The Short Circuit Is Weird

dispenser going [Music] up the short circuit is a really weird gun or tool thing I don't I don't know what you call whatever it is uh it's pretty strange but not literally strange no there's no such thing as a strange short circuit because valve was unable to make a strange variant since the short circuit was a promotional item for the release of this game that nobody's heard of and adding a new short circuit variant would require the Publisher's permission uh Val's work around to this legal pickle was to add stranger fires which were items that transformed the existing copyrighted items into new strange variants genius except they stopped dropping crates with strange fires in them back in like 2014 and for some reason they never made a new one for the short circuit so the short circuit isn't strange but it is it is it is most people know what it does but I don't think anybody really knows exactly how it works I mean even the Wikipedia page had this entire sentence that was just straight up wrong until I requested that it be fixed the short circuit doesn't stun people and it doesn't usually do 35 damage to the first person it hits I I actually have no idea how someone came up with that in this video I plan on going into extreme detail on why exactly the short circuit is in my opinion one of the most deceptively deep unlockable weapons in TF2 but before that I'd like to talk about this video [Music] sponsor after these mes we'll be right back War Thunder is the sponsor it's a video game the most all-encompassing vehicle combat game ever made actually it's like if this taunt for the soldier was actually real but also still in a video game you can take command of over 2500 tanks planes helicopters and ships under the wartime Mandate of 10 major nations from by planes and armored cars from a 100 years ago to the shiny fighter jets that Tom Cruz would love to be photographed in front of the combat in this game is not only historically accurate though it's immersive enough to think that you were drafted thankfully you're actually flat footed and in the comfort of your heated gaming chair there are over 70 million people playing this free game yes you can play this game for free on PC Xbox or Playstation and when you start playing today by using the link in the description you will be able to grab a massive Bonus Pack available for new and returning players that haven't played for at least 6 months this includes an exclusive Eagle of Valor vehicle decorator 100,000 silver lions and 7 Days of premium account status available for only a limited time so don't miss out go check out War Thunder if you're a fan of PVP combat military history and War thank you War Thunder for the sponsorship now let's get back to the regularly scheduled video Let's Get Scrat the actual way that the short circuit works and interact acts with the world of TF2 is somehow much more complex than what its ingame stats or even what the Wikipedia page would have you assume when you use the primary fire it works like an extremely short range very weak flamethrower it's more like a taser that doesn't really do anything except damage whatever is at Point Blank Range for 10 damage every 0.15 seconds costing you five metal per shot meaning that you can melt a light class in about 2 seconds for 65 metal I mean it sounds pretty decent on paper but in practice it's kind of a was of metal and is ultimately a pretty dumb way to kill someone impractical but funny which would describe half of the weapons in TF2 so it checks out congratulations for getting to kill with the primary figh of the short circuit that doesn't happen very often but the real way to use the short circuit and where the weirdness really starts to ramp up here is in the secondary fire which shoots a big bright 65 metal costing team colored ball that does a lot of weird stuff first of all it deletes projectiles which has always been the main draw of using in the short circuit any projectile except for ones that cannot be deflected are deleted once they enter this 300 Hammer unit wide boundary box of the ball but only if the ball feels like deleting it it really just depends what I mean is that the ball doesn't instantly gobble up a rocket or sticky bomb the moment the two of them intersect the ball periodically checks to see if there's a projectile inside of it every 0.105 seconds and if there is projectile go bye-bye like it works but there are some projectiles in TF2 that travel really really fast so fast in fact that there is a time frame in which a projectile can enter the ball right after it checks for projectiles and then manage to pass through it before it checks again this doesn't happen every time but it can happen after briefly testing each projectile that travels significantly faster than the base versions here are the percentages that I came up with but with anything based on the random variables of a tf2 match your results May Vary all right so it deletes projectiles most of the time big whoop but how can it do this or [Music] this I mean you look at that it's kind of like an OnDemand Rocket Jump for the engineer right this is flipping over the table of the movement hierarchy of TF2 as we know it why is this not causing chaos in the streets am I the only one around here the short circuit well it's pretty situationally advantageous to be doing this to be honest and it actually requires some pretty specific circumstances to even work in the first place so let's explain starting from a fun little TF2 fact all damage in this game no matter how small has knockback that is greatly increased when the player taking that damage is Airborne or off the ground in any way whether you're flying through the air like a bird or just pressing the space bar to jump the amount of damage you take translates to the distance in which that damage can knock you back so if you get peppered by a scatter gun from across the map you'll go 2 in back and if you get your rocket reflected back at you for a billion damage you'll go flying all the way back to spawn in addition to deleting projectiles on a repeating tick the short circuit ball also does damage on a repeating tick but not the same repeating tick it's a separate one it's 15 damage and repeats every half second before it either explodes on its own or hits a surface the ball actually doesn't seem to take damage at all when fired normally at nothing probably because it would end up just hurting the engineer when it takes that first bit of damage on firing it but if the ball detects an enemy player in ins side of it it starts taking damage on them immediately this means that if an enemy and the engineer firing it are both inside of the ball when it takes damage both players will be affected by it so you might be able to see where this is going already but there's actually a second part that is just as important if the ball explodes before hitting a surface it will explode for another 15 damage independently from The Tick damage meaning that you can sometimes end up doing around 60 damage to someone who is running along with the ball ball and then gets caught in the explosion at the end pretty cool uh but that's not the relevant bit what's relevant here is that the ball explodes instantly when it hits a surface doing another 15 damage that is and I cannot stress this part enough independent from The Tick damage so this all means that if you hit an enemy with the ball while you're both standing inside of it and then the ball immediately hits the ground and then explodes the ball will do a guaranteed total of 30 damage to both the enemy and yourself 15 damage on the tick and 15 damage on the explosion so if you fire the ball at the ground while standing next to an enemy player and jump at the same time you will do 30 damage to yourself which will knock you into the air about 30 damage worth of distance this isn't an insane amount of height but it can often be enough to confuse or Delight your opponent and ideally give you an advantage of just some kind at the very least it might end up looking kind of funny or cool which is still kind of worth it fun little tidbit here is that if your enemy also jumps at the same time that you fire it they also will be sent into the air about the same distance not really useful at all but it can happen so this is the way that the short circuit jumping Works normally I mean it's not normal but this is like the normal way that it works you just Rocket Jump on your foes as engineer and you get some style points in exchange for 65 metal or fail spectacularly up to you but how the actual [ __ ] do you do this I mean normally this silly little move barely lets you clear the top of people's forehead heads but this this is starting to look more like a legitimate Soldier Style Rocket Jump how could this happen I don't understand what's going on here well the first thing to point out here is that there's nothing special about the way in which I'm executing the move nor is there anything different about what the enemy is doing in actuality the most important factor for pulling off this height with the short circuit jump is location location location in particular surfaces the ground the floor certain surf surfaces on certain TF2 maps for whatever reason just send you way further when you short circuit jump off of them if you're like me and have short circuit jumped off of the bots on TR walkway you may have already noticed this in fact it was kind of already known that this bug happens the same week that valve added the ball to the game but just like how anid opened my eyes to the Strategic potential of short circuit jumping in general he also went ahead and sent me this one day out of the blue and I was like what I was like huh don't understand what's going on here I was like this I did this face and so my investigation began it didn't take long to figure out the special buggy sauce about the walkway on this training map was present on this specific spot on badwater last so right away I asked my friend Grizzly Berry who is familiar enough with the hammer Editor to have made his own Maps what elements in these two areas are the same and like a bro he pulled through with some pretty Illuminating details so let's get into them here's what we found there are certain types of map elements that for some still unknown reason chalk it up to the source engine being itself make the shortcircuit explosion go off twice like it literally appears to stack on top of itself which is the most apparent when you listen to the sound effects I've only been able to successfully confirm a few different types of surfaces that cause the short circuit ball to react in this way Funk door or Funk door rotating prop Dynamic and Funk brush to very briefly explain the intended purpose of these elements in a super oversimplified way these are elements that for various reasons are animated that could mean like a door opening such as this gate a trapo opening like the one that opens to let the cart drop on last it could be something as simple as this sign raising on bad water or this big area rigged to explode on cash works so basically any relatively flat surface that changes or animates in a predetermined way usually tied to game logic has a pretty good chance of making the short circuit ball explode twice upon impact I say a pretty good chance because using these elements are not the only methods of animating things so things that seem like they would work for this trick such as this rotating panel on Barn Blitz ends up not working a good example would be the last point on Venice which looks a lot like the badwater one but simply doesn't contain the secret sauce for whatever reason but when it comes to the ones that do have that secret sauce for the purposes of this video I will just shorthand these areas as d damc surfaces these Dynamic surfaces are actually much more common than I expected across tf2's nearly 100 maps and I definitely haven't found all of them but the common type of dynamic surface has actually been right in front of us all along a control Point see when a team captures a control point it changes color essentially it animates from Blue to red and back again this means that any control point in the game is able to be utilized for these extra high jumps the tricky part part is mainly that it's only possible within this tight Circle and the point not being completely flat can actually make the double explosion not trigger if you happen to be angled improperly so it's actually kind of inconsistent but regardless the height that is possible off of control points is still practically nothing compared to what's going on here so what is going on here well in even more specific circumstances there can actually be two different types of dynamic surfaces stacked on top of each other in the the same place the perfect example of this is badwater and barn Blitz last which are essentially copy pasted from one another the trap door in the middle that opens to allow the cart to drop is a funk door and the entire area within the hazard marker is a prop Dynamic that animates the explosion that happens when it's capped these two elements overlap with each other which allows the ball to explode not twice but three times so instead of taking 30 damage 15 from the ball ticking on the enemy and 15 more from the explosion hitting the ground you're now taking 60 self damage 15 from The Tick 15 from the explosion hitting the ground 15 from Dynamic surface number one and 15 from Dynamic surface number two this is very similar to the kind of thing that is present in this specific spot on TR walkway the entire walkway is actually programmed to animate the Bots across the floor they're not really walking so it's more like TR float way and this panel that you can activate to make the Bots fly up in the air is a fun door rotating but what's even crazier about this spot is that there appears to be a third Dynamic element here that makes the ball explode for a third time the only place that I've been able to find this kind of insanity is actually on cash Works last I don't really know why it's like this but this entire area has three Dynamic elements stacked on top of each other engineer go flying I haven't really spent very much time investigating every single map in TF2 for more examples of these Dynamic surfaces so I'm sure that there are some out there that I don't even know about yet and I'm kind of hoping that after people see this video more areas where this kind of thing is possible get discovered hopefully some that are actually viable enough to be thrown into gameplay but at the end of the day really I just think that this Quirk which is one of the many weird quirks about the short circuit is just a funny little Tech that might occasionally make a highlight real to be honest I probably had more fun looking into exactly why these uncharacteristically high jumps are possible than actually attempting to do them in game because you're probably just better off shooting the guy but you know this way is cooler but now that the Secret's out I hope to see the occasional soaring engineer on badwater last that would be pretty funny thanks so much for watching and once again thank you to War Thunder for the sponsorship remember to use my link in the description to grab the bonus pack with all the stuff you see on screen it's available for a limited time only so don't miss out on that and I will talk to you nieces and nephews next time [Music] bye-bye [Music] aah

Channel: Uncle Dane

Views: 822,820

Keywords: team fortress 2, tf2, engineer, gameplay, guide, tutorial, tips, first person shooter, uncle dane, professional, pro, free to play, free, steam, sale, deal, items, crafting

Id: cq-MZauZ_uM

Length: 15min 17sec (917 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 30 2024