The Fan O' War, also known as "One Last Fuck You Before I Go"

One step closer to the hothand getting covered. Although admittedly I don't know what there is to say about it

I like using the Fan in combo with Mad Milk and specifically the shortstop's shove to bully snipers on instant respawn servers.

Honestly if you could just mark multiple people for death it'd be way better. If Sniper gets to mark a medic and his pocket for death by tossing a projectile that recharges every 10 seconds, scout should be able to do the same if he runs in and manages to make his melee work.

One of my friends used to constantly torment us with the Fan O' War. He has a Strange Professional Killstreak one named "Buenos Dias Fuckboy". You'd be minding your own business, then suddenly, you'd be marked, and dead

You have completely missed the two reason I personally will swap to the Fan - Snowballing demoknights and kunai spy’s. Both are fast, have a ton of health, and are difficult to take down for a scout solo, but once they’re marked for death (which is easy for a scout to do, considering they’re both melee play styles) both of these play styles are invalidated by a bit of focus fire. If there’s a demoknight or kunai stomping the server you’re on because of clueless teammates, this can shut them down swiftly.

Wait the Last TF2 BWA episode was 8 months ago? Where does time go

I think the idea of hitting someone unaware of you to reward you with an easy fight is neat, but if you're behind someone and initiate with a scattergun shot in melee range instead of setting up marked for death, you'd probably win the duel anyway. Still, I'd call it an upgrade over stock bat outside of rare situations where you actually are fully out of ammo and NEED to kill with the bat now or you lose the fight.

Shout-out to that medic who ubered you as a Scout holding this thing.

On top of FoW in MvM: Sandman's "death mark on ball hit" upgrade will ALSO apply to regular hits. So you've got a better Fan'o'War with projectiles that can completely stun giants if thrown correctly. Yes, it costs 500 bucks, but as a Scout what else you can dump your money in anyway

8:56 People tend to ignore bonk scouts? Half the time I use it the entire enemy team flies into a rage and hunts me down until it wears off. Which is useful as well, as it makes for a good distraction, but yeah we have different experiences with the weapon.

Now I know what it feels like seeing one of the weapons of your loadout being in a Bad Weapon Academy video

I do like the visual of it getting an increased range in the form of it blowing the wind of war at a fucker.

Honestly for a while now force-cleaver-fan has been my favorite way to run scout especially in hightower-style deathmatch scenarios. It has enough meme-status to feel like a fair fight, but I love how the force just kills people marked for death (how a sawn-off shotgun SHOULD feel tbh), even heavies become a reasonable target if you can get that first hit off.

Hey look ma, my name’s in the video!

I don’t use this weapon enough to call it bad, just “limited use cases” like the gas passer

Something Valve should add (because it would be fun(ny), not because it would be good) is “getting a FoW hit causes damage to not reduce your Babyface’s meter for a couple of seconds “.

Fan O’ War + Soda Popper Is one of the most underrated combos.

spoilers for [TF2] Bad Weapon Academy: Fan O' War he is going to talk about the Fan 'O War

10:56 I laughed when you dance taunt at the sniper when he was dying at his mercy from bleeding mini crits.

I really like the idea of the fan because it makes sense for a scout. Just give someone a “screw this guy in particular” mark, and now he’s easier to kill no matter who is going after him.

I use this thing RELIGIOUSLY. It’s an excellent equalizer for combos making a fight with overhealed classes way easier to take, often taking a whole shot less. Or making a twitchy and slippery enemy that much easier to hit and it makes the pistols ammo cap much less punishing to use as more than a finisher. Of course don’t test your luck, running at people still gets you killed, but you’d be surprised how many people have died to my Mark or have been forced to retreat lest that get beamed by no damage falloff bullets. I’m already teying to get in their face and if they manage to kill me first then they’re marked and super vulnerable to my team. IMO its one of scouts best melee options where the downsides of most aren’t worth the benefit(aside from batting Christmas ornaments for free).

I never knew the fan only marked one target at a time

It's good to have you back fish

I wanna add that in Vs Saxton Hale, fan of war is pretty decent. Especially in a game mode where teamwork is needed to beat the 30K health tank. Mark for death is so good, also you don’t need to worry about other enemies since…there’s only one

Hey FishStickOnAStick! Good work showcasing your personal experience and opinion with the Fan-O-War. Regarding your ‘Bad Weapon Academy’ videos however, I’m not really convinced that this is a bad (or at least was considered bad) weapon. One question I have for example is: Why should I not use this to support my team in contrast to Scout’s other melee options?

9:04 Bonk scouts are either completely ignored or subject to intense pursuit from 90% of the enemy team, no in between

Another glorious Bad Weapon Academy video, and I can imagine your pain at the sight of the last scene.

Thanks for continuing to do these!

Great video man, was fiending more tf2 bad weapon academy and this delivered!

Honestly I love the fan, just because sometimes it's really fun. That cleaver combo is just so so delicious. Also it can genuinely be the best for slapping a pocketed heavy since it really helps the team beam them down

Shortstop Guillotine and Fan is already my favourite loadout in the game so it's nice to see I'm not alone in enjoying it

I'm absolutely cracking up at you saying "After a.. short break" at 0:37. I forgot exactly HOW DAMN LONG IT HAD BEEN XD, good to see the series back though, love ya Fish

One thing about MvM: The Fan can actually prove to be really effective, since snipers are usually perched far away from the drop zone and the META Soldier loadout includes the Concherer.

I personally realy like the fan o war, the concept of hitting someone with your melee and then your propper guns(or viceversa) its really fun.

I usually use the FOW with the madmilk and FAN in vsh as a support scout. It's very easy to get all of your debuffs in since hale is most often focused on the bigger classes and groups, so you can easily catch him by surprise. and on most maps a FAN shot afterwards will just send him flying.

If I recall correctly the fan of war used to last for quite a bit longer than 15 seconds. One of my first killstreak weapons was the fan so I used it a lot and now I like it quite a bit. Situational but fun.

Fan o war is by far my favorite scout weapon :3. I use it in every loadout. Mostly with shortstop. Playing a mid range ambush status scout is great

Honestly don't think this one, the Huo Long, or the Sydney Sleeper are that bad. I use the Huo Long more than all other miniguns and it's nowhere near as bad as people think tbh

I just binged bad weapon academy last night. Love this timing

It forces full health players to suffer a respawn timer lol

I finished watching all the TF2 Bad Weapon Academy videos so far now! (though I watched this one at release)

A buff suggestion is when equipped all the buffs and debuffs applies to your entire loadout. This means your primary and secondary can now mark but they all do 75% less dmg.

SO GLAD YOU'RE BACK MAN

The poor man has found his stereotypes series, may your viewers love and support you through all your creative choices in the future for your channel.

I love the ORAS music!

Probably the easiest way to make the fan better would be removing the 1 target limit for the marking... So a Scout can try to sneak up on and tap an entire group to set them up. Probably should shorten the mark from 15 to like 10 seconds with that though.

Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 1:00 Stats Breakdown 2:38 The problems with this weapon 4:36 MvM 6:34 Primaries 8:30 Secondaries 11:17 Conclusion 12:20 Potential rebalances 13:30 Outro 14:12 Bonus clip

One thing I like with the long duration of the debuff, and everyone's full understanding of the danger it presents to them, is in cases where you land the hit but flop the kill, the marked target has little recourse but to retreat, or fight while under life support. Nailing a medic or his pocket with this is especially good, even if the move is undeniably the most riskiest one; it'll force them to make a decision that effectively lasts the duration of a respawn. I've seen far too many players have to retreat from the frontline because they got marked; it's a great way to take someone out of the fight.

Its been a long shot since the last episode huh

From what I get from these clips, you can end the engagement at medium range rather than close-range, allowing you to dodge, juke, and retreat from your late target’s teammates with ease. Heck, with a good enough juke during the start of the fight, you could hit your target as you’re passing by. It would make them look in the wrong direction.

Idk why i was so incredibly hyped for this video

Best support melee for Scout, run this with the BFB and do hit and runs in the heat of battle. Pair with milk for further support or hatchet for big damage and regain speed buff.

Honestly, I’ve gotten a lot of use out of this melee in conjunction with the Pistol and Babyface. Getting a cheeky bonk in gives me the opportunity to get more boost when I can land my shots, and it helps with juking out the enemy and chipping them down as well.

I love Fan O' War because I am a fan of humiliating my enemy and announcing their defeat to the entire server. No wonder strange for this weapon costs so much, what an intimidating power

Thanks for the video fish stick! I know you probably won’t see this but you and the rest of the tf2 community really helped me out of my depression! I can’t wait for future videos

The virgin Fan o' war vs the Chad warfare enjoyer

I was hoping a "I Defense of" of the Fan O' War, now it will relegated into Bad Weapon Territory, Thanks Fish

I used to run the Fan o War with Baby Face in a flank heavy playstyle where I would use the boosted movement speed to tag people that are currently fighting my teammates, was honestly pretty fun.

I think my favorite use for this weapon is kind of situational but something I love doing. Just flanking an enemy group, slaping their medic and running away like an annoying distraction. It is so funny seeing the enemy medic panic sometimes.

Personally, i wouldnt say fan o war is completaly useless, it IS usable and sometimes fun to use with diffrent combos. plus, i think its more of a "youre second secondary", isntead of getting kills with it like with youre any other meele, you give yourself a a boost, of mini crits, like bonk gives you immortality and mad milk gives you self healing on hit. also, you could just use scattergun, and scout's pistols as his two primarys, and fan o war as his secondary, since you'll be dealing most damage out of these 2 options, youre scattergun, and the pistol.

The fish is seriously underrated. I once gave a medic lifelong trauma by random critting them with a fish… right before they were about to pop uber for a push.

Gotta love how bad weapons sometimes help each-other out

You’re doing great Fish!

Another thing to remember is that this isn't the only melee that turns minicrits into crits. Meaning the bushwacca will crit marked enemies. Got a friend as sniper with me a few times to do this. It's not as good as jarate most of the time, but we have had someone accuse cheating.

It is a cool weapon in concept but thats about it, I do like the speed boost on kill on rebalance, however with sandman also giving mini crits it doesnt feel very rewarding, especially when you only get the boost on kill so its not guaranteed. I feel like the range increase would make it better, but do I want to get myself in danger to get, still quite helpful, but not insanely helpful boost? The 25% faster holster speed is nice I'll say that. It just gets outclassed easily. It is fun when it works tho. Oh and the sandman also has a mark for death upgrade in mvm so even there it falls off later.

I think a fun change for this weapon could be making it a Sandman-style projectile melee, with slow recharge not assisted by ammo packs. Then, it could apply the Marked effect at range, allowing for longer range single-target work and another option other than the scattergun for eliminating light classes at distance with a cleaver combo, while requiring significant skill

This weapon is so cool. The concept of a weapon where you are an absolute rat tagging people with melee to make them take more damage is super fun. Unfortunately it is very much high risk and very inconsistent reward.

Also, I find the mark for death one at a time thing completely ludricrous if Jarate can completely mark a whole group for death in nearly the same time as the Fan O War. With the Fan O War, it's a melee weapon that costs risk and skill to hit a group since your range is limited. Meanwhile, Jarate can do the same thing in just one click depending on aiming of the arc.

I've been using a combination of the baby face's blaster and the fan o war, with the increase in speed I'm able to both close the gap quicker and back up to avoid damage, while the reduced mag size of the bfb isn't as detrimental since it takes many less shots to kill, especially at a slight range. Only downside is if they see you coming for them your gonna get slowed down and killed, but on alot of maps you can move so fast around the flank that you can just coordinate with your team to have them distract and then hit the high value target and dip away, it's very effective in casual with my flank heavy spy-like playstyle

Something to mention for MvM Scout, it's that as the waves progresses and credits pile up, the Sandman becomes a better version of the FoW because of the (500 credit) upgrade allowing the balls to mark the target they hit for death. So you basically have a ranged FoW that also slows robots.

One idea I had was to allow the Guillotine to Crit when it would normally mini crit. Add the Mark For Death to the Sandman Ball and suddenly you have three great combos

5:48 also if you have 500 extra credits, you can just use the Sandmann and mark enemies with your melee, but also have a ranged option for marking.

The best casual strategy that I’ve seen with this is kind of a support scout where they never actually kill people but just run around honking people and farming assists.

11:00 scorch shot but bleed

I believe fan o' war is a great weapon for teamplay. This weapon is not for uh, it's user's benefit. It allows you to let your team focus a specific enemy you marked for death, and deal with other enemies by yourself at the same time. Sure it's easier and more effective to shoot enemies right away instead of first marking them for death and only then shooting, but that's not how this weapon should be used. As teamplay mostly lacks in casual tf2, and despite that i'm not a competitive player and never played it, so i might have a wrong picture about it, but i think that fan o' war may be the best melee weapon for scout in a competitive setting, where you and all of your teammates have a voice communication. You flank enemy team, mark one target with fan o war, tell your team who you've marked, and while your team deals with the marked enemy, you can deal with others. Damage bonus and lack of damage fall off for mini crits makes it a lot easier to focus a specific enemy and so much faster too.

Man the more I see the bomb carrier paint the more I like it

One other thing you didn't mention about the Fan O War is its hit sound, specifically to the enemy. It's freaking scary.

IT HAPPENED! FAN’S O WAR UNITE

Hey if I remember, you did The Sand Man that the thing can relatively outdo the Fan of War in MVM when it has the M4D upgrade, right? Especially as the way it was implemented can cause not just balls, but the bat swings to do the marking.

tbh, I was waiting for this one to drop.

Speaking of the disciplinary action, maybe the Fan o' War could provide Scout with a speed boost on melee hit. To reward you for connecting the hit with the opportunity to get away and let your team get the opponent, or give you the much needed juke potential to reload and win the 1v1

hope ur doin good, fish

The funny thing is that I tend to meme MvM with the sandman. Yeah sure using 500 for M4D is stupid, but as someone who’s trying things to spice it up while also dropping back to “ok reliable when shit didn’t work” meant I should have done something later about it.

I think with the fan of war shortstop combo that the fan can also be used as a “get off me”, threatening to hit anyone who gets out of your ideal midrange with shortstop mini crits

I just had a random shower thought go through my head that still utilizes the buff that you gave to the Sandman's buff, what if the melee of the Sandman could create a custom debuff that slows down the opponent at half the speed of a moonshot, and lowers the overall damage of the Sandman user by about 10% after every consecutive swing of the melee for about 5 seconds. However, the Sandman buffs the melees of all allies by about 15% for 7 seconds. Do you know what this means? That's right, a single Sandman Scout would be able to singlehandedly create so much chaos in a Medieval Mode server, which is why I put the lower damage of the Sandman itself so that it cannot combo off of it by itself, and I would like to exclude the Demoknight subclass from being able to benefit from the buff along with crits and mini-crits nullifying the effect that the Scout could possibly give. Why? Well, because if we were to combo the damage everyone would need a Sandman Scout and that would not be balanced at all in the slightest. What I want this to do instead is to make all original meme Melee weapons into viable range, which I believe would fit in with the Sandman's theme, in that it is the SANDMAN. "Mr Sandman, Give Me a Dream" or insert the entirety of Enter Sandman by Metallica type of thing. This would make the Sandman honestly pretty cool due to the virtue of it effectively giving Scout a niche of being a leader of meme melee loadouts, and it would also still cost the Scout a lot by needing to have a team, needing to get into the enemy's face, which as you've said with the Fan O War is not an easy task, especially with 15 less health, and there are just so many other factors against Scout in this case and it would not invalidate the Ball option if anything else it would provide an option for Scouts to optionally lead a Melee army into a weakened enemy team that is too busy reloading their bullets or whatever else they could possibly be too busy with. The only class I can think of off the top of my head that would possibly be able to counter or actually enjoy this consistently would be Pyro, which I suppose since it is the Pyroland guy that a phony like Scout would like to rip off would be teaching the phony his place. Pyro, with the ability to airblast and the ability to burn so many enemies, especially with the Phlog, would technically have a lovely time just enjoying burning and blasting enemies away at their leisure. But yeah, what is Scout, Soldier, Demoman or Demoknight, Heavy, Pre/Post Building Engineer, Medic, Spy, or Sniper going to do against an Army of Melee Zealots marching towards them? Kill them one by one or try to Splash Damage as many of them as possible? That's probably not going to be a particularly possible possibility considering that one of them has to reach them at some point, and all Soldiers only have up to 4 rockets, 3 if we're talking about the Black Box which Conch cannot save a Soldier from Melee, Scouts will be eaten alive, Demomen and Demoknights will have to actually hit the enemies, Heavies cannot kill everyone, Engineers need their buildings and only their Sentries could block an Army of Enemy Melee fanatics which as I mean, they can still just switch off their melee and shoot the Sentry, Snipers can only shoot the classes one by one and that is because there is hopefully no Medic to heal everyone up, not even to mention the fact that once a Sniper is overwhelmed, there is nothing that they can do, Spies cannot stab an entire army that will probably be looking for them, and even if they were to threaten the enemy with a Kunai Trickstab, I mean the Sandman team can just shoot the kill joy, and what is a Medic going to do? Seriously, this niche for Sandman would not be overpowered, but it would be fun. It would be like an event that signals and heralds the coming of Melee Mania, the bell of the apocalypse, a sign of the Endtimes.

Almost the end for bad weapons academy tf2

8:25 hey hey hey! Don't expect me to gloss over that, say it right!

hes BACK

I had to repeat the clip at 12:27 cuz lol no way you ACCIDENTALLY killed that medic XD

Give it a ball like the sandman so you can mark people from a distance while still being able to mark people by hitting them then lower the time from 15 seconds to 10

it's actually quite good on medieval mode (defending last becomes a walk in the park together with the mad milk)

I love you fish do you have an opinion on the doom 2016 stun bomb mod

the only thing i got from this video is to use it with the cleaver and taunt before your enemy dies. this weapon became like a solid 7/10 for that meme potential alone. im off to clown on some snipers now

It's a bit strange to not see the "How can we make this weapon better" section that these videos have had in the past. I guess it isn't fully necessary anymore thanks to the rebalance server.

For weeks I did nothing but go on 2Fort with the Force-a-Nature, Flying Guillotine, and Fan o' War, but not using them quite how you'd think. I didn't use the Force-a-Nature to shoot people, but purely as a movement item. What I would do is terrorize snipers by hitting them with the Fan o' War, and immediately following up with the Guillotine. That combo does exactly 127 damage over time, and it's hilarious to bait the snipers into chasing you instead of running for health. You just stare at them from just outside their melee range and watch them bleed to death.

Almost wrote a comment before getting to the mvm part of the video. In general, it only lasts long enough to be useful against bosses or early game giants, such as in expert low cash, you're almost always doing more for your team by just upgrading your gun and shooting.

I enjoy using the fan as a support scout with the mad milk in MVM.

My personal skill issue scout build: Baby face blaster Crit a cola The Sandman/ Wrap assassin/ Fan o' War Because you can move faster and deal more damage if youre good and you'll take more damage and move slower if youre bad

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, BAD WEAPON ACADEMY MY BELOVED (please dont make us wait 8 months im begging you)