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“Guess I’ll just not move”

Natascha, the Heavy’s second minigun, is sometimes controversial due to its ability to slow its targets to a crawl. As we’ve discussed, players often react poorly to having their movement limited. This can be even more pronounced when it feels like the Heavy is wielding a tractor beam that traps you in its lethal storm of bullets.

With this post, I want to cover two related topics: first, how exactly the Natascha works (slowdown is more complex than you think!), and second, whether it’s good for gameplay.

Natascha (+) On hit: Slow enemy (slowdown decreases with range) (+) While spun up and below 50% health: 20% damage resistance (-) -25% damage (-) -30% spin-up speed

When I tested how the slowdown works, I did the following:

Used the TF2Items plugin to make the Natascha perfectly accurate and to give myself full knockback immunity and near-infinite health;

Slowed down the server’s time to 10% of normal;

Enabled cl_showpos, allowing me to see my current speed;

Ran at a friend as they shot me with Natascha.

For reference, this is a Windows server, meaning it may round values a little differently than on a Linux server; this may affect distances, but shouldn’t affect anything else I tested.

I found the following things:

At distances beyond about 500 hammer units (HU), I was affected increasingly less by the slowdown. It seemed to stop having any effect once I was ~1300 HU away from my friend.

Within ~500 HU, when I was hit by a bullet, my speed would drop to 180 HU per second. 

It did this no matter which class I was playing and ignored speed-increasing items like the GRU or the Concheror’s buff.

The slowdown lasted for very slightly longer than it took the Natascha to fire again - so if my friend missed even a single shot, my speed would go back up, but if I was under constant fire, my speed would stay down. (This does not quite hold true while under the Concheror buff, which also increases acceleration; my speed would judder between 180-190 HU/s while under constant fire.)

If I was crouching while walking (again within 500 HU), my speed would drop to 60 HU/s, again irrespective of base movement speed.

If I was spinning my own minigun while walking, my speed would not drop. Note that the Heavy’s spun-up speed is already lower than 180 HU/s.

If I altered the Natascha’s damage or bullets fired in any way, the numbers remained the same.

This leads me to believe that the Natascha’s bullets immediately reduce the target’s max speed to 180 HU/s, or 60 HU/s if crouched. They reduce speed less at longer ranges, but still do so irrespective of the target’s base speed.

Discussion The Natascha has been around for a long time, so I hate to criticize it too much, but the slowdown isn’t really the ideal design choice. As a general rule, players don’t like feeling trapped or out-of-control.

The good news is that the Natascha can be outplayed if you stay at a distance, where its slowdown doesn’t work. Moreover, it requires that the Heavy be able to aim at you, meaning skillful dodging can help mitigate its effects. These features are very important for the target’s game experience, even if they don’t reduce the frustration when you do get trapped in close range.

If given the chance, I would not fully overhaul the Natascha. Although it’s not perfect, there are simple changes that can reduce its frustration factor, and in general it’s wise to keep weapons as they have been for years. 

That being said, I’d recommend a basic change to the slowdown system: have it reduce the target’s speed by a percentage rather than to a flat number. This means it affects everyone relatively equally and can be countered by movement speed boosts. In addition, it might be worthwhile to have the slowdown start decreasing before ~500 HU, giving enemies the chance to more accurately predict the penalty they’ll take. Point-blank is a lot of slow, mid-range is some slow, long range is no slow; this is a little more obvious than point-blank and mid-range being the same amount of slowdown.

These are simple changes, but I think they’d greatly improve the game experience for players who have to face Natascha. But I might not have thought of everything, so I’d welcome your input, too. And don’t hesitate to call me out if I’m being too lenient on the weapon!

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I have done nothing but test miniguns for three months

“You stayed alive longer that time as Heavy than your previous best!” Yeah, I know, I was testing.

Some of the more popular posts on this blog have been my graphs, one of which showed the (approximate) damage each minigun could do over time. However, I will concede that these were made using limited information about how miniguns worked, particularly in that window of time just after you spin up where they ramp up from half damage to full damage.

To that end: I believe I’ve figured out how the Heavy’s miniguns ramp up damage. I am the first person I know of to do this, as not even the wiki contains comprehensive data. In addition, I’ve gathered data on their firing speed which supports existing knowledge and supplements my conclusions. All that data, and my conclusions, will be posted below. But there’s also a TL;DR for those who trust me/don’t like reading.

TL;DR: If a minigun spins up faster than about 0.9 seconds, it will have a damage penalty lasting about 1.1 seconds from the time it is ready to fire. If it spins up slower than 0.9 seconds, the damage penalty will instead start to decrease at 0.9 seconds (even before the gun has started firing) and finish at about 2. This penalty will decrease linearly, starting at 50% damage and ending at 100%.

Minigun rampup All miniguns have a period of time, just after they’re ready to fire, in which they deal reduced damage. This is to prevent miniguns from being instantly fatal to the enemy and to promote defensive play by the Heavy.

The wiki consensus is that this penalty “starts [at 50%] when the gun is revved, decreasing linearly over the course of one second.” For one, this statement doesn’t make it clear whether the clock starts ticking when the fire button is pressed or when the gun is fully spun up. For two, more data is always good. So I tested it.

To do this, I used asherkin’s TF2Items plugin to modify the stats of the miniguns, giving them perfect accuracy and only one bullet (to allow myself to better count shots). Throughout testing, I used the same plugin to modify spinup time.

Anyway, what I did: I spun the gun(s) up from a dry start and fired at a bot, watching the damage numbers to see how they scaled up. I did this at point-blank range and with the server time scale set to 1/10 of normal, so I could count shots effectively. In a spreadsheet, I put the damage of each shot (first, second, third, etc.) to see how long each minigun took to reach its full damage. As a final caveat, I multiplied the damage by 10, allowing me to see the digits that would otherwise be rounded off. I’ll list the shots in order here (with damage divided by 10 to reflect base values).

(Oh, and I modified the Tomislav to fire at the normal rate, and removed damage alterations on the Brass Beast/Natascha, so the count would be equal. Additionally, I tested different miniguns with different spinup multipliers, ensuring that there was no difference between individual guns).

0x spinup time: 6.7, 6.7, 6.8, 7.7, 8.6, 9.5, 10.3, 11.2, 12.1, 13.0, 13.4 (11 shots to full damage)

0.5x spinup: 6.7, 6.7, 6.8, 7.7, 8.6, 9.5, 10.3, 11.2, 12.1, 13.0, 13.4 (11 shots to full damage)

0.8x spinup: 6.7, 6.7, 6.8, 7.7, 8.6, 9.5, 10.3, 11.2, 12.1, 13.0, 13.4 (11 shots to full damage)

0.9x spinup: 6.7, 6.7, 7.1, 7.9, 8.8, 9.7, 1.06, 1.15, 1.24 (11 shots to full damage)

1x spinup: 6.7, 6.8, 7.7, 8.6, 9.5, 10.3, 11.2, 12.1, 13.0, 13.4 (10 shots to full damage)

1.3x spinup: 7.8, 8.7, 9.6, 10.5, 11.3, 12.2, 13.1, 13.4 (8 shots to full damage)

1.5x spinup: 9.1, 10.0, 10.8, 11.7, 12.6, 13.4 (6 shots to full damage)

2x spinup: 12.2, 13.1, 13.4 (3 shots to full damage)

2.05x spinup: 12.6, 13.4 (2 shots to full damage)

2.15x spinup: 13.2, 13.4 (2 shots to full damage)

2.2x spinup: 13.4 (1 shot to full damage)

Well, if we were to start with the last value, we’d say that the spinup penalty starts when you start to spin the gun, and so it ends before the really slow gun even fires once. But look closer...

Notice how the values for the first few guns are exactly the same, no matter how fast they spin up. Those seem to indicate that the penalty starts when the gun is fully spun up. But as we’ve established, if that were the case, even the slowest guns would be taking the same penalty - and they aren’t.

That’s the little quirk that leads me to believe it isn’t just a single, flat penalty. I suggest that the penalty will wear off about one second after fully spinning up, or at a time equal to [default spinup time + about one second] - this latter time is represented by the very slowest miniguns in my list. This means the Tomislav (and stock minigun, almost) take the full duration of the penalty, but the Brass Beast and Natascha start counting down before they’re fully spun up. So they start firing with part of the penalty already elapsed; their first bullet is about 60-65% of the full damage, rather than 50%. And if we had a minigun that spun up in twice the default time, its bullets would start firing at about 90% damage, with most of the penalty already elapsed by the time of the first shot.

Spinup time and firing intervals To make sure everything was squared away, I decided to also test spinup time and firing intervals. The wiki lists these as 0.87 seconds and 0.105 seconds, respectively.

For spinup time, I set the server timescale to 1/10 again and timed how long it took between me clicking the mouse and the gun firing, then divided that figure by 10. Because of the limits of my timer (my wristwatch), I can’t give exact errors, but somewhere around 0.87-0.9 seems about right.

For firing speed, I started firing the minigun and timed how long it took to run through all 200 shots. The answer was almost uniformly 21 seconds, pointing to a fire interval of 0.105 seconds. And to make absolutely sure, I multiplied the minigun’s ammo by 5 and tested again. To expend 1000 shots, it took just about 105 seconds, giving the same value. The wiki is, for all intents and purposes, correct on firing time.

You sharp-eyed analysts may have noticed something. If the penalty takes 11 shots at most to decay, and each shot is 0.105 seconds apart, it can’t be a flat 1-second penalty. While I’d need to do a lot more strenuous testing to find exactly how long it is, I think it’s safe to say about 1.1 seconds now (accounting for the fact that the last shot is already pretty close to full damage, so it takes more like 10.5 shots to reach full).

Why should we care? Uhh... the sublime joy of discovery. Or if Heavy mains really want to optimize their damage. But for me, it’s the sublime joy of discovery.

Caveat I am human, and so I make errors. This is a given. To this end, I want you to critique my work. Run over the numbers over and over in your head and see if you can draw the same conclusions I did. I did this repeatedly - both in my own head and others’. The amount of work I’ve put in here makes me hope that I’m correct, but it is not a guarantee. I am absolutely happy to talk this over with you or do anything else which might get better data.

“You don’t use science to prove you’re right, you use science to become right.”

- Randall Munroe

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