Dude, people still play TF1, and it’s hella better than TF2, in everything except graphics. Especially CustomTF.

as for soldiers vs pyros, every class has its strengths and weaknesses, 1 on 1 -soldier wins (maybe dies short after), but 5 soldiers on 1 pyro could still mean few soldiers dead
soldier doesn’t do anything special, but its a class good for every thing
pyro is specjal :) just imagine TF2 without him

That was yesterday, at least.

On mine, my best scoring class is Engineer (27), followed by Soldier (25), then Sniper (21), then Scout (19), then Pyro (15). My Pyro playtime is 1 hour more than my second highest, and about equal to all other playtimes put together.

One of my friends played TF2 for the first time as a Soldier, and got second place on his team. His words after were “Jesus. Those rockets are… certainly something.”

If you look at the TF2 stats (on the steam website), Soldiers Rockets account for 35% of all damage done. In the game. (These stats were taken before the weekend, so those may have dipped, but that was true as of tuesday.) Think about it, over 1/3rd of all damage done was by one classes one weapon.

Ouch.

It’s funny, when I first played TF2, it was basically my first TF experience since QTF (before Air Quake and all that). So, as with QTF, I picked a Pyro… and was surprised he wasn’t that great. It wasn’t that I had become worse (although I had), it was that the entire gameplay for the class had changed. Take my QTF general playstyle as Pyro (I’ll use 2forts as an example):

->Get into enemy base.
->See turret at top of the staircase, in the main hall.
->Fire 3-4 Incendiary rockets at it, including one at the Neer fixing it.
->Throw a napalm grenade at it.
->Once it was destroyed, run into the room outside the spawn, and drop 1-2 napalm grenades.

And so on. Note, I pretty much never used the flamethrower. It was slow damage, horrible if you turned and fired it, and basically wasn’t enough to kill anyone. Now take how I play Pyro in TF2:

->Try to get over the bridge.
->Soldier crit rockets me.
->Try again, this time making it.
->See turret at top of the main stairwell.
->Wait for a soldier/Demo/Heavy/Sniper to take it out.
->Go up the stairs towards their spawn.
->Burn 1-2 people with my flame thrower, die.

Now, I’m making this more simplistic than it really was, but essentially the Pyro isn’t ‘great’ at ambushing, it’s that you have to ambush, or you’re screwed. Even then, a quick-turning heavy will annihilate you, a soldier can crit rocket you (and hit himself, yet live), a medic can run backwards and heal himself while shooting you, and for some reason not die to your actively-burning-him Flamethrower, etc etc.

Why did I go through that whole tirade after mentioning that quote?

Every. Single. Person. That I introduce to this game, gets the best score early on as a soldier. Why? Crit rockets. They absolutely remove the need for good aim, tactics, and so on. Now I think the soldier is a great class – I love the ability to remove sentries, rocket jump to better locations, defend objectives, etc. I think, however, that the crit rocket becomes a problem because it acts like a crutch. I was so tired of dying to the aforementioned rockets, I changed to a Soldier. We were defending (I forget which map), and I was trying to disrupt them as a pyro. I went from 5 kills, 10 deaths, and 8 assists, to 24 kills, 12 deaths, 10 assists in about 3 minutes. And all I did was find a group of people, and fire rockets while strafing left and right. That was it. Crit rocket, boom three down, crit rocket, boom two down.

I like what they are doing with these class patches (although they really, really need to do two at a time, to prevent teams of 9 of ‘x’ class, 1 medic, 1 heavy teams), but I think there are larger issues at stake. Especially considering the Kritskreigh pretty much takes the most complained about feature, and makes it happen a lot more often.

I honestly am terrified of what the Demoman and Soldier unlockables are. Because I imagine those will not be fun days when they come out.