[TF2] Bad Weapon Academy: Your Eternal Reward

what are you doing giving you your reward your eternal reward [Music] welcome to bad weapon academy where we take a look at some of the worst weapons tf2 has to offer and i show you how to best utilize them i'll be the first to say that i am not the best spy player in the world so me making some kind of dissertation on a spy weapon should be taken with a heavy grain of salt with the enforcer and red tape recorder those had such specific usage cases that don't rely on janky ass backstab mechanics that i felt fairly safe talking about those but a knife is the core of the class and as such is a bit harder to talk about without a lot of experience however i think most spy players will absolutely agree with me when i say that the your eternal reward is the worst knife in the game way back in the day this weapon saw a lot of use because it was part of the infamous saharan spy set which gave you the incredibly useful attribute of near silent decloaking even when paired with the dead ringer back when that was also very powerful then poly count sounds sense they stink then poly count sets were largely removed and now all you have to show for that fez you bought is a bunch of rough coarse irritating sand and the knife fell off in popularity and then after jungle inferno it fell off even worse this is because of the knife's design philosophy so let's break that down a bit the stats of the returner reward are unique among the knives you can't disguise easily you either gain your disguise through the use of a backstab which disguises you as the target you just stabbed or you trade all of your cloak to get a disguise and your backstabs are now much quieter and cloak the enemy's corpse hiding it from view as well as removing the kill from the enemy's kill feed however when jungle inferno came around to go along with the new function of using your cloak to gain a disguise they added a new drawback in the form of a 33 increase to your cloak's drain rate i don't have to tell you that this is really bad your normal 10 second cloak with the invis watch is brought down to about 7 seconds and this is even more extreme with the cloak and dagger now you can offset this with the letranger but this is such a massive downside that it essentially forces you to use it if you want to be just as good as you normally would be using any other knife and revolver pair this would be a lot worse if the latronger wasn't already a great weapon on its own but it limits you from using stronger revolvers that would be better for defending yourself making impactful long range picks and for making you less reliant on your knife so what this means is you're essentially trading your effectiveness in cloaking for effectiveness in disguising the problem with that is that disguising simply isn't that powerful a tool and now even getting a disguise out in the field is a challenge disguises are as disposable as they are for a reason they're not that strong so you can get one without any sacrifice and keep it for as long as you want and get it back whenever you want very rarely can you fool someone who is actually worth targeting the rare moments when you can are [ __ ] awesome and make your brain feel 500 larger but it's not something that can be relied on even in a pub setting and in a pub setting you'll quickly realize as a spy player that the kunai does the job way way better to put it into terms that spy maids can understand the kunai turns you into your average shonen protagonist by giving you the game design equivalent of plot armor that was not a backstab what the [ __ ] was that that medic was looking right at me see even when i succeed i'm not happy about it because that was just [ __ ] i didn't deserve to kill that medic the your return reward meanwhile turns you into light yagami when you get an entire group of people it feels like everything is going according to keikaku but when you [ __ ] up it's because you're in way over your head and probably got cocky or some factor got introduced three-fourths of the way into the story that you couldn't possibly account for and that seems purposefully introduced just to screw you over all i'm saying is there's a reason naruto got 720 episodes the light only got 37. your strength as a spy doesn't usually come from your ability to trick your enemies it comes primarily from attacking at the right moments when their attention is on something else this is something that the euro toner reward both excels and fails at thanks to the silent nature of your backstabs groups of enemies will remain unfocused on you for longer periods of time allowing you to pull off large chain stabs assuming the rapidly disappearing ragdolls of your enemies with half their cosmetics still visible don't fly in front of their teammates faces or they don't have voice chat turned on where the knife suffers here is getting to that point in the first place now that your cloak and defensive capabilities are gimped you either trade your limited cloak for a disguise or get nowhere with your cloak and then die undisguised and nearly defenseless against anything stronger than maybe another spy now you can just disguise upon spawning and it won't consume any of your cloak meter and you should pretty much do this every single life as you return a reward spy but if at any point you lose it which will happen if you need to defend yourself or [ __ ] up a stab you're back to square one this is a needlessly punishing weapon for one that has upsides that are honestly very limited in use if anything spy's usage is so limited in general that i'd honestly argue the mechanics of a silent backstab which conceals your enemy's body and doesn't appear on the kill feed would help spy become much more useful if applied universally as if playing spy wasn't stressful enough now you have to deal with not disguising ever or else you risk losing what is easily your most valuable tool as a spy cloaking so you're fighting your own muscle memory more than the enemy team this is arguably worse than not being able to disguise at all because fat fingering the b key isn't gonna screw me over if i can't do that and i still have my good cloak drain rate i guess it's ironic that in an attempt to make the knife more accessible and more utilized they made it even more user hostile it's a knife that punishes you in every aspect of your class you can't disguise easily you can't cloak efficiently you have to use the weakest revolver in the game damage wise otherwise your cloak is even worse and even if you use it to shoot people all you're doing is removing your current disguise in exchange for filling up your cloak meter to put on a new disguise and lose your cloak again all in the name of focusing on a knife that performs less efficiently than any other one in the game because the words spy as me have become synonymous with this knife to the point of being a common rename for it maybe when valve removed the ability for free to place to talk they weren't actually thinking of mitigating the bots they were just trying to buff this knife and hey by the way if the only backstab you get or the last backstab you get in a chainstab is a slow [ __ ] like a soldier or heavy you're stuck with that unless you undisguise on purpose or waste your cloak just to move around faster considering what easy targets these classes are due to their slow speed this is unfortunately a very common occurrence so that's a lot of problems on what's already a pretty damn punishing class assuming the people you're fighting against don't have lizard brains now a lot of issues come down to cloak management so let's talk about that first things first very very patient players might get some use out of the cloak and dagger and the stranger to offset the lack of cloak as much as humanly possible this also allows you to recharge your cloak after sacrificing it should you need to disguise in complete safety as long as you're in an area where a stray rocket or flame particle won't touch you just stand still to get your cloak back up dip out disguise dip right back in and charge it up again the biggest problem with playing this way is that it's really boring and you lose a lot of momentum for faster paced games this can result in you getting all this setup and prep work done only for no payoff whatsoever because while you were busy waiting for your cloak to come back your team was out there actually playing the game i'd say this method works best on maps that are more static like cost maps or certain stages of attack defend for something like payload or 5cp which is a lot more mobile you'd be better off using the stock watch in order to get use out of the many ammo kits you'll find around the map the dead ringer is i guess an option but its uses are a lot more limited with this knife in particular you don't lose all that much cloak but you still don't get as long of a cloak out of it the d cloak is still really loud and sacrificing your escape tool in order to get a disguise is a lot more punishing when it's a binary yes it works or no it doesn't system as opposed to the other watches which can at least give you something to work with if you're not at full charge and you can't even get cloaked from metal packs anymore meaning you're gonna have to be a lot more careful with your management on certain maps that are very generous with their metal like the first stage of thunder mountain which is crawling with max ammo kits being able to sacrifice your cloak for a disguise is far more valid of a choice but with the dead ringer you deprive yourself of that option far more often i'd say the stupider your enemies are the better the dead ringer is with this knife but if they're that stupid then i'm pretty sure butter knifing them to death is going to be just as effective overall i'd say the stock watch is the best option assuming you're using the ellet ranger it's the least punishing and if you have good map knowledge you can still stay cloaked for quite a long time if you find the proper ammo packs in terms of using your cloak for a disguise this is something i rarely find viable except for right inside of spawn ammo packs out in the field are much better used to simply keep yourself invisible instead of keeping you disguised except for in a few fringe situations such as if you need to backstab someone in the line of sight of a sentry backstabbing people around sentries is actually one of the best applications of this knife in general assuming you don't get caught out beforehand you can easily kill the engineer and sap his sentry without the sentry ever noticing when normally without much more precise timing or a pre-emptive sap this action would be pretty suicidal the whole not getting caught out part is really important though arguably the most important if you're caught out before you even get a chance to backstab someone you're dead that's not an issue with the weapon specifically so much as it is just a spy issue that's compounded by using a revolver that does [ __ ] damage and having far less cloak to work with however if you don't have a disguise while attempting a stab then it is an issue with the weapon and you'll stick out like a sore thumb even more than if you were a pyro without a head or a demo without legs as long as you decloak behind cover you're setting yourself up for the best chance of success you just need to keep an eye on your cloak meter decloaking out in the open is risky but may be necessary depending on your target snipers in particular might hang out in areas that don't have much declucking cover it's also dependent on your level of cloak if you're using something besides the long leduframage deciding where you get to de-cloak is a luxury you'll often have a hard time coming across those extra seconds you're losing really add up if you manage to decloak successfully and no one notices you then it's stabbing time now target priority is important here if you're going for a large chain stab it's important to start from the back of the group and work your way forward to maximize the number of stabs you get this can seem pretty obvious like no duh but considering normal target priority for spy where you get the most valuable target first and whoever you can get afterwards it's worth bringing up the silent killer aspect is that it's most powerful here assuming the group is loud enough to mask the very small yet still noticeable noise the backstab makes you can basically be a lethal phantom who wipes out half the team or more if you're lucky these situations aren't exactly common but when they do happen it's frankly disgusting just how fast you can cut through a group another bonus of the silent backstabs is that even if you backstab a slow class at the back or middle of the group like a heavy or a soldier no one's noticed anyway so you can just swing your knife to get your normal spy speed back and get the faster guys ahead of him without issue on the subject of target priority since we've already mentioned one of spy's most frequent targets in the form of the engineer already let's talk about his other most frequent target the sniper for the most part how you deal with a sniper will be pretty much identical to any other knife and the sniper is a decently viable disguise that lets you keep a fair degree of speed and it's not something that a lot of spies tend to disguise as which is a bonus for fooling the enemy there is one small tiny minor drawback though the razorback exists now i personally think that the whole razorback invalidates spy as a sniper counter thing is pretty ridiculous since the spy can just shoot the sniper and go right back to business but that is completely out the window if you're using the eternal reward this thing was designed to be a middle finger to this knife specifically you cannot attack a razorback sniper without losing your now much more precious disguise and because you're essentially forced to run the lahorda you might not even have the easiest time gunning him down compared to the ambassador the stock revolver or even the enforcer and even if you do manage to kill the sniper you're stuck without a disguise unless you sacrifice all of your cloak so you'd better hope he was sniping around at least a medium ammo kit or else he just screwed you without even trying as if i needed another excuse to not like the razorback oh it's not a backstab stop giving me backstabs that aren't backstabs it's mean when it comes to these guys take them out if they're entirely isolated or if they're in a group save them for last if you can if your team is nearby then a lone sniper won't put up too much of a fight and if not you still at least stand a chance against them especially since you can't jirati bushwacka you if he has the razorback equipped and i think that just about covers things the year returner reward is a cool weapon on paper but it suffers from a lot of problems that spy has in general and exacerbates them communication screws it over entirely it's reliant on inconsistent mechanics and it's stapled onto the weakest class in the game so how do we fix this poor sad excuse for a knife i say we break out the old time machine on a couple things one get rid of or greatly reduce the cloak drain it's way too crippling two give back the quiet decloak because that would give this knife so much more utility quiet d-cloak used to be busted because it was not only attached to a hat making the mechanic pay to win to an extent but it was also compatible with the old dead ringer which made it insanely difficult to counter well with the new dead ringer that's not as much of an issue since it's not instantly rechargeable with a metal pack or a few backstabs a spy is putting himself in much greater risk by decloaking right behind a big group instead of heading to safer ground in order to assess his surroundings or take some pod shots with the latron j to get his cloak back up and get into a better position or have his escape tool ready and finally either get rid of the trade cloak for disguises thing or make it a lot less impactful like half your cloak for a disguise why not i'd much rather rely on smartly utilizing my cloak especially if it has silent utility than relying on a one-and-done disguise that is going to fool nobody and it lets the weapon keep the higher skill ceiling it had rather than dumbing it down so everyone gets to realize how bad it is so basically go back to pre-jungle inferno you return a reward but trade the disguise buff for a silent d-cloak buff yeah i guess i could have explained that a lot faster then just fixed the bugs surrounding the ragdoll still having cosmetics on and let me festivize it and i think the eternal reward would end up seeing a lot more use it's a shame that a knife that's this selectively fun to use is ultimately so punishing and mediocre it's a pub stomp weapon in the same way that spy is a pub stomp class if you're doing well with it you would have probably done well with any other option i mean come on the [ __ ] kunai exists like silent backstabs are nice and all but being basically unkillable as long as there's at least one [ __ ] on the enemy team is better but anyway that's it for now go out there and get those half a team chain stabs and tell them fish sent you [Music] [Music] [Music] oh yeah i'm feeling it thank god that soldier's body like wait okay anyway butthead's time

Channel: FishStickOnAStick - Gaming

Views: 639,997

Keywords: fsoas, fishstickonastick, tf2, team fortress 2, tf2 spy, tf2 spy tutorial, tf2 your eternal reward, your eternal reward, yer spy, your eternal reward spy, bad weapon academy

Id: uPy3brg4sfE

Length: 17min 18sec (1038 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 26 2022