Alright, so, taking a look at the ancient art of boxing on wikipedia, not only did I discover that it was the only martial art that could be executed by kangaroos, and that punch out was not a space shooter, I also discovered that the idea behind boxing was to be the last man standing on the ring.

Now the closest it gets to a ring in TF2 is a control point, so I guess the boxing heavy unlock should focus on control points, or, depending on the game mode, the objective.

And then I told myself, if the heavy can couple an offensive/defensive bonus with the raw power of his minigun, he'll be way too powerful.

So the whole idea was to replace the minigun with something equally heavy. So I thought a heavyweight boxing belt would do just fine. And BAM! Here you got this heavy weight champion belt, and it even has a gold star! Wonderful.

So that gives us:


Bortsch belt
Level 13 Boxing Belt
+Gives crits when defending/capturing an objective.
-It's not the minigun.



Now, a little clarifying here:

With this equipped, your secondary and melee become your only source of damage. You have to rethink your loadout, here are some exemples of the consequence-heavy choices you'll have to make when deprived of your minigun:

-can I afford keeping my sandwich on, depriving me of my only ranged weapon, the shotgun?
-do I want to keep my GRU on if I'm going to hit people from upclose?
-will the game mode and map I'm currently playing let me take full advantage of the buff?
-do I have hats that synergize well with this belt?


What this belt should accomplish, would be making the beloved shotgun heavy a more viable teammate in offensive scenarios, and a strong teammate in one-CP modes as long as the control point is unlocked (king of the hill, arena mode). The heavy would also become an excellent intelligence carrier, provided he can get to the intel without a minigun in the first place. Now, I can't wrap my head around whether or not this should be allowed in medieval mode. Probably not.

On the flip side, his abilities to defend anything that's not a control point, and to provide a sustained barrage of bullets are pretty much anihilated. The heavy is encouraged to play the objectives and gets buffs to kill enemies while doing so. To continue with the topic of defense, pecking away at people with your shotgun while they're capturing should not grant you critical hits, as you need to man up and physically block their capture. This doesn't apply to capture the flag/special delivery/mann vs machine, since the objective can't be physically blocked, so instead critical hits should be dealt whenever damaging the carrier.

The inclusion of this item would be a great addition to the heavy's metagame, as the secondary and melee slot are often overlooked while playing this class.

Thanks for your attention, please provide feedback. More to come.