Spy

The Spy is a support class whose purpose is to immediately kill unsuspecting enemies at great personal risk. He has 125 health and 107% speed, making him slightly faster than usual. His Disguise Kit allows him to camouflage himself as an enemy teammate, while still taking damage from them as usual. His Invis Watch allows him to cloak and turn invisible, only being revealed when he bumps into an enemy, or is shot by them. These allow him to sneak into enemy lines without being detected, giving him freedom to roam around the map. With his Knife's backstab feature, he can instantly kill any enemy looking away from him, which is especially valuable against Snipers and Heavies. His Revolver acts as a reliable backup weapon for when he is inevitably caught, able to blast pursuers close-up and finish off enemies from afar. Finally, his Sapper allows destruction of enemy buildings, disabling them and dealing constant damage to them. This skillset is designed to allow the Spy to kill enemies undetected and be able to sneak away, with limited combat abilities outside of espionage.

Spy
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Basic Information
Icon
Type	Support
Health	125 (185 with overheal)
Speed	107%

Thank you for being such a dear friend.

The Spy after taking out his local mercenary

The Spy faces unique challenges and gameplay interactions compared to other classes. While all classes are capable of spychecking, Pyro and Heavy are the best equipped to do so thanks to their continuous rate of fire, high damage, and, in the case of Pyro, the ability to set the Spy on fire, revealing him even while he's cloaked or disguised. In addition, enemies aware and paranoid of a nearby Spy will often shoot teammates they believe to be acting suspicious, forcing the Spy to play unpredictably and change where he's attacking the enemy from to keep catching enemies off guard. When revealed, the Spy is often outmatched by most classes, with the exceptions of Medic, Sniper, and other Spies. His primary tool for defending himself is the Revolver, which is primarily used to gun down low health classes or destroy sapped buildings. His Knife is significantly less useful for self-defense due to its low damage and swing speed, only being a justifiable self-defense tool when used in conjunction with the Tranquilizer Gun, allowing the Spy to deal critical melee damage to enemies, while also reducing their ranged damage output. As a result, the Spy is much weaker in 1v1 fights than other counters, causing him to be considered by many to be the weakest class in the game.

Despite this perception, the Spy can still be incredibly effective and of great benefit to his team. Using his cloak and disguises, he can infiltrate and move around the enemy team safely, often targeting high value classes such as Engineers, Medics, Snipers, and Heavies. However, backstabbing other classes when possible is still helpful, and hard focusing high value classes is not recommended. The Spy usually decloaks around corners or deep into the enemy backline in order to mitigate the sound created when decloaking and minimize the risk of an enemy seeing them uncloak. In addition, Spy often attacks and targets enemy Engineers, as well as their sentry nests to make holding an area more difficult or to slow down the enemy team. Through these tactics, Spy can cripple an enemy team, preventing them from having helpful buildings, limiting their healing, stunting their momentum, and inciting paranoia and frustration from repeated stabs. Spy's gameplay is incredibly reliant on skills like gamesense, and often requires precise and creative movement to avoid bumping into enemy players, observation skills to spot fallen weapons for cloak, good aim to gun down enemies, and good timing to ensure enemy players are as distracted and unaware as possible for the best chances of a backstab. One good example would be to wait for a Heavy to be revved and shooting at the enemy team before attempting to stab him. Spy players often find enjoyment in the intricacy of his gameplay, the satisfaction of getting an impactful or difficult backstab, and, in some cases, the feel of outsmarting an enemy.

The Spy is voiced by Dennis Bateman.

Bio

Country of Origin: France

Job: Uncloak & Dagger

Motto: "..."

Contraptions: Disguise Kit / Cloaking Watch

A master of disguise, misdirection, and the byzantine details of who really runs things, the Spy is a double reverse quadruple agent whose reflexive suspicion is entirely justified.

Weapons

Primary

Weapon	Kill icon
Revolver
Tranquilizer Gun

Sapper

Weapon	Kill icon
Sapper

Melee

Weapon	Kill icon
Knife

PDA

Weapon
Disguise Kit

Watch

Weapon
Invis Watch
L'escampette

Tips

Main article: Basic Spy Strategy

As a Spy…

• …disguise yourself as an enemy with your disguise kit. Beware, attacking will remove your disguise.
• …call for enemy Medics by hitting E while disguised.
• …try to act like an enemy while disguised. Observe where enemy team members are, and disguise as one of them.
• …press Shift to run at normal speed while disguised as slower classes.
• …your revolver is a very useful tool for when a stealth operation doesn't go your way.
• …place your electro sappers on enemy buildings to disable and destroy them. Disguises aren't lost when placing sappers.
• …your electro sappers disable sentry guns before destroying them. Sap a sentrygun before attacking the engineer.
• …use your knife to backstab enemies from behind, killing them instantly.
• …hit MOUSE2 to cloak and become fully invisible for a short period of time.
• …use your cloak to get behind enemy lines, and your disguise to move around amongst them.
• …your tranquilizer gun slows down your target and decreases their ranged gun damage. This helps create an opening for an escape.
• …the darts from your tranquilizer gun cause your target to take guaranteed critical hits from melee damage. Let your teammates gang up on them.
• …the L'escampette allows you to move quickly to or from the enemy base. Make quick escapes, or quick infiltrations!
• …you lose cloak taking damage with the L'escampette equipped. Stay out of the line of fire.

Related achievements

Achievement		Description
	Deep Sleep	As a Spy, kill 10 tranquilized players with your melee weapon.

VIP achievements

Achievement		Description
	Fraudulent Transaction	As a Spy, kill the Civilian using the boost given by him.

Names in other languages

Language	Name	Meaning
Bulgarian	Шпионин	Spy
Spanish	Spy	-
English	Spy	-
French	Spy	-
German	Spy	-
Hungarian	Kém	Spy
Italian	Spia	Spy
Polish	Szpieg	Spy
Brazilian Portuguese	Spy	-
Romanian	Spy	-
Russian	Шпион	Spy
Turkish	Spy	-
Ukrainian	Шпигун	Spy

Update history

2.0.0 (Death & Taxes Update)

• Updated the Spy's Cigarette “shell” to be slightly higher poly.
• Added Spywalk for Spies. (Bound to Shift by default)
• Added a glow to the Spy's cigarette.
• Updated the Spy’s mask textures to be consistent with the 10 classes.
• Being touched as a Spy now also affects the viewmodel.

2.0.2

• Updated tf2c_spy_gun_mettle to include updated Sapper damage modifier
• Fixed Spywalk not being applied clientside

2.0.4

• The move speed increase from tf2c_gun_mettle_spy now only affects Spy, rather than all classes

2.1.0 (Fight or Flight Update)

• Updated the Spy:
  • Increased the Spy's movement speed to 107% (from 100%)
  • Set by tf2c_spy_gun_mettle 2, the new default setting for tf2c_spy_gun_mettle; can be changed by server operators
• Heal points are now given for Shock Therapy healing, Medic passive regen, Kritzkrieg self healing, being healed by an enemy Shock Therapy as a Spy, and stealing enemy Sandviches
• Added the tf2c_spywalk_inverted convar, which sets Spywalk (moving at Spy's regular speed while disguised as slower classes) as the default behavior, with +SPEED (Spywalk bind) imitating your disguise's speed

2.1.2

• The Spy now has a +20% damage resistance and reduced debuff duration while cloaked
• Added a Spywalk indicator on the Disguise HUD (enabled via tf2c_spywalk_hud, enabled by default)

2.1.3

• Spies now gain double the amount of cloak from building gibs
• Cloaked Spies now correctly take 20% less damage even from crits

Trivia

• The Spy used to have 100% movement speed in both Team Fortress 2 and Team Fortress 2 Classic, but both iterations were eventually changed to 107%.
• In Team Fortress 2 Classic, Spy gets another line for his "Thanks!" voice command where he says "Prego" ("Translation: "You're welcome"). This was lifted from the prerelease versions of Team Fortress 2.
• The RED and YLW Spy smoke white cigarettes, while the BLU and GRN Spy smoke brown cigarettes. Despite this, the class selection portraits in-game have the BLU and GRN Spy smoking white cigarettes.
• For the French dub of the game, the Spy was given a British accent and several of his responses have been altered to use british words, suggesting that the Spy's nationality was changed to better fit local sensibilities.