Weapon reskins in TF2 have always seemed like a strange case to me. On one hand, if you like how a weapon works but hate how it looks, it's nice to have another option to choose from. But on the other hand, reskins usually look like they would function differently from their counterpart, and I've always thought it would be neat if cool looking weapons like the Maul had more of an identity than "it's the Homewrecker but for rich people." So, I took a large number of weapon reskins currently available in the game and gave them their own set of stats, ranging from "slightly modified sidegrade to the original" to "completely new weapon idea that's not balanced at all but a ton of fun."
For this video at least, I'm only going to be modifying weapons that are relatively cheap and easily obtainable so it can keep the pay-to-win to a minimum. Basically, if it's under a key in backpack.tf (tm) or it's directly craftable, then it's gonna be fair game. I'm also not going to be touching the Original, either of the Pyroland weapons, or the Holy Mackerel since, even though they're technically reskins, they have enough unique functions that make them notably different from their counterparts. All right, let's go.
The Three-Rune Blade is a really cool looking weapon that just doesn't do it for me. Like, sure, if you hit somebody with a sword in real life, they're probably gonna bleed, but if you made a sword that's so poorly weighted that you're guaranteed to hit yourself if you miss your target, then you'd probably be better off not even forging the sword in the first place and just hurling chunks of iron at people. So hear me out, we've already got Demoknight, but we don't have Scoutknight. I've always thought it would be really cool if the Three-Rune made Scout function kinda like Demoknight. You have a lot more health, better damage and range, and a slight movement speed buff in exchange for Scout taking his medieval roleplay very seriously and refusing to use any non-medieval weapons. Scoutknight would effectively be a sidegrade to Demoknight by trading off health and shield resistances for better movement and secondary utility. I'm actually surprised we don't have a second melee subclass in TF2 already with how much time went into Demoknight. And the Three-Rune seems like the most obvious weapon change to make to make that a reality.
The Holy Mackerel is notably different enough from stock because of the killfeed tracking hits function. However, the Unarmed Combat does basically the same thing as the Holy Mackerel, so it does count as a reskin. The Unarmed Combat's basically a meme weapon, so I'm not too concerned about making it competitively viable or anything, but I do wanna make it fulfill its role as a funny weapon by giving it funny stats. Since you're slapping people around, why not give it a knockback effect? The knockback wouldn't be much, but you'd be able to get kills with this pretty well just by juggling people around. It would be kinda annoying to fight against, but the idea of slapping people off a cliff is funny to me, so I personally like the changes regardless of how effective they may be.
The Nostromo Napalmer is technically not a reskin from stock because, if you have the entire item set equipped, you do more damage against Scouts who are wearing the entire Alien set, but only like 5 people have ever gotten use out of that specific stat, so I'm willing to make an exception. Most of the flamethrowers right now reward you for being as close to your target as possible. So I thought it would be interesting to make a flamethrower that's the opposite, where it has increased flame distance but reverse falloff so you have to keep your target at the maximum possible distance to get the most damage. The increased flame speed would also give the flames more range since their calculation is based on time in the air instead of distance, so essentially it's not as much of an ambush tool as much as it is a spacing tool. I have no idea how good or bad this would end up being because it's such an "out there" concept, but I think this would be more of a high skill ceiling flamethrower to add to the game, and it would also work well in the Nostromo due to how the original version works in Alien.
The Postal Pummeler has such a random design for an Axtinguisher reskin. Like sure, a mailbox as a melee is cool and all, but why make it a reskin to the Axtinguisher of all things? So if not an Axtinguisher reskin, what would a mailbox do? Mail has to travel to reach its destination, and a lot of mail travels by air, and yeah, this is a Pyro Market Gardener. There's not much explanation with this one, the only thing to note is that I added a deploy speed bonus to both negate the jetpack's long holster animation and to give you more time to hit targets with the Detonator's smaller jumps. Other than that, I feel like Pyro could use a Market Gardener and these are stats that would be a lot of fun in TF2. And it would make it doubly function by making the mailbox theme make more sense.
The Maul is another really cool looking weapon that ends up being boring because of its stats. Because of how futuristic this thing looks, I'd expect it to do something more high-tech than just being a building smasher. So, what if we inverted the Homewrecker's damage against enemy buildings to provide buffs to friendly buildings instead? What I'm thinking for the Maul is that you'd be able to whack friendly buildings to make them operate a little bit faster. That means Sentries would fire faster, Dispensers would regenerate ammo and heal faster, and Teleporters would take a little bit less time to recharge. This is, of course, a significant buff to Engineers, so just to make it a bit harder to keep buildings overclocked, a firing speed penalty would probably be necessary. Pybro's currently a great niche that's limited to a single weapon type, and since teamwork-based playstyles should be widely encouraged in a game called "Team Fortress 2", getting Pyros more options to help out friendly Engineers would be a super great addition.
The Bootlegger and the Wee Booties are two weapons that only exist because of their item sets. But even though the Wee Booties are consistent with its set, the Bootlegger doesn't really make sense in its context because its set doesn't really work well with any of the shields. So, what if we made it work with sticky jumping? The new Bootlegger would effectively be a combination between the Mantreads and the Gunboats, but for the Demoman instead of the Soldier. I don't think this really needs that much explanation since there are already similar weapons in the game that you can use as an example if you would wanna imagine how these would work, but having the Bootlegger be Demoman Gunboats would both make a lot of sense and appease a lot of community members, so I think that's a good route to take with them.
So then, what would the Scottish Handshake be, since its part of the same set as the Bootlegger? Yeah, it's the Demoman Market Gardener, pretty much copy and pasted from Soldier. There are way too many reasons why this makes sense and I'm not the first nor last to come up with this idea, but I will get it out there that I thought about this change years ago before it became popularized, so yay for being a hipster I guess. Overall, making this set focus more on sticky jumping would give Demo the proper counterpart to Soldier's Airborne Armaments set, which I think the game could certainly use.
The Nessie's Nine Iron makes no sense because it completely ignores its source material. In the obscure indie game called "Golf", you don't use golf clubs as swords, even though it would probably make the sport much more entertaining to watch. Golf clubs are used to hit a ball to make it go flying into the air. So, the Nessie's Nine Iron should be able to hit players to make them go flying in the air. Basically, I'm changing this from an Eyelander that can collect heads to a knockback-based sword that also has a Sandman projectile built in. A Demoknight option that has a launchable projectile would make for a very unique playstyle, since even though you're sacrificing a big chunk of your damage, the projectile range and ability to control what direction players are launched in would make this weapon pair incredibly well with hazard-heavy maps. This one is definitely "out there" as far as the stats go and I'm not sure how effective it would even end up being, but it would be a lot of fun to use if nothing else.
The Fishcake is a heavy lunchbox that, for whatever reason, is way more obscure than it really deserves to be. Like, I'm pretty sure I had a thousand hours in TF2 before I even realized that this existed. So to aid weapons that have become victims of obscurity, we should give this poor fish a reason to be used. My thought with the Fishcake is that instead of granting Heavy max health to make further fights go better, it should instead grant him a passive health regeneration over the course of 30 seconds, which will also accomplish something similar. 100 health instantly and 8 health per second makes this heal a total of 340 HP, but it does give it back to you slowly, meaning that you also have some passive regen during your next combat. I can see this being pretty strong depending on how we tweak the numbers, but I mean c'mon, its an obscure reskin of an already bad item, it deserves to have a spot in the line light for at least a little bit.
Next up is the Apoco-Fists, which are way too cool looking to just be a reskin of the stock Fists. The cosmetic gib on kill stat's a pretty good base for a lot of interesting weapon ideas, but I think explosions are probably the most fun way to take that. My thought with this one is that everytime you hit someone, you create an explosion similar to how the Caber works. However, instead of just getting the first hit being a super powerful explosion, you would create many explosions on every hit that would do about 30 damage or so and some knockback to both the Heavy and whoever he's hitting. This would coincidentally also give the Heavy the ability to punch walls to climb them, which probably wouldn't do a ton for ya, but vertical mobility on the Heavy is always a welcome edition, and I can definitely see this opening up a few new strategies at least.
The AWPer Hand is a scam. This is supposed to be the AWP but ported to TF2, so why in the world can't I one-shot people by hitting them in the chest? Well, I guess that would cause balance issues, so we'll just make it accurate in the next best way. I think the most interesting stat we can port over from the real AWP would be the double scoping mechanic that a lot of CSGO's rifles have. Of course, we would also have to port over the mechanic that scoping with it makes you slow as hell, but I feel like that would be a worthy trade-off. This would make the AWP a better rifle for holding longer angles, but double zooming can also hurt you sometimes, because it makes it take longer to unscope, so I don't think it would completely surpass the Sniper Rifle in terms of utility.
The Fortified Compound is another weapon that's a huge missed opportunity. Like you're telling me that Valve had a chance to add another Sniper bow with different stats, but they chose to just make it a reskin? Nonononono, we're fixing this today. Since compound bows are known for how much power they can put behind arrows, I was trying think of ways to make this thing feel like a heavy hitter without directly increasing the damage. I think the best that I could come up with is making this a bow version of the Machina that takes a little bit longer to fully charge. After all, compound bow strings take a ton of force to draw and Sniper's not the strongest guy out there, so it makes sense that the arrow would take longer to be pulled back all the way. The added projectile speed might be a little bit overkill but, again, I wanted to make the Compound feel like there's force some behind it. So let me know what you think of these stats in particular, I'm kinda curious to see how you'd think this would turn out.
The Sharp Dresser is another weapon that commits the biggest sins a reskin can. It looks way too cool for a reskin and it doesn't respect its source material at all. Then again, what do you even do in Assassin's Creed? I mean you like jump off rooftops to assassinate people? Yeah, why not? The goal with this one was to emulate the Assassin's Creed falling assassination mechanic that may or may not even be a real thing. These stats might seem a little bit gimmicky, but I wanted to make the stats for the Sharp Dresser something that would make it easier to trick stab but harder to chain stab. Would these stats actually be useful at all the on Spy? I have no idea, but this weapon seems like it would be a lot of fun to use so I'll keep it.
The Wanga Prick is in the exact same position as the Fishcake. It's a reskin of a bad weapon that doesn't really have any reason to exist in the first place. So, I might as well do something more unique with it. I was going to make up something about how I thought of these stats based on traditional acupuncture or voodoo rituals or some other BS, but I literally just saw the skull on the weapon and thought this would be funny. This one, um, could be completely broken or completely useless depending on how much teamwork your team has. There's no big idea behind this, I just saw the skull on the weapon and wanted to include the "Mark for Death" mechanic somehow and figured, "You know what, being able to apply it to groups of enemies would actually give Spy a sort of supportive role." I mean it's not even that much more powerful than the Jarate since Spy has to take huge risks to actually get a backstab, but it still might be a little bit ridiculous if you can use it correctly.
And finally we end our weapon reskin chain with the Quackenbirdt, which is something I thought about for a long while and decided that my sole inspiration for all of the changes was that the Quackenbirdt has a duck on it and ducks are pretty fast (kind of). Spy doesn't really have any mobility-based watches that he can directly control. I mean the closest thing to that would be like the Dead Ringer, which only provides a three second speed boost each time you feign. My thought with the Quackenbirdt was to give Spy an option that would allow him to be fast but, as a trade-off, would make him a bit more of a glass cannon than normal. I could definitely see these changes causing the Quackenbirdt to dominate the cloak watch slot, so I think we could definitely increase the HP penalty or decrease the speed penalty and get about the same result.
So those are all the weapon reskins that don't cost your left kidney to actually buy. Like I mentioned, I love most of the reskins that are currently in TF2 from a design perspective. It's just a shame that most of them never get used because they're more expensive versions of already mediocre weapons. If you have any feedback or ideas for the changes that I mentioned in this video, I would love to see them in the comments. I really do like reading through the critiques of mine that people comment, even if I don't respond to every single one. Oh, and also, I do have ideas for the very expensive weapons, I just figured that most people would complain about them being pay-to-win if I decided to change them. (And also, I didn't want to have to spend 100 dollars on the background footage.) So, I decided not to touch them in this video. If you really do wanna see them, I would definitely be down for finishing the reskin list, just comment below and I'll kinda take a tally.
