Major Team Fortress 2 Update Rebalances Tons of Items, Fixes Maps and More

Over the last year or two, Team Fortress 2 news had become fairly predictable. Some new maps, a deluge of cosmetic item sets and occasionally a few new weapons. Needless to say, it had all become rather dull to read about and outside of the Mann vs Machine Update -which was released then promptly forgotten by most- there wasn't much variance. Regardless, Valve's formulaic auto-pilot for TF2 had proven to be quite successful at making the company tons of money, but the lack of consistent item balancing had begun to turn some players away.

Of course, we are running on Valve time here. I think the conversion ratio goes something like 1 Valve day = 1 normal person week. Once you factor that in, yesterdays major TF2 release came quite quickly. First things first, the update came with 60 or so new workshop items with most of them being hats (of course). Again nothing groundbreaking, but it wouldn't be a TF2 update without hats. More importantly, the update finally rebalanced many of the weapons and items players had taken offense at over the last two years.

The number of items rebalanced comes close to the number of hats added, with nearly every recognizable item being tweaked. A couple of major changes include; item sets no longer providing the users an extra bonus and damage now reduces the effect of Feign Death while using the Dead Ringer.

TF2 does have a competitive Esport scene which has a selective list of items deemed suited for competitive play. It will be curious to see whether these sweeping changes will cause an introduction of new items into the gameplay meta.

While the update did add two new community made maps, most older maps have also had many of their collision issues and exploits removed.

The full patch notes can be found by visiting the Team Fortress 2 blog post. Since I am a "casual" TF2 player I haven't really paid attention to what items are overpowered. I'm curious, what changes are you excited to see?