I "main" medic

I play in pugs. You're taking that the wrong way, it's not that serious.

http://i.imgur.com/Lfn2o.jpg

A demoman has no place in standing here. They have better things to be doing if you're forward holding, like spam. A soldier here won't be able to deny incoming damage if someone comes the upper route; someone coming the lower route will get a face full of flames and either a likely minicrit rocket to the face or a crit flare to the crotch. Soldier's good at dealing with people taking the lower route, too, but with spam engagements pyro is better because he can more easily force people to fall back with reflects or afterburn. This is a better place for other classes with combat rather than holding hard as pyro does. You're vulnerable from people coming through the other side of the battlements, but...

http://i.imgur.com/Kc5IT.jpg

In the safety behind another chokepoint you can reposition yourself if you know they're coming (given forward holds and comms, you should) so that you can keep them from going very far or getting much damage in - unless they're a demoman, in which case they probably have a better job to be doing, like spam. Soldier is really good in this position too, but it's a fallback from the other one, which a soldier can't hold as consistently as a pyro without taking a lot of heals or falling back/down for health, which gives up their position. If, as pyro, you have to chase someone from here, airblasting them into a wall and axtinguishing them is viable if you can pull it off, which shouldn't be so hard.

I'm not the person getting shat on, I'm the person doing the shitting. I play pyro. People can't engage me when I hold ground in a good position; it's worse than when I play heavy and engineer, and yes I'm talking about people who are significantly better than me at this game, because frankly I suck.

>they're flanked
by a pyro that's supposed to be holding ground?
wat
not relevant

EDIT: Okay, I'll bite, I'll get my favorite position

>at that range
you can't get to that range without getting shat on by the airblast. you are talking about close range, right? I can't tell. have fun getting to close range against a pyro and not being dead. ranged heckling is better, except with soldier.
demo is like the only 6s class that CAN reliably engage a pyro, I don't know what you're smoking.
>rocket jump out if you're a soldier
oh boy I love being unable to engage

I gave you a definition of something being out of place, but apparently you didn't pick up on it. I was talking about things not having proper counters in balance, at the same time as it being out of place, you should have been able to draw a fucking connection.

>Why shouldn't pyro have burst damage ability like a sniper rifle except only at close range where it's suppose to excel?
Because nothing else in the game makes up for it with a counter. There's no counter to movement control coupled with guaranteed crits. It's only broken in situations where the pyro's positioning is superior and they're doing a job of denial. Isn't that straightforward enough? I don't get what's hard to fucking understand.

mustard: the pyro's "never alone" either, you know, it's broken in most even encounters; group engagement? you can deal with that. but 1v1s happen. like anything that doesn't involve a demoman and then another powerclass, basically. the only single thing that counters a comfortable pyro is heavy, and they almost never cross paths outside of DM.

I'm not going to stop summarizing things I've already explained with hyperboles, jesus christ

I don't even disagree with most of this shit but you seem to be completely ignoring my real argument and placing something else in my mouth

how many times are we going to do this

I'm talking about guaranteed weapon crit combos, you're bringing up perfect reflection and situations where the pyro is out of position which are completely irrelevant to my argument and no good positioning is NOT that rare

PS:

GG self conflicting argument

the only thing out of place with pyro is the specific pair of combos axtinguisher/flare with degreaser in specific zoning situations; I never said anything about the rift axe or the bubblegun because consistency and art style have absolutely nothing to do with gameplay so even considering that for what I'm saying is fucking retarded.

out of place is in terms of gameplay; debuffs like jarate milk and bleeding make sense because they're similar to afterburn which was an original part of the game; being able to deny and punish any engagment except for super specific ones is completely unique and not considered in tf2's original balance design, so reasonable counters don't exist like they do for other aspects of the game that do that kind of denial. sentries, you have stickies and pipebombs and most classes can spam at them - they're stationary, immobile (originally) and you don't have to worry about them outside of vital chokes; heavies you have spies and snipers, and other classes can spam them down given (I'm going to stop mentioning spy because they're a general special counter that's countered by everything else); sticky traps have a very small area of power and can be knocked around and shot out and ubered through; none of these things are out of place because there's proper compensation for them in other parts of the game. pyro's situational utter denial isn't. it was tacked on and buffed to hell and given toys and not properly tested.

where the fuck did I say pyro is out of place, tell me

guys apparently fitting == realistic

solution: don't shoot rockets at pyros (range)

all your problems are solved

if by "annoying" you mean "doesn't fit in with anything else in the game and doesn't seem to belong" instead of "this fucks me over so I'm mad at it" then yes

honestly I think the only reason I'm having trouble here is because I don't think "broken" means "unbalanced"
I agree with almost everything you guys are saying

Highlander is like, on 5CP it's balanced, the situations where pyro is broken almost never pop up, it's even with other classes in that regard. In PL it's pretty bad though because of engie babysitting + wrangler, but that's a combination of the engagement denial and the wrangler itself being broken, weird tangent, sorry.
There's more to TF2 than comp. Pubs and "other gametypes" like 4v4 and 3v3 exist and matter, man; they're where pyro is the most "broken", with varying viability, though there is still a degree of "gay" brokenness in 6s.

Pyro is consistently broken in specific situations as in #44, because of the combination of their engagement denial and their critcombos. You can't initiate against a pyro with any of tf2's power classes when they're in a comfortable position; you can't even properly initiate against a pyro with an uber.

Surprisingly, you can get away with rolling pyro during 6s last pushes on some maps (not all the same as for defending) because of the engagement denial ability. And that's fine.

The thing about the instant kill thing is, tf2 isn't supposed to be a very-lethal game, and the ones that do exist are supposed to be brutal punishment (demoman) or classes Designed Around intitation. Giving a pseudo-instantkill to a heavy combat class for use in active combat on the person they're combatting is outright unbalanced; the rest of the game isn't designed to handle that. The crit combos aren't viable in comp play, they just break pyro's engagment denial to where even if you manage to engage one they can screw you over in inconsistent (to you) ways (mostly because airblasting doesn't apply properly to input prediction)

you just need to give a better example than 6s

@HL: hahahahah what no I don't think that, that would be retarded
pyro's role in highlander is balanced, the class diversity and large numbers of players makes pyro be not-broken in the few situations he otherwise would be

sorry been editing my post