Currently, scientist is seen as one of the worst classes next to mercenary due to their combo being very VERY janky.
A very simple improvement would fix this and make scientist probably heaps better in gameplay:
Allow for the flask to be equipped with weapons, rather than something that overtakes them.
Make the flask combo something that spews out random flasks around the player, rather than in a set direction at a somewhat random distance.
The only big issue I see most players have with scientist is their lack of ability to use their combo with weapons and their combo being pretty iffy damage wise. Buffing it so that their combo isn’t something that overtakes weapons, and is instead a sorta aoe effect around the player, rather than aimed at a direction would help this class see significantly more play time.
Bumping this because Wow this is needed; I love Scientist conceptually but their flasks are so inconsistent. If they were less bouncy and/or didn’t have such heavy autoaim (it assumes that it’s a hitscan it feels like) and/or got increased throw speed per upgrade so it wasn’t outclassed in DPS by literally any high-tier weapon past round like 3 it’d be great, but as it stands now it feels so wonky to use flasks. Nevermind the fact that the healing provided by Scientist is abysmal compared to what the Doctor can do. I like how they play as a sort of unique character, but their risk/reward for completely replacing your primary just isn’t worth it when its DPS falls off so heavily. I’d love to see a world where a maxed-out combo just throws like 3-5 flasks per second or something nuts. Idk, just spitballing.
Expanding on this thought: I think it’d be fine to have a radically different character that’s unique. It’s what makes Scientist cool to me. The main issues of Scientist are that 1) Flasks fall off after the first couple rounds, leading to a class with a near-useless combo skill and a below-average right click; and 2) Upgrades don’t do near-anything for Scientist. The two issues work hand in hand. At the start, Scientist is fine, but after a couple rounds, what does Scientist go for? Damage is obvious, and the path to Sawed-Off is nice, but otherwise, upgrading the black hole doesn’t do anything(?? Like the radius looks larger but it doesn’t suck in…?) and the combo ablility’s max time gets up to… 6 seconds… which nets you one (1) more flask for like 10k+ points.
An obvious change would to make the combo ability upgrades more useful. An obvious upgrade would be damage with each combo upgrade; this would also help Journalist greatly (since right now it’s entirely pointless LOL). I’d also argue a rate of fire upgrade for Scientist specifically would be great so it could compete/combo with high-DPS weapons (ex. M4, Assault SG) but either way, it needs something. Right now it’s just not ever worth it to go Scientist mid-late game since every other class either offers better either survivability (Doc, Survivor), better AoE (Merc, Engineer arguably), or both, and it bums me out ‘cause I’d kill for Scientist to be at least decent. I like how weird they are! But that’s my two (2) cents.
As an addendum, playing Scientist online is brutal. The flasks are so desynced it’s not even funny. I mean it is funny but like. Wow it’s bad.