I'm sort of new to this site, but whatever. Here
are some of the tips and tricks that I've learned while playing as Pyro. Keep
in mind that these are just opinions. Fell free to disagree with them if you
wish. I've noticed that most other class threads have a stickied guide and that
the Pyro section is missing one, so I guess that’s what motivated me to write
this.
And so, without further ado, let's
begin.
To navigate to a certain section, just press
Ctrl+F and search the section's code indicated in the brackets.
Special Thanks goes to: Kaz21, Dartagan
INDEX:
1. WEAPONS [QWER1]
2. GENERAL TIPS + STRATAGIES [QWER2]
3. CLASS SPECIFIC STRATAGIES [QWER3]
4. UNLOCKABLE WEAPONS [QWER4]
5. CLOSING COMMENTS [QWER5]
WEAPONS [QWER1]
As a Pyro, you have 3 weapons, and another
three that you can upgrade to by getting achievements.
Default Weapons:
Flamethrower:
Damage Per Second: 90-153. Depends on how
close you are to your enemy.
Ammo: 200, no clip
Crit effect: 3x Damage
Special Effects:
Leaves enemies burning for another ~6 seconds
or so, deals 50 afterburn damage.
Ability to use compression blast
Shotgun:
Damage: 80~90 each shot assuming that all
bullets hit target. 180 Damage when crit.
Ammo: 6, 32 clip
Special Effects:
The Pyro's only non close ranged weapon
Fire Axe:
Damage: 40~80 each hit. Critical does 195.
Special Effects: Most people don't realize
this, but the axe actually has a range of ~3 feet when stationary, more if the
pyro is moving forward, and even more if the pyro is rushing forward and the
enemy is retreating backwards.
Unlockable Weapons:
Backburner:
Stats: Same as flamethrower
Special Effects:
Guaranteed critical hits when hitting from
the back area, equivalent to up to ~450 damage per second, enough to kill an
overbuffed heavy.
Compression blast is disabled.
Flare Gun
Damage: ~15 on hit, 60 if crit. Afterburn of
~6 seconds for 50 afterburn damage.
Ammo: 1, 16 clip.
Special Effects:
The round drops over long distances, sort of
like the medic's syringe.
Sets enemies on fire, effect doesn't decrease
over time but there's a limited range due to the curved nature of the round.
Axtinguisher
Damage: 20~40 on hit, 195 crit.
Special Effects:
There is an automatic crit if the enemy
you're hitting is on fire.
Same range effects as the fire axe.
The weapon with the most DPS if the enemy is on fire.
SPECIAL!
HADOUKEN
Taunt with at least 1 ammo in Flare gun or
Shotgun, takes like 3 seconds to initiate, but all enemies ~3ft in front of the
direction you were pointing will be instantly killed. Good for humiliating scoped snipers or killing people on the winning team when they rush towards your spawn.
GENERAL TIPS + STRATAGIES [QWER2]
There’s not much, since most of you’re
playing style is based on what class(es) you’re against, but here’s some
general tips for your gaming.
- Know the map you're playing on. You'll need
to know all the secondary tunnels and passageways you can use to flank your
enemy. You should also keep an eye on the locations of the health packs.
- Try to keep a medic with you. They're
ridiculously helpful, but most of them are rushing off to heal soldiers and
heavies so they probably won't bother to heal a wimpy little pyro like you
unless they know that you're leading the scoreboards or something.
- You don’t need to keep on burning the enemy
until he/she is dead. Most of the time, they’ll get killed by the afterburn
anyways. Your shotgun is a great way to finish off a burning opponent. Besides,
chasing an opponent to enemy territory just so you can get the satisfaction of
burning them into a crisp isn’t good for the pyro’s health either. An exception
of this is the heavy since they have the sandvich. It still isn’t worth it to
be chasing after them though. If you can’t kill them, just retreat.
- Surprise is your best friend. Since the
pyro is mainly all close ranged combat, if any of your enemies see coming, you’ve
already ruined your chances of success and you’re probably going to die.
- Try to know the locations of the health
packs in the map you’re playing. If you’ve burned an enemy, most of the time
they’re going to be looking for a friendly medic, dispenser, or health pack to
stop the afterburn with. If you’ve got your eyes on the healthpacks, and can
intercept them before they get there, you’ve gained a 1/3 chance to get a kill
you otherwise would’ve missed.
- Make sure you know a location where you can
safely retreat to, such as a friendly sentry or some chokepoint that your team
is currenly owning. If you bite off more than you can chew, it’ll help you not
get hunted down and killed by the angry, burning players that you’ve just
pissed off.
- Constantly be moving. A moving target means
a harder target to hit.
- I’m pretty sure that you’re able to get on
top of most classes by jumping and then crouching, landing on their heads. Haven’t
actually tested this out yet, but it’d be fun.
- Work with your spy to take out sentries.
Have the spy sap the sentries, and immediately after, rush into the room to
take out the temporarily disabled sentries.
- Hide behind corners when your team loses on
a map and use the Hadouken taunt to embarrass those pompous kids who’re
strutting around killing everything in sight.
- You’re still able to shoot through the
gates, although it’s a bannable offence on most servers. To do so, stand around
half a foot to a foot away from the gate, facing towards it at approximately a
30 degree angle flame almost parallel to the gate, but not quite. Some of the
flame passes through the gate and hits the enemy. People die surprisingly fast
this way, that’ll teach them to taunt in front of you.
CLASS SPECIFIC STRATAGIES [QWER3]
SCOUT
These guys can be annoying little buggers if
they’re played by good people. Most of the time, they’ll run close to you,
start spamming their shotguns, and run away. Just set them on fire , chase them
around until they’re no longer in your flamethrower range anymore, and retreat
while firing your shotgun at them. However, if they’re being played by decent
players, they’ll be jumping all over the place and you probably won’t be able
to hit them with your flamer. Just spam your flamethrower/shotgun while making
a dash for friendly territory. You won’t be able to kill them anyways.
SOLDIER
These guys are ridiculously annoying. Even
the suckiest soldier can send a rocket to your feet and another one immediately
after you land to kill your just like that. A crit rocket will kill you in one
hit. You’ll want to be going in and out of cover, trying to compression blast
their rockets whenever you can to scare them. Try charging at them with your
shotgun at times too. You’re just trying to scare them into taking out their
shotgun and when they do, rush at them with your flamer. Otherwise, just make a
tactical retreat if you can. Compression blasts won’t help you much because
most soldiers already know to aim towards a pyro’s feet. Although if you do
send most of their rockets back at them or at least deflect them, many soldiers
will get scared and take out their shotgun, letting you burn them to a crisp. Try
send them flying up in the air with the compression blast if you can. It’ll
disorient them and give you time to run away, or continue killing them. I find
that most soldiers are quite easy to kill if they don’t have a medic.
DEMOMAN
This class isn’t really much of a big threat.
As long as you pay attention to where you’re going and avoid places where they’re
camping with their stickies, you’ll be fine. They generally won’t be able to
hit you with their grenade launcher unless you’re just standing in one place,
If you’re chasing after them and they’re laying stickies all round, either compression
blast them out of the minefield or take out your shotgun and get away from his
stickies. It’s really annoying when of them them gets lucky and hits you with a
launched critical sticky though.
HEAVY
These guys have a ridiculous amount of
health. It’ll take you 2~3 seconds to kill them when they’re not overbuffed,
and when they are, it’s basically impossible to get in their face and kill them
before they get their gun spinning and riddle you with bullets. Heavies will
generally be sticking around medics. You’ll have to kill their medics before
you can hit them, which means you have to rush in, take out his medic, retreat,
and then find another chance to hit him when he’s alone. Lone heavies are
relatively easy to take out if you take them by surprise. Flame them,
compression blast them into the air if you can as soon as they start to rev up
their gun, and run away while firing the shotgun. Natasha makes it so that you
don’t want to be charging at the heavy head on, since when you’re in such close
range, the speed decrease really comes into play and you literally won’t be
able to move. The sandvich also makes hit and run tactics largely useless
against heavies since they’ll be able to neutralize the afterburn with the
healing. There’s nothing you can do about that though, just suck it up and try
to finish off the burning heavy whenever you can.
Other Information From Kaz21
The axtinguisher deals 195 damage if the enemy is on fire. Use this to your advantage. Two hits from the axtinguisher along with one or two puffs from the flamethrower will instantly kill any heavy, even if they're fully buffed.
PYRO
Another annoying class. They can’t be set on
fire, but will be damaged by your flamethrower. It ends up being a game of who
can keep each other in their crosshairs the longest. Remember that when you
move your flamethrower, the flame lags behind by like a foot, so always aim
ahead of the enemy pyro if you’re doing one of those dances. Try to jump around
and dodge as much as you can, and when you feel that the pyro is at low health,
back away and shoot at him with your shotgun. Try to move backwards while
flaming since it’ll increase the range of your flames but will decrease the
range of the enemy pyro’s. They may realize this and switch to the shotgun,
which is when you can rush in and deal massive damage. If you’re about to die,
run for friendly territory while firing your shotgun or flamethrower, depending
on how far away you are from the pyro.
ENGINEER
Level 3 sentries are the only ones that pose
a threat to the pyro. The level 1 and 2 sentries can easily be taken out, along
with their engineers, by circle-strafing it (rotating around the sentry in a
circle, taking advantage of the fact that the sentries rotate slower than you
are able to move). You’ll need to have some sort of a head start on the
sentries to do this though, so make sure the sentry isn’t pointed directly at
you when you jump out of cover. However, you won’t be able to take out sentries
if you don’t have any cover, as their knockback will basically keep you
stationary until you get out of their range. Don’t try to take on level 3
sentries unless you’re getting ubered or you know it’s at a really low hp. Also,
don’t jump when fighting sentries since their knockback can knock you up into
the map limits and keep you there until you die or they run out of rounds
(99.99% of the time it’s the first).Also, if the engie decided to build his
sentry near a corner, you can try to edge around it until you can see a part of
the sentry, but it can’t fire on you, and take it out like that. Flames also
pass through machines to hit the engineer himself. Doesn’t really help much
unless all you’re trying to accomplish is to kill the engineer so that some
other class can go in and take the sentry out.
MEDIC
They’ll usually be accompanied by either a
soldier, heavy, demo, or pyro. Demos and Pyros aren’t really popular unless
they’re rushing in for an uber. You want to kill the medic first whenever
facing a pair, as it’ll be considerably harder if not impossible to kill
certain enemies such as the heavy while they have a medic buffing them. If you’ve
got them on fire and they’re running away, don’t pursue, since they’ve most
likely got the bloodsauger out and just might regain enough hp from hitting you
such that they don’t die from your afterburn, and you don’t want that do you?
Regarding Ubers
The most important thing you want to do when
fighting a medic team is to force the medic to use their uber early in order to
save their own lives, or to kill them before they’re able to use their uber. If
however, they do manage to get their uber going, compression blast the medic as
far away from the person he’s ubering if you can. If not, don’t retreat, but
stay behind them, or in the neutral area, under cover. The person who’s being
ubered usually doesn’t look behind him, since he’s invincible, and will only
try to kill everything in front of him. If you’re retreating and happen to get
into his line of sight, he’ll start hunting after you, too. However, if you’re
not in his line of sight, he’ll just push as far into you’re territory as
possible and then either die or retreat. Usually when a medic ubers a
companion, there’s a bunch of non-ubered enemies rushing with them. If that’s
the case, just try to find cover and stay there until they all pass you by, and
then surprise them by burning them in the back. If it’s only the medic and his
companion, just trail behind them by 10 feet or so. When the uber wears off,
they’ll try to retreat and you can burn them up when they do so.
SNIPER
These guys are only annoying at long range.
As said before, constantly stay moving and strafe a lot. If you get
headshotted, that’s life. Deal with it. The flare gun is nice for dealing with
snipers since it’ll mess up their aim, but I don’t use it. Largely useless at
close quarters. Just sneak behind them and burn them up.
SPY
They’ll always be disguised. Try puffing on
teammates randomly to spy check. Other than that, there’s not much to say.
Watch your back, and if you encounter any resistance at all, immediately do a
360 turn while spamming the flamer. I won’t repeat the obvious stuff such as that
spies can’t walk through allies or friendly machines. When getting healed from
a dispenser, puff on everyone that comes near. Don’t keep a continuous stream
of fire going like others may tell you since that’ll just tip the spy off and
make it such that he won’t get near you, unless you’re at a choke point, in
which case it’s fine to keep on puffing fire since cloaked spies won’t be able
to get through without getting detected.
UNLOCKABLE WEAPONS [QWER4]
As stated in the first section, the
unlockable weapons are the backburner, flare gun, and axtinguisher. I’ll
compare these together in this section.
Shotgun vs Flare Gun:
The Flare Gun is only useful when you’re
trying to mess up a sniper’s aim. Other than that, it’s pretty useless. On the
other hand, the shotgun deals quite a bit of damage and can finish off enemies
not within your flamer’s range. I’d say that the Shotgun is a no-brainer here.
Information From Kaz21
The Flare Gun's effects don't decrease according to range, so it's the pyro's best long range weapon. Better than the scout's and engie's pistols at long ranges.
Fire Axe vs Axtinguisher
Honestly, I don’t use these weapons a lot, since
both flamethrowers do more dps than the Fire Axe, and can hit partial hits too.
Plus they give an afterburn, so I don’t really see the point of the fire axe. The
axtinguisher however, you can use in combo with the default flamethrower. Puff
the enemy, compression blast him into the air, and then hit him with the
axtinguisher. Kills everything but heavies. For me, the choice didn’t matter
since I don’t use the weapons either way, but I guess the axtinguisher is more
useful, so I picked that. Plus it gives you a bigger e-peen since it tells
everyone that you’ve completed the 20+ acheivements required for it.
Flamethrower vs Backburner
I can’t really make a good decision on which
one is better yet. The backburner grants you extra damage, but the compression
blast is extremely useful. I originally started out using the backburner, but
the realized that the compression blast was far more useful, and I got critical
flames from my flamethrower from time to time anyways, so I stuck with the
default flamethrower. It depends on your playing style though.
Regarding the Compression Blast
The Compression Blast takes up 25
flamethrower ammo, and creates a blast of air in front of you that sends
anything there back. This includes rockets, stickies, grenades, and enemies. If
you send a rocket back, it becomes your rocket, and you can get the kill, If
you send a grenade back, it becomes a grenade of your team color and won’t hurt
you, but will still give you the kill if you use it to kill an enemy I think I’ve
never used a Compression Blasted grenade to kill anyone before. The CP is an
extremely powerful tool for pushing ubers back, as it can send the medic far
away enough such that his teammate is no longer invincible, or it can send both
players back. This is especially usefull for heavy ubers since by the time the
heavy un-revvs, walks back to his original place, and revs up again, the uber
is already over.
CLOSING COMMENTS [QWRE5]
Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this
guide. I was bored this one Friday night and was without internet connection. Whew,
7 pages of typing, that’s quite a lot. I’ll post this up and get some shut eye.
That’s about it I guess. If you notice anything wrong, as I suspect there are
since I haven’t done any editing at all, feel free too tell me, same with
anything you think might make this better.
THE END