Guns? Who needs guns? Team Fortress 2‘s Sniper is ditching the weapon that gives him his name for a longbow dubbed “The Huntsman.”
What’s The Sniper without a sniper rifle? Apparently he’s a killing machine, according to what Valve is telling us about one of the new items the class will be receiving in its upcoming update. The Huntsman is a longbow that comes with a simple guarantee: “You will shoot them and they will stick to the wall and they will die.”
The Huntsman boasts a potential instant crit if you score a headshot, and can nail an enemy to the wall as “a bolt-ridden corpse hanging…that’s gruesome and funny.” If the crit or the arrow doesn’t kill them, the arrow will stay lodged in the target’s body, which not only sounds like it’ll be worth a laugh but also might prove pesky to a spy whose cloak won’t hide the giant arrow sticking out of the back of his head. The weapon carries 18 arrows and will require a one-second charge for “full power shots.”
As revealed last week, one of Valve’s objectives with the class pack is to encourage the Sniper to get out of his roost and into some more face-to-face engagements with his targets. The Huntsman could do that, especially with the one-second charge for power shots that’ll potentially make it easier to do some shoot-and-dodge instead of stand-far-away-and-wait-and-shoot.
Now I think bows are pretty cool, but I can see how gun nuts might be upset that the alternative to one of the most lethal weapons in TF2 is going to be a piece of wood and string. A bow-and-arrow is totally weaksauce compared to a sniper rifle, they will say. “Aren’t bows are primitive and harmless?” they will ask. To which Valve will respond: “Why don’t you ask the dinosaurs? Except you can’t, because the cavemen bow and arrowed them to death.” It’s true, you know.
