TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Soviet Power

As is traditional for this point in the Class Update timeline, Chris and I have both got our taunt kills, and again he beat me to the blog brag. For the unfamiliar, the Heavy class has always been able to point his fingers like a gun and say “Pow! Haha!” But until the recent updates to the class, that wouldn’t kill a man stone dead if he stood in the way of it. Now it does, and there’s an achievement for it.

This is how it went down:

There was a lot of missing completely.

One or two completely wasted ubercharges.

One instance of “I’ve Landed On Your Medic’s Head And This Taunt Doesn’t Fire Down.”

A great many foiled by knockback.

One that goddamn should have worked, he walked right through my finger during this.

And then, on my very next life, the very same guy, emboldened by his apparent immunity to the taunt in our last encounter, impaled himself on my middle- and fore-finger and flew back in a spray of SO MUCH BLOOD.

This is what happened while I blew the imaginary smoke from my imaginary gun barrel.

And these were the spoils. All Heavies become pathologically silly when they unlock these, serious tactics are out the window.

Soon after I jumped back to Badwater Basin and won by a) riding on top of the cart doing the KGB taunt, b) standing in front of the cart doing the KGB taunt, and c) standing actually in the blast hole doing the KGB taunt, and miraculously surviving.

Getting this was a lot more fun than my more gruelling quest for the Hadouken Kill. I was about to call it a night on Sunday, but when browsing achievement progress I noticed I was one Sandvich away from Konspicuous Konsumption, one WE MUST STOP LITTLE CART! away from Stalin The Cart, and only three achievements away from unlocking the Killing Gloves of Boxing, which I had actually started to lust after since giving up my shotgun for the Sandvich.

I joined a Badwater Basin server and munched a Sandvich, stopped the TINY LEETLE MEN from Pushkin the cart the requisite one time, then noticed that everyone else on the server was in the same clan, and they probably wouldn’t appreciate me wasting the slot I was taking up by repeatedly trying to Pow! everyone I met.

So I ended up in purgatory: instant respawn 2fort 24/7. roBurky joined me there, but I soon got autobalanced to the other team. Usually I refuse to fight my friends and Spectate until there’s a slot on their team, but since I wasn’t playing properly anyway I didn’t object.

It was hilarious. Before long most people on the enemy team knew me, and knew that I wouldn’t attempt to shoot them or in any way be effective when attacked. So a lot of them would draw their own melee weapons and take great pleasure in beating me to death as I was frozen to the spot, pointing my fingers impotently at where they used to be. roBurky took this one step further: he was playing Pyro, so would circle me after I started taunting, switch to shotgun and perform his own killing taunt, which takes rather less time to get to the lethal bit.

Not only did he succeed, but this was his fourth Pentadact-killing in a row, so it earned him a Domination. He tried it again the next time we ran into each other, so this time I sidestepped and killed him back with a critical uppercut.

Once I’d earned the gloves, I stuck around for a while to try them out. Long enough to discover that if you can get behind a Heavy Medic pair, you can punch out the Medic and use the crits time to KO the Heavy before he can take you out, even if he’s pretty on-the-ball.