Some opinions about Heavy

[Gangrene]

An incoherent, 12 am, first draft essay about heavy

So I've got some takes about Heavy that aren't entirely organized or pointed, but just some observations about what he is.

Firstly, I wanna ask: What do you play heavy for? Why would you choose to main him? Why would you see your team composition and decide a heavy is what is lacking? What does he speak to you and your mood as you boot up TF2 to crunch your latest 4017th hour in the game?

I do play him but I honestly don't know the answer. He appeals to my desire to think less about the game. He doesn't need to reload, he doesn't need to account for projectile travel time, he doesn't need to aim for the head or feet, he doesn't need to maintain any traps, he doesn't need to come up with creative ways to use terrain to get around. He just has a health bar that permits him to not worry about movement and a gun that doesn't demand much aim.
If I'm having a skill issue, he seems like a pick for me to easily pull my weight.

Or at least that's the hypothosis. Heavy is not easy. 300 health on it's own sometimes means that a player physically can't clear your health without reloading, but it also just means that demoman just needs to shoot you with three grenades instead of two; demo kills Heavy in a full second instead of a fraction of one. All of that stuff I said you don't need to think about, you still do a ton.
Your terrible movement speed can best be circumvented if you surf damage, so heavy movement needs more reaction and split-second planning than anyone else.
And of course the minigun, while being relatively easy to actually aim, is in many ways the most commital and slow-to-respond gun of all. Aside from melee weapons and maybe the machina, heavy is the only class that has a weapon that needs a "wind up" period before it's allowed to do damage (and even once you can start shooting it takes another second before it can achive it's full dps). It's the Dark souls of guns.

Like it's not that you absolutely need to know all these things, but without being modestly knowledged about playing him, he still will struggle to pull weight. You need to keep your brain on. Heavy is not the brain-off class.

Idk pivoting to the next thing I wanted to talk about is his health, and what it does for him.

Heavy is defined by being slow, having a big gun, and having a lot of health. And like, heavy's health is strange.

As I said 300 is substantially more when compared to other classes. He can go toe-to-toe with a scout, get his ass kicked, do that again, and then still be alive enough to grab a health kit. He can stretch his health across multiple 1v1s.
But it's not like 300 health is that hard to clear for a demoman, or just a team of players in general. Heavy isn't really great as a Tank, and generally needs the rest of the team to help him do anything in the choke. The game just doesn't really have a "Tank" class, it just has a damage class that is exceptionally healthy.

But as a damage class, he's also not that great, right?
Demoman and soldier justify themselves through their ability to fire in bursts and around walls, allowing them to maintain dps no matter how constricted their positioning is. They also can do crowd control with explosives, which is important when they have limited shots and need to clear out as much of a room as possible. As uber targets, they are also decently mobile and can get wherever the medic needs them to be in 8 seconds.
Pyro may not have as spectacular burst damage and doesn't do much while hunkered down, but pyro is reasonably fast, has a hitbox-piercing flamethrower, and often doesn't need to reload. Valid uber target.
Heavy also doesn't need to reload, but his minigun can only really hit one enemy at a time, needs a continuous line of sight on enemies. He's too slow to keep up with anyone that dodges into cover, nevermind push with an uber. He's not a great pick for damage. What is he good for?

I don't feel like Heavy has a very strong place in the overall stratagem of TF2.

Pivoting...
Heavy, with a shotgun and minigun, without a medic, can feel pretty trying. He can't easily walk to health kits, so the damage he takes really sticks to him for a while. Obviously, he needs a way to self-heal, and the lunchbox items are of course the solution to waiting over 10 seconds for healing. And they're also the secondary of choice if you do have a medic, because medic needs a healer too. But I think people forget what the shotgun does. Revving can't be your answer to every situation, players love to hit and run before you finish revving. You need a secondary weapon, one that is more easily ready for action. And it's the shotgun!
But I feel like there's a stigma about shotgun on heavy. It's the fat scout strategy. Switching to the minigun is disrespectful if you run shotgun. It's also a selfish strategy. The Medic needs some health, the medic can't eat your shotgun. But like, the shotgun is the easiest way for the heavy to keep attackers from dropping the medic while he's moving, and I feel like that needs to be understood.

Pivoting...
Heavy's relationship with medic feels exceptionally reliant. Heavy almost needs a medic to do anything special. He needs a medic to be permitted to run shotgun, he needs a medic to be allowed to run a lunchbox item and wait for his minigun to rev as he gets shot helplessly. 450 health is also just kinda somewhat enough to be a Tank, and if you need a "tank" class then an Overhealed and crossbow-pincushioned heavy is the best you can get.
And because medic heals linearly, and heavy sponges up so much mroe damage than anyone else, heavy's reliance on the medic also just feels like an expense for the rest of the team.
Idk where I'm going with this

Y'know I'm just tired, gonna post this like this and go to bed

 

[Ismaciodismorphus]

Heavy sits in the middle of his team and shoots people and lets big boy classes like soldier and demoman kill people on the frontlines

 

[MayaMogus]

I like playing heavy cause he relies mostly on game sense. When you out position the enemy you can just mow em down. I like being rewarded for gamesense without worrying about buildings being sapped or having to play medic

flank heavy is too fun

 

[Plainz]

i got 14 killstreak with iron curtain in a test a week ago, i think heavy is in good place, just give him bigger bullet spread to make tracking scouts in close quarters easier

 

[Tiftid]

Here's what the guys who made the game reckon:

[Keith Huggins] With its wide field of fire, the Heavy's minigun lets players who don't have great twitch-aiming skills still wade into the thick of combat. To make up for this reduction in the value of the player's aiming skill, we amplified the importance of other skills. For instance, the wind-up time before firing and the heavy's reduced speed while firing force players to learn to anticipate both the start of combat and incoming enemy attacks.

This is a pretty intelligent take.
Talk to any Heavy main and they can offer you some additional insight.
Mostly it involves jumping around corners while revving - this means that you'll already be ready to fire the instant you're visible around the corner, which is smart.
We can complete our cake with a little sprinkle of Uncle Dane's insight that defeating a Heavy as an Engineer mainly involves rapidly corner-peeking him with the shotgun, since he needs to keep his cursor on you for a long time to kill you, but you don't need to offer him the same courtesy.

This all combines to create a solid picture of Heavy; he's very strong in open areas at any range where he can't be corner-peeked or easily retreated from, and although his weapon is very powerful, it requires considerable skill to use while avoiding just standing still and being unable to shoot the enemies while they're whaling on you.
It's also important to note that this means that Heavy DOES need to creatively use the map's terrain. In fact, it's the most important aspect of the class by far.

"The overall stratagem of TF2" is a lot simpler than people think.
As long as a class is currently fun for you to play, it's worth playing that class.
Even if people are totally right and Spy is less strong than Sniper, he's still fun to play, so he's still worth playing (and people definitely still play him).
Therefore, the highest priority in class design is ensuring each class offers the player a notably different experience from the others (which is even true for Spy and Sniper), so the widest possible audience is reached.
It's even fine for you to only like one class, or never play a particular class because you just hate it that much.
If you hate playing Medic, you shouldn't think "I need to play Medic cause our team doesn't have a healer"; that's not only making the game less fun for yourself, but directly going against the design of the game and not even that much more likely to make you win in my experience.
The Commander was axed for a reason...
Dividing the classes into "Damage, Tank, Heal" is also short-sighted in that it inhibits them feeling different to play relative to one another.
On the whole, Overwatch has done incredible harm to the average player's perception of class-based video games, and even after eight years little has been recovered.

 

[Plainz]

i was about to write how heavys bullet spread was bigger in 2007 but when i found a video and compared to current tf2, it's actually exactly the same, i wonder where did this myth even come from because i remember hearing about it a lot

 

[Ismaciodismorphus]

i was about to write how heavys bullet spread was bigger in 2007 but when i found a video and compared to current tf2, it's actually exactly the same, i wonder where did this myth even come from because i remember hearing about it a lot

You might be thinking of the nerf that makes heavy have larger spread and lower damage for a second when first firing his gun after spinning it