Team Fortress 2 adds organ harvesting, many nerfs & more open development

Traditionally, Valve have maintained impossibly motionless poker faces about what they have planned in the longer term for Team Fortress 2 [official site] updates - something which helped to build insane degrees of anticipation back in the day, as we prayed and begged for videos and comics and guns and hats. These days, Overwatch seems to absorb most of the air in the room, and in addition TF2 is so fatted with stuff that it's hard to get too excited about this or that being tweaked. That's why the latest round of patch notes are semi-notable: they're telling us what they've got in the pipeline before it gets sprayed into the game, as opposed to the usual after.

"In the past, we've made blog posts about changes we've already shipped or stuff we've tossed onto the smoldering scrap-heap of failed ideas; this time - based on your feedback - we're going talk about changes while we’re still working on them", reveals the Valvian hivemind on the latest TF2 blogpost. As such, they go into detail about what's currently on the drawing board "the next major update".

If you're not an active player of the game, this stuff may not make too much sense to you, I'm afraid - major it may be, but it's not a new mode or class or delightful character backstory reveal. In short, though, they want to:

• Transform the Panic Attack from one of the game's least-used weapons into something more universally beloved, primarily by making it more immediate to fire after you switch to it but reducing its damage in order to compensate for it. "Removing the queued/delayed-fire concept basically invalidates the original design, so we've started over."
• Nerf what they seem to feel is a currently over-powered Spy with certain weapons.
• Also tone down some Scout abilities, while making others feel more consistent and less random.
• Make the Solider's B.A.S.E Jumper harder to control in the air, in order to prevent bucketheads from being "frustrating to fight against".
• Try to stop the Sniper's Darwin’s Danger Shield from being pretty much a necessity for anyone playing that class.
• Change various Medic Ubercharge weapons so it's less easy to achieve - including introducing, er, organ harvesting from other players as a means of recharging the Vita-Saw.
• Assorted weapon tweaks for the Heavy, including making it so that the initial damage and accuracy penalty on miniguns can be eaten up by spinning up the gun first (where previously it would apply to your first second of shooting, whether spun up or not).
• The Engineer now uses up metal when repairing buildings remotely - without that cost, Valve felt that the ability was "too powerful."

They're after feedback on all this stuff, and go into detail about all the changes right here. Any of you lot still playing TF2? How's it holding up in the harsh light of 2017?