Gentleman Jon — Already fading from the memory and no doubt the cause of much roster slashing and burning yet to come, the TFTV Zowie Invitational – European Edition (or something like that) gave us a preview into the shape of the ETF2L season to come. I’ll be taking the usual overview, faking credibility, indulging in sparkling hyperbole and prognosticating on the season to come.
Soldiers
Surely there are too many graphs? I couldn’t argue, but this is what I’m looking at so you’ll just have to deal with it. Firstly above we have the usual DPM/KD but with a new-for-6v6 rating value which is just a combination of the two with a bit of balancing for their relation to winning chances. There’s also a dotted line to show where the graph switches from pocket soldier to roaming soldiers with one important exception. Can you guess who it is?
Tek set the pocket soldier standard, has the French soldier ever been better? With the only DPM over the 350 mark and the best KD he stands well clear at the top of the rankings. Stark has taken a step up from the season 7 review cleanly taking 2nd place here. KnOxXx and Ipz could justifiably claim their stats were weakened by having to play against eachother so much, but KnOxXx is some way off his performances of last season. Perhaps there is improvement to come?
Gear once again steps in to show up some of the lesser pocket soldiers, his DPM was second only to Stark and Tek but his KD suffered a little.
Forsak3n pocket mercing for Lego had a creditable tournament, whereas Kalho has dropped off a bit from last season as the re-jigged TLR roster looks for some consistency. Knuttson looks like a potential weak link for Dotter.
Amongst the rest of the roamers living in Gear’s mighty shadow, Sideshow, Captainhax, T-Mac and Zebbosai all put up similar numbers, with Zebbo slanted a bit more towards survival than aggression. Killari and Crizzl were a bit off the pace but Zoob had a terrible tournament. Converting from pocket soldier last season where he was one of the unsung performers, he really struggled in the roamer role.
So let’s see if our extra data is of any interest. The damage rates chart illustrates how fast damage events were recorded for a player (hits per minute, in red) and Damage Per hit (blue) records how much damage they did on average. Below that we can see the kill rates (blue), and assist rates (red). The soldiers are in the same position on both graphs so you can make a direct comparison.
We can see that Tek is a serial spammer, shooting at everything that moves. The pocket soldiers generally have a lower damage output per hit and that may be down to use of the shotgun or down to being the spearhead and having a lot more to shoot at, clearing chokes, etc.
Standing out however is Stark who practices what he preaches by apparently not indulging in useless spam. That said only Gear and Tek hit damage at a faster rate than he did so perhaps it’s partly down to something like double gunboats ploys as well preventing the shotgun from reducing his average (note: total speculation). Looking at the kill rates it appears that Tek was rewarded with more assists, but this could be down to Stark getting no support from his team although as we’ll see later Permzilla was a very strong assister.
Ipz on the other hand was playing with ridiculously brutal scouts and Gear, so his assist rate is naturally higher. Having been to the Byte school of spamming choke points Forsak3n’s damage per hit is almost as low as Tek’s, along with Kalho, but Kalho has a very low hit rate for a pocket soldier which with his high KD to DPM ratio indicates excessive passivity. Knutsson stands out as having a very high assist rate, behind only Tek, Ipz and Gear.
The roaming soldiers in general hit fewer shots but get higher damage per shot, due to no shotguns, and maybe less spamming. Exceptions to this are Sideshow and Crizzl. There is also a moderate trend amongst the roamers to have fewer assists than kills than pocket soldiers who usually seem to have more assists than kills although there’s more than one exception. This is particularly strong in the case of Zebbosai perhaps reflecting the solo approach that dominated his scout play last season. Exceptions to this amongst pockets are career roamers Forsak3n and Salt who may find it hard to control their solo instincts, and Stark has a relatively low assist rate to his kill rate as well.
In an attempt to give the roamers something this illustrates those soldiers most effective against the Medic, although it’s a mixed picture between pockets and roamers. The timescale of the graph is per hour, so in a two map match these averages might be what you’d expect to see over the whole thing. Medic kills in blue, uber drops forced in red.
CaptainHax is the most deadly medic bomber, although it seems they often see him coming in time to hit the right mouse button. Stark almost matches him, but was far more effective at making it a surprise. KnOxXx also got a lot of medic kills, presumably from his ultra aggressive style of pushing last before his team has capped mid in pursuit of hapless fleeing physicians.
Gear of course was a terror to medics but other roamers who did a good job were T-Mac and Zebbosai. At the other end Tek and Forsake3n’s pocketing duties didn’t involve chasing down medics, but it wasn’t in Sideshow, Killari or Zoob’s job description either. Get Zoob a medic!
Scouts
So now we can see why Smzi wanted to see this “for hype”, someone knew he’d had a good day. The two MIG scouts were top of the heap, a statistical supremacy which doesn’t bode well for the rest of the league. Smzi had the KD in the defensive scout role (he got more heals anyway) while Bash got the damage, although no other scout managed the same damage output compared to either player.
Zen looks right at home at this level, setting impressive damage and KD. Helberg by comparison was altogether more mediocre but it’s a good start for the scout pair. Sheepy put in a good performance as well mercing for Fenneks, he did significantly better than his partner Delzic and it may be a struggle for them to replace his quality for the upcoming season.
ETF2L overlord and Highlander all rounder Permzilla weighs in with a strong showing for his team, but Hawku was in the dungeon for AYO looking a little out of his depth perhaps.
The MDM scout pair of Droso and flip, reunited from the ruins of TSE look pretty good with neither a significant weakness and overall an above average pair. By comparison the Evokate pair look to be below par with Flippy firmly mid table and Plapla struggling nex to hawku.
Kiler and Beavern both seemed off colour in comparison to last season, they’ll both be hoping to shake a bit of the rust off and compete more strongly when the real struggle begins whereas Rake had a strong tournament.
Amongst the better performing scouts Bash and Perm got out high rates of fire compared to their damage, although in Permzilla’s case this resulted in a strong bias to assist whereas most other scouts (not just top scouts) got more killls than assists. Only Helberg and Beavern showed that kind of pattern, although flip and sheepy were also borderline. Hawku and Plapla also showed a bias, but at their end of the table it may not be stylistic, it might just be getting stomped.
At the top end Smzi, Zen, Sheepy, Droso and Rake were more focused on quality over quantity and all also had more kills than assists.
Because the names are in the order of the rankings and the rankings have a bias to KD over damage, in the midfield we can see scouts that concentrated on quantity of shots versus single shot damage seemed to survive a bit better. The scouts right at the top combined both.
Demomen
Sickless gets top spot for FNX, mostly due to hammering out massive amounts of damage. Mike, slumming it on Demo in AYO, was the only other player to get close to those levels but he couldn’t stay alive.
Dr Phil gets into second spot with the opposite style, doing reasonable damage but preserving his life. Kaidus played a little more aggressively but in a similar style as did dmoule and Hys. Nadir and Ryb took the aggressive route.
Mike has a totally atypical demo style blasting away with everything he’s got which results in a mountain of assists and a pretty good rate of kills, unfortunately looking at his KD he tends to spend a bit too much time in the spawn queue as a result.
Sickless is next on the volume of hits chart but it’s telling the way these are combined with very high average damage as well. Hys and Ryb have similar damage per hit but their comparative hit rates are much lower. Amongst the remaining mid table demos there’s a steady decline in damage and hit rates.
Nadir and Hys share Mike’s bias towards assists although to a lesser extent. In Nadir’s case he has a good scout pair and KnOxXx cleaning up on his damage, and Hys had Rake enjoying a good performance.
It’s interesting to note that sickless’s assist rate is the lowest of any top half demo but his kill rate is much higher. It would be interesting to see if that was the result of Kritz (he is Russian) but these secrets are forever hidden from us by the gaping medigun shaped hole in the log.
Also noteworthy is that if KAD were used rather than KD Mike would have a decent shot at being the top demo. The extent to which that depends on the rest of your team is the reason I’ve ruled it out for individual rating.
Medics
Taking a quick look at the medics, the KAD, Ubers per minute (UPM) and assists per minute all use the left axis and uber drops per minute uses the right axis.
KAD seems to go pretty much with how well the team did, Thun then Mitsy then F2. Outside of that there’s a bit more variation largely based on the success of the combo players.
Assists per minute mostly shadows KAD except in the case of F2, who clearly legs it as fast as possible from danger keeping his KAD inflated. Mitsy seems to be a little quick to take to his heels as well.
When it comes to dropping ubers Skeej is in a class of his own. F2, Mirelin and Mitsy are a bit sluggish on the right click as well. At the opposite end of the spectrum Thun was caught out very rarely but the apparently permanently re-christened 2max didn’t drop once.
Predicting the Season
Stats are a poor predictor of future performance at the best of times, and in this tournament with players shaking off the ring rust and mercs in many rosters there’s only limited conclusions to be drawn.
MIG look ominously good as their roster would indicate, with the season so unpredictable the kind of supremacy their scouts have could be enough to carry them through. Add in Gear who seems to have lost none of his prowess outside of the Epsilon bubble and the fact they have no significant weaknesses makes them a very strong team.
MDM were the main challengers in the tournament but their team feels solid rather than spectacular and they’ll either need more from Nadir on demo or for KnOxXx to really hit top form to compete at the top. The scout pair played well, and Nadir appears competent on demo but the X factor just doesn’t seem to be there.
The other French team, the perennial Evokate, had good soldier play but were let down by the scouts. Rumour had it that they were going to be super keen for this season, and Tek’s game seems to have been raised. Can the rest of the team follow?
Forsak3n had nothing but good things to say about his trip to the wonderful land of Lego, and if their regular pocket soldier Natural can live up to his standard then they should have enough good performers to be competitive this season particularly at scout and demo.
The FNX roster looks vulnerable but having 2 mercs in key positions makes it impossible to predict where they’ll end up. Unfortunately some of the regulars look a bit suspect, Delzic had a hard time on scout and Killari struggled roaming too. Sickless could end up with a very big weight to carry. Skeej led in dropping, but with sickless’s vast damage there’s a strong possibility quite a bit of that was Kritz, so perhaps it wasn’t worth the pop.
On paper Dotter looks pretty good, but for whatever reason it wasn’t coming together in this tournament. There’s huge potential for improvement there if they can discover their inner keen. Nobody really expects Knutsson so be the top pocket but every other player there has the potential to compete, but without the motivation the season could just as easily drift by.
With TLR Hys apparently unable to lift a mouse due to injury their future is up in the air. The recruitment of Mirelin was something of a coup for the team, and his presence might make the loss of their leader turn out to be an unexpected blessing. We’ll see if Hys wants to ruthlessly cut anybody on the back of this tournament. For some reason there’s no handy TF2 website listing player injury times and their expected return date, someone get onto that.
Finally Ayo look a mixed bag. The soldier play looks pretty good (yes, even with Sideshow in the team) with Stark even making up for Sideshow’s deficiencies in going after the medic and with Mike on demo (assuming it lasts and particularly if he can play a little less suicidally) the power classes should be able to give anybody a game. There’s potential problems on scout though, Perm held his own although he was a bit passive, but hawku was horribly outclassed. If he can’t shake off those thick layers of rust (or if they don’t have a significant upgrade planned) it could be a fatal weakness.
I think I’ve fudged that sufficiently to avoid any recriminations. I won’t be able to give this season the same level of coverage as last but I’ll try to turn out some interesting bits and pieces and look at some big matches.
Originally published on VanillaTV (vanillatf2.org) on 2014-02-02 by diemasher.
Recovered from the Internet Archive (archived copy) as part of tf2esports.com's preservation of VanillaTV's TF2 coverage. The original site is no longer online. All rights remain with the original author; reposted for historical reference.