TF2: Does Pyro ACTUALLY Need Airblast? (Experiment)

there's a lot of mechanics in TF2 that are simply not fun to fight against you've got quick scope head shots AKA random bursts of skill and the mere existence of weapons like the Wrangler for every single unique mechanic or weapon in the game odds are someone has complained about it at one point or another and one of the best examples of this is one of the most divisive mechanics in the game Pyro's notorious airblast on one side you've got people wanting it to be removed believing it punishes basic reactions and makes pyro 2 powerful and on the other end you've got people who believe that pyro would be unplayable without it without polarizing Air Blast is it got me thinking what would happen to pyro if Air Blast was removed from TF2 would it make pyro the Ultimate wm1 machine or would it kill any reason to play the class well let's find out but first I would like to explain the basics of Air Blast since it's actually quite a varied mechanic airblast is a secondary attack used on every flamethrower except for the flagistinator with each taking a different amount of ammo to use as well as the dragon's Fury having a significantly slower cooldown in action Air Blast serves to benefit pyros and their team in both offensive and defensive ways with the main uses being to one reflect projectiles this can be used to protect yourself teammates and even friendly engineered buildings but they can also be shot right back into the enemy team for potentially catastrophic damage which is complemented by the fact that reflective projectiles deal minicrit damage because why not right you can also reflect Rock attack your feet allowing pyro to be able to rocket jump which can be quite effective at closing gaps even though it's a pretty risky maneuver secondly would be to extinguish burning players it's pretty self-explanatory but one thing to note is that extinguishing players rewards you with 20 Health which is fascinating when other classes you can extinguish using their weapons receive such a weak reward and arguably the most annoying to fight number three juggling opponents around the uses of this are basically endless whether you want to deny an Uber push protect your medic from an incoming bomb or even save a clueless teammate from getting backstabbed a lot can be done by blasting players away so it's pretty clear that airblast is one of Pyro's most versatile mechanics but does that make it too good does it make pyro an unbeatable overpowered piece that deserves to be rotting in the streets of Detroit well in order to figure that out I decided to play Pyro without being able to Air Blast for two weeks and you might be asking why specifically two weeks that's simply because I feel like an experiment like this requires a good amount of play time in order to properly assess it later on but I can't deny that this experiment isn't exactly perfect for one I did this all within casual servers where the skill of players isn't exactly consistent plus I decided to do this with the flatistinator since it could not use Air Blast which hopefully means I can get at least a semi-realistic view into what pyro would be like without Air Blast but without further Ado let's find out if pyro actually needs Air Blast [Music] and so my pain and suffering begins as I said in the intro I'm going to be using the flagistidator but that's mainly because it does not have Air Blast which is interesting because it's the only flamethrower to have that downside but to keep things fair I'm not going to be using its critical all fire because this experiment is mainly to see pyro without Air Blast entirely it would only make sense to use the flagistanitor in this scenario as stock without Air Blast no more no less other than that it's going to be a basic generalist pyro Loadout consisting of the Detonator and power jack as for Cosmetics let me get into something a little more comfortable yeah I guess that works but to go with this Loadout I'm gonna need a profile makeover foreign Taco ah yes ah yeah it's perfect well I guess there's nothing to do but Q for casual oh dear the thing is when you don't have Air Blast you're really limited on your options the only things you can really do are burn people with your flamethrower shoot flares across the map or use a shotgun or whatever whatever your preference is and you know swing your melee other than that you're basically a Sitting Duck to any class that has range higher than a [ __ ] toothpick most of the time you're gonna get countered by just like snipers or Engineers or anything with hit scan but the fact of the matter is now [Laughter] okay got it so far it's not that bad though from what I'm seeing you know maybe I haven't seen the worst of it yet I surely haven't but perhaps it's not maybe maybe perhaps Mario doesn't need Air Blast oh come on man what the first day without Air Blast was interesting to say the least I stupidly decided to play just as aggressively as I would normally which resulted in a lot of easily avoidable deaths but that's not to undermine the few times this aggressiveness actually managed to pay off but those were mainly against some of the most unaware players I have ever seen you see the thing about pyro is the flamethrower can only deal a semi-decent damage if you're within [ __ ] sneezing distance any further and you're left to whatever your secondaries can deal which won't be that much either and if you even want to get someone close to your opponents you have to maneuver very carefully as you have no means of Defending yourself aside from Simply dodging crosshairs but then again playing like dookie is kinda expected when you're not used to handicapping yourself like this and I do acknowledge that playing regular flog is quite similar to what I'm doing but having crits is a powerful way to mow down a crowd and can honestly be a real Lifesaver just a shame I'm not using it right going into the second day I was mainly looking to form a consistent strategy to both keep myself alive and land some pics but with this learning process came a roller coaster of gameplay in one life I would be basically Unstoppable and then the next I would fall flat on my face and this mainly came down to when I decided to go in since the flamethrower's DPS is reliant on how long someone is burning it's optimal to only go in once opponents are focused on something else I know it's a basic way to succeed with anything but like what options do I have exactly but luckily if I did get into a sticky situation I still had one final trick up my sleeve you see the Detonator is actually insanely helpful at being effective wish I knew that a while back but seriously the Detonator provided movement potential that I desperately needed whether I was escaping death getting to normally Out Of Reach spots or just dealing Splash with some well-timed deaths this secondary feels like it's playing quite a massive role in my performance going forward [Music] I'm so dead man oh my goodness how did I dodge that I think we're just man you think oh my God 26 and a man maybe pyro doesn't need air blast so you know how I said the Detonator would be pretty helpful at doing well yeah it was scene number three was unique for some reason I was doing actually quite well regardless of the map or server I was playing on I managed to get kill after kill after kill but I don't really have an explanation for why I was doing well I mean I could be cocky and say I was improving but like come on what most likely happened was just me getting into matches with literal zygotes buddy are you lost what the [ __ ] was that and I guess now would be a good time to emphasize just how important several unique sessions is to forming a proper conclusion because if I just based my thoughts on this singular Session One it would be about as weak as Texans when one whole inch of snow falls and two where's the fun and suffering only once you know I gotta milk that out by the way you see that subscribe button yeah you do you know what to do shark another grab even though this video is coming out long after Halloween I'm recording this at the tail end of Scream Fortress but why the [ __ ] am I playing on Halloween Maps well I saw some people in a VC and I thought hmm juicy clouds what I'm a tf2 YouTuber but what I was actually in for would be quite the goddamn ride from dealing with the insanity of spells and the wenchless nature of cheaters who having to listen to its [ __ ] raw complain about engineer for what feels like an eternity there's something about rocketing unreasonably angry that's unreasonable you think this is people always say spy counters engineer because they're like Reddit brain and then like they can't deal with spies so obviously spies will be viewers at home I'm not saying to dachshund but here's his full name and legal it's dead it's dead [ __ ] you no there's nothing never mind engineer respawn meaning that all our efforts were invalidated because Engineers are balanced boss I [ __ ] hate Engineers I [ __ ] hate Engineers so much it's unbelievable open gifts open gift as for my actual gameplay I really do not have much of value to say without chaotic things get within Scream Fortress it's utterly a miracle I managed to kill anything with this handicapped present but things would soon take a drastic turn [Music] why why is there a level two down here I told you there was a century oh he just [ __ ] ran into it what is our team doing entering day five I finally realized that maybe using the same secondary over and over again isn't that great for experimenting so I made the tough decision to instead switch to the shotgun for my secondary and it definitely took some getting used to since I was restricted to whatever was possible with basic jumping however I still managed to pull through pretty well sure my shotgun name is absolutely pathetic but at the very least it allowed me to focus more on my positioning rather than just flanking with the Detonator but something else happened in this session I managed to get on a hefty kill streak during a random match of bad water oh poor guy where you can [Music] God what though WM one man I'm 13-2 right now this is ridiculous medic it's your only purpose to pocket this is getting scary I've hit 15 now oh foreign let's do this what is happening man I'm on a 22 [ __ ] killstream what the [ __ ] [Music] oh my God what the [ __ ] I'm amazed I'm still kicking right now oh okay I got cocky [Music] these six was certainly a much more grounded experience compared to the last session I say that but somehow my gamer juices flowed into this session because I went on another ridiculous kill streak it wasn't Godlike but still baffling but afterwards things took a drastic turn of events I kept getting into situations where I just simply couldn't do anything I either couldn't get close to my opponents or was blocked off from parts of the map entirely which is where the limitations of pyro without Detonator jumping really started to set in simply because you're at Mercy to design elements of whatever map you're playing on and on some maps it's easy to flank or otherwise get close to the enemy but on others good luck sport but as much as that sucks to see that's completely fine remember I don't want to rely on these movement-oriented unlocks because that only covers a small portion of secondary's pyro can use [Music] what the [ __ ] are you doing spy what the [ __ ] capping off the first week of my personal hell day seven was actually quite a calm session where nothing that special happened oh my God that's a first I mean I did about as well as you may expect after doing the same thing for a week straight but that's not exactly interesting to talk about time and time again so instead I feel like talking about Good flamethrower technique since it's actually quite important while playing like this sure you can waggle your flamethrower like a [ __ ] Wii remote but my man that just ain't reliable what I mainly try to do is lead my Flames into my target shooting where they will go rather than just right into their hitbox which is complemented by Flame particles being influenced by your speed and direction of movement but why should you do this well it boils down to particles dealing more damage the longer you're being hit by them but of course you're still within melee range so if your opponent's senses are functional you can always try some careful strafing which is especially useful against cocky demo nights but no matter what happens if you manage to play your cards right you might just end up having a pretty beefy match yeah I died 36 times bite me for the first day of my second week I decided to whip out all reliable just to attempt playing combo pirate like this and well I did all right but uh that's about it yeah this was genuinely the least interesting session to play I couldn't really do all that much with my combo weapons since no matter what it'd be better to just wm1 but maybe that's because I'm so used to playing combo pyro with Air Blast but I wasn't gonna give up on it just yet so unfortunately I do not have much to say for day nine I managed to play one match perfectly fine but after that my PC decided it would have a meltdown leading to some of the most headache inducing gameplay I've ever attempted to endure so that sucked let's just move on finally we've reached double digits and luckily session number 10 was actually playable no longer was I running into horrendous stutters every two seconds good jump holy [ __ ] cyber what a job I watched that whole thing but anyways the de-rusting process for combo pyro was very Hit or Miss without Air Blast I mean I was certainly in a better Groove than before but as I've said many times now there's only so much you can do and that's made even more apparent when you're focusing on dealing damage through a gimmick but it does make Landing a shot feel so much better while also making a Miss hurt so much more and trust me you miss your shot while the entire enemy team is staring at you yeah it's over in the pursuit of using different weapons you can imagine that eventually The Scorch out was going to be brought up and I won't lie using The Scorch that made me feel dirty mainly because this was the first time I was able to just sit near my own team and still be effective with basic spamming and while I was doing a bit of that while using the Detonator the scorcher requires way less effort since its flares explode on impact rather than when you choose to death but it did feel weird to play this defensively when I really didn't have a reason to play like that but all in all the Scorch shot was just a pretty boring weapon to use for this and I'd much rather use the Detonator dispenser pick sorry I had to I've got a confession to make the rest of these sessions were not recorded with the others instead these last few sessions were recorded during the middle of December why because I was in a coma suffering from the disease known as working retail at [ __ ] Black Friday but at least I'm now deciding to finish it right anyways number 12 was notable for a couple things number one being the new Smith's Maps which I exclusively played on during this session the issue about this is of course learning the layouts of the new maps and with any new map you get to play where's Waldo on warehealth and ammo packs are which can definitely cost you aside from that I finally took it upon myself to use the man melter so that it could finally extinguish my teammates once again which felt great it felt like I could actually benefit my team to some degree something that I could barely do while using everything else sure I can't land man melter shots for the life of me but it's still incredibly helpful to be able to extinguish teammates especially in the environment where most other players just simply won't do that I've been holding off on using these remaining weapons since I simply didn't think they would be helpful for what I was doing but eventually they needed to be tackled so first I decided to cross off the thermal Thruster and what can I honestly say about the thermal Thruster it just sucks sure it's okay at traversing the map but after that why in the hell should I use it you just cannot do anything of value without sacrificing yourself in the process and honestly that's not really worth it in fact I got so fed up with using the thermal Thruster I remembered that the panic attack existed and my God it felt amazing to do actual damage once again believe it or not having an actual weapon for a secondary allows you to deal much better than having a glorified paperweight but it's finally time to rip the Band-Aid off foreign well this is it the final session of playing pyro without air blast and I most certainly went out with a bang or rather a coating of gas I brought out what is most certainly Pyro's worst weapon the gas passer and what new could I get from whipping on this glorified water balloon because I sure as hell don't know it's hard to explain but using this weapon while handicapping yourself makes it basically impossible to do anything at least the thermal Thruster was able to close gaps as for the gas passer all I could do for damage with it is throw it and pray and if your team can take advantage of it it's basically pointless at least I was able to experience this one final session live on stream I'm to Pat the Rousey on my birthday no less but with that said it is finally over well that certainly sucked but on a serious note playing without Air Blast was quite the goddamn ride it was incredibly bizarre playing with a flamethrower that could only deal bass DPS and nothing else especially with just how mind-numbing it was to do over and over and over again but of course I did end up getting used to it I mean how could I not it's really basic and sure doing such a thing may have regressed the remaining skill I had while playing the game but I guess it was worth it right but that's not what you're here for do I think pyro needs Air Blast the short answer within casual at least is no but trust me it's a lot more complicated than that so let me break it down TF2 itself is home to many walks of life all of which have their own skill levels but given that casual mode is the easiest way to play the game there is certainly a higher amount of unaware players than anywhere else and if you're going up against unaware players you can honestly get away with just about anything but for every kill like Gods came at least one death to even things out and that's because pyro as a class gets put into a weird position without Air Blast basically every class can spam you you out from afar while you're only able to deal chip damage and or afterburn which in all fairness is true for regular pyro but without Air Blast there's even less you can do because on top of hitscan classes countering pyro projectile classes can now also counter pyro since your only real option is to hope you can dodge a splash or deal pathetic damage this forces you to focus entirely on positioning which turns you into a spy but without cloak or a disguise kit all you can do is sneak up hope you don't find a Sentry in maybe land a kill and very likely die afterwards but let's face it pyro is not a good damage dealer thanks to the flamethrower being gradual and subject to rampa so what about Pyro's defensive uses well here's the list of defensive things pyro can do without air blast and here's the list with Air Blast yeah it's night and day I felt like I had no reason to sit back and play defensively so I always just ended up trying to get kills listen I wasn't just gonna spy check for hours and hours I have my limits thank you but I honestly believe you cannot do much defensively without Air Blast think of all the projectiles I could have reflected all the teammates I could have saved from dying to afterburn or at least stop from burning as well as all the Ubers I could have prevented or otherwise weakened to some degree so as much as getting a Godlike kill streak was great and all it doesn't change the fact that playing like this is incredibly one-dimensional and simply doesn't benefit the team with that said within casual settings pyro doesn't necessarily need Air Blast sure playing without it is boring as Helen is the bare minimum of what a class can do in a game like tf2 on top of the fact that the class benefits heavily from having it the question wasn't about how good Air Blast is I was merely asking if a class like pyro could still be playable without it if you know the basics of TF2 or are a strict Vlog main you'd probably do just fine without Air Blast but I still believe airblast makes the class at least a bit more interesting however in competitive settings I do think it is necessary given that you're in environments where players are on their A-game pyro needs to be able to reflect projectiles attempt to deny Uber pushes and occasionally extinguish teammates Air Blast is the sole reason pyro can be competitively playable but then again I am not a comp player by any stretch of the imagination so what would I know but to give one concise answer outside of specific ways of playing the game I do believe pyro needs Air Blast it makes playing the class much more of an adrenaline rush being able to just send back any projectile and deal damage with it which regardless of its current balance makes pyro an interesting class and that's part of why I still play it almost six years later so what could I have done better as I said this experiment wasn't perfect far from it in fact so it would be good to at least look at my flaws for the sake of fairness first of all I could have recorded sessions better aside from the crappy OBS settings I easily could have played for longer in some days but I just didn't from being tired from work that and actually trying to record them day after day I ended up skipping days because I had no motivation to do this especially with Black Friday and the holidays making me want to become a future alcoholic secondly was just focusing on variety it sucked looking back at the first few sessions just using the Detonator when most other weapons were only used once plus I didn't even bother with melees but then again what was I honestly going to gain from most melees while playing without air blast and finally I don't know if casual servers were the best way to tackle this since let's be real I was gonna do all writing casual servers no matter what but either way this was an interesting little experiment to do and most certainly a change of pace compared to what I usually make but it was fun at least in some spots it's still suck to do in other news I bought this weird fruit jelly thing here's my thoughts on it [Music] if the difference between winning and losing is a few straight pellets you need to stop blaming your gun and start playing better

Channel: UnusualSandwich

Views: 277,778

Keywords: unusualsandwich, unusualsandwich tf2, unusual, sandwich, unusualsandwich pyro, pyro, pyro tf2, tf2 gameplay, gameplay, tf2 pyro, team fortress 2, team fortress, tf2, airblast, airblast tf2, tf2 airblast, tf2 experiment, experiment tf2, pyro overpowered, pyro op, overpowered tf2, valve, steam, valve tf2, airblast op, airblast overpowered, is airblast overpowered, does pyro need airblast, death of degreaser, phlogistinator tf2, tf2 phlog, TF2's Most Unnecessary Random Mechanic

Id: a57-cjxDyuI

Length: 23min 44sec (1424 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 28 2022