reasons I bring it up actually is because uh do you remember how I mentioned that I had some really nice strange Parts on Miami well one of them was headshot kills and if you ever see a part like this on a strange sniper rifle you'd usually expect something like 70 to 80 of their total kills to be headshots and 30 to 20 big body shots you can see here on my strange orb that about 77 of my total kills are headshots but when it comes to my Ambassador by the time I reached a thousand kills it actually only had 189 headshots meaning the vast majority of my kills were all thanks to body shots which does sound like it defeats the purpose of even using the weapon in the first place and look yeah okay I don't have the most precise aim compared to some other gun spices you're not gonna see some Crow type Ambassador plays coming from the guy who used to exclusively swear by the stock revolver purely because they couldn't be bothered to get headshots but with that being said I do think that 19 headshot ratio is slightly misleading because when you take a look at that combo we were just talking about earlier you start by hitting your headshot for the bulk of your damage and then quickly follow it off with the body shot to secure the kill as fast as possible and that obviously isn't counted as a headshot kill under the weapon stats look I just want you to know that I swear I can hit headshots and this isn't at all a massive cope because I promise I promised you guys I can hit them okay like look look look look I'm on altitude a scout pops into my vision out of nowhere and they hit such an elegant flick headshot that I started making noises like this oh ah and look still don't believe me well here on badwater on day 47 you can see I'm lining up this beautiful shot on a soldier except no [ __ ] you I'm actually lining up a headshot on this invisible spy you had no idea was there but I did because I'm the best at the game ever so look as you can see by these two clips that have definitely not been cherry-picked from over a thousand total kills I'm actually pretty damn good at head shotting with the Ambassador and don't let the fake news of my headshot kill strange counter convince you otherwise now one of the more interesting aspects I found whilst playing gun spy was actually separate to the Ambassador entirely and related more to our knife the spicycle for those who don't know if you're fighting a pyro and have taken burn damage you can swap to your spicycle to melt it making it disappear from our hand but this does give us some nice upsides such as being fireproof for a full second and also prevents us from taking any afterburn damage for another 10 seconds after that now having to wait 15 seconds for your knife to recharge can be problematic when playing spy normally but if we're almost exclusively using our Basta well it's a whole different story because we basically gain a bunch of almost free defensive upsides whenever we are versing a pyro take a look here on day 47 on bad water where a pyro pushes straight into me melting me down to 19 HP instantly but because I swapped my spicycle and stopped the flame damage immediately I'm able to stay alive long enough to connect a final shot on them to secure the kill or again here on day 44 on bomb Blitz a confident pyro starts to bum rush me so I activate my spicycle giving me some extra breathing room to line up this clean little headshot now I will admit that even though this was technically the gun spy portion of the challenge there were times where I would go for backstabs yeah I know I'm a fraud but if I somehow end up behind a 300 HP heavy am I really going to use my Ambassador which probably won't even be enough to kill him in time when his back is being offered to me on a silver platter this did lead to some slight issues though as there were instances where I was about to go and secure some stupidly easy stab with my spicycle or maybe there was some one in a million chain stab lining up but because a single particle of fire would come into contact with my poor French flesh I was left with nothing my spicycle would melt I'd have no knife leaving me in an incredibly awkward situation where I'd often have to use my dead ringer to bail as quickly as possible and cry cry over the fact I just missed an opportunity to pop off take a look at this clip on day 47 on Borneo where a heavy is absolutely clueless to my existence he's overhealed with 360 HP meaning it would take a comical amount of time to kill him with my Ambassador so I go for the stab instead except right before I can actually get it this stupid pyro fires his Scorch shot from behind meaning uh-oh my spicycles gone and I can no longer stab anything for 15 seconds how good it did happen pretty frequently but because this was the gun spy block of the challenge I tried not to be phased by too much as I should have been using my Ambassador in the first place anyway but it was definitely a hassle at times I won't talk too much more about this bicycle here because there's a dedicated section with it coming up but just know it synergizes really well if you are playing gun spy and you only have to be cautious when you go for the occasional backstab but look on day 48 of The Challenge on a very very sad game of two foot where I was eagerly anticipating the sweet release of never having to play Ambassador spy again because the past eight days of playing gun spy were so damn underwhelming I actually hit a thousand kills now you may notice it took a fair bit longer than usual to reach a thousand kills with the Ambassador that was because I missed a couple of days over the weekend where I was down there down having a good time in the Australian Capital territory so overall this block of the challenge had less kills and hours played compared to the others I do actually have some closing thoughts on guns by here because man I was looking so forward using the Ambassador but just turned out to be super underwhelming now don't get me wrong the investor is still a fun Weapon It's just that when you have to force yourself to use it consistently and you're left shooting off 18 damage peanuts across the map at some heavy who couldn't care less about your existence it can be a little draining I definitely think the stock revolver would have been a more consistent and reliable choice and because my headshot aim was uh less than Stellar on occasion I could have just ended up dealing more damage overall with that but it already had a thousand kills so I just got stuck exclusively with the Ambassador also this block the challenge scared me because if it was this painful getting an ambassador to a thousand kills whilst playing gun spy then how much more painful was it going to be to get my enforcer to that many kills and if you're sitting there thinking oh Max so what even is the enforcer and why do you keep bringing it up in such an ominous tone um you'll see you'll see soon enough in this block of the challenge I accumulated a total of 1342 kills and died 658 times leading to a surprisingly decent KD of 2.04 which kind of surprised me it did make sense because I had a lot of defensive utility in the spicycle and dead ringer meaning my survivability was really good and as I was playing Guns by I didn't need to be constantly throwing myself into super dangerous situations to get backstabs meaning I was dying less overall My Spy time increased from 150 hours and 34 minutes to 166 hours and 52 minutes for a total of 16 hours and 28 minutes meaning I was now 13 hours behind schedule which is getting more and more worrying with every passing block of the challenge but whatever we still had a lot of time on our hands and it wasn't a super daunting margin to make up for it just meant I was going to be playing a fair bit more spy every day for the second half of the challenge and God I've said this after every block I suck at managing my time honestly I was just happy to have finished up with Guns by at this point I was excited to move on to literally anything else in spice Arsenal at this point and fortunately for us it was about to be another exciting age of pace in the next block coming up day 50 would you look at that we were officially halfway through the challenge at this point and to be honest with you I think I was actually starting to wrap my head around this whole spy thing I will admit though that the weapons we had cycled through in the challenge thus Firework the big hit is that every Spy player left I'm talking about the stock knife with its reliability the big earner with its speed and its ability to Gap close off actively and of course the kunai with its ability to single handly tear their entire teams but it was time to get a little bit more wacky with our knife selection because in this block of the challenge we were going to be trying out the your Eternal reward now from the get-go I have to admit something about my mindset towards this knife as I was 99 certain that the second I hit a thousand kills with it I was going to be moving on to something else now this might sound a little Prejudice given I hadn't even used it yet but my expectations were not particularly High going into spluck the challenge but to be honest with you it was actually surprisingly good for those unaware there are two upsides to the your Eternal reward firstly and the whole gimmick the weapon is standing around is that you instantly steal the disguise of the person you backstab as you know with the other knives the moment you hit a stab your disguise vanishes and you're exposed to the world like Mr Krabs is and that one episode of SpongeBob where he outgrows this shell making us vulnerable to the enemies around us however the eurotona reward flips this Dynamic on its head as rather than giving us over heel or a speed boost after getting a stab we instantly gain our victims disguise helping us to quickly blend in with our environment the other upside to the eurotunna reward is the fact our backstabs are silent but yet again we need to whip out a big old asterisk here because it's only half true yes when we brutally murder someone they'll no longer scream out on Agony as their Olympic corpse hits the ground but enemies are still able to hear that meaty sound our knife makes when it hits an enemy and the sound of their Ragdoll colliding with the ground which makes this silent killer step more of a quieter killer but we'll get back to that later of course you can't get anything for free in this world so these two upsides are accompanied with two drawbacks firstly the 33 faster cloak drain rate which is by no means ideal but the other stat is the rail kicker here as to disguise as an enemy you know that core mechanic to spy's gameplay Loop we have to use up our entire cloak bar anything less than 100 means you are unable to disguise entirely unless you're able to get a backstab and as you can imagine this is pretty brutal to play around and oh boy the detects him adjusting too early on the first thing I learned you have to do with the eurotuna reward is make sure you disguise whilst you're in your spawner as it's the only location on the map where it won't cost any of your Clopper this isn't the ideal place to be disguising because you usually want to be picking something that is fitting of whatever situation you find yourself in once you're on the front line but if you're in a spawn room you won't have any idea of what's going on so you just have to make an educated guess if it happens to be a bad kit and you realize this is you're running to the front line well that's tough luck as to swap your disguise up you have to forfeit your entire cloak bar meaning you have lost the single most important tool in your kit until it recharges this can put you in some really awkward situations like in this clip-on Frontier from day 50 where I'm using the Cloak and Dagger which is a new invis watch but we'll touch on that later and I managed to get behind the enemy team the only issue is I have no disguise selected meaning I have to wait 10 seconds for my cloak to come back just to lose it all when I disguise as this scout where I then have to wait another five seconds just so I have a little bit of cloak in my bar to actually go and play the game with my first two days the your tonal reward was basically me wrapping my head around how janky this was as two of my core mechanics namely going invisible and disguising have been flipped entirely on their head and as you're probably able to guess things didn't start off all that crash hot and this was definitely the most jarring change I had experienced so far in swapping loadouts I mean God my first game on upward was an absolute disaster as I was basically getting myself killed on cooldown with every play I tried to pull off this is also probably a good time to mention what I alluded to earlier but after 30 days straight with the dead ringer I thought it was time to say goodbye and give a new Option a bit of a chance so to pair with the eurotunnel reward I decided to go with the cloaking dagger now relative to the dead ringer which fundamentally changes how you place by the Cloak and Dagger isn't too far removed from how the stock in this Watch Works rather than having our cloak last for a set amount of time the Cloak and Dagger drains its charge depending on how much we move for example if we run a straight line the envious watch will last 10 seconds whereas the Cloak and Dagger will only last for 6.6 seconds meaning it has 35 percent less charge overall however if you decide to do something like Crouch walk whilst invisible which makes us move substantially slower our cloak can last for almost a full minute and if we don't move at all well we actually gain our chargeback meaning we can stay invisible for as long as we like as long as we aren't moving this encourages a much more patient and passive playstyle where you can watch over your enemies like a hawk and wait for the one ideal moment before you decide to uncloak make it function in the exact opposite way that the dead ringer does which encourages you to run directly at the entire enemy team and face tank as much damage as possible before de cloaking in a hyper aggressive spot now I will admit that swapping to the Cloak and Dagger at the same time are swapping to the eurater reward probably Amplified some of those Growing Pains I experienced early on in the first two days especially but hey I thought they would synergize nicely together and because they also swap back to the latronge in My Revolver slot which as you remember gives us that additional cloak time I thought it would all piece together to make a nice little Loadout and to be honest it kinda did I found that the eurotunnel reward definitely shined brightest when it came to hitting chain stabs and that's mostly thanks to its silent killer mechanic now yes we touched on it before and whilst it isn't technically a silent kill it is drastically quieter relative to a normal stab as the screams of your enemies is what usually gives away your position any competent player will immediately snap behind them when they hear that regular backstab audio cue but with the eurotunna reward the sounds of explosions gunfire and hoovie voice lines will usually cover up that faint stabbing sound effect meaning you can actually have the single most reliable way of chain stabbing competent opponents which is nothing to scoff at I can't tell you how many chain stabs have fallen apart up until this point of the challenge because one of the five enemies I'm approaching from behind actually plays with their volume on and is able to shut me down immediately after I get that first kill but with the eurotunna reward I mean just look at this clip on Frontier from day 50 where I secure perhaps the fastest four times chain stab of my life without a single opponent being aware of it it's only once I bump in this engineer that somebody realizes that a third of their team just evaporated off the face of the Earth or here again on Frontier two days later I get a stab on this pyro this sniper and it's only once I kill the medic and he stops healing the soldier in demo that they actually turn around and suspect something is wrong I also found that the silent killer mechanic is especially powerful in situations where the whole enemy team is concentrated on the objective such as on a last push or last defense we can stack up stab after stab on players who are too focused on pushing the cart and holding the front line take a look here on day 54 on upward where I am able to pick up 5 stabs on enemies as they respawn because they are so focused on my teammates who are funneling into pushing the objective of the point giving me a free ticket to all of their unprotected spinal cords now admittedly spy prospers in an environment like this ordinarily but when you have the added ability of no screaming victims and an instant disguise in the position your enemy just was it makes it so damn easy to blend into your surroundings as if someone does happen to turn around to quickly check their back all they'll see is there may be slightly suspicious looking teammate but given there was no scream no pop-up in the kill feed and the enemy team is about to capture the objective well it's probably better they turn around and focus on the front line in the balance of probabilities here with the time I spent on the eurotunna reward I honestly start to think that there's an argument to be had about this silent killer mechanic being stronger than the instant disguise mechanic and whilst they're both undoubtedly very valuable I really can't emphasize how much more consistently I was pulling off these chain stabs with the eurotuna reward and it genuinely surprised me as the how powerful it was well that was until I stabbed the heavy I found that it is an all Sunshine of rainbows with the orator award when it comes to chain stabbing because yes instantly disguising as your opponent is very powerful for tricking your enemies but uh if you happen to stab a soldier or heavy Midway through your chain stab well your movement speed is going to come to a grinding halt making it way harder to get any other stabs unless your opponents aren't moving that much here on day 53 on upward I dropped down on this heavy to get a stab before clicking away and when I go back in to get this engineer my movement speed is so comically slow that I'm caught out by this spy checking pyro and the only reason I managed to escape is because he accidentally air blasts me to safety up on this High Ground also before we go any further I have to admit something very embarrassing that the Euro tunnel reward made me realize here during this part of the challenge you know how I was just talking about stabbing Heavies and moving slow as a byproduct well when you play Spy normally you tend to disguise as classes like Scout medical spy so you can maintain your movement speed as you move around the map that makes sense right well because I never really had a reason to disguise as slower classes like Soldier or heavy in the past until using the Euro tunnel reward it led to perhaps the most embarrassing moment of my TF2 career and let me just explain how the cogs turned in my brain here you can see I have recently stabbed a soldier and therefore disguises him meaning I move slower around the map with his base movement speed so I think okay I wonder if Soldier can make this jump here on Frontier and oh my God he can well whatever I flank around only to get caught out by this engineer so I immedly run away and go invisible but as I do this I realize huh I'm moving kinda quickly right now so I D cloaked to get the health and ammo packs and then you can see my realization in real time as to one of spy's core cloaking mechanics oh wait when you're in bit is that you keep the oh I have just learned a core spy mechanic what when you're invis like as a class that you're like like a soldier with lower movement speed you walk at spy speed when you're invisible yeah you don't know that I've when you've been playing spy for 50 days dude yeah I don't disguise I only disguise as a medic Scout and spy so I don't lose my movement speed oh my God that's crazy so yeah I'm not proud to admit it but after more than 4 000 hours in TF2 it was only in that very moment that I learned that you don't maintain the slow movement speed of classes like heavy and Soldier when you go invisible and you actually revert to spy's default movement speed when no one can see you yeah I know thank you thank you I'm very talented and deeply grateful for my platform where I educate people about a game that I seem to know nothing about I always just assumed you would move slower whilst invisible too when you had a slower disguise equip but nope it only took me half a Year's worth of hours in this video game to learn that fundamental mechanic anyway with that genuinely awful experience out the way I think one of the best things at the eurotuna reward and Cloak and Dagger combo taught me during this block of the challenge was patience which was a bit of a drastic shift to what I had been doing for the last 30 days straight I'd been placing a greater emphasis on trick stabs using the dead ringer aggressively and trying to farm as many kills as possible for almost a month now but with these two guys equipped I noticed that there way I played spy shifted drastically I spent a lot more time invisible just standing still and becoming fully aware of my environment around me it began to teach me to focus on respawn times more to know when opponents would be coming and playing so passively just ended up giving me A New Perspective to approach spy from you know you don't always have to force plays when the situation isn't going to work out which I sometimes found myself doing under the guise of limit testing when I had the dead ringer equipped and whilst I think that is important to improving at the game so is patience when it comes to spy take a look here on day 54 I spend more than 30 seconds invisible to ensure that one the enemy team is fully distracted when pushing the car around the corner and two no one is respawning at that moment being that I wouldn't be randomly flanked before I reached my opponent and look one stab on the heavy and one stab on the soldier see I swear patience can be cool guys and look here again on Frontier front wait Frontier again why is every clip in on anyway it was day 50 and I see a pirate come around the corner with overheal and I know this because the little particles coming off him meaning I have to hold off my attack for a few seconds as a medic isn't going to be too far behind and lo and behold my patience is rewarded with two nice stabs had I pushed earlier that demo would have eradicated Me So reading your environment and playing patiently is vital to succeeding on spy um until you're invisible in a corner for 40 seconds just to die to a random crit before you can do anything yeah no that that happened on P here on day 53 rate I was literally invisible for close to 50 seconds before a Demoman was able to Cave my head in with a critical VB long neck swing I guess that is the risk you always run whilst playing spy and if you try to plan for literally every possible variable as something will still manage to come up and [ __ ] you over no matter how patiently you're playing I will say that I definitely prefer the more aggressive player Style just because it's a lot more mechanically engaging than well sitting in a corner for minutes at a time but I'm really glad I got to use the euro Turner award for a little section of the challenge here because it gave me some valuable perspective on the other ways you can play Spy and it really did exceed my expectations honestly I might have to revisit this weapon sometime in the future because I really think it does have the potential to be a pretty damn good side grade but anyway as I predicted at the start of this segment the eurotuna reward was going to be shelved as soon as it hit 1000 kills and that happened on the end of day 54 meaning we have ticked yet another weapon off the list but I'll make so you might be saying to yourself what did you do for the rest of this 10 day block if you already got a thousand kills by day 54. well my mentality at this point in the challenge was to take off all the uh how do I put it less desirable spy unlocks so that I could spend time focusing on one specific Loadout for the final stretch of the challenge and get really good at using whatever that was and let's just say there's weapons like the eurotunna reward like the Spicer school and like the oh God enforcer which I need to get up to a thousand kills before I could start grinding one Loadout exclusively and so that brings us to the final knife which we had to reach a thousand kills for the challenge and that was the spicycle now don't worry I'm not gonna go anywhere near in depth on this unlock as I did for the eurotuna reward partially because I've already talked about it and partially because it's well kind of boring now it's not to say it's bad it's actually far from it because I ended my time with the spicycle with a KD of 2.61 which is the highest I had out of any of the knives for the challenge so far that's because I learned it's a super safe pick when you pair with something like the dead ringer and latrage you become an absolute defensive Beast who can escape easily from situations you would Otherwise Die in but remember as I mentioned before during our gun spy days this comes at the cost of having your stabs absolutely cocked every once in a while by some cross-mapped flame particle that melts your spicycles because the hitbox is stupid and I hate pyro this becomes especially annoying when you're attempting to tricks have a pyro because they're able to melt your knife before you're able to get into the correct position and this is the reason that makes this bicycle a literal non-starter for most spy mates now admittedly I don't have many clips of this happening because try to tricks have a pyro when you have the spicycle equipped is just about as likely as solar light making a video on something that isn't Demonite related but I did find a moment where I was feeling extra confident for whatever reason I did try to give it a go here during the guns by days on Frontier again I try to bet a flog pyro up this hill so I can go for a stair stab and just as you'd expect I come into contact with the fire meaning my spicycles gone and I have to pack my bags and leave the country as fast as possible unless you're able to maneuver in such a way that you dodge the Pyro's constant stream of fire as you attempt to trick stab it's going to be pretty unlikely that you're actually able to pull something off if you had to ask me when I think this bicycle functions best it'd probably be when there is just one pyro on the enemy team otherwise you're just gonna be missing out on so many stab opportunities due to random spy checks and that is not gonna be fun for you at all I actually distinctly remember this one game I had on Frontier on day 57 where there were maybe four pyros constantly patrolling glass when I was attacking and I was literally incapable of getting into position a let alone backstabs some people because my spicycle was melted for like 90 of the game so times like this you probably just want to swap off spy entirely but unfortunately I didn't have that luxury afforded to me at this challenge okay pyros they have what I found to be the most infuriating part about the spicycle though is that yeah you might get lit on fire and escape with your invulnerability but then you're left for 15 seconds waiting for the damn thing to regen and it just creates a lot of extra downtime in between your plays which drastically slows down the tempo of your gameplay and I mean come on with the world we live in where I probably need to have Subway Surfers Gameplay at the bottom of the screen of this video to ensure people make a path to 7 second Mark it's safe to say that the spicycles ideal play style feels much more slower pace and honestly boring relative to other unlocks like the kunai or big erdo I know much more to say about the spicycle outside of this because it's basically just a stock knife with the added bonus of giving you an easy escape to against pyros if you don't want to try and trick stab them which admittedly did lead me to have a really good KD because I was taking less risky plays but hey come on now that isn't the fun way of playing Spike late on day 57 on Borneo I did end up securing the 1000th kill on my spicycles which did actually surprise me a bit as I wasn't really keeping track of it but that officially meant that I had secured 1000 kills on every knife at this point of the challenge meaning I was free to use whatever one I thought would make me play the best this may at this point the challenge there were now just three weapons remaining to get a thousand kills on first was Marvel a tranche which was already pretty close at this point with 800 kills on it second was the Diamondback which still had a bit of a ways to go with 400 on it but I wasn't too worried about racking up kills on that one and thirdly oh here we go enforce was still at zero and I still had to get to a thousand but hey that's a problem future me has to deal with and when I say future mean I actually mean pass me because I am future me right now doing the voiceover for this video and I know how it goes with the enforcer it's um it's pretty bad it's actually really bad but we'll get there when we get there anyway though one thing I haven't really touched on so far in this block of the challenge is that we were now going back to using knives which meant we were also back to trick stabbing and even though I hadn't done much of it in the previous 10-day block of the challenge with all the gun spy stuff going on I got straight back into it like I had never even stopped I was continuing to amaze me with my progress thus far into the challenge was how far my stair steps had come and how much better they had gotten during those early blocks of the challenge it always felt super clunky my movement was off and I was only getting them against the most clueless of enemies but nowadays it was starting to feel like second nature as I was growing increasingly comfortable with them on a subconscious level I wasn't overthinking the enemy's position my position when I had to jump or anything like that it all just flowed really smoothly when it came time to execute a stairstep and it was feeling really good I think what epitomizes my progress the most is a clip I hit here on day 54 on Mountain Lab where I actually pulled off my first blind stair stab of the challenge oh it 54 days to get that type of trick stub if you don't know the reason it's so hard to hit one of these is because it's entirely dependent on your game sense and understanding of movement speeds to predict when your enemy will be close enough for you to jump backwards over the head to get the step if every stairstep I have hit prior to this one I'm usually looking directly at the enemy as they come towards me and therefore can time my jump a lot better because you actually have that visual cue of their model moving now this isn't just some flashy play you can pull to look really cool as it actually serves a really valuable function in that it's way less predictable relative to a normal stair step when you see a spy perched up at the top of a staircase on harvest death staring you as you approach them it doesn't take 11 of Engineers phds to understand ha he's probably going to try and trick stab me here but with your back turned the opponent chasing you is one not going to be expecting a tricks up as much because you're not stirring them dead in the eyes making it super obvious and two they have less time to react to it when you do eventually jump now admittedly I think I could have been pulling off blind stair Subs like that one on Mountain Lab much earlier in the challenge but I just kind of forgot they existed and only start attempting them after my time on gunspy from this point forward though I did start getting them much more consistently and it just goes to show how far my prediction skills and general game Sense on spy had come since day one so that was nice to see now to tie everything up for this block of the challenge I think it's time I have a slightly overdue conversation with you about the engineer now before heading into this 100 day challenge I always assumed that because spy is equipped with the sapper and unlock designed exclusively to counter engineer and his pesky little buildings that I surely wouldn't have any issues dealing with him I mean have you seen Meek to spy he literally slides his sapper across the floor Gangsta Style and proceeds to execute an engineer with one bullet to the head so if we're going off the game's Canon yeah we should be fine right well it turned out to be a little more complicated than that and let me start with one quick fact oh my God Engineers surprisingly annoying to deal with the whole spy birth engineer jewel is centered around the fact that you basically have to deal with two opponents when fighting him there's a Texan himself and the auto tracking mechanical nightmare that is his centrica now the most common way of dealing with this conundrum is you first backstab the engineer which reveals you to the Sentry but before it can lock onto you and guard you down you quickly whip out the sapper and disable it that way however this isn't always how things go in practice and I quickly learned through this challenge that a level 3 sentry gun could react in a [ __ ] heartbeat to my presence and launch off a bunch of rockets that would instantly annihilate me before I could even react take a look at this clip from day 48 on bad water where I'm using my map knowledge to get to this High Ground I drop down to stab this heavy and no joke within 18 frames of getting the kill I am instantly annihilated by a set of rockets from the sentry gun or from earlier in the challenge on day 37 on badwater I see the engineer I plan to stabbing with my big earner and then use the speed boost to quickly go over and slap his Sentry before it can kill me but again within half a second a set of four Rockets is rapidly approached searching my location and denying me from playing the game now yes I do realize that I'm dying so comically fast in these two clips because the sentry gun is already looking my direction meaning there is no buffer period of it having to turn towards me so technically if I stab my stab such that the sentry gun is facing as far away as possible there probably would be more room to get the step off in time but God you already have to chuckle like 200 variables of spy with knowing where each player on the team is the level of Hell their movement pattern what health packs are up and all that other garbage so the last thing I want to be conscious of before I go in for a gangster ass play is the [ __ ] degree of rotation that the Sentry is facing to make sure I don't get nuke to the frame after I get a backstab this is also kind of embarrassing to admit but I also seem to have a slight issue with the act of actually placing my sapper on an engineer's buildings as Spike I know this sounds weird but I have a frightening amount of Clips where I would look in a Sentry's Direction with my sapper equipped but for whatever reason I wouldn't actually place it down look here on Dust Bowl all the way back from day two of the challenge where I find myself in a super advantageous spot whilst invisible so I drop down to get some stabs go to stop the Sentry so I don't die immediately but I don't actually place it and die immediately after my first step you can actually hear the immense disbelief in my voice from my live reaction I just have to I stopped I literally sapped it I sat and I sat at this game should pop up and look I would love to say that this got better over time but no it didn't really there is so much footage of me being unable to stop stationary targets and it does make me slightly concerned for my own mental well-being watching these back in retrospect and God whilst we're on the topic of my mental well-being don't get me started on situations where there happens to be multiple Engineers with multiple sentries because or if there's one thing that made me angry beyond belief in this challenge it was this I'm gonna spare you my hour long rant on this topic for the sake of brevity well I mean the video is probably going to be four hours long already but just know that if you're in a situation like bad water lost where one century is on the map room and one century is a bottom what are you supposed to do if you stab and stab one of them the other Sentry will gun you down and all their teammates will snuff you out and murder you too and by the time you respawn and come back that [ __ ] already has enough the level 2 Sentry up again so you basically become the TF2 equivalent of Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill in an eternal Loop of trying to kill sentry guns the only thing that can save you from this endless cycle is of course your own teammates and organizing a coordinated push but come on let's let's just be real that's that's not going to happen very often in a match of casual like I'll try but we just know it's not gonna happen there are so many points where I'd be tilted beyond belief and start spam snapping all the engineers stuff on repeat because I was unable to get stabs and we just have to pray that my team would coincidentally push at that very moment all of their stuff was disabled but yeah as you can probably expect that very rarely happened but look even as surprisingly annoying is dealing with Engineers turned out to be you do still counter them in the one way that truly matters and that's getting their teleporters to quote the great uncle Dane sentries get kills dispensers save lives and teleporters win games ever since I heard this from Dane in his video on teleporter etiquette it's always stuck with me because in your average game of casualty of two teleporters are essential to Victory think of dust bowl lasts on offense once your team has capped the first point it takes almost 20 seconds to reach the front line again and when you have 12 people on a team who are dying on cooldown to some crack sticky spamming demo man that is a lot of wasted time dedicated to just walking a teleporter basically moves your spawn room forward to wherever the exit is placed and this is crucial for maintaining the pressure of an offensive push or defensive hold that you can keep a steady flow of reinforcements without too many gaps so when you give one class in the game a watch that allows them to go invisible behind the enemy Team without them realizing and the tool that can disable and slowly drain the health of Engineers buildings you've just introduced one hell of a counter and to be honest with you this might be the single most objectively useful thing you're able to do for your team as spy it's something I focus on especially hard in the early days of the challenge as I'd start any round on offense off with disguising as a spy going invisible maneuvering behind their entire team and then sapping and shooting down any of their teleporter entrances at their spawn door I even remember a specific instance on Borneo on day 11 where I managed to get behind only to be greeted by five teleporter entrances at their team's sport this clip also serves as a great example of why you have to be careful of respawn times when you go in to destroy Telly entrances as you can potentially be gun down down in an instant by some random dude who happens to respawn at an unfortunate time make sure you use your scoreboard to see how recently enemies have died and plan accordingly otherwise you may get caught out in a pretty embarrassing fashion Honestly though dying to get one or two teleporter entrances is 100 worth it as your respawn time of say 8 seconds pales in comparison to the 15 to 20 seconds of extra walking everyone who dies on the enemy team is now going to have to embark on as they respawn even though this was something I knew going into the challenge if there's one single bit of advice I could bestow upon you from this entire video it's to make sure you target teleporters because they genuinely win games if they're not dealt with and you are the best class in the game to destroy them but let's be real destroying stationery targets with alsapa isn't all that exciting when it comes to the engineer matchup but do you know what is absolutely dunking on that stupid dumb Texan in 1v1s and there are two main ways we can go about this number one is the big brain Sigma mental outplay or two the flashy mechanical trick stab path so to explain the first option I actually have a question for you if you're playing engineer in here that your Sentry is being sapped what are you gonna do in response unless you're some Buddhist monk who believes in detaching themselves from all material things you're probably gonna be lying to your building and remove the sapper right I mean it only makes sense if you're close enough to fix it why wouldn't you well as a spy player I quickly realized in this challenge that we can actually prey on this Primal response in the monkey brain of engineer players because it makes it super easy to predict their movement and where they are likely to pass towards let me show you a clip so it makes sense this was from day 7 on Mountain Lab and I spot the enemy engineer turning to his Sentry so I decide to sap his teleporter to force him to come and repair it meaning I can now flank around him whilst visible D cloaking behind him and securing a really nice stab on him because his movement was so telegraphed or again here on day 35 on Pierre I'm not entirely sure where the engine is so I sap his Telly and dispenser to force him to reveal himself and I then jump up on this High Ground leading to a nice drop stab moments later when he attempts to remove the sapper look the only thing I'm going to say about these two clips is that a so-called free thinkers when they hear spies seven months Century these are genuinely some of the most rewarding players I pulled off whilst playing spy in this challenge because it just demonstrates a deep understanding of the game and hey I think it's pretty cool when you do that now I will admit these aren't necessarily the most flashy type of play to pull off and that's where our second option comes into this and it's the mechanical outplay I touched on this before but if you're not aware as an enemy spy you are able to crouch jump onto any of Engineers buildings for a nice little high boost which yes does instantly give away the fact for a spy because allies aren't able to collide with buildings but it does provide for a great vantage point to trick stab enemies from now we'll admit that these clips I'm about to show you are from Future Days of the challenge which we haven't covered yet but it does make sense because if you remember my ability to do basic trick steps earlier in the video it uh it wasn't great but as I developed my stair stabs specifically and my ability to improvise with the environment around me my ability to use engineer buildings as props for trickstabs did improve later on so take a look here on day 64 on Borneo where I spot a nest on the right here jumping with my sapper to disable it for my team and then hop on the dispenser for the height to execute a beautiful stair step on the engineer as he comes around the corner and again here on day 97 on Frontier I execute a similar combo where I sap his Sentry jump on top of it and get a clean little stairstep as a he runs to repair this last clippy actually Blends in some of those mental outplays we talked about earlier now sapping his Sentry forces him to rush towards it and therefore makes it a lot easier to predict his movement for our stairstep meaning there is a bit of overlap between these two paths we could take when dunking on Engineers okay look I could keep rattling off here about engineer because I think it is the most interesting matchup spy has but given this block of the challenge is already longer than the other ones and this video has already been going on for however long it's been going on for let's wrap things up with a quick fire round on engineer firstly my God are there some absolute bot Engineers who are extremely fun to [ __ ] with and I have a bunch of clips of it happening and they make me feel silly and they make me giggle secondly it's really funny when you're able to get an engineer Sentry to kill their own Creator very silly I like it thirdly finding teleporter exits unguarded could rack you up some insane kill streaks if they're placed in bad spots and it legit just Farms you kills for your strangers fourthly oh my God I learned that the palms and can one shot you if you're using the kunai which is also incredibly funny and happened to me a total of two times in the entire challenge out of like 10 000 deaths so that was pretty awesome too and finally I lied to you I've done that a lot in this video and I'm doing it again because there's another elephant in the room right now you see there was a third hidden addition to my Loadout in this block of the challenge but yet again I've avoided it this whole time because this one specifically doesn't deserve to see the light of day so if we take a look at my sap a slot I started using the the red the red tape recorder in this section of the video oh God sorry about that even imagining this thing triggers a visceral reaction in my intestines uh okay well the red tape recorder doesn't feel dirty to use like the Diamondback does it instead just feels bad to use because uh it is bad I I don't know why it exists I'm barely going to talk about it because I like I know this is the 100 days of spy challenge so I feel obliged to at least mention it okay but basically the point of the red tape recorder existing is that a D levels and Engineers building as it saps it which is actually a really cool concept so if we apply it to their level 3 Sentry for example and it takes them too long to get to it but the time they do eventually repair it it'll be level two or potentially even a level 1 Sentry meaning they have to sink a bunch more resources into it to get it back to where it was okay that sounds kind of cool so what's my big issue here well I'm going to show you one clip all right I'm not gonna edit it you're just gonna watch it and you tell me what happens okay okay thank you foreign that's right from the moment I accept that teleport it took 27 seconds and 16 frames exactly to destroy it do I have to say anything else do you know how long that is compared to the normal sapper maybe some nerd Emoji looking ass ten thousand hour spy May will say well actually there he can highly knees uses for the red tape recorder in a competitive environment I don't want to hear it's bad I hated it it sucks it takes so much time it's actually comical I use it for like another four days in the challenge after this block and then swapped immediately back to the normal sapper because I couldn't take it any longer this stupid strange red tape recorder is going to spend a trillion years never seeing the light of day in my inventory until the inevitable heat death of the universe where it will finally finally feel the sweet Embrace of death and proceed to haunt me for eternity in the afterlife I have nothing else to say I don't care if I'm being stubborn and it actually might have some practicality because it doesn't it sucks I hate it go away please please leave me alone and there we have it just a normal guy wrapping up this normal section of his normal video who didn't just ran about item in a game for like three minutes so hey let's take a look at the numbers for this block of the challenge I accumulated a total of 2235 kills and died 946 times leading to a record high KD of 2.36 but because this block had two distinct sections where I used zero Turner reward for one half and it's bicycle for another the numbers are slightly different with the Euro tunnel reward I got a total of 1079 kills and died 502 times leading to a still really impressive KD of 2.15 but it was actually with the spicycles that I put up some LeBron James level numbers as we got a total of 1 159 kills and died just 444 times leading to an insane KD of 2.61 which is my best in the challenge so far that combination of the spider school and dead ringer really meant I wasn't dying much because of that crazy level of defensive utility so I was really happy to see that high of a KD and it actually may be considered the spicycle a little bit more for the future my spy time also increased from 166 hours and 52 minutes up to 188 hours and 22 minutes for a total of 21 hours and 30 minutes which is more than the 20 minimum I needed but we were still running a bit behind schedule meaning yep I'm gonna say it again I have to sink more time in the coming blocks of the challenge to reach that elusive 280 hours on Spike also I have nowhere else to put this but on day 56 someone accuse me of having latrage Amax after missing half my shots and uh this was the result so I'm not actually cheating also six people voted yes what so yeah I guess that was a milestone of the challenge and actually on the topic of the electrons it actually hit 1000 kills on day 59 of the challenge meaning we could tick off yet another weapon from the list we were actually getting very close to reaching 1 000 kills on every Spy weapon at this point meaning we would soon be able to tick off that Big Goal we set at the start of the challenge and could then exclusively focus on maximizing our KD and improving as much as possible for the rest of the challenge so what was the only thing keeping me away from that well there was one very powerful but very dirty revolver that needed a thousand kills and the painfully mediocre one that needed it too my rationale going into this next block was that I want to start designing my final Loadout for the challenge once I had finished getting a thousand kills on the enforcer and Diamondback my game plan was to hopefully wrap up with those two weapons in the next 10 days meaning I could have the final 30 days of the challenge to dedicate to one Loadout exclusively and I could just spend all my time grinding it out and getting really good with it the only problem here is that I wasn't fully sure what weapons I wanted to use in each slot just yet the only option I was certain on was using the dead ringer which I'm going to talk about even more later on in this video because holy [ __ ] this thing really grew on me over this 100 day challenge and I knew it was definitely my favorite relative to the invis watch and Cloak and Dagger when it came to the knife slot I was tossing up a lot of options here even though I wasn't the biggest fan of the spicycle and how it forced you to play more defensively it had got to be a crazy ass KD and was objectively the best option to run with if we're going off the numbers but I would be lying if I didn't say that I was much more interested in two other candidates namely the kunai and the big earner I really did enjoy using both of these options because of the upsides they granted once he got a stab but I realized that whilst my kunai had something like 3 500 kills on it at this point it might be going only had about 1500 meaning there was a pretty big mismatch here I think that the logical thing to do here would be to use my big owner in this block of the challenge and see if it grows on me any more than it already has and I could therefore come to a more informed decision whether I want to use it or it's brother the kuna this was all excellent but before we could figure out what revolver I was going to use we did still have some loose ends to type in the Diamondback which needed 500 or so kills on it and okay I've been putting this off for long enough let's just let's just do it the enforcer I needed 1 000 kills on the enforcer and after using the Ambassador and how underwhelming it was getting a thousand kills on that thing let's just say I was not looking forward to using this stupid little comically small revolver for even a second unfortunately though it was one of the final two weapons we had to get to a thousand kills so there was no point in delaying it any longer so let's take a look at its stats shall we the main draw of this weapon can be seen in its first stat with the 20 damage bonus to enemies whilst disguised which gives us a nice little bit of extra punch on that first shot we fire off in a jewel in fact this damage bonus is enough to allow us to two shot light classes at close range and when I say close range I really mean it but more on that in a bit the next stat is perhaps one of the most bizarre in all of TF2 and I'm not joking when I say that because the enforcer has the ability to pierce damage resistance effects and bonuses if you haven't played TF2 before that might not sound that strange but if you take a deeper look there really isn't that many damage resistance effects in the game the most prominent example is probably the vaccinator but asides from that there's the fist of Steel on heavy and the battalion's back up active effective but uh outside of that there really isn't too much which just makes for a bizarre stat for a weapon to have I will say that I wasn't aware of this during the challenge itself but the most practical use for this damage piercing stat is that it does do extra damage to wrangled sentries making the enforcer an actually pretty viable option of doing that but I didn't get any footage of it because I didn't know it existed so that's unfortunate now this disguised damage bonus and resistance piercing does come at the cost of a 20 slot firing speed as well as the inability to hit random crits which look in casual can actually be a significant Nerf and I'm not entirely sure why they felt the need to slap that on top of everything but it is what it is so how did it actually fail to use this thing well in all honesty it's not that bad it definitely has its moments and to be more specific if you ever find yourself behind the enemy team and happen to stumble across a sniper with the Razorback you can too shut their ass before they realize anything has happened now of course you can two shot any light class from a close enough range with the enforcer but I found myself abusing snipers the most because they're usually isolated from their team and not moving all that much making it easier to actually hit them I even had a strange part for snipers killed on my strange enforcer and spoiler alert snipers ended up accounting for just under 20 of my total kills by the end of the challenge which didn't surprise me whatsoever I even remember having this one interaction on day 61 on Thunder Mountain where I was repeatedly killing the sniper with the Razorback equipped and he reached a Tipping Point after one too many deaths and said I was [ __ ] annoying in Chuck which yeah I get that I also found that the additional 20 damage while disguised would randomly come in clutch against opponents who were low on health and fleeing from the front line as I just happened to stumble across them whilst they were treating it just to dish out a surprisingly big chunk of damage on them for an easy kill also do you remember earlier how I mentioned that the resistance piercing stat on the enforcer was a little bizarre because of how Niche It is Well to show you just how rare it is I'm going to show you every clip from my 1000 kills with the enforcer where this resistance piercing came in useful now you ready well here we go wait oh this goes through the fist of Steel damage oh the third clip of his items utility in 700 kills I mean damn did you see how excited I was there there's the overwhelmingly positive reaction of a man finally getting utility out of one of tf2's most Niche mechanics to be honest I don't even know what the point of this stat is it was a really awkward rework when they added this and if valve ever decides to provide TF2 with uh any support I hope they take another look at this revolver because it is genuinely bizarre in how it functions but on Max so I hear you say you've been absolutely dreading having to talk about the enforcer throughout this whole video and to be honest it sounds like you found the weapon to be fine so what's your issue here well I realized that I was getting enforcer kills at a pretty slow rate by only using it passively and to be honest with you after what I went through with the Ambassador I wanted this process of getting a thousand kills to go as quickly as possible which is why on day 64 of the challenge where I only had 460 kills on it I decided I was going to start using it exclusively as a really bad gunspy option and ignore my knife entirely and this my friends is where my hatred stems for the painful mediocrity of the enforcer because this was the beginning of my instead of the arc all right I hope you're ready the stupid two shot mechanic doesn't even work half the time if you're unlucky enough to be like two Hammer units too far away which just turns into a worse version of stock the 20 style of firing speed definitely screws with your aim because doesn't shoot in the same Rhythm as the electron or stock revolver meaning I have a theory that this makes my flicks less accurate because I missed timing them because of my brain's muscle memory which led me to miss way more shots than I should have I got so desperate to get a thousand kills but as soon as we'd win around and be rewarded with Chris I would be lined straight to the enemy spawn in an instant just to ensure I could be the first one to kill all the defenseless people trying to hide just to reduce the amount of total kills it would take and therefore scrub the process and all these factors melted into one big [ __ ] storm of mental turmo which had to be dreading the challenge for the three days it took to get the in Thors to a thousand kills and I mean just look how I was holding up in this clip bro oh my God oh my God holy [ __ ] if it was a knife it'd be fine but [ __ ] the enforcer it wasn't pretty it sucked as it was super painful and God I hate the enforcer it's not even that bad I just like out of principle what what you did I don't I don't like you I don't like you but ultimately on day 66 in the warm-up for a turbine game of all things I secured my last two kills necessary for 1 000 meaning we could take off the second last weapon from our list I rewatched my reaction else editing this section and oh my God the genuine pain in my voice is so palpable and they actually sound so exhausted it's over oh God this meant we now only had one final weapon to reach a thousand kills with and it was the Diamondback which I swapped to immediately after finishing with the enforcer now don't worry I did not plan to gun spy with the Diamondback like I did with the enforcer even though I probably could Farm kills quicker with it by doing that this is one of the weapons I was actually tossing up to potentially use for my final stretch of grinding so I thought I should give it a fair evaluation and look before we dive into the last 500 kills I got with the Diamondback it's important for you to know that my little step with the enforcer there was actually a very significant turning point in the challenge because it marked a very very noticeable change in my mood towards well everything you know the novelty of playing spy had started to wear off at this point and I was honestly dreading my three hours of required play time every day if you ask any of my friends who have to enjoy Discord calls with me during this period they will attest to the fact that I wasn't very pleasant to be around because the Challenger it wasn't all that fun when you had to grind out thousands of kills on weapons you never wanted to use in the first place so let me introduce GC to a bit of a different side of things here because it's all been relatively positive with this video up until this point but I think it's time to take a deeper look into the mental side of playing spy and more specifically just how draining it was if you haven't gathered it so far from this video Spy is easily the weakest class in the game and if anyone tries to tell you otherwise they are wrong there's no competition here and even though you have the potential to pop off a spy and dominate whole servers there's an equal and opposite possibility that you will be relentlessly spy checked by a gang of pyros for the entire game making it physically impossible for you to do anything there is no other class in the game other than maybe medic who is so reliant on factors outside of your control to play well and it makes for a really really frustrating gameplay Loop when you're going up against more competent players and this was really starting to sink in after more than two months of playing spy every day I remember when I first started out on this Challenge and was going to learn as much as possible I would force myself into literally every situation to Fast Track my progress and the experience I gained but I was now at a point where if I joined a server and died one too many times particular person or was just generally having a hard time flanking behind I would simply disconnect and recue into a fresh game this is actually really common amongst high-level Spider-Mans and I noticed it a lot during the challenge because I would see the same people either [ __ ] stomping a server and everybody on it with some crazy ass KD or they joined a game die a handful of times without creating much impact just for me to see removed from match by system in chat moments later at first I found this pretty confusing but as I played more and more it just made sense because sometimes you join games where you're not gonna do much whether it be because their team is competent they have a lot of spy Checkers or if the map just utterly sucks for you to play on it's honestly in your best interest to try your luck on a fresh server instead of suffering through hell for 20 minutes I even remember this one particular game where I wasn't aliasing so everyone wanted to see what the big famous Niche micro celebrity omaxa was doing and we ended up with eight spies eight spies ordinarily I think that's funny as [ __ ] but when I'm trying to max out my KD and improve as much as possible on spy for the purpose of this challenge I can't say I want to stick around all that long on a server like that because we are about to get these [ __ ] stomped out of us and if I'm gonna be honest with you I was leaning into this a lot I'm not proud to say it but I would get seriously tilted after dying two to three times without hitting a stab and rather than trying to play it out and help my team do the best of my ability I just re-cued this was probably the first major symptom of my spy brainwrap which began infecting my gameplay and I'm not proud of it especially in retrospect I wish I did stick around to those tougher servers more just to challenge myself but when you're two months deep into playing the same class over and over day after day I don't really blame myself for getting a little bit tilted there's also another option which I was ordered to a handful of times and that's if things weren't going my way and I was getting really angry and was just not wanting to play Spy whatsoever I'd actually swap class entirely and stomp the server for a little bit as a mental reset I distinctly remember this one instance on upward where it was just not going my way at all so to shake things up I gave Vlog pyro a go for one life and proceeded to go on a 17 kill streak on my first attempt almost getting a Godlike and this left me bewildered now I almost go but look sometimes I would have the mental fortitude to remain in again even though everything was working against me I'd remained strong I wouldn't let it get to me I'd take a deep breath and proceed to get very angry and yell to myself like an insane person oh red dude this game test my [ __ ] will to live every time I play it I'm not gonna lie towards the very end of the challenge I even resorted to hitting my fan over and over for some immediate stress relief after moments that were especially [ __ ] and I ended up breaking it it's just sitting in my garage now and it won't turn on I know I'm a very normal person who deals with their anger in 15 year old video games in a very normal way but hey at least I got a new fan and it's honestly not that much better I kind of miss my old fan while we're on the topic of things completely outside of my control which infuriate me beyond belief you may have noticed that this video has managed to avoid a glaring issue that TF2 has been suffering from for three years now and that's Bots and cheaters to be honest with you the first 50 days of this challenge were pretty good and it was actually very rare that games got Infested by Bots like yeah that would be the occasional Lobby where I was invis hiding in a corner just for some gibbous wearing spinning sniper bot to instantly headshot me but barring that it was actually smooth sailing for the most part but halfway through the challenge there seemed to be a major uptick in how many Bots were around you see with my daily schedule I was trying to play my spy games from around midday through to 3 P.M which isn't ideal by any means because I'm from the great country of Australia where there are way fewer players in the region it can actually be hard to fill up service on casual in the morning to early afternoon and if you know anything about Bots they love to fill up partially empty servers sometimes he could kick them and prevent them from taking full control but more often than not seeing three to four of them join meant it was time to recue which was of course frustrating to deal with but it's just something we have to live with until valve decides to pull their finger out of their ass and actually support this game in a meaningful way now it wasn't just Bots causing me issues during the tail end of this challenge either as I was beginning to realize that there's actually a lot of cheaters who prowl around the Australian status because I was playing so much TF2 so consistently I began learning the in-game names of all the resonant cheaters we have here on the Australian servers and whilst there is no chance in hell I'm ever going to give them the attention they want by name dropping them there is one specific character I do want to talk a bit about for the sake of the story let's call him um what how about unemployed loser who has 100 hours in the past two weeks consistently on steam with the weed theme profile showcase and loves to cheat in the morning because he has nothing better to do with his sad sad existence or grant for sure we could go with too I'd be running into him a lot on casual and even though he didn't always cheat sometimes he wouldn't do a great job of concealing his aim lock and the most obvious example of this I could get was here on a game of snowy ghost oh that's some nice aim lock you've got there your flicks are so clean dude why do you cheat so blatantly idiot this was the first time I'd actually gone somebody cheating on footage as I realized with this uptick in Boston cheaters I should probably start documenting it for a section exactly like this in the video but anyway he got kicked from the server I had footage of his blade and aim lock and that was that fast forward three days later on Powerhouse where oh the enemy team's top scorer is our good friend Grant now unfortunately I don't have footage of the full interaction here but I started calling him out for being a cheater in text chat and no one was believing me so I said [ __ ] it just give me one second so I went to my editing timeline found that clip I just showed you on Snowy Coast rendered it out uploaded it as an unlisted link to my main El maxo channel right here and proceeded to send to the server as proof of his blatant cheats usually I wouldn't be this bothered but because this guy was a closet cheater and was also really annoying to deal with over text or voice chat when I played with him I want to put in the work to get him kicked as easily as possible and guess what it actually worked and the enemy team got God Grant's sorry ass booted from the game in dire times where valve isn't going to do anything about cheetahs you gotta take things into your own hands and that's exactly what I decided to do so Grant whenever we cross paths in casual again you know what you can expect to happen hi there I'm just gonna interrupt for a second here because I actually found out it's like that's kind of wholesome in this story uh whilst I was making the video I actually went back and checked his steam profile so I want to get some b-roll of like his the Wii team profile I noticed that his name was actually a link to his stream on Kik so I went and started watching and he actually told me that he done with his finish with cheating in TF2 and he's now playing face at CS go where you literally can't shoot because the ant uh the Andy Chief and I thought that was really holes I talked to him for a second and he was like it seems like he's reformed he's no longer cheating which is actually we love to see it we love to see it so thank you grant I saw a name drop you but God bless you okay back to the video without delightful dose of paying yourself the way I do want to wrap things up when it comes to how mentally training it is to play Spy I touched on her briefly before but I truly understand why Spider-Mans get so frustrated playing this class because it is so overlides on so many factors you just cannot control oh you got a single backstab on a sniper at the start of the round yeah well they're gonna swap the pyro now and become your most dedicated hater by spy checking literally everything for the whole game yeah unlucky oh oh you've been chasing someone for a while and are moments away from hitting the stab but oh no they've turned around at the last frame and you're now dead that's uh that's tough man or again you're just trying to flank behind but have come across three Pirates Who are all spreading their flame particles onto literally every surface of the map to ensure you can't make a single play I'm sure you'll be fine it's little moments like this which make spy so infuriating to play because I don't think any other class in the game gets this [ __ ] over by random luck and chance because the nature of playing spy is a binary in that you either get a stab or you don't it makes getting caught out all that much more brutal because it's not like the other classes where you can have a close Jewel and emerges to better player and say a soldier of a soldier matchup because you connected your Rockets more accurately no you kind of just die if you get unlucky and this is what started to weigh super heavily on my mental for the remainder of the challenge I definitely I think I was a major dumbass for picking spy first out of all the classes to do a 100 day challenge with because I am just of the belief that he is innately the most frustrating class to play and that really began to take its toll on me as we got deeper and deeper into things I'm definitely a little biased here and will notice similar moments when I choose to play other classes for extended periods of time but for now I can safely say that I understand why Spider-Mans gets so toxic because their class can feel like a bit of a gamble at times okay now I've gone all that out the way I can finally announce that I am done being a big old way I wear crybaby about spy and it's time we get back to the mission at hand AKA those final 500 kills on the Diamondback as I mentioned earlier the Diamondback is actually a weapon I'm considering to use in my final Loadout because it provides you with an insane level of damage output for just a playing spy how you're supposed to I know I already mentioned this earlier in the video but at this point of the challenge I'm averaging at the very least like two stubs per Life which translates to two stored crits and therefore gives me the additional ability to two shot eight of the nine classes on any given life the additional level of offensive capability this weapon adds to spy is genuinely scary and whilst I was using it in this section I found so many damn clips of me just laughing at myself with the other [ __ ] this weapon can be to play against at times look at this clip from day 68 on bomblets where I spot my friend who was on the enemy team and yeah it just looks crit there's a second one well I just don't think there should ever exist a world in which I as a spy am able to fire two bullets at the second healthiest class in the game from this distance and come out on top it even felt like there was a noticeable uptick in angry messages I got when I was trying to get my final kills on the Diamondback I mean just look here on day 71 on altitude I got a quick stab on this Soldier meaning I can two shot this sniper and then I mean I guess he's not entirely wrong but it's honestly wild just how many people despise this weapon and after using it for so much of this challenge I could definitely understand why anyway on day 71 on Frontier my beloved I hit a flick shot that didn't even look like it hit the Scout in all honesty but that was apparently enough to get my 1000th kill meaning I had officially gotten every single spy weapon to at least a thousand kills we could finally tick off that goal we set over 70 days ago and I'm not gonna lie this felt fantastic I had actually given every weapon a fair chance and I can officially say that I have a pretty damn holistic understanding of spy and his unlocks and all of their new answers now of course I'm far from mastering any of these weapons and knives like the eurotuna reward and guns like them Ambassador do have a lot of untapped potential which would require tens of thousands of kills to unlock but at the very least I felt competent in my ability to select any Loadout of spy at this point I know I'd be able to do a good job for my team also I hope it now makes sense as to why this section goes to a very awkward day 71 instead of 69 as it took a little extra time to get both my diamond back and enforce it to a thousand kills but it's whatever of course though we're not done yet and in fact I think we're actually about to head into the most exciting part of the challenge now there's no longer any restrictions over my head and I'm not forced to use particular weapons like the enforcer and I can just use what I'm most comfortable with and get really really good at it over the next 30 days but we will discuss the loadout I ultimately decided on in the next section and explain some more things there so for now let's take a look at the numbers for this block of the challenge I accumulated a total of 3198 kills and died 1395 times for a KD of 2.3 but we use so many different items in this block so let's break it down further from day 60 to 64 where I was still focusing on my back stabs I had a KD of 2.39 which was really respectable however when I just decided to exclusively use the enforcer to farm kills as fast as possible by KD actually jumped up even higher up to 2.48 which just goes to show how insanely powerful the dead ringer and spicycle Synergy is when playing gunspy and finally what was most surprising was when I swapped back to the big earn a Dead Ringer and Diamondback on day 67 although that I had previously gone to KD of 2.24 with back in days 30 or 39. I actually found my KD decreased to 2.15 I'm not sure if this was because I was focusing on gun kills more and therefore played worse but I was actually shocked to see this and it did mean I would have to spend a lot more time weighing up my final Loadout for the challenge my spy time increased from 188 hours and 22 minutes to 208 hours and 52 minutes for a total of 20 hours and 30 minutes which was slightly more than I officially needed for this block of the challenge but I was still 12 hours behind where I needed to be which I was going to have to chase for this final month overall I was pretty drained at this point in the challenge I was happy we'd finally ticked off four of spies weapons with the 1000 kills but this did mean I'd kinda lost a sensitive direction for the challenge right now all I had to focus on was getting 280 hours of just trying to improve as much as possible which isn't very tangible and meant that measuring progress was going to be a bit more underwhelming now this did daunt me slightly but to be honest a part of me was really looking forward to this final stretch of the challenge where I could just try and master spy as much as possible using one Loadout exclusively and just getting as good as I possibly can in the next 30 days was really really appealing to me now don't get me wrong it was going to be an uphill battle playing for more than three hours every day with the exact same blowout for a month but it was going to be well and truly worth it because I was about to start pulling off some genuinely insane plays in this final stretch as everything came together food so with every Spy weapon out the way at this point we were left with the true freedom to pick whatever we thought would be the most optimal Loadout for this final leg of the challenge and get really really good with it I will admit though that a good Loadout is pretty subjective but the main two criteria I needed my weapons to satisfy here is one the ability to maximize my KD as much as possible and two a preferably some room for some flashy plays with it now it's revealed to you the greatest spy Loadout ever concocted it would probably make the most sense to go in order of how they appear in your Loadout slots but I actually want to shake things up here and go the other way around starting with the sapper now admittedly there really isn't competition here your two options are one they're perfectly fine and reliable stock zapper or two the worst thing ever made by a human being that I hate oh my God is it so stupid so yeah we went with the sapper here no surprises about that one next up in the loadout was actually a choice I didn't really expect at the style this challenge but wow did the dead ringer really grow on me over the 70 days of playing spy I remember the first block I use it during days 20 to 29 of the challenge and I absolutely despised it because it completely changed how I had to approach playing spy and I was by no means a fan of this play cell initially however as I sunk more and more time into it I realized just how powerful of an option it was with all the defense futility and that speed boost in particular it seriously opens up so many avenues for crazy plays that you could only dream of with the stock in this watch and I knew I had to take it with me for my final Lowdown now this is where things start to get interesting because these last two swaps have had a lot of serious competition and there were so many great candidates to choose from earlier in that last block of the challenge I mentioned that I was really tossing up between the big owner and the kuna at this point both of them stood at around 3 000 kills each meaning I had given them both a pretty fair opportunity to learn some of their deeper complexities and to be honest I really was in love with both of them with the dead ringer equipped I knew I wanted to play aggressively and go for a lot of trick stabs because I'd always have that get out of jail free card in my back pocket whenever I needed it and the question was though which of these two options gave me a better chance of getting more kills while simultaneously dying less to maximize my KD as much as possible and as much as I love that speed boost on the big earner and all the crazy potential that opens up I think deep down I knew the kunai was exactly what I needed now don't get me wrong I actually prefer the big earner and think it is a much more fun option to play around with but its biggest issue is that 100 HP threshold which just leaves you super vulnerable now I know the kunai has a base of 70 HP but it only takes one step for you to gain the tankiness of a soldier which gives you so much more breathing room when it comes to either escaping if things are too hot or choosing to play even more aggressive when you want to secure some steps and again this isn't to say the big owner is bad its ability to Gap clothes between stabs is unrivaled and makes for super flashy plays but I just don't think that speed boost is anywhere near as consistent as the Kunis over here plus one of the biggest things I wanted to hone in on in this last stretch of the challenge was improving my ability to trick stab my way through bigger groups of enemies and having my health refreshed on every stab is a way more reliable buff to have compared to the speed boost the big earner definitely would have put some work in but the Kuno was just too alluring and I think it is the better option when it comes to maximizing my KD now the final option we have to choose here was our revolver and again there was a lot of competition to there were two options I wanted to cross out immediately though and that was firstly the enforcer if I didn't make it obvious that I do not like this weapon throughout this video and secondly the Ambassador which I understand does have insane potential if you put in the time with it but I don't think I was gonna harness that in the remaining 30 days this left us with three options the stock revolver the electrons and the Diamondback now this one is gonna hurt but I just knew I couldn't use the stock revolver it's not a bad option and when it comes to gun spy specifically it will always be my Preferred Choice but this decision came because of my knife Choice the kuna I know I talked about this before but if I'm ever at 70 HP my odds of winning a duel with a revolver were really damn low and on the flip side if I had a nice Overhill thanks to my kunai why would I go for a kill with My Revolver when I have a lot more wiggle room to attempt more aggressive steps and it's actually this mindset which crossed off the Diamondback for me too as even though I think it would definitely be a powerful option and could lead to a bunch of kills I wouldn't be able to secure otherwise I still just know that if I'm ever overhealed after getting a stab I just want to get more stabs to continue the chain and I know this meant My Revolver Choice had to support my kunai usage and not the other way around so with the power of deduction this means I ultimately decided to go with electronic it's the only revolver choice that provides me with a passive buff and this is majorly important if I'm using the kuna 40 more code duration extends the window I have to get into an optimal position once I use my dead ringer and this again just gave me so much more breathing room to set up for a quick play plus something I really undervalued when making this choice is the cloak on hit the electrons rewards you with which holy [ __ ] I really looked past how useful that is in conjunction with the dead ringer but I'll talk about that more later on so yeah if you're looking at my Loadout right now you might be thinking El maxo unpc this is literally just the Spy main Loadout and yeah you're right after sinking so much time into this dashing French fellow I Now understand why so many people gravitate towards this combination of weapons because each individual part complements the other items so damn nicely there's a reason Spider-Man's froth over it and given that my brainrod condition was worsening by the day I think it was time for me to accept the reality that I too had become a spy main myself throughout this challenge the good thing about this Loadout is that I already had a bunch of experience with the kunai and dead ring it together so there wasn't going to be much of an adjustment period meaning I kind of just hit the ground running the thing I found craziest about this block of the challenge was comparing my trick stubs from the beginning in the early days and seeing just how far they had come in around three months of practice by far the biggest Improvement I made overall was just how seamless my ability to hit a tricks I've had become and this applies to all the different variations in the beginning I felt as though I needed the perfect environment with an enemy walking directly towards me at a predictable speed if I wanted to have any hope of pulling something off like a matador but now everything truly felt like second nature one of the biggest reasons I insisted on using the kunai over the big earner was because I wanted to hit those crazy chain trick stabs that all the cool spymades do in their YouTube montages and after 70 days of practice I was actually starting to hit them take a look here on day 90 of the challenge of bad water where yeah okay to point out the elephant in the room it is the warm-up time but hey it's still a pretty cool play anyway I hit a matador on this pyro miss a swing at first but then secure a second Matador on the medic and then yep a third Matador on the sniper I'll take a look here on day 73 on Borneo where I start things off with a simple stab on this clueless Soldier but then take my time because I have the Overhill to line up my movement with the sniper to get a matador before getting a quick little reactive Corner stab on the Scout as I move past him these were the exact type of plays I wanted to improve at over the hundred days of this challenge And the fact I could now consistently throw myself at a bigger group of enemies and actually had a chance of coming out on top was a really nice sense of progress I will admit that I didn't get any of those actually insane Clips where it's like one spy versus a [ __ ] zombie horde of enemies and they don't mess up a single trick stab and manage to Circle strafe everyone but that might take 500 Days of playing Spider pull off so I'm pretty happy with what I was able to achieve another big way in which my trick steps had improved was with my ability to both improvise on the Fly and predict my enemies movement better because I collected so much experience on spy at this point something like 200 hours or more I had a repertoire of knowledge on all the different Maps match-ups and situations I had been in I could use them to guide myself to the most optimal play in the present take this clip for example from day 89 on badwater where the Scout activates my dead ringer so I begin to run away but notice he is following me so rather than retreating like a coward I hop up on this railing wait a moment and then jump over correctly timing it to hit probably one of the most satisfying stair stabs I got in this entire challenge or take a look here on day 85 on Borneo I get a quick stab on the soldier as I pass this pyro and no he will be chasing me so I go down the stairs turn this corner and mistime my stair stab on him but I quickly readjust it as I land and strafe around him to secure a strafe stab instead being able to quickly adjust In the Heat of the Moment is the one thing which separates a good spy players from the truly great ones and although I definitely wouldn't call myself great being able to improvise like this from time to time is again a really rewarding sense of progress compared to what I could do on day one of the challenge I also noticed myself taking bigger risks with stair stabs in these later days as I use random props around the map like crates and railings more with only slight hide advantages to pull off some pretty impressive and way less predictable steps this was actually one of the most important things I realized too as anyone could hit a corner stab on a clueless free to play Pyro chasing you to the end of the Earth but when it comes to more competent players you really have to start experimenting in ways they won't expect if you want to have any hope of actually securing a stab on them okay look this is all nice you know my trick steps have come so far but I do have a slighted mission to make yet again you know how I've been lying a lot in this video and withholding the truth from you for dramatic effect to help me structure this nightmare of a video that has almost 3 000 Clips in it well I gotta do it again because I've actually neglected a certain type of trick stab for this entire video and I just know the Spy Mains who are still watching have probably been banging their heads against their monitor waiting for me to talk about it but I have very good news you see there is a Holy Grail when it comes to spy trick steps a type of stab which comfortably sits at the top of the tier list if you've ever watched a spy Montage these feature in them quite prevalently because one they are perhaps the single most flashy player you can get on any class in TF2 two there is an insane amount of mechanical depth to executing it correctly because of how many moving Parts there are all going on at once and three there's also a significant amount of luck in finding the opportunity to actually pull them off and it's not a very common situation you'll find yourself in so look let's just cut to the chase at the very top of the food chain of all trickstabs sits the Elusive surfstub and it's something I'd actually spent the entire challenge up until this point trying to pull off so the term surf dab is actually quite a broad definition because it encompasses a whole lot of things some impressive and some less so but the basic gist is that in TF2 damage applies knockback on you which you can use to move around AKA surfing now this isn't to be confused with surfing like you do in CS go on those special Maps but I will admit it's a bit weird that they share a name given their drastically different mechanics so I'll make sure to refer to it as damage surfing from here on out it's a core mechanic to a class like medic who can surf rockets and stickies to escape bad situations and similarly we can use it as spy to get our ass to safety if we're ever in a pitch we're basically treating the enemy's rocket or whatever damage form it may be like one of our own and timing our jump as it hits us so that we can get a massive boost to either get the [ __ ] out or if you're feeling a little ballsy you can use it to go straight back in before we dive into the crazy mind-boggling insane surf stabs I want to show you how practical surfing damage can be when it comes to playing spy take a look at this clip from day 51 or bad one where I absolutely choke this stab on the medic and the heavy notices instantly to maximize my chance of getting away I jump and Crouch repeatedly so that the bullets he's firing from his minigun push me away faster and then use the extra distance I've traveled to actually get a stab on this Soldier or again here on day 27 on Snowy Coast I unintentionally get launched by a rocket after this stab which boosts me straight into this Demoman to get the freest kill of my spy career now yes I know the second clip wasn't intentional but just goes to show how powerful surfing can be as a gap closer this is one of the biggest reasons I loved using the big earner as that speed boost meant I could continue chain stabs over longer distances but because we weren't running it anymore you have to resort to mechanics like this to give yourself the best chance of getting steps now to be honest my hundreds of hours on Soldier were definitely coming in clutch in this regard as I have spent almost a decade now at this point rocket jumping which unsurprisingly carries a lot of transferable skills over to surfing other people's rockets and explosives to this mechanic on spy did click pretty naturally for me but as you're probably aware the stabs I've been showing aren't anything too crazy and I was rattling going on about how these are the creme de La Creme of spy steps so let me show you an example of what an actually crazy surf stab looks like yeah I know it's pretty wild and that's like the coolest [ __ ] I've maybe ever seen and I wanted to do it myself so in the back of my mind throughout this entire challenge I was always on the prowl for a situation where I could make it happen leading to run very exhaustive hunt for a flashy surf stab which had a whole lot of fail attempts oh that was almost such a clip no I almost actually hit my first super cool clip no what hey oh that was almost a surf snap again but I screwed up I botched it oh yes yes that was the sub step that was it it keeps happening keeps getting so close oh no I heard the prophecy the prophecy as you can see by my audible suffering the process thus far had been pretty brutal for all those attempts I didn't have the kunai equipped which is almost a prerequisite for hitting a surfstep as it makes it a whole lot safer jumping from enemy's rocket if you have a bunch of overheal reducing your chance of dying immediately or as you take full damage on the way down there had been so many close calls over two and a half months of attempts but I just knew I had to get at least one kind of cool looking surfstab before everything was said and done with this Challenge and luckily for me on a beautiful Autumn morning on day 75 I was defending a spy on the hoodoo and the Stars finally aligned oh oh if my reaction were I was howling like a wolf didn't make it obvious um I was elated that one was 75 days in the making and oh my God it almost didn't happen because that soldier's rocket took me down to literally one HP if he had been slightly more precise with his rocket I would have exploded into pieces and we never would have witnessed the one genuinely impressive thing I had done in this entire challenge also I won't lie to you after I hit this one cool surf step I drastically decreased the amount of them I went for because I wanted to maximize my KD and they are extremely risky to pull off but hey I'm thankful I have at least one or two clips to show for all my effort but hey you know what I think the kunai and all the trick stabbing is getting a bit too much of the spotlight here for the final stretch of the challenge don't get me wrong it's the most crucial element to playing spy by far but there are two other important parts to my Loadout which are also essential to facilitating this aggressive playstyle I had adopted I think we should give them a bit more love starting with the dead ring I know I mentioned it before but when I picked this up for the first time I remember hating it I specifically remember how much I despise using it on offense when pushing into last as on maps like omelets I had absolutely no idea how to make it work and I genuinely thought I was going to end up using the stock in this watch by the end of the challenge as I know a lot of Spider-Man's I talk to regularly say it's their favorite but then I kind of just kept using after every day of playing spy I found myself loving the dead ringer just that little bit more and as I continued to improve with it and recognize the situations it worked best in it kind of led to this crazy positive feedback loop where by day 50 I was almost certain it was going to be the option I took into the final days of the challenge there is a whole lot to love when it comes to the dead ringer but by far what made me love it almost unconditionally is that beautiful speed boost which just opens up so many Avenues to play more aggressively take a look at this clip on day 74 on harvest where I pop my dead ringer and D cloak relatively quickly and use the speed boost to immediately hunt down the Scout for a really easy Stat or here on day 76 on Dust Bowl I pop my dead ringer going up the staircase and use the speed to quickly Jump The Gap and strife stab this Demoman before they're even able to comprehend the play I'm pulling this gets even crazier when you realize that you're actually able to prolong the speed booster dead ringer after Fades by hitting b-hops which led me to this absolutely insane play on steel on day 83 where I get a stab on this cute little Fanboy before popping the dead ringer where I maintain the speed boost even after it fades by hitting 3B hops in a row leading to a super clean high speed stab on this enemy Spike one of the other things I really started to learn with the dead ring in these later days of the challenge was how important timing your D cloak is there's this interesting battles you have to strike with the dead ringer as if you take damage and decide to pop it you have to balance two factors simultaneously one you need to make sure you escape and survive so you want to use the invis for as long as possible to ensure that you get to a safe position but two you also want to minimize the downtime of your dead ringer by D cloaking as soon as possible to reduce how long its recharge time is and can therefore get back into the action as fast as possible if you use your dead ringer to tank one bit of damage and d-click immediately it'll be out of action for 10 seconds but if you make use of the full charge to ensure you get away safely this means you'll have to wait an additional 10 seconds on top of that which can leave you out of the game for a really long time this is of course exacerbated by the fact you can't use ammo packs to replenish your charge either it is what it is secondly I touched on this before but there can be a lot of downtime waiting for your charge to come back which can leave you playing Super passive at times thirdly you have to make sure you proc your dead ringer first then disguise otherwise you leave a trail of smoke which is common knowledge but I found myself screwing the sub more than I'd like to admit and finally the damage resistance isn't always enough to save your ass especially when it comes to something like random crits which will absolutely obliterate you if you're not careful I'll also mention here but the latron synergizes really nicely with the dead ringer and I found myself taking long distance pot shots when I was out of charge just to reduce how long my downtime out of combat was and this really helped in keeping up a constant level of pressure on the enemy team by day 75 I actually got my dead ring at a hail Zone and I can now safely say that it is truly one of my favorite items in all of TF2 I definitely don't think it's overpowered either though I understand why it's kind of a neatly annoying to play against because it does make you an absolute pain in the ass for the enemy team to deal with especially if you're anything like me who is T cloaking on cooldown to make sure it's up as much as possible either way though it's an awesome concept for a weapon and I had an absolute blast getting better with it now now you'd probably think at this point in the challenge where I'd been playing so much spy that it would get pretty monotonous and boring at times right well yeah no it definitely did we'll talk about that in a second but the thing that's so beautiful about this game is that it still found ways of surprising me even in these later stages where I wanted to smack my head against the wall sometimes and I actually want to run you through some of those now it may sound a little bit weird at first but in this block of the challenge especially I actually picked up a gambling addiction now I know what you're thinking uh El maxo what does this have to do with anything did you like start unboxing crates after every death to try and get unusuals and keep yourself entertained or what and no actually I found a way more wholesome version of gambling that became one of my biggest sources of fun whilst I was kind of losing my mind during the challenge and it's all to do with enemy teleports you see I realized that if I got behind the entire enemy team I'd often have access to their teleporter entrances at their spawn room and as spy you're actually able to take them and so I realized that if I was ever getting bored or fed up with how things were going I actually had a virtual slot machine at my disposal which I could use to throw myself into a really chaotic situation and try to work my way out of for a little bit of spontaneous fun you're only 75 on upward I make my way behind the red team and wait for the teleporter but luckily get a quick stab on this medic as they spawn which gives me a good overheal as I take the Telly leading to a stab on an Angie sniper Soldier and even electronic kill 2. I'll hear from a bit earlier in the challenge on Thunder Mountain I take the Telly even saying to myself before picking up an absolutely beautiful quadruple kill with the big hurdle I honestly think this was a good habit to pick up as I realized that what separates the good spies from the great spies is the ability to act on your feet and make use of your environment so dropping yourself into some absolute chaos which you have no control over is a great way at improving your improvisational skills but remember this is teleporter gambling and if you know anything about gambling there is the potential to lose everything and yeah don't you worry it happened quite a bit sometimes you get your ass handed to you but that's why it's so fun you know it's like normal gambling where you can either make a bunch of money or lose everything you've ever accumulated in life as you continue to feed your parasitic addiction which strains you of everything you value and love now it wasn't just teleporter gambling which got me through these Final hours because there was a bunch of other stuff too I think one of my other absolute favorites had to be interacting with enemy spies now there's a bit of a duality to this as whenever you come across an enemy spy whilst you're sneaking on the back line it can go one of two ways you'll either make a new best friend for life as you both Bond over the fact you are the weakest class in the game and don't really want to [ __ ] each other over any harder than you have to or you'll trigger a primal reaction in their brain as both of you engage in a metaphorical dick measuring contest where you find out who the better trickstabber is and yeah most of the time it was me I don't think I can articulate you how absolutely satisfying it is to see some enemy spy who thinks they're the absolute [ __ ] try to go for a stair stab on you thinking they'll actually pull it off just for you to readjust your movement and trick stab there trickstab it is like the ultimate Way of asserting dominance on enemy spies and my ego lives for moments like that because I'm an insecure little [ __ ] who thrives on being the better player in a 50 year old video game that nobody cares about in the real world now admittedly I did get my ass handed to me by much better spies a fair few times I don't know if I have any clips of it to put here because you know when you get absolutely Shattered by an enemy spy my first reaction isn't oh I need to clip that for the point in the video where I talk about spies who are better than me it's actually more of a staring blankly at my ceiling for 20 seconds as I reconsider all of my life decisions type things so unfortunately I don't think I have much footage of it actually happening I will say generally that when I knew a spy was better than me there was a pretty low chance I'd go for a trickstep unless I was super confident in my abilities usually I would just resort to My Revolver which is a logical thing to do against a better player but unfortunately it's a very fast way to bring out the inner toxicity out of an opposing spyman anyway the final Joy I want to talk about during this monotonous stretch of grinding was making people themselves wait wait hold on no not like that you see the combination of the kunai which gives overheal and the dead ringer which gives you all this defensive resistances means you are in a good position to make enemy goobers explode themselves with their own Rockets pipes and stickies all you have to do is start breaching their personal space to make them feel claustrophobic by hugging their hitbox and Vlog you can secure some pretty unconventional kills by making trigger happy Demoman regret ever pressing Mouse one in your vicinity admittedly you may find yourself going down with them at times but I think the silliness has the situation makes it worth it also in a similar vein I kept getting owned by rocket jumping soldiers who had literally no idea I was near them and this is one of the few ways of dying which actually made me laugh so here's a little hyper cut of that huh anyway though I mentioned it a bit in the last block of the challenge but the mental side of things was definitely eating away me at this point of the challenge the first two weeks weren't too bad in this grind and I was progressing at a nice Pace but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't losing my patience with everything I had to forcefully drag myself to my PC to play each and every day and it was usually at a time of day where my friends weren't around because they're not full-time YouTubers who can't afford to play TF2 at 11AM on a Thursday so all this was done in solitude and that that is the last thing you need when you're hating every second of playing the game it was super mentally taxing and playing a class like spy who I know I've said 100 times now is so dependent on so many external variables going in your favor it just really Stacks up around day 90 I kind of realized that I was just going through the motions of playing spy instead of actively trying to improve with every session all I wanted to do was get through my three hours as quickly as possible so I could go and do something else and I realized that wasn't what the challenge was about I was so close to the end and the fact I wasn't valuing every moment as an opportunity to get better undermined the whole point of doing this challenge so I realized that I needed to have a mindset shift moving into these final days so like I was playing poorly or anything far from it actually my Katie was still progressing Higher and Higher and I felt like I was still improving but it was definitely starting to stagnate as I became much more focused on just putting in the hours rather than improving at every given opportunity and so I wanted to change that you might have noticed that the structure for this block of the challenge is a little bit weird going from Day 72 through to 93 but it's actually for a specific reason I came to a realization that I had to give it my all for the final week as I know I would regret looking back on this whole challenge if I spent my final days just trying to squeeze out every minute of Play Time possible to tick over that 280 hour mark instead of actively trying to improve and so before we dive onto the true final stretch of the challenge let's take a look at this block stats I accumulated a total of 5 394 kills and died 2128 times for a KD of 2.53 which I was super happy with but I knew we could bump it up a bit more I saw this block with 208 hours and 52 minutes and finished it with 263 hours and 56 minutes for a total of just over 55 hours I really picked it up again in this block because I had fallen behind significantly when it came to my in-game time I was happy we've started chloring back some progress It's been I was gonna need just over 16 hours of play for these final seven days which is definitely more than attainable there are a few achievements i hidden this block as a challenge too like on day 83 where I broke LeBron James scoring record on my strange beard by kunai hit the second highest rank of Australian on day 91 and I even managed to get 105 points in one round on upward which was an absolutely insane record but all right with a positive shift in my mental I went into this last week as a challenge prepared to give it my absolute all I had been playing spy almost every day for over three months at this point and it might be controversial to say but I think I'd actually learned a fair bit about this conniving Frenchman up until this point I was basically treating this final week as a way to exhibit my skills and show just how far I had come since those humble beginnings in day one in the third block of The Challenge from Days 20 to 29 I used this same kunai dead ringer and the tranche combo and had a KD of 1.85 so my main goal for this seven days was to beat that Dumber by as much as humanly possible to show you how far I had come since then and I was feeling super confident about it all the mental reset was exactly what I needed to power through this remaining week of the challenge as I definitely gotten in my own head about how tedious and boring it had all become so by putting things into perspective with the fact there was only seven days left it really made me value my time more and playing the game felt less like sure and once again became an experience I was enjoying unsurprisingly when you convince yourself you hate something you tend to do worse at it as a byproduct 2 and this is exactly what had happened to the quality of my spy gameplay for the last week or two which I felt as though it stagnated significantly going into each day with the negative mindset meant I was more impatient with the players I went for was quicker to get angry when things didn't go my way and therefore I made a lot more errors and poor decisions now that's not to say every second of this last stretch was a cakewalk you know random crits and brain dead teammates will always test my mental fortitude but it was definitely a significant Improvement it also reminded me of a mindset I used to have when I played oh sorry for bringing this up but A League of Legends if you don't know how League Works firstly congratulations and secondly you're basically at the mercy of how well your teammates perform once you realize this and you learn about 40 of your games are just always going to be losses it makes dealing with defeat a whole lot easier and I started to bring this into my spy game you know I wasn't going to pop off insanely hard every single life I wasn't always going to be able to steamroll through my enemies and some lives my team was just gonna be horrific while their team was just going to be insanely talented you can't control this and I know I spent so much time in previous sections rattling on about how frustrating these external factors are to play into But ultimately they're out of your domain control your gameplay quality only begins to tank if you let things like random crits and incessant spy checking get to your mental it's this negative feedback loop where something [ __ ] will happen which makes you upset which therefore makes you less rational in your gameplay decisions and more impatient which therefore makes you more susceptible to even more [ __ ] occurring which just repeats the Vicious Cycle this mindset is honestly applicable to everything in life and sounds like something I talk about on my self-help Channel but to be honest with you this last week of playing spy really demonstrated to me the power of PMA AKA positive mental attitude you will forever be at the mercy of valve's casual matchmaking system and nothing is going to change that so getting frustrated by brain dead teammates does nothing but hinder your own experience every player who is better than you is always a new opportunity to learn something and improve at the game so rather than dreading those times where you're up against the Prem level pyro with over 20 000 hours and has seemingly never made a wrong tactical decision in the heat of a game before you can use it as a chance for growth people will probably call this cringe about a video game but if you genuinely want to improve it's only going to happen the more you put yourself in difficult situations where you actually have to think outside the box and experiment with your gameplay and it can be hard to be perfect with your mindset all the time as you might have a bad day or I don't know you might might have been playing spy almost every day for three months and we're getting kind of a little fed up with it but the more you're able to ground yourself in this kind of growth mindset the better things will be for you to quote Brian Tracy you cannot control what happens to you but you can control your attitude towards what happens to you and in that you will be mastering change rather than allowing it to master you how cute is that but okay my motivational self-help talk about the importance of mindset and TF2 is officially over I was really Blown Away with my ability to chain trick Subs together here in the final week of the challenge and it was one of the key things I wanted to be able to pull off by the end of 100 days I was by no means perfect at it and didn't get anything more than a triple but hey that's a whole lot better relative to where things start on day one where I kept whipping out my disguise kit and sapper whenever I got into a stressful situation I talked about it a lot in the previous section but I finally felt comfortable as spy in basically any situation I found myself in having the safety net of the Dead Ringer along with the potential for massive overhear with the kunai just gives you a layer of confidence in your ability to handle those bigger groups of enemies and I was actually looking more and more forward to the super stressful situations where I was sworn by a larger group of folks I definitely wouldn't emerge Victorious every time as unsurprisingly a hundred days isn't a long enough period to absolutely Master a class in TF2 but I back myself more often than I do this was especially the case for 1v1s where I was overwhelmingly confident in my ability to execute something simple like a stair step Corner stab or Matador as it was basically second nature at this point when it came time to pull them off there's also an exciting moment on day 95 and although this wasn't a goal I'd formally set out to complete when I started the challenge it was really exciting to see my kunai finally hit the highest strange rank in the whole game oh my God here we are that's it that's it baby haleson my virginity has regrown I feel compelled to go watch some anime right now we lose the game but there it is as you can engage with my reaction it did feel like I reached a point of no return because I would now formally be categorized as a person who is lame enough to get a strange kunai to hail Zone which is some intense emotional baggage I'm gonna have to cope with for the remainder of my life on this planet and to be honest with you I don't really want to drag this last week out now don't get me wrong these last seven days were by far the best I had played in this whole challenge seeing the amount of progress I had made since day one was genuinely mind-blowing as every facet of my spy gameplay had improved so significantly it was great to think that three months ago I was fat fingering to the wrong weapon during intense jewels and was consistently failing to hit simple backstabs on enemies who weren't even moving that much versus where we were now I mean I of course knew that to some extent I would become a much better spy player over this challenge but for such a short period of time in the grand scheme of things I was genuinely Blown Away by what I was able to accomplish now that's not to say it had been easy up until this point I mean playing three hours of spy every day for three months was an incredibly mentally draining process I really am not proud of how impatient I got at times during this and I really do wish I could go back and keep up a more positive mindset throughout the entirety of the challenge but still to see me go from struggling to strafe around enemies to pull off a basic Matador to literally flying through the sky off of an enemy's rocket to backstab them was such a jarring transition and it truly made all the hardship worth it it made waking up to play three hours of tf2's weakest class worth it made all those shitty games with bad teammates and spy checking pyros worth it made dying to all the random crits from gibbous soldiers on the other side of the map worth it and yes it definitely made all those failed surfstep attempts worth it so instead of dragging things out any longer than they need to be I want you to watch the end of my final game of the entire challenge this was the match which would take my spy time over that 280 hour mark and it quite fittingly took place on Frontier the map which should become my absolute favorite to play Smile oh well that was slightly anti-clivactic and I think with that if we go and check our backpack see else 280 hours and one minute it's all done spy is finished 100 days of spy absolutely done oh Christ 200 hours of in-game time on spy and what have I learned God this class is frustrating that is first and foremost if I haven't highlighted that what an experience I had a great time uh I I really I really think it's honestly worth making a new class I think it's worth giving a shot if you haven't give it a try see how you feel uh and you think you learn a lot about TF2 but with that I have formally finished playing spy and that means I don't have to tomorrow I don't have to get up and play three hours of spy because I've done it for 100 days but thank you for making this fun on the video I'll probably have some more Reflections in outro I might even include this but damn 100 is a spy it's over it's complete I've learned a damn lot and [ __ ] am I glad it's over but so I'll see you later and there we had it I had officially ticked off my two goals for this 100 day challenge namely one reached 280 hours of in-game time on spy and two get 1 000 kills on every weapon it had been a pretty massive Journey filled with a roller coaster of emotion and I'm not gonna act like I was a leader to finish this challenge if anything it was more a sense of overwhelming relief I was very much looking forward to the fact I no longer had to boot up TF2 every day just to play Spy for three hours against my will because to be honest with you it had sucked out some of my passion for the game and I was just looking forward to actually playing TF2 when I genuinely wanted to so before we dive into some of my thoughts about the challenge let's take a look at the numbers and my hours and TF2 had gone up by 324 from a total of 4043 on the 12th of December 2022 up to 4 367 on the 3rd of April 2023. you may notice this is 113 days in total not 100 and that's because I do did miss the occasional day when I was busy and I think I did have like three or four mental health break days in there when I just couldn't bring myself to open TF2 for this last seven day stretch of the challenge I accumulated a total of 1 357 kills and died 496 times for a KD of 2.74 which was well and truly my highest to date and I was super happy we managed to get it that high as for the challenge in total we got 22 534 kills and died 9707 times for a total KD of 2.32 which is honestly feels a bit higher than what I expected I think this does make sense with how well I played from Day 70 onwards where it really came into my element but I suspect it would be something more like 2.1 or 2.2 as an average for the whole challenge I will admit that there could be some slight errors and emissions in my calculations because I manually recorded my kills and deaths after literally every game I played on on a Google doc so I might have input something wrong here all there but for the most part I think those numbers should be good we also reached a total of 47 and 807 points meaning I averaged about 500 a day whilst playing in this challenge meaning I have well and truly put LeBron James scoring record to shame unless he continues to have superhuman Seasons with the Lakers at the ripe old age of 40. so before we close out this video I want to take you through some of my biggest takeaways from this Challenge and some of the things I have been reflecting on since it started and that all starts with something really important number one a high KD does not mean you are a good spy now measuring progress as you get better in a game like tf2 can be pretty damn hot on a classes like sniper or Scout you can track your progress in something like aimlab or Kovacs to objectively see how much more accurate you're becoming but outside of that there aren't really that many metrics to use now as you've seen throughout this entire video I did end up settling on the kill death ratio as the main statistic I was going to use but in all honesty it wasn't a great one but don't get me wrong it tracks what it tracks well as the challenge progressed I was dying less and killing more starting off with the KD of 1.83 and getting all the way up to a peak of 2.74 which is an improvement of just under 50 now don't get me wrong this is fantastic and definitely displays a great level of improvement however my issue is that there is a whole lot more to consider when it comes to the conniving Frenchman you see as spy you are a support class who has insane pick potential in a similar way to something like a sniper with one single play you have the ability to flip an entire game by getting a crucial stab on a medic with Uber or coordinating a sap play on the enemy engineer's nests but generally these game-changing players you'll make won't be reflected in your kills and deaths or any number for that matter if anything your KD should be relatively smaller if you are prioritizing things like sapping teleporters and going for important picks rather than just farming through as many enemies as humanly possible one thing I haven't even mentioned in this video up until this point is stab priority and who you should be targeting and that's because I was operating under the pretense that I needed to maximize my KD to show tangible progress meaning I just wanted as many stabs as possible no matter who they were on like yes I got a [ __ ] ton of kills through this challenge but how many of them were game altering of course at some point quantity does override quality with stabs but how often was I actually targeting the sniper who was shutting down my entire team with one sight line or how often was I going for the medic when they had Uber to prevent my team from getting rolled I just didn't Place enough importance on these massive players with capable of pulling office spy and ultimately if I aim to do another 100 day challenge I definitely need to factor in some new stats like win percentage or other important metrics specific to a class I'm playing like Medics killed a sniper or Allied healing on my strange sandwich is heavy ultimately a good spy is one who wins the game for their team and whilst yes the way I farm through servers and got massive kill streaks was definitely useful to my team's Victory I just don't think I gave enough time to appreciate the other metrics which Define a good spy player so I'll know that for whichever class I pick next second thing I want to talk about is choosing spy as the first class to test this video format was probably a major mistake so I went in this 100 day challenge because I genuinely wanted to improve its spy and see what all the trickstab hype was about I'd never been that good at it so I finally thought a video like this would be a good excuse to actually upskill myself and look those were some good intentions going into this challenge with but [ __ ] man I don't know how you spy Mains do it because this class is the most frustrating to play by far I know I made a big point of it throughout the video but your Reliance on external factors is just so genuinely infuriating at times so much of the game is out of your control and you are often at the mercy of the quality of your enemies and how often they spy check to be a useful part to your team on a class like Soldier it doesn't matter how good the enemy team is because I know how to position myself such that I will be useful I can still find myself racking up kills but on spy it feels like you just can't do anything in certain situations maybe this is a byproduct of a lack of experience but God the amount of people who would just luckily flick and turn around the frame before I was about to stab them would randomly spy check an unsuspecting corner of the map look to quote the great Kanye West that right there could drive a sane man berserk of course I had no idea this would be the case when I went into the challenge but I wish I started on something like I don't know Demoman a generalist who is useful all the time instead of the absolute weakest class in the game was only useful in a handful of Niche situations I guess it's good I got spy out the way first if I do decide to do another 100 day challenge and to be honest although it was really challenging for my mentor that did also make it extremely rewarding by the end of it so maybe I shouldn't be complaining the third thing I want to talk about is feeling yourself improve at something is awesome now if you don't know me as a person I'm very big into self-help though might be cringe and lame to some of you but I literally have a channel dedicated to it because I love the idea of progressing as a human being and constantly improving yourself through life in every aspect and I felt a lot of that whilst playing spy I can't really explain to you how feeling it is to start hitting those harder stabs more consistently Landing in the correct position for a stair stab more often or absolutely reading your opponent like a book for a massive predictive play these highlights really make the process of improvement so damn exciting and I think the biggest example of that in this video was the surf subway hit on day 75 which as you could see by my reaction was easily the most elated I felt in the entire challenge I'm pretty sure I want to revisit the 100 day format with another class soon because seriously getting really damn good at something over a given period of time is Super fulfilling and the fact it won't have to be on the weakest class in the game next time around it does make it a lot more bearable uh at least I hope the fourth thing I want to talk about is I have a newfound respect for Spider-Man I know I talked about this a little bit in the video at times but wow spies are super mentally draining class with very complex mechanics that are really hard to pull off I remember always thinking that so much of spy was luck and hitting face steps but no I think through my 22 000 kills maybe 30 to 40 of them were face tabs that I didn't have any intention of pulling off I suppose I wasn't interpret abusing and I don't really want to open that can of worms now but I can safely say that I massively overestimated how often good spies hit face depths I know it might seem like [ __ ] in the moment but I would encourage you to be more charitable the next time a spy outplays you more often than not they just use good movement and game sense to get the advantage over you and it actually means a lot saying nice stab in chat every once in a while if they really caught you off guard also I kind of understand why Spider-Mans are so toxic not that it excuses them but when you dedicate thousands and thousands of hours or class where there is so much [ __ ] I mean yeah I kind of get it so you have slightly more of my respect to my place the fifth thing I want to talk about is that almost all of spy's weapons are really damn viable barring the red tape recorder and to be honest I feel like someone of the Comets is going to leave a PhD dissertation on how it's secretly broken and that I'm actually a massive Morpher not using it but I think every one of spies weapons actually serve a great function in specific situations the kuna is great for chaining stubs together the big owner is good for closing the Gap and hitting Speedy trick stubs Spice Girls great in conjunction with gun spy or if you want to play safely and the Euro tunnel reward is surprisingly effective against more competent players due to that silent kill or when you want to get stabbed with a lot of Engineers around it is a bit different with the revolvers where I think something like the enforcer which isn't necessarily a terrible unlock it definitely needs some type of makeover just because it fits into such a strange position that doesn't really make a lot of sense I also think the Ambassador needs that damage falloff looked at because oh my God was it sad to hit 54 damage headshots on enemies who weren't even that far away from me outside of those exceptions though I think spy potentially has one of the most well-bounced kits in the game as each unlock actually serves a specific use and shines in certain situations which I can't say about other castles like come on when am I ever going to UC Liberty launcher as soldier I really like where spies unlocks are and it made getting a thousand kills on each weapon a lot of fun uh except the enforcer but I've given that poor thing too much [ __ ] throughout this whole video so we'll let him be for now and finally by far the most important thing I took out of this challenge was number six don't have a tower fan within punching distance of your desk I love the fan I had man I use it for two years at this point and when I gave it that final kill blow on like a day 90 and it just stopped producing a breeze for me a small part of me died with it so I want to dedicate this entire video to my boy who is unfortunately no longer with us if you've made it this far in the video please comment our APL Maxwell's fan and I will give you a free heart react for your dedication to somehow watching all of this there we have it that has been everything I have learned and experienced after playing the conniving Frenchman for a hundred days thank you so much for making it this far I have no idea how long this video will be but given my script is almost at 50 000 words now I'm guessing this could be a bit of a long one seriously though this project has been my entire life for the past four months and I will have sunk something like six or maybe even 700 hours into it when all is said and done so I really really appreciate you making it all the way through I will use this as an opportunity to remind you to join the Discord for that giveaway we've got going on and they also have a patreon if you want to support me there also check me out on Instagram El Maxwell underscore swag so I can pick up baddies with my cloud and also check my Twitter out with the same handle for some Elite tier [ __ ] posting I'm also going to Freestyle this in here I'm actually making a second Channel which I'm going to use to launch with this video I'm gonna post every trickster by hit and it's just gonna function somewhere I can post it posts some TF2 or maybe some lower epic content on other games so yeah make sure you sub to that and I'll leave a link to that down below thank you so much again I really hope you've enjoyed my downward spiral into spy insanity and I will let you know that I do have at least one more 100 day challenge video like this planned no matter how well it happens to perform with the algorithm because there is one Australian Hitman I'd love to spend some time getting good at but for now thank you so much for watching God bless you and have a good rest of your day foreign [Music]

Channel: elmaxo

Views: 8,249,665

Keywords: tf2, team fortress 2, spy, tf2 spy, tf2 challenge, elmaxo

Id: RmlMbgcvqJs

Length: 202min 37sec (12157 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 19 2023