The Eyelander is not a Good Sword. Please Stop Using the Eyelander.

The eyelander is pretty definitively demo's worst sword, and I can explain why

Why I Made This

The eyelander is so lame. Thats it. The half-zatochi gives you great survivability, the persian persuader gives little downtime between charges, and the skullcutter gives 234 damage random crits. The eyelander gives you very little comparatively. I'm just sick of seeing it everywhere, because its not fun to play and it isn't fun to play against.

Everything Bad About the Eyelander

There are a few things but most importantly, you get -25 max hp. Now you can reverse this with enough heads, but its difficult to even get there for a few reasons: one, before getting as least 2 heads you can die to a single melee crit. This is bad. Really bad. I can't tell you how many times I've been playing demoknight when I come across another demoknight using the eyelander who thinks their invincible. Long story short, I kill them. Very easily. Because the eyelander is not a good sword. Secondly, snipers can kill you with only a minor amount of charging their shots. This is bad when you are in a different area code than a sniper and have no reasonable reaction. Third and finally, you just die a lot faster than you might think. 25 health may not seem like a lot, but 25 health is a huge difference in tf2. Everything in the game kills you significantly faster, even without considering damage thresholds as with the previous two reasons. Even besides the -25 health thing, you don't even seriously benefit from the eyelander's upsides until you get 2 heads. When every death means starting from scratch, it's not very hard to see why that's a huge problem.

Meager Upsides

There are only two upsides to using the eyelander: extra speed and extra health. Both of these would be pretty good, except you have to get 1 kill to gain any extra speed and 2 to make up for the downside. More often than not, that upside never gets used due to how little health you have. Even when those upsides are obtained, the only real weakness they are circumventing is demoknight's ability to close the gap. With good charging, this can be ignored without any additional movespeed. The health is okay, but it still doesn't cover any demoknight weaknesses: you're still weak to sentries, you're still weak to airblasting pyros, you're still weak to heavies, and if you don't trimp you're still weak to snipers. The benefits of the eyelander seem good on the surface but can easily be supplemented with better play, which only leaves the huge downside.

Why Other Swords are Just Better

Either sword outperforms the eyelander in their respective categories, the only thing the eyelander has is doing a mediocre job at both instead of a great job at one or the other. For speed, the Persian is king. Every medium ammo pack basically refills your charge, making recharge time basically nonexistent. Whenever you would want speed, the Persian would ensure you have a full charge meter to get that speed. The eyelander can only get significant speed with 4 heads, which aren't easy to get and are extremely easy to lose. The half-zatochi is absurd at times for survivability, and leaves the eyelander in the dust when it comes to health gain. +100 hp per kill is extremely great, and in most situations where the +35 hp from the eyelander would be useful the half-zatochi overheal can supplement it and surpass it. The skullcutter is the odd one of the group, not really affecting survivability or movespeed. The skullcutter has random crits, though, along with its already good +25% damage. This instantly makes it very useful for hybridknight, something the eyelander just can't do. Using the eyelander with a grenade launcher is basically begging for death. With the skullcutter you can do a guaranteed 103 damage with the tide turner, and a potential 234 damage if you get a random crit, the former being useful for finishing off damage opponents while the latter being useful for unexpectedly obliterating your enemies. The claidheamh mor seems pretty useless, being mediocre on regular demoknight, but it has a good use with hybrid knight. Sure, it doesn't have the flashy crits of the skullcutter or the health gain of the zatochi, but it has a simple +0.5 second charge time with 25% of charge being replenished on kill. With the tide turner, you get longer charges that instantly recharge upon a kill, which can be very useful in the right hands. The downside of being 15% more vulnerable seems bad but do remember that this is only active while the weapon is, so if you don't want to take that extra damage simply put it away when you don't need it. The eyelander on the other hand can't have its downsides ignored by switching away, you're stuck with that -25 health constantly before you get heads. All of these swords combined could fill any possible use case for the eyelander while being more efficient at their jobs and much more fun to use.

So Please, Stop Using the Eyelander.

The eyelander is only great against terrible teams who have no idea how to counter you. Literally any other sword has wider use cases without the added headache of losing heads upon death. The ONLY acceptable time to use the eyelander is during halloween if you're using the HHHH with the outfit to match. Otherwise, just use the other swords man. If you don't have any other swords, I will give you some for free. I'm not joking. I am so fed up with the eyelander that if you comment on this guide right now asking for a sword I will give you whatever non-eyelander sword you want, no questions asked. With your help we can topple the eyelander dominance facing harvest servers everywhere, so please start dissing the eyelander today.