the negev in csgo was updated to be just as broken as the pyro was with JI, reducing its cost by over half and changing its recoil pattern so after a second of continuous fire, it had zero spread

ESL and ESEA literally banned the weapon next week because it needed time to determine if this would affect high level play, and it was almost unanimously agreed that it should stay banned for at least a little while despite pro players saying they werent going to use it. its why the most recent CS update was another pass at the negev.

the same situation is playing out here with pyro. it's been updated poorly and made too easy to play, and even though it may not affect the highest level of play, many players including some of the highest level of play would like to see it banned in order to call valves attention to the problem

To keep it short.

Pyro doing well is ok.

Pyro doing well easily isn't.

It's been an entire season. If it's such an auto-win button that can only can be countered by running your own Pyro or a Sniper, where is the plague of unstoppable Pyros ravaging Open?

I don't have the CS knowledge to refute your analogy, but I feel like there's a fundamental difference between a very strong hitscan weapon and JI Pyro. The difference is you counter a hitscan weapon by aiming better, which is mechanically difficult. You counter Pyro by pressing S and taking corners wide, which is not difficult.

You also have to think of the cost. As I understand it (correct me if I'm wrong), nobody was using the gun before and so banning it costed the metagame nothing. There is a real cost in banning Pyro that affects every team and every player in the division. Don't minimize that.

The problem with pyro isn't that it's pyro. The problem isn't that it's completely unable to be countered. The problem is that far too much work and effort has to be put in to counter something that requires very little work and effort to use. If the dps of the flamethrower was decreased, and the flames made less obnoxious to try to see through, the class as a whole would be a lot better to play against, and would increase the skill required by the class. Even decreasing the max ammo would make a lot of difference. If the pyro ran around with 40 ammo(probably lower than necessary but it illustrates the point), he'd basically be able to airblast once, and then would be forced to go in with flames. Or, if the flamethrower was just changed to being a lightning gun that would work as well. The reason it's broken is that it basically guarantees a trade or better for any class in the game for little to no aim required, and the trade is assuming the class it's fighting hits every shot. Pyro being viable for most situations isn't a problem in my eyes, the problem is that we're trying to play an fps where aim is required, and pyro is way to good for a class which requires effort to miss on.

To clear up the first clip in gink's video (im on the team that got owned on gully) we had a miscommunication between our pyro and our medic leading to him getting dropped which means we could have dealt with it better than we did. I'll give you that. But if a class it at the point at which a team has to have an 8 second solo uber (on the same class i.e pyro vs pyro) to counter it, then it has to be considered quite absurd

The trade is assuming that the class that is faster walks into range of a class that is slower. Going Pyro is not a guaranteed trade or people would sac on Pyro.

I don't understand how you can be so deluded. Have any of you actually played 6s Pyro for more than a handful of lives post-JI update? If you get a guaranteed trade every time you go in as Pyro, I have a spot on my Invite team for you.

Yes, killing people with the Flamethrower is easy if you get into range. What nobody seems to understand is that if you get into range of a slow, short range class with bad mobility you have already fucked up and deserve to die. You can apply everything you said about Pyro to talk about Engineer or Heavy, but neither of them are overpowered, because they're limited by their mobility, their range, and by the opposing team's capacity to not walk into their optimal range when they could just not do that. Not walking into range of a turtle class is not mechanically difficult, I have no doubt that every player on every team in Open has an S key.

Your suggestions are awful, but I'm not going to address them because they're irrelevant. I'm seriously questioning if you've ever touched Pyro if you think that giving him 40 ammo will fix anything though.

They could literally have solo Ubered any standard class and done the same thing.

The argument was that Phlog and/or Pyro is overpowered because in this video, a team pushing last with Phlog Pyro one time succesfully, and there was no way to counter that. I'm telling you how to counter it. If you want to continue arguing that the Phlog and/or Pyro are overpowered, you need to make a new argument.

A pyro can be ubered and still do its full damage potential while moving at the max movement speed for that class, heavy has to spin up and slow himself down making him easy to run away from, and all of engineers effectiveness comes from his sentry is almost all cases. Those comparisons are useless to make and prove nothing for your argument.
Also I wouldnt really consider the powerjack move speed and the detonator jumping to be bad mobility
Pyro at this point is just an overwatch hero, meet him on his terms = you lose, no chance for error on the pryos part and no chance for outplay or recovery from the other player

Your argument is that Pyro is not easy to run away from because he can run at 100% speed.

In 6s.

Think about that for a second.

Also Powerjack is obviously terrible as an approach tool and Detonator is extremely mediocre. It's the equivalent of doing a minimum damage rocket jump as a gap closer. They are passable at getting from place to place, but that doesn't matter if you can't get kills without the enemy team donating them to you.

(also i edited previous post to respond to you in case you miss it)

solo ubering a standard class against a pyro means you lose once the uber has ended because he can obliterate anyone but another pyro who kills him first. Fun.

No, because the Phlog Pyro's Medic popped much earlier.

If you take it a step forward and say, "well, what if the defending team lets the Pyro walk onto point uncontested?" And the answer to that would be, "Then they would have a much better chance of capping last if the Pyro had airblast, and that defending team would have lost the cap to pre-JI Pyro anyway."

Im not refuting that we shouldnt have lost the round, im just astounded that you can possibly think a pyro instagibbing any class in the game with such little effort is healthy for competitive gameplay

It does not take skill to press S and check corners. This is not a technique exclusive to high level players, anyone can do it.

Are we balancing for the skill floor now? Medic is significantly easier than Pyro with a much lower skill ceiling. Building Sentry Guns also takes zero skill. And Spy is capable of instagibbing any class with no mechanical skill, if they don't play around Spy existing.

Competitive 6v6 has never balanced with the mindset of protecting low level players from their idiocy. I hope that will never change.

Also, you said this:

Implying that the only way to counter [Phlog] Pyro is with another Pyro. This is what I am disproving.

I am by no means a low level player, medic requires brain > pyro doesnt. spy dies after getting one kill > pyro doesnt. Sentry guns cant get ubered and run into an entire enemy team > pyro can. Competitive tf2 is balanced around keeping the players' skills as the focal point and removing aspects of the game that give large advantages with little to no effort or counterplay (i.e wrangler, Sydney sleeper). Pyro gets rewarded for being within 5ft of an enemy that isnt invulnerable. I know that it does get used as a scapegoat for things going poorly in game quite often, but when almost every single tf2 player that has any understanding of the game (even pubbers) complain about it being too easy and unfun to play against, simply saying 'git gud press S XD' isnt enough to quell the frustrations that it will continue to bring.

everything in the game should be balanced at every level and in every gamemode and its 100% possible and not even hard. like gunboats or scout (i kno a lot of ppl will have trouble understanding that one, but i dont mind explaining)

in the situation where gink was in house and insta kills thalash, hes outnumbered, has 18 hp and in some retarded situation but still manages to kill someone

even after gink had died

and theres a health pack like right there but it was so fast that despite the scouts move speed he couldnt even reach it, and thats thalash, not some pub scout, hes better than u as well as most of these stupid ass clips happening to the best team in europe but i guess they just lack the skills u do

now thats a cherry picked situation cause its bat shit retarded thats even happening, but the point is that it could happen and some kind of retardation happens all the time now that people are just switching to pyro at random times without any thought usually just because they are bored and then end up reflecting a rocket into a med with uber or killing like 3 people without really understanding what they're doing themselves, they're just bored and walking forward

these ppl making these vids arent trying to show us how they out brained the other team, gink and dark necrid and all the other ppl making these vids are just showing all the dumb and shitty stuff u can just get away with now

if this update came out in 2009 tf2 wouldn't of got to where it is today, not only because of what its done to 6s but mainly what its done to pubs. the reason why my last post was significant was because pubbers have gotten worse like a lot worse because they rely on this shit a lot more and they end up with like -6 k/ds and struggle and rage in chat when their shit doesn't work. when i was pubbing and shit it wasn't like that at all and ppl were always trying to do new shit like new rocket jumps and trick stabs what have u but now if you pub and u see someone doing that its just a competitive player u recognise from somewhere else.

wat this leads to is no players coming to play comp because they understand that they aren't good enough to despite knowing what comp is now. the average pubber now knows what comp is most likely because as a youtuber and twitch streamer b4nny has pretty much replaced the role star_ had, moreso on twitch, like if u have the word like 'b4nny' in your name or 'lft', a pubber nowadays will know what that is and understand that you are a comp level player and thats how they understand why you're better, but if u don't and you're doing well, you're a hacker, because the skillfloor of the pubber has decreased by that much.

and ofc, the perception of the game changes when people see all this dumb shit happening. people have kind of just accepted that tf2 isn't going anywhere so theres not really any debate, but there used to be, as in ppl from my school would play CS and stuff would say the usual 'this game is for children and its easy' and then u would show them some MGE or shadowburn frag vid and they wouldn't think like that anymore, but if they saw gink's vid they would go back to how they were thinking before.

u can pretend like no one thinks that about TF2 all u want but its very very common that ppl think that way about this game and this pyro shit isn't helping whatsoever, its actually making no part of the game better than it was before the update and 90% of the community as well as myself would much rather be playing the game before the update

ya, u can just press s but thats not fun and not needed in the game. its one dimensional as much as it makes the pyro ineffective and awkward that you have to adjust your own play style just to fight this class and that everyone has to adjust it in the same plain and boring way.

if ur a scout and ur fighting a soldier, theres all sorts of things u can do to approach the fight from both angles. its interesting, which is pretty much the best thing abotu competitive is the individual styles that u can play. pretty much all classes i mean even dodging a sniper ppl will do their own individual shit but playing pyro u just walk forward and playing against a pyro u just walk backward

i mean u might as well be playing OW. the way u talk about the game u might as well be playing OW and it wouldn't surprise me if u attempted to be an OW pro but it just didnt work out

Pyro takes significantly more thought than Medic. Pyro has to make difficult decisions constantly because you are leading pushes or alone, and is punished harder for positioning errors because of the opportunity cost of not running Pyro and slower speed. Meanwhile, everything a Medic needs to think about can be microd for him, and he can brainlessly follow whoever is leading the push like a dog on a leash. I guarantee every player who reads tftv can play Medic at the same or higher level than they can their combat class main after a few weeks of practice. I would not say the same of Pyro.

If your team has lost multiple people to a Pyro Uber, or worse, a Pyro sac, then I have no sympathy for you and you deserve to lose. He has shit approach tools and walks too slow to catch any 6s class. How the fuck do you ever let that happen? Your argument was that Pyro should be banned because killing people doesn't take mechanical skill. Surely, any person to die to something that takes no mechanical skill is a tragedy that we must never allow to happen again, since this is an FPS, and aim is sacred, right?

Yes, but the difference is there's quite a bit of counterplay. For example, staying five feet away, and/or being invulnerable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum

Pubbers think Sniper and Scout are bad, that Heavy is mandatory, and that Soldier is overpowered. They've also been bitching about Pyro as long as Pyro has existed, even when it was utter garbage.

If you have to stoop as low as saying that you're right because the lowest common denominator of X category agrees with you, your argument is lacking.

I guarantee you do not want to play the version of 6v6 that pubbers imagine to be ideal. Seriously.

https://puu.sh/zQ27d/7145956719.jpg

Yeah, you go right ahead and do that.

Do you not see the irony that you're telling me I can't criticize Thalash because he's better than me, while criticizing me, while I'm better than you?

Nobody is perfect and even the best players make mistakes constantly. If you think that top level players don't make mistakes, or they don't make mistakes that people worse than them can recognize, I don't even know what to tell you.

He didn't die because he was too slow, he died because he walked into the flamethrower. It was easily preventable and he fucked up, the end.

What the video's author intended is irrelevant. The fact of the matter is that they succeeded because the Pyro's victims fucked up incredibly simple things, like, for instance, walking into a Phlog Pyro when he has crits, or not juggling a Pyro who can't airblast and is holding W.

Here is STAR's most popular video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGr18BHG4ak&ab_channel=STAR_

Show your friends this and ask them if TF2 looks like a competitive game.

I also don't understand where you're going with this. Iatgink doesn't have the following of Banny or STAR, and if they watched Banny today they'd be far more likely to appreciate competitive TF2 than if they watched STAR's youtube in 2009 or whatever. I can find hundreds of videos that depict TF2 as a silly casual game from 2009 that have at least as many views as that Pyro clip.

As for the argument that there are less competitive players in pubs which leads to less awareness of competitive TF2 in pubs, it's far more likely due to the horribleness of Casual matchmaking and the death of community servers stopping competitive players from pubbing. That's what's deterred me and most people I know who have taken a step back from pubbing.

I would too. That doesn't equate to banning Pyro.

...What?

I don't think I need to go any further.

Probably about 70% of my playtime was in pubs, but I've given up. Full of retards just walking at you through doorways and dealing 150 damage in about a second by flailing their mouse. If you correctly guess where they are through the blinding flames and hit your shots perfectly then you maybe trade with them.

I think the majority of the problem with pyro class is that it just removes half of what makes somebody successful in hiding/going for a play. When a scout or soldier hides or goes behind for whatever reason, you have to have enough game knowledge to know where good hiding places are, what hiding places are consistently checked and therefore invalidated, and then after you succeeded in the positioning part of the play then you have to be able to hit the shots that make your play successful.

On the other hand pyro completely removes the 2nd (arguably more difficult) part of doing this. If your playing pyro and you managed to hide you have already won, the aiming requirement is just removed by the dps and lack of need to aim with the flamethrower. In a normal situation when somebody goes for a play you have two opportunities to stop them, you can find and deal with them or if you don't find them you can out dm them or hit a difficult shot to stop them. When a pyro goes for the same play you can only find them, once they are able to initiate fight they want, 99 times out of 100 they are at least going to trade where a scout or soldier has a much harder time being effective or even just trading.

In higher levels of play pyro becomes less effective because higher level players check hiding spots better and have better dm in order to capitalize on hiding successfully, but still leads to unfair deaths in a lot of situations

tldr scout/soldier takes positioning and aim to be effective where pyro only requires positioning to have the same effect

Olympic level mental gymnastics

This is not a topic that warrants a thread with almost 250 posts

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c4/d6/7e/c4d67e39c33fef32b17f2e5e1728f06c.jpg

lock this shitty thread please

this is the most retarded thing i've ever read. you gotta be trolling at this point, but if not then just please stop. you're making yourself look absolutely inept.

actually, just to not be misconstrued, even if you are trolling then stop as well.

Ignore number username give lg remove airblast thank you

The prophet has spoken.

I don't really think pyro should be limit 0, even though pyro pisses me the fuck off, I'm using it at the same time for strong last pushes, but I think the discussion has been overly simplified here. 'instakill at close range' and 'hold s' is just a load of bullshit and isn't relevant to the grand scheme of things

it's pretty fucking obvious pyro can frag, but imo trading is not the most important thing. Really strong pushes can come from pyro, which used to have the downside of 'you're running a pyro' now have a lot more use since the character can actually kill now.
I don't see much discussion on what do you do when you're 1 down and the pyro class walks onto 2nd detting ur traps and reflecting ur spam & launchers, or what do you do when you need desperately to get onto mid, but the pyro class is preventing you from sacking or taking trades. Neither of that is to do with damage or holding s.
This kind of thing was always possible, but it came with the downside that pyro sucked and did little damage, so all you did was turn it into a dm fight, now that's not really a reliable way to deal with it.

it's obviously a weak class when you have the upper hand and all he can really do is spam flares, but it's these moments where you're down that you find that the class gains huge aids factor thanks to its ability to shut down many options, especially imo, in moments where you need to keep one scout with your medic, which gives you one key counter class to play with

is it broken or overpowered to be able to stuff options by only picking a class, and also requiring arguably less mechanical skill than any other class but engi? possibly, but tbh I don't think I've played against enough pyro to think my opinion holds much sway

having said that every time I get killed by a pyro I want to leave the game

this to end the discussion thank you :)

https://i.imgur.com/iRU7XTy.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cDdpQfqvck