The Heavy Weapons Guy

The Heavy Weapons Guy (HWGuy for short) is the big bad mother on the team. He carries the monster Auto-Cannon, the most devastating non-explosive weapon held by any class. The AC winds up its barrel, and lets loose with the equivalent of 6-8 shotgun blasts per bullet it uses. The beauty of the AC is that it will continuously fire until it runs out of bullets or the users stops it. Unfortunately while firing the AC you cannot move more than at a snail's pace. Even when you are not firing the AC, the HWGuy's movement is very slow, the slowest of all the TFC classes. With the trade off of speed, HWGuys get 300 armor and 100 health, and have the ability to use MIRV grenades. HwGuys are generally reserved for defense since they move so slowly, and cannot move much while they are firing.

What's new?

Wow almost everything is new with the Hwguy. The biggest thing is that you can now move while you are shooting the Auto Cannon. In TF 2.8 you could move while shooting, but your bullets would stop while you crawled along the ground. In TF 2.9 you are rock solid in your place while you are firing. Now in TFC, you can crawl along as fast as TF 2.8, but your AC never stops firing. That is a huge difference in game play, since now if someone ducks behind a wall to avoid your cannon you can crawl to expose them.

You can now prime and throw grenades while you are shooting your AC. That is a massive change also since you can lob grenades behind obstructions while you pin enemies down behind them with your AC. All the while you can be crawling closer to the obstruction to give yourself a better angle of attack. This combined with the more powerful MIRVs will make Hwguys a much more-used class in TFC. In the previous weeks I was always wondering why there were all these Hwguys running around in all of the screen shots. Now I know why.

Another huge difference is that the wind up and cooldown of the AC is noticeably shorter. It is much easier to engage enemies in a more mobile fashion because of this - you can actually chase down enemies more effectively since they cannot take easy shots at you as your AC winds up.

The spread of the AC is slightly smaller than that of TF 2.9, but only slightly. At large distances the spread is still too large to really hurt anyone. There are also tracers in the line of fire, much like the MP5 of Half-Life. All of the bullets are still hitscan however. With the addition of decals for bullet marks, the AC can really dirty up the place in a hurry. Fortunately the default r_decals value is 300, so you shouldn't see a noticeable slow down because of all of the bullet holes.

The rate of which the AC uses bullets is MUCH slower than TF 2.9. I think it is roughly half the speed, or even less. You can sit there for a LONG time shooting the AC before it runs out of ammo.

My only gripe with the HWGuy is that the AC needs to be much louder! The TF 2.9 AC is great, it really feels like you have a huge gun in your hands and you're tearing through enemies. In TFC, the AC still tears through enemies, it just doesn't feel like it. With the louder grenade sounds, I thought AC should also have sub-woofer thumping sounds to accommodate it.