Balancing Pyro?

Qersojan

L2: Junior Member
Sep 27, 2015
54
4
Edit: Ive seen some more good points and discussed it more with people and this is my current conclusion. Pyro is a little weak overall but for offense its really not made for. Its half way between a support and defense class. And to make it an offense class we would need to give pyro some more speed, faster switch speed, stronger combos, more reliance on combos, and make fire less counterable by everything that heals.

The most of us recognize that the phlog's new changes werent for the better. I am not a noob who dies to simple phlog pyros, they are still easy to take care of if you are paying attention, but thats the problem. Why is he listed as an offensive class when his most offensive weapon got a god buff but is still easy to deal with? Pyro has ALWAYS been the least effective offensive class. Take the others, scout and soldier. Both of those are great at medium range, both can rollout really fast, both do strong burst fire damage, scout has enough speed and agility to avoid many hits and soldier has enough health to soak them up, Pyro barely effective anything above close range, decent rollout but not great, no burst fire but consistent cone, doesnt have enough agility to avoid hits and not enough health to just soak em. With these standards even demo the defensive class is better for offense, which funny enough thats exactly the case. Then what is the Pyro's real role and what is his specialty? Pyro cant be offensive because he doesnt have enough range, speed, health, or burst, to be so. Pyro cant be defensive as all defense roles specialize in area control, and when you compare it to the heavy and engie, pyro is pretty shit at that. Defense can hold their ground, pyro is fragile in that sense. Then the remaining placement is support, which is how hes played in a comp situation, at most he is on spy duty and keeping the sentry alive by pushing back ubers and rockets. So wait the third class listed in offense is actually played like a support for defense? Yep.

So the phlog is very likely to get nerfed, airblasts have already been nerfed, its most viable weapon is sub par now. With all of that, it would make pyro easily the most unviable class in the game. So how could they buff pyro, to help him hold his own in a comp offensive situation. First lets look at one of his most unique traits, after burn. In the early days of tf2 afterburn was pretty effective, what happened? Well what happened was too many classes were getting new items with healing and extinguishing abilities without consequential buffs to afterburn, they gave it too many counters. Conch, Black box, Cozy Camper, Jarate, Milk, and those arent including the fact that all the health packs around the map can extinguish you, that you can get healed by a medic, cart, or dispenser to negate it, and pyros can extinguish and cannot be ignited. Now a days afterburn is only a problem when someone just took your health pack, where there is no medic or dispenser or anything. That really is just a problem with bad teamwork. Those are the only times i die from afterburn, is on a pub with no medic waiting for a health pack that the healthy scout just nabbed. I play medic alot too so that passive regen makes it very rare for afterburn to be the death of me.

So lets buff afterburn, but how? Healing is the main counter to afterburn, and there is no counter for healing. So how about the fire disentergrates healing gasses that are produced from the medigun and dispenser, carts, and you cant pick up health packs while on fire. Meaning you can only be extinguished by liquids like jarate or milk, and you can only be healed by passive effects like amputator, camper, conc ect. This will make extinguishing team mates more important along with igniting and fire more effective, in turn it makes both their pyro more dangerous and makes our pyro more useful. It will also make the recently nerfed shields more viable because of their nerf plus new found ability to extinguish self. Boom, pyro is instantly a force to be reconned with. Afterburn in general does about 60 damage and the flare shot does 30, so that is 90 damage. Its still less than the rocket launcher but its good for a secondary. It makes sense because rockets cant exactly be extinguished, which used to make fire less effective because of how easy it could be countered.

That makes afterburn something to not disregard, and puts a serious disadvantage and not like a little annoyance like it was before. I mean how many times have you been playing tf2, been scorched and ignited, and shrugged it off because you can easily heal or extinguish it? Too many. But Pyro would still be missing some key parts for an offense class. Burst damage and survivability. To make pyro survivable he should have 185 health but be as slow as a demoman. That way he can take some damage but not still have that above average speed. And for the burst fire, the flame thrower should do extended blasts of fire, and then change canisters. That blast fire would do more damage as fire does now however the canaster reloading should take awile. It would work so you spray fire for about 4 seconds and do a ton of damage then have a 1.5 second reload. I think he should out damage heavies up close, because heavy is too great with his specialty of most damage and most health. I personally think pyro's thing should be massive damage.

So what do you think? Would this make pyro too powerful, perfect, or would you rather he stay in a support like roll? Tell me your opinions below.
 
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Habber T Mancer

L1: Registered
Dec 15, 2014
20
33
I don't think your changes would make pyro any more offensive. Such a massive buff to afterburn would encourage staying back and letting afterburn do the work, and reduced speed in trade for just a measly 10 health would make pyro less effective overall, considering it has the shortest range primary in the game.

I do think afterburn shouldn't be as useless, but making it unextinguishable and unhealable is going too far. It already acts as a soft counter to crit heals and by extension healing from medics/carts/dispensers, so expand on that but leave medkits still able to extinguish. Afterburn's initial purpose was to get people to panic and retreat, and having nothing to retreat to makes it just extra DOT.

I think pyro should stay a support, its design was flawed from the start so I think it's better to take it in the new direction it's heading. First of all: Make the degreaser do something else entirely, and increase pyro's base switch speed to .3 seconds. (40% faster than default.) The degreaser enabled pyro to play both support and offense better, by letting pyro attack and defend allies, while making gameplay less mindless all at the same time. Making the fast switch default and giving the (still superior to stock in comp) degreaser a new role would stop all that fighting and bring pyro up to the power curve.

If you wanted to make pyro more offense based, some nerf to airblast force/cost, and an increased base speed and flamethrower/melee damage would be needed. Problem is, if you did that it would end up really unfun to play against, more so than it already is. It would also make it too similar to scout in a lot of respects so I'm not sure how an offensive pyro could even be accomplished.
 

PossessedInkieShark

L3: Member
Mar 27, 2015
113
32
Frankly, pyro is fine as it is. A pyro is able to take out just about any other class 1v1, much like scout and solly. The closest thg to a hard counter is a level 3 sentry nest which takes time to build up.
The phlog is like the backburner, except you can choose when to get your crits, for the downside that you have to earn them.
Give 4 players afterburn, that is -6 hp/s which is a huge help to your team.
Is pyro as offensive as scout or soldier? No, pyro is more versatile than both imo. A buff to pyro would make it overpowered and not fun to play against.