This is the closest anyone's come to persuading me to looking into using the original. Can you elaborate further?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0YiWsAM0O8

Welcome back Ronald "Literally a Motherfucker" Jenkees.

e: "gentleman"
rip me

Physical aggression seemed called for (unfortunately) but he took things a bit too far. As amazing as the uppercut was, it, the hairpulling, and the brief fight that ensued wasn't really necessary. Guy looks to be over twice her size. Open the door and throw her ass out.

accidental double post :x

I see little to no reason in shifting focus to pubs, and I'm not very interested in learning the metagame behind two largely unpopular comp formats in order to argue this. It's both reasonable and convenient to keep this limited to 6s and HL.

Soldiers can easily bypass airblast abuse and there's nothing stopping your scouts from cleaning face. His lack of mobility means that he can't back out if he starts to get pinched so it's extremely easy to overwhelm a pyro. This holds true for any class that lacks mobility.

Nothing wrong with this in my eyes. If you can't focus down the pyro before or during a push then something is wrong with your team coordination. In HL, you have a heavy so you're pretty good to go.

The problem with your approach here is the fact that you don't seem to understand the limitations of the pyro in practice. Any of the cookie cutter classes can dish out just as much damage as he can without needing to be close enough to catch the enemy with a lick of flame, airblast, then flare. Soldiers can do more damage faster and easier just by shooting feet at close-ish range. Demo's pipes don't even have falloff. Scouts have mobility on their side. You say that tf2 isn't supposed to be a lethal game but 5 players with good DM coordinating attacks is very much lethal. A pyro isn't any more powerful than the cookie cutter 6s classes, and certainly no more powerful than heavy or demo in HL. This is why I'm sitting here wondering why you think a nerf is called for.

You're losing me again. First you shrugged me off by implying that I needed to look at pyro's balance outside of 6s. Now you're telling me you didn't mean for me to analyse his balance in HL. What the heck am I supposed to be looking at here? In what environment and at what skill level is pyro broken? Why is it broken? How would you change it?

Why?

Here's one of the main splits in TF2's community: those who refuse to accept deviations from what they consider to be "normal" or "fair" and those who are willing to accept changes assuming they're fair in terms of balance. There's literally no reason to call for the pyro to be even less viable than it already is unless you just really hate playing against pyros and want the class to be so awful that it isn't worth running in any given situation.

I make one reference to 6s and you think my entire argument is based around 6s. Alright.

Besides, do you REALLY think the pyro is predominant in terms of damage output in highlander? Really? If you take away or nerf his critboosting then what little DM viability he has will be completely crushed and he'll be demoted to babysitting the nest/combo at all times.

???

Yeah anybody would concede that random crits are dumb but what's wrong with forced crits?

Okay so you think puff n sting should be nerfed or removed. Why, and what other changes would you make to balance that out? Pyro is already nowhere close to being viable outside of defending last, and even that's map dependent. Any claim that the class should be nerfed harder just makes you look like you're really sore about the pyro's mechanics and think they should go away regardless of the repercussions that would have on the class.

Considering a truly top level pyro would have rocket/pipe aim just as good as soldiers/demos and the fact that it's downright harder to nail reflect directs than it is to just hit directs as soldier/demo, wouldn't pyros compete for soldiers and demos for highest skill floor? Granted, RJs and SJs come into account but it's not like it takes much time to master rollouts and the basic-ish jumps that you'll actually be using in matches etc. As another counter point, although reflect RJing is really gimmicky and situational, it's definitely a lot harder than normal RJing.

That's not factoring in secondary aim or properly utilizing weapon combos. The theoretical skill ceiling for Pyro is being able to do anything you want with any projectile thrown at you while effectively using weapon combos due to the degreaser.

As if there isn't at least a dozen ways to put out fire.

@wareya: since you're still here, would you care to very concisely and slowly iterate your point considering everybody here is apparently dumb and can't comprehend a single one of your posts?

e: Just to spark a separate discussion, here's a hot query. Who here would consider pyro to have one of the highest skill ceilings in TF2?

#08: You realize that getting killed by puff n sting means you either:

1) Got flanked, which is almost like being backstabbed by a spy who doesn't have cloak
2) Were outplayed by somebody attacking you with a melee weapon

Yeah puff n sting is devastating but it's not really very viable in practice. Considering pyro's lack of both mobility and a cloaking device he's one of the worst flanking classes in the game. As for face to face encounters you're generally better off going for flare crits (which aren't much more damaging than pipes/rockets/meatshots etc) than trying to close distance for a puff n sting.

Unless the pyro gets something else in return, nerfing two of his three viable methods of damage output would severely gimp the class. He's already got his share of shortcomings, so why make him even worse? There's nothing wrong with rebalancing but you're calling for an outright nerf.

Kind of a sloppy mess of a class. To compensate for bad flamethrower DPS they buffed airblast. To compensate for still having terrible DPS they buffed the airblast harder and gave the pyro the degreaser so that the buffed flaregun and already devastating axtinguisher are even better. Nothing OP here, just a bunch of stupid bandaid fixes in the form of crits, crits, airblast abuse, and more crits.

Regardless it's endearing in terms of versatility. Thanks to a handful of unique and effective unlocks, the pyro has more available to him than the basic "Be aggressive, be passive, now be aggressive again" that every class shares. Pyro isn't particularly hard to play DM wise, but it's the ability to know when and how to utilize different weapon combos that separates a good player who's playing pyro from a good pyro.

To answer your questions: No, see above, no.

#03: why are the crits so bad? The only annoying thing about encountering a pyro is the fact that he locks your movement. Even though he's dishing out crits left and right, only axtinguisher crits do significantly more damage than rockets, pipes, meatshots, etc etc, and that's only at melee range. I don't really see what's wrong with "critwhoring" from a gameplay perspective, but from a balance perspective, it's a very lazy approach to patching up a class that hasn't had any direction in terms of balance for about two years.

people who complain about pregame tryharding. there's nothing wrong with a little warming up :x

small green +

my tracking is really bad though, so

Thanks for the responses everyone. turtsmcgurts solution was the closest to what I was looking for. I picked crosshair1 and enlarged it so that the lines are spaced out enough to be visibly separated from my main crosshair and changed the colors to my preference (green for primary, yellow for secondary, cyan for melee). Q functions normally and I still have my custom crosshair. Thanks again!