Heavy vs. Pyro: The War Goes On

I voted for Team Heavy in the current ongoing War even though I knew Pyro was going to win in a landslide, but I honestly would love to see Heavy get some love. Pyro has enough silly nonsense about him already, I don’t think he needs more bizarre unlocks or reworks; just look at 2007 release Pyro and see how indistinguishable he’s become from his roots already. Heavy in contrast is basically the same, and that’s not fair because he could be an interesting class if just given a chance.

Captain Blades recently released a steam guide covering alternate Heavy unlocks to the Minigun/Sandvich/GRU loadout, and I learned a few very interesting things from it. For one, they finally added a model to the dropped Dalokohs Bar (for those not in the know, it used to be undroppable, and once it became droppable it used a generic small healthkit model). Now it drops one of those Halloween candy bar healthkits, which is a perfectly acceptable compromise in my eyes because it differentiates the dropped item from some other map-spawned kit. Hell, let’s give that model to the Candy Cane healthkit while we’re at it, it’s equally as thematic.

I tried playing Heavy in Casual so I’d have something to report on the new class, but other than finding I prefer the Tomislav to the stock minigun, I find myself gravitating back to Demoman for the high damage output just because Heavy’s lack of mobility really starts to grind my gears. So far the most fun I get out of the guy is going cosmetic-free and playing like a competent but economically-lacking Heavy, then blowing some Medic’s mind when I randomly toss him a Robo-Sandvich.

Meanwhile I can have loads of fun with Pyro in his current iteration. The Backburner is great fun for flanking, the crit combos feel awesome to pull off if largely dependent on luck and lag, and the Powerjack just has a better feel to it than the GRU despite both weapons sharing up and downsides. I can’t really explain it. When my friend plays Engineer I can go Pybro with the Homewrecker and enjoy a completely different playstyle to either the crit-farming Pyro or the flame-oriented Pyro, and all of these builds can replenish health through airblast now thanks to Valve’s last rework of the class…I just genuinely feel like Heavy needs to be improved over Pyro, even if he’s technically more balanced and powerful at the moment. There’s a reason we’ve got a bunch of Pyro mains on SPUF, SCUD and r/tf2, but Heavy mains are few and far between (and often embrace silly subclasses like stamda the shotgun heavy.)

Of course, its been heavily hinted that Valve plans to rework both classes eventually; this war just determines who gets placed on the operating table first. So I genuinely don’t mind if Pyro wins the war as we’ve all pretty much known he would since Day 1. But knowing how long it takes Valve to get to TF2 updates these days, Heavy might have to wait a really long time to get his updates if he’s not first in line…