no

why

Highlander is not organized, it's 9 people yelling at each other

Redi, that's an answer to a question that no one asked.

I'm far from an expert, but I'd say demoman would be the hardest transition from my perspective. I can wreck pubs as demo (not much of an achievement), but I'd likely be an embarrassment as a 6s demo on any map where speed is a concern.

Competitive demo opens up it's own little universe of development, and it's a class where previous FPS experience doesn't massively factor in (except for quake players and pipe aim, but even that is a bit of a stretch).

demo

I'd say demoman and pocket are the hardest transition

As a medic main, I personally found the switch from pubber to 6s quite drastic. Now I wouldn't necessarily say it's the hardest transition, but I found it pretty up there.

In pubs, you don't have to worry about comms, tracking uber advantages, and can generally just choose a pocket (typically a heavy or demoman in a pub environment) and just keep your pocket ahead of you. Sure, masses of spies and snipers are a pain, but assuming you're a good pub medic before going into competitive you're generally keeping your eyes out for them anyways.

In competitive 6s, you're often depended upon for main calling (meaning lots of comms and listening closely to what your team is calling out), knowing the enemy uber advantages, heal orders, surfing and overall strong competitive game sense. When all these factors are combined together, along with the fact that a large majority of competitive players expect their medic to be invite level and love to yell at their medics, I found it to be a pretty rough road transitioning over to it.

I'd think medic would be the hardest due to having to learn positioning and being one of the candidates to maincall, counting ubers and dealing with enemy offclasses such as sniper is difficult as in pubs normally you can get away with peeking

Sniper imo, just think about how many snipers there are that offclass poorly as scout after being mistreated by the game (...)

Medic is a pretty easy transition imo. The only skill that you have to have in 6s that you can't practice in pubs is uber tracking. Main calling doesn't factor in since it's not a required thing for medics at all.

Scout is probably the easiest class to make that leap though.

I'd rank it as scout> medic> roamer> demo>pocket

Demo because some of the roll outs are hard and overall the class is very hard to master.
Also Demo requires huge amounts of game sense and positioning to get right.

Demo, because intelligent spam is something you can't learn on pubs (what I mean is for example predicting where the enemy will rollout on granary)

I don't really think rollouts are that big of an issue, but people usually go practise on their MGE skill instead of rollouts.

I'm curious why you have pocket ranked as a harder transition than demo. Is it because you are expecting the pocket to be main calling?

So the easiest would be scout?
Why wouldn't be roamer

Roamer requires timing and knowing what to kill.

I consider demo a bit easier to transition than pocket because so much of a pocket's job is communicative, main calling aside. A good pocket has to be able to spearhead a coordinated push, something that's basically impossible to do in pubs. Theoretically you can practice all aspects of a competitive demo in pubs. Lobbing damage, positioning, area denial, whatever. Pockets can practice tanking damage and can use the right positioning, but the parts of the game that involve timing, like when to leave your medic for a sac play, can't really be learned outside of a competitive environment.

Pub demos aren't punished for poor competitive practices, while pub pockets can't even try some competitive practices.

bess believeeeeee demo is the hardest.

i think demo is one of the easiest outside of learning initial rollouts

demo dm definitely carries over from pubstar demos to competitive highlander demos

i would honestly think spy or heavy or engineer are the actual hardest to transition into because you're playing against much better players than you would actually see in pubs

it's very easy to die if you don't understand that people work together in highlander with any of those classes, and being dead means a lot more for your team than if you were just a pubstar rather than playing highlander

you have to be aware of sightlines and the areas that people tend to be in, which might differ depending on how coordinated teams are

people trash on heavies and engineers a lot, but playing them at a high competitive level in highlander will show you that it's not that easy since if you're out of place for even a second, you're likely to get picked off

spy becomes increasingly harder as you play against better players (and better pyros) of course lol

You bring up some good points but OP is trying to talk about 6s transitions, not highlander. I think that the majority of 6s classes have a lot of niche things you need to learn to be able to do well, only class that would transition easily in my opinion is scout.

I think scout is easiest, if you can aim you can play at a pretty decent level

oh oops
i completely misinterpreted the last thing he said lol

i think it's a toss up between demo and medic

demo rollouts are tough to practice, but are vital for a teams mid success
actually doing damage and calling it can be tough in 6s too, especially the higher division you play in (since people will be actively dodging and getting in your face, while also hurting you a lot)

medics have to really think about scenarios and instantly assess it to really do well, and that would be hard coming from only pubbing to competitive
like they might know in certain situations when to pop from pub medding, but at the same time they might not have the full trust they have to have when playing with a team such as in scenarios where they have to decide to milk the uber or when to actively aggro on a team when both teams almost have uber or when to actually retreat

pub medics usually don't have the most dependable people to uber in, so they'll end up retreating too soon or going too far deep most of the time, which is seen in a lot of newer medics imo

NO

Demo because "all you do is spam" in pubs. M1+M2 = "shit"

transitioning into a spamming class will break your spirit as you were once one of them.

welp

The 6s classes transition over pretty evenly from pubs. The hard part of transitioning from pubs to 6s comes from gamesense and how/where to push on maps which all boils down to lack of experience. In pubs when you play demo you spam as hard as possible to give your team an advantage in health, similar to 6s, and rolling out fast to mid on certain pub maps helps with that aspect greatly. When playing roaming soldier/flank scout in pubs you go for picks from behind the team or jump on a medic who looks like an easy kill to give your team a player/push advantage which is also similar to 6s. When pocketing or comboing in pubs you are constantly building your uber while protecting your medic and pushing forward once you get that uber or using it defensively against a push if you're outnumbered greatly which is similar to 6s. As a medic in pubs you are constantly buffing those around you while trying to stick with the best player in the server who will protect you best, aka your pocket, and using ubers just like you would in 6s. DM transfers over from pubs, but gamesense and map awareness do not.

Experience is what truly matters when transitioning from pubs to 6s. The classes are not easy to learn, and your first day playing a pub you cannot go straight into 6s. You need plenty of experience pubbing to learn the class you wish to play and play it the correct way to help your team, and, most importantly, top the scoreboard. If you were looking for which class is hardest to learn and pickup (learning curve) it would probably go in this order, demo > soldier=scout > medic. I say soldier and scout are pretty even because they are both simple classes, but scout requires awareness that you won't die instantly and soldier because the learning curve of rockets and rocket jumps is quite high.

TL;DR dm transfers from pubs, awareness and gamesense don't entirely transfer. what matters is experience. PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE

Demo transfers to an extent from pubs to 6s. Besides gamesense and positioning, which can only really be learned from heavy experience, I don't think deathmatch skills are that easily transferred. Sure you can sticky/pipe spam in pubs and get mega kills on clustered bunches of pubbers who don't have the greatest movement. However, once you have to actually learn rollouts and coordinated damage in 6s, you kinda need to overhall your deathmatch as well. People will actively try to avoid your stickies, so you can't be careless and throw them in the general direction of a player, hoping for a hit. Ammo management is also a skill that kinda gets overlooked a lot, because you will not always be fighting with 8 stickies and 4 pipes in your clip all the time. You have to learn to know when to use which weapons and how to deny effectively while not leaving room for the enemy to close in on you. Also, good scouts will be a pubstar-to-6s demo's bane at first. Learning to actually aim pipes--as opposed to mindlessly spamming them in front of you in pubs--is extremely hard to master, and will take a lot of practicing to get it down sufficiently to counter scouts or jumping adversaries. I would advise new 6s demos to work on pipe aim at first. However, it is also crucial to not neglect to practice effective sticky techniques, i.e. sticky sniping, traps, delayed detonations.

i learned how to demo from pubs
hit people with sticky bombs

Demo transition from pubs is pretty harsh, you basically have to rethink how you play the class, especially with how important demo is in a team

Becoming a mediocre roamer is pretty easy, which is why lower divs are flooded with mediocre roamers. Learn to bomb medics and BOOM you're a mediocre roamer.

Becoming a good roamer is tough, which is why there are relatively few great roamers. My last season in 6s was sort of a wake up call, since I finally started to understand that the roamer is the "wetworker" of the team, doing all of the ugly stuff that isn't noticeable to the casual eye. Is it time to be the "big brother" on the flank? Is it time to be the vanguard on a push? Is it time to be the clean-up on a push? Is it time to hide, or time to bomb?

The realization basically paralyzed me for a few weeks because I couldn't think and act fast enough to do all of those jobs at the same time, so I was basically doing none of them. By the end of the season I was starting to be able to do some of those jobs more effectively, but by then the team imploded and my personal life went bonkers.

It's similar to the transition for medics. The line of progression I've seen from a bunch of medics is that they go from "bad" to "decent" disproportionately fast, but the transition from "decent" to "good" takes a really long time. I think it would come down to getting the mechanics down, which lifts you into "decent" range, but from that point it becomes more about intangible qualities.

As a low-open shitter, this is one of the few topics I feel I can give insight on.

This is all my own personal opinion, like most others here, and likewise should be taken with a grain of salt, especially considering how I'm only steel.

I would feel like Scout is definitely the easiest, all things considered. The hardest thing a Scout needs to do is flank the enemy and take them down without taking damage. The only communication to really need to do is say where people are and when you're going in, that's pretty much it.

Roamer is the second easiest, so long as you can rocket jump well, which any respectable roamer should know how to do. The reason I say it's the second easiest is because it's basically the same as the scout, except you don't always have to flank, and when playing roamer, you have to rocket jump. And the communication is basically just saying when you're jumping.

Pocket is probably middle ground. The reason for this is that for this class, and ever class after, there are some aspects of the class that cannot be practiced in pub play. Anyway, here goes: I'd say pocket is the third because of the fact that the pocket has to do substantially more communication in regards to pushing and things like that. It's incredibly difficult to practice pocket well in a pub, even if one of your friends is a medic main, because there are far more than 4 other people to heal on any one server at any one time, and most pubbers will only bitch at you if you try to call.

Next comes demoman. Demo is higher up because of the fact that, as a demo, in pubs, mostly you'd do m1 + m2 to destroy any pubbers who charge at you with reckless abandon just because they can. Whereas in a competitive environment, people will know how much you can do, and they know how scary you are. They also know that, unless you're b4nny, you suck at close range. So not only will they target you more then they would a scout or roamer or soldier, they also know your primary weakness.

Last, and the hardest, is medic. As a medic, you need to dodge, know who to heal and when, know when to pop, know when to milk, know how to call, know how to track ubers, and other stuff. You also be pretty damn aware of the fact that everybody wants to kill you and blame you for everything. In pubs, you can't rely on most players, and therefore have to heal and pocket the highest scoring player or something similar. But what if all the good players are snipers, or spies, or other medics? Not to mention the factor that everybody will blame you for that frag they didn't get. You've also got to track ubers, and in pub tf2, how likely are you to meet and non-battle medic? Honestly, I could go on for hours about how the medic transition is so hard. But I'll just rest my case for fear of repeating myself.

To conclude: Medic>Demoman>Pocket>Roamer>Scout