Remove whichever sucks to play against the most.

EDIT My hope is that pyro would be removed.

inb4 remove from game

idek, the main problem is they're sluggish and annoying to play against and simple/boring to play as. you can fix the second with unlocks but the former involves major reworks/unlocks that drastically change the class (e.g. let heavy move fast, give pyro something that works reasonably at medium ranges).

and that doesn't even cover fixing airblast/flamethrower mechanics

too late

shouldve just made a 1 sentence meme post smh

Heavy:
Tight spread projectile miniguns instead of wide spread hitscan.

Pyro:
Cant be fixed. The class's basic design is flawed. Buffing to the point of usefulness would only make it annoying to play against and even more brain dead to play.

I had the thought of making it so that the flamethrower works like a lightning gun in both flame and airblast. I think this would require a lot more skillful tracking and allow for valve to let all the flamethrowers have different sprays. For instance the default flamethrower has good damage and has a tight spread with flames and airblast, meaning you will have to aim pretty close to the player to do flame damage and airblast things away. Then for maybe say, The Degreaser, it has low damage with its wide and tall flame and airblast region. Just a thought.

The rapid speed in which you can send off airblasts is pretty OP imo too.

i've never found heavy to be too "unfun" to play against but playing against pyro's who plus the m2 key is just god awful ESPECIALLY since airblast is used much more often as a dumb crutch aim assist/complete momentum denier rather than actually reflecting things.

the actual "people shuffling" part of airblast as it is is the only real aids part of pyro since flamethrowers are a bad weapon and reflects are honestly easy to deal with if you don't go for directs (not to mention sticks det in your face if you reflect and you can fire pills faster than you can reflect). Personally i believe a really nice change would be some form of start up time to airblast (just so it isn't some instant aim assist)+ some sort of visual cue to let you know that you are about to be airblasted so you can adjust accordingly. Airblast should also not have the ability to complete eliminate any form of momentum or have the ability to take away strafing instantly (even on the first airblast) since having that type of control taken away from you is really frustrating to play against and just dumb, obviously some people might not agree with me but I truly believe that "fun" mechanics are very important in any game. You can be "juggled" in a sense by other projectiles in this game but none are instant like airblast and they can all be avoided with proper movement and such, not to mention those techniques are at least "somewhat" skill-indexed.

obviously adding some sort of startup lag makes reflecting harder but then again adding a modicum of skill-indexing to this shit class is probably a good thing

these changes make the class even worse than it already is but at least then you can start to buff different mechanics and not deal with how shit airblast is

sorry about my rambling lol

pyro could become such a fun class to play and also much more balanced if they turned the flamethrower into an lg that had to be aimed accurately with the afterburn damage being nerfed to an extent that you didn't have to run for a health pack if the pyro accidentally touches you as well as the flare gun not doing 90 damage and the reserve shooter not existing. i would also increase pyro's speed in the same way the spy got a speed increase if the pyro was nerfed like this. this would make the pyro a fair, balanced and enjoyable class to play in my opinion.

with heavy i would probably just make it so you had to be more accurate with the minigun or perhaps a damage nerf because at close range it does unreasonable damage for its survivability with a medic that it will 90% of the time have

problem with pyro/heavy/engi is that they don't require the same accuracy of the other classes (excluding spy, but spy should be left as it is because its a different matter) which leads to people who main those classes and spending thousand of hours of their time on them and they are left with little skill on the other classes. it also damages the reputation of the game with csgo players thinking its easy as hell because they mow down servers with heavy medic combos. if engi was up for change i would make it so you had to aim the sentry gun and make the wrangler only give the sentry more hp.

Pyro is fundamentally broken as his entire purpose is to be short range dipshit class in a game of mid range - long range dipshit classes, similar to spy except spy is at least evasive. The only way to actually "fix pyro" imho would be to change how the class functions.

It's like you could rework his weapons, which absolutely needs to be done, but flamethrowers are always going to have mechanics that are braindead easy to use and annoying to play against.

I like Blaine's idea of giving him some kind of LG, I feel like that could remedy a lot of problems that he has.

I think Heavy would be fine with a bunch of new unlocks but Pyro needs a complete rework 'cause no unlock will make him less cancerous.

remove pyro and then re-add pyro as a different pyro

remove self-guarantee-able crits/minicrits as a mechanic for pyro secondaries

The pyro in tf2 is BY FAR and away superior to the pyro in TFC so I've always had problems with too much talk of reworking the pyro overmuch because I remember him when he wasn't just non-optimal but actually a detriment to the team lol. So I at least give valve credit for creating a class that *can* be played in some game modes without it ruining everybody else's game lol.

Pyros having a tighter spread on their fire and having it focus as an LG *might* be somewhat interesting but you'd have to deal with the range of such a mechanic (what range would be appropriate?) for the LG effect to work and so on - it'd be a major change.

The best way to "fix" pyro would be to have him maintain his present speed and HP but up the amount of damage the flamethrower does at very close range - *very* similar to how heavy can easily be out DPS'd by most classes at long-medium range, but will typically absolutely shred you at pt. blank range the pyro *should* fall into the same realm - if the pyro can get a jump on you or flame you at pt. blank range you should be virtually doomed. The difference between pyro and heavy would be that pyro has lower HP and is faster than the heavy,but has far less medium-long range capability than the heavy. So you'd have two separate niches (short range devastation) being filled by two classes with opposite capabilities (high HP and slow vs low HP and fast). They've already tried to have pyro operate this way on a multitude of occasions (back-burner, axtinguisher) - but always through unlocks. Axtinguisher was particularly lame because of the ability for the pyro to air-blast virtually in perpetuity. Instead of trying to give the pyro wonky extra mechanics just make his flamethrower do respectable damage - if a solly can do 110 damage to you with a direct the pyro ought to be able to do the same - and he should be rewarded for doing so since he has less health and mobility than the soldier for example so most of the time he'll just die trying to get there lol. You could make it more skill based by giving the primo short range damage a tighter spread (as indeed the heavy's bullets have a *really* tight spread at close range hence the huge amount of damage).

Air blast is an ok mechanic as it is (since I doubt they can seriously rework it), but I *would* prefer if the air blast took more ammo. Air blasting should be a serious choice for the pyro - atm it isn't because the ammo cost is fairly low and the main damage of the flamer is negligible in terms of impacting the game relative to airblasting.

In short, if you let a pyro get right on top of you, you deserve to die, and if the player somehow finagled the map to be able to do that they deserve their kill - it's only annoying (to me) when they can manipulate you for an exceptionally long time via airblast (although it is possible to manipulate your movement when you're airblasted so long as you don't get put into a corner or against a wall). .

There was a game called loadout that had energy weapons that functioned similarly to LG's from Quake, but had sweetspots within the beam. Could the flamethrower work like this, with the sweetspot close to the player using the flamethrower?

Yeah maybe something like a cone of flame that does shitty damage at the edge of the cone but in the center of said cone you would get trashed at close range. I mean at least that'd give the pyro some viability, a dash of skill-ceiling - and a patently obvious mechanic that isn't taking away somebody else's control of their own character by forcing them against a wall or using wonky crit/invincibility mechanics.

This is actually a good idea imo.
Looking at the videos in OP's post, you see that the flameThinks shoot out the same amount of damage no matter what range, they just get wider. This "sweetspot" remedy could allow it to be so that the farther you are the less damage you take and the less afterburn you will have. The closer you get, the deadlier it gets. Referring to what Marxist said, "(what range would be appropriate?)"
I think if this "LG" Method is used, it'd be a good idea to make his flamethrower a more medium range weapon, but making the very tip of the flames just do such piss damage but then when your right in front of the pyro, its heavy levels of shred.

I couldn't agree more with Marxist post #14 but I hope valve would do something with pyro requiring basically no aim - you don't have to actually hit a target, as long as you're firing in the enemy direction it does damage. Someone mentioned mechanics from Quake and lighting gun - that would make sense I guess.

heavy: make the minigun do more damage with bullets in the center of the cone, up his revved move speed so his movement exists in some way

pyro: double flame speed, halve the flame lifetime, make him do extra damage when hitting multiple targets OR do extra damage when burning one person for a long time

now their primaries are at least somewhat skill indexed

Well I'm order to change them, start by deleting them. Then, stop right there. Mission accomplished.

airblasted rockets shouldn't be minicrits, doesn't make sense

I guess I didn't mention heavy- Heavy is already the best and most glorious class in the game so there isn't much that needs to be changed in that realm at least in regards to sixes. If anything I'd be an advocate of people running heavy *more*.

As the old motto goes "If we start to lose, dumbbrain go heavy" it worked wonders.

Making his gun a projectile weapon *could* be pretty interesting - so long as it's better than the 50 cal defensive armaments in battlefield 1942 lol. (If you never played that game it was basically impossible to hit anything that was moving - which was everything - with said gun unless you were a god who had honed their craft for hundreds of hours lol).

pyro just needs to not be a class whose unlocks are based around getting guaranteed crits or guaranteed mini-crits on people

backburner: crits people from behind
degreaser: faster weapon switch speed so you can pull off crit combos easier
phlog: kill people to build up free crits
flare gun: free crit on someone who's on fire
detonator: free mini-crit on someone who's on fire
reserve shooter: free mini crit on someone who you've airblasted upward
manmelter: free crits after extinguishing teammates (only passable crit-based unlock imo)
scorch shot: free mini-crit on someone who's on fire, and has a sort of effect radius to boot, so basically a better version of the detonator without detonator jumping (EDIT: apparentally the scorch shot blows up stickies, what the fuck)
axtinguisher: free crit on someone who's on fire
volcano fragment: hit people to light them on fire
neon annihilator: free crit on someone who is in water or wet in some way, because they're trying to avoid being on fire

Marxist <3

I think pyro can be fixed, but it involves a bit more than tweaking some numbers.

First, the way flames are coded is inconsistent, everyone knows that. It needs to be fixed, or changed to a hitscan cone.
Second, airblast is poorly coded too. The stun lock isn't justified IMO, nor the way that pyro can reflect things that are behind him.
Third, pyro DPS is garbage. As Marxist the smart man says, pyro is the close range specialist, and yet he can be out damaged by many things : pipes, rockets, scouts, heavies. So he isn't even good at his speciality. If the flames are somehow made consistent a damage boost would be nice, instead of the wacky heal blocking added by the last update.
Fourth, afterburn gets irrelevant in correct matches like highlander, where there is an enemy pyro and a medic. Afterburn has a lot of counters : medics, pyros, healthpacks, and all the throwable stuff. I would like to see afterburn NOT get countered by medic. For example, extinguish someone with a medi gun takes 2 seconds and during those 2 seconds healing done is reduced by 50%.

For heavy I don't know. Besides maybe changing (again) natascha and GRUs, i think he's fine. He was fine too before all the accuracy nerfs and miniguns giving weird resistances :(

You are right. While some weapons like neon annihilator are clearly funny gimmicky ones and not a real problem, for pyro to get free of crits/mini crits, he needs to do his main job correctly : burn down people. I'd be fine with no more crit gimmicks for a reliable and high close range DPS.

As long as the Heavy throws golf balls and not boulders, it could be interesting as an unlock.

gru could be fixed just as easily as making it the escape plan for heavy

that way he can get away when he needs to, but he cant get to mid instantly and ruin the midfight's fun

Thought: What about re-working the Airblast mechanic so instead it "absorbs" the damage being delivered and return it in the form of either ammo, health or (maybe) a pickup that deals minicrits for 2s when a teammate grabs it?

That's a lot of things.

I don't know.

What I do know is that it's fundamentally not at all fun to just be popped in the air and robbed of your mobility, simply because the pyro right clicked vaguely near you.

Though I'm away that pyro is also frustrating to actually play.