Scrambler Uses

1. Spawn your scramblers when the jackbot comes out. This prevents snipers and katana assassins from grappling it.
2. Spawn them when the other team leaves their support on gremlin duty. Making them have to wait an extra 30 seconds for their skills is nice.
3. Spawn them to aid your assassin against the enemy assassin when clearing the bot lanes.

I basically never use spawn scramblers unless I'm messing around, but the big problem I've noticed is that they're fairly quick with basically no health, so what ends up happening is that they fly to the front line to be quickly destroyed. Have you tried the Jackbot/Scrambler tactic? I haven't but I would think that the scrambler would quickly pass the Jackbot, it would be hard to time the bot spawn to actually make it useful.

Why would this prevent them from grappling it? Alternate fire grapples don't get affected by skill draining effects.

spawn them and them use your explosive rounds on them if you wanna go that route. or just spawn them and keep pushing them back untill someone spawns a gap shot. they make such a strange pair. the intimidation factor alone makes me quit.

The katana grapple did. Did you change it?

It was one of the "buffs/fixes" for Sins in the oct 13 patch.

Why to spawn scramblers:

1. Free money for the other team
2. Gets rid of any pesky spare cash you might have lying around
3. For the lulz

scramblers drain skills, this comes in use at least a little against certain all-support and all-assault and all-tank teams.

it does make blackjack-killing a harder task for assassins, which may not be able to escape with smoke or dash after being caught while out destroying bots.

it does make the jackbot less desireable, as pros escorting the jackbot dont have to worry about the enemy's table-turning skills, like bombs and charges and product nades (at least from point blank)

tho i must say it probably helps to be able to spawn 4 scramblers, in waves of 2 in front of and behind the jackbot. (wait, whats that? after the update, snipers will be able to spawn 2 at a time? hey, that makes this easier!)

Scramblers are for an all out siege on the enemy base. They home in on pros, so they'll gun for the first person to drop off the spawn ring, or else they go for turrets/moneyball, ensuring they're in the fray. Maybe their armor is a bit weak for this purpose, but skill drain is powerful.

They won't get you many kills, but that isn't what they're for, and what they ARE for is incredibly difficult to actually have feedback on whether or not its working.

I think the issue with scrambers is that I can recall multiple times where gapshots, gremlins, Bouncers, and buzzers actively contributed to my death.

I can remember maybe a single time where I thought "man, that scrambler screwed me over."

This.

You can theorize all you want about how a scrambler might actually serve some sort of purpose in a given situation, however my experience tells me that most of the time scramblers get destroyed before they can do anything at all. Although, part of it is that since they are so rarely used, when someone does see one they might go for it just because.

Pretty soon we won't be able to freely buy juice. What are snipers gonna do with all their cash?

Further annoy the enemy team with scrambles!

God forbid most of them actually start upgrading the other 1/2 of their skills

Snipers don't need to buy juice. Explosive shot = HUGE juice. Although that too is changing apparently.

Sniper skills are situational just like every other class's

On a close-quarters map like laserazor it can be better to upgrade traps to 3 before passive just because the skill drain is stupidly OP right now and it is fun to just randomly throw traps around.

Or if you're pushing the base hard and working on turrets flak upgrades are a must, upgrades are also great for grenadeIII and ammo mule's glass "hiding" spots for flushing out that annoying support/assault that just stares at you from behind the glass waiting for you to charge or let his health come back.

Grapple 2 is a no-brainer but I have been moving away from it as one of my first upgrades unless I find myself getting swarmed by assassins. The smg to me seems to be one of the best close-mid range weps in the game, capable of kiting tanks, killing bad assaults, and with bronze clip size, killing a gold armored assassin in one clip if all the bullets hit. But grapple 3 is still very nice on Steel Peal because unless you are in a base, ring-outs are kind of rare and the extra damage usually means the difference between just knocking someone around like a red-headed stepchild and a grapple kill.

I don't know many snipers who would wait long on passive 3 due to its imbalance juice building and bot group wrecking abilities right now so I am guessing that's part of the 1/2 you mentioned.

That said, I think I have used a scrambler about 5 times. I was not impressed. Even to the point where the match has gone on for 10+ min and I have 2k cash on hand with maxed skills, I find juice (in overtime) or turrets(assuming we have a support/the other team isn't picking them off every second) to be a better use of my cash.

I actually played several games over the last couple of days where I tried using scramblers. It only reaffirmed my belief that they are completely and totally useless. It doesn't matter if you escort them, when all it takes is a shot or two for any somewhat powerful weapon to kill them. The only time they are any sort of help at all is when a pro isn't paying attention and jumps down right in front of one, which doesn't exactly justify their use.

WOAH, you know what i just thought. in a way, it would make sense to give a sniper buzzers, and an assault scramblers.

snipers already send death through the air from their spawn, that explodes on impact, and is heavily reliant on traps to engage nearby enemies (buzzers = flak), so it makes sense.

assaults are heavy-skill class so it makes sense, and least an assault could properly escort a scrambler AND use the bots effect against the enemy in combat.

not to mention the obvious balance. assaults rarely use their bots unless they want to be annoying to the enemy team, because they already are a flying murder-machine, so that would be miniscule nerfing. a sniper would get a bot to make up for its loss of juice, over-abundance of money, and slight nerfs elsewhere.

whats the opposite of a nerf? a buff? well, the sniper gets a buff that makes sense, and an assault doesnt get nerfed, if scramblers work that well with an assault escort it would also be a little buff if anything.

and im sure it would also be a minor fix by the developers to implement this. wouldnt it require 2 copys and pastes?

I'm pretty sure it was me, hellking, and starpilot last night, but pilot spawned a scrambler, not only does it get into their base, but it wrecks the assault that i just slammed into the red

Wait, so you actually got to see a scrambler get a kill in the killfeed?

That's rarer than bacon!

We figured out that scramblers also wreck turrets pretty fast. I think they should blind firebases and turrets that they are next to.