Pyro. Cool class. Can it be annoying? Yes. Just as annoying as playing against any other skilled class. Less annoying than a good sniper, spy or scout. Either way, the people that play Pyro and are good at it deserve credit. I think the skill gap is pretty obvious between a bad,good and great Pyro player. Or maybe that's me being bad.

Okay, I'll bite.

OP: No.
Skill: Moderate.
Combo: Not OP, but still bad for balance.
Reasons: Stated, caught into an irrelevant argument but still stated.

#29:
This isn't the first time this has happened to me........
(you were reasonable, I didn't have a reason to respond to you)

The pyro is designed to be the best short range combat class, aimed at encouraging players to adopt an ambush style of play. To achieve this...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjA-lEt1sQA

Get close, you die (most of the time).

scout still better short range combat class than pyro

EDIT: things like visual noise making it hard to fight pyros, being part of the game's balance, just prove that testing your games mainly with "bad" players (especially multiplayer ones) like valve does (at least did with tf2) is a pretty bad idea.

Welcome to the first two years of TF2, where random crits, damage spread, and bullet spread existed. They have admitted there were terrible oversights, especially with random crits/random damage and fixed it. +50HP backburner pyro, the first two equalizers, sandman, and many other unlocks has shown that they really don't playtest well, even for pubs.

My least favorite part about the pyro is getting hit for 66 damage just because the pyro caught you with the edge of the flames, so even when you kill them in two hits there's a chance they can do 66 damage to you, and that's the minimum damage, regardless of if they just barely looked at you.

that's actually my favorite mechanic in pyro. punishes you for being in their turf, but doesn't ruin anything.

#35: Man, if only they had like, a beta, or something!

Pyro is in my opinion UP. Sure once it gets in range it can kill you really easily, but so can any class. Hell even an engie can kill a soldier if he gets a good first shot on him. Admittedly the soldier would have to be pretty bad but I think you get my point. getting airblasted over and over again is really annoying. One thing that they could do to fix it is to make it feel like you're getting knockbacked by an explosion so that you still have air control.

The trick to beating a good pyro at close range is to stagger your shots. Idk if that will work against whoever the coolest ugc plat lepyroxd is but it certainly works against most good pyros. Im pretty sure the lag compensation is in the soldiers favor too because sometimes I will die to a rocket and then the airblast sound plays.

Pyro would be way more balanced if they just added the detonator's abilities to the flaregun. As a flanking class she should still have some extra mobility.

If youre a gunboating soldier you're kinda fucked against pyros :/

Would you guys like to see a lightening gun sort of weapon for the pyro? I think it could work if it only worked at all at close range

I remember when running backburner pyro through shit house was a viable strat.......

nothing can be done to make pyro viable without completely changing the purpose of the class in the game overall. something like reasonable splash damage with flares would be a possibility, but the class would still be outplayed by pretty much every one of the core fragging classes

#38 when did the pyro suddenly become a flanking class?

the fact that pyro's flame attack hitboxes go twice as far as the flame and that the reflect is even farther is what makes him ridiculous especially to scouts. Pretty much insures he is annoying as fuck to any class. At that range reflect + flare gun out-damages shotgun and scattergun if hits are made. Probably OP in pubs but simply sometimes irritating otherwise unless it's a pug or low team.

As if there isn't at least a dozen ways to put out fire.

@wareya: since you're still here, would you care to very concisely and slowly iterate your point considering everybody here is apparently dumb and can't comprehend a single one of your posts?

e: Just to spark a separate discussion, here's a hot query. Who here would consider pyro to have one of the highest skill ceilings in TF2?

soldier, demoman, sniper, spy have the highest skill ceilings in tf2
/imo
pyro is higher than some but lower than others.

I'm not going to manage to concisely describe something I've tried breaking down several times in a row because apparently saying "it's like this except that" doesn't say anything about the "except that" part, even though it does
yes I'm bitter

fun vacuum

just my thoughts

I've always looked at pyro as a more mobile version of the heavy, but with less health

the pyro itself is generally underpowered and the flare gun and degreaser are a huge band-aid for that as people have said

the class in itself isn't very difficult and doesn't take that much practice to be amazing at the class

honestly the best thing about the class is the ability to block movement, but it is really annoying about it because it's not a passive movement blocker like stickies, with which you just think to yourself, " oh I can't pass there, I will die because stickies " but rather it is an active movement blocker, where you have to shoot it to kill it, but it can reflect the pocket's ( in 6s at least) primary form of attack, which is to say, annoying

which is why people hate it

reflects, not puff n sting

sorry triple post somehow..

wow wtf just happened

Takes no skill whatsoever to play the class.

I like reflects

Okay so IMO pyro is an obnoxious broken combination of situational mechanics and the worst one that would fix most things if you removed it is puff and sting
there that's your concise version of what I was trying to saying manging

fire is an annoying mechanic, airblast is an annoying mechanic, crits are an annoying mechanic

pyro's not overpowered in any way it's just not really fun to play against

puff and sting is not as annoying/broken as puff and flare. At least puff and sting can be avoided by the majority of the classes either by jumping away or killing the pyro. Flaregun pretty much guarantees the death of a 125hp class when hit and it's a lot easier for the pyro to hit you then it is for you to hit him when he is juggling you at range.

Considering a truly top level pyro would have rocket/pipe aim just as good as soldiers/demos and the fact that it's downright harder to nail reflect directs than it is to just hit directs as soldier/demo, wouldn't pyros compete for soldiers and demos for highest skill floor? Granted, RJs and SJs come into account but it's not like it takes much time to master rollouts and the basic-ish jumps that you'll actually be using in matches etc. As another counter point, although reflect RJing is really gimmicky and situational, it's definitely a lot harder than normal RJing.

That's not factoring in secondary aim or properly utilizing weapon combos. The theoretical skill ceiling for Pyro is being able to do anything you want with any projectile thrown at you while effectively using weapon combos due to the degreaser.

#50: well the thing about that is that if you're engaging a pyro at close/close-mid range as a scout or get caught out while corner peeking you either failed to pick your battles properly or your roamer didn't back you up properly/you weren't buffed as you should have been
there's no reason for a scout to die to a flare outside of DM, which is the only place it's truly broken (No I'm not talking about SOAP)
though it is retarded that you can't engage a pyro, and flarecombo is one of the reasons.

I consider puff-and-flare a puff and sting anyways, don't get me wrong, but it's both of the two (flare/axtinguisher either with degreaser) that are "broken", not "flare or axtinguisher alone and the other not so much"

???

Yeah anybody would concede that random crits are dumb but what's wrong with forced crits?

Okay so you think puff n sting should be nerfed or removed. Why, and what other changes would you make to balance that out? Pyro is already nowhere close to being viable outside of defending last, and even that's map dependent. Any claim that the class should be nerfed harder just makes you look like you're really sore about the pyro's mechanics and think they should go away regardless of the repercussions that would have on the class.

every class in tf2 revolves around 6s guys

EDIT: the problem with the crit combos is that the only classes that should be able to (virtually) instant-kill are demoman(with traps), spy, and sniper; the direct hit is bad enough against scouts at point blank range, giving mid-close range instant kills to a class that can control movement outside of their weapons' good range is gay. Combine that with pyro's other traits.

I make one reference to 6s and you think my entire argument is based around 6s. Alright.

Besides, do you REALLY think the pyro is predominant in terms of damage output in highlander? Really? If you take away or nerf his critboosting then what little DM viability he has will be completely crushed and he'll be demoted to babysitting the nest/combo at all times.

you just need to give a better example than 6s

@HL: hahahahah what no I don't think that, that would be retarded
pyro's role in highlander is balanced, the class diversity and large numbers of players makes pyro be not-broken in the few situations he otherwise would be

sorry been editing my post

You're losing me again. First you shrugged me off by implying that I needed to look at pyro's balance outside of 6s. Now you're telling me you didn't mean for me to analyse his balance in HL. What the heck am I supposed to be looking at here? In what environment and at what skill level is pyro broken? Why is it broken? How would you change it?

Why?

Here's one of the main splits in TF2's community: those who refuse to accept deviations from what they consider to be "normal" or "fair" and those who are willing to accept changes assuming they're fair in terms of balance. There's literally no reason to call for the pyro to be even less viable than it already is unless you just really hate playing against pyros and want the class to be so awful that it isn't worth running in any given situation.

Highlander is like, on 5CP it's balanced, the situations where pyro is broken almost never pop up, it's even with other classes in that regard. In PL it's pretty bad though because of engie babysitting + wrangler, but that's a combination of the engagement denial and the wrangler itself being broken, weird tangent, sorry.
There's more to TF2 than comp. Pubs and "other gametypes" like 4v4 and 3v3 exist and matter, man; they're where pyro is the most "broken", with varying viability, though there is still a degree of "gay" brokenness in 6s.

Pyro is consistently broken in specific situations as in #44, because of the combination of their engagement denial and their critcombos. You can't initiate against a pyro with any of tf2's power classes when they're in a comfortable position; you can't even properly initiate against a pyro with an uber.

Surprisingly, you can get away with rolling pyro during 6s last pushes on some maps (not all the same as for defending) because of the engagement denial ability. And that's fine.

The thing about the instant kill thing is, tf2 isn't supposed to be a very-lethal game, and the ones that do exist are supposed to be brutal punishment (demoman) or classes Designed Around intitation. Giving a pseudo-instantkill to a heavy combat class for use in active combat on the person they're combatting is outright unbalanced; the rest of the game isn't designed to handle that. The crit combos aren't viable in comp play, they just break pyro's engagment denial to where even if you manage to engage one they can screw you over in inconsistent (to you) ways (mostly because airblasting doesn't apply properly to input prediction)

you still haven't responded to what I said a looooong time ago.

this is a team game. if there's a class that (not even always, just in a small handful of specific situations) is really strong in 1v1s, but extremely weak when focused by multiple players, doesn't that balance his 1v1 capabilities?

who gives a fuck if you can't usually beat a pyro while plusforwarding him as a lone scout or gunboats roamer? WHY WOULD YOU BE PLUSFORWARDING TO ENTER A 1V1 IN THE FIRST PLACE. the pyro is less forgiving in that regard, sure, but 1v1s are stupid the majority of the time.

I main demoman and I know for a fact that, because I'm incredibly powerful when left unchecked, I'm gonna be focused by several players all the time. yet, I manage to cope, because the class itself is capable of avoiding that scenario (with its mid-range strength and area denial). a pyro has NONE of that shit. just because a class becomes the priority target in most of the situations where it's viable doesn't mean it's broken. heavy and engineer are the exact same thing.

I see little to no reason in shifting focus to pubs, and I'm not very interested in learning the metagame behind two largely unpopular comp formats in order to argue this. It's both reasonable and convenient to keep this limited to 6s and HL.

Soldiers can easily bypass airblast abuse and there's nothing stopping your scouts from cleaning face. His lack of mobility means that he can't back out if he starts to get pinched so it's extremely easy to overwhelm a pyro. This holds true for any class that lacks mobility.

Nothing wrong with this in my eyes. If you can't focus down the pyro before or during a push then something is wrong with your team coordination. In HL, you have a heavy so you're pretty good to go.

The problem with your approach here is the fact that you don't seem to understand the limitations of the pyro in practice. Any of the cookie cutter classes can dish out just as much damage as he can without needing to be close enough to catch the enemy with a lick of flame, airblast, then flare. Soldiers can do more damage faster and easier just by shooting feet at close-ish range. Demo's pipes don't even have falloff. Scouts have mobility on their side. You say that tf2 isn't supposed to be a lethal game but 5 players with good DM coordinating attacks is very much lethal. A pyro isn't any more powerful than the cookie cutter 6s classes, and certainly no more powerful than heavy or demo in HL. This is why I'm sitting here wondering why you think a nerf is called for.