Spy - How to tweak?

While I admit the spy is perfectly playable, I doubt many would disagree it needs a little tweak.  As Explodesed (sp?) said in another topic, the game has changed from it's original conception, and the spy needs to change with it.

What I was thinking was...

• The spy isn't immediately revealed when he brushes up against a foe.

This is a troublesome one.  When the cloaked spy brushes up against a foe, his cloak flickers, revealing him.  Often, it's hard to tell you were revealed and react accordingly, which makes the spy learning curve considerably higher.  More troubling, when an opponent lags, that opponent may cause a spy to flicker, while the spy's own display shows him to have successfully evaded the enemy.  The lack of flicker would allow the spy to slip into backstab range without being held back by a very minor feature.

Common sense recommends a spy to take alternate routes to the back line of battle, but unfortunately, these routes are often narrow with many sharp corners, and there's little a spy can do to evade enemy movement in such cramped confines (except retreat the way they came).  Removing the flicker on a bumped spy would mean spies could take such routes with more confidence, and would require enemies to be more sensitive to when their movement is obstructed, or openly fire into areas with suspected spies to make them flicker that way instead.  Such a fix would require more intelligent play from enemies while taking away a sometimes arbitrary handicap in the spy.

• Disguises made more efficient.

Of the disguises, only a handful are truly usable.  These flaws are increased bit by bit with each loadout release.  This fix would involve giving spies disguised as medics a random ubercharge %, cause spies to display with loadouts and would avoid giving spies the same name as the player looking at him.  Disguises are unreliable at best, they don't need to be handicapped further.

The idea that I like most is your cloak bar doesn't lower when you are not moving.

I'd like for the flicker, to actually BE a flicker- a sudden outline of red will tip you off, but you won't tell EXACTLY where the Spy is going.

Either that, or when flickering, the cloak doesn't drain.

I'd like the flicker to reflect it's change on the view model

The spy should explose upon contact with anyone. That would encourage you to stop you walking into people.

On a different note, maybe the shimmer should be like the pyro fire effect, a translucent shimmer around the end of your screen. Anything too obtrusive and bumping into people will further reduce your chances of escaping.

Disguises, I really don't know what to think anymore. Improve them and people will pick them out in a week or so. Keep them and people will have to learn cloak management and that cloak > disguise.

The most annoying and the thing that is most up to chance is random enemy movement resulting in your discovery and inevitable death.

I can't tell you how rediculously frustrating it is to make it almost all the way behind enemy lines with the little cloak you have only to be bumped into by an Engineer, who had been standing RIGHT behind his senty the entire time suddenly go to get more metal and discover you. He did nothing skillful, or anything at all to discover you, but rather did it by complete accident. The cloak flicker is so distinct that there's no way even a noob would miss it.

And don't even get me started on disguises...they are so bad it's not even funny. Any experienced player will immediately spy check and call out anyone with half health. And then we have primary weapons and running speed, not to mention sniper zoom, and suddenly disguises are limited to a few classes that won't get you killed instantly.

What I really hate is when you barely brush against someone, so that neither person's movement is impaired, but then you apparently flicker, and die.  And of course it's hard as hell to notice whether you've flickered or not on your little character model, when you're trying hard to evade 5 people who decided to come out of nowherer and swerve around.

When you brush up against someone your class picture next to your hp shows it.

Also, if you disguise as a class you have a loadout weapon for and have the weapon equipped for that class, it'll show that weapon.

The other thing that bugs the heck out of me is the sapper.  It's just not terribly effective.  Against newbies you can sap-spam until the building in question detonates, but much of the time, you're having to get into contact with a building (which may have enemies surrounding it), sap it and kill the engineer (or vice versa).  An engineer has almost 10 seconds to deal with you and whack his sentry, should you sap it.  I appreciate that the engineer can't be too easy to counter, but on the other hand, ineffective sapping is just frustrating.

Right now, sappers only work reliably if you coordinate with an ally.  It would be nice if the sapper also had a secondary effect to reward successful placement.  Nothing OP, but something like...

• The sapper requires metal to remove, putting engineers in a tough spot if they want to remove multiple sappers and fix all of the damage.
• The sapper swiftly drains sentry & dispenser reserves in addition to causing damage.  Thus, sapping lower level sentries would stall an engineer's ability to upgrade them (IIRC, wrenching will fix damage & replentish ammo first, then upgrade after that's done) and even a removed sapper would have minor benefits as far as slowing enemy progress.
• Sapped buildings cause damage to spy and enemy alike as they explode.

I think spies should be able to display the secondary weapons as well - maybe even as far as to be able to fire them.