u/D33Zwastaken

Hi im pie/pos and ive been in the ci community for a little over a year. Even tho i only started being active in this subreddit recently, ive been playing for over 2 years and have been active in the discord community for about a year and getting to know and befriend some of the best players in the community. i have over 550k kos and used to speedrun competitively.

My experience with flamethrower spans over 2 years and i have 17k kos on it. I used to main flamethrower alot when i first started and had under 100k kos, however eventually i realised i was relying on it as a crutch being an extremely low skill floor weapon which was heavily impeding on my improvement keeping me from playing harder gamemodes and challenges. So i dropped it and played exclusively without it for some time and during this time i got much better at the game and got introduced to the ci discord community (not the official ci discord, but instead some smaller communities with about a hundred people). in these smaller communities i got to know some of the best players in the community, while i never bothered to join cih, i do have quite a bit of history with many of them.

while my opinions on weapons arent perfect, nearly all of what i say about weapons have been molded from months of interracting with countless players, most of which have over 500k kos, however out of all weapons, ive talked about flamethrower the most. there is 1 pro player that uses this weapon and he knows slingshot is better, the way he uses it is also completely unique to how every flamethrower glazing beginner uses it.

honestly im just tired of argueing about flamethrower, if u use it for fun, i have nothing against u, but if u wanna say its a good weapon better than other others, ur wrong. i cant say nothing else, but trust me when i say i have more experience with flamethrower than u might think, if ur gunna try and tell me about its aoe potential, i already know and i know that its not good. if u believe that all of the best players in the community (who have collectively agreed flamethrower is the worst weapon in the game and its not close) are wrong, go ahead but im tired to argueing about flamethrower in this subreddit.

Weapons and Gears Tierlist

After finding some of the best players to ever touch the game, ive made an objective tierlist for weapons and gears in combat initiation!

Ofc the nature of a tierlist is subjective and stuff, but this tierlist is as close to an objective tierlist as i can get it, essentially this list is the collaborative opinion of 19 of the games best players when asked for the weapons and gears ranked by pure max potential. This tierlist dosent care about fun, skill or playstyle, made only to assess weapons' max potential in mobility, damage output and utility (which is why this tierlist means nothing to casual players which is 95% of the community).

This tierlist contains 19 pros, with a collective KO count of 24,049,392 and an average KO count of 1,265,757. In total this tierlist contains 9 SOLO MM victors and 8 speedrun WR holders. With some famous names such as Xylem, Equinoxium, Kostk, Baja, Bricky and Deadly.

I basically asked each player to rank every weapon from 1 to 21 and every gear from 1 to 16 then put them all on a spreadsheet (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LdM-uuAsqRpdY8YwJz2Xskq4E2ee-1\_7L-QMLSCAZtQ/edit?usp=sharing) and then averaged every weapon out to find a collective ranking of every weapon and gear (weapons had cost taken into consideration).

While i do not contend at the level of the players i interviewed for this tierlist, i am experienced and have spent alot of time interacting with many of them, if u have any questions about the placement of weapons on this tierlist, feel free to ask me any questions and ill try to answer them to be best of my ability.

Thanks to Deadly and Neojae for helping me reach out to Curtality and Bricky, and thanks to SBM for making the graphic for the tierlist, ofc a huge thanks to every player who decided to help me on this project.

So inherently the nature of a tierlist is subjective, especially for a game like ci where ur playstyle matters alot to how certain things in the game are, but a while back i was thinking about potentially making an objective tierlist based off a weapon/gear’s max potential in multiple categories like mobility, damage output and utility. Ive managed to get a couple of my friends to help me in this and by the end of the project i should have a sample size of around 20 of the games best players in multiple categories, the best at their craft and their opinions about every weapon and gear. I hopefully should get this done in under a month from now and ill post the results and a spreadsheet containing all the info for those interested.

Fell free to comment any predictions for this tierlist below, itll be very interesting to see what people think before seeing the finalised results

Early game towers rly just feel like a waste of an inventory slot, due to the nature of modern tds, alot of things just require a shit ton of dps in the lategame or else u just lose and this often requires 2 or 3 dps towers in ur loadout maybe even 4 in solo. Ofc u still need towers to survive the early game, but i only rly choose towers for this job that can also accomplish a secondary role, like cowboy for early but also eco, engi for early but also dps, frost blaster for early but also stalling. Towers like gold scout of brawler whos role is only early and cannot fit any other role just end up seeming like a waste of a tower slot. Every single other tower role is essential, you need dps, support, utility, eco but early game is rly just unnecessary and has no place in modern TDS.

Idk maybe its just me