so the big Pyro question:

are Pyros now viable for competitive play?

it's been about a month since the update, we've all had some time to achieve and experiment with the unlockables, there's even been a little pyro action in some scrims, and this all leads us to the 6 million dollar question, can pyros play competitively?

i rather not have them to play competitively
they're annoying as hell

i've seen him played seldom in pro games recenty, but not to too great effect.  this is far more that a month or so ago when i literally never saw him.
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in 6v6 I would say no(like Engy and Spy), but in 7v7 or more I think Pyro is quite viable in comp play.

We've run pyros in 8v8's, as have a few respected clans I know in leagues/scrims. It's mostly based on what map you're going to play. Pyro is limited in it's ability to maneuver a map, but for some maps, pyro can clean up. I watched a match between Team Veneration and DJedi a little while back on Labor, and both teams experimented with pyros, and it changed the flow of the game. Definitely a competitive use for them now.

We've run pyros on Dustbowl, and on defense in Mach4 (using air blast to screw ubers at the stairwell, etc), and it's worked well. Won both those games.

excellent!  now i will take your quote completely out of context Majin!

Quote:

honestly i never expected this update to make pyro one of the core competetitive classes like soldier or demo or medic, but i'm glad that he now has some utility for competitive teams.

But doesn't the 6v6 teams look something like:

1 medic (maximum limit)
2 soldiers
1 demoman
1-2 scouts
maybe 1 heavy

I don't see any room for a pyro on that team. Even if you dropped the extra scout, do you really want to trade the pyro for a heavy?

Also, I want to know if vanilla foretress is going to be used, as it might be considered "more balanced", at least until all the unlocks are out. Note: Vanilla Fortress also includes the air blast. Of course.

The pyro is still about finding and exploiting the proper opportunity (for example, a pyro who gets a drop on a demo+medic combo can almost always take both players out, that's huge). As the number of players on both sides drops, the number of opportunities drops.

In 8v8 I'd say that you can almost always run a pyro and get some use out of it. 7v7 there are many maps that a pyro will do well on. 6v6 a pyro can still be useful, but scouts and soldiers dominate games with small numbers of players and there's not the space for a pyro when you're going to want to run 2 scout 2 soldier almost all the time.

A majority of linear CP's are great to run Pyros on, like Mellow said though that's more for 8v8 and 7v7, where you don't necessarily need two scouts to dominate (or have one player float between Scout and Pyro); A/D maps are also great as you can really eat up precious time with well-timed ambushes with BB or compression blast to ruin uber rushes/knock off the point. As for CTF, Pyro has more of a defensive role staying back with the Engy (and a demo sometimes) in order to stop those ubers or help keep the sentry safe.