Demoman Guide [OPEN]

anonymousity · Posted: Tue Oct 25, 2011 3:32 pm Post subject: Demoman Guide [OPEN]

I like where this shit is going with all these CT class threads. We have some damn good demos in this clan who play differently. I will throw in my piece and shit out some tips, some personal pieces of flair, and brag a little.

Summary: You are the destroyer of sentrys, do not heed any sentry ever because they are your bitch. There is not a sentry situation in the game that scares me with demo for you have bombs that fit every situation. Whether your bouncing pills off walls to hit the ones people put right outside of a door, charging up the sticky launcher to cluster fuck one from afar, sidestepping in and out of a corridor with the loch or pill launcher to avoid it's fire, sticky-fucking one from a lower angle or over a wall, they literally cannot stop you.

When it comes to anti-personnel:

1. The Sticky Launcher: Also known as the best gun in the game, the alpha and omega, light of the world or bulbasaur's gooch muscles, I do believe this is the most versatile weapon in TF2. You can kill every class with it, and of course anything the engineer can build. Scout giving you problems? Give him an obstacle course of bombs, pull out the tube/loch to dictate his movements haduken style, and watch him fuck it up. A great target for kritz and ubers alike. Can be charged to hit any range. Holds 8 rounds. Anyone who considers the demoman one of their main classes needs to use this gun, because if you aren't, you lose his +1 on every other class / situation. This gun can be used to slow down heavy / medic ubered combos by pinging them backward while they're trying to move into position. It can be used to fly through the air. Great spy-checker, great for capture point maps, great at everything and anything. The only situation you are at a slight disadvantage with is a open-area battle against soldiers of equal talent, for the rocket is a little more direct. Still, you do more damage then them, and have the potential to be just as accurate; just not as fast. Use this gun or lose to everyone else using it.

Tube Launcher: Probably this thing's best asset is that the bombs bounce off walls. Especially useful on our hometown Egypt where every capture point has pillars around it, allowing you to bounce them off right onto the point and farm sluts. Still it should be stressed that 90% of the time, you should still be practicing actually trying to hit people with the tubes, as they explode on impact and deal great damage. The gun is good against sentrys, but not as good as the loch-and-load or sticky launcher. (an unfair statement, for the sticky launcher is better then all the guns. It is possible to fly with this gun, but it's just not as practical as using the Best Gun, as it is just better.

Loch-and-load: This gun will kill any sentry in two hits before they can repair it. A great training tool for learning to hit people with pills, though it should be noted the trajectory is slightly different then the Tube Launcher. A great anti-personnel weapon if you can track people with it well. Has an enormous explosion area and a crit shot will blow up anything / anyone. Definitely a difficult weapon to use, but I recommend practicing with it, for it will improve everything about your game.

Now I'm not much of a Demoknight, so I don't want to address that too much. I would like to point out that using the shield negates your ability to use the best gun in the game, so take that as you will. A demoman without a sticky launcher is like myself sober; much less formidable in any situation. But should you ignore these stone cold facts, I believe the Splendid Screen is the best shield because of the added damage on impact, and the Half-Zitochi is the best melee for it's health stealing broken-ness. The Battleaxe is also a decent call for added damage, but you move slower, which doesn't matter too much when you're moving super fast towards your opponent. Also, use the pain-train on Medieval Mode, for when everyone is armed only with melee or arrows, who gives a fuck about bullet damage increase?

Honestly a decent loadout we've been pioneering is the Alibaba's Booties with the sticky launcher and any melee, simply because it gives you +25 health and you still have a sticky launcher.

So theres some random shit for you, is there anyone out there that can say anything about the Scottish Resistance? Anything else I'm forgetting? Am I wrong that the sticky launcher isn't the best gun in any game, ever? (Of course I'm not, but just saying.) Lets talk about this black Scottish cyclops for a bit.

IMPORTANT SIDE NOTE: If you have any reason to collect hats for any class in TF2, collect them for the demo, because he has the best hats by far and in all just looks better then everyone else. It's important to be better looking then your opponent, for even if you lose, you still win.

LOOK GOOD > FEEL GOOD > PLAY GOOD COACH
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Eugene · Posted: Tue Oct 25, 2011 4:05 pm Post subject:

Atatme and I were talking about this briefly the other day. Almost every other weapon in the game either changes how a class plays, except for the loch-n-load. Basically the idea is that items such as the Scottish resistance allow you to be more sneaky with traps, or how the gunslinger allows for an engie to be more offensive. The Loch-n-load doesn't really give you anything but more damage for the loss of 2 more shots in the chamber and the bouncy bounce of the regular pills. I personally use Vanilla loadout so I don't play with it, but does anyone have any thoughts on the matter?

anonymousity · Posted: Tue Oct 25, 2011 4:33 pm Post subject:

It changes you into a full-blown sentry killing machine, from a full-blown sentry killing machine. So your right, it doesn't change anything at all.
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atatme · Posted: Tue Oct 25, 2011 5:48 pm Post subject:

The scottish resistance can be quite useful, you just have to be very good at aiming with your pill launcher of choice if you use it because it isn't as effective as the sticky launcher in straight forward fights. You can still beat many classes because of its faster firing speed by firing a LARGE amount of stickies on the ground and waiting for them to fuck up, but the added charge time before the stickies can be used means the gun is far less effective at firing just one or two stickies and then blowing them up. That means against good soldiers, demos, pyros, and scouts, you are going to probably need to use either your pills or your melee. (Pyros and mediocre scouts LOVE to charge into a battle axe when they think they are getting past your mine field)

Now, the Scottish Resistance is GREAT at zone control. You can have 4 separate traps of 3 stickies all in separate locations, and you still have 2 stickies which you can spam and detonate. I often use the SR on offense on egypt 1. I put a few stickies by the two main exits, stairs and caves, and stand on the ground by the end of the stairs so i can easily cover them both. Then my last 2 spots vary. I sometimes put some on the max health, if there are spies, pyros, and scouts flanking me ill put 2 separate traps behind me. I also sometimes put some on the ground by the ramp. Then I have 2 more stickies to spam detonate over the stairs (without detonating my traps), and if anyone rushes me i have the LnL and the battle axe. It works well and you can control your zone extremely well, making it a lot safer for an engie to set up a forward base under your protective umbrella. This tactic can be used in many key areas around the maps, I'm sure you all can think of many other examples. The fact that you trigger when the traps explode means that you can easily stop pushes from multiple places at staggered times, where as with the sticky launcher you would only be able to cover 1 of those doorways at a time unless they charged into your traps simultaneously

Messy Recipe · Posted: Wed Oct 26, 2011 1:34 am Post subject:

The grenade launcher's best asset is not bouncing off walls, because that means you're not hitting. Its best asset is that it fucking HURTS when you actually hit someone with it (you kinda touched on this). If you can consistently hit with the pipes then you can do a lot more work quicker than with the sticky gun.

Now, the sticky gun can be easier to kill with since you can just kinda scatter them all around someone or airburst them, but there are quite a few situations where it's just too slow. If you're up against a heavy without his medic then you want to nade him; he's an easy target to hit and you can pop him with 3-4 grenades before he has a chance to react. But if he's paying attention then you'll be dead before you get enough stickies out (they take time to ramp up to full damage to make them less useful in close combat), or if you're far away he'll just leave their immediate splash zone or shoot them.

Scouts are basically a hard counter to the demo and stickies are terrible for melee-range combat, so grenades are actually a better choice there too if you can actually land one on the guy. Stickies DO let you control where he can walk but by the time they actually arm and ramp up the damage, a good scout will have you dead.

Basically anytime you need to do damage FAST, direct hits with the grenades will always serve you better than trying to sticky someone. Basically, the sticky launcher will prolly end up getting more kills, but I think the nade launcher is more effective at getting any given kill when used optimally.

A trick I've found is great for difficult sentry nests / medic/heavy combos / anything hard to deal enough damage to quickly to matter -- plop down a few stickies, then switch to the nade launcher and set the stickies off just as the grenade impacts.

Demo is also one of the best classes to switch to melee with. The explosive weapons bounce people around a bit and they land against walls or just get disoriented a lot -- and for your part, your weapons are not great at close range (well, the nade launcher is but it's hard to hit and hurts you) and slow to reload. Often, in a close range demo vs demo after everyone's nades have been fired, the first one to pull out a melee weapon will win.

IMO, Demo's best loadout is generally the default -- with the health from the bottle and the vanilla nade and sticky launchers. I wouldn't pick the Half-Zatoichi because it limits your ability to whip out whatever weapon is the most immediately useful.

A note about demoknights: Their purpose in the game is to look cool and to limit the effectiveness of the class. Now, if you have the opportunity for lots of melee kills in a single life often, the Eyelander is superior because you'll end up with more health and be faster, but the shields are only really useful if you're some kind of situation like the end of Dustbowl where rocket and nade spam at the corner bounces stickies around a ton and where the explosive resistance gets you through the spam.

The charge itself can be good in limited circumstances to keep pressure up or get away, but in both cases a sticky jump is more effective if you've got the health.

One thing demoknights ARE good at is killing vanilla demos since they do close range well and vanillas don't, but it's not really worth giving up all the demo's potential for.

Regarding sentry nests, demo is by far the best for taking these out and 99% of ubers should go to demomen (Kritz should too because of the kritz stickies...). You usually don't need a n uber though except to give you breathing room to kill a nest without getting picked apart by snipers and heavies while you do it. Stickies are the best but in some situations you wanna use nades, like if you're in the back of Egypt 1-B hitting the sentry in the corner by the main staircase. Generally, if you have to charge the stickies, it's worth considering nades instead (just be sure to actually land them or the engy will repair too quickly).

A note for those who haven't figured it out: It usually takes only 3-4 stickies to kill a level 3 gun, depending on how close they land and how long they sit before you set them off. You can take out at least 3 separate guns in one run with both weapons.

I generally don't use the ScoRes because I like to play fairly aggressively, and the arming time on it is a lot longer and the mechanics make it hard to use offensively, but it can be very useful in an offensive role if there are a lot of buildings in a spot you can hit, but the non-engineer enemies are defending the area well. You can pop in a splatter bombs all over in a matter of seconds.

Against pyros -- double nade them or get them to walk over a sticky or two. REALLY DANGEROUS because they're killer at close range and you're not, and also because they can just reflect the grenades into you even if they're coming straight for you (and stickies too but they don't reflect as far). I die mostly to pyros... but I've gotten a lot of kills on them too by hitting a single nade and then meleeing them instead of running.

One last thing: IMO demo has the highest skill ceiling and most destructive potential in the game. If you were able to hit 100% of the grenades you'd be unstoppable right there, add in always placing stickies in just the right spot and knowing exactly when to bottle-whip someone and you've got an untouchable killing machine. There's literally nothing the demo can't kill -- it can take down engineer nests, it can kill heavies in seconds, and everyone else dies even quicker than the heavy.
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WildBillThickok · Posted: Wed Oct 26, 2011 4:11 am Post subject:

The Scottish is terrible unless you're not actively fighting against people. the 0.8 second load time over the sticky makes it borderline unusable in active combat. It's only quality is for camping points or zones, which is fine, if you hate winning. Loch vs Launcher is def just a matter of preference in overall quality, but in different maps their differences shine.

Messy Recipe · Posted: Wed Oct 26, 2011 6:07 am Post subject:

I'd say the Loch vs Launcher isn't preference, Loch is just worse / only a situationally better thing in very specific situations. You get +20% damage but have -50% ammo, so your damage output is only 60% of what it'd be with the launcher (1.2 * 0.5).

Sure, you get the extra speed and a lil extra punch if you're hitting a sentry, but you're also giving up the bouncing and the ability to kill as many people defending that sentry. I only really get much use out of it if there are a bunch of engineers clustered in one spot.

More on the ScoRes: I can only think of a few times it's actually served me well -- all of them were clearing out a shit-ton of buildings in a room or around a corner or something when the medics weren't doing a good enough job to defend me long enough to lay down real stickies. If you pop around, say, the last corner on Dustbowl on defense, you can fill the whole building up their with stickies in a couple seconds with the ScoRes. You can also clear out the first cap point on Egypt or the attics on the first and second stages of Goldrush with it.

Still, in any situation I'd prefer the normal sticky and a medic. Even when just defending a cap point the normal one is better because the ScoRes only lets you make more sticky traps there -- but sticky traps are nowhere near as effective as direct combat with stickies and the ScoRes doesn't function in direct combat because it takes too long to arm.
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atatme · Posted: Wed Oct 26, 2011 2:52 pm Post subject:

ON THE SCOTTISH RESISTANCE:

I killed 4 people in very quick succession with the SR yesterday. I ran around a corner and all four of them started unloading on me. I proceeded to dodge as much of their hate as I could while running backwards shooting stickies everywhere. They knew I was going to sticky the corner i just went around so they took a wide angle when approaching me making those nades seemingly useless. I had read this approach and had put 2 stickies that they couldn't see on the wide approach. First scout is dead. The other 3 then use that approach that he just cleared out to come after me. I had used the time I had to set up many other traps, and had already switched to my LnL. I LnL the 2nd guy as he jumped and tried to rocket me. The impact pushed him back into the original stickies (the ones on the corner) and I popped em so he was dead. The 3rd guy chose to use some boxes I had already trapped for cover, so he was toast as well. The last guy I LnLed to death, taunted afterwards, and was at like 20 some health.

The SR is usable in battles, everyone just tries to use it the EXACT SAME WAY as the sticky launcher. The people who hate this gun are the ones who fire 2 stickies off and then can't detonate them before their opponents move and so they are like "WELL CLEARLY TERRIBLE". Obviously that doesn't work. Its like saying counterspells are useless in magic because in order for them to be effective you can't make the most of your mana on your main phase. That is a true downside of counterspells, but that doesn't make them useless. You just have to alter your play style (and possibly deck construction) to make the most of them. The same thing is true about the Scottish Resistance. You have to play differently with this weapon to make it effective. That doesn't mean its useless.

Also, in terms of it only being good in defensive roles, theres many ways you can work prove that wrong. The added firing speed of the SR makes it better for zoning than the regular sticky is. Most players don't think "oh those are SR stickies, i have more time now". Most players just try to get as far away from stickies as they can while still trying to kill you, because that is almost always the right play. Because of that and the added firing speed of SR, you can use them to give your opponents narrow angles of attack to pill them down even better than you could with the stickies. You can also advance sticky traps with the SR much in the same way as terran's advance siege tanks in starcraft or 2 good engies leapfrog sentries to get them near the front lines. The SR is just all about raping your opponents via the environment. Knowing where they are gonna want to hide and having a nasty surprise waiting for them.

ON DEMOKNIGHTS:

Demoknights are good at 2 things: 1: Forcing melee. The pyro is the best class at short range fighting, which is why he generally beats the hell out of demoknights, but the demoknight is by far the best plan at FORCING melee encounters. Between the large ground coverage of the shield and the fact that the eyelander (and claidheammor) has the longest reach of any melee weapon, that makes it tough to actually run away from a demoman if he effectively charged you. Also since he has the two most broken melees in the game (the only two that can fully heal you without a health penalty), that means he can actually carve his way through a crowd in situations where other classes would get one or two kills and then die (done it before).

The second thing the demoknight is good at is punishing getting hit by pills. If you are airborne (looking at you soldiers who always jump while shooting) and a demo grenade hits you, you are going to fly in a very predictable way with a very predictable landing area that you can't do shit about. A good demoknight WILL be meeting you at your landing point with a crit sword cutting your fucking head off. This also makes demoknights very good at punishing rocket/sticky jumps. If you know where they are landing, they are pretty fucked. Now the only way you actually have control of this situation is if you are using a grenade launcher and create the situation yourself. Because of that, the boots are pretty fucking bad.

Now, on the last point, I already know what die hard demo fans are gonna say. If you know where they are going to land they are screwed anyways. Put another pill there or a sticky and they die just as much. True. The difference is that 1: you get fully healed if you are using one of those swords, if you don't you get an eyelander head which is always a good thing. 2: crit sword hits hurt a LOT, unless you random crit with your nade you aren't going to be doing as much DPS. Sure crits are sure things. 3: You are advancing ground while you are killing them. That isn't always a good thing, but it generally is. So yes, you are kind of fucked if you have predictable landing against a demo in general, but demoknights profit from that situation far harder than other demoknights do.

anonymousity · Posted: Wed Oct 26, 2011 4:19 pm Post subject:

I agree; you should be trying to hit people with pills whenever possible. But don't forget about using pills to bounce around corners or down onto a spawn, they do a shit ton of damage and are generally unexpected in those areas.
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SD TR!G · Posted: Wed Oct 26, 2011 7:42 pm Post subject:

equip sword, decapitate, repeat

Vlad Piranha · Posted: Wed Oct 26, 2011 8:50 pm Post subject:

I find that if you have a good level of skill with the Chargin' Targe, it has serious uses. I used to hate it, but with the Booties, I have an easy time aiming and they make you highly mobile. "Killing" a Dead Ringer Spy will still count as a head cut, so if your team is being spammed by spies, you can rack up a good head count and become quite deadly in a short period of time. I've managed to rack up 12 melee kills in back to back lives before due to getting a few Spy heads first and then turning on the other members of the blue team. While not a full time class choice, the Demoknight is vicious and deadly if the situation calls for his use.

SD TR!G · Posted: Wed Oct 26, 2011 9:27 pm Post subject:

just not all the time. as a side note: I won't uber a demo wielding a sword. just a waste of effort.