Concept of Durability

Actually, I'd like to see durability restored and even reduced. I think if there's a real chance that armor or a weapon could break in game that could add some interesting dynamics to CTF gameplay. For starters, it would make medic teaming less of a thing.

In fact, just to go off on a bit of a tangent here, it might be interesting to have armor and weapon restock stations or maybe even different armor, tools, and weapons (could have additional abilities for certain classes) to make PvP and gameplay even more dynamic. One of the cool things about that is it would allow players to tailor their playstyles of a class to certain materials.

That wasn't really related to the current discussion but I do think restoring/reducing durability could be a springboard to making CTF a bit more of an interactive and creative game that allows each player to tailor gameplay with a certain class to their own style

 

Then again, if the pyro flint and steel were to have even less durability, you'd hardly get to use it before it breaking. The restock stations are an interesting idea, but that'd be pretty much doing what medics do.
@Admiral_Munson
I agree with the infinite durability that's been added, overall.

 

I always found durability to be annoying when playing a class like chemist myself, but I'm not positive on how much effect it actually had on the game.

 

Durability never played such a huge role, and if we did have durability come back and even reduced Medic's wouldn't be able to ever protect themselves for long. A gold sword has 33 uses, if they even cut by let's say 10% it would have about 29 hits. Which may seem like a lot, but really isn't.

For Ninja that wouldn't be much of an effect, unless you play defensively which some do, and that will lead to bad things with your sword breaking and you having to kill yourself or such.

But if they were to add that I hope they would add a feature where once your item breaks it goes on a cooldown before it replenishes your lost item. I agree with Admiral, medic teaming would be reduced, but so would healing in all, even with a cooldown the Medic would have to choose two paths, heal everyone or defend themselves and the flag, and they would lose their multi-tasking ability.

Overall I am glad this is not a thread about the classes, and a topic for everyone to discuss. As well as this idea, I think bringing durability back would be great, but should not be reduced. So if they did bring durability back for all classes it would make the game more of a challenge, and more fun to me overall.

 

It only really came into play for REALLY spammy Pyros, Chemist, and Medic.

I've had long tanking streaks with old Chemist and Medic where most of my armor was broken by the time I died. Something makes me want to keep it like that for now.

 

Infinite durability should stay at least for Armor because Armor's really important for distinguishing classes.

Weapon durability would be interesting though.

@Admiral_Munson I totally think restock stations would be cool. I've always pondered the idea of Health and Inventory Restock Pack/Powerups being scattered around the map in predetermined areas and have a respawn time. Health Packs would heal you to full health and remove all debuffs, while Item Packs restored your entire inventory. However, as I said, these would have a lengthy respawn.

Each map would probably have 3 or 4 of each pack on both sides of the map (because symmetry), which respawn in 30 seconds. This helps take pressure and reliance off of Medics, while still keeping them important. If there's absolutely no Medic on your team, there's still a way to restock your items and health, but since there are very few packs around, you'd probably have to share with your entire team and will have to wait a while. Medics are still great because they can restore many people while packs can only restore 1.

With weapon durability, this would be interesting. Now there's suddenly a struggle with map control, trying to prevent enemies from using packs so you can share their limited supply with your own team so they can repair weapons and restock things like Steak, Pots, and Arrows. But every class should get a backup weapon so they can have some sort of combat once they run out. Like an Iron Shovel or something that does even less than Wood Sword damage.

If packs were added though, Steak would need a nerf. Being able to regenerate Steak without a Medic would make games extremely stalemmatey.