I’m starting to warm up to the pyro, no pun intended. My “most kills” is currently from the pyro, at 8. It is fun popping out and torching people. You have to know when to engage and when not to engage. You want to run in, set the guy on fire, and run away. Circle strafe to avoid getting shot at.
I think that as a pyro I should just run away from HW guys. As others have noted, they are also great against spies. I think they’re also good against scouts, as the scout depends on getting close for damage, too, but is less durable. Just don’t let follow them running backwards firing their shotgun at you.
I die a lot to demomen, as you are very vulnerable to their grenades as you chase them. Jumping over their grenades seems to work pretty well, as it fires at a regular interval. Assuming they aren’t aiming at your face.
I think the role of the pyro is not to kill people, but to almost kill people. Except for dirty dirty spies.
edit: I seemed to be doing well enough. I was consistently second place on my team playing pure pyro. The number one guy was a spy, and had 3 or 4 times the points I did. I should have just sat in observer mode and watched him at work.
I don’t think that I care that much about the comments from players who have been playing the same game for the last 8 years. Nothing would make them happy.
I don’t want to derail, but the achievement mention made me think of this: How is it that Steam can do “Xbox Live for Windows” better than the people that made Xbox Live?!
And I don’t just mean the achievements, I mean the whole integration with the Steam shift-tab overlay and buddy list and all that jazz.
I find heavies to be almost useless without an accompanying medic. Together, they are a very effective combo. However, I also found that enemy spies are very effective at killing the medic+heavy combo simultaneously (first the medic, then the heavy).
Speaking of spies, Pyros are probably their worst enemies. If they see a spy cloak, they run at the same speed as the Spies and will set them on fire, giving away their cloak… half of my deaths as spy was from a Pyro in a game earlier today.
All in all, Pyros aren’t too bad when they’re using in close range situations. But they’re just crap, utter crap at long distances. I guess you could mitigate some of that by becoming good with the Pyro shotgun, but I’d rather not. Although I did notice it was very hard to kill a Demoman with a Pyro for some reason. Do Demomen come with fire resistance of a sort? It’s not really fair since Demomen can already kill Pyros very fast with their grenades.
I still don’t understand Snipers. I’ve been playing them as my 3rd longest class, and I still don’t understand it. Are you supposed to be defending all the time, camping far away? That doesn’t seem very useful for helping your team advance.
Scouts I understand even less. They’re just so weak and they die so fast. Maybe they’re just supposed to run past everyone, be annoying and try to cap the enemy points.
Well that just stinks. I’m not sure how useful the Scout is then unless there is a really good team environment. Half the time an enemy engineer will build a turret near their capture point, and then there’s nothing that Scout can do, running around will just get him killed fater.
More importantly, does anyone know if it’s possible to scrap your existing buildings as Engineers?
I wonder if engineers would be too weak if they didn’t get building material from dispensers (or at least would get it at a highly reduced rate). The original blurb for engineers was that they have to take risks in order to collect materials from fallen enemies, but currently engineers do nothing but sit by their dispensers when building turrets.
TF2 probably has a console command, but this little thing is handier as it can be used for any game, and takes screenshots, and if you pony up a little money - movies. I just use the free version though.
Anyways, TF2. Screw the spy being OP’ed. The real class aching for a nerf is demoman. Their gernades have pretty good distance, can attack indirectly (i.e. no line of sight required), kills with a direct hit, and can turn any choke point into death to cross. One of them is fine, but when they start grouping… holy cow! They don’t even have to aim. Just fire where the enemy is and with all those 'nades flying every direction no corner is safe.
Other comments
Ideal Team Size: I think its 10/team. 12/team is just a little to frantic for my liking, but that may be map dependent. However, I’d still pick a 24 player server over a 20 player server. Why? Because once you hit 8 I think things start to suck badly. This game is best when there’s room for specialization, and you don’t have that luxury on smaller teams. You need every player to contribute every step of the way. And it goes with out saying that servers don’t always run at full capacity, so I go for servers with close to 24 players. 12/team is a lot better then 8/team.
Scout: Is a lot of fun to play. Their speed can make them “untouchable” in the open space. Double jumping is great to get to those hard to reach places and attack your opponents from behind. Basically, if the game didn’t have sentries this class would need to be nerfed. Especially with the new fire power Valve gave it.
Sniper: Basically, the purpose of the sniper is to attack from great distances. The greater the distance, the better off the sniper is. He makes a great counter to the heavie/medic offense. Charge up a shot, and shoot the nearly immobile heavie in the head for a one shot kill. The ideal spot for a sniper is overlooking the firefight. His best map (or at least the best map I’ve played to any degree) is well, with all the available ramparts. On his own, he’s pretty much limited to defense. But, if he’s tagging along with a fight force, he can go on offense and try to thin enemy ranks. Oh, and do note that he outranges and can damage sentry guns. This has been particularly useful for me on dustbowl.
Is there a way to switch to 3rd person like in UT?
I tried the scout last night but I need to see him in 3rd person view to fully understand him I fear.
I’ve been doing really well as a pyro as well. Besides being great spy filters, they are really good at stopping mass base rushes. Even if I don’t get a kill, the wall falls apart as they run away from me or off to some water to put the fire out. In either case, they are weak enough to stop the rush or to be picked off by the rest of my team
Thats kind of a weakness in the stat system. I think at best I have 7 kills and I’m like to think of myself as a really good TFC player. I just perfer to hang back and protect the base. Sure I probably could go out and rack up kills as an assualt class but I find it much more statisfing to stop 3 attempts on the brief case than getting 20 some kills. However stats don’t reward that kind of play.
