best spy strat, Diguise as a sniper, then stand on a spot doing nothing but jumping or spinning, then after a while that player you are disguised as gets kicked
I have actually tricked people on the enemy team by disguising as bots before. It's really fun until you get quick-scoped by the very bot you're disguised as.
something interesting about the kunai is the decreased overheal decay is a byproduct of the reduced max health. all classes typical overheal lasts for 15 seconds, that goes for both heavy's 150 and scout's 60, meaning it decays quicker the higher your max health pool is. since the kunai gives you double your max health in overheal, that's 4x more overheal than is typical, but 35 health decays in 15 seconds.
Thanks you for mentioning this it isn't spoken of enough. Another nearly inconsequential implication of the lower max health is that fall damage is also based on max health so a kunai spy will take the lowest fall damage in the game allowing them to stretch that 210 hp even further in certain edge cases.
@@mywither7878 i think so, some values are weird with rounding (ie 125hp only gets 60 overheal, 175 gets 85, 200 gets 100, 300 gets 150, obviously it's not exactly 1.5) but since it's based on the decay rate of how fast 30 overheal would decay with the medigun's buff, and since 60 is a round number and it's just the kunai giving extra overheal, it should decay in ~67.5 seconds (not sure how the rounding would work, but that's an extra 6-8 seconds of overheal compared to the current kunai though 15 less hp simply because you have 10 less base health.)
Kunai isn't a crutch for bad spies, it's a fucking jetpack for decent spies. At least we don't live in a dystopia where every spy uses the diamondback on top of the kunai. Great video as always fish.
I want to waterboard every single one of those fucking deadringer kunai diamondback spies who ALWAYS wear the cone hat (you know the one) and either the noh mercy or some bandana.
The diamondback situation is so sad because it's such an easy weapon to fix. Keep the crits on building destruction, ditch the crits on backstabs. At the moment, the diamondback rewards kills with more kills, a really bad rich get richer snowball mechanic that should be avoided. With just building destruction, the diamondback will actually reward you more kills for taking the less-kills route. It's perfect balance. In general, a spy tries for two things before death or escape: engi nest busting or sick chainstabbing. It is *very rare* that spies can accomplish both of these things simultaneously. So, if you were to make a reward for spy, reward one with the other, don't reward one with more of itself. This could also be a decent way to buff the red tape recorder. The more backstabs you get in one life, the faster the red tape recorder deconstructs buildings. Rewarding kills with building destruction.
agreed, personally a spy main and run ambi stock watch and kunai the diamond back feels way too cheap so i don't run it and the deadringer is just for chainstab pub but far far more likely bad spies that compensate for there mistakes and those are the same spies that will get little out of the kunai compared to a good spy. however personally don't use it as i play on uncletopia and deadringer apart from covering for mistakes is far less flexable and effective if you know truly how to use the stock watch well. and just use ambi as i find headshoting fun and do it consistently enough to not have to justify to switch to stock revolver.
Another thing with the kunai is that it meshes along with one of the other annoyances of spy, which is how unreliable and inconsistent the melee system and backstab recognition is and how unreliable spy is because of that. Sometimes some backstabs aren't even that well earned which makes the kunai all the more infuriating, besides it punishing everyone for the mistakes of few.
Fishstick! You forgot to mention that the dead ringer grants you a 75% damage resistance AND a speed boost which means not only will you have more health than a heavy, but also be faster then a scout! Bahahaha.
@@randomperson7350 eh still powerful, it doesnt suck really its still good, just not too infuriating to fight compared to its previous versions of having 90% damage resistance and can be recharged by ammo packs
@@RandomFurry07 its pretty solidly the worst Invis watch because you lose cloak on demand for a glorified damage sponge that takes 20 seconds to recharge
I love using the Spycicle. I just love making people into beautiful ice statues and it was the first strange knife I unboxed, so it holds a special place in my cold dead heart.
To be fair, spy is weak for a very good reason. If you were to make an argument for which tf2 class *should* categorically be the weakest, it's probably spy. And that's because spy isn't about strength, he isn't about topping the scoreboard, and he's not about lone-wolfing. Spy lives and dies for his team. In the same way that engi is support for within your front line, spy is support for well past your front line. Engineer is the defense, spy is the offense, but both are support. Engineer provides a location for the team to hold, spy provides an opportunity for the team to push. Making a class that is that potentially impactful into something that also has frontline strength is a terrible idea, as we can see with what is happening with interp abusing frontline kunai spies
In every encounter with any other knife, spy is a joke at best, what the Kunai does is allow years of experience in spy to shine. The Kunai isn't throwing all of your years of experience in the trashcan, it's only forcing you to actually put this experience in practice instead of just shooting the spy once and laughing it off.
The dopamine high you get being fast with the big earner will always be a reason to equip it over the kunai. The vulnerability of not being able to be full health after each stab really makes your plays while speedboosted mean so much more when you pull them off. The kunai is just the easy way out tbh
It is, but you have to play your cards right still. Big health boosts still mean nothing when your extra health can be shredded by a whole team that's now aware of you. The only way you can effectively escape if you can't get into their backs is to surf their explosions, their bullets, or use the dead ringer if you are a cunt.
Yeah, The Big Earner is honestly underrated. And even if the Kunai can sometimes lead to big chainstabs, so can The Big Earner. The speed it gives you can honestly set up some fat chainstabs. Heck, I'd even say that The Big Earner has massive utility in this regard because, like Soundsmith showed in his Mann's Guide video on it, you can absolutely get around to people's backs who are actively trying to aim-track you because they underestimate your speed.
I used to use the Big Earner because it was all i had, then i got the YER & boy have i really enjoyed the Among Us Spy, this shit is surprisingly terrifying in pubs.
Honestly the Big Earner was my go to with the Dead Ringer even before the speedboost because of the cloak on kill. Its really one of my favourite knives in the game
@@fujitachi I'm curious what you think is so bad about his arguments. Personally, I think its very agreeable. I'm of the opinion that it's both unfair and unfun to play against a good kunai spy because of how generally difficult it is to protect you own teammates from spies. Fish stick's proficiency with spy is not really relevant since most of the video is about why playing AGAINST a kunai spy is problematic.
The kunai is really strong but the video does just come off as making up some strawman turbo spy that haunts every pub and is a God because of the kunai and would be shit otherwise
@@nich3897 yea the kunai is only good against bad players and becomes a direct downgrade the second enemy doesnt have gibus heavies and snipers. No idea what fsoas was thinking while making this video
I rarely play spy, and I'm not good at him at all, but the silent backstabs does a good job at allowing you to escape after backstabbing some far off Sniper or Engineer.
Fun fact: the Kunai was a gardening tool, similar in purpose to the trowel. It was used by ninjas, but primarily as a climbing tool, not as a weapon, although of course ninjas were trained to use whatever they could get their hands on in a pinch.
@@shmoking466 Ninjas were real, just not the kind that pop culture portrays. For the most part they never did any of that edgy dark clothing nonsense over just dressing up as a normal farmer and shanking their target because it turns out that blending into the crowd Agent 47 style is a lot easier than trying to pull some weird shadow-stealth bullcrap that sticks out comically badly in daylight. The dark clothed pop culture ninja image originated as a stage prop in kabuki theater (people dressed in all black to blend in with a black background to carry things as ancient special effects that emulate floating objects and whatnot) that people ended associating with ninjas because...it just looked cool despite having no correlation with ninjas whatsoever.
@@shmoking466ninja's are just basically spies. Whenever they backstabbed someone while disguising as a farmer they took their life essence and became stronger. the legendary Captain phase tank is the last remaining ninja alive today and he has absorbed the life essence of thousands of players.... I mean... Farmers
I still remember when a lot of people used to pair the Kunai with the old Dead Ringer and it was hell on Earth to face against that I’m glad it got nerfed!
Right? Plus the old Amby, it was a nightmare to play against, and I say that as a spy main. But now the spy is _at best_ "in a fine place", not at all OP. Given all the more experienced players now, spy is weaker than ever. The real problem is always team balance, and has been ever since Valve took away team scramble. Every game is a roll and all that changes is which side of the roll you're on.
It makes me sad how I don’t see the Big Earner all that often and I usually always see the Kunai OR the Your eternal award. I freaking love the Big Earner because of the speed boost you get so you can jump in, kill 1 or 2 people, and jump out before you die. It’s really satisfying.
I think a good way to balance the kunai would be if it gave the health slower. Rather than instantly gaining 75 health it goes up like the rolling health in earthbound. That way after two pipes a demo doesn't have to deal with a 210 health spy, but rather a 50 health spy still healing.
Thats sounds like a pretty cool idea. This would make the Kunai less aggressive, and force them to make a choice: Go for more stabs or wait for your overheal.
@@ccarmilluwallpathat’s how the kunai used to work, and it wasn’t that good because of it. I think lowering the minimum overheal to something like 55 would be more balanced, that way it’s not immediately a straight upgrade to stock after 1 backstab, but also not useless against low health target
It doesn't matter how good at the game _you_ are. Hell, it doesn't even matter how good at the game the enemy spy is. All that matters when someone runs kunai is how bad at the game one's team is.
You could apply this to any other knife, to be fair. I do still get the sentiment - Kunai gives you way more flexibility and survivability, so you're more LIKELY to get those chains on a team that's unprepared (especially if you're not a great spy, it gives a bit too large of a safety net), but you could basically say this about Spy in general. Spy in general is going to destroy a team that is bad at the game.
It's always this fucking sentiment. People treat spy as a joke of a class that shouldn't be rewarded for skill so it's always your team that's bad or unprepared, but never hard work or game sense in the part of the spy.
@@SirCrusher There’s a lot of responses I could make to that, but for the sake of relative brevity, I’ll only use one. I absolutely believe in rewarding spies for skill. The problem is there’s not a single other weapon in the game that simultaneously lets you get away with playing like an absolute moron while also snowballing off others doing the same as much as the kunai.
@@purplehaze2358 but the Kunai doesn't do that. If a bad spy player has bad habits and manages to perpetuate them by using the Kunai, then he'll be stopped by average players. Bad habits will get you killed whether you have the Kunai or not, and if the Kunai gives the illusion that you're doing better while you maintain bad habits you're actually less effective in the long run.
I have to say, watching footage of a Kunai spy chain-face-stabbing three Heavies as they were actively pumping him full of bullets really made me think the problem isn't as much with the Kunai as it's at least partially on turbo janky facestab detection.
Perhaps, but the Kunai uniquely encourages taking a chance on spamming facestabs because you have the health to manage it and potentially will get an insane reward from it. With the other knives, you might occasionally get a bullshit backstab but your ability to seek them out is much much lesser.
@@disappointedoptimist255 Yeah, the Kunai isn't the most well thought out weapon, but it's made way worse by the fact it's design unintentionally encourages exploiting jank game mechanics.
this is why I always use the shahanshah. It lets you oneshot kunai spies that haven't gotten a stab yet, or ones that have gotten a stab with a crit if you've already been damaged. If you're above 50% health, it doesn't lose out on any damage thresholds against kunai spies.
Once there was i red spy disguised as scout calling me to heal him and i saw how low his health was while i didn't even know he is a spy so i decide instead of medigun i used my Xbow to heal him quickly but instead i killed him 😂 Crusade crossbow is the best
Recently in asian servers, especially on community servers like uncletopia, kunais have been becoming more and more rare. During 2018-2020, almost every spy was using kunais, probably to counter the spike in pyro players, and throughout covid, as more people started playing the game for longer, it died back down. One possibility is that people just simply got bored of it, and wanted a challenge, to be able to feel something after that 7-player chainstab. I realised this way before my tf2-maturity, and eventually just traded my kunai. Now I am a significantly happier spy main, and actually enjoy playing spy more than ever before. The lack of kunai has also forced me to get gud with my revolver aim, and I have been hitting more and more ambassador headshots ever since.
@@cewla3348 If you can aim, stock is better than the ambi anyway. You need to be at the edge of the ambi headshot range for it to outdamage stock just pumping out bodyshots, and that's just incredibly difficult even for the best players. So keep that mf thang on you and just learn to aim it better, ahah. It's definitely a hard weapon to use though
I'm glad you finally made a video about this to fill in your lore, people who don't play and watch your editorial TF2 vids have been confused about why kunai spy was so bad. Also, all the problems you bring up apply to sniper, helpless feeling, feeling that you need to switch classes or play to hard focus them, a highly skilled player making it a nightmare for everyone else, etc.
The main problem is that kunai makes the big weakness of the spy, which is bad to meh direct combat options once caught out and high chance of death once that happens, irrelevant. Just power through and find some poor f2p to stab and go on your merry way. It would be more applicable if sniper had an unlock that invalidated his close range weakness... oh wait, Jarate. NVM.
@@Joural0401 the chances of even a good sniper pulling off a quickscope at close range is extremely low if you have decent movement skills as scout other close range combat classes like soldier, demo, demokinght, pyro can just decimates the sniper since they can survive a quick scope unless the sniper is good enough to quickscope + bodyshot or smg at close range in which case the sniper kinda deserves that kill you can also make arguments for other classes negating their main weaknesses like pyro having flareguns and demo having the lochnload and quickie laucher which helps them perform better outside of their effective range but for some reason these aren’t considered when discussing about “sniper is overpowered”.
Because with pyro and demo you're changing out super important slots to make up for your shortcomings, while creating new shortcoming in the process. With sniper you can equip jarate with basically no downside.
@@brianraley686 well yes i agree that jarate is overpowered but by picking sniper you’re sacrificing powerful combat abilities and pushing power of other classes for single target elimination
The main issue is once a kunai spy gets a backstab (even more so if they are also using the Dead Ringer), the only thing that can consistently kill them is a backstab from another spy. This is a problem since spy v. spy is not only not encouraged in game, but is a rarity even if it was encouraged.
Gotta say I don't encounter it too much either. The most fear-inducing Spies I have seen use the YER to melt a team before you can even warn them in voice chat. But maybe that's just me.
You can hear a YER stab sound. I'd say it's the weakest spy knife but still it isn't bad. The fact you can hear people getting stabbed by YER and the fact you can't disguise and cloak to escape after using gun (killing razorback sniper) sucks.
The kunai is one of the few weapons I think should be balanced around casual rather than comp. It's not a knife to be used by bad spies, it's a knife to be used against bad players
I think the entire concept of the weapon is busted as a result. Extra Credit made a video about it, but the TL;DR is you don't want new players to ragequit forever because they're getting dominated by a Kunai Spy. (The good players should still get better results, but you want weapons, characters and the like to encourage the worse players to hang around and git gud rather than punish them into leaving.)
Yeah let's nerf Spy even more! The weakest class in the game, getting more nerfs, ever sending him into obscurity. Quit meet riding. Fish made a super L take.
@@Harrisonmego No, spy is still extremely fun when you're not dominating everyone by getting one stab Nerfing one knife isn't fundamentally nerfing spy, it's nerfing everyone reliant on it
@@NotFine Nerfing a weapon for a class makes the class less fun because it eliminates choice and variety. Do I need to run down the list of busted Spy unlocks for you?
Same honestly. I got a strange for each of the stock items. Maybe I just suck but whenever I equip the kunai or big earner every demoman on the server gains magnetic grenades.
@@OldandAbandonedHarcorte I'm a spy main with 150+ hours in the class, usually going with the stock loadout. When Fish said that you don't get hit much when you're invisible I had to pause the video and sigh
As an ex spy main (for now i switched to scoutie), my favorite loadout of all times is a stock clock reskin, ambassador and the big earner and i feel honored by this video.
0:06 Absolutely no one heard of “spy syndrome”. This is a very common trope in the community to make shit up, be that categorization on terms and then act as if it’s popular. 0:45 “Glass cannon” implies that a class with that description can do lots of harm but will easily die. Spy can die easily, but I don’t see him doing more harm than sniper. Sure, he can instakill fast, but that’s limited to hypothetical scenarios whenever it’s not f2ps around a cart. Sniper can kill a light class every 1.5 seconds, yet no one brings that up as a point because it isn’t. Soldier can shoot his rockets at a massive group of people, killing more people than shots fired, but again, no one brings it up. 1:48 Kunai is very often used, but you make it sound like it’s used above everything else like it’s the ubersaw of knives. It’s on par with stock in how often it’s used as if that’s a point. There was a period when the hothand was used almost exclusively because funny ha ha meme. Use doesn’t automatically mean that a weapon is good. The kunai is a more fun option for most people, and I think most better spy mains would tell you that stock outdoes kunai in most cases. 1:52 Isn’t that a point against you, though? That the kunai isn’t really that good, but the people who use it are? It takes 8.5k kills to get a strange to that level. 2:47 I have over 1k hours on spy and a friend of mine who showed me this video has over 1.3k, and I can confidently tell you that I am not good enough to make the kunai work better stock in the vast majority of situations. Health matters, believe it or not. Random damage happens. Spam is everywhere, more on some maps, and less on some others, but it’s generally everywhere. There are many situations where there isn’t a convenient route around it and you have to go directly through it. This is when you die. Random spychecks, which cost the enemy absolutely nothing, will kill you far sooner, and especially if they’re done as you’re decloaking. Kunai works in situations where you’re gonna be shot at after a stab, but you gotta realize that those situations are typically the situations where you will be shot at before you even get a stab. You’re making a point against all this by asking a snarky rhetorical question the answer to which is “often”. 3:12 There is a huge difference between 70 and 125, as you yourself said. There’s a bigger relative difference between that than between 125 and 210, so I don’t see how you can two points that follow the exact same concept and disregard the one that goes against your narrative. You reacting to a damage source is going to last quite a bit longer than 0, and you will take the same amount of damage when you’re at 125 hp and when you’re at 70. 65 leftover hp is a lot more than 10 when fighting a pyro. You can still get a trickstab in with 65 and pop the deadringer or maybe even use stock invis to escape, but you simply can’t do that with 10. You can take a pill at 125 and keep going, being very likely to avoid whatever comes next if you’re invisible, but you can’t do that at 70 because you’ll be dead at the first shot. 3:29 There are scenarios where you can’t possibly escape. The thing is, the majority of the time, you can, even with the c&d, not to even mention the deadringer. If you can’t, that’s on you, but decent spies can. Bumping a player isn’t always a death sentence and neither is failing a stab. The spy in the clip in the background did exactly the thing you’re claiming is statistically irrelevant. He got 0 backstabs, yet he got away despite being shot at. 3:59 You use gameplay footage from good spies that aren’t you and then you proceed to say you’d nerf the kunai, a weapon you make out to be by far the most popular knife on what good players (good spy mains especially) realize is the weakest class in the game. 4:10 You made a true point that it doesn’t matter for the spy if the target being backstabbed has 1 or 1000 health. So, if you put the same effort in, why would the reward be drastically lower? Also, a kill like that will give you a temporary 20hp boost over stock, which you call massive, and you said that permanent -55 is practically irrelevant, so I don’t see how your logic follow. 4:34 Target prioritization is a concept that might as well not exist in casual. It’s only relevant in comp, which, the last I checked, makes 2% of the player base and thus the game. And to say it entirely doesn’t matter is simply false. If you stab a medic and not a heavy, you can be theoretically melted in 0.42 seconds as opposed to 0.25 with stock. And this ain’t chess. You very often don’t have the luxury of picking kills. You go for whoever is the closest, and when you go against that to “help” your team of randos and strangers, it’s always at the cost of your performance. 4:58 That superiority doesn’t always end up mattering, as demonstrated in the clip you played in background while making that point. 6:06 180 was less than 195 even before the advanced math that came with the update. Now a soldier needs to fire 3 base damage shots to kill you as opposed to 3 before the update, and you need to hit 5 as opposed to 5 before the update. If that’s hard to manage to a soldier and if a change is palpable, than that soldier deserves to die. If you get overheal that high, it’s gonna take 4-5 seconds for it to deplete below the threshold. So with max possible overheal and if a demo was to shoot two consecutive pills at you, it’d make the difference you claim it makes. Realistically, you’ll take damage from other sources and you won’t eat two pills in 3-4 seconds. When were snipers quickscoping kunai spies to begin with? If you’re relying on melee crits to kill spies, you’re doing things very wrong. 7:07 And how often does you entire team die in several seconds to a kunai spy? Certainly happens much less than a soldier pubstomping, especially if there’s a medic, which there usually is. So, a great spy mains with a pocket and a uber at the end did what basically never happens, against what’s clearly an incredibly bad team and not a single player dealt 125 damage to the spy by themselves, so you can’t even say that this dying to an infinitely regenerating spy because he was infinitely regenerating is backed up by the gameplay. I’ve seen chains like that, they’re incredibly rare, but they do happen. What I haven’t seen is this to-be messiah being unable to save the team because the kunai spy just keeps killing teammates. 8:46 Yes, the mistake allowance increases dramatically. The thing is, that still is the mistake allowance you have for being on the enemy side of the territory, uncloaked and undisguised. There’s still plenty more for you to do wrong than there is for most of your enemies to do wrong. And if you think that in situations like these, as demonstrated by the background footage, you have any advantage over a soldier surrounded by his teammates, you’re wrong. 8:59 Funny how you bring up Sisyphus into this. Dying with the kunai after a backstab starts this lovely cycle of having next to no health and getting a backstab all over again. Helpless really is the best word to describe this feeling. Awful point. 10:08 You made a point that counters the point you made right after it. Yes, it’s the same, you’re helpless to wait in every case, with every weapon, as is the nature of the respawn timer. Most of spy’s rampages end with him dying as well. 10:42 Yeah, having shitty teammates sucks when you have a kunai spy to deal with sucks. That applies to literally every other weapon. If your problem with the kunai specifically is that the spy has a stat boost against you, then you can sleep firmly knowing he’s not coming after you, but the first unaware or otherwise easy to stab teammate he sees. pt. 1/2
10:57 When does this happen? Where are these overpowered, insanely good pubstomping kunai spies to come at you every time you turn on the game? It’s a problem that doesn’t exist. How often do you look at sky, watchful of comically large neon pink grand pianos falling down to get you? 11:06 I’ve been active on TF2 forums for 5 or 6 years, I’ve had many spy main friends, the friend of mine is even had tons of spy youtubers in his friends list, and I can confidently tell you that I’ve never seen that point made. The one guy you showed making that argument doesn’t make the argument popular. 12:57 So a spy with a draining 210 health and a weapon arsenal you yourself said is weak is somehow infinitely stronger than a solder at 200 actual health and a rocket launcher? Even with full overheal, it takes roughly 40 seconds of completely inaction in terms of taking damage for you to get to 125 health. 13:11 If you’re consistently winning 4v1s as the weakest class in the game wielding a knife that one shots only from the back, then yes, you’re a good spy. Go ahead, try to demonstrate to me how it’s actually easy and all everyone needs is the kunai. 13:25 And here’s why the word “potentially” never means anything to you people. Yes, when you fully abuse something to its theoretical limit, it tends to get absurd, but it’s in no way indicative of actual balance. A uber does this tank aspect quite literally infinitely better. It doesn’t make the uber this infinitely powerful game-breaking thing. And let me give you an example that follows your own logic. Any class with any weapon can heal with healthpacks, granting them potentially infinite health, which is more than an overhealed heavy, in case you haven’t noticed? Not specific enough? Heavy has the sandwhich. Even better than the kunai, as he doesn’t even need to get kills! Medic doesn’t even need to use a weapon to get his passive healing, so as long as he survives the entirety of every encounter for the entire match, just like the kunai spy, he can simply not die. 13:44 Let me run you through a scenario. A soldier attacks me, doesn’t kill me and I heal. Then he attacks me again, doesn’t kill me, and I heal. Then he attacks me again, doesn’t kill me, and I heal. Then he attacks me again, doesn’t kill me, and I heal. Then he attacks me again, doesn’t kill me, and I heal… No shit you won’t die if don’t die. Your point is literally that the spy has the ability to survive and will if you don’t kill him. 14:35 Your point isn’t exactly being helped by you saying that the thing helping it is an exaggeration. 14:52 Because a 504 hp heavy doing up to 500 dps is very much not the same as a spy at 210 health doing up to 50dps facepoking you in hopes of getting a backstab. 15:29 So the background footage is of some no skill spy brainlessly tanking damage? And he’s doing nothing more than basic easy spy gameplay? 16:03 The big earner has the exact same flaw as the kunai. It punishes you for the mistake of others. If you want to make a point that that’s the huge deal braker for kunai, then make it for the big earner. You already said the even with the overkill, a kunai spy is easy to kill, so… The idle watch for f2ps is just that, a disgrace to balance and you can’t tell me that the l’etranger doesn’t have a huge crutch element to it. There isn’t a flawless weapon. 16:19 But I thought it was incredibly easy, hence you can just equip the kunai, win 12v1s easy, as so many spies do on the daily, as you describe it. 16:21 So, a player with over 4.6k hours self admittedly can’t pull shit off that to “any degree of reliability” that supposedly makes the kunai op? Excuse me, but how good do you need to be to do it? How much time do you need to spend? And how often are players more experienced for this for the weapon to be an issue? 16:27 That would require the entire concept of healing to be removed entirely. 16:54 If you’re making absolutely stupid plays, you ain’t getting the overheal needed not to die when doing them. Is a stupid play the one that results in you killing multiple people and then tanking damage you otherwise couldn’t have? Doesn’t sound stupid to me. 17:11 Consistency matters. If it’s not consistently a crutch, then it’s not a crutch. Let’s say a clueless player get a stab and survives when they shouldn’t because they had the kunai. What then? They have no overheal left and they’re stuck at 70 hp. They’re not gonna be able to pull off another kill like that and will instead die. How does that differ from them getting a kill with stock and dying? 17:47 Yeah, it’s superior to trash. 19:16 No. The spycicle gives you flame resistance for having it in your hand. The kunai gives you health when you kill someone with it. Pressing Q and killing a player are multiple orders of magnitude different in difficulty. For this entire video, you’ve been pretending that playing with the kunai has you running around at 210 hp at all times and healing whenever you see a player. 19:33 And is that not earned? Backstabbing someone at 70 hp and trickstabbing a pyro to survive the afterburn seems like enough effort for the reward. 19:53 I have absolutely no clue what you’re talking about. As people tell you, your experience is not representative of the actual state of the game. And I’m willing to accept your admission. 20:24 As stated already, two spy mains with more than 1k hours on the class aren’t good enough to use it over stock. That’s good of a reason as reasons get. This lovely 2.4k review of your video was a common act and tribute of Smoke and Fujitachi.
"Yeah it's superior to trash" Hot Take but it's not even superior than the other knives lol, I'd argue that even the YER is better because it's chainstabs don't rely on how many bullets you can take before eventually running out of the supposed walking health packs to grab.
@@turkishjanitor3666 I'll take remaining undercover between backstabs over rapid healing that only saves you in situations the Big Earner would've done better.
the only reason I can think of why spy often gets really strong weapons is because hes a fragile class and his ability to win is drastically effected by the enemy team's skill, like if a spy wants to take out an engineer nest, a pyro with a homewrecker will make the spy's job absolute hell. So most of the knife unlocks have abilities based around giving a bonus on backstab to help you out. Its just that kunai, lets you get away with things you shouldn't have.
@@cewla3348 it takes one hit at the building and the sapper is gone, they can literally just hit it and immediately turn around, or at least light the spy on fire before hand so he can't even hide or escape once the pyro wastes like 1 or 2 second saving the buildings, or airblast him, especially with the degreaser
Honestly he should have never been in the game to begin with TF2 A game that PRIDES itself on player skill Has a class whose core design is antethetical to the whole concept
I'm surprised you didn't even mention the potential synergy with the Diamondback. In addition to 200 health, what if every link in your chain stab gifted you a free gun crit? Just imagine stabbing half the team, skedaddling with the Dead Ringer, then picking off the other half with your bounty of crits. Totally earned team wipe.
the gun mettle buff really turned this weapon into the old ambassador, it just overshadows everything now. can the devs at least make the health gain minimum 55 to match your starting health? i mean, at least it declines, so you won't stay at 125 for any longer than a second or two unless you're really fast.
bro is writing weapons down in his death note all jokes aside, i really appreciate it that you were able to get the thoughts a lot of us have across like with the scorch shot
I have 2 ideas on how to maybe fix the Kunai. If you want to keep the upside of gain hp on kill and overheal, then a downside that could be done to at least make it harder would be to lower the backstab radius. Make it harder to just trickstab people because you were angled a certain way on their hitbox. This has been done in the past by Valve but it was a universal knife change that was reverted. The second idea is the completely change it's stats, but make it have the same sort of identity. Every backstab gain +15 max hp, up to a max of 150, and with every backstab heal 35hp. Downsides would be the Kunai swings slower, so the window of opportunity for your team to turn around is increased before they continue the chainstab. And either increase cloak drain, or add the old Enforcer downside of +.5 seconds to activate cloak (especially if you can figure out how to make it work on the Dead Ringer). Maybe these ideas are bad, idk. But these are just my thoughts on how to maybe fix the Kunai.
I think either a cooldown on lifesteal or greatly diminishing returns on subsequent stabs in a small time frame would work well to balance the knife's current stats.
Instead of cooldown on lifesteal, just make it so kunai spy cannot receive overheal while having any overheal. This will also create dramatic moments of tension and decision making, as spys overheal is now both a timer to get things done fast, as well as a restriction from doing so well that you run out of guys to stab for health before you can actually heal again
14:22 This chainstab... I don't doubt that the Kunai has problems (though I think Valve would kill it if they ever decided to nerf it) but the problem with this whole segment was backstab registration and once again clueless players. It's just that the Kunai allows you to *continue* to abuse those to aspects of the game by keeping you alive the whole time.
you can tell fishstick is tealking from a place of in-experience because most of his clips of actually good gameplay, arent his clips, or are repeats from earlier in the video its like fishstick was like "the knife is op, very very rarely, but im going to make it seem like its op, almost always" "the only reason not to use the kunai, is because you dont want to, or dont have one" this sentence alone discredits fishsticks opinion here, its like he has never used it, and if there wasnt (some) footage of him using it here, i wouldnt believe him if he had told me he had used it
"i guess the wrench really suffers there though" brother, as an engi main, stock is one of the better wrenches, especially when playing a more aggresive playstyle. being able to knock sapper off is 2 hits with no downsides is super userful. some would prefer the urika effect, but i find the benifits of it to not outweigh the downsides, especially when you're not playing somthing like payload where you dont need teleporters as much
How to nerf Kunai without pissing off (maybe?) most Spy mains: Make the overheal decay faster. The Kunai overheal decays slower than the Medics' overheal...
Adding a cooldown of like 5 to 10 seconds to the lifesteal of the kunai would balance it quite well i think. It would force the spy to think more carefullly before running into a big group, and give others reasonable time to kill him.
My biggest balance change I’d like to add is honestly a cool down on the health on kill. Maybe like 3-5 seconds. This would force to the spy to pick their targets wisely as well as completely eliminating a spy just tanking 100’s of damage.
I remember in one of STAR_'s TF2x10 videos, a soldier had the black box and it instantly healed him for 200 hp per hit. And despite getting shot like 10 times with fully charged minicrit sydney sleepers and multiple flares, he just would not die.
Another thing worth noting, is that the Kunai allows Spy to change how they play to such an insane degree, that it's almost like a subclass, but you aren't giving up Spy's actual kit. You can still do all of the normal Spy things, but now you can also forgo stealth to start acting like a power class through the enemy team. Sure it isn't necessarily easy to do, but difficulty alone shouldn't justify insane rewards (a similar point I make against Sniper's balance, because difficulty can be overcome with experience). I'd say for a Kunai rework: What if they reduced the health penalty to either -25 or -35 (putting you at either 100 or 90 base HP respectively), and then making it so the knife no longer grants you immediate chunks of health. You would instead get a weak health regeneration for "insert duration" on backstab (say 10 or 15 HP/s). This regen would allow you to overheal, similar to a Medigun, and if needed they could make it so the overheal rate is slower (sort of like how the Vaccinator takes longer to overheal a target). Now sure, this would allow the Spy to get to a high health total, but you'd have to literally be choosing to not damage the Spy for a long time. This would significantly reduce a Kunai Spy's ability to ignore damage, but it would also still make it a good escape knife, especially when fleeing with your cloak.
@@SirCrusher Yes, of course it's an exaggeration, I shouldn't have to state that, but I guess it isn't obvious enough for some people. The point is that the Kunai lets you play very differently to how Spy is intended to function, without any major kit sacrifice to do so. Instead of being a pick class that ambushes important targets, you can throw subtlety to the wind and stab to your heart's content, unless the enemy team decides to direct their undivided attention to you. It'd be like if the Gunslinger was still able to make level 3 Sentries, or if the Demoknight still had access to the Stickybomb Launcher.
@@trainershade1937 that's not actually true, if you don't pick important targets the power classes will get you. That's what always happens. People adapt to the Kunai too easily. It's one of those weapons that seem strong but lose power once people notice it
Ik this isn't related to the actual video's content in any way, but I always gotta appreciate whenever Fish used background music from the Sly Cooper series in his videos. I recognized the Opera of Fear chapter's hub world AND encounter theme from 3 damn near instantly because of how much these games are ingrained in my memory 😁
It doesn't "Encourage good team coordination" so much as "Reward good team coordination and punish a lack of team coordination" but not actually changing the likelyhood of said coordination occuring.
Ngl this guy lost me at "what if every class had a kunai type weapon" argument. It'd be broken because they're not a spy lmao It's like asking if the scout should have access to a rocket launcher
I personally use the YER just because the silent kill and disguise let you slip into the usual tf2 chaos and stab whoever you want. way too often you can just stab someone being pocketed by a medic and grab a free heal or even get ubered. only real downside is it encourages such a weird playstyle that any other knife feels weird to use
Problem with the kunai is that very often, even if you are too savvy to be consistently backstabbed by that same spy during the whole round, you are still often dealing with an unkillable nuisance, arguably the same issue with the dead ringer. Sometimes is not like they accomplish that much but rather that it transforms a lot of their mistakes from game changing issues to slaps-on-the-wrists. And of course a beast of a spy is a nightmare unless you can actually outsmart him (good spies are more based on outsmarting them rather than overpowering them).
I just realized something: The more you focus on the spy, the less time you spend on focusing on the enemy team. So in other words, the more clueless and braindead players you have on your team, the more time you will be forced on focusing down the spy, which in turn makes it easier for the enemy team to focus you down and kill you. In other words, the spy can easily force your attention onto him more often than his team.
The Kunai is Spys best knife, and it still doesn't stop him from being massively underpowered to the point of near unplayability in anything except a pub match. And saying something is overpowered in a pub isn't exactly a profund statement.
I think I might live in that alternate dimension. I haven't played in months, but I don't remember ever seeing just kunai spies. I have over 600 hours on Spy and my most used knife is stock. I don't even think I play better with the kunai. Maybe it's my playstyle. After I get a few stabs, I usually just run away. Never really tried the facetank strategy, because I'm not good with trickstabs. Besides, I use my gun more. I have more kills on my strange revolver than my strange kunai, and they're both far from Hale's Own (although, tbf, I haven't used either too much).
I honestly think the Kunai could be fixed with one simple nerf. Add a five second cool down on being able to get health from back stabs. For example, stab, you get your health and if you got another three within those 5 seconds you would have gotten no more health.
Spy still works even against experienced teams, you just need to wait for the enemy team to be distracted by your own team's coordinated push, thus causing the enemy team to get wrecked when you get your textbook med pick against them
I just hit 50k kills on my YER. I run it with Amby and stock invis watch. Hearing someone say "spy as me" gives me dopamine that can't be compared to using kunai dead ringer.
The YER actually has a hidden stat that no one talks about which is its a sentry repellent, with the auto disguise feature backstab sentry guns will always ignore you, making it really nice to bust turtling engies up
It's funny how you say that's the best while you're almost instantly killed by everyone if you make the smallest mistakes. Sure it can be great when there's a good spy but that can be said with every spy knife.
I know it's probs me being bad at spy but I find I can never use the Kunai, I think the bonus HP isn't that strong cuz it goes away in time plus if you make a minor mistake and get hit by something small it matters alot cuz your hp is tiny
Spy is my most played class and I've rarely used the Kunai, the only times I have are mainly mvm or when I was achievement hunting with friends, although I will admit that my own personal tastes and playstyles contribute heavily to not using it. I like the whole sneaky and stealth approach to spy since you can't really do that as any other class unless you pretend to be friendly or something.
What I'd do to fix the Kunai would be simple. + +25 HP Heal 50 HP on melee kill - This weapon has a small swing delay No overheal Reduced sapper health ± Every kill you get increases your health recovery and gives you a damage resistance (up to 75 HP healed and 20% damage resistance) for up to 20 seconds, but you're unable to cloak after a kill for 5 seconds, up to 20 seconds. These boosts will not drain while you're near a living or recently killed (registered as having been killed for less than a second) opponent and increase in 5 seconds every kill you chain.
i love how in the rare ocasions where i get a perfect backstab oportunity and get behind someone it just doesent count as a backstab and i just use the knife and get instantly killed
I think the kunai needs a downside that isn’t related to health, possibly something along the lines of reduced cloak or reducing max move speed to 100% (and reducing the max overheal back to 195 or 200) Hell, it could be the opposite of the YER and make a distinct sound whenever it lands a backstab
I think 2 nerfs and buffs that would make the kuni not as insane. Buff: Make the hp penalty down to 100 Nerfs: Add a 12 second cooldown to the hp gain, making it so he can gain the hp but not chain stab while being unkillable Make him unable to gain overheal passively besides kuni
I recommend a 10 second cooldown on the kunai's health reward after each stab. You still get the risk-reward, 70 to 200, but you have to hold on to it.
The overheal drain rate only depends on your base health, not what you got the overheal from. It's just that the kunai lowers the base health a lot so the drain rate is lowered by a lot too. You always lose 50% base health in 15 seconds. From 300% you drain to 100% in 60 seconds.
Spy is a glass cannon whose glass is tempered for extra strength. The big earned forces you to be corporate glass in exchange for extra gunpowder. Kuni just boosts your kind of gunpowder for slightly more money.
There’s also the hidden stat on the Kunai. “Every stab counts as a backstab.” Like for real look at 7:07. Literally stabs a demo from directly in front of him.
@@Eye_Of_Odin978 well sniper is just fundamentally designed to make you worse at the game. He encourages negative thinking. Literally sit behind your team and occasionally check for a spy. Then kill everyone across the map instantly and remove and meaningful engagement. The bazaar bargain just makes all of this worse, but sniper conceptually is a stain on the game and it would be better without him.
Something to think about with spy knives is that most of them are designed around chain stabs. Examples being the YER, BE, and the Kunai. And the positive outcomes of the knives are the same but different, the end goal is the same anyways. And escaping is similar but different, the BE with it's speedboost, the YER with it's stealth, and the Kunai with health. Makes you think how limited spys play styles and weapon uses are.
@@mariustan9275 there's plenty of ways to change up spy's knives, how about a throwing knife with ranged stabs and hits that's on a cool down. How about a knife focused on boosting your revolvers power post stab, a knife that involves explosive backstabs. There is a lot you can do to completely change the way the knives play, but they all play similarly but the difference are the post backstab survivability.
@@thefatherlydecoration4629Ranged backstabbing? That sounds like it'd need a ton of balancing to not make it into "one shot across the map that you could have never seen coming". That could be Sniper but with less aim and more unpredictable because a Spy can throw thus while jumping around. At least with Sniper spots they are usually flankable. The second idea for a knife that powers up your gun sounds cool. I think Soundsmith suggested that and also the DB rework on the fish rebalamce server does that. Also explosive backstabbing? How will that work? OHKO everyone around whoever was stabbed? That also needs serious balancing because dying just because a Heavy got backstabbing sounds like it'd be infuriating
@@mariustan9275 As for the ranged backstab, i'd make the projectile speed that of grenades. You know so it's slow and only somewhat consistent at mid range, and have no melee attack (kinda like the cleaver) and the cool down on it would be like 5 or 8 seconds.
@@mariustan9275 For the explosive knife, give it like a small ammo count (like 5 knives that are on cool down, ammo packs don't give you knives). Giving it like a 3 second arm time (no chainstabs), and the AOE damage would be at most like 100.
i think the kunai should regenerate the health you would get instead of getting all of it instantly, that way you wouldn't be literally invincible as long as you have enemy backs in your disposal
@@mechadeka I can't be immune to dying when im up close to all classes. And since all classes deal max damage in close range, the survivability of spy is pushed even lower
Suggestion for balancing the kunai: instead of giving back health on kill, have it increase maximum health while leaving your current health as is. This would force the spy to disengage and find healing in order to actually make use of that larger health pool. Alternatively keep it the same but it only gives 50 health per backstab.
I still believe if you do good with kunai you'd do good with any other knifes, since the raw health on my experience never carried a spy too far or protected them from beign popped into the corner and mercilessly gunned\bombed down
I did the math, and here’s what every class would look like with a Kunai equivalent: Scout: A scattergun that reduces his health to 70, but any time he gets a meatshot kill (~75+ damage dealt), he gets overhealed up to 210 health Soldier: A rocket launcher that reduces his health to 110 (130 with the Backup), but any time he gets a direct hit kill, he gets overhealed to 330 health (390 with the Backup) Pyro: A flamethrower that reduces their health to 100, but a non-afterburn kill overheals them up to 300 health Heavy: A minigun that reduces his health to 170 (220 with the Dalokohs), but a non-falloff kill overheals him up to 450 health due to it being the maximum. It’d be 510 or 660 with the Dalokohs if there wasn’t a maximum. Demo: A grenade launcher that reduces his health to 100, but a direct hit kill overheals him up to 300 health. Demoknight: An Eyelander that reduces Demo to 100 health (125 with the Booties), but a melee kill overheals him up to 300 (375 with the Booties) Engie: A wrench that reduces his sentries’ health to 85, 100, and 120 for each level, but a sentry kill overheals the *sentry* up to 255, 300, and 360 health, respectively. This would stack with the Wrangler. Medic: A crossbow that can’t heal and reduces Medic’s health to 85, but a kill with the crossbow overheals the Medic up to 255 health. Sniper: A rifle that reduces his health to 70, but a headshot kill overheals the Sniper up to 210 health.
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best spy strat, Diguise as a sniper, then stand on a spot doing nothing but jumping or spinning, then after a while that player you are disguised as gets kicked
Your strats confuse and frighten me, sir
I have actually tricked people on the enemy team by disguising as bots before. It's really fun until you get quick-scoped by the very bot you're disguised as.
Bro Satan is afraid of you.
Sounds like fun
Damn bro I’m trying that now.
something interesting about the kunai is the decreased overheal decay is a byproduct of the reduced max health. all classes typical overheal lasts for 15 seconds, that goes for both heavy's 150 and scout's 60, meaning it decays quicker the higher your max health pool is. since the kunai gives you double your max health in overheal, that's 4x more overheal than is typical, but 35 health decays in 15 seconds.
Thanks you for mentioning this it isn't spoken of enough. Another nearly inconsequential implication of the lower max health is that fall damage is also based on max health so a kunai spy will take the lowest fall damage in the game allowing them to stretch that 210 hp even further in certain edge cases.
Does this mean back in the days of 60 and 195, that it was over 4x the duration?
@@mywither7878 i think so, some values are weird with rounding (ie 125hp only gets 60 overheal, 175 gets 85, 200 gets 100, 300 gets 150, obviously it's not exactly 1.5) but since it's based on the decay rate of how fast 30 overheal would decay with the medigun's buff, and since 60 is a round number and it's just the kunai giving extra overheal, it should decay in ~67.5 seconds (not sure how the rounding would work, but that's an extra 6-8 seconds of overheal compared to the current kunai though 15 less hp simply because you have 10 less base health.)
Kunai isn't a crutch for bad spies, it's a fucking jetpack for decent spies. At least we don't live in a dystopia where every spy uses the diamondback on top of the kunai. Great video as always fish.
Facts
And they don't all use the dead ringer...
I want to waterboard every single one of those fucking deadringer kunai diamondback spies who ALWAYS wear the cone hat (you know the one) and either the noh mercy or some bandana.
The diamondback situation is so sad because it's such an easy weapon to fix. Keep the crits on building destruction, ditch the crits on backstabs.
At the moment, the diamondback rewards kills with more kills, a really bad rich get richer snowball mechanic that should be avoided.
With just building destruction, the diamondback will actually reward you more kills for taking the less-kills route. It's perfect balance.
In general, a spy tries for two things before death or escape: engi nest busting or sick chainstabbing. It is *very rare* that spies can accomplish both of these things simultaneously.
So, if you were to make a reward for spy, reward one with the other, don't reward one with more of itself.
This could also be a decent way to buff the red tape recorder. The more backstabs you get in one life, the faster the red tape recorder deconstructs buildings. Rewarding kills with building destruction.
agreed, personally a spy main and run ambi stock watch and kunai the diamond back feels way too cheap so i don't run it and the deadringer is just for chainstab pub but far far more likely bad spies that compensate for there mistakes and those are the same spies that will get little out of the kunai compared to a good spy. however personally don't use it as i play on uncletopia and deadringer apart from covering for mistakes is far less flexable and effective if you know truly how to use the stock watch well. and just use ambi as i find headshoting fun and do it consistently enough to not have to justify to switch to stock revolver.
I just kinda use the "Your Eternal Reward" because people falling for the disguise is hilarious to me
Chad
I use it cause I don't like hearing screams.
@@Legend-Of-The-Sun What do you mean? The only thing I hear is screams from my teammates to stop using it
@flamecats yes! one of my favorite things to do is just meme on 2fort killing snipers
i use it too
Another thing with the kunai is that it meshes along with one of the other annoyances of spy, which is how unreliable and inconsistent the melee system and backstab recognition is and how unreliable spy is because of that. Sometimes some backstabs aren't even that well earned which makes the kunai all the more infuriating, besides it punishing everyone for the mistakes of few.
It's called the Big Earner, not the Well Earned 'er
Search circle strafing and the whole spy oriented community that investigates Spy's backstabbing potential.
It's the melee system's jankiness that caused facestabs.
Yeah the melee system is ass but I don't see any spies complaining about facestabs or stabbing the air and getting kills.
@@xXToxicXxification probably because spy gets fucked over by dumb hitbox mechanics, than the mechanics help him.
14:44
The acknowledgement of how cool Raw’s falling stab against one of his teammates was lol
He was so flabbergasted.
that was my clip :3c
@@rawccoon OMG IS THAT THE SUPER POPULAR POR- im mean tftuber
@@rawccoon Ok, will change comment accordingly
now there are hundreds of Spies who will name themselves "Captain Face Tank" after this video.
good.
Finally a worthy name
its not that funny
@@waterburgr it is
Fishstick! You forgot to mention that the dead ringer grants you a 75% damage resistance AND a speed boost which means not only will you have more health than a heavy, but also be faster then a scout! Bahahaha.
OH MY GOD IT’S ACTUALLY THEWHAT!!
Sadly the Dr sucks so it isn't the best option for spy :(
@@randomperson7350 eh still powerful, it doesnt suck really
its still good, just not too infuriating to fight compared to its previous versions of having 90% damage resistance and can be recharged by ammo packs
@@RandomFurry07 its pretty solidly the worst Invis watch because you lose cloak on demand for a glorified damage sponge that takes 20 seconds to recharge
Little less if you use the cloak gun to get back your charge
I love using the Spycicle. I just love making people into beautiful ice statues and it was the first strange knife I unboxed, so it holds a special place in my cold dead heart.
spycicle is the best gunspy (most fun way to play) knife as gunspy IGNORES the knife for a gun, so why not be immune to afterburn/pyro?
I just love spy-cicle bc I hate w+m1 pyro's when im playing Gunspy
I find that effect really cool too and I think the backstab sound is less noticeable than the default AAAAAAGHHHH
@@quotastrider801 true, Its also just a big middle finger to pyro's, once you use it you can safely gun down the pyro with your revolver
my heart is cold (BALLS)
my moves are bold (BALLS)
never get old (BALLS)
i save the world (BALLS)
Kunai allows you to counter the biggest hard counter to Spy;
Decades of players playing TF2, knowing each of his tricks, and having basic game sense.
Yes
Yeah it said something that kunai is only balance and fair because how weak spy is for even a few aware teammates(especially a paranoid pyro).
Ja
To be fair, spy is weak for a very good reason. If you were to make an argument for which tf2 class *should* categorically be the weakest, it's probably spy.
And that's because spy isn't about strength, he isn't about topping the scoreboard, and he's not about lone-wolfing.
Spy lives and dies for his team. In the same way that engi is support for within your front line, spy is support for well past your front line.
Engineer is the defense, spy is the offense, but both are support. Engineer provides a location for the team to hold, spy provides an opportunity for the team to push.
Making a class that is that potentially impactful into something that also has frontline strength is a terrible idea, as we can see with what is happening with interp abusing frontline kunai spies
In every encounter with any other knife, spy is a joke at best, what the Kunai does is allow years of experience in spy to shine. The Kunai isn't throwing all of your years of experience in the trashcan, it's only forcing you to actually put this experience in practice instead of just shooting the spy once and laughing it off.
The dopamine high you get being fast with the big earner will always be a reason to equip it over the kunai. The vulnerability of not being able to be full health after each stab really makes your plays while speedboosted mean so much more when you pull them off.
The kunai is just the easy way out tbh
It is, but you have to play your cards right still.
Big health boosts still mean nothing when your extra health can be shredded by a whole team that's now aware of you. The only way you can effectively escape if you can't get into their backs is to surf their explosions, their bullets, or use the dead ringer if you are a cunt.
Yeah, The Big Earner is honestly underrated.
And even if the Kunai can sometimes lead to big chainstabs, so can The Big Earner. The speed it gives you can honestly set up some fat chainstabs.
Heck, I'd even say that The Big Earner has massive utility in this regard because, like Soundsmith showed in his Mann's Guide video on it, you can absolutely get around to people's backs who are actively trying to aim-track you because they underestimate your speed.
I used to use the Big Earner because it was all i had, then i got the YER & boy have i really enjoyed the Among Us Spy, this shit is surprisingly terrifying in pubs.
The adrenaline highs you can get with the Big Earner are insane. I agree hard. You don't get that same feeling with the Kunai.
Honestly the Big Earner was my go to with the Dead Ringer even before the speedboost because of the cloak on kill. Its really one of my favourite knives in the game
He's done the Scorch Shot, and now the Kunai. Let's hope for the Vaccinator next.
It's only a matter of time for the vaccinator. It's been in our radar for a long time after all
do know pyro counter vac medic hard right ?
@@ammi5311 ubersaw counters pyro
@@lovecrisis619 can confirm this is true
Only melee counters vacc, with crits, because good luck trying to do that when you are not a demokmight
I airblasted a Kunai spy off a cliff one time and I swear to God I thought I saw him panic as he wondered why his Dead Ringer wasn't working.
GOOD LUCK FAKING THAT DEATH!
@@BLZ231spy falling while screaming
pryo mains try not to taunt spies challenge (impossible)
Bro made up a random scenario in his head delusional
@@ItsWoodSK I play TF2 ofc I'm delusional
You're getting rolled by kunai spies multiple times a week? I'm shocked whenever I see a decent spy.
Right? I'm far more worried about really good snipers deleting everyone from across the map to notice many spies doing well.
@@fujitachi I'm curious what you think is so bad about his arguments. Personally, I think its very agreeable. I'm of the opinion that it's both unfair and unfun to play against a good kunai spy because of how generally difficult it is to protect you own teammates from spies. Fish stick's proficiency with spy is not really relevant since most of the video is about why playing AGAINST a kunai spy is problematic.
@@fujitachi Thanks for elaborating. I'll check it out when you post it.
The kunai is really strong but the video does just come off as making up some strawman turbo spy that haunts every pub and is a God because of the kunai and would be shit otherwise
@@nich3897 yea the kunai is only good against bad players and becomes a direct downgrade the second enemy doesnt have gibus heavies and snipers. No idea what fsoas was thinking while making this video
The Conniver's Kunai: From glass cannon to *nuclear warhead.*
I'll always love the spycicle the most even if it's not the best. I love the art you can make with it.
real life sander cohen
I rarely play spy, and I'm not good at him at all, but the silent backstabs does a good job at allowing you to escape after backstabbing some far off Sniper or Engineer.
Spycicle, Dead Ringer, Red Tape, L'etranger. The annoying pest who doesn't die, you get to deconstruct buildings for essentially free
'art'
Get off it mate.
Fun fact: the Kunai was a gardening tool, similar in purpose to the trowel. It was used by ninjas, but primarily as a climbing tool, not as a weapon, although of course ninjas were trained to use whatever they could get their hands on in a pinch.
Fun fact Ninjas aren't real, at least not what you think
@@shmoking466 And how would you know what I think? I've heard others say the same. Invariably, they were mistaken.
didn't know that a trowel was used for climbing
@@shmoking466
Ninjas were real, just not the kind that pop culture portrays. For the most part they never did any of that edgy dark clothing nonsense over just dressing up as a normal farmer and shanking their target because it turns out that blending into the crowd Agent 47 style is a lot easier than trying to pull some weird shadow-stealth bullcrap that sticks out comically badly in daylight.
The dark clothed pop culture ninja image originated as a stage prop in kabuki theater (people dressed in all black to blend in with a black background to carry things as ancient special effects that emulate floating objects and whatnot) that people ended associating with ninjas because...it just looked cool despite having no correlation with ninjas whatsoever.
@@shmoking466ninja's are just basically spies. Whenever they backstabbed someone while disguising as a farmer they took their life essence and became stronger. the legendary Captain phase tank is the last remaining ninja alive today and he has absorbed the life essence of thousands of players.... I mean... Farmers
I still remember when a lot of people used to pair the Kunai with the old Dead Ringer and it was hell on Earth to face against that I’m glad it got nerfed!
with either ambassador for more pain or le'tranger for different flavour of pain
Right? Plus the old Amby, it was a nightmare to play against, and I say that as a spy main. But now the spy is _at best_ "in a fine place", not at all OP. Given all the more experienced players now, spy is weaker than ever. The real problem is always team balance, and has been ever since Valve took away team scramble. Every game is a roll and all that changes is which side of the roll you're on.
@@LividImp and a roll for how long before you get auto-balanced
@@metagamer1341 Watched it happen several times last night.
Laughs in the cloak gun.
It makes me sad how I don’t see the Big Earner all that often and I usually always see the Kunai OR the Your eternal award. I freaking love the Big Earner because of the speed boost you get so you can jump in, kill 1 or 2 people, and jump out before you die. It’s really satisfying.
Same
Because one pipe and you're ded
@@brounee2 Yeah if you run into one of the 9 classes it sucks, but you can just avoid them at the end of the day you have invisability.
I think a good way to balance the kunai would be if it gave the health slower. Rather than instantly gaining 75 health it goes up like the rolling health in earthbound. That way after two pipes a demo doesn't have to deal with a 210 health spy, but rather a 50 health spy still healing.
Thats sounds like a pretty cool idea. This would make the Kunai less aggressive, and force them to make a choice: Go for more stabs or wait for your overheal.
Or go half zatoichi route and allow 50% over heal (100hp) to be healed per stab
@@ccarmilluwallpathat’s how the kunai used to work, and it wasn’t that good because of it. I think lowering the minimum overheal to something like 55 would be more balanced, that way it’s not immediately a straight upgrade to stock after 1 backstab, but also not useless against low health target
@@orangejuice8279 or just reduce the amount of health you get.
It would have to heal at a rate over a quick fix uber, or the point of it giving enough to get out after a risky stab would be gone
It doesn't matter how good at the game _you_ are. Hell, it doesn't even matter how good at the game the enemy spy is. All that matters when someone runs kunai is how bad at the game one's team is.
when i play spy i either top score or at like 4 kills and 17 deaths never in between
You could apply this to any other knife, to be fair. I do still get the sentiment - Kunai gives you way more flexibility and survivability, so you're more LIKELY to get those chains on a team that's unprepared (especially if you're not a great spy, it gives a bit too large of a safety net), but you could basically say this about Spy in general.
Spy in general is going to destroy a team that is bad at the game.
It's always this fucking sentiment. People treat spy as a joke of a class that shouldn't be rewarded for skill so it's always your team that's bad or unprepared, but never hard work or game sense in the part of the spy.
@@SirCrusher There’s a lot of responses I could make to that, but for the sake of relative brevity, I’ll only use one.
I absolutely believe in rewarding spies for skill. The problem is there’s not a single other weapon in the game that simultaneously lets you get away with playing like an absolute moron while also snowballing off others doing the same as much as the kunai.
@@purplehaze2358 but the Kunai doesn't do that. If a bad spy player has bad habits and manages to perpetuate them by using the Kunai, then he'll be stopped by average players. Bad habits will get you killed whether you have the Kunai or not, and if the Kunai gives the illusion that you're doing better while you maintain bad habits you're actually less effective in the long run.
7:57 i hate you with every fiber of my being
I have to say, watching footage of a Kunai spy chain-face-stabbing three Heavies as they were actively pumping him full of bullets really made me think the problem isn't as much with the Kunai as it's at least partially on turbo janky facestab detection.
Perhaps, but the Kunai uniquely encourages taking a chance on spamming facestabs because you have the health to manage it and potentially will get an insane reward from it. With the other knives, you might occasionally get a bullshit backstab but your ability to seek them out is much much lesser.
@@disappointedoptimist255 Yeah, the Kunai isn't the most well thought out weapon, but it's made way worse by the fact it's design unintentionally encourages exploiting jank game mechanics.
I find the melee hitboxes cuck me just as often as they help me if not more
wdym there's absolutely nothing wrong with being backstabbed while you were looking directly at the spy, it's a """"""""feature""""""""
Face stabbing is and always has been a huge problem but spy players cry about it if you bring it up
this is why I always use the shahanshah. It lets you oneshot kunai spies that haven't gotten a stab yet, or ones that have gotten a stab with a crit if you've already been damaged. If you're above 50% health, it doesn't lose out on any damage thresholds against kunai spies.
22:54 Your disguise health was on max, which means not getting healed by a crossbow was quite logical. That's why he thought you were his teammate
does the crossbow not play a different noise when shooting a disguised spy?
@@MrJohn8apie it does, it makes the crunch sound effect it always plays when you hit an enemy
@MrJohn8apie maybe he didn't hear it
Once there was i red spy disguised as scout calling me to heal him and i saw how low his health was while i didn't even know he is a spy so i decide instead of medigun i used my Xbow to heal him quickly but instead i killed him 😂
Crusade crossbow is the best
Recently in asian servers, especially on community servers like uncletopia, kunais have been becoming more and more rare.
During 2018-2020, almost every spy was using kunais, probably to counter the spike in pyro players, and throughout covid, as more people started playing the game for longer, it died back down.
One possibility is that people just simply got bored of it, and wanted a challenge, to be able to feel something after that 7-player chainstab.
I realised this way before my tf2-maturity, and eventually just traded my kunai. Now I am a significantly happier spy main, and actually enjoy playing spy more than ever before. The lack of kunai has also forced me to get gud with my revolver aim, and I have been hitting more and more ambassador headshots ever since.
Any gunspies in asia? Revolver boys rise up
This comment reads like a guy getting off of some kind of addictive drug and improving his relationship with his family and children.
@@galacticgamer6635 what's the difference?
personally when I play spy i use stock revolver but its cause i cannot aim for the life of me and body is bigger than head.
@@cewla3348 If you can aim, stock is better than the ambi anyway. You need to be at the edge of the ambi headshot range for it to outdamage stock just pumping out bodyshots, and that's just incredibly difficult even for the best players. So keep that mf thang on you and just learn to aim it better, ahah. It's definitely a hard weapon to use though
11:19 "A meta weapon is a meta weapon. You can't say it helps with team coordination."
-TJ ""Orange"" Yoshi
I'm glad you finally made a video about this to fill in your lore, people who don't play and watch your editorial TF2 vids have been confused about why kunai spy was so bad.
Also, all the problems you bring up apply to sniper, helpless feeling, feeling that you need to switch classes or play to hard focus them, a highly skilled player making it a nightmare for everyone else, etc.
The main problem is that kunai makes the big weakness of the spy, which is bad to meh direct combat options once caught out and high chance of death once that happens, irrelevant. Just power through and find some poor f2p to stab and go on your merry way.
It would be more applicable if sniper had an unlock that invalidated his close range weakness... oh wait, Jarate. NVM.
@@bartoszkrawczyk5921 or if Sniper could pull out a quick scope at close range and negate their close range damage drop off, perhaps?
@@Joural0401 the chances of even a good sniper pulling off a quickscope at close range is extremely low if you have decent movement skills as scout
other close range combat classes like soldier, demo, demokinght, pyro can just decimates the sniper since they can survive a quick scope unless the sniper is good enough to quickscope + bodyshot or smg at close range in which case the sniper kinda deserves that kill
you can also make arguments for other classes negating their main weaknesses like pyro having flareguns and demo having the lochnload and quickie laucher which helps them perform better outside of their effective range but for some reason these aren’t considered when discussing about “sniper is overpowered”.
Because with pyro and demo you're changing out super important slots to make up for your shortcomings, while creating new shortcoming in the process. With sniper you can equip jarate with basically no downside.
@@brianraley686 well yes i agree that jarate is overpowered but by picking sniper you’re sacrificing powerful combat abilities and pushing power of other classes for single target elimination
The main issue is once a kunai spy gets a backstab (even more so if they are also using the Dead Ringer), the only thing that can consistently kill them is a backstab from another spy. This is a problem since spy v. spy is not only not encouraged in game, but is a rarity even if it was encouraged.
Gotta say I don't encounter it too much either. The most fear-inducing Spies I have seen use the YER to melt a team before you can even warn them in voice chat. But maybe that's just me.
You can hear a YER stab sound. I'd say it's the weakest spy knife but still it isn't bad. The fact you can hear people getting stabbed by YER and the fact you can't disguise and cloak to escape after using gun (killing razorback sniper) sucks.
The kunai is one of the few weapons I think should be balanced around casual rather than comp.
It's not a knife to be used by bad spies, it's a knife to be used against bad players
I think the entire concept of the weapon is busted as a result. Extra Credit made a video about it, but the TL;DR is you don't want new players to ragequit forever because they're getting dominated by a Kunai Spy. (The good players should still get better results, but you want weapons, characters and the like to encourage the worse players to hang around and git gud rather than punish them into leaving.)
Yeah let's nerf Spy even more! The weakest class in the game, getting more nerfs, ever sending him into obscurity.
Quit meet riding. Fish made a super L take.
@@Harrisonmego No, spy is still extremely fun when you're not dominating everyone by getting one stab
Nerfing one knife isn't fundamentally nerfing spy, it's nerfing everyone reliant on it
@@NotFine Nerfing a weapon for a class makes the class less fun because it eliminates choice and variety. Do I need to run down the list of busted Spy unlocks for you?
@@Harrisonmego there's like only 2 right now
I'm a hard stuck 200+ hour stock spy main and I'm proud
You're a amazing
my respect for you
Finally, a respectable spy
Same honestly. I got a strange for each of the stock items. Maybe I just suck but whenever I equip the kunai or big earner every demoman on the server gains magnetic grenades.
@@OldandAbandonedHarcorte I'm a spy main with 150+ hours in the class, usually going with the stock loadout. When Fish said that you don't get hit much when you're invisible I had to pause the video and sigh
As an ex spy main (for now i switched to scoutie), my favorite loadout of all times is a stock clock reskin, ambassador and the big earner and i feel honored by this video.
0:06
Absolutely no one heard of “spy syndrome”. This is a very common trope in the community to make shit up, be that categorization on terms and then act as if it’s popular.
0:45
“Glass cannon” implies that a class with that description can do lots of harm but will easily die. Spy can die easily, but I don’t see him doing more harm than sniper.
Sure, he can instakill fast, but that’s limited to hypothetical scenarios whenever it’s not f2ps around a cart. Sniper can kill a light class every 1.5 seconds, yet no one brings that up as a point because it isn’t. Soldier can shoot his rockets at a massive group of people, killing more people than shots fired, but again, no one brings it up.
1:48
Kunai is very often used, but you make it sound like it’s used above everything else like it’s the ubersaw of knives. It’s on par with stock in how often it’s used as if that’s a point. There was a period when the hothand was used almost exclusively because funny ha ha meme. Use doesn’t automatically mean that a weapon is good. The kunai is a more fun option for most people, and I think most better spy mains would tell you that stock outdoes kunai in most cases.
1:52
Isn’t that a point against you, though? That the kunai isn’t really that good, but the people who use it are? It takes 8.5k kills to get a strange to that level.
2:47
I have over 1k hours on spy and a friend of mine who showed me this video has over 1.3k, and I can confidently tell you that I am not good enough to make the kunai work better stock in the vast majority of situations. Health matters, believe it or not. Random damage happens. Spam is everywhere, more on some maps, and less on some others, but it’s generally everywhere. There are many situations where there isn’t a convenient route around it and you have to go directly through it. This is when you die. Random spychecks, which cost the enemy absolutely nothing, will kill you far sooner, and especially if they’re done as you’re decloaking. Kunai works in situations where you’re gonna be shot at after a stab, but you gotta realize that those situations are typically the situations where you will be shot at before you even get a stab. You’re making a point against all this by asking a snarky rhetorical question the answer to which is “often”.
3:12
There is a huge difference between 70 and 125, as you yourself said. There’s a bigger relative difference between that than between 125 and 210, so I don’t see how you can two points that follow the exact same concept and disregard the one that goes against your narrative. You reacting to a damage source is going to last quite a bit longer than 0, and you will take the same amount of damage when you’re at 125 hp and when you’re at 70. 65 leftover hp is a lot more than 10 when fighting a pyro. You can still get a trickstab in with 65 and pop the deadringer or maybe even use stock invis to escape, but you simply can’t do that with 10. You can take a pill at 125 and keep going, being very likely to avoid whatever comes next if you’re invisible, but you can’t do that at 70 because you’ll be dead at the first shot.
3:29
There are scenarios where you can’t possibly escape. The thing is, the majority of the time, you can, even with the c&d, not to even mention the deadringer. If you can’t, that’s on you, but decent spies can. Bumping a player isn’t always a death sentence and neither is failing a stab.
The spy in the clip in the background did exactly the thing you’re claiming is statistically irrelevant. He got 0 backstabs, yet he got away despite being shot at.
3:59
You use gameplay footage from good spies that aren’t you and then you proceed to say you’d nerf the kunai, a weapon you make out to be by far the most popular knife on what good players (good spy mains especially) realize is the weakest class in the game.
4:10
You made a true point that it doesn’t matter for the spy if the target being backstabbed has 1 or 1000 health. So, if you put the same effort in, why would the reward be drastically lower? Also, a kill like that will give you a temporary 20hp boost over stock, which you call massive, and you said that permanent -55 is practically irrelevant, so I don’t see how your logic follow.
4:34
Target prioritization is a concept that might as well not exist in casual. It’s only relevant in comp, which, the last I checked, makes 2% of the player base and thus the game. And to say it entirely doesn’t matter is simply false. If you stab a medic and not a heavy, you can be theoretically melted in 0.42 seconds as opposed to 0.25 with stock. And this ain’t chess. You very often don’t have the luxury of picking kills. You go for whoever is the closest, and when you go against that to “help” your team of randos and strangers, it’s always at the cost of your performance.
4:58
That superiority doesn’t always end up mattering, as demonstrated in the clip you played in background while making that point.
6:06
180 was less than 195 even before the advanced math that came with the update. Now a soldier needs to fire 3 base damage shots to kill you as opposed to 3 before the update, and you need to hit 5 as opposed to 5 before the update. If that’s hard to manage to a soldier and if a change is palpable, than that soldier deserves to die.
If you get overheal that high, it’s gonna take 4-5 seconds for it to deplete below the threshold. So with max possible overheal and if a demo was to shoot two consecutive pills at you, it’d make the difference you claim it makes. Realistically, you’ll take damage from other sources and you won’t eat two pills in 3-4 seconds.
When were snipers quickscoping kunai spies to begin with?
If you’re relying on melee crits to kill spies, you’re doing things very wrong.
7:07
And how often does you entire team die in several seconds to a kunai spy? Certainly happens much less than a soldier pubstomping, especially if there’s a medic, which there usually is. So, a great spy mains with a pocket and a uber at the end did what basically never happens, against what’s clearly an incredibly bad team and not a single player dealt 125 damage to the spy by themselves, so you can’t even say that this dying to an infinitely regenerating spy because he was infinitely regenerating is backed up by the gameplay. I’ve seen chains like that, they’re incredibly rare, but they do happen. What I haven’t seen is this to-be messiah being unable to save the team because the kunai spy just keeps killing teammates.
8:46
Yes, the mistake allowance increases dramatically. The thing is, that still is the mistake allowance you have for being on the enemy side of the territory, uncloaked and undisguised. There’s still plenty more for you to do wrong than there is for most of your enemies to do wrong. And if you think that in situations like these, as demonstrated by the background footage, you have any advantage over a soldier surrounded by his teammates, you’re wrong.
8:59
Funny how you bring up Sisyphus into this. Dying with the kunai after a backstab starts this lovely cycle of having next to no health and getting a backstab all over again. Helpless really is the best word to describe this feeling. Awful point.
10:08
You made a point that counters the point you made right after it. Yes, it’s the same, you’re helpless to wait in every case, with every weapon, as is the nature of the respawn timer. Most of spy’s rampages end with him dying as well.
10:42
Yeah, having shitty teammates sucks when you have a kunai spy to deal with sucks. That applies to literally every other weapon. If your problem with the kunai specifically is that the spy has a stat boost against you, then you can sleep firmly knowing he’s not coming after you, but the first unaware or otherwise easy to stab teammate he sees.
pt. 1/2
10:57
When does this happen? Where are these overpowered, insanely good pubstomping kunai spies to come at you every time you turn on the game? It’s a problem that doesn’t exist. How often do you look at sky, watchful of comically large neon pink grand pianos falling down to get you?
11:06
I’ve been active on TF2 forums for 5 or 6 years, I’ve had many spy main friends, the friend of mine is even had tons of spy youtubers in his friends list, and I can confidently tell you that I’ve never seen that point made. The one guy you showed making that argument doesn’t make the argument popular.
12:57
So a spy with a draining 210 health and a weapon arsenal you yourself said is weak is somehow infinitely stronger than a solder at 200 actual health and a rocket launcher?
Even with full overheal, it takes roughly 40 seconds of completely inaction in terms of taking damage for you to get to 125 health.
13:11
If you’re consistently winning 4v1s as the weakest class in the game wielding a knife that one shots only from the back, then yes, you’re a good spy. Go ahead, try to demonstrate to me how it’s actually easy and all everyone needs is the kunai.
13:25
And here’s why the word “potentially” never means anything to you people. Yes, when you fully abuse something to its theoretical limit, it tends to get absurd, but it’s in no way indicative of actual balance. A uber does this tank aspect quite literally infinitely better. It doesn’t make the uber this infinitely powerful game-breaking thing. And let me give you an example that follows your own logic. Any class with any weapon can heal with healthpacks, granting them potentially infinite health, which is more than an overhealed heavy, in case you haven’t noticed? Not specific enough? Heavy has the sandwhich. Even better than the kunai, as he doesn’t even need to get kills! Medic doesn’t even need to use a weapon to get his passive healing, so as long as he survives the entirety of every encounter for the entire match, just like the kunai spy, he can simply not die.
13:44
Let me run you through a scenario. A soldier attacks me, doesn’t kill me and I heal. Then he attacks me again, doesn’t kill me, and I heal. Then he attacks me again, doesn’t kill me, and I heal. Then he attacks me again, doesn’t kill me, and I heal. Then he attacks me again, doesn’t kill me, and I heal… No shit you won’t die if don’t die. Your point is literally that the spy has the ability to survive and will if you don’t kill him.
14:35
Your point isn’t exactly being helped by you saying that the thing helping it is an exaggeration.
14:52
Because a 504 hp heavy doing up to 500 dps is very much not the same as a spy at 210 health doing up to 50dps facepoking you in hopes of getting a backstab.
15:29
So the background footage is of some no skill spy brainlessly tanking damage? And he’s doing nothing more than basic easy spy gameplay?
16:03
The big earner has the exact same flaw as the kunai. It punishes you for the mistake of others. If you want to make a point that that’s the huge deal braker for kunai, then make it for the big earner. You already said the even with the overkill, a kunai spy is easy to kill, so… The idle watch for f2ps is just that, a disgrace to balance and you can’t tell me that the l’etranger doesn’t have a huge crutch element to it. There isn’t a flawless weapon.
16:19
But I thought it was incredibly easy, hence you can just equip the kunai, win 12v1s easy, as so many spies do on the daily, as you describe it.
16:21
So, a player with over 4.6k hours self admittedly can’t pull shit off that to “any degree of reliability” that supposedly makes the kunai op? Excuse me, but how good do you need to be to do it? How much time do you need to spend? And how often are players more experienced for this for the weapon to be an issue?
16:27
That would require the entire concept of healing to be removed entirely.
16:54
If you’re making absolutely stupid plays, you ain’t getting the overheal needed not to die when doing them. Is a stupid play the one that results in you killing multiple people and then tanking damage you otherwise couldn’t have? Doesn’t sound stupid to me.
17:11
Consistency matters. If it’s not consistently a crutch, then it’s not a crutch. Let’s say a clueless player get a stab and survives when they shouldn’t because they had the kunai. What then? They have no overheal left and they’re stuck at 70 hp. They’re not gonna be able to pull off another kill like that and will instead die. How does that differ from them getting a kill with stock and dying?
17:47
Yeah, it’s superior to trash.
19:16
No. The spycicle gives you flame resistance for having it in your hand. The kunai gives you health when you kill someone with it. Pressing Q and killing a player are multiple orders of magnitude different in difficulty. For this entire video, you’ve been pretending that playing with the kunai has you running around at 210 hp at all times and healing whenever you see a player.
19:33
And is that not earned? Backstabbing someone at 70 hp and trickstabbing a pyro to survive the afterburn seems like enough effort for the reward.
19:53
I have absolutely no clue what you’re talking about. As people tell you, your experience is not representative of the actual state of the game. And I’m willing to accept your admission.
20:24
As stated already, two spy mains with more than 1k hours on the class aren’t good enough to use it over stock. That’s good of a reason as reasons get.
This lovely 2.4k review of your video was a common act and tribute of Smoke and Fujitachi.
100% this dude is just seething for the sake of seething
"Yeah it's superior to trash"
Hot Take but it's not even superior than the other knives lol, I'd argue that even the YER is better because it's chainstabs don't rely on how many bullets you can take before eventually running out of the supposed walking health packs to grab.
@@Legend-Of-The-Sun I'd take rapid healing over rapid disguises that can only save you from being gunned down by a sentry.
@@turkishjanitor3666 I'll take remaining undercover between backstabs over rapid healing that only saves you in situations the Big Earner would've done better.
1:52 I'm friends with this person this has got to be the worst way you could be featured in a video lmao
Well do you agree?
the only reason I can think of why spy often gets really strong weapons is because hes a fragile class and his ability to win is drastically effected by the enemy team's skill, like if a spy wants to take out an engineer nest, a pyro with a homewrecker will make the spy's job absolute hell. So most of the knife unlocks have abilities based around giving a bonus on backstab to help you out. Its just that kunai, lets you get away with things you shouldn't have.
a pyro with homewrecker cannot kill the spy, and while they're distracted with the buildings there is now a knife in their back.
@@cewla3348 it takes one hit at the building and the sapper is gone, they can literally just hit it and immediately turn around, or at least light the spy on fire before hand so he can't even hide or escape once the pyro wastes like 1 or 2 second saving the buildings, or airblast him, especially with the degreaser
This is less of a reason for strong weapons like the Kunai to exist and more of a reason for Pyro to be unable to remove sappers.
Honestly he should have never been in the game to begin with
TF2
A game that PRIDES itself on player skill
Has a class whose core design is antethetical to the whole concept
@TheAircool1
Spy? Explain further.
I'm surprised you didn't even mention the potential synergy with the Diamondback. In addition to 200 health, what if every link in your chain stab gifted you a free gun crit? Just imagine stabbing half the team, skedaddling with the Dead Ringer, then picking off the other half with your bounty of crits. Totally earned team wipe.
a bit like the frontier justice, but flavoured for spy.
the gun mettle buff really turned this weapon into the old ambassador, it just overshadows everything now. can the devs at least make the health gain minimum 55 to match your starting health? i mean, at least it declines, so you won't stay at 125 for any longer than a second or two unless you're really fast.
Imagine if the eyelander could heal 150hp per kill... wait a minute.
That's just the half zatoichi
bro is writing weapons down in his death note
all jokes aside, i really appreciate it that you were able to get the thoughts a lot of us have across like with the scorch shot
I have 2 ideas on how to maybe fix the Kunai.
If you want to keep the upside of gain hp on kill and overheal, then a downside that could be done to at least make it harder would be to lower the backstab radius. Make it harder to just trickstab people because you were angled a certain way on their hitbox. This has been done in the past by Valve but it was a universal knife change that was reverted.
The second idea is the completely change it's stats, but make it have the same sort of identity. Every backstab gain +15 max hp, up to a max of 150, and with every backstab heal 35hp. Downsides would be the Kunai swings slower, so the window of opportunity for your team to turn around is increased before they continue the chainstab. And either increase cloak drain, or add the old Enforcer downside of +.5 seconds to activate cloak (especially if you can figure out how to make it work on the Dead Ringer).
Maybe these ideas are bad, idk. But these are just my thoughts on how to maybe fix the Kunai.
Or maybe add a cooldown to the lifesteal. idk
I think either a cooldown on lifesteal or greatly diminishing returns on subsequent stabs in a small time frame would work well to balance the knife's current stats.
Because the spy desperately needs a nerf
Instead of cooldown on lifesteal, just make it so kunai spy cannot receive overheal while having any overheal.
This will also create dramatic moments of tension and decision making, as spys overheal is now both a timer to get things done fast, as well as a restriction from doing so well that you run out of guys to stab for health before you can actually heal again
@@CorwinTheOneAndOnly i second this opinion
to quote the 'sniper is OP' crowd:
"Just Because it's hard to pull off, doesn't mean it's balanced"
Ironic considering how often he complains about sniper not being dominant and overpowered
Why have a skill celling when people are going to cry nerf when you reach it
14:22 This chainstab... I don't doubt that the Kunai has problems (though I think Valve would kill it if they ever decided to nerf it) but the problem with this whole segment was backstab registration and once again clueless players. It's just that the Kunai allows you to *continue* to abuse those to aspects of the game by keeping you alive the whole time.
I’d agree that the amount of damage tanked is excessive, but those were all from behind and not laggy stabs of luck
you can tell fishstick is tealking from a place of in-experience because most of his clips of actually good gameplay, arent his clips, or are repeats from earlier in the video
its like fishstick was like "the knife is op, very very rarely, but im going to make it seem like its op, almost always"
"the only reason not to use the kunai, is because you dont want to, or dont have one"
this sentence alone discredits fishsticks opinion here, its like he has never used it, and if there wasnt (some) footage of him using it here, i wouldnt believe him if he had told me he had used it
It's sort've like the diamondback in my opinion where it simply rewards spy more for doing what his class should be doing in the first place.
yet both of those do the same thing as the scatterback for Scout but the Scatterback brings nothing else to the table.
I don't think that specifically is the issue though. Are banners and babyface's blaster op because you're rewarded for doing damage?
"i guess the wrench really suffers there though" brother, as an engi main, stock is one of the better wrenches, especially when playing a more aggresive playstyle. being able to knock sapper off is 2 hits with no downsides is super userful. some would prefer the urika effect, but i find the benifits of it to not outweigh the downsides, especially when you're not playing somthing like payload where you dont need teleporters as much
Reason why to use other knives; half the thrill of playing secret murderer games is the fear of getting found out, so it’s probably the same with spy.
How to nerf Kunai without pissing off (maybe?) most Spy mains:
Make the overheal decay faster.
The Kunai overheal decays slower than the Medics' overheal...
Adding a cooldown of like 5 to 10 seconds to the lifesteal of the kunai would balance it quite well i think. It would force the spy to think more carefullly before running into a big group, and give others reasonable time to kill him.
Just make it add max hp on kill. Problem solved.
at least all of the pro spy gameplay confirms my ‘hold strafe keys and pray’ strat
My biggest balance change I’d like to add is honestly a cool down on the health on kill. Maybe like 3-5 seconds. This would force to the spy to pick their targets wisely as well as completely eliminating a spy just tanking 100’s of damage.
I remember in one of STAR_'s TF2x10 videos, a soldier had the black box and it instantly healed him for 200 hp per hit. And despite getting shot like 10 times with fully charged minicrit sydney sleepers and multiple flares, he just would not die.
Another thing worth noting, is that the Kunai allows Spy to change how they play to such an insane degree, that it's almost like a subclass, but you aren't giving up Spy's actual kit. You can still do all of the normal Spy things, but now you can also forgo stealth to start acting like a power class through the enemy team. Sure it isn't necessarily easy to do, but difficulty alone shouldn't justify insane rewards (a similar point I make against Sniper's balance, because difficulty can be overcome with experience).
I'd say for a Kunai rework: What if they reduced the health penalty to either -25 or -35 (putting you at either 100 or 90 base HP respectively), and then making it so the knife no longer grants you immediate chunks of health. You would instead get a weak health regeneration for "insert duration" on backstab (say 10 or 15 HP/s). This regen would allow you to overheal, similar to a Medigun, and if needed they could make it so the overheal rate is slower (sort of like how the Vaccinator takes longer to overheal a target). Now sure, this would allow the Spy to get to a high health total, but you'd have to literally be choosing to not damage the Spy for a long time.
This would significantly reduce a Kunai Spy's ability to ignore damage, but it would also still make it a good escape knife, especially when fleeing with your cloak.
You can't act like a power class lmao, that's an exaggeration. Spy doesn't have the damage potential a soldier or a demo has
@@SirCrusher Yes, of course it's an exaggeration, I shouldn't have to state that, but I guess it isn't obvious enough for some people.
The point is that the Kunai lets you play very differently to how Spy is intended to function, without any major kit sacrifice to do so. Instead of being a pick class that ambushes important targets, you can throw subtlety to the wind and stab to your heart's content, unless the enemy team decides to direct their undivided attention to you.
It'd be like if the Gunslinger was still able to make level 3 Sentries, or if the Demoknight still had access to the Stickybomb Launcher.
@@trainershade1937 that's not actually true, if you don't pick important targets the power classes will get you. That's what always happens. People adapt to the Kunai too easily. It's one of those weapons that seem strong but lose power once people notice it
Nah, I think it's fine as it is.
Spy doesn't deserve another weapon nerf after how many years of his weapons getting fucked over for years
@@SirCrusher Sir, the man can literally instakill anyone. You can't GET higher damage potential.
Ik this isn't related to the actual video's content in any way, but I always gotta appreciate whenever Fish used background music from the Sly Cooper series in his videos. I recognized the Opera of Fear chapter's hub world AND encounter theme from 3 damn near instantly because of how much these games are ingrained in my memory 😁
I'm glad you mentioned it. Those games are still some of my core memories
Kunai wasn't always 70 health it was 60 before its small buff
It doesn't "Encourage good team coordination" so much as "Reward good team coordination and punish a lack of team coordination" but not actually changing the likelyhood of said coordination occuring.
Ngl this guy lost me at "what if every class had a kunai type weapon" argument. It'd be broken because they're not a spy lmao
It's like asking if the scout should have access to a rocket launcher
Exactly
I personally use the YER just because the silent kill and disguise let you slip into the usual tf2 chaos and stab whoever you want. way too often you can just stab someone being pocketed by a medic and grab a free heal or even get ubered.
only real downside is it encourages such a weird playstyle that any other knife feels weird to use
Problem with the kunai is that very often, even if you are too savvy to be consistently backstabbed by that same spy during the whole round, you are still often dealing with an unkillable nuisance, arguably the same issue with the dead ringer.
Sometimes is not like they accomplish that much but rather that it transforms a lot of their mistakes from game changing issues to slaps-on-the-wrists. And of course a beast of a spy is a nightmare unless you can actually outsmart him (good spies are more based on outsmarting them rather than overpowering them).
I just realized something:
The more you focus on the spy, the less time you spend on focusing on the enemy team. So in other words, the more clueless and braindead players you have on your team, the more time you will be forced on focusing down the spy, which in turn makes it easier for the enemy team to focus you down and kill you. In other words, the spy can easily force your attention onto him more often than his team.
The Kunai is Spys best knife, and it still doesn't stop him from being massively underpowered to the point of near unplayability in anything except a pub match. And saying something is overpowered in a pub isn't exactly a profund statement.
I think I might live in that alternate dimension. I haven't played in months, but I don't remember ever seeing just kunai spies. I have over 600 hours on Spy and my most used knife is stock. I don't even think I play better with the kunai. Maybe it's my playstyle. After I get a few stabs, I usually just run away. Never really tried the facetank strategy, because I'm not good with trickstabs. Besides, I use my gun more. I have more kills on my strange revolver than my strange kunai, and they're both far from Hale's Own (although, tbf, I haven't used either too much).
Local sniper player talks about how 'strong' spy is
I honestly think the Kunai could be fixed with one simple nerf. Add a five second cool down on being able to get health from back stabs. For example, stab, you get your health and if you got another three within those 5 seconds you would have gotten no more health.
7:20
Y'know.
This also applies to spy as a whole.
Spy is only good if your team is bad.
that's why spy used to work. people fell for his tricks.
🤡
Spy still works even against experienced teams, you just need to wait for the enemy team to be distracted by your own team's coordinated push, thus causing the enemy team to get wrecked when you get your textbook med pick against them
If Kunai is recruit difficulty eternal reward is veteran
I just hit 50k kills on my YER. I run it with Amby and stock invis watch. Hearing someone say "spy as me" gives me dopamine that can't be compared to using kunai dead ringer.
@@00coolman1 that’s a pretty chad loadout
The YER actually has a hidden stat that no one talks about which is its a sentry repellent, with the auto disguise feature backstab sentry guns will always ignore you, making it really nice to bust turtling engies up
Closing in on 4k kills with mine. An amazing, underappreciated weapon. I usually use Letranger and C&D with it.
@DocUri Anytime I hear "spy as me," I just sigh with disappointment.
So by his logic the big earner is a straight upgrade
It's funny how you say that's the best while you're almost instantly killed by everyone if you make the smallest mistakes. Sure it can be great when there's a good spy but that can be said with every spy knife.
Kunai is best vs bad players vs good players that shit is near unusable
True facts here
I know it's probs me being bad at spy but I find I can never use the Kunai, I think the bonus HP isn't that strong cuz it goes away in time plus if you make a minor mistake and get hit by something small it matters alot cuz your hp is tiny
you probably should have factored in the health drain from the overheal, since that might have been an important detail to add
Spy is my most played class and I've rarely used the Kunai, the only times I have are mainly mvm or when I was achievement hunting with friends, although I will admit that my own personal tastes and playstyles contribute heavily to not using it. I like the whole sneaky and stealth approach to spy since you can't really do that as any other class unless you pretend to be friendly or something.
What I'd do to fix the Kunai would be simple.
+
+25 HP
Heal 50 HP on melee kill
-
This weapon has a small swing delay
No overheal
Reduced sapper health
±
Every kill you get increases your health recovery and gives you a damage resistance (up to 75 HP healed and 20% damage resistance) for up to 20 seconds, but you're unable to cloak after a kill for 5 seconds, up to 20 seconds. These boosts will not drain while you're near a living or recently killed (registered as having been killed for less than a second) opponent and increase in 5 seconds every kill you chain.
i love how in the rare ocasions where i get a perfect backstab oportunity and get behind someone it just doesent count as a backstab and i just use the knife and get instantly killed
I think the kunai needs a downside that isn’t related to health, possibly something along the lines of reduced cloak or reducing max move speed to 100% (and reducing the max overheal back to 195 or 200)
Hell, it could be the opposite of the YER and make a distinct sound whenever it lands a backstab
hi jontohil! i have a question
8:58 roguelike fans be like "yo this gameplays fire"
To anyone who says "Spy needs the kunai because he's a bad class", he's not. You're just bad at using every other knife.
Spy is not a bad class and I don't understand why people think that.
He’s not even a bad class, if used in the right hands he can be a goddamn menace
@@thebushbros6626 well that applies to every class though. It's just spy, relatively, is the worst out of all of them
I think 2 nerfs and buffs that would make the kuni not as insane.
Buff:
Make the hp penalty down to 100
Nerfs:
Add a 12 second cooldown to the hp gain, making it so he can gain the hp but not chain stab while being unkillable
Make him unable to gain overheal passively besides kuni
9:50 stabs a heavy in the face thru a wall and it registers a backstab. This game is a mess
I recommend a 10 second cooldown on the kunai's health reward after each stab. You still get the risk-reward, 70 to 200, but you have to hold on to it.
The overheal drain rate only depends on your base health, not what you got the overheal from. It's just that the kunai lowers the base health a lot so the drain rate is lowered by a lot too.
You always lose 50% base health in 15 seconds. From 300% you drain to 100% in 60 seconds.
The issue is, this relies on the fact that the players you are up against either don't have ears, or fall into trickstabs.
I would say Spy IS broken. I get backstabbing from my face...
Thx, you convinced me to switch to Kuni; I didn't know it was that good! Kuni, diamond back and dead ringer main now ;)
Spy is a glass cannon whose glass is tempered for extra strength. The big earned forces you to be corporate glass in exchange for extra gunpowder. Kuni just boosts your kind of gunpowder for slightly more money.
There’s also the hidden stat on the Kunai.
“Every stab counts as a backstab.”
Like for real look at 7:07. Literally stabs a demo from directly in front of him.
Ah yes, the “I don’t need to think about any of my engagements ever” knife
Still no worse than the "I don't even have to TRY with this thing" rifle that is the Bazaar Bargain.
That thing is actual cancer.
@@Eye_Of_Odin978 well sniper is just fundamentally designed to make you worse at the game. He encourages negative thinking. Literally sit behind your team and occasionally check for a spy. Then kill everyone across the map instantly and remove and meaningful engagement. The bazaar bargain just makes all of this worse, but sniper conceptually is a stain on the game and it would be better without him.
1:35 Kunai is strainght upgrade because first backstab you get is free.
i refuse to use the kunai out of principle, when i play spy i only use stock
Im mean stock also is in most cases better lol
@@Mf_CHIP true, kunai is good against braindead players
The kuni is a cruch for spys who cant play spy outside if backstabs
paused the video at 19:40 and found the single frame of a sniper with a questionable sign image
@@swallow_skyla3602 it's loona from helluva boss
Something to think about with spy knives is that most of them are designed around chain stabs. Examples being the YER, BE, and the Kunai. And the positive outcomes of the knives are the same but different, the end goal is the same anyways. And escaping is similar but different, the BE with it's speedboost, the YER with it's stealth, and the Kunai with health. Makes you think how limited spys play styles and weapon uses are.
But the problem is Spy's core class is designed around backstabbing. How do you make a weapon for Spy that doesn't backstab.
@@mariustan9275 there's plenty of ways to change up spy's knives, how about a throwing knife with ranged stabs and hits that's on a cool down. How about a knife focused on boosting your revolvers power post stab, a knife that involves explosive backstabs. There is a lot you can do to completely change the way the knives play, but they all play similarly but the difference are the post backstab survivability.
@@thefatherlydecoration4629Ranged backstabbing? That sounds like it'd need a ton of balancing to not make it into "one shot across the map that you could have never seen coming". That could be Sniper but with less aim and more unpredictable because a Spy can throw thus while jumping around. At least with Sniper spots they are usually flankable. The second idea for a knife that powers up your gun sounds cool. I think Soundsmith suggested that and also the DB rework on the fish rebalamce server does that. Also explosive backstabbing? How will that work? OHKO everyone around whoever was stabbed? That also needs serious balancing because dying just because a Heavy got backstabbing sounds like it'd be infuriating
@@mariustan9275 As for the ranged backstab, i'd make the projectile speed that of grenades. You know so it's slow and only somewhat consistent at mid range, and have no melee attack (kinda like the cleaver) and the cool down on it would be like 5 or 8 seconds.
@@mariustan9275 For the explosive knife, give it like a small ammo count (like 5 knives that are on cool down, ammo packs don't give you knives). Giving it like a 3 second arm time (no chainstabs), and the AOE damage would be at most like 100.
i think the kunai should regenerate the health you would get instead of getting all of it instantly, that way you wouldn't be literally invincible as long as you have enemy backs in your disposal
Yes I love being oneshotted even thpugh I stabbed so many people because rocket launcher can deal 100 immediately
@@ivantan2841 So your idea of balance is to be completely immune to dying?
@@mechadeka I can't be immune to dying when im up close to all classes.
And since all classes deal max damage in close range, the survivability of spy is pushed even lower
Suggestion for balancing the kunai: instead of giving back health on kill, have it increase maximum health while leaving your current health as is. This would force the spy to disengage and find healing in order to actually make use of that larger health pool. Alternatively keep it the same but it only gives 50 health per backstab.
spylander
At least kunai spies dont steal healthpacks from medics.
Give the kunai a speed penalty. If he's gonna have the gealth of a Soldier or Demo, give him the walking speed of one.
Oooh.
I still believe if you do good with kunai you'd do good with any other knifes, since the raw health on my experience never carried a spy too far or protected them from beign popped into the corner and mercilessly gunned\bombed down
Spy knives in tf2 have always been a strange case to me
This all gets negated by a W+M1 pyro and airblast
Also what do you mean it's a bad idea to get in a Spy's face? What are they gonna do, backstab me?
You can't backstab anyone when you get pushed of a cliff
@@ex-caliburn-realliterally yes, have you seen the facestab bullshittery a decent spy can get away with by hugging you?
Airblast can stop a stab, w+m1 makes you a walking overheal pack
I did the math, and here’s what every class would look like with a Kunai equivalent:
Scout: A scattergun that reduces his health to 70, but any time he gets a meatshot kill (~75+ damage dealt), he gets overhealed up to 210 health
Soldier: A rocket launcher that reduces his health to 110 (130 with the Backup), but any time he gets a direct hit kill, he gets overhealed to 330 health (390 with the Backup)
Pyro: A flamethrower that reduces their health to 100, but a non-afterburn kill overheals them up to 300 health
Heavy: A minigun that reduces his health to 170 (220 with the Dalokohs), but a non-falloff kill overheals him up to 450 health due to it being the maximum. It’d be 510 or 660 with the Dalokohs if there wasn’t a maximum.
Demo: A grenade launcher that reduces his health to 100, but a direct hit kill overheals him up to 300 health.
Demoknight: An Eyelander that reduces Demo to 100 health (125 with the Booties), but a melee kill overheals him up to 300 (375 with the Booties)
Engie: A wrench that reduces his sentries’ health to 85, 100, and 120 for each level, but a sentry kill overheals the *sentry* up to 255, 300, and 360 health, respectively. This would stack with the Wrangler.
Medic: A crossbow that can’t heal and reduces Medic’s health to 85, but a kill with the crossbow overheals the Medic up to 255 health.
Sniper: A rifle that reduces his health to 70, but a headshot kill overheals the Sniper up to 210 health.