am i missing something here?

I haven't pubbed in years..I should get back into it

But I can't get a free one-hit kill on a sniper with it :((((((

but the best melee for med is the pan :(....atleast thats what reddit told me before

The caber is terrible. 123 damage means nothing unless someone can follow up on the damage. You probably wont be the person to follow up on the damage because 1. if you switched to caber you probably have nothing loaded. 2. The deploy time is so long you'll probably die before you swing (which is also longer than stock). 3. Even if you manage to hit with it you'll be bounced into the air by the explosion and be an easy target.

Given a different scenario where you already have your caber out and why would you? IronBomber and Regular Stickies are more consistent and safer for you. If you're sacking you're literally throwing away a demoman to get 0 kills cause you have to have the caber out at least 1s before you hit someone (who is probably buffed and has a fair bit more than 123hp) and the switch time is also 1s which in that time period you could've fired 3 stickies or 3 pipes. Even just comparing it to other melees alone it doesn't have the utility of pain train, it doesn't have the reward factor or range eyelander has, it doesn't have the overall usefulness or range of the Scotsman Skullcutter which is better vs opponents at less than 78hp and ones with more than 123hp which given the scenarios that would require you to switch to melee i.e. no loaded ammo and/or someone is sub 78hp and you have no teammates around. The only time the caber could be seen as being useful is if you're jumping with a sticky jumper, fire all of your grenades, and then caber and hit 3+ snipers in a pub and even then just using the regular sticky bomb launcher for the jump and all would proabably be more effective.

my mistake, fixed. they voted liberty launcher as worse than the rocket jumper

im mostly meming but people seem to all think it only does like 80 dmg when in reality it doesn much more. it's a fun way to get a kill when you're probs dead already and you dont really lose anything since demo melees dont really matter

the survey was also posted on r/truetf2, and people who visit that sub are either comp players, tryhard pubbers or aspiring comp players who are not confident enough to get into ugc.

it makes sense that the comp meta shows in the survey because about half the responses come from truetf2. the survey didn't get much attention in r/tf2. ranking the basher and escape plan high versus phlog and reserve shooter low shows the survey was influenced by comp meta, because in pubs the whip/market gardener is usually run more often than the pickaxe, for instance. also 6s players hate crutches like reserve that give a clear advantage in a 6s/mge setting lol
it's not exactly tomfoolery or weird if you think about it that way.

naw the pan is just a standard melee wep

jarate bushwacka has always been strong as fuck & it's a really cool way of adding movement skill to a class that doesn't really have much

also i feel like the ambassador is by far the worst spy gun now and the nerf actually completely ruined the fun of playing the class. i only say that because the revolver's horrific spread makes it frustrating and random to use even though it deals absurd damage

the caber sucks still idk what u say
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also the jumper being rated higher than the liberty launcher isn't that unreasonable imo, especially in pubs.
you combine it with a shotgun and you become this stupid flying fat scout so to speak it's pretty fun

the liberty launcher does gimped damage so it increases the # of rockets you need to kill someone, and therefore time, and still does self damage on jump

even if you combine it with shotgun at that point you take more self damage than gunboats on and you use your shotgun so much more you might as well have free jumps

in a competitive setting the jumper loses relevance because you can't spam things anymore which is like, your job as soldier

,

jag best engineer melee
pistol and sh worst secondary/melee

haha ok

jag is the best tho

Said it before but I think 80%+ of TF2 players don't actually care about numbers or stats or analysis or logic and like to vote in these types of polls just based on what they think or feel. I'm sure it's not intentional, but. I appreciate those who break down the raw data and shit and explain the real story. My two cents

I don't think you're entirely wrong for some voters but the bigger issue (especially for TrueTF2 altho I'm not sure how much the sub actually contributed to the survey - I feel like it was def. below half) is that people's individual perception of balance is often heavily skewed based on how they play TF2 and the survey didn't really target a specific form of TF2's gameplay. So what they think is probably correct for the TF2 they actually play, and it may not actually be incorrect for them or coming from an emotion standpoint.

I'm going to go with the most obvious difference I can think of right now and go with the Pyro's flamethrower. Most 6s only players seem to think the stock Flamethrower is better, and largely when people offclass to Pyro in 6s they seem to use stock. This has kind of bled off into the pub space I think and a lot of pub players think stock is better. (hence why it won this survey) If you mainly play Highlander at a decent level you're going to think Degreaser is better as it is meta there for good reason.

'This weapon functions identically to the wielder's default melee weapon' - TF2 Wiki

for any noob that wanna disagree with me