Alright, time for a fun discussion! I see A FREAKING LOT OF PEOPLE constantly mentioning how they hate the "W+M1" Pyros. Since I don't rage over games, I'd like to hear your reasoning as to why you hate it or as to why you think it's something stupid to hate. For instance; I feel that the people who dislike it, are just "crying" about it. I won't hold it back, but if you're telling me that... ...a pyro running blindly towards you, strafing or not, kills you with his flamethrower ablaze, then I say you have no reasoning to call him the noob. And this is my reasoning: 1. The player killed you. Killing other people is the general gist of what you are trying to do in TF2 - he succeeded, you failed. Try again, lad. 2. Saying that "It's a cheap/noob tactic" does not work. Scout throws baseballs that stuns his foes, Spy backstabs people before they get a chance to fight back and so on. If it's such a "noobish tactic", you must be the worse player for being defeated by it. 3. The Flamethrower is the primary weapon for the Pyro. It's a more mobile but weaker minigun that requires no spin-up time from a simplistic view and also burns the foe for extra damage. The fire can be put out by medics and medkits and other entities, such as bonk or sandvich. Try play pyro without ever using your flamethrower, if it's such a stupid/overpowered weapon. 4. "Pyros are overpowered" This is a very broad call-out, so I'll try to cover some arguments on this one. I can edit in more later on this one. "He can airblast my rockets/stickybombs away" At a cost of ammo and he must actually time the blast. "He has no counter" The majority of his weapons are close quarter combat with the exception of his flare gun. A seen pyro is often at a big disadvantage. If you still think a CLOSE-QUARTER COMBAT class kicking your ass, at melee range especially since you probably underestimated him in the first place, you only have yourself to blame for being toasted alive. Snipers with decent enough aim, Scouts that know to keep their distance and harass, Heavies that can aim and outlive the damage and Sentry Guns from the Engineer are notable threats for your "W+M1" Pyros. "He has too many crits" The Pyro either random crits like many other classes, or can secure crits by hitting you with a slow flare that deals 90 damage to you if you are on fire or 195 if you're hit in the back by the axe while on fire. Or a mini-crit if you face the fearsome guy. Or maybe he blasts you up and reserve shoots you, but he could just had burned you as well. Protip: Don't get burned. If you get burned, Pyro ambushed you - like he's meant to. He's the winner of the chicken dinner. Let the flame wars begin. Spoiler Ha, get it? Because Pyro shoots f- Alright I'm sowwie
Guess now's the time: Phlog has no airblast. If you die by it, you either got ambushed or your aim faltered. Degreaser is a strong flamethrower but gives you more time to survive due to a weaker afterburn / 10% less damage. Don't try to weapon-heckle a degreaser Pyro.
Well, I think w+m1 on itself is not really annoying. But our servers have unlimited ammo. So if you just type +attack and walk around, it's kind of easymode. But I stopped caring a long time ago, I play for fun and to moderate ofcourse!
While I have had a few outbursts because of pyros, I don't find them unbalanced, I just find them annoying. The reason would probably be that I rarely see anyone trying something new. If it's not new players using the "W+M1" strategy, it's always the Degreaser + Axtinguisher + Reserve Shooter/Flaregun loadout. There's also the "the grass is always greener on the other side" thing. You have the enemy pyro that's airblasting, extinguishing, burning and just being an overall menace and then you have your own pyro who runs straight at enemy snipers, into enemy sentries and doesn't extinguish anything. Also, one more reason why I find pyros annoying was introduced by our VSH server : giving them infinite ammo is a terrible idea. Getting airblasted around isn't fun and using your rage just to kill one pyro isn't fun either.
Scouts are another reason you have to 'rage a solo' individual because they are so fast and virtually impossible to catch if they know to keep their distance. Soldiers equipped with a black box and gunboats can also become a problematic man to catch. Pyro isn't the only one. Regarding the "Degreaser + Axtinguisher /+ Flaregun + Reserve Shooter" thing, it's complaining about another player's choice of guns. Nobody is in a position to tell people they shouldn't play a loadout of their choice. The comparison with the good and bad pyro is just how the game is. There's the good, the bad, and the dead.
Honestly anyone that complain excessively about anything has clearly missed something. The game isn't ""fair"" at all and it never has been. Everyone has different opinions about everything, this is mine: All explosives in the game are retarded. Every single one. "BUT DIRECT HIT IS TEH SKILL BECAUSE AIMING" no, shut the fuck up you're bad, you should feel bad, and you're still gonna spam that shit like everyone else. Don't even get me started on Demoman, even with if not particularly with the latest update in mind. Snipers could charge and one-shot every class except heavies and soldiers with a vaccinator up their ass with bullet resistance. He also shoots from a distance! Imagine that! Backburner-Pairo's come from behind and if you're slow you'll get bent over "LIKE UR MOM KEK", double-medic teams are retarded, Heavies have too much health and could take anything on with their 10 000 000 000 damage/sec miniguns, Engineers could camp the hell out of their bases lurking behind their sentries. Oh I'm sorry, "defending". Spies could trickwhack your shit in any staircase, the dead ringer is retarded. Force-A-Nature Scouts are equally so. And the baseball is SO annoying because it stuns you when you get hit! If someone whines specifically about the "w+m1'ing", maybe it's their belief that absolutely everyone are professional's who knows how to switch weapons. Because that's hard for many people. The game is retarded and you shouldn't play it. It's impossible to please everyone. And yes, Valve is retarded too, everyone are bloody well aware. But it is what it is and bitching about it probably won't make it any simpler, it might even encourage retards to do the thing they're doing only to annoy you further. Because people are dicks like that. TL;DR Don't complain.
A lot of people just have a hard time accepting that it is not Counter strike as well; where you're even in health and have access to the same weaponry. In TF2, the classes have all strengths and weaknesses that change the flow. Nice post, Dakte.
This is the thread where everyone pulls on their maturity costumes, and all guffaw with one another about how silly people are for complaining about these things, and how they themselves are truly too intelligent for such trivial complaints, yet the SECOND you leave and start playing and dying a few times, you'll get pissed and start complaining about factors like m1 w-ing again. I mean, who are you guys trying to impress?
@Jozzeh, I never said that they shouldn't play with that loadout, I'm just saying that it's becoming the default for almost everyone at this point. Every other class I see usually has a bit of variety in their kit, but pyros are dead set on using this particular loadout in every situation. I don't have any right to deny them that loadout, but I do have a right to not like that loadout.
Some classes don't require a lot of skill. So I feel extra satisfied when I kill Pyro's and Force-a-Scouts.
The reason I feel so pissed off when being killed by pyros is that the skill floor is too low and skill ceiling is too high for the role Pyro takes up in TF2. He's supposed to bring havoc, but everything that always happens is 1. Pyro becomes the winner in 1v1 situations or 2. Pyro flatout kills everyone before there is a chance to respond to it. And this is also due to two things. 1. Flame particles 2. Balance between burning damage and afterburn damage The pyro's main gimmick is burning people, but the damage the pyro deals when just using it is so much higher than the afterburn damage. It takes away the factor of tactic, and promotes headrushing in, which is rather unforgiving in a game that was (supposed to be) about teamwork and tactical positioning. Now it's a shitty duck-infected game where you fly around the map trying to abuse every single spot as much as you can. Oops, derail. The flame particles are also a significant issue. They're inconsistent, random and do not serve any reason to use the flamethrower in another way than to hold the primary fire button and just wave the mouse around. Even as a degreaser pyro you find yourself doing this to get out of sticky situations, because there is no drawback. You have no reason to tactically light people on fire, you just whack the flames in there. The reason I am not complaining about spread on shotguns and revolvers is that the spread on those can be turned off. A pyro is random and/or spam. This will always mean that new players will always choose this class. Or the engineer. Because the sentry will do the aiming for them. And yes, this might all be a bit narrow minded and whatnot, because I also play pyro regularly, but that's a rule of video game design. Give a player a weapon of mass destruction and they will use it, over and over again.
I've been playing a demonigga with Loch'n'load for quite a long time and trust me, if you have decent aim and good reaction - no pyro can outgun you nor reflect your nades. It's all about how you play - not them. TF2 is a well-balanced game and even the vast variety of weapons to choose for each class can't change the situation on the battlefield. Got killed? You're bad. Man up and find a better tactic against your enemy.
I have to agree, it's quite amusing given some of the standards we've been tossing about as of late - but hey, gotta start somewhere right?
@Nickston First off, if a Pyro is killing everyone "without a chance to respond to it" on his own, I don't think the Pyro is the issue. And Pyro is designed to be effective on 1 on 1s because of the afterburn. Not a lot of players do it, but I sometimes just ignite someone just about enough before they turn to me, then I retreat while still flaming/firing the shotgun. The Scout is another class good in 1 vs 1s because of his speed which he can abuse to flank his foe and dodge his bullets. The idea is that, instead of staying until only one of us stands, my enemy is still on fire and is panicing to put it out, might even die from the afterburn. And even if he doesn't die, I've contributed to my team by forcing the enemy to retreat, buying time and position. I don't really aim to bash on your argument here, but regarding this part. I am pretty sure that if I was right infront of a flamethrower that spat fire on me, it wouldn't just tickle. While it adds damage, many classes can deal with it accordingly: A heavy has 300HP, if his aim is decent enough he mows the Pyro down in around 1 to 2 seconds. A scout being so fast can just run away, even backpedal and be faster (while firing his scattergun). A soldier/demoman can stop him dead in the tracks by explosive jumping. The other classes drew the shorter stick and will have a harder time dealing with him. Now, I may not fully understand what your issue with the flame particles is but I thought it was doing a good job of being hot? The flamethrower has a short range, and even shorter when the Pyro runs forward, but since the particles travel, the range is "longer" when he backpedals and fires it. This means that in a Pyro battle; a pyro backpedaling and firing his flamethrower wins over the pyro chasing after him. (Feel free to explain if I didn't catch what you meant)
@Jozzeh The biggest issue I have with the randomness is the randomness of which the flame particles spread. It's a cone weapon, which effectively makes it better when you're inaccurate with it. It's similar to the shotgun's spray, except that in the more limited environments, the shotgun's spray can be turned off, resulting in a circular shape with 9 bullets where 1 (maybe 2?) is always exactly in the middle. The flamethrower does not have a spray pattern which you can turn off. It does not reward, as to say, "accurate flaming". You do not have to aim at the enemy significantly to hurt them with your weapon, while every other weapon requires this. Even explosives require you to think about where to shoot and to predict movement of sorts. As for the W+M1 stuff, it's completely my opinion. It might be double-sided complaining about it while Pyro is my 2nd or 3rd most played class, but it just annoys me when people bash in without a strategy and succeed. It's not rewarding in any way, at least not to me. As for class lineups, I did post a chart about pyro w/ average skills lined up against other classes with average skills. It basically contained the information that the only classes who can decently kill the pyro are long ranged classes, and those are 2 out of 7: the sniper and the spy. This is in a world where the game does not revolve around vanilla weaponry, as the spy pretty much needs the ambassador to successfully take down the pyro at that range. However, when removing the vanilla aspect, the pyro also has an easier time dodging headshots from either class, especially when the powerjack comes around.