Yes... sorta. The more you play properly with your team/ with your heals, the more powerful scout becomes. Pair that with these players having top-tier deathmatch abilities, and you get a pretty powerful class.

It's not necessarily overpowered as much as it is good.

It's overpowered in the same way the Queen is in chess.

So by far the most powerful and valuable peace and you don't want them to ever die? Cause that is how i treat my queen when playing chess.

That's the medic. Scout is more like the pawn. A basic building block for the game, underappreciated, but can completely dominate and win you games if you know how to use them correctly.

To echo the other guys he's really good at his role, getting kills and staying alive which ultimately wins you games. His speed/double jump give him more effective health because you can expect scouts to get hit less often then the soldiers/demos and they are able to use effective movement at no cost to their health pool. Also they are very well equipped to deal with 6s classes. Soldiers (and more rarely demomen) derive a lot of strength from the ability to rj and that is generally harder to deal with as a fellow soldier or a demoman, and it is much easier to shoot these things when you have a hitscan weapon. Also, given the right terrain (and awareness of that terrain) a scout can intelligently jump around objects away from the ground to force soldiers/demos to hit airshots rather than splash damage, all while they waddle around with a large center of mass. All he really lacks is area denial and splash damage which is a little less obvious how that wins you games.

Also, he's always had basically the same strength but players just took longer to develop it. I might compare it to something like the sniper as a class or the direct hit as a weapon, where theoretically if someone could truly master the weapon they would be insanely powerful and if they could use it flawlessly they should be better than other classes/weapons, but no one has actually been able to reach that point. I believe soldiers/demomen reached their peak or close to it a lot sooner than scouts did.

It's dumb

"I can't jump around with gunboats without getting punished because scouts deny me boo hoooo"

don't u dare compare bl4nk to gunboat soldiers

to ask a question within a question: would buffing the demolitions man steer 6s away from being so scout centric?

only class that definitely needs a buff is the soldier class rest is fine

the sticky nerf made scouts more powerful, so yes, it would

yea even back when demo was powerful the scout has always been the main counter to demo since it's so easy to get up close and kill them, and now with the sticky nerf and the medic-buff, which actually compliments a scout holding W (cause now medic can hold W with him) demo is significantly harder to play against a scout (that can aim)

the double jump mechanic literally makes scout what it is and if you combine that with really good aim and 185hp you can literally wreak havoc no matter what league, what division. scout will always be the all time carry class (unless demo/solly gets ultra buffed which is not gonna happen)

it just comes down to aim and your team doing basic damage and space creation for you to secure frags, or even to make plays yourself and take potential 50/50 chance 1v1s (which you shouldnt really take if ur smart anyways)

Boy if you're lumping me in with dumbboating mongos, you must've gone to school in a bus shorter than the one I rode. Hey you remind me of someone. Oh wait, no you don't because I don't know no name shitlords.

that was pretty weak lol.

scout is pawn bc both of them can only hold w/move forward kappa

As a Scout player, the sticky nerf/heal buff made me play more and more cocky. Also ever since Soldiers stopped using shotgun, you're escaping in a lot of situations where you clearly shouldn't have.

Scouts seem to be especially potent in todays game in comparison to 2+ years ago due to various changes, such as:
-demo being nerfed
-soldiers evolving from predominantly using the shotgun to gunboats
-tf2 is now a lot faster paced than what it was before
-scouts today have a lot better aim/movement compared to before
-the recent medic update which allowed medics to move as fast as scouts results in them being healed a lot more which ultimately allows them to be consistently devastating

I don't know, those are just my thoughts I guess

About the demo nerf specifcally:

2 freshly laid stickies don't kill a scout anymore, because the demonerf made the stickies do less damage until a certain timespan had past (maybe 2 secs not sure). So if a scout rushes you, it's better to try for sticky+pipe combo, which is more unreliable. Either way, this made the scout much for dangerous and kinda forced demo to go to the pocket role unless you are very good. But scouts have become godlike as well, so being a good demo doesn't cut it as much as it did before.

Better to go for traps instead ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

What would need to be changed in order for scout to be more "balanced"?

Make shotgun viable again

the weapon switch speed change actually helped in that regard

Yeah but considering its a weapon on 4 classes and outclassed on all of them except pyro (whos just garbage overall) shotgun could probably use a buff.

The shotgun itself is mostly fine, the biggest downside with running shotgun (or anything else than gunboats) is that you become an immobile damage sponge who needs a lot of heals. Buffing the shotgun will not change this.

making the scatter gun shoot slightly slower, point blank scout is potentially dealing more damage than a soldier, and a full hp scout can win a 1v1 against a full hp solly if both hit all of their shots and shoot as soon as they see each other.

so nerfing the firerate will give you more time to react to scouts flanking and not lose 300 hp in under a second and a half

wouldnt making soldier do less self damage make the shotgun viable again (naturally gunboats would keep its current stats and reduce the self damage even more than it currently does)

or make a super shotgun for all classes with a shotgun, less shots more damage/tighter cone?

It doesn't really make sense to buff a heavy class or nerf scout when tf2 is already stalematey. The only exception is what downpour said, because soldiers would still be able to play at a fast pace.

Actually that is a really smart idea.

Scouts mobility options keep getting upgraded for no reason and it makes playing soldier more and more boring.
Boston Basher Jumps, Winger Jumps, Medic Move Speed buff mean they can literally go anywhere soldiers and demos can but with ~hitscan~ so they're just better

To make things even better Valve nerfed the escape plan so you take mini-crits when you're already low health, mini crits negate falloff damage so hitscan from a scout that can chase you anywhere on the map will do max damage

I agree that soldier needs to do less self damage to make up for scouts having map wide dominance

don't forget the unlocks that make scout even stronger and most people have not played against those in 6s