· Reduced firing speed and accuracy, increased clip size by 10

The SMG was a bit underwhelming compared to the other available secondaries, as it lacked the damage potential to cut through hordes and deal with the special infected. This rework makes it slightly more effective at securing kills when firing into a horde and improves its chances of killing special infected before needing to reload.

· Increased clip size to 6, greatly increased spread, reworked pellets and damage

The V2 Chrome Shotgun felt like a downgrade to the magnum rather than its own distinct weapon, so it's been adjusted to feel more like a shotgun. It will now fire more pellets that each deal slightly less damage, and the pellets will be fired in a wider cone. To compensate, its clip size has been increased by 2.

· 50% less range

A common complaint in vanilla gameplay is that shotguns are too effective at range. Whilst this is less of an issue in TAO thanks to the wider spread of most shotguns, it's been officially fixed here. Shotguns will now deal no damage beyond 1500 units. It won't make a huge difference in most cases, but it can prevent players from dealing chip damage to infected across larger sightlines.

· Reverted to a secondary weapon, can be used while incapacitated
· Now uses fuel, has 50% more fuel than the vanilla chainsaw
· Can be refueled by shoving red gas cans

It seems that the main balancing factor of the chainsaw is its limited fuel. When given infinite fuel, it begins to overshadow other weapons and make the user very difficult to kill. With limited fuel, the chainsaw becomes hard to recommend over a more reliable melee. The solution was to increase the size of the fuel tank and let it be refueled with gas cans. The chainsaw now has enough fuel to get through a couple of hordes worth of infected, and the user has the additional task of searching for gas cans that they can use to refuel it.

· Increased max spread

This is a very small nerf to make the Spas a bit less effective outside of point blank range. It's now harder to take out Smokers and Spitters before they can set up for an attack.

· Increased firing speed
· Decreased accuracy recovery, increased spread per shot

Another minor rework, the AK47 now has slightly improved DPS at the cost of becoming less accurate the longer it's fired.

· Reverted back to a primary weapon
· Has a 50 round clip, with 180 rounds in reserve, and can be reloaded
· Ammo can be refilled from ammo piles
· Fires 3 bullets at once
· Accuracy decreases as the weapon is fired
· Automatically switches to your secondary to avoid dropping when out of ammo

Although having the M60 and Grenade Launcher as carriable items was fun and made the weapons more appealing choices, there were a number of bugs that came as a result. As such, the M60 has been reverted to a regular primary weapon, offering a very high DPS and strong crowd control capabilities, but being very ineffective against distant targets.

· Reverted back to a primary weapon
· Ammo can be refilled from ammo piles
· Slightly reduced arc compared to V2

Like the M60, the grenade launcher has been reverted to a primary weapon. It can once again have its grenades refilled from ammo piles, and it has a reduced arc to be a bit more effective at mid range without the need to lead your shots.

· Decreased max spread

A minor buff to make the magnum more accurate when it's fired quickly.

· Increase firing speed, decreased accuracy, -5 clip size, increased damage

The MP5 felt a little awkward to use due to its slow firing speed. It's been reworked to improve its DPS at the cost of needing to reload more frequently, and its accuracy has been reduced to help further differentiate it from the silenced SMG.

· Survivors can crouch walk faster
· Survivors can move faster when at low health

Both these changes will help to improve the pacing of the game, particularly after intense combat. The survivors can progress to the next area faster and will hopefully spend less time waiting for an injured teammate to catch up.

· Temporary health decays slightly slower
· After being helped up, survivors will have 40 permanent health and 35 temporary health

These changes are also aimed at improving the games pacing. Respawning with permanent health means that if a survivor can avoid taking significant damage, they'll be able to keep up with their full health teammates. This is particularly useful for when survivors go down in a low intensity situation, as it saves them from needing to use pills immediately.

· 66% more wandering common infected will spawn
· Horde sizes during finales have been slightly decreased

Having more wandering commons helps to create more high intensity combat situations when survivors enter a new area for the first time. As for the finale horde sizes, this was implemented to help prevent holdout finales from dragging on for too long without impacting the overall difficulty too much.

· Pills and Adrenaline can now be given directly to a teammate instead of being dropped on the floor

Dropping healing items while incapped was a good feature in theory, but in practice it turned out to be a very niche gimmick. The idea has been refined and healing items can now be given directly to a teammate, making it much more useful.

· All grenades, healing items and upgrade packs can be shared with teammates directly
· Items can be taken from bots

This feature is popular in various other mods as a quality of life improvement, and the mechanic has now been implemented in TAO. Players can now give items to one another, and use bots to hold items for them.

· Players can share ammo with other players using similar weapons

An entirely new feature, you can now give your clip to a teammate who is low on ammo, helping to keep them in the fight. This mechanic can be used to have one player fulfil a support role by using weapons like the SG552 or Military sniper and supplying ammo to teammates using the desert rifle or AWP.

· Increased Charger movement speed while charging
· Increased Witch movement speed
· Increased common infected awareness
· Decreased Boomer reaction time

All of these changes were added to help certain infected feel more fair to play against, or to improve their effectiveness in combat as a means of offsetting the various buffs to the survivors in V3.

· Added training mode

Want to learn as you play? Training mode can be enabled using the EMS file in "ems/tao/training_mode" (off by default). It will provide summarized tips in chat to explain the changes to weapons, the infected, and base mechanics that are different in TAO V3 compared to vanilla L4D2, letting you learn what's new when it's relevant, without the need to read through all the change logs.

· Added contingency for Chargers accidentally pinning survivors (they will now drop survivors after the first hit)
· Partial fix for Chrome Shotgun not having firing sounds (it works properly so long as the survivor isn't standing on the ground)
· Deployable ammo packs now give full ammo (previously they maxed out at 360 bullets, meaning SMGs could be left half full)
· Added contingency for gas cans that spawn inside another prop (they can be picked up by holding RELOAD and pressing shove, or can be shoved with a chainsaw and used as fuel)