#the main classes i switch between are: soldier. pyro. demo. heavy. engineer. sniper.

[skeletalheartattack]

You should play tf2 more

i've been playing a lot of it as of late actually, mostly been trying to practice playing pyro better, though i just don't really talk about it. really been trying to master the detonator.

my only real exposure to the game currently through playing it is just playing casual, i don't really play any community servers these days.

[coyotejone-s]

i'm insane. rubber rats and such. here's my thoughts on who the reds and blues would main in tf2 vs whose place they would take in a potential au. spoiler: they ARE different. and also i'm not making the au, but if you wanna do it feel free to use this as a guideline.

disclaimer: i'm a walking tf2 encyclopedia... for the lore and comics. i HAVE played it of course, but i'm by no means an expert on strategy and such, so contesting my knowledge on that end is more than welcome.

RED TEAM

Grif

Main: jumps around a bit, but always comes back to heavy because he's got high health and decent damage rates. mostly follows simmons around because no one wants to fuck with the battle medic. that being said, he CAN hold his own (he's actually REALLY good at the game) and watches simmons' back like a hawk. and his other teammates' too i guess (silly).

Place: heavy. big dude, cares for his family, wouldn't be doing this in an ideal world. also he deserves a big gun. RIP the grifshot.

Simmons

Main: as mentioned, he'd be a battle medic, and a fucking TERRIFYING one at that. definitely puts a lot of time into it, and it absolutely pays off. has one of the best k/d ratios purely because he's just fucking going for it. it looks like luck but every second is strategized to an embarrassing degree. this makes him feel powerful. god forbid someone kill grif, because he'll hunt them down for the rest of the match.

Place: medic. he deserves to be unhinged. we've all seen how he is on the warthog turret.

Sarge

Main: soldier. he's got rocket jumping down to a perfect science. he is defying gravity. he has discovered some sort of secret technique to perfectly optimize speed and distance while minimizing damage. he will never tell anyone what it is and he will show it off at any chance for the rest of time. thus, he never fucking plays any other class.

Place: soldier. there is nothing to be said that hasn't been said already.

Donut

Main: this one's tough actually. i think he'd flip between pyro, demo, scout, and soldier. he likes the fast-paced gameplay, and is pretty decent at all of them.

Place: scout! he's got a hell of a throwing arm! i'd be willing to bet he was in little league as a kid. i could have better reasoning but i had to switch him when i switched tucker.

Lopez

Main: engineer. it's familiar, trying to keep things fixed and running while a bunch of idiots run around and fuck things up. can often be seen rancho relaxing next to at least 2 fully-upgraded sentries like 30 seconds into the match.

Place: engineer. same reasons, same play style.

BLUE TEAM

Church

Main: good god, he tries to main sniper, but he's so fucking bad at it. gets backstabbed all the fucking time. he's too stubborn to stop. to his credit, though, he's pretty damn good with the melee and smg.

Place: sniper. again, he's not GOOD at sniping, but he's good enough with the subweapons that he qualifies.

Tucker

Main: probably scout. he likes being fast and annoying. it's not really that deep LMAO. i think he plays like me: running directly into the line of fire and just trying to hit as many people as possible before dying. a tried and true strategy. unfortunately, as such, his k/d ratio is impressively terrible.

Place: demoman. initially i wanted to place him as scout, but then i thought about eyelander and the energy sword and it won me over because i love eyelander. i think he'd try to demoknight and be really bad at it GHSJASKHGSA.

Caboose

Main: listen to me. you can put him in any class and he'll kick fucking ass. he has every perfect strategy mapped to muscle memory or something. he's a fucking enigma. no one can beat him. if caboose is on your team, you are almost guaranteed a win.

Place: pyro. it's the whimsy.

Kai

Main: i think she'd main spy purely so she can cloak and watch everyone else run around like idiots. occasionally she gets a kill in, but that's mostly when they stumble close enough to her. she can be very efficient when she wants to be, but mostly she's here for the drama. she has a screenshot folder of grif and simmons doing gay shit. it's... massive.

Place: spy. she gets to serve cunt, be bisexual, and kill people. what more could a girl want???

MISC

Disclaimer: Locus and Felix do not have a place to take due to a lack of main-enough characters. Sorry!

Wash

Main: look at me. i think wash is exceptionally bad at most of the classes. he does his best, but they just escape him. he's pretty good with pyro, but he sees pyro as overly easy with little challenge (no offense to caboose). against all odds, i think he's best at engineer, and surprisingly good at it! usually he follows lopez around (because lopez knows what he's doing), but about half the time he'll be on his own and tentatively killing it.

Place: ms pauling. in season 10, he mostly follows carolina around, dragging the reds and blues with him and following the majority of her orders. remind you of someone?

Carolina

Main: also tends to jump around, but prefers support classes. she'll join whichever team she thinks needs the most support at the time. half the time she'll be on the sidelines, cloaked and watching her idiots fuck around.

Place: the administrator! she's the most properly take-charge of all of them. i'd imagine she inherited the position from the director.

Doc

Main: medic, what did you expect? he's surprisingly good at offense, but prefers to stick to healing. in the event of an o'malley switch, he battle medics. he's not good at it.

Place: merasmus. he deserves wizard powers.

Locus

Main: spy. suits his style PERFECTLY. will occasionally play sniper if needed. absolutely cracked at both even though he says he doesn't play video games (this is a lie).

Felix

Main: he doesn't play tf2 because he thinks the people who play it are annoying nerds. this being said: probably either scout or sniper. scout when he feels like being an asshole, sniper when he feels like actually being efficient. either way he gets to show off.

[lollich0p]

Swag okay I had to play the map twice because my first team was a total lost cause, completely ignoring the bomb running off to parts of the map with no robots and flat out ignoring any advice given etc etc

Also I played both times solely as engineer (this is long im so sorry)

I actually think having to play the map with two wildly different teams both made up of people who are either very new to the game or at least new to mvm really helped show how good/bad the map is at teaching you the basics.

I'm gonna go through each wave and complain try to dissect why the map and mission is so harsh on new players

Bigrock is a large mvm map along with rottenburg and mannhatten which poses quite a few challenges for new players. Mostly being there's a lot of space to get lost in and a lot of choices for places to start the round in mostly having you end up with you team setup too far back with most of the middle of the map between the cave and the hatch too difficult to defend for new players.

The first wave consists only of small robots like all the other normal missions being scout pyros and heavies, there's really not much to say about this wave I think it's a rather calm start with a mild amount of challenge compared to crash course or doe's drill but over all just a normal beginning wave. Setting up is usually the biggest problem here with teammates not going into the cave to get ready and with engineers specifically setting up in really unhelpful spots. (don't get me started with how new engineers treat their dispensers) Here is a picture I put together in like a five seconds showing the main good setup spots for engie your sentry being red and the dispenser being blue.

The base pic is blatantly stolen from a really good solo sniper guide for the advanced missions on this map. These aren't the only good spots in the cave to set up on but I think they're the easiest to work with for both you and your team. (I personally prefer the right sentry placement with my dispenser behind that first pile of rocks with the fence, with me detonating busters at the very end of the fence or dropping off the rocks to det in the corner)

My first team was made up of an engineer, a demoknight, a tomislav heavy, a medic and a soldier. We got pushed all the way back to the hatch on this wave though most likely because we started without everyone being present in cave at the start of the match and also being short a person because nobody wanted to wait for every one to join. We missed about $70

My second team was made up of an engineer soldier two heavies and a medic. in the beginning our scout was fucking around at spawn during the the first bit but showed up and did his job, not much of note happened. We didn't miss any money that round.

Wave two consists of regular soldiers scouts, infinite engineers and four giant crit soldiers, definitely the hardest robot introduced so early in the normal missions.

The four crit soldiers are obviously the biggest threat here but you start with enough money to easily max out crit res as a front line class to not worry to much. As an engineer if any of the giant soldiers focus on your buildings simply using the wrangler will help it withstand the couple rockets it will take before it goes down. If you dont have the wrangler and your building is at low simply grabbing your sentry and hiding behind a wall for a few seconds will force the robot to refocus on one of your other teammates if necessary. if for whatever reason the giant is focused on you and not your buildings get well behind cover as quickly as possible short of being over healed a single crit rocket kills you in one hit. an important lesson about how fragile you are sure but its mostly just a pain in the ass.

My first team actually did perfectly fine on this round which was surprising since our soldier and demo left and we had anther engie and medic join both of which refused to switch to another class. This wave was very easy due to us almost always having a medic with their blast shield between us and the robots. they were never able to get past us into the first "hallway" of the cave. with this team I always had to set up to body block robots with by sentry because our heavy spent most of his time too far back for him to actually help stop any robots.

Nothing much happened with my second team. none of the giants were able to get past us and out of the cave nothing much happened.

I think this is a poor introduction to the teleporting engineers just due to how distracted your teammates will be by the giant soldiers plus from past experience if your team isn't fully prepped to take down a nest they basically push you back on the map permanently.

Wave three consists of Giant pyros with uber medics, heavies soldiers, scouts with quick fix medics, and both snipers and spies for support. This is comparable to a regular intermediate wave (village vanguard wave six comes to mind) I consider this to be a very fun wave if you have a class that can deal with the uber medics if you don't this one can be a bit of a slog. The spies and sniper can be very annoying especially if non of your team spychecks and just let each other get stabbed (both of my teams did this)

I had to play this round exactly the same with both team having to use my sentry to body block the ubered pyros so they don't steamroll us. neither team had a class that could easily kill the uber medics so we had to pop each one and wait. other than that not much happened. The other engie on team one blew me and all my stuff up with his buster and I got really mad about it, other than that nothing.

Wave four starts with two tanks one after another and giant demos with small packs of soldiers, there are also snipers melee scouts and engineers for support. This one can be a pain due to your team being split between the demos and the tanks this is a great part where you have to learn about bomb priority due to to the tanks basically being slow unstoppable bomb bots and you team having to decide who has to focus on what. (the support bots mean next to nothing here I've never had any trouble with them short of an annoying sniper spot)

The first team was prepared to take on the tanks with one of medics switching to pyro and us finally having a sixth player also a pyro (a pleasant surprise) and all of us has gathered to start attacking before the round had started. They had no problem focusing on the tanks and waiting for the demos to get close to start attacking. I did have to take care of two of the demos almost on my own the medic running back to help on the second one for some reason. (i also got a very funny wrench kill on a giant demo because my sentry got destroyed right before the team came back and the med ubered me lol)

The second team was not ready for the tanks and I had to ask them over voice and text chat to please come over to help attack in the beginning it still took them a full twenty seconds after the round started to actually come up and help fight the tank :/ other than that after the tank rolled out of the cave i was left alone to fend off giant demos alone (both of the heavies were focusing on the thank for some reason) it went over fine once my team came back to support me.

Wave five consists of tall fists of steel heavies, gloves of running heavies, normal heavies, and two giant heavies. With snipers and spies for support. This is a really nice gimmick wave that is challenging but still allows your team to make mistakes and recover from them. I think this is one of the best normal waves period due to how it shows off the main types of heavy all working together excluding the shotgun heavies :(.

Disregarding what I just said my first team made multiple mistakes on this wave and made no effort to fix them culminating in them completely ignoring the bomb as I repeatedly asked for help covering the large amount of robots they let slip past. ending with me getting taken out by a pack of spies and watching the completely ignored bomb drop as my teammates ask over chat why they lost the wave. I left after that.

My second team in contrast got pushed back to the cave entrance a few time but was able to take care of the stray robots that slipped by and were able to push back to the front multiple times and was able to end the wave at the main gate. (they also paid attention to spies this round yaaay)

The final wave is made up of soldiers, four(?) giant crit soldiers, a giant heavy with three quick fix medics and a tank. with bowmen for support.

I'll be honest I didn't realize this was the last wave until halfway through my second team had been slamming through each wave relatively easily so far and I was actually able to set my sentry up right up by the gate the robots came from for most of the wave, it all just sorta blurred together until suddenly the round was over. The most notable thing that happened was having to watch our poor medic run straight into three different detonating busters in a row (idk what he was trying to do he wasn't even trying to build uber by stabbing)

Overall it's a fairly average mvm mission and map but it definitely shouldn't be classified as a normal mission it just throws slightly too much stuff at new players for them to handle and honestly does a bad job introducing the support engineers I think big apple barricade or village vanguard does a better job introducing them big apple showing you how a mecha-engie sets up by forcing them to run out instead of teleport and village vanguard showing its teleportation better than begin infiltration does by having a much more obvious tele spot and more routes to attack if it gets set up.

And specifically with playing engineer on this map most of difficulty you face it due to your team not working with you (teammates have a bad habit of thinking that you're completely self sufficient and never need help in mvm which is a terrible mindset to have in this gamemode)

I think the best classes to use this mission as practice for are sniper and spy. due to its high amount of giants and slow moving robots it makes it very easy to get headshots ans backstabs while learning about the robots ai and movement. But this also makes that map not as good of a training ground for the rest of the classes as first time players will be getting "spammed" with very dangerous robots up close for the first time.

End Communication *explodes*

abt to go on a rant abt why i hate bigrock on normal difficulty