f13.net

Meet the Sniper (http://steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=app&AppId=5051)

Saw it about an hour ago, worst one yet. Funny, but not good. Seemed rushed.

Christ - having half the population as medics is one thing - but pyros....

Remind me not to play tf2 for a few weeks.

Edit: Video was fine though they seem to be getting shorter - "I think his mate saw me.... yes... yes he did"

I liked it.

The rifle sound makes me hard in the groin area.

Christ, I need to play some games.

Rock Paper Shotgun pointed out that we can see one of the new pyro guns in this video:

(http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/images/june08/pyrogun3.jpg)

Please oh please oh please let it be a napalm grenade launcher.

Okay.  No one chuckled at the montage where the sniper kept drinking coffee,  and the level of yellow fluid in the jars behind him kept going up?

I thought the whole thing was awesome.

Schild said he thought it was funny, but not good.  Whatever that means.   :oh_i_see:

The Demoman with the broken bottle in his eye made the whole thing worthwhile. Also the final billboard: FOAD camping fun all year round

The rest was gravy. Tasty gravy.

Please, no.  The worst thing they could do is give more classes explosives.  THere is enough spam from demos as it is, if most other classes get explosives the game will become nothing but nade spam. 

Pyro may be my new favorite class. Deflecting rockets while charging across the bridge in 2fort will be awesome.

http://www.steampowered.com/pyro/?pw=presspreview

 :ye_gods:

That's probably the easiest achievement to get, ever. It just requires having _one_ friend.

BarbeQueQ: Cause a dominated player to leave the server. :drill:

While very punny, it should've been "Cause a dominated player to switch to Pyro."

More good news; you get the unlockables at 15, 20 and 25 achievements.

All the achievements are easy if you orchestrate them.  I just can't fathom how they ever thought this one would happen in any sort of non-lame (fun, challenging, or surprising) way.  I mean, if the achievement is "find a friend who'll let you kill him," just call it that.

I've never seen anyone do the cigarette-flicking taunt outside of their spawn.  EVER.  I didn't even know it existed until someone told me about it.

At least there aren't going to be any unlockables riding on it this time around.

CTF_Turbine going in makes me very, very happy.  Probably my favorite 3rd party map.  I've never played Fastlane. 

EDIT:  My reaction to the Backburner is that it seems a wee bit OP, given that you flame  most people from the back anyways and an extra fifty health makes you the second fastest class in the game with the health of a soldier.

Given that Pyro buffs impact one class  more than any other, I think its only fair Spies go next.  Random things I would suggest:

1)  Revolver replaced with extremely slow-loading one-shot (two extra ammo) silenced pistol that does not drop disguise.

2)  7 second invisibility that removes collision detection/clipping with enemy buildings and characters.

3)  Sapper on a low ammo charge (two or maybe three) that takes appreciably longer for an engineer to remove.

4)  Remove ability to disguise, but grant one throwing knife able to instakill that can be thrown from invisibility.

5) Prop Gun- remove revolver, but get to fire fake projectiles/flame/etc. when you are disguised as that class.

In all likelihood though, we'll end with something stupid like a revolver that always crits from behind  :?

You fail Valve marketeers, you fail hard.

Are you kidding? That taunt is probably my favourite!

Have you ever used it at a time when there was the remotest possibility of an enemy pyro being on the same half of the map as you?

It's one of my favorites too, but for stuff like deathcam taunts (which is the time you're most likely to be caught with your pants down) most people taunt with the weapon they have out rather than taking the time to switch to a new one.  And nobody runs around with the cigarette case in their hand because you can't see anything that way.

That's pretty much exactly what i mean - i specifically switch to the case in order to use that taunt.

I suspect you will be very popular in the weeks to come.

Is this life yet ?  :awesome_for_real:

Is that a philosophical question?

Is live this yet ?  :awesome_for_real:

Nope, sometime this evening, PDT.

Oh, and apparently the hadoken taunt is now an instakill attack.

My life has new meaning.

Make with the burning. It's live.

rofl this is awesome.

I've gotten kicked from 3 servers for owning people as an engineer cause everyone's an idiot and keeps going pyro.   :awesome_for_real:

Yeah, every server seems to be in turbo achievement grinding mode at the moment.  Might need to wait a few days.

If anyone wants to do achievements in an organized, two person setting (can't get quite all, but can get at least 20-25 of those easily) come to Triforcer's Hippie Funtime Server and we'll switch off giving achievements. 

Goddamnit, I want to stab the fucking achievement whores right in the motherfucking eye. Got on a server last night and was absolutely innundated with Pyro FOTM achievement whores. Both the flare gun and the new flamethrower are mean fucking weapons, the flare gun especially so.

I spent most of last night as a demoman blowing up pyros after they "cleverly" blew my stickies aside with their airgun. The best thing is now not only can I blow up pyros with sticky fields, I can rob them of all their ammo. Life is good.

I got OMGWTFBBQ just now.

It was one of those moments that was so  :drill: that I had to stop playing for the night because it couldn't be topped.

I had thought that when I got it, it would be by sneaking up on a sniper and hadokening him in the back.  I was wrong.  Instead, I got a heavy.  IN HIS FACE.

 :hulk_rock: :hulk_rock: :hulk_rock:

I haven't played TF2 since the Medic changes for the most part, so playing as a Medic is in a server full of achievement-humping Pyros is the most fun I've had in TF2 in a long time.

The great rush seems to be over, at least on the decent euro servers.

It seems to be subsiding on the west coast servers as well. I actually got to play pyro last night for awhile because we only had one when I joined the server.

I found one fellow person fed up with achievementboxing with 24 retards and we went to an empty two-person server (for some reason, neither of us could create a server without the other getting "server will not respond").  We both got 22 achievements in an hour.

And yes, the Backburner is overpowered.  Compressed air is so very situational that losing it isn't a liability 90% of the time, and most good Pyros attacked from the back anyway.  Coupled with 50 extra health point, its godly.  Losing 15 or 20% of frontal damage may have balanced it.  But maybe that's balanced by the fact the other two things are pretty  meh (flaregun not better than shotgun in most situations, axtinguisher useless except on heavies). 

UPDATE:

I have never played a full round with a Pyro until today.  My first round, on a pubbie Warpath (with Backburner)- first on a 24 person server and a 62-26 K:D ratio.  THe highlight was charging toward the center point on the bridge while 2 soldiers and 2 medics were capping it, all facing me and firing, and me wasting them all. 

So yeah, either I am Pyro Mozart, or there are some slight balancing issues.

They sucked. AS a soldier I killed two pyros and a medic charging across the bridge on 2fort. Of course, they also sucked. One soldier shouldn't lose against a pyro, let alone two with medic support.

huh?  as a soldier pyros are easy, cause I just juggle them back with rockets.  It's only a problem if you have 2 or less rockets currently loaded, or you aren't great at leading.

Well, the nerf helped some too.  I'm sure one/both of the soldiers in my example contributed greatly to their own damage by shooting at their feet as I went around them. 

I think it helps that I play a Pyro like a spy.  On goldrush stage 1 yesterday, I just sat on the crates to the right of the far right door until the offense had cleared most people out and started moving the cart with 5 people.  Nobody ever looked at me, and I rushed out and killed them all.  But I still don't think a pyro should have instakills (and against anyone except a heavy, a critting backburner is basically a ranged backstab) against 5 people, even if they don't initially see him. 

Exactly. I was saying the soldiers sucked. Pyros are a piece of cake for a soldier. I was trying to give an example of how easy they are, but it came out all wrong.

ah yeah I misread that.

Fuck the Backburner.  Fuck it.

I didn't have a real problem with it,  when not alot of folks had it.  Now,  every god damn pyro running around has it and its completely stupid.  For most classes, if a pyro catches a bit of you from behind that's it.  The extra health also makes it much dicier for soldiers and heavies to take them out. 

Not too mention that they completely break insta respawn servers in half.

You can't break something that's already broken and stupid.

Just unlocked the axe.  I have 8 hours logged since the patch, and I figure about 2 hours of that was the first night when I went engy to rack up kills from the swarms of noob pyros.  That makes the time /played to unlock all the weapons without doing any weird grindy shit about 6 hours.

This feels like about the right place.  I'll be interested to see if they can keep the bar set around there for future achievement packs.

I changed my mind on insta respawn:  for many maps,  its not that bad.  It just makes it nearly impossible to win as the attackers. Which is better than getting constantly run over on some of the massively team stacked servers.

Its even less fun to play on a server where the people you play against are all in the same clan,  and you have guys on your team who are obvious noobs.

This.

I don't understand why, in a game like tf2, anyone thought that having a half assed grind system to improve weapons is a remotely good idea.

Alternate weapons balanced against the defaults would be fine.

But this entire concept is stupid. I just hope they figure that out before they fuck up all the classes, then they can come back and nerf stupid shit like the backburner before the game degenerates.

BTW, for those of you that hate the grind, the unlock achievements works for pyro as well. Just re-run it.

I rehosted it: Unlock_TF2_Achievements.exe (http://files.filefront.com/Unlock+TF2+Achievementsexe/;10822668;/fileinfo.html)

For everyone else, enjoy your treadmil.

Edit; Just a quick note. This does not modify your game in any way, it uses steam's own API to communicate that the client has unlocked all achievements. Tens of thousands of people have used it; It's not hacking, you won't get banned for it, but they might take your achievements away some day. They probably won't though, since it's been months and if they cared they would have done it before now. They probably figure people who are willing to use it aren't willing to grind and so they don't care.

Thx.

http://steampowered.com/status/tf2/tf2_stats.php

Valve keeps TF2 stats.  Why is the red team so dominant, even on CP maps?  You'd think over thousands of rounds that would be within a few decimal points of 50/50. 

Ah neato, it looks like everyone hates well, badlands and hydro. That'll learn'em.

25% of all damage done is flamethrower damage... hmm... achievements bollocksing things up much?

I'm curious if the backburner criticals are counted in the criticals chart. If so, the backburner really is not a big deal;  it's below almost every other weapon.

Half of that is probably people AFKing with the mouse button held down on achievement servers.   :awesome_for_real:

Pyros have gone down to pretty normal levels on all the standard servers.  I'm not seeing more than 2 to a team these days.  Although I'm still tending to favor it just because I want to get really good with that air blast.   :drill:

In the category of "should be an achievement but isn't": I killed a sentry with its own rockets.   :raspberry:

I knife-killed a sentry.   :oh_i_see:

EDIT:  Will one rebounded volley take out a level three sentry?  That seems pretty OP if its the case. 

That's only awesome if there wasn't a sapper on it at the time.    :oh_i_see:


It's only as OP as the sentry's ability to dish out damage.  A level 3 sentry fires 3 rockets at a time, but it only takes 2 rockets to kill a sentry of any level.  If you bounce back three rockets, bye bye sentry!

In practice the airblast isn't a great way to get rid of sentries, because unless you're ubered you're not going to survive a sentry long enough to bounce its rockets back at it.  In my case I was able to do it because the sentry was built out of range, so I was able to dance back and forth to get it to fire a single volley and bounce it back without having to eat bullets the whole time.

(http://media.steampowered.com/steamcommunity/public/images/apps/440/56165fc4e56d3dbffa7e18650618adaa048f6d36.jpg) CLEARCUTTER, BITCHES.