TheVille

Alizée Fan wrote:I'll let you in on one of our trade secrets YNWA - all pyros die constantly. Pyro's have one of the shortest life expectancies in the game - 37 seconds, last I saw the numbers (only Scouts die faster). The nature of the assignment is to charge towards people who have superior weapons in order to reach a place where your f/t will work, to charge towards uber charges where your weapon cannot possibly work, and to put yourself between incoming projectiles and their squishy targets as often as possible.

To really play the class offensively (regardless of which team you're on), you need to think and move like a spy, but without the benefit of invisibility or long-range secondary. Take their routes, trying to remain unseen, and imagine your approach like it's an uncloak - if they spot you, you're going to get fragged painfully without doing anything useful.

Relying on your f/t for damage in most cases will be a questionable to bad option - it's great for chaos and superb for airblast, but it really doesn't do much against decent players. Instead, use it to prep the victims for your follow-ups with secondary and/or melee. A good Backburner flank is an exception, but the trade-off for airblast cost is nowhere near worth it, in my opinion.

As Pyros, we're great at buying time for other people to get out of Dodge, but we're not good at surviving ourselves. That's fine - the team can afford to lose us much more readily than a medic or engy, so protect them with your life - it's a worthwhile trade. Diving headlong at your foe in a hopeless situation, airblasting them and puffing flame, might only get you one or two seconds, but that's long enough for somebody else to either get out or show up, and that helps the team.

Pyro does have one huge glowing positive, and that's ubers. We are the ultimate in uber blocking, and situationally the best uber patient as well. When blocking ubers, we're likely to die, but it's either us or a whole swath of more valuable people/things. Look for doorways, chokepoints, and ledges, and use them to airblast the hell out of incoming ubers, either forcing them back through a door that blocks their fire, or off a ledge so they lose time. Separate medics from patients to break the connection, or if they get close to a sentry gun, airblast the patient straight up, and the gun will sky-walk them (lift them to the top of the skybox) in a heartbeat. The inverse of this is that Pyros are one of the strongest Uber attackers there is. For defense a heavy can be better, and for something up on a ledge a Demo has the advantage, but on the flat against players or SGs, a Pyro will get more done than anybody else.

Anyway, I'm typing a lot more than I meant to, and most is probably already covered earlier in this thread. What it comes down to though is stealth, thinking really fast, switching weapons even faster, and not worrying one iota about KDR.

Flaming Cheese Wheel wrote:look for allied Pyros

Alizée Fan wrote:As Pyros, we're great at buying time for other people to get out of Dodge, but we're not good at surviving ourselves. That's fine - the team can afford to lose us much more readily than a medic or engy, so protect them with your life - it's a worthwhile trade. Diving headlong at your foe in a hopeless situation, airblasting them and puffing flame, might only get you one or two seconds, but that's long enough for somebody else to either get out or show up, and that helps the team.

Pyro does have one huge glowing positive, and that's ubers. We are the ultimate in uber blocking, and situationally the best uber patient as well. When blocking ubers, we're likely to die, but it's either us or a whole swath of more valuable people/things. Look for doorways, chokepoints, and ledges, and use them to airblast the hell out of incoming ubers, either forcing them back through a door that blocks their fire, or off a ledge so they lose time. Separate medics from patients to break the connection, or if they get close to a sentry gun, airblast the patient straight up, and the gun will sky-walk them (lift them to the top of the skybox) in a heartbeat. The inverse of this is that Pyros are one of the strongest Uber attackers there is. For defense a heavy can be better, and for something up on a ledge a Demo has the advantage, but on the flat against players or SGs, a Pyro will get more done than anybody else.

Anyway, I'm typing a lot more than I meant to, and most is probably already covered earlier in this thread. What it comes down to though is stealth, thinking really fast, switching weapons even faster, and not worrying one iota about KDR.

Plinko wrote:I wish I had a nickel for every player that burned to death while running away from me while I was a pyro yelling furiously to come back so I could put them out.