If you want to improve, the very first thing to clear up is mis-conceptions.
Any false information or things some group of randoms who don't understand the gamemodes themselves push on to others.

There's quite a lot of fake information thrown-around these days, especially due to the type of information it is, small and easy to get wrong, so this may take some time.
Grab some snacks and prepare, to learn.



This is the worst type of mis-information, seriously.
And it's breed because people don't want to put up with incompetent people.

Let me explain, spy, sniper and pyro are the type of classes where if you're bad at the game or just playing them, they're automatically a bad class for you.
Now assume you're some 1000 tour grinder who just wants to finish his mann-up mode with the randoms the tf2 match-making system gave him and half of them are clueless.
You've done over 3,000 missions before, you've done them again, and again and again; you've explained the mere basics of Mann vs Machine to pablo.escobar2001 never-played-mvm-before-but-chose-expert so many times before that you just don't want to do it anymore.

So you make a plan or you've seen somebody do a similar tactic:
Think of a Mann vs Machine team setup, any group of newbies, dummies or people who aren't even trying can use to win easily with.
We need classes easy to play and mindless to get upgrades for.

Pick 1: Scout, right from boston he has a built in money magnet!
Why worry about your newbie teammates not getting any of the money or missing some when it just flies right on to them?
Plus, he heals from money hitting him too, and he starts with a lot of mobility to dodge attacks!
An easy top tier pick for the group.

Pick 2: Soldier, Soldier was built to be an easy to play generalist from the base up, rockets are easy to use and fire and provide good dps.
Upgrades are simple too, just buy rocket launcher stuff. (we'll get to this later in 4)

Pick 3: Demoman, somebody has to take care of uber medics and who else is easier to kill uber medics with when robots just walk on top of your sticky bombs?
You don't even need to think about proper placement, just put all 8 or 14 down and let em explode!
No more uber medics for your group.

Pick 4.Medic, the safety net of your newbie/failure-proof group; don't worry about your team mates not buying upgrades like movement speed or jump height to let them safely dodge projectiles when your medic can just overheal them to over 3x their normal health.

Pick 5. Heavy, He already has over 500dps in normal tf2, give him +40% firing speed and a kritzkrieg medic for well over 2,000 (approximation).
Heavy is also another class designed to be easy to play from the base up so he's another easy pick.

And lastly, 6. Engineer, Engineer is always going to be chosen; not for teleporters, not for sentry guns; but for his dispenser.
You consume a lot of ammo, especially with this setup and dispenser is op.
I personally would like for ammo upgrades to get a buff or something, maybe some sort of ammo regen even so engineer isn't an absolute requirement for mann vs machine.

Either way, that's the group of 6 our 1,000 tour player has chosen to harshly imprint upon all newer players so he doesn't need to go over teaching again and again and again and again.


But why isn't pyro/sniper/spy chosen?
Because like I said earlier, they're classes who if you're bad at playing, they're automatically bad; and potentially detrimental in some cases.
Really, a bad pyro doing nothing but spamming airblast is worse than an afk pyro.

Pyro:
If you airblast too much soldier can't proper hit with rocket specialist, sniper can't headshot anything and spy gets robots airblasted around him in 360 degrees.
If you spam airblast sentry busters you're just harming your engineer as he can't deal with the sentry buster quickly and return his sentry to doing dps and if you airblast robots behind medic's shield, then, that speaks for itself.

Sniper:
If you can't hit a single headshot then you'd be better off just using an smg.
A quick tip I can give now is wait for robots to pickup the bomb, then headshot them as they have a 50% speed decrease or shoot giant robots. It makes it a lot easier.
But still if your shots can't hit anything then sniper is not for you.

Spy:
Do you remember those butterknife spies who ran up to you one day? Or maybe that was you a few years back or even now?
Well that's basically a newbie spy because bot ai.
The only invisibility watch which works in Mann vs Machine due to the coding of these bots is the dead ringer and that isn't explained to you.
It even gives great benefits such as damage resistance and a speed boost.
A lot of new mvm spies also try to sap before backstabbing, this is unneeded and does not reduce the robot's reaction time.
Just go in, stab, and then get out.
Save sappers for small robots, engineers or super scouts.


Phew, okay that was an extremely long piece of mis-information but the rest won't be this long.
I really wanted to get that bit over with as the first thing you learn here though so you could maybe have a better perspective on why mis-information spreads.

As a quick recap there, 1,000+ tour players don't want to have to teach every new group of randoms they meet in every one of the 3,000+ mvm missions they go to; so they just say "Don't play sniper/pyro/spy" as they require education on how to play them and skill to execute.
Instead they'll repeat "play scout/soldier/demo/medic/heavy/engineer" for the reasons listed above.

They don't want to go through re-education for every new group of people they meet, so rather than explaining why they're saying this, they're just going to splurt out "I have 1,000+ tours, stop playing 2citites lol noob, i play expert" and so on.
To the point of it becoming a habit, once it becomes natural to them after doing thousands and thousands of missions, that's the point when it starts to leave the grounds of "i'm tired of re-teaching newbies" and enters the grounds of "i'm toxic and just want my golden pan ffs".

Regardless, the root of this problem is new players entering difficulties they're not ready for in mann-up mode, so, please go through a boot-camp run first before tackling the difficulty in expert.

Alright, i'll stop now since i'm sure you have the idea, now for the rest of the mis-information!:


Alright, Alright; this one isn't explained to new players at all without googling/being yelled at/stumbling upon it one day so i'm willing to let them one slide if it's your first time hearing this.

Tanks do have 75% minigun resistance and for a good reason, if it didn't exist then heavy would be doing over 2000+ dps to a tank and nobody would be able to stop him since tanks do not fight back. (citation needed)[xkcd.com]

Here's a video of what it looks like with the tank minigun resistance removed by Sigsegv:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLw7YrD8jGQ

In short, imagine your local phlog pyro doing x4 more damage to tanks.
Moving on~

Character limits.

Well i'd like to see you do that dps while you're dead.
If you do nothing but rely on your medic to keep you alive and yell at him when you die over and over and over; again and again, then you're just being an annoyance to not only your medic but your entire team; especially if you're an important role like the one who takes care of uber medics or money collector.

You don't need to throw all of your money into resistances either, the only ones which really matter are 1. Crit Resistance, 2. Movement speed and 3. Jump height; with that practice dodging attacks and before you know it you'll be screaming for medic to run over to you with his healing beam a lot less.
This also helps if there's other newer players on your team who don't quite know the art of dodging yet or you have multiple front-liners like heavy or pyro who will take the majority of damage by freeing up the medic's time on you and giving extra time for them.

Additionally i've seen plenty of high-tour players fail basic dodging before followed by screaming for medic so maybe you'll free up some time for them, too.

Side note if you're going to be playing Heavy/Pyro, resistances get priority over movement upgrades, more on this in their own parts.

Entirely false, 100% false, especially to you engineer sitting next to the bomb, far away from any other player who killed a single scout and sat there watching the money burn away.
Everyone can pick up money, even spy can be your main-money collector!

If you kill a robot in some obscure place where you're not within direct line of sight of the scout or rocket jumping distance of, go grab the currently burning money pile before your team misses out on their A+.

If you're a front-liner like heavy, pyro or maybe even spy who's behind the enemy front line, then you can contribute too if the scout is busy somewhere far away or dead.

One thing I will warn you about though, Do not collect tank money if a scout is nearby, a dead tank can immediately give a scout 200-400 health depending on how much money is dropped and is sometimes vital on harder missions (for example, not wave 666 but something like gear grinder).
If the scout is bad, though, then go right ahead.

No.
it's not.
It's even easier than two cities or arguably even advanced.
If you want a real challenge, try gear grinder first; once you're done with that there's a lot of community-made custom missions and maps to try out with harder difficulties than valve can provide; both in wave 666 form, endurance form and regular wave formats.
Go have fun.

I don't really understand why people say this is the hardest, probably because you start with the most cash or because of all the shiny giant robot icons.

Entirely false, as in, wow.
The whole "dps isn't everything" point I made a few minutes ago should speak everything about why this is false but i'll go over the other two banners.

Battalions back up - Honestly not that great and extremely situational, the best use case is when you can't really afford full crit resistance because of a lack of money or you need to get dps first.
Either way the rare case where you want the aoe crit resistance is when you use the back up, alternatively someone sent you a popfile with a lot of undodgeable projectiles and you need more resistances to tank them.

Concheror - This is a top-tier banner, right next to buff banner or even better than it; but why is it so good?
Let's start with the juicest part of all, the speed boost.
The aoe speedboost alone is an insanely good thing to have when put to good use, here's a list of things to do with the speed boost solo:
1. Catch up to super scouts your pyro didn't airblast because your engineer didn't make a dispenser.
2. Go back to ammo packs/dispensers quicker, less downtime is more uptime for dps.
3. Help a teammate run away from their death, less death uptime is more life uptime; which is also more dps. (citation needed)[www.explainxkcd.com]
4. Dodge more projectiles.
5. Be the hero your team needs.
6. Make "newbie-group"-only 1000 tour players mad.
And relatively not much more with the power of speed boost!

The aoe heal-on-hit is a great thing to have too and stacks with mad-milk, providing a lot more survivability to tank with and is multiplied by dodging more attacks, amazing!

As for the buff banner, you have at least 5 different ways to cause minicrits to robots without it.
1 - Fan o' war/Sandman
2 - Jarate
3 - Pyro reflects
4 - Sniper's Cleaner's Carbine (rip guaranteed crits)
5 - Loose cannon?
And many more without going into more weapon-specific crits/minicrits; remember that crit-canteens exist too.

Remember, i'm not saying the buff banner is bad, aoe minicrits are very nice, i'm just saying the other options are good too.

Practically a clone of Mis-information 1. but spread by a different source, un-knowledged people making videos trying to spread their own knowledge on MvM.
I'll give you a very quick but completely accurate one.
S-tier: Scout, Soldier, Pyro, Demoman, Heavy, Engineer, Medic, Sniper, Spy
A-tier:
B-tier:
C-tier:
D-tier:
What-are-you-doing?-do-you-know-what-game-you're-playing-tier???: Trolldier (original)

Yeah. All nine classes are completely viable and not one is a direct upgrade or completely worse to another, who knew?

I don't even understand how or why this exists but all red money is is money which is automatically collected because the sniper preformed a headshot/scoped kill.
Simple as that

It does not.
You have the exact same explosive damage uncharged as you do fully charged with a sniper rifle. There's no difference.

...no
Google it first before lying
Expert/Gear grinder has the exact same loot pool as 2 cities
It's so annoying how easy and fast this information is avaliable yet how many people get it wrong.

Uhh actually crit-boosted beggarz-bazooka soldier is with full upgrades.
Yeah.
Pyro is much more efficient though at least; much, much more efficient.

Also pro-tip, you gain more dps by fully reloading your clip than firing off one shot at a time. (Does not apply to beggarz)

Now that we have the common false information out of the way, let's get into the basics of MvM.
Afterall, a player is only as good as they are bad.

You may be wondering or thinking "but I already know how mvm works, isn't it a bit, y'know, late for that?"
Ah, but I mean the unspoken rules of Mann vs Machine.

Let's go over them:

Rule #1: Have viable class composition, assuming the wave isn't going to be a complete joke or has unusual gimicks to it, I would advise the following be fulfilled:

-Have at least 1 main money collector: Can be Spy or Scout

-If the mission has groups of robots (giant or small), have at least one primary AoE damage dealer: Can be Soldier, Demo, Pyro or Sniper.

-If the mission has giant robots or generally slow tanky robots (not tanks), Have a single-target damage dealer: Can be Heavy or Spy (if skilled)

-if the mission has tanks which appear to be a problem, have a tank buster: Can be Pyro, Soldier Demo or Scout

-If your team is not running on purely energy weapons or other items which do not require ammo, then have at least 1 engineer

You'll probably think of more once you become more skilled at MvM, don't be afraid to experiment with allies


Rule #2: Reload speed is better than firing speed, again, less downtime means more uptime which means more dps; and reloading can take a really long time too~
Generally firing speed and reload speed is leagues better than damage since damage has diminishing returns, the more you upgrade it the less dps you gain, compared to firing and reload speed where the more you get, the more dps you gain.

Increasing returns


Rule #3: If you aren't a front-liner, dodging is much better than tanking, assuming you're new, try investing more in to movement speed and jump height instead of more resistances.
They're significantly cheaper and if you never take damage in the first place, it's practically like having 100% damage resistance.

Rule #4: Don't attack uber medics until they're killed or already popped uber, I shouldn't have to tell you this one but for some reason, some unknown, alien, inhumane reason, people still do it.
Let the Scout/Demo/Sniper kill them off first or your local kritz-boosted soldier/etc, then move in to kill them.


As a swift recap:
-Have a decent composition if you're not messing around
-Reload speed and Firing speed > Damage
-Movement speed and Jump height/Dodging > Tanking/non-crit resistances
-Stop making uber medics pop uber, especially you newbie scouts/soldiers/heavies/pyros. Stop. I would say engineer can cause this too but a sentrygun that aggressive is usually dead.


Everything here is applicable to all areas of Mann vs Machine, always look at your enemy and what you can best do to slaughter it.
Stall
Tank
Dodge
Increase DPS
Or even ignore

Moving on, the next nine sections will cover the basics of each class; I suggest learning the basics of at least 2 or 3 classes in case of the scenario where the class you primarily learnt about was already taken by someone else.
I will also cover the more advanced tactics for people really wanting to play said class and know more about it, however, I trust you to be better than most randoms I find already by this points; so let's push that *just* a little bit further!

Note: I'm not telling you read everything here, just the classes you like first

Additionally, side note, you see these cool blue holograms here?
They tell you which path robots are taking for the wave.


Now, let's continue on making you not be this guy:

So, you've decided to play as the loud speedster himself, the scout?
Pubs just wouldn't the same without him, nor would mvm.

IMPORTANT WARNING: HAVING MORE THAN 1 SCOUT ON THE TEAM IS BAD
There's half the healing-dollars to go around and it provides no benefits considering the massive downside.
Don't do this.



Here i'll go over the basics to play as a scout effectively in Mann vs Machine, first and most importantly; your gear

The fan of war is an always must have and so is the mad milk; you could in theory mark for death with the sandman too, but that requires a rather expensive upgrade and is only really viable when the fan of war is banned for whatever reason.

Here's a quick tier-list of scout weapons; this will be based off of how generally applicable they are, note that just because something is below another weapon in the tier list does not mean it is bad or inferior.
All it means is that the weapon is less generally applicable than those above it.

Anything with a Star* next to it means there's something to note and the weapon regularly requires certain skill or knowledge to execute in order to enter the stated tier.

AG-tier = Always good
A-tier = Typically good but comes with a downside which takes it away from being always good
B-tier = Useful in a number of situations, or even sometimes just a few; not always applicable
C-tier = Useful in extremely few situations when preforming ridiculously precise things and are otherwise not useful except when doing that one individual thing
D-tier = Unuseable generally speaking



AG-tier: Scatter gun, Soda Popper, Force-A-Nature* = Mad Milk = Fan O' war
A-tier: Back scatter, Shortstop = Sandman
B-tier: Bonk! Atomic Punch
C-Tier: Winger = Atomizer
D-Tier: Pistol, PBPP, Flying Guillotine, Crit-a-cola, Baby Faces Blaster = Bat, Candy Cane, Boston Basher, Sun-on-A-Stick, Wrap assassin

If you are interested as to why these specific weapons are good/bad, I will cover that in the first part of scout, advanced; for now to play the mere basics of scout this will do.

So, how do you actually play scout anyways?
You have generally applicable weapons and aren't running around with useless equips anymore, what are you doing?
An old thing which was thrown around a lot is "Scout collects money and debuffs robots, that's it", which is entirely false; following the "buy movement speed, jump height and crit resistance only" tactic we used earlier, we can apply this to scout.
Hey, you're the highest health member on your team after you pick up some money and the fastest, you should have absolutely no trouble dodging almost everything and tanking the rest!
*Sentryguns not included.

When a wave or mission first starts you'll probably be sitting at 125 health, or preferably more if your medic was kind enough to heal you!

However assuming you're in this by yourself and the medic doesn't care about you at all aside from reviving, wait until the first group of robots die, then collect the money.
Now you've got yourself started, rinse and repeat until you're an invulnerable dodging tank capable of collecting money 24/7!

Do the classic Milk n Mark to any giants you see and definitely milk hordes of robots.
You may not feel like milking is doing a whole lot; but to a front liner or someone at low health, you will be their #1 hero!
Even more than the medic.

However, money should always be your priority, always.
With the exception if the bomb is mere seconds away from being deployed but other than that, money first, money first, money first.
If your team is missing money it won't just hurt you now for missing out on health, it will also hurt you and your entire team for the entire remains of the mission.
A+ should be your preferable goal every single time for the sweet, sweet $100 bonus.

So you have your milk, fan o' war and scattergun of choice,
You know to collect money first, milk n mark second and shoot stuff with your gun
What about upgrades?

Uh, pretty simple really.

Get crit resistance as soon as it's needed.
Then get mad milk slowdown, then get movement speed and jump height.
If you have at least decent aim then go for scatter gun upgrades to maximize dps like reload speed, otherwise get some resistances if you're having trouble dying.

Maybe get uber canteens if you Absolutely must and maybe crit canteens if you have scattergun upgrades and need help on a tank wave.
Don't bother with anything else really unless you're really having trouble with something and save it until last.

Yep, that simple, see you in advanced!

So, what makes a weapon good?
Why am I doing these things as scout?
And how can I push myself further?

Well just like I said in the basics, let's start with the tier list I showed earlier.

So why are these certain things good and why are others bad?
A very fast observation one could have is that scout is really split, most of his items are either uber good, or useless/super bad.



Let's start off with the scatter gun, soda popper and Force a nature as well as the other AG-tier weapons.

• Why is the scatter gun so good? The same reasons as normal tf2.
  It's consistent and you have full and utter control over it, it has no bad stats nor good stats, just a high damage gun.
  
  More importantly, at +50% damage bonus you can one shot kill uber medics if you press your face against them.
  At +75% damage bonus you can do so less carefully and at 100% you could even have a little bit of distance safely.
  
  Of course ideally your demo man or sniper would complete this task but it's no guarantee with randoms, especially if someone keeps popping the medics uber charge and causing them to spread out, sniper can't headshot that, demoman can try his best to kill the rest overs but they're a bit spread out now.
  
  This is where you can at least lessen the damage, grab your damage-boosted scattergun and shoot those uber medics point-blank, be the hero your team really, really needs.
  Soda popper and Force a nature can do this too
  
  
  
• Soda popper has the bonus of free jumps with the downside of starting with less clip size, not too big of a downside considering you can just upgrade to fix it, arguably better than stock for MvM.
  
  
  
• But you probably saw the shiny red star next to the Force a Nature, how do we use this thing to make it good?
  Well it knocks back robots, this could be used to stall but even worse, make it hard for your sniper to land shots.
  Imagine it as a mini-airblast and everything discussed there, consider what you're doing to other players by making robots bounce around everywhere before shooting and you should be okay.
  
  Use it to stall and pit robots first, then damage second.
  
  
  
• As for the last two, Mad milk should be obvious, 60% of your insanely high dps is turned in to healing, and it can be upgraded to slow robots a lot.
  I don't need to explain why this one is so insanely good when compared to the other items, the mad milk is something which buffs your entire team, considering that's 6 people, that's a lot better than just one.
  The buff banner is popular for a reason
  
  
• And the Fan o war follows similar reasons, free single-target minicrits for your entire team.
  Friendly reminder that sentry guns can minicrit too.
  
  Whole team buffs > Shared buffs > Individual buffs > No buffs

So, A-tier.
It's really nice that scout doesn't have any all-bad primaries.. if it wasn't for one member of the family.
These two scatterguns are basically AG-tier but missing something which makes them as good, so this should be short.

• The backscatter is bad because of less clip size, reducing Tank DPS as scout, minor but you also loose spread and the upside is something which rarely comes in to play as robots love staring at you.
  
  
• Shortstop may be capable of more tank dps but due to less damage per individual shot, it's incapable of one shot killing uber medics no matter how many damage upgrades you get.
  You would have to use either a crit canteen, be crit boosted or have minicrits somehow to make it happen; all of which are not guarantees, especially with bad players.
  
  Additionally the shortstop's downside can suck when you want to grab one piece of money but keep being blasted away.
  A good tip though if you're tired of just body blocking giant medics, the shove is really effective against them.
  
  
• As for the Sandman, the mark-for-death upgrades costs $500 and comes with a cooldown in the form of base ball recharge time; requires an expensive upgrade, is slower without max upgrades, requires good aim, a robot could jump in front of the projectile, it could be deflected or reflected and etc.
  So on.
  Maybe if the mark-for-death effect was free it could be viable.
  
  Simple as that.

• Would you like to add some more unnecessary image size with that?
  Heh, jokes aside the Bonk! Atomic punch falls under "useful in certain situations", these being when you're low on cash and desperately need to pickup money before it burns away, or when you desperately need to pick up money in general.
  It's essentially an uber canteen but you can't shoot, and you loose milk.
  
  Note that this isn't bad just because mad milk exists, it's bad because it's not always going to change the outcome of a fight and thus Bonk! Atomic Punch is not always good.

C-tier weapons are only going to be used for an exploit or something.Seriously, think of one good use for these weapons without having them be insanely overshadowed by above options.
• Winger is overshadowed by jump-height upgrades and there's no where special to jump to in mvm maps, Atomizer is the same and requires you to swap to melee, which makes you not use your other weapons.

Repeat of C-tier but they can't even be used for an exploit.

• Pistol has pathetic dps and is overshadowed by scattergun since you'll be surrounding robots all the time anyways and there's no targets to pick off.
  
  
• Crit-o-Cola sucks since you take extra damage with no upside because Fan o War exists as well as the rest of your team applying mini-crits.
  
  
• PBPP is a pistol repeat, also if you're below 125 health you're usually dead mid-wave or just respawned.
  You'd also just get more healing from mad milk + scatter gun anyways.
  
  
• Flying Guillotine sucks for the same reasons pistols sucks, it's a slow recharge on a single-hit throwable with underwhelming damage, completely out-shun by scatter gun.
  
  
• Default bat and its reskins is either a meme weapon or you're cosplaying a robot crit-boosted bat scout.
  
  
• Candy cane's upside is rarely relevent for a number of reasons.
  1. Other people, primarily sniper, kill the majority of robots
  2. The only person who *might* run in to your healthpacks is pyro or maybe spy if they take damage, you'll be too busy at over max overheal to care.
  3. People rarely go below their max health at the front line and are willing to risk running in to danger for a small health boost of 20% their hp.
  Also you take more damage from explosives which might just get you killed.
  And you aren't mini-critting giants.
  
  
• Boston basher.
  If you hit, you do a jokingly small about of bonus damage
  If you miss, you hit yourself, maybe steal a healthpack from the backline and have your screen flinch for six seconds.
  
  
• Sun on a Stick
  You're just memeing
  If you really, absolutely want to know why this is bad in mvm too then.
  You're stealing kills from pyros who desperately need their heal-on-kill health to stay alive while also not mini-critting giants and if you're using them for the fire resistance then. Just. Buy it.
  At least it's the single best melee for x10 mode!
  
  
• Wrap assassin
  you're joking, right?
  Wasn't I explaining how bad the guillotine and the boston basher is enough for you to know why already?
  You can figure this one out, you're a smart guy
  
  
• Baby Faces Blaster, phew.
  This used to be the SS-tier go-to item for scout before it was nerfed in to oblivion.
  In short, downsides with no upside, at max boost you move at 173% speed compared to 172% if you had just bought three speed upgrades.
  Maybe that 1% speed will matter somewhere, somehow, but you need to actually get it first and not immediately loose it from being nudged in to by Glass Joe.
  Also how dare you exercise your legs!?!???!?
  (Should this be in D-tier just because of the theoretical 1% speedboost?)

character limits

character limits



So now that we have a greater understanding of why we use the weapons we do, how about how to actually play?

After all, a good tool may enhance one's work but if they can't work to begin with, no work will be done.

Building on top of what was learnt in the basic Scout guide, what else can we learn?
Well we already know to shoot uber medics if we are capable of doing so but what else?

Well, say goodbye to your fire, bullet and explosive resistances unless a wave spams nothing but one of them for now, after getting mad milk slow down, your movement upgrades and crit resistance when applicable.

The best contribution you can have to your team is boosting your scatter gun damage while you're collecting money and debuffing robots, first start out with reload speed unless your team really struggles with uber medics; then get damage boost so you can begin picking them off yourself.

The goal here, if you aren't compensating for uber-medics, is to boost your overall dps as much as possible; so reload speed, then firing speed followed by ammo, damage and clipsize, then more ammo if you aren't maxed out already.

If your team starts having trouble healing then grab some points in to mad milk recharge time, remember, the more points your invest, the more the next point will be worth

Then you can start getting any luxuries like damage resistances which aren't critical to winning or random stuff like heal on kill.


The reason i'm encouraging this is two things, giant dps and tank dps.
Primarily the latter.

As a scout, you can output a surprising amount of damage against a tank.
Who would've thought being able to fully utilise the scattergun's 175% damage ramp-up against a slow, tanky target would've been optimal?

If there's no money to actively collect then go right at it, a good scout can be so beneficial to a team with their duties that there's no reason to switch on the last round you you can fully make use of your scattergun's abilities if you don't want to.

However, make sure you can properly utilise the scattergun first, mad milk is still insanely good and I don't understand why people give up mad milk and fan o war just because it's the last wave but it's always nice to have good aim


That's it!
Go out there, practice, and then show them what kind of guide-graduating scout you are!

So, you want to play the rocket-spamming, rocket-jumping questionably sane maniac himself, the soldier?



Let's see, where to get started.

Get. Reload. Speed. After one point of rocket specialist
Reloading your rocket launcher takes ages, and as we've learnt so far; less downtime = more uptime = more dps

After that get firing speed, then you can begin questioning things like max ammo count if you're running out of ammo; more importantly though as you upgrade all of those things, get some points in movement sped.
Yes Soldier can rocket jump around the place cooly, but he's still just a slow class while he's spamming rockets.
You most likely don't have gunboats and every rocket spent to rocket jump is one spent not shot at robots, so we get movement speed to help dodge and keep that to a minimum mid-spamming.
Additionally, some jump height won't hurt either to assist with dodging, don't forget about crit-resistance either.

As usual, always get crit-resistance once it's needed.

After that get damage boosts to have more efficient use of out of your ammo, or even during; just remember that reload speed and firing speed get top-priority for dps upgrades.

Now moving on, time for an actually accurate tier list which isn't made by someone who thinks they know mvm but has likely played through only 10 - 20 easy/valve expert missions.
You need community expert to really be hardened up.


Here's a quick tier-list of soldier weapons; this will be based off of how generally applicable they are, note that just because something is below another weapon in the tier list does not mean it is bad or inferior.
All it means is that the weapon is less generally applicable than those above it.

Anything with a Star* next to it means there's something to note and the weapon regularly requires certain skill or knowledge to execute in order to enter the stated tier.

AG-tier = Always good
A-tier = Typically good but comes with a downside which takes it away from being always good
B-tier = Useful in a number of situations, or even sometimes just a few; not always applicable
C-tier = Useful in extremely few situations when preforming ridiculously precise things and are otherwise not useful except when doing that one individual thing
D-tier = Unuseable generally speaking



AG-tier: Beggars Bazooka*, Rocket Launcher, Cow-Mangler*, Black box = Concheror, Buff Banner = Disciplinary Action, Escape Plan
A-tier: Airstrike = B.A.S.E Jumper
B-tier: Battalions Backup = Paintrain
C-tier: Direct Hit = Equalizer, Half-Zatochi
D-tier: Liberty launcher = Gunboats, Mantreads, Shotgun, Reserve shooter, Righteous Bison, Panic Attack = Shovel, Market Gardener
Rocket Jumper tier: Rocket Jumper

If you are interested as to why these specific weapons are good/bad, I will cover that in the first part of soldier, advanced; for now to play the mere basics of soldier this will do.


And for the final piece of the very basics of soldier, just spam rockets; use rocket specialist to stun super scouts or exceptionally ruthless.
You don't ever need one point in rocket specialist, multiple levels does not improve the stun, max rocket specalist does not fix Direct Hit's lack of explosion radius and is not worth the $400 saved, I mean, you're spending $900 extra just to save spending $400 on and upgrade and a lot of aoe damage.

Spam rockets, spam rockets and focus tight groups/super scout.
Easy to play

See you in advanced

Alright, whoo, the fun part, explaining why each weapon is generally good in most situations, useless or just situational.

Welcome to your journey of becoming an advanced-tier soldier~

Like the advanced scout guide i'll begin with AG tier and work down to the lowest tier.

• Let's start off with the biggest one of them all, the rocket launcher with the absolute highest dps in Mann vs Machine.
  At the comparatively small costs of accuracy, a little bit of explosion radius and one of your fingers, you can be a One Man Army.
  
  To properly use the Beggars Bazooka, you need to spam left click when shooting, don't build up your rockets; just spam your left mouse button and fire them off one at a time.
  This may seem contradictory to what I said about "fully reloading gives you the highest possible dps", but the beggars is special if you only do one at a time.
  For some reason, the firing animation is irrelevent if you do this and it lets you spam rockets ruthlessly.
  
  This won't work in normal tf2 and the accuracy penalty will likely make you loose most match ups but in Mann vs Machine, once you get max reload speed you can have much more dps than most launchers.
  
  okay, enough praise; but really, this is the highest dps launcher soldier has; Beggars bazooka, don't forget it. High dps, spam left click, win every time.
  Just manage the accuracy penalty and you'll be okay
  
  
  
• On to the next option, Stock, it's reliable as it has no upsides nor downsides, it's always accurate unlike beggars too and is very standard to train with, since there's nothing bad about it and it reliably shoots aoe dps there's no scenario where it's actively bad, a simple gun.
  
  
• The blackbox is essentially stock but you start with one less rocket but gain health on hit, useful for when you need more healing and your medic either isn't enough or healing you to begin with.
  A single clip size upgrade will remove the downside, so imagine spending $400 on a clip size as giving yourself the heal-on-hit benefit.
  This used to be much, much stronger before valve nerfed how its healing worked.
  Strong upside with relatively weak downside, simple as that again.
  
  
• The Cowmangler, naturally you should avoid using this with a kritzkrieg medic on your team who is uncapable of kritz-boosting the demoman, but otherwise not using ammo is good for a number of reasons.
  You don't need to be baby-sit by the engineer's dispenser
  You can easily run no engineer if everyone runs cow mangler
  Even more so with the 3 soldiers, 3 banners strat
  
  It's another rocket launcher which is difficult to explain aside from strong upside with relatively weak/downsides
  The biggest downside this launcher has is its terrible damage against buildings, but it's very easy to just ask one of the other five members of your team to kill the sentry, you could even contribute by using its alt-fire~
  Another simple gun for a simple man
  Actually, due to the Soldier's overall simple design most guns don't have a lot of tricks to them
  for making them great aside from "good stat with practically no/a very small downside", huh.
  
  
• Moving on, ah, the Concheror.
  This is potentially the single best MvM banner when used right, remember what I said about the Concheror helping with pick up ammo, save team fights, dodge more projectiles and so on earlier in to the guide?
  It really is that good, you need to remember that while weapons which just boost your dps are great, less downtime = more uptime = more dps; it's a common theme with a lot of the top-tier weapons here.
  
  Now i'll introduce the buff banner at the same time since it's default for a lot of either new, medicore or just-grinding-mvm soldier players; and it's still a great banner.
  One grants your entire team minicrits, including the engineer, and the other grants your entire team a speed and healing boost, including your medic, well, minus the healing thing.
  
  If the buff banner was the only source of minicrits in all of mann vs machine, if items life the fan of war, jarate an such were never added to the game; then it would be a required choice
  Thankfully though, the TF2 of the past added numerous ways to mini-crit your opponents to death however you please
  
  tl;dr, the conch is great for a stacking speed boost and more healing-on-hit while the buff banner can give you a little bit more dps if you require it.
  
  
• Last two, the whip and the escape plan.
  As you may have noticed both of these two things affect movement speed, one passively and the other actively.
  The only reason they're here is because all soldier melees suck.
  Yep, you heard it.
  Ignore the tier list for melees as long as it isn't the pain train since you probably won't be using them anyways, you'll be too busy rocket jumping, rocket spamming and horn-blowing to pull out your melee.
  
  If you ever get to the point of doing so, you've probably hit a brick wall and are either near-death or near a dispenser anyways.
  
  If you're playing medieval mode mvm, go for the whip, half-zatochi, equalizer or even stock.
  They're all equally useless in normal Mann vs Machine

Okay, A-tier weapons, these are typically AG-tier weapons but have one or two downsides which made them not always good

• The Airstrike, is a great weapon if it didn't have the explosion and damage penalty, that's it.
  Soldier is an extremely simple class for simple people, and crazy people who enjoy flying across the map at mach speed.
  The explosion penalty, especially while mid-air is a big detriment considering the upside, also 15% less damage is a flat -15% dps and ammo efficiency.
  You also need to spend at least one rocket just to use the firing speed upside to rocket jump up in the air, it's good, you can use it, it's just, not as good as some other choices competitively speaking.
  Completely viable though.
  
  
• As for the B.A.S.E. (Base Antenna Span Earth) Jumper it just goes well with the airstrike, if you're rocket jumping around everywhere you'll rarely be nearby your team enough for them to benefit from your buffs so you may as well equip it and reduce your fall damage while also giving yourself more time to aim a good shot/get rockets out mid-air.
  The biggest downside though is you'll suffer a lot more knockback mid-air due to friction.

• So, the battalions backup, some people absolutely love it and others question it.
  To me, I find the middle ground of this weapons can be very useful when its situation occurs, and is other generally un-needed/over shadowed by other banners.
  I'm following the same "if you dodge everything you won't need to tank anything" tactic still since it's the best way to go through damage.
  Of course the biggest looser here is your team heavy, especially if he takes the brass beast; however the Concheror's healing effect generally makes him okay, especially with a scout and medic.
  
  So, when should I use the battalions backup then? you may wonder.
  Use it when the wave has a lot of unavoidable damage or crit-spam to negate the effects of said unavoidable damage/fall-off immunity.
  You could still use it outside of the scenario but that's not taking full advantage of all the types of banners you have for the job.
  The right banner for the wave can make everything much, much easier.
  
  
• For the pain train, use it if the map has capturable objectives and you'll be grabbing them without your team a lot, or even just do it since it'll be the only melee with a benefit to you.
  Simple

• Let's start off with the big one, the Direct hit.
  The only, single, individual reason this garbage-for-mvm rocket launcher isn't in its own catagory of bad and horribleness is for one, single reason.
  Imagine you're some sadistic mission maker, or just want a challenging mission, who says the soldier must have more than x dps on wave 1.
  You can't afford proper upgrades, maybe the soldier has to do more than a certain amount of damage with each hit.
  
  Otherwise, never, ever, ever touch this thing.
  In fact, this is so ridiculously precise, I should have just thrown it in to D-tier, or even made its own tier just for the direct hit.
  -70% explosion size for what?
  *barely* more damage against a single robot? I could just spend $400 and have that against an entire wave.
  The projectile speed is pretty useless in mvm too.
  There's giant robots.
  No amount of upgrades in to rocket specialist, or anything else; will ever save this gun.
  It's bad, it's terrible, it's no-good.
  Don't even breath on it before your other guns catch direct-hitness.
  This is your warning, splash damage is vital in mvm when you can have it.
  
  So what about the other weapons?
  
• The equalizer and the half-zatochi, like all soldiers melee suck.
  Equalizer because, okay all melees for soldier suck in mvm but this one because it encourages you to fight at low health.
  Half-zatochi is a nice idea but I will remind you that samurai demoknights are a thing in mvm, and they love jumping and charging everywhere.
  Also heal-on-kill is an upgrade too so, what are you gaining outside of Medieval mode?
  
  Uh also the cool benefit to the Equalizer is taunt killing but in style I mean uh medieval, zatochi is one-hit killing other zatochi robots but you'll likely die first since it's a 10 vs 1

• The liberty Launcher gives you 25% less damage across all of your rockets, every single one of them, for, what?
  One more clip size and more projectile speed, easily upgradeable and downside is ridiculous compared to the upside.
  
  
• Gunboats
  Uhhhhh explosive resistance and medic.
  yeah, also you aren't using a banner.
  
  
• Mantreads
  Uhhhhhhhh no.
  You're playing market gardener soldier if you're using this.
  Also you aren't using a banner
  The biggest benefit is likely the damage push force resistance but it's overshadowed by the banners, really.
  
  
• Shotgun
  If you're not playing engineer then you're sacrificing for another weapon, in this example banner.
  The shotgun is a good gun but once again, overshadowed not only by the banners but also by every single rocket launcher in the game; minus one.
  Even if you go full shotgun mode the bullets will spread everywhere with projectile penetration and only be effective against 1 or 2 robots before turning in to medicore damage.
  
  
• Reserve Shooter
  Same reasons as shotgun but the upside is even less applicable.
  
  
• Righteous Bison, oh, this one hurts a little.
  This used to be one of the best weapons in Mann vs Machine until valve nerfed it, hard; the penetration doesn't work properly as it once did and the hitbox was made smaller all for no reason.
  I'd rather have the old bison back but for right now it's bad because it's overshadowed by other soldier items and the individual dps of the weapon is bad after the nerf.
  
  
• The Panic Attack
  Same as reserve shooter but with a slightly more applicable upside
  
  
• Stock shovel and Markget gardener
  All soldier melees are bad.
  All of them.
  If you think otherwise then track how often you pull them out in a normal game instead of just rocket jumping with your last rocket without forcing it.
  If you aren't rocket jumping to grab more ammo then you need more soldier practice.
  Soldier melees suck.

• racket jumpa
  
• -100% damage penalty is a good job mate
  
• This used to be an extremely good weapon to pair with the bison before the nerf.

Okay, we've just learnt why some weapons are good and why other weapons are less good, but what about why upgrades are good and why other things aren't good?

I'll start off with the upgrades, rocket specialist, reload reload reload, firing speed firing speed firing speed firing speed, movement speed and jump, ammo and damage.

If you're using a cowmangler you have infinite ammo to begin with and if you have a dispenser, that works too.

Rocket specialist is great as a stun-lock tool, you can stall robots for as long as your team needs, or until you run out of ammo.
Like I said in the basic guide, the extra tiers are practically useless, they do not increase the stun duration or amount, you can not get an aoe stun, it improves the stun in no way, shape or form.
All it does is boost explosion radius on direct hit and increase projectile speed; however compared to the other upgrades we could have and the fact the explosion size is dimishing returns, we only get one point in it because of that.

Reload speed is maxed first because reloading as soldier is slow, really slow, and as we've learnt so far; less downtime = more uptime = more dps.
if you still really don't believe in the less downtime = more uptime = more dps thing then go play an mvm game as soldier without a single point in reload speed and tell me how good it is.
It's the biggest example of it

Firing speed because of gaining returns and it helps with rocket specialist stun-locking; movement speed and jump height to dodge everything and ammo and damage for the efficiency.
Always try to dodge damage since not taking damage in the first place is effectively a free 100% damage resistance, always get crit-resistance however when applicable since crit spam can usually 1-2 hit kill you. (exceptions apply, see: heavyweapons/smg sniper, etc)


Soldier's job is easy, you just spam rockets, dodge the damage and then play your horn/shell every now and then and wish you had the skill of an orchestra.
So there's not a lot to mention with playstyle really, no hidden tricks; just spam rockets.

Incase you forgot about the top-tier beggars bazooka by now, that will take up a lot of ammo so consider getting ammo upgrades before firing speed, since the firing speed upgrade is rather irrelevent on that gun; pro tip.

Always consider what banner is appropriate for the situation.
Desperately need more dps? Grab the buff banner!
Really need more survivability and less downtime? Take the conch!
Did somebody just spam a wave with crit heavies/smg snipers? Equip the battalions backup and say no to crits, today!

also valve add an mvm-applicable melee please and a good sniper melee, please.

Enjoy your first steps as a guide-graduating soldier, first remember to practice, then show off.
Just remember others may not have seen this guide, so point them this way; or may not speak english, I can't help you if that's the problem.

Either way, Bon voyage

Mhmmphph Mhmhphmh! Mhmmhmh!
In other words, "I love playing pyro! He's one of the most enjoyable classes in the game!"

WARNING: Due to Jungle Inferno, there's currently a bug with the normal flame throwers where they do 50% less damage if they hit a prop. This includes tanks; tl;dr a heavy's minigun outdamages a pyro flamethrower even with the 75% tank damage reduction.

Dragons fury is fine though so use that for tank busting.



So, remember what I said about pyro being one of the harder classes to play fundamentally in some way earlier?
This basics section will be much longer than others because of it and if you really, really want to play pyro then I would advise reading through all the way in to advanced and until the end.


So, Pyro, Cute Rogue? Pyromaniac? Destroyer of Robots?

Well what does he bring to the table that others can't?
What he does bring to the team that others can't is airblasting, airblasting is the single most effective tool for relocating and stalling both robots and the bomb.

In addition to stalling and relocating, airblasts can also save burning teammates, reflect projectiles and so on, everything pyro can normally do in Tf2 but in Mann vs machine.

However, in addition to airblasting; Pyro is a front line machine.
Some people say his flamethrower is a bit weak but they typically use it wrong and forget something, it's designed to mow down entire hordes of people from the start.
I'm sure you remember that one time a back burner pyro dropped down behind your group of 7 people and either wiped them all or at least caused very sevre damage, causing all of you to fall back, right?
Or maybe you were that pyromanic in disguise?

Either way, pyro is made for sweeping groups of people from the start, so why people tell you to start with damage upgrades I, don't understand.

Another warning before going further on is, Pyro isn't the type of class to get insanely high scoreboard stats, but he is the type to hard-carry the team in a tough situation.
A well placed dispenser with a well-trained pyro can cause an immediate game over for the robots due to the raw stalling power and dps a pyro can output, especially with teammates.

So how does pyro actually be, pyro?
How should I play him? What do I do? How do I not die?

Alright, alright, keeping organised with the rest of the guide i'll start with the recommended items.


Here's a quick tier-list of pyro weapons; this will be based off of how generally applicable they are, note that just because something is below another weapon in the tier list does not mean it is bad or inferior.
All it means is that the weapon is less generally applicable than those above it.

Anything with a Star* next to it means there's something to note and the weapon regularly requires certain skill or knowledge to execute in order to enter the stated tier.

AG-tier = Always good
A-tier = Typically good but comes with a downside which takes it away from being always good
B-tier = Useful in a number of situations, or even sometimes just a few; not always applicable
C-tier = Useful in extremely few situations when preforming ridiculously precise things and are otherwise not useful except when doing that one individual thing
D-tier = Unuseable generally speaking



AG-tier: Flame Thrower, Back Burner* = Detonator*, The Gas Passer = Home Wrecker, Powerjack*
A-tier: Phlog, Dragons Fury = Flaregun, Man Melter, Scorchshot = Backscratcher
B-tier:
C-tier: Thermal thruster = Third Degree, Neon Annihilator
D-tier: Degreaser = Shotgun, Reserve shooter, Panic attack, Stock, Axtinguisher, Sharpened Volcano Fragment, Hot Hand

If you are interested as to why these specific weapons are good/bad, I will cover that in the first part of pyro, advanced; for now to play the mere basics of pyro this will d- wait, copy paste won't work here.

Remember when I said "if you intend to play pyro, you should look through his guide to the very end?"
Well as you can see, half of the AG-tier is red stars; you could just take the left overs from there, but if you don't intend to play pyro then i'd say stop here, this is the point of no return, your final, repeated warning.

Okay, onwards we go~

So, where do most Pyro guides and players fall short for MVM?
Ah, an already answered question, they take damage bonus first before getting any kind of resistances.
As pyro, your #1, first upgrade should be resistances, don't bother touching movement speed or flamethrower upgrades until you have enough resistance upgrades for the wave.
If you must pick between one of two, get one of them to 50% resistance first, then the other, preferably Crit, then fire, then bullet, then explosive.

• Crit is taken for obvious reasons, taking x3 damage with no fall off is, unfavourable.
  
  
• Fire is usually before bullet if a decision is forced since bullets can miss a lot easier than fire can.
  
  
• And bullet is usually taken before explosive since you can reflect explosives

Additionally, get heal on kill, it's a must have, at least level 1 but preferably 2 will be enough.

Of course, always take what's going to be hurting you the most during the wave, so if there's two giant pyros but 50 soldiers; you probably want the explosive resistance~

Once you have your resistances up, then it'd kind of up to you on what to take for the rest of the waves.

Are there going to be a lot of tanks?
Will I need more dps for the tanks?
Is there a pit I can airblast giants in to?
Should I not spend all my money this wave to save for canteens/buy backs?
Are my airblasts annoying the sniper?
Where can I reset the bomb and is it worth investing in to?
Just remember to get ammo upgrades for your flame thrower, they improve literally everything you do; and less downtime = more uptime = more dps.
Additionally, always get the ignition explosion upgrade for gas passer the moment it's applicable, before everything else.
Otherwise the gas passer is useless

Pyro is likely the most complicated MvM class of them all with so much more to consider, and yet once you become good at him it all just, works.

The upgrades should be rather obvious if you're not using any red star weapons, if you need more dps then get damage bonus; if there's a pit/reset position then get more airblast power, if your sniper is screaming their very loudest at you then you're probably airblasting too much and should calm down a bit.

As for playstyle, you don't want to run blindly in to every horde of robots, rather you want to close the distance first, preferably out of sight before incinerating each and every one of those robot or zombie scum.

Additionally, if there's a pit nearby, try pitting robots first before flaming them, it's much, much quicker and the bomb will be reset back to the very start of the map if it falls in.
Resetting the bomb is a tremendous aid to your team and it's easy to do, pyro used to be in the meta™ for a reason before medic got reworked.

So, short recap.
-Get max resistances first when they're applicable
-Movement speed and jumpheight is less important on pyro, potentially not even needed once you finish reading up on the detonator
-Get close to robots rather than charging straight down 20 sniper sight lines
-Airblast robots in to pits whenever possible, even if they aren't lethal
-Your flamethrower is a robot-melting tool right from the start
-The best way to kill a tank is by standing infront of it and looking directly up


So, I don't have much more to explain in the basics due to how tricky Pyro is.
You've passed the point of no return, so let us continue, dear

Give me fuel, give me fire, give me the teachings I desire!

So, what exactly makes a pyro weapon good and what seperates it from bad?
You may have been able to make a few guesses from the previous section and by looking at the tier list, but let me tell you precisely, dear:



AG tier weapons are always applicable and can provide exceptional bonuses too.

• The Flame thrower is good because it's the best airblaster in the game, it's not bad and having a strong airblast is great.
  As you've learnt a bit of and are soon to learn more of, airblasting as pyro is vital; if all you did is crowd and tank control then you should just be playing soldier, or even just sniper if you're only doing crowd control.
  This is a strange version of less downtime = more uptime = more dps which benefits your entire team by giving them more time while also instantly killing robots.
  
  
• The back burner is essentially stock but can give you free crits from behind, so there's only two things to note differently from stock here.
  The first is naturally you run out of ammo quickly when airblasting, so if you're planning to be pitting any robots, make sure you have either a good engineer or can manage your airblasts very well, preferably with max airblast force upgrades.
  
  The second thing to note is, if you have a spy; this flamethrower could be more useful than you think.
  Imagine you're infront of a giant robot, grabbing his attention, then the spy gets his backstabs off and the giant turns towards him; now his back is facing towards you.
  The giant at this point is either dead, or about to turn his back to you where you can do the obvious.
  
  This isn't taking full advantage of the crits on back-burn, though and it may be better to use stock here as you have four other members of your team who could contribute to dps too, I would say either go full backburn, or don't back burn at all due to how costly the airblast can be even with good ammo management.
  
  You may be wondering why this is stared considering it's that simple but imagine using this as you would a regular flame thrower.
  This one asks great ammo management of you and requires a certain skill, without it I would recommend using different flamethrower as it's arguably a direct downgrade if you aren't both carefully managing your ammo and making use of the back-burn trait whenever possible.
  
  Additionally, you may be wondering about good ideas on how to get behind robot backs, and that would be the exact same tactic you used to get to the robots in the first place.
  They do have slight hearing potential but primarily hunt through sight.
  
  Sometimes a great upside requires more than just regular practice to use.
  
  
• The Detonator is another red star weapon and you may be wondering why it's above the other pyros weapons and even competes with gas passer if you're new to the class.
  To wonder i'd like to show you detonator jumps, they're the exact same as rocket jumps but with the detonator and with a right click as soon as you fire.
  Yes, that means you can detonator jump off walls and in theory chain-detonator jump with upgrades.
  
  If you don't know how to rocket jump then I would advise learning to do that first, once you understand rocket jumping (jump then immediately crouch, look down and preferably behind you, followed by shooting a rocket) then you can basically do the same thing with the detonator but with an added right click when you shoot.
  Just remember the pyro class never got gunboats but fun fact: the Detonator explosion isn't explosive damage, it's actually bullet.
  Who would've guessed
  
  However we only care about basic detonator jumping here and i'd say there's a few conditions which are preferably met before whipping this gun out.
  1. You're preferably competent at detonator jumping, it's a long-forgotten art ever since the thermal thruster came out but is much, much quicker than it.
  2. You're good at airblasting and upgrade priority, remember you don't have to use the detonator on day 1 of your pyroness, just remember it exists
  3. You're capable of watching your health early-on, the detonator hurts without bullet-resistance upgrades or a medic
  
  A quick note with upgrade priority, as a pyro you just want enough to be able to soak up enough enemy fire to get the job done since you're usually either flaming and dodging or airblasting and taking the damage head-on.
  
  So what makes it so good just because it can detonator jump?
  Less downtime = More uptime = More Dps, yep, not only that though
  It also removes the need of buying movement speed and jump height due to how instant it can be with no cost, you could get one point in to jump height for slightly bigger jumps while keeping the instantness but that's your decision.
  
  So, saving $700 in upgrades and being more mobile than that? What a great weapon this is!
  Even capable of fighting the gas passer with enough skill and if burst damage isn't a problem.
  
  Additionally, jump height increase lets you reach the edge of the detonator explosion better, allowing you to jump much, much, much further..
  
  Get practicing.
  
  
• The Gas Passer.
  Rather a rather self-explanatory weapon, if you're taking this then buy the explosion upgrade first before anything else and continue on regularly otherwise, the gas passer explosion is a very cheap aoe fixed 350 damage anybody can activate and is usually considered to be broken or overpowered.
  The reason it's considered an overpowered/cheap weapon is because it requires no skill to use compared to the output of one hit killing most groups of robots and completely negates pyro's main weaknesses; however the detonator is still capable of competing against this thing due to the $1300 minimum saved plus the added mobility.
  
  To further explain as to why this reason is so hated though see this link:
  https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/318491053692813312/628308861580869642/unknown.png
  
  As a tl;dr, it removes the skill of playing pyro and is functionally broken in addition to taking the strongest MvM class and making him ridiculously overpowered, making the gamemode trivial.
  
  
  You can use this against anything but it's primarily useful against smaller hordes of robots, especially vaccinator.
  Not even damage immunity can save you from this thing, as it has no damage type.
  
  Without the explode on ignite upgrade however, the gas passer is just bad and doesn't have a place in mvm, so it's a bit of a be overpowered or have no power situation
  
  However when a good sniper is on your team, you would be much better off using either the detonator or the scorchshot, most of the time you're much better off using the scorchshot to begin with honestly.
  With a good sniper it just falls behind even more compared to the scorchshot and detonator.
  It shines a lot in valve MvM servers because it's easy to use; that's it.
  
  tl;dr clears hordes of robots, including uber medic and heavy combos with almost zero effort and has a relatively quick recharge time too.
  Don't use it if your team has a good sniper.
  
  
• The Home wrecker, is another weapon which speaks for itself, you can one-hit remove sappers to help out your local engineer, especially if he's using the jag.
  It's good for the same reasons as normal tf2, enough said.
  
  
• As for the powerjack however, it's Always Good if you don't know how to detonator jump or are still learning to get the extra speed boost every now and then; but if you can competently and easily detonator jump then this weapon becomes redundant to detonator jumping.
  Why benefit from 15% more speed when you could have the speed of an mini-explosive jump, plus the height?
  
  Since pyro is a front-liner anyways he's not actively dodging 24/7, nor can he always do so, making quick bursts of great, spammable movement superior to active movement which can be changed at any second.

Moving on to A-tier classed weapons

Weapons here are usually always good but have a flaw or two which prevents them from always being good regardless of scenario.

• The phlog is a rather classic piece for tank busting due to the free crits it gets, however it comes with the big downside of no airblast.
  Due to the no airblasting, you can not pit robots meaning you can not reset the bomb yourself (others will have a lot of trouble doing so too so mark that off the list), you can not extinguish teammates, you can not reflect projectiles like crockets and you can not stall robots.
  
  This is a little bit more on the situational side but due to the free crits it can still be really good.
  Of course it's a natural tank buster and can melt robots with free crits at full upgrades, however, speaking of upgrades; this flamethrower best works when you have complete resistance upgrades and some ammo, otherwise it begins to fall short without airblast.
  This isn't contradictory to "flamethrowers are robot melting machines from the start" either, it just follows without airblast making it worse, especially early on.
  
  It's good for being the single highest dps flamethrower when considering solo-crits, if you have permanent critboost for whatever reason however, use the dragon's fury for dps.
  
  
• The Dragon's Fury
  The reason this flamethrower is good is because of it's noteably above average dps.
  The reason it isn't AG-tier is because of the airblast downside, it is the second worst flamethrower in the game for airblasting.
  The dps of the dragon's fury is noteably more than that of stock but also overall less to the phlog when considering crit spam.
  
  This could be treated as a mid-way between stock and phlog when you need a lot of dps but just a little bit of airblasting too.
  
  
• The Flaregun and Man Melter are both in the same boat of they're good but overshadowed for the same reasons.
  Flare for the inability to detonator jump
  Man melter for the inability to detonator jump
  
  They can still be used for long-range engagement against snipers and other robots as you get closer, with the scorchshot having the special ability to knock robots back but suffer from over-shadowedness.
  
  You can use them if you want and they aren't completely killed off by other weapons, nor are you a detriment to your team for using them; they just aren't as good as other weapons for Mann vs Machine.
  
  
• Scorchshot, The Scorchshot.
  The Scorchshot is an amazing weapon for knocking back giant robots in a certain direction.
  Just line them up, make sure you have some reloading speed/firing upgrades on it and let loose your flares of fury.
  Giant robots are resistant to airblasting but since the Scorchshot technically isn't an airblast they don't have the resistance.
  The downside of course is the investment, it knocksback harder than the compression blast but costs more credits for upgrades.
  This can be insanely power when invested in to but isn't something you should sink credits in to all the time.
  
  To emphasise, this is the single best stalling weapon in the entire game and has ridiculous knockback power and at a practically infinite range.
  If you need to stall for more dps or push in to a pit, this is your answer.
  It also has a miniture detonator jump too.
  
  
• The Back Scratcher
  This is a weapon which doesn't really belong anywhere at all, it's not Always good since medics heal you for less but it's not situational or always bad either.
  I'll leave this one up to you for figuring out, if you can learn when to use this weapon like I did then you'll know precisely how to use it in MvM for less obvious reasons.
  Side note, it's really good in medieval mode for obvious reasons

*crickets*




These items are used practically just for exploits or similar extremely specific things

• Thermal Thruster, since they removed the ability to stunlock giants and normal bots fall like tin foil by the time you can buy stun-spam it's pretty useless.
  You can't go anywhere useful you already couldn't, or even when considering the detonator.
  It's slow, clunky and doesn't do much
  The specific situation i'm thinking of with this weapon is somebody made a non-miniboss/giant robot which is immune to backstabbing.
  
  In such a scenario, stun-lock away
  
  
• The Third Degree, it's literally just an upgrade to the stock fireaxe which if crit boosted can be used to clear entire waves of uber medics, it's a joke weapon practically since other people can do this for you without the cost of needing a crit boost.
  It's, not cripplingly bad to use a random pyro melee weapon since they rarely come in to play so saying why pyro melees are good/bad when it isn't obvious is rather difficult.
  In short, most pyro melee weapons are Not Applicable to combat.
  
  
• The Neon Annihilator is overshadowed by the homewrecker for sapper removal and is just a pyroshark melee; again pyro melee is very rarely used, infact this is why I don't have an explanation for you for the back scratcher, Pyro melee is just; never used.
  It isn't used unless you're messing around and having some fun.
  Just stick to your flamethrower of choice and detonator.

These weapons are unuseable generally speaking and are basically C-tier but can't be used for a single really precise task.

• Why is the degreaser bad?
  It's simple, a downside with no beneficial upsides.
  Weapon switch speed rarely matters in mann vs machine and it makes airblasts more expensive.
  
  
• Okay then why is the stock shotgun bad?
  Because it could be literally anything else.
  If you're not playing engineer then you're sacrificing for another weapon, in this example Detonator.
  The shotgun is a good gun but once again, overshadowed not only by the Detonators but also by every single Flamethrower in the game.
  Even if you go full shotgun mode the bullets will spread everywhere with projectile penetration and only be effective against 1 or 2 robots before turning in to mediocre damage.
  
  
• What about the rese-
  Same reasons as stock with a rarely applicable upside
  
  
• Panic at-
  Same as stock shotgun with a slightly more applicable upside
  
  
• Fine, why is the Stock Fire Axe, Axtinguisher, Sharpened Volcano Fragment and Hot hand bad?
  Really it isn't.
  Just like I said at the end of C-tier, all pyro melees are really even used in the first place so it's not bad, it's just technically not as good as others.
  Much like the homewrecker and powerjack technically being better than other choices, despite their upsides rarely coming in to play; really.

Personally, if you came this far; I have confidence you can analyze the problems with all of pyro's weapons, knowing the vital of pyro points in mvm and mvm entirely.
I gave you a fair warning that the pyro guide would be more than any other guide here and i'm glad to came this far.
So, let's finish this.

Give me Fuel, Give me Fire, give me that which I desire!



Pyro's upgrades are more complicated than other classes as it's a careful balance.
You want enough resistance to survive and have enough funds left over to enhance your flamethrower or other abilities to get the robots done.
This mostly comes through experience but for now, remember what was stated in the basics guide.

Originally posted by (Ch4) The Pyro - Basics:

As pyro, your #1, first upgrade should be resistances, don't bother touching movement speed or flamethrower upgrades until you have enough resistance upgrades for the wave.
If you must pick between one of two, get one of them to 50% resistance first, then the other, preferably Crit, then fire, then bullet, then explosive.

• Crit is taken for obvious reasons, taking x3 damage with no fall off is, unfavourable.
  
  
• Fire is usually before bullet if a decision is forced since bullets can miss a lot easier than fire can.
  
  
• And bullet is usually taken before explosive since you can reflect explosives

Additionally, get heal on kill, it's a must have, at least level 1 but preferably 2 will be enough.

This is rather true, crit, then fire, then bullet and then explosive resistance.

Damage and max ammo should be balanced carefully, generally keeping both at around the same level until maxed out; however if you have a good engineer with a free dispenser to keep next to you this likely won't be an issue.
Remember the engineer also has four other ammo-hungry teammates to keep filled up though before you go on a max-ammo upgrades strike, it's typically safer to upgrade max ammo as it lowers the chance of running out of ammo mid-pit airblasting by quite a lot.

The reason they're balanced out is because damage is an ammo-efficiency in its own way, you require less flames to kill a robot or less sniper rifle bullets to finish something off so overall it's ammo saved

As for burn time and burn duration, don't bother, they're useless and just luxuries, though if you're this far in you likely know that by now.

Heal in kill is naturally vital since without it you'd just die, your medic probably won't be there to save you all day unless they're a pocket in which case you have a bad medic.


There's not a whole lot to upgrades aside from "know what counters what and what is going to kill me first?"
Remember that giant heavies have a 50% damage bonus for some reason and giant demomen shoot faster with little reload time for some reason.

You'll likely learn the robots in time but hordes typically are what do the most damage, except if it's heavy.




Moving in to play style, what can a pyro do?

Well, approaching robots to get in range is easy if you're right infront of their spawn already but what if it's bigrock or coal town?
Many offical MvM maps offer alternate routes which let you get the drop on robots, for example:

Bigrock has:

• A central wooden structure to duck inside, both along bottom and higher floors
  
• Multiple fences and rocks within the cave section of the map, you can hide inside behind them
  
• Multiple fences at the hatch and a few cliffs to hide either ontop of or below

Decoy has:

• Extremely short travel time to the front line
  
• Multiple fences around the bomb hatch to make use of, luring robots in and then airblasting them off the bridge
  
• A lot of cliffs and wooden structures leading to heightened terrain, even these can be used to your advantage to get the jump on unsuspecting robots and even rain fire from above

Mannworks has:

• More fences near the hatch you can use to lure bots in
  
• Very subtle hills and cliffs, much smaller than the previous examples, for example right of the catch there's a med kit and some ammo, infront of there is a rather subtle incline you can crouch behind for most small robots or just run in to and use the medkit location as cover.
  
• The central up-front structure to duck in and out of, jumping down on to robot in the back-half too

Cover will be your best friend early on, you likely can't afford all of your resistances and you're too close range to dodge too, so identifying cover quickly is great skill to have.


What should we do once we actually encounter our enemy, though?
Simple, assuming you deemed them worth getting close to and not an instant death without uber; flame them, or if they're near a pit or on their way to one then pit them.
Sometimes you'll want to use an uber canteen to help pit them and that's okay; since pitting the bomb takes priority above all else, really.

Additionally, the optimal way to flame robots once you move in close is to look down to the ground slightly and quickly sway your mouse cursor back and forth, spazzing a little bit.
I can't explain why due to character limits but don't do this against jumping bots for obvious reasons.

Sometimes you decide to retreat and you want to get back fast, naturally the fastest way to do this is to detonator jump away but it's not always the safest.
If you don't know how to detonator jump you could also try walking but that is much less safe than detonator jumping.
If you think you can tank the damage or get a medic to heal you then go ahead and detonator jump/run back to cover, otherwise you can just wait for a medic to heal you or until everything dies.

Or, you die with your team, one of the two.



Additionally there's a lot of weird information going on surrounding tanks, a lot of it fake.
All you need to know as pyro is you are the most cost-efficient class for killing the tank, especially with the phlog.
And that you want to get your flame as close to the center of the tank as possible.

This usually comes in the form of standing sideways to the tank whenever safe and pointing your flame thrower to the very middle; and since the tank is such a big creature that also usually means looking upwards just a little.
Preferably you could be inside the tank while doing this but sadly some things are too good for valve.
I just want to be an inter-dimensional warp pyromaniac capable of injecting my flames directly in to the cores of my foes.


Now, about airblast stalling; while you're sitting next to your heavy or maybe soldier on the front line; airblast everytime some robots come too close and risk surrounding you.
It's much easier to avoid damage and kill robots while they're all down a single choke point and vice versa, it's much easier for robots to kill you when they've surrounded you and die harder when they're in all directions.

So try to keep robots back, trapped in choke points and make the job easier for everyone else, try to pit the bomb whenever possible and airblast super scouts appropriately, it can be harmful to airblast if the scout is already being body blocked and he could either jump over or fall down to a place your team is not prepared for a super scout to be.


Also remember sniper, as long as you aren't spamming airblast on all the giants, all the time he'll probably like you.
A lot has been taught so far too, so well done.
Naturally, knowledge is nothing without training, so go out there and practice.

I'm not asking you to become a Pyro main overnight but I will say to go practice in Mann vs Machine, even on a lower difficult if you must and work your way up to being the expert hard-carry pyro you can definitely be.
High Scores or Extreme Damage Numbers may not be what shows on your scoreboard, but a good airblaster will indefinitely handle the bomb, the robots and their team.


The pyro is a class which requires knowledge on how to play and plenty of experience before he begins to be good which is where most mvm players and even competitive players fall short.

Have fun and enjoy your graduation to Pyroness, Dear~

It's usually said "Pyro don't airblast sentry busters!"
but this requires some context~

Airblasting a buster in to the air over and over again is annoying for engineer players, they just want the buster dealt with as soon as possible and you're delaying that.
Then medic players try to grab uber from it with an uber saw and they can barely reach it with all your airblasting.

Two classes which don't like it immediately.

However there are situations where it is really, really good to airblast a buster!


For Example 1:
Imagine your engineer is dead and respawning, a sentry buster is mere seconds away from the sentrygun and blowing it in to ashes!
In this scenario, it's a good idea to airblast the sentry buster, stalling it, while the engineer player comes back from the dead to grab his sentry.
Once the engineer is within sentry-grabbing range just stop airblasting and continue your day like normal.

For Example 2:
Imagine the sentrybuster is already on the sentry!
Your engineer has abandoned it before hand and there's no airblasting the buster away before it begins detonation!
However you can still save it, airblast the sentry buster away from the sentry gun while it's detonating; remember it will be stopped by the sentrygun if you airblast it directly towards it and to back up yourself before you die with it.
After it's gone and your engineer stares at you in surprise for a moment you can head back to pyroing as usual~

Have a nice day and remember, character limits are evil

NOTE: The best way to kill a tank has been updated with information, the new best way found is standing directly in front of it and pointing your flamethrower upwards.
I couldn't include this in the guide due to a bug not letting me edit other segments

So, the drunken scottish cyclops who's cursed eye attacks every halloween is your choice, eh?

This one will be a bit tricky considering the sub-class of the demoknight, trying to balance two different classes on the same plate so to deal with that i'll have a seperate second for demoknighting



Naturally here i'll go over the basics on how to play DemoMann, starting off with the weapons; again doing demoknight in its own section.
Let's begin


Since Demoman doesn't have any "Mandatory" weapons i'll start off with another one of my generally-applicability-tier-lists-for-demoman


Here's a quick tier-list of demoman weapons; this will be based off of how generally applicable they are, note that just because something is below another weapon in the tier list does not mean it is bad or inferior.
All it means is that the weapon is less generally applicable than those above it.

Anything with a Star* next to it means there's something to note and the weapon regularly requires certain skill or knowledge to execute in order to enter the stated tier.

AG-tier = Always good
A-tier = Typically good but comes with a downside which takes it away from being always good
B-tier = Useful in a number of situations, or even sometimes just a few; not always applicable
C-tier = Useful in extremely few situations when preforming ridiculously precise things and are otherwise not useful except when doing that one individual thing
D-tier = Unuseable generally speaking



AG-tier: Grenade Launcher, Ali-BaBa's Wee Booties = Stickybomb launcher, Scottish resistance = Eyelander, Bottle
A-tier: Loch-N-Load, Iron Bomber
B-tier: Loose Cannon, B.A.S.E. Jumper = Targe n Charge, Stickybomb jumper = Pain train
C-tier: Tide Turner, Quickebomb launcher = Claidheamh Mòr, Half-Zatoichi
D-tier: Splendid Screen = Scotman's Skullcutter, Ullapool caber, Persian Persuader

If you are interested as to why these specific weapons are good/bad, I will cover that in the first part of demoman, advanced; for now to play the mere basics of demoman this will do.


Alright, moving on; now assuming you're demoman, not demoknight (again this will be covered in its' own section), what's the basics of playing this demoman class and why are his damage upgrades more expensive?

Let's start with the upgrades so we have an easier time with the play style, as always, get crit resistance first if that's what you need; otherwise you're risking getting one-hit-KO'd


As a demoman you'll likely be added for your medic-killing powers and sometimes uber medics come out really fast, so you need to get sticky traps out fast.

To do this max our reload speed first then fire rate on your sticky bomb launcher while also grabbing a heal-on-kill to keep yourself alive.
Fast movement speed and jumpheight isn't an immediately required grab for demoman due to how he launches his projectiles, they go at an angle and are affected by gravity, allowing you to hide behind cover as you spam bombs at suspicious but unaware robots.

Once you can spam stickybombs everywhere or once things get a bit too spammy for you to handle, then I'd recommend getting movement speed and jump height.


So how about actually playing demoman, assuming you're clueless to him?
Well it's surprisingly similar to just playing him in stock tf2, if you're a good stock tf2 demo then you're also likely to be a good mvm demo.
The only difference is you don't have to hide your stickytraps as robots will lovingly go right in to them~

Really, just spam your stickytraps where the medics are going to be and detonate when it's time, try to spread them out just a little bit to counteract the medics themselves being a bit spread out and then spam either more stickybombs or your grenade launcher to the left over groups.
I'd recommend the grenade launcher if you're absolutely terrible at quickly getting stickybomb traps up for medics but if you can get stickybomb traps up then go do that.

Remember that stickybombs were changed many years ago to start off with less damage and reach their full damage after a few seconds, though if they're getting hit by 8-14 stickybombs at once, it likely won't matter.

Demoman is a decent tank buster too but if you already have either a pyro or a beggarz soldier on the tank itself and your teammates are getting overwhelmed at the front lines slowly; go help your teammates first.
You have spammable AoE damage for a reason, more spammable than solder to begin with,


You also probably noticed I mentioned the stickybomb launcher a lot and although you can use the grenade launcher to kill uber medics you usually need either crits from your medic and good aim or full damage upgrades to be safe and good aim, you can equip a shield if you're going grenade launchering though.


Additionally if you take the eyelander I would advise playing a bit safer in to the later rounds as you'll rarely have a good time to grab heads later on compared to early on, if you do though then you could easily save $600 on movement speed upgrades!
Until you die and struggle to get your four heads back.

However that's practically the basics to playing demoman really, he's a very easy class to play and the trickiest part is getting your trajectory right.

If you're interested in more then i'll see you in advanced; as again there's not a lot to talk about to playing demoman on a basic level, really.

So, what makes a demomann's weapon good?

Since he's the king of spam it should be fairly simple but let's take a closer look, shall we?

• The grenade launcher, is a classic tool which has been with the demoman since day 1, it's good since it's a reliable spam weapon; especially later on into the game.
  With 3 levels of damage bonus it can one hit kill uber medics without any need of crits; or at level 0 with full crits or at level 1 with mini crits.
  In other words it has no downsides as is a reliable spam weapon.
  Good because it isn't bad.
  
  
• Ali Baba's Wee Booties/Boot Legger, These boots are good for when you realise you aren't using your grenade launcher as they serve as a nice 25 health boost for extra survival.
  In other words a great slot filler which is better than a useless launcher.
  
  
• The stickybomb launcher is another old and reliable weapon, everyone knows what it does and it's great at killing entire groups uber medics without much thought.
  It's a good AoE damage spam weapon and is good because it isn't bad.
  
  
• The Scottish resistance is another good because it isn't bad weapon but it could be even better than the stickybomb launcher with a little bit of practice.
  It's a lot less popular than the stickybomb launcher since it's designed for defense but since Mann vs Machine is usually an entirely defensive gamemode you should be okay!
  The power to detonate certain stickybombs now and other later is extremely powerful, you could lay down multiple traps; detonate half of a stickybomb trap and the other later and have nearly double the maximum stickybombs active at one!
  
  It even starts with a solid fire rate bonus and free extra max ammo!
  Once you become good or even decent at making stickybomb traps, it's hard to go wrong with this launcher; arguably a direct upgrade for MvM alone.
  
  
• The bottle is a great weapon because it has no negative effect to using it; really, that's it.
  The eyelander takes away from of your health.
  The half-zatoichi hurts you for not getting a kill with it and makes you vulnerable to one-hit-kills.
  The pain train makes you take more damage from bullets.
  The ulla pool caber hurts you if you try to use it.
  The Claidheamh Mòr makes you take more damage from everything if you hold it.
  And the Scotman's Skull Cutter makes you slower if you hold it.
  
  No downside is sometimes an upside, more often than you may think.
  
  
• The Eyelander is a weapon which speaks for itself.
  Even if you aren't a pure all chips demoknight, you can still execute a few robots with this sword early on or even a few unsuspecting spies/snipers later on for a colossal move speed bonus, a good max health boost and you have a freaking sword.
  It's an amazing boost to your survivability if you don't die with the heads.
  You can also skip out of movement speed upgrades if you have your head bonus filled!

A-tier, these weapons are essentially AG-tier but have a downside or effect which makes them not always good.

• The Loch n Load; The biggest downside here is missing, especially with entire hordes of robots coming towards you.
  With how spastic they are it's a bit easier to miss than you think but that's not all that's bad about this weapon, it's missing some size in the clip and has much less explosion radius.
  The bonuses don't really come in to play either.
  
  However if you need to get very precise shots, say against a group of uber medics; this is likely your weapon if you really, really, need it.
  
  
• Iron Bomber, the problem with this weapon is the explosion radius penalty; it's not nearly as bad as the loch n load but it's still a technical downside if you really want to grab every bit of dps which you can.
  
  
• The Sticky Jumper is looked at just like the rocket jumper for some people but something very important seperates them.
  The soldier has no alternative for his primary but the demoman does, ish.
  If you're using the sticky jumper then you can greatly boost your mobility as it costs no health to initially launch yourself in to the air and you can still use a grenade launcher as you do so.
  
  
• The Targe n Charge is a great replacement for the sticky bomb launcher if you aren't using it.
  It excells at saving your life by giving resistance to explosives, fire and gives you a shield charge ability to quick run out of or in to a bad situation. (with your quickfix medic)
  What takes this away from being always good is it doesn't help nearly as much as the stickybomb launcher does for killing uber medics early on, assuming you're a demoman.
  
  
• The Pain Train, it's good on custom maps which allow you to recapture robot gates or payloads, otherwise it's practically useless, it is useless really; fully and completely, useless.

B-tier, these weapons are useful in a number of situations or even just a handful; not always applicable.

• If you desperately, really really really desperately need to push robots back or stall them then use the loose cannon; otherwise its' mechanic cripples the dps output.
  This is assuming multiple pyros somehow isn't enough
  
  
• The B.A.S.E. Jumper is a survival tool for avoiding pyros, melee bots and most projectile spam; especially from other robot demomen.
  It rarely outclasses the shield since you can't exactly have a dispenser while you're in the air or pick up ammo or health kits.
  If you need this as a tool of survival since melee bots or pyros or demomen are too powerful for you then this is it.

These weapons are only useful in a few very specific scenarios/situations and are rarely useful outside of them compared to other weapons.

• The quickiebomb launcher is the ugly, memeish cousin to the other stickybomb launchers, generally hated in normal tf2 and it lacks a place in MvM.
  It has a damage penalty and lacks in clip size, the upsides are pretty minor and overall the downsides outweigh the upsides.
  Quick stickybombs aren't really useful in MvM the majority of the time since general robot movement is predictable.
  The only scenario this is good in is ridiculously unpredictable, fast robots.
  
  
• The Tide Turner, you aren't constantly charging every single robot you see, so damage resistance is far more important.
  The only situation where this is good is, imagine a short twisty corridor with a lot of turns and you need to charge to escape; this is it.
  That is the situation where you can use the full turning charge ability to your benefit.
  
  
• The Claidheamh Mòr, the only scenario this is good, assuming you're a demoman, is if it's a really long map and you really need the extra charge distance to escape.
  Simple as that, otherwise it's a deathwish, even if you are demoknighting.
  
  
• The Half-Zatoichi, you run the risk of getting one hit killed by Samurai Robots but you can also one shot them, it's really not worth the risk though.
  Where is this good then? One hit killing boss robots that is.
  Otherwise you are the one getting one hit killed.

D-tier, these weapons are essentially C-tier but they lack any redeeming features.

• The Splendid Screen, like I said in the tide turner, resistance is the vital part about shields and why they're taken.
  The splendid screen provides less resistance than the Targe n Charge and has no barely redeeming features unlike the Tide Turner.
  In other words, it is overshadowed completely and utterly by the Targe and charge
  
  
• The Scotman's skull cutter; the damage upgrade is minimal compared to the movement speed penalty which can easily get you killed by lacking the ability to dodge properly.
  Terrible downside for a very small upside.
  
  
• The Ulla pool caber will do more damage to you than it will be doing to robots.
  Really.
  TF Team please unnerf.
  
  
• The Persian Persuader.
  You loose a lot of ammo.
  You can not refill your stickybomb or grenade launcher ammo unless your charge bar is ready.
  Your sword will steal ammo from you to refill its' own charge meter.
  You benefit in no way from the upsides.
  
  This is Demoman Super Hardmode.
  
  You've been warned

Due to how simple Demoman is to play I don't have any gameplay advice to give to you.
Remember to always prioritise killing uber medics first, especially if they're near the bomb hatch with full uber charge.

Don't miss and don't split your upgrades, max out either the grenade launcher or the stickybomb launcher first; not both.

So, have fun then playing the Demobomb spammer himself, congrats.

Oh by the way, if you have 14 stickybombs stacked on top of each other and you only want to detonate one, just shoot out another stickybomb and you'll automatically blow up the oldest one placed, it's insanely good at thinning out crowds using concentrated crit stickys instead of burning all 14 up at once and wasting them~

So, instead of becoming a demolitions expert you want to become a head-taking oil covered manic from Scotland with a cursed Sword Axe Golf Club in your hands?

Well, let's begin!

First up, Demoknights rely on crit damage and smaller bots, they are very ineffective against giants and generally do relatively poorly against tanks without nearby smaller robots.

If a mission lacks small robots to pick on then it's usually a terrible idea to grab demoknight, you'll have trouble getting the kills you need to trigger crits-on-kill

So I suppose I could begin here; with the basics.


Here's a quick tier-list of demoknight weapons; this will be based off of how generally applicable they are, note that just because something is below another weapon in the tier list does not mean it is bad or inferior.
All it means is that the weapon is less generally applicable than those above it.

Anything with a Star* next to it means there's something to note and the weapon regularly requires certain skill or knowledge to execute in order to enter the stated tier.

AG-tier = Always good
A-tier = Typically good but comes with a downside which takes it away from being always good
B-tier = Useful in a number of situations, or even sometimes just a few; not always applicable
C-tier = Useful in extremely few situations when preforming ridiculously precise things and are otherwise not useful except when doing that one individual thing
D-tier = Unuseable generally speaking



AG-tier: Ali BaBa's Booties/Boot Legger = Targe n Charge = Eyelander
A-tier: Half-Zatoichi
B-tier: Pain Train
C-Tier: Grenade Launcher, Loch n Load, Iron Bomber
D-Tier: Loose Cannon, B.A.S.E. Jumper = Sticky Bomb launcher, Scottish Resistance, Sticky Jumper, Splendid Screen, Tide Turner, Quickie Bomb launcher = Bottle, Scotman's Skull cutter, Claidheamh Mòr, Ulla Pool Caber, Persian Persuader

If you are interested as to why these specific weapons are good/bad, I will cover that in the first part of demoknight, advanced; for now to play the mere basics of demoknight this will do.


So, what's the most important thing for a demoknight to upgrade? Crits-on-kill.
Demoknight is terrible without this upgrade but you only need one level of it until later on when you begin fighting giant robots.
You can usually chain kills very easily together with two seconds of crits on each kill, especially with the eyelander's massive movement speed bonus~


Additionally, health on kill is a vital upgrade, so is attack speed after crits-on-kill.
Naturally, damage bonus is the least important upgrade for demoknight.

I don't think I need to talk about demoknight any more.
You just hit small robots with a sword and avoid giant robots if you don't have crits.
He's the single easiest class to play really.

Just buy 1 level of crits on kill (and crit resistance), then melee speed, heal on kill, resistances.
Get two levels of crits on kill if you're having giant robot problems and then go swing your sword around in to robot's vulnerable un-crit boosted, un-crit resistant neck.
Sometimes snipers and spies can be your favourite bot spawns if no other small bots are lying around.

(more information coming soon)

Alright, what makes a sword good you ask?

Why is a shield a shield and what's with these fancy shmancy boots you may be wondering?
Well, let us begin~

• Ali Baba's Wee Booties/Boot Legger is a great choice as it gives a massive boost to your survivability once you begin dodging with it, combined with the eyelander it also removes most need for movement speed upgrades; all of which is really essential to playing demoknight well in both MvM and normal TF2.
  For example if you want to or need to chase something down.
  
  
• Targe n Charge

....Okay
Do I, really need to tell you how to play this guy?

Philosophical and like a bear; heavy generally wishes for you to shut up before he shuts you up.



Heavy is a very, very simple class so I don't have much to teach at all, uh, really.
The biggest difference compared to other classes is getting resistances instead of movement speed and making sure you manage your health well; maybe not as much as pyro since he's more squishy than you but it's still your main form of survival.

I'll start off with the weapons


Here's a quick tier-list of heavy weapons; this will be based off of how generally applicable they are, note that just because something is below another weapon in the tier list does not mean it is bad or inferior.
All it means is that the weapon is less generally applicable than those above it.

Anything with a Star* next to it means there's something to note and the weapon regularly requires certain skill or knowledge to execute in order to enter the stated tier.

AG-tier = Always good
A-tier = Typically good but comes with a downside which takes it away from being always good
B-tier = Useful in a number of situations, or even sometimes just a few; not always applicable
C-tier = Useful in extremely few situations when preforming ridiculously precise things and are otherwise not useful except when doing that one individual thing
D-tier = Unuseable generally speaking



AG-tier: Minigun, Brass Beast = Sandvich, Dalokahs Bar = Fists, Killing gloves of Boxing, Gloves of Running Urgently, Fists of Steel
A-tier:
B-tier: Natascha
C-tier: Beefalo steak sandvich = Warriors spirit
D-tier: Tomislav, Huo-long heater = Shotgun, Family business, Panic attack, Second banana = Eviction notice, Holiday punch

If you are interested as to why these specific weapons are good/bad, I will cover that in the first part of heavy, advanced; for now to play the mere basics of heavy this will do. (not that heavy is a complicated class to begin with; in fact I think that's all I will put in to advanced since there's nothing else to teach from what you see here)


So, you need advice on playing heavy to his fullest, huh?
I'll start off with a ridiculously common mistake called "no shooty tanks"; just don't shoot tanks if there's other things you can kill.
See a giant and a tank? kill the giant
See an engineer nest and a tank? kill the engineer nest
See an entire swarm of crit bat scouts heading towards you, alone, as the tank has almost reached the hatch? Run.

Sure if the tank is mere seconds away from deploying its bomb then I'd advise you shoot that first to lower the risk of rain a game over.
Yep~
I trust you to remember the heavy's minigun does 75% less damage against tanks and since your shotgun is practically a waste of no sandvich you may aswell begin beating your meat against it

Follow this handy-dandy list of heavy vs tank dps weapons:

Brass Beast: 108 dps vs tanks
Warrior's Spirit: 97.25 dps vs tanks
Minigun: 90 dps vs tanks
Fists: 81.25 dps vs tanks

Yeah, Miniguns outclass melee weapons for vs tank dps, assuming they both share no upgrades.
The damage boost variants also outclass the non-damaged boost variants too, obviously.
However just remember one very vital rule: No Shooty Tank
Thanks




Alright but what else can I tell you?
The normal stuff, hide behind cover, heavy shoots out of his eyes not his gun; shoot giants robots first as that's your biggest strength to the team and don't assume you'll have a dispenser all day and all night.

Pay attention to your health every few seconds too to avoid dying because you fought someone either without overheal or at low health.
Speaking of overheal, sometimes your team won't have a medic and if that's the case then you really want to hide behind cover, you turn in to one of the squishiest members of your team without a medic or mad milk.
If a giant has mad milk and you have upgrades then you'll likely be fine but if you don't or you're trying to fight 10 giants at once, then, you're likely dead without hiding the majority of your body behind cover or picking off one giant robot at a time.

Sure, heavy is strong but he's far from invulnerable, you could get mowed down, blown up, backstabbed or be surprised by a sentry gun.
You're still the single highest dps member of your team, though, you may not have great splash/aoe damage to clean crowds or the ability to destroy 10 uber medics from across the map but you're still the dps.


Alright so what about upgrades?
The most important part of playing heavy

Well first of all you want to stay alive, so as always crit resistance first if it's needed.

You'll likely be getting in to a lot of fights but you won't always be the target of dps, especially if you have a medic.

In short, a *little* bit of primary ammo > firing speed > resistances/heal on kill > luxuries
If you don't have a medic/mad milk and you're not good at avoiding damage > resistances/heal on kill > ammo > firing speed > luxuries
If you don't have medic/mad milk and you're good at avoiding damage > firing speed > ammo > resistances/heal on kill > luxuries

Okay, I know why you're here and you know why you're here, as a heads up again since heavy is extremely basic i'm not going to be listing his playstyle here, just explain why certain heavy weapons are bad and others are good.
Let's begin.


Weapons in this tier are generally always good and can be used at any time without hassle, note that this does not mean weapons below this are immediately worse

• Alright, so Minigun, it's always a good choice to have since it lacks downsides, it's your average minigun with high dps, there's not a scenario it's strictly bad in.
  
  
• As for the brass beast it's downsides are very small in Mann vs Machine with how you'll be playing heavy compared to it's upside of 20% more dps, more ammo efficiency and so on.
  If you don't know what gun to choose, if you need survivability then minigun; otherwise brassbeast.
  
  
  
• The sandvich is a good item since it's better than the shotgun, same as normal tf2 really.
  You likely won't be using it much anyways but it could save your medic or someone else in a minute.
  
• Hey, same for Dalokahs bar, but it has a combo with the quick fix.
  Did you know using the Dalokahs bar with the quick fix will give you nearly full overheal compared to if you didn't have the dalokahs bar? Pretty cool, right?
  
  
• Fists are good as a tank killer and because they suffer no downsides, they could likely easily be replaced with fists of steel though if you want but are not outshined due to how many downsides the fists of steel have.
  
  
• Killing gloves of boxing; these are some rather unique gloves as all you need to do is finish off one robot with a punch to give yourself x3 damage for a few seconds, insanely good if you can land the hit for the five seconds as you, already having incredible dps, only gain more.
  Additionally, amazing in Medieval mode!
  
  
• Gloves of running urgently are useful for getting to the front line quicker when your engineer's teleporter either doesn't exist or is in a questionable position or even retreating.
  
  
• The fists of steel are good for being held anywhere out of battle to reduce damage from any surprises you may encounter, like a sentry gun, some burst-fire soldier around a corner or a sniper from across the map.

*crickets*

• The Natascha is situational, when you absolutely need dps but also need to slow something down a bit more; this is the situation.
  It's not a rediculously precise scenario but still, situational; otherwise you're just sacrificing 25% of your damage for mediocre upsides, 25% less dps and 25% less ammo efficiency~

C-tier weapons are only going to be used for an exploit or something.Seriously, think of one good use for these weapons without having them be insanely overshadowed by above options.

Alright, let's get in to the meat of this potentially juicy weapon combo.
• Buffalo steak sandvich, useless in normal mvm, useful in Medieval mode; maybe it could be used as a mini-GRU but requires really perfect timing.
  
  
• Warriors spirit, kind of useful in Medieval mode against single targets, bosses, otherwise out-shun by Killing gloves of boxing.
  The only other potential use is desperate tank busting.

D-Class, basically C-tier but can't even be used for a cool exploit or medieval mode or something similar.
Let's a go~

• The Tomislav, is a weapon with a very strong downside and practically no upsides.
  Faster spin up is useless in mvm since robot movement is fairly predictable to heavy scale, silent barrel doesn't even work on bots and the accuracy bonus is not worth the 20% loss in dps.
  You'll likely be in a robot's face anyways and there's a number of giants so the accuracy bonus is useless.
  
  
• The Huo-long heater has less damage per shot and thus less dps than the brass beast, even with afterburn.
  Sure you'll be in a robot's face but you could do the same thing with the brass beast, and do more damage, and spend less ammo and have a damage resistance!
  What are you doing?
  
  
• The shotgun is bad because you're not engineer.
  If you're not playing engineer then you're sacrificing for another weapon, in this example Sandvich.
  The shotgun is a good gun but once again, overshadowed not only by the sandvich but also by every single minigun in the game.
  Even if you go full shotgun mode the bullets will spread everywhere with projectile penetration and only be effective against 1 or 2 robots before turning in to mediocre damage.
  
  
• But panic attack and family business
  Also bad for the same reasons, family business has a little more clip size and panic attack has more dps on low health which you can't do on every map since you aren't a soldier/pyro/engineer.
  Maybe in theory this could be a tank busting weapon if you have an extremely high amount of money then, maybe.
  You've also likely already won anyways.
  
  
• Huh, why is the second banana bad then? It heals you, recharges faster and is throwable, that's good, right?
  Every second spent eating or throwing is a second not spent firing your beasty minigun, so slower bursts of healing is optimal over drawn out ones.
  If you really can't survive without one, even if you have a dispenser and heal on kill and full resistances then; just have someone switch to medic.
  
  
• Eviction notice sucks since it's a terrible weapon, it used to be a fun joke weapon but then they reworked nerfed it and now it's, useless.
  Regardless of context.
  Even in x10 it sucks now.
  Why.
  
  
• The holiday punch used to be a fun joke weapon but valve fixed nerfed it too by making robots immune to laughing; if you get a random crit or attack from behind then instead of doing 195 damage, you instead do 0 too.
  However certain server mods will undo this change, allowing you to make giants laugh all day long~
  With fix, it's useless.
  Without fix, it's very good.
  Simple as that~
  
  
  Now. the only individual thing I can teach you about besides what i've done already is how knockback rage works.
  While knockback rage is active you do 50% less damage, of course if this means not a single giant can walk closer to the bomb hatch and the rest of your team is shooting then technically this is a gain regardles, though for speedrunning it's not advised for obvious reasons.
  The 50% damage penalty is pretty big and means you need to use it appropriately.
  
  You want to use this to pit giant robots, the bomb or have your local pyro to airblast robots so you can rage them in to the moon. (R.I.P. Moon)
  Yes, everything has ridiculously increased knockback when in mid-air, the lack of friction to the ground is pretty strong; or weak perhaps, dunno.
  
  In conclusion, Knockback rage:
  
  • Use it when there's giants next to the pit
    
  • Use it when there's a bot next to the pit
    
  • Use it when you need to stall robots/the bomb, bonus points for working with your local pyro to rage robots in to orbit.
    
  • Don't use it randomly
    
  • Don't use it when you need full dps
  
  Due to character limits, please see this video for more information: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lajLEa_Hkzk
  
  
  
  But as I said at the start there's really not a lot to talk about with this guy, he's, very simple.
  Shoot stuff with minigun, no shooty tank, throw sandvich, airblast, spy chec- wait wrong class.
  Hey if this is your guy though then have fun, please we need you to kill the giant medics since so few people want to play heavy Please help.
  
  
  
  Congratulations!

This is where the writing part of the guide resumes being fun for me~

So, you've obtained eleven hard science PHDs or want to pretend to have obtained them?
Engineer is your guy then



Alright, maybe you're scared of sentry busters, maybe you don't know what building to put down or just keep rebuilding your sentrygun before a dispenser, maybe you hog your dispenser all to yourself and don't share it despite having absolutely no benefit to keeping your own dispenser to yourself.
I don't know so i'm going to teach all of them here.

However, let's begin with picking the right weapons
Most of engineer's toolset is good and it's extremely difficult to go wrong without actively trying to troll, however a good troll won't give themselves away immediately just by picking bad weapons/upgrades on purpose.


Here's a quick tier-list of engineer weapons; this will be based off of how generally applicable they are, note that just because something is below another weapon in the tier list does not mean it is bad or inferior.
All it means is that the weapon is less generally applicable than those above it.

Anything with a Star* next to it means there's something to note and the weapon regularly requires certain skill or knowledge to execute in order to enter the stated tier.

AG-tier = Always good
A-tier = Typically good but comes with a downside which takes it away from being always good
B-tier = Useful in a number of situations, or even sometimes just a few; not always applicable
C-tier = Useful in extremely few situations when preforming ridiculously precise things and are otherwise not useful except when doing that one individual thing
D-tier = Unuseable generally speaking



AG-tier: Shotgun, Frontier justice, Window maker, Pomson 6000, Rescue ranger = Wrangler, Short circuit = Wrench, Southern hospitality, Eureka effect = Construction PDA = Deconstruction PDA
A-tier: Panic Attack
B-tier:
C-tier: Gun Slinger
D-tier: Pistol

If you are interested as to why these specific weapons are good/bad, I will cover that in the first part of engineer, advanced; for now to play the mere basics of engineer this will do.

So, yeah, like I said it's extremely hard to go wrong with weapon choice without trying to pick bad weapons.

How do you play as engineer though?
I will warn you now, buy dispenser range first regardless of what's coming or if you're about to get crit rocketed to death.

Dispenser range is the single most important upgrade to always get first, your sentry gun is primarily just a cleanup tool, your teleporter is very nice but not required.

Put your dispenser where everyone can use it, you may think of some places as too dangerous or too front-liney but if your team has the dispenser there in the first place then there's no reason for them to fall back and make the place dangerous.
Naturally though you want to hide it behind cover whenever possible so it's not constantly being bombarded but still in a place your team can quickly get to.

How about your sentrygun though? Right where the bomb is, it's the objective and sentryguns defend objectives, most of the time at least.
If you can get the sentry body-blocking robots too then that's even better, especially for super scouts!
Either way, defend the bomb/s first, gate/s second and then whatever you feel like last.
If the bomb is still all the way at spawn then go ahead and wrangle to your desires

As for your teleporter, anywhere near the front line is generally okay, try place it against a wall so spies can't backstab someone the moment they go through and:
If you can, put it on top a mannhatten banana and remove it the moment someone teleports through, this causes the victim to fall ontop of said banana and slip into the grinder.
Additionally you can mess with people by putting the teleporter at the edge of a cliff, over-excited individuals will cluelessly walk straight to their death, or you can try to manually push them in for the few seconds they're standing confused.
If people catch on to the facing-towards-cliff teleporter then just make it face backwards and watch them press the S key straight to their death.
You could also make a troll teleporter which takes someone further away from the front line at spawn, good places are the ally way to the right of coaltown's spawn and behind the hatch, where the tanks comes through, in rottenburg.
Remember, if they kill themselves, it's worth more points.
Be polite


If a sentrybuster comes, they're very easy to deal with too, just grab your sentrygun then run up to the buster, let it begin to explode and then make your way back to safety.
Sometimes a medic will want to build uber charge by hitting the sentrybuster with an ubersaw, if this happens then just try to explode on the medic pull back for a few moments, let him grab full uber and then continue normally.

Now, how about upgrades?
Again, dispenser range first
Dispenser range first
Dispenser range first
Dispenser range first

Always max out dispenser range first, people usually have engineer on their team just for his dispenser.
It's that good and really outshines everything else you can bring, even yourself.


After you've gotten the obligatory dispenser range though, get one point in building health and max metal at least as these are almost mandatory aswell, you'll be taking a lot of damage when your buildings start to get hit and use a lot of metal in both repairing and upgrading them; refilling them too.

From that point on, get whatever you need for a wave.
A lot of damage coming your way? Buy some health
Running out of almost or almost keep running out of metal? Buy some max metal
Can't upgrade/repair your sentry gun fast enough? Buy melee attack speed
Need to get to the front line quicker because the scout took the teleporter infront of you or you just need to dodge some projectiles? Just take a few points in movement speed and jump height

Engineer is a rather adaptive class but his upgrades are very simple, you tend to get the same ones every time and there's not a lot to talk about regarding upgrades, except for one thing.

Never get level 3 sentrygun firing speed.
Why? The game literally can't update fast enough to shoot bullets at that speed and it won't help with rockets, not that they do a lot of dps anyways, mostly burst.

Here's a quick chart:

Playing engineer basically is rather basic, really, so moving on to advanced if you wish to learn more.

Alright Pardner, what makes a weapon generally good and what makes a weapon generally bad
Well, since the entire engineer's array of various weapons is pretty much good there won't be much to talk about here, much more about playstyle.


Oh dear.. this will be a long one..
And really there isn't a lot, much or anything to talk about since engineer's weapons are pretty plain, speak for themselves and there's nothing bad or good about most of them
It's very, very hard for me to write this as there's nothing to talk about, you can practically go over a few weapons and see all of them.

As a tl;dr for this, all AG-tier weapons are good because they aren't bad.
You're given my permission to skip this part now if you wish.

AG-tier weapons are generally always good and can't go wrong

• Shotgun, the class it's good on because you're sacrificing nothing and it's a golden spy killer, reliable, solid damage when it's needed but not the best option either; a jack of all trades if you will;
  It's good because it's not actively bad/asking you to sacrifice anything.
  
  
• The Frontier justice is essentially the shotgun but you gain crits on kill, this could easily be a direct upgrade to the shotgun if you don't mind the missing clip size, easily fixable once you have luxury credits to spend on it.
  
  
• The Window Maker Widow Maker is an amazing gun and a great alternative to sentrygun upgrades; it also shreds tanks.
  As an engineer, your job is to keep a dispenser up, keep a teleporter up and *sometimes* use your sentrygun to block robots/giant scouts.
  If you're tired of slapping your sentrygun and using a wrangler all day then try the Widow Maker~
  Remember to the get the standard max dispenser range, 1 level in HP and 1 level in max metal before grabbing all the firing speed, movement speed and jump height you can get to begin shredding robots with an infinite-clip shotgun in your hands!
  
  It is the single most efficient tank killer in the game, even better than a phlog pyro.
  However the downside is it's capped at a mere 40% firing speed and no damage upgrades, making the pyro outclass it again practically instantly; however for wave 1 and potentially 2 it definitely beats the pyro in terms of dps, assuming you have very little starting money that is.
  
  So hey, if you're looking for an alternative to sentry engy this is a surprisingly viable tactic, just remember to keep your gear up first and window maker gun up second.
  
  
• The Pomson 6000 is another good weapon again because there's nothing, bad, about it.
  additionally you can take ubercharge away from giant medics just by pulsing them at close range with this gun, it's really nice actually in combination with the wrangler because of that.
  
  
• The Rescue Ranger is another good gun for obvious reasons, with the amount of times i've said gun in a row i'm starting to feel like i'm playing Enter the Gungeon.
  
  
• Ah, the wrangler; it doubles your sentrygun's firing speed, makes it take 66% less damage and gives your sentrygun infinite range at the cost of you having to manually control it; which could be seen as it's own benefit by telling your sentrygun to not target uber medics.
  In short it's a massive stat boost to your sentrgun which is your main source of dps and tanking; a massive stat boost to you.
  In short again, it's good because it's an overall boost to everything you do with a sentrygun~
  Also if you want to maximize your wrangler dps, move closer to your target.
  
  
• The Short circuit is again, good because it's not bad.
  It does the job of removing projectiles very well, enough to save your team, your sentrygun and even you~
  
  
• The wrench, The Southern Hospitality, The Eureka Effect, good because it's not bad, etc etc; the stock is the best wrench for keeping both your sentrygun alive and you alive, eureka lets you teleport, I personally prefer the jag but moving on
  
  
• The Jag, this is my wrench of choice as you saw and it's good because it's not bad, it's also good because it's the fastest wrench to get new gear up and it's downside is easily made up for in the rescue ranger, if you're paranoid of spies and your teammates happen to be useless for that/are busy then just use a wrangler and shoot them down yourself as you see them decloak infront of you.
  
  
• Uh The PDA, it builds stuff there's no other choice
  
  
• Uh the Destruction PDA, kinda situational, you don't really have a choice here but you can use upgrade canteens after manually killing something.

I'm, very happy that's done.
moving on.




A-tier, they're essentially AG-tier weapons but are have a downside or effect which makes them not always good but usually applicable.

• The Panic attack, phew, finally a non-AG-tier item.
  The problem with the Panic attack is, despite it being a reliable shotgun with a doable upside, it asks you to be at low health.
  If being at lot health isn't a problem for you and you have either healthpacks or a medic/dispenser who can heal you quickly in the case of a sentry buster coming through then I don't see a problem here.
  If health is important though then the DPS benefit may not be worth it.

*crickets with a guitar*

• The Gunslinger, it's rather obvious as to why this is bad but let me explain in case you're unaware for some reason.
  Your level 3 sentrygun is already very disposable and has enough trouble providing sufficient dps for the team.
  By taking a level 1 minisentry instead you're lowering your dps, making your sentrygun redundantly more disposable and you loose your ability to block giant robots with it.
  A normal sentrygun can stop giant robots, however a minisentry will not, not to mention it's very easy to just jump over too, if it wasn't instantly killed when stomped on that is.
  In short, you're loosing a lot of dps, a very important part of the engineer's toolkit, the power to block giants and gain nothing except redundant disposability.
  The only situation where this might be good is when every robot one-shot kills your buildings regardless and you need something you can throw down and ignore for either dps or a distraction.

D-tier, these weapons are practically unuseable generally speaking.

• Pistol has pathetic dps and is overshadowed by shotgun and wrangler since sentryguns redeploy instantly and your shotgun does a better job of killing spies than it.
  Even if you really wanted to pick someone off then the wrangler is far better at that, better than the pistol ever will be in most scenarios even more if you can sentry jump.

i. never want to write about another engineer weapon again.
there was nothing to write about except for the widow maker
they all speak for themselves.
moving on.

So, now that we haven't really learnt anything aside from why certain weapons are bad, let's finally discuss something worth listening to, how do we actually play Texas Mann efficiently?



Well sadly there isn't much more to discuss here either, sadly, but I can give some advice.

Upgrades
Like I said earlier, dispenser range is the #1 most valuable upgrade the engineer has since the dispenser is also the #1 most important building the engineer has; always max it out first if you don't know what to do.

Most of your upgrade choices are identical to the basics, really, as the Engineer's upgrades are very simple.
Dispenser range first, max metal/max health.
If you need to tank more damage then max building health
If you need to upgrade/repair faster then melee swing speed
If you need to do more dps then 1 or maybe 2 points into sentry firing speed, though usually just 1 as if you really need damage so badly then use the wrangler
If you need more metal since you keep running out or come close to doing so then get more max metal
If you're dying a lot then you're either not hiding behind your guns enough or you should get some crit resistance/movement speed and jump height, yes you can dodge around projectiles as you repair buildings too with enough training; then make sure you don't die by staying safe and letting your buildings do the hard work.
Speaking of hard work though..



Well, where do you put your sentrygun?
Near the bomb, first, always near the bomb.
Near the bomb and preferably either blocking the path the robots take, forcing them to take your gun down before proceeding or if that isn't possible on some higher ground.
Like I said earlier, your sentrygun is a great clean up and blocking tool first, dps second.

If your sentrygun isn't protecting the bomb from the one random Ninja scout who slipped by your defense, likely either nobody will or an entire team member will be forced to sit back and do nothing because your sentrygun isn't defending the bomb.
Put it where the bomb is.


How about your dispenser?
Where your teammates need it, near the front lines and just out of cover preferably.
Remember, this is for your team, not for you, you are not benefiting from this item's ammo refilling nearly as much as your team is.
Put it where your team is.


As for your teleporter it isn't too important, of course don't be a complete coward with it or put it infront of the robot's spawn.
Put it somewhere safe so when your teammates spawn in they aren't instantly getting bombarded/backstabbed/sentrygunned, but also somewhere where it isn't going to take longer than 10 seconds for a heavy to enter combat.
Put it somewhere safe and easy to reach, for your team.


How do I counteract sentrybusters, uh, for my team?
Well, if you really want to sentrybuster kill people; first you need to gain their trust.
Detonate the buster normally a few times, be respectful of them and if they see it then hey, even better.
Wait until they're distracted in the thick of combat, if there's a smoke screen then even better, now's your chance.
get right behind them, careful not to make too much noise as you may get them to turn around, also look out for if they're retreating or charging forwards.
Time their movement appropriately to make them back right up in to a sentrybuster as it goes Boom.
Have fun


Super scouts keep running through the defense!
Well, sentry block them.
Look at where the robots at going by the holograms and put your sentrygun is a position where no giant could slip through.
Remember, these are giant robots, they are 1.5x the size of a human; you have plenty of space to work with.
Most robots don't like jumping either so walls are the important part here; if a 1.5x scale giant can't slip through the walls, then they'll likely need to bust down your sentrygun, this works well around corners too as robots have trouble compensating for sentrygun existence most of the time; example here:

This is a screenshot from a map called mvm_barren, i'm putting my sentrygun is a position where the giant robots can't squeeze between it and the fence, so they need to either break the sentry gun down first (very likely) or just walk around it, intelligently. (much less likely)
If you are going to do this though, it's obvious but bring the wrangler; triple health is generally a good thing for tanking damage and blocking robots.

Well, there you go, there really isn't a lot of interesting things to talk about with engineer as he's a very, speaks-for-himself kind of class.
Go train hard, dodge projectiles and push your buildings to the limit.
Don't be afraid to manually destroy something just to rebuild it with an upgrade canteen quickly if you must either, a well placed sentry at the right time is much more valuable than a filled up sentry across the map doing little to nothing; same goes for dispensers.

Either way congratulations, go out there and don't die, let your buildings experience that for you.

So, the questionably sane german ex-doctor who treats his patients like experiments is your choice of play?
Alright then, let's get started



First of all the weaponry, going into battle with a bad toolkit is usually unadvised, so let's take a lot at what we have available


Here's a quick tier-list of medic weapons; this will be based off of how generally applicable they are, note that just because something is below another weapon in the tier list does not mean it is bad or inferior.
All it means is that the weapon is less generally applicable than those above it.

Anything with a Star* next to it means there's something to note and the weapon regularly requires certain skill or knowledge to execute in order to enter the stated tier.

AG-tier = Always good
A-tier = Typically good but comes with a downside which takes it away from being always good
B-tier = Useful in a number of situations, or even sometimes just a few; not always applicable
C-tier = Useful in extremely few situations when preforming ridiculously precise things and are otherwise not useful except when doing that one individual thing
D-tier = Unuseable generally speaking



AG-tier: Crusader's Crossbow = Kritzkrieg, Quick-Fix*, Vaccinator = Ubersaw
A-tier:
B-tier:
C-tier: Medigun = Amputator*
D-tier: Syringe gun, Blutsauger, Overdose = Bonesaw, Vita-Saw
Solemn Vow-Tier: Solemn Vow

If you are interested as to why these specific weapons are good/bad, I will cover that in the first part of medic, advanced; for now to play the mere basics of medic this will do.


So, the medic has a very different job; instead of keeping robots dead, their usual job is keeping team mates alive, alive teammates = more uptime, more uptime = more dps.

If you're using the vaccinator most resistances will be irrelevent to you but for the sake of assuming you don't want to learn medic here and just want the basics of the class because some random told you to, let's continue.

How do medics keep people alive?
They overheal the healed, heal the hurt and revive the dead.
As always you want to dodge projectiles and take medkits first, you're the medic, your life is more valuable than anyone else's; remember that.
If you're not alive, how can you keep other people alive?

So, let's say someone has died or a group of people have died and you need to revive them as soon as possible regardless of what it costs since a sentrybuster is about to come and ruin everything.
Well, while your ubercharge is active you revive teammates practically instantly, so pop your ubercharge and watch your entire team be revive at the tap of a button; literally.
This can be really important in some scenarios.

Additonally, you build shield charge depending on three things:
1. How much healing you're doing, the more healing you do the more shield-charge you get, yes this helps with the quickfix's heal rate technically and is punished by the vaccinator's overheal rate penalty.
2. Damage, heal a demoman or sniper as they wipe a crowd of robots to receive a ton of shield-charge, easy.
3. Shield level, a level 2 shield is both larger than a level 1 and recharges much, much faster. Consider it a priority.


What other Quick-Medic-Quick-Tips can be provided?
Overheal Expert > Healing Mastery, this is because the more points you invest into overheal expert, the better it is.
Overheal Expert does two things, it increases max overheal and increases the duration of said overheal.

The more ovehealed you are, the longer it takes for the overheal to go away.
The more overheal duration you have, the longer it takes for a point of overheal to go away.
In other words, Overheal Expert makes itself more efficient the more points you invest into it, you can leave teammates alone for a longer amount of time with each level you get, increasing more and more with each level you get.

However, make sure you have enough Healing Mastery to actually use your overheal expert, especially if you're using the vaccinator with it's ruthless but fair 66% overheal rate penalty.
In that case, Healing Mastery may just be the better choice to actually overheal your experiments.



Well, that's enough about specifics, for general upgrades again always get crit resistance first if a wave is spamming it or similar, get shield first typically along with the healing related upgrades for your medigun as the ubercharge rarely matters, even if it's kritzkrieg and even then you have the ubersaw most of the time.
In other words crit resist > shield > healing related upgrades/movement speed/jump height > luxuries.

Of course, if you're really having trouble with a specific damage type consider resistances to that, etc etc.

Some notes I will say is that melee speed is the ubersaw is a viable upgrade later on to fill your ubercharge faster.


As a quick recollection:

• Your life is more valuable than other's lifes, so your survival is a priority above others, don't be afraid to run away if you really, really have to and there's absolutely no safe corner you can hide behind
  
• Overheal is good
  
• Crit resist (if needed) > shield > healing related upgrades/movement speed/jump height > luxuries (If you don't know what else to get, heavy spam waves can be rather brutal with bullet spam afterall)

Well, moving on.
I'll see you in advanced if you're interested

So, what makes a medic weapon good?
How do you use them and what are they good for?
How do you really play medic to the fullest?

Well, let me teach and as I said earlier the first part of advanced will include tier explanations, so, let's begin!


AG-tier, these weapons are usually always good in practically all scenarios

• The Crusaders Crossbow is the meta for a reason, it lets you do damage and get extra healing with minimal medigun downtime, you won't really be using your syringe gun in MvM but if you need to, the crusaders crossbow is generally the most accurate for anti-sniper and anti-spy.
  Essentially, it's good because it doesn't ask you to stop what you're doing to use it, you can just carry on as normal.
  
  
• The Kritzkrieg is the standard meta-pick primarily due to the guaranteed kritz, free crits is a great thing and a big burst of dps since sometimes that's all you really need, it doesn't have any penalties either and is a good general use medi-gun if you're new to medic.
  It speaks for itself, really
  
  
• The Quickfix, now we're entering less-meta territory but remember, meta =/= good or best.
  Like you saw earlier, this weapon requires a little bit of explanation since it has a strong downside, -50% max oveheal.
  Due to the 40% more healing rate you can technically get shields up faster due to the more healing and the ubercharge is amazing for a heavy/pyro as it grants immunity to any stuns, slows, knockback and so on; in other words:
  This weapon is great because it technically lets you shield more often and greatly strengthens a front-liner, essentially a direct upgrade to stock for most scenarios.
  ..Just look out for soldiers, pyros, demomen, demoknights and engineers trying to blast
  jump/charge you in to a pit.
  
  
• The Vaccinator, one of the best mediguns due to the 75% damage resistances and the instant revives.
  This medigun is amazing as you can revive anybody instantly by using a single uber charge or save yourself by using an ubercharge of an appropriate damage type, or even a team mate
  This is the best medigun for keeping your team alive, which means more uptime which equals more dps.
  
  
• The ubersaw is essentially the stock bonesaw but you gain a quarter of your ubercharge on hit, the downside doesn't really exist and you can gain full ubercharge off of sentry busters with this.
  Another weapon which speaks for itself.

*crickets*


*Combo crickets*


*C-C-Cricket breaker*

• So, the medigun, it's ubercharge is pretty useless in MvM as your healing is usually more than enough and most robots don't supply some insane dps to need invulnerability to tank; even then uber canteens largely make this gun inferior.
  So, why would you ever use this medigun?
  Some mission maker made a mission with one-hit-kill spam, that's it, if one-hit-kill spam is the problem then this is your gun; otherwise it's completely inferior to other options as it provides nothing of use the other mediguns don't provide and do more of.

• The Amputator, this is only good when it's really, really, really hard for you to survive because you keep getting seperated from your team or you keep dying to DoTs, Damage over Time, like fire or bleed or etc.
  Don't taunt as the healing is mediocre compared to an upgraded medic beam and you won't gain shield charge doing so and you're just a sitting duck for a few seconds while you do so and you will not heal from it.
  Use the passive healing when it's held and that's it.
  Moving on
  
  
  D-tier, these weapons are essentially C-tier but have nothing to save them.
  
  
  • Let's begin with the Syringe gun, Overdose and Blutsauger, it's generally bad since using it usually asks you use it for a few seconds at least to get effective use out of it, even then you're not healing people or ubesawing during that time.
    The Overdose's upside is rarely applicable in addition to taking up your time and the blutsauger decreases your natural health regen, something vital to keeping yourself alive as medic.
    
    Even if you're just using it for mad-milk syringes; your heal-on-hit effect is already being done by the scout so you're loosing a lot of value there. (Most of your healing is overheal anyways)
    The ubercharge gain is painfully slow compared to just using your medigun and worst of all you're spending $200 on an upgrade who's task is already fulfilled for free by the crusaders crossbow at both a much safer distance and much quicker rate; which could've been spent on a level 2 shield, healing mastery or overheal expert.
    In other words, all overshadowed by the Crusaders crossbow.
    
    
  • The Bonesaw is overshadowed by the ubersaw as it's practically a direct upgrade.
    In fact, it really is just a direct upgrade to stock.
    
    
  • The Vita-saw is just an inferior ubersaw with a big downside, you loose 10 of your 150 health, bringing your closer to death at all times and the upside is just a bad ubersaw's upside.
    To benefit from it's upside at all you need to die which is generally a bad thing.
    Shortly, it's a bad ubersaw which asks you to play poorly to benefit from it's upside.
    Even if you're dying constantly you would be gaining more ubercharge from the ubersaw.
    
    
    You do realise you can see the health of giants without this weapon equipped, right?
    Do you, really want to know the health of a sniper or engineer or spy or something?
    Maybe an uber medic?
    You're taking time out of your day to do this.
    I am slightly confused.
    This is a joke weapon in MvM.

So, Medic, We know his weapons but what do we do with them? How do we play him?

Let's begin on a more interesting element, the gameplay.



Like I said earlier, medic shield is built by three things

Originally posted by (Ch8) The Medic - Basics:

How much healing you're doing, the more healing you do the more shield-charge you get, yes this helps with the quickfix's heal rate technically and is punished by the vaccinator's overheal rate penalty.
2. Damage, heal a demoman or sniper as they wipe a crowd of robots to receive a ton of shield-charge, easy.
3. Shield level, a level 2 shield is both larger than a level 1 and recharges much, much faster. Consider it a priority.

How can we use this to our advantage?
Well, look for when someone's about to do a lot of damage, like a stickybomb trap or a soldier/heavy popping crits; or when a sniper is about to wipe entire crowds of robot's heads off before they see him; then heal them as they do so and enjoy your shield boost!

Though, that's rather obvious, how about something more hidden?

Reviving people does not grant ubercharge or shield charge but it's still your priority, an alive teammate can try to keep themselves in battle while a dead one is, already dead


Let's go over how to use the Vaccintor.
So, got a bunch of heavies/flares coming? Vaccinate yourself and your patient for bullets
Getting swarmed by soldiers and demomen? Vaccinate yourself and your patient for explosives
Have a horde of Pyros coming? Vaccinate you and your patient for fire

Since damage in mann vs machine is usually one type at a time for most missions, maybe sprinkled with another lightly sometimes, it's easy to quickly switch to the appropriate resistance for the job, largely making buying resistance upgrades yourself redundant; which is an amazingly good thing.
As a medic you don't always have the money to afford self-protection upgrades when you need them, since you're so powerful your upgrades are naturally pricey, not cheap like some other classes.

I suppose i'll answer the question some of you may have now then, is it better to save lifes or to revive with them using vaccinator charges?
Save, always save.
Maybe a demoman has a lot of heads, maybe a heavy has full rage bar or a soldier has buff banner; engineer needs to save his sentry gun?
Saving is always better than letting someone die and then instantly reviving them, unless they really need the ammo or something I guess.
Additionally with blast resistance uber, you can save people from things like sentry busters and nukes, they aren't instant kill afterall!

So yeah, use your point and click beam to heal people, dodge projectiles and right click to grant either triple dps to a teammate, make them practically invulnerable with healing speeds and invulnerable to knockback/stuns or make them a walking titanium gauntlet with vaccinations.

If you have to decided on how to use your charges though since you're limited, usually reviving is your first priority though.
I'm saying this as I don't want to confuse you in the previous segments where I said "save > revive" as that's more of a "save someone now or wait until they die and then revive them" for context.
Always revive first as it puts another player immediately into the field



As for your middle click shield it's another easy one to play, some medics like to pop it way too early and waste it's duration, some medics pop it too late and die so let's try to pop the shield at *just* the right time.

Robots have a reload animation, some robots have infinite clip size and won't have this but most will have to reload, mainly the burst-fire robots you're used to.
Use that for timing when you're at close range to the giants, wait for them about to finish reloading their clip and then activate your shield for maximum duration; if you're a bit scared then it's okay to do it a bit early and edge a bit closer each time until you're comfortable with your timing but if you're at a distance.

If you're at a distance then just wait for the robot to shoot, once you see those rockets, grenades or whatever flying at you then it's time to either use your shield or pop a Vaccinator charge.

Another tip for the vaccinator and shield:
Remember that each patient you want to save will use up a vaccinator charge, this can be very draining for protecting your entire team; however using your shield is like uber-charging your entire team for its duration, they will be immune to all damage, immune to knockback and your shield will handle everything.
When protecting one person who's getting focused down, vaccinate, when protecting your entire team, shield.
Also try to switch to fire resistance if it's coming towards you since that can penetrate shields.
simple


Additionally, don't be afraid to prioritise your charges on good players; and just a reminder:
high tours =/= skill (High tours does not equal skill)

Either way, soaked everything up or nothing at all, make sure you know what you're doing before you grab the vaccinator.
And as the "Meet The Medic" taunt puts it: "Remind those ungrateful bastards how valuable your medic skills are".

So, Sniping's a good job mate?
It's easy work, out of doors and you're guaranteed to not to hungry



So, the single most important upgrade for sniper is explosive headshot, it makes the class viable in MvM and sniper is otherwise rather bad without it.
It turns snipers headshot in to a massive high damage AoE which pierces through all armor/resistances and is the single strongest crowd clearing ability in the game.

A problem some especially newbie snipers have is landing headshots, somewhat understandably so with how spastic robots can be with their heads, randomly looking in a certain direction for no good reason.
The trick to counter this is just aim for the robots carrying the bomb or giant robots since they move 50% slower than most.

So, now that we've displayed that making out Explosive Headshot first is priority due to how strong it is and which robots are easiest to kill; let's focus on the weapons, sniper only has very few to work with so pay attention.

The sniper has this problem where for some reason he can't rescope immediately after firing, even with +999% firing speed and +999% reload speed it can't happen.
For some reason the game forces the sniper rifle to wait until the normal reload animation time has ended before allowing you to scope again, this makes reload speed upgrades completely useless on most sniper rifles and getting melee speed would provide more anti-tank dps.

However the Hitman's heat maker does not have this problem, and is why it's the #1 rifle; i'll explain more when the time comes but for now:


Here's a quick tier-list of sniper weapons; this will be based off of how generally applicable they are, note that just because something is below another weapon in the tier list does not mean it is bad or inferior.
All it means is that the weapon is less generally applicable than those above it.

Anything with a Star* next to it means there's something to note and the weapon regularly requires certain skill or knowledge to execute in order to enter the stated tier.

AG-tier = Always good
A-tier = Typically good but comes with a downside which takes it away from being always good
B-tier = Useful in a number of situations, or even sometimes just a few; not always applicable
C-tier = Useful in extremely few situations when preforming ridiculously precise things and are otherwise not useful except when doing that one individual thing
D-tier = Unuseable generally speaking



AG-tier: Hitman's Heat maker = Jarate, Cleaner's Carbine* = Kukri, Bushwacka
A-tier:
B-tier:
C-Tier: Huntsman = Darwin's danger shield
D-Tier: Sniper Rifle, Sydney Sleeper, Bazaar Bargain, Machina, Classic = SMG, Razorback, Cozy Camper = Tribalman's Shiv, Shahanshah

If you are interested as to why these specific weapons are good/bad, I will cover that in the first part of sniper, advanced; for now to play the mere basics of sniper this will do.



So, aside from explosive headshot? What else is important to get?

Slow on Jarate is another amazing upgrade, it slows down any giant or group of giants or group of robots by 35%, which is a lot.
It's like a second mad milk but no healing.
So, is there anything else?

Uh, nothing, really; once you get explosive headshot you're pretty set.
Get max ammo capacity if you're low on ammo, get reload speed if you're using the heatman's hitmaker and movement speed is still viable for dodging rocket/projectile spam, even when you're scoped in.
30% more movement speed is 30% more movement speed.

The important parts are:
1. Get Explosive Headshot first
2. Slow on Jarate
3. Don't miss your headshots
4. Get reload speed if you're using the Heat Maker


Yeah, relatively simple.
See you soon in Sniper Advanced.

Why are some guns and not guns but instead jars so good, and the rest so bad?

Well it's all about what I said with the scoping thing earlier, let's get started

• The Hitman's Heat maker is truely the single best sniper rifle there is as it overrides the scoping problem.
  Usually you have to wait for a set cooldown to finish before you can scope again and fire off another headshot with other sniper rifles but with the focus of the hitman's heat maker you can take full advantage of max reload speed and keep it up the entire wave due to being able to gain focus while in focus!
  It has over double the firing speed of other sniper rifles with max reload speed which is over double the potential dps and crowd clearing abilities with no downside.
  Bodyshotting in mvm as sniper is the same as missing entirely.
  
  
• Jarate is another common, popular good weapon.
  I likely won't need to explain this one since it's another weapon which speaks for itself but AoE mini-crits and the ability to slowdown entire groups of enemies in Mann vs Machine is really strong.
  Mini-crits = more dps
  Slow down = more time to use your dps.
  
  
• The Carbine's cleaner is a great tank-killing weapon but only when in combination with the bushwacka.
  All you need to do is use it with the bushwacka normally when tanks come and the free crits you get make it an extremely powerful tank-busting combo for sniper, you'd be surprised by how much damage you can do with these two weapons and you can switch to them mid-wave if needed.
  Without the Bushwacka this weapon falls short.
  
  
• The Bushwacka, it's great since it allows the sniper to have a massive dps boost against tanks and any melee-only robots, the free crits should not be underestimated as a tank killer.
  
  
• The Kukri is essentially the bushwacka but without the ridiculously powerful upside.
  It's good because it isn't bad, it isn't overshadowed either as you aren't always meleeing robots as sniper and sometimes not having the 20% damage vulnerability can save your life.

Hey, Risk of Rain 2 is technically out an it is an amazing sequel to Risk of Rain 1; the 3d magma worm is truely terrifying and beautiful to look at compared to the Risk of Rain 1 magma worm surprisingly; you can only experience it by playing it for yourself; bonus pleasure for knowing how aggressive RoR 1 magma worm is.


Also the silky wings item is pretty broken with the commander if you play Risk of Rain 2, you can very easily leave the bounds of the map and enemies won't chase you either; you can even go underneath the terrain and shoot them just like in Team Fortress 2.
Oh, looks like it's time to return to tierlist tiers with weapons in them now, talk later.

• The huntsman is the single worst sniper primary for normal MvM, you give up explosive headshot and the hitman's heat maker effect for; nothing.
  You're trading the upgrade "Explosive headshot" an upgrade which makes sniper as a class even viable for something called "bleed duration", which is a stupidly small damage boost capped out a glorious 10 dps with minicrits.
  The only time this is useful is Medieval mode.
  
  
• The Darwin's danger shield means you don't have jarate. However it's a little bit tricker to aim perfectly with the flinch happening constantly too.
  In other words, use this when flare pyro spam or fire damage in general is a problem.

• The Sniper Rifle, Sydney Sleeper, Bazaar Bargain, Machina and Classic technically aren't unuseable but are so overshadowed by the hitman's heatmaker is hard to say it's good or even decent when it lacks the firing speed.
  Charge rate and damage does so little it pretty much doesn't matter in MvM; and the sydney sleeper's jarate effect, while nice is both already done by jarate and lacks the heatmaker's firing speed.
  It's a really nice alternative and still has explosive headshot but is still overshadowed.
  
  The closest competiton to the heatmaker, the bazaar bargain has around ~295 peak dps, without including explosive headshot compared to the all powerful heat maker's 500 dps.
  I could go further into detail with this but in short, since the heat maker fires much, much, much faster than the other sniper rifles; it gets many, many, many more explosive headshots off than the regular rifle.
  Which is the bulk of sniper's dps and thus the strongest rifle overall, etc.
  Moving on.
  
  
• SMG has pathetic dps and is overshadowed by the sniper rifle entirely due to explosive headshot.
  The sniper rifle has much better crowd clearing powers and the bushwacka + carbine much better tank killing powers.
  If you're concerned about individual robots then sure, maybe use this if you Must play Sniper but otherwise stick to carbine/jarate.
  
  
• The Razorback is bad since it's rarely useful.
  Unlike sentry guns, you can stand on top of rocks and ledges to avoid spies entirely.
  They have a lot of trouble climbings rocks in the bigrock cave or the sign in the front pieces of wood on the building in the middle of coaltown.
  They also have trouble with what a big open window is.
  Additionally spies are announced publically to you anyways so it's not a big surprise as to when they come.
  
  
• The Cozycamper is nice in normal play but since health is so abundant in MvM and you're rarely targeted aside from snipers/spies the flinch mechanic isn't too useful.
  Overall, not overshadowed, but an inferior choice to jarate/cleaners carbine as it lacks a proper use in MvM.
  Use it if you want but you have been warned it isn't going to be a great secondary compared to others for general MvM playing.
  
  
• Both The Tribal Man's shiv and Shahanshah is overshadowed by Kukri and Bushwacka.
  If you're under half health you're usually dead in MvM and DoTs, while incurable by healthpacks as robots can not pick up health packs, rarely help.
  Even in MvM where the huntsman only has the bleed upgrade and not EH, bleed is very rarely chosen outside of luxury money since it's only 8 extra dps base or 10 with minicrits.
  Same applies to the tribalman's shiv.
  
  
  Also fun fact you can headshot sentry busters:
  
  
  
  And honestly there isn't a lot more to sniper I could teach you.
  Really there isn't.
  Just headshot well, focus on your Explosive headshots instead of spamming jarate and remember to prioritise robots over tanks as that's what you're good at.
  Sniper is a class which talks for himself and just asks you to play a point and click adventure with robots heads.
  
  Final Final pro tip, normally there's a 1 second cooldown on rescoping, but if you enable auto-rescoping in advanced config you bypass that entirely.
  
  Congrats and stuff, I guess
  Wooo!
  
  
  Now, remember to practice

https://youtu.be/XtWYYTt9ZOU


So, you enjoy sneaking behind enemy lines as they don't suspect a thing, grabbing your knife, and before you do it imagine yourself shoving your tiny butterfly knife in to their backs.

Better learn to enjoy collecting money as spy then.


(I don't know why this image is so big)

So, Mentlegen.
What can spy do?
What hidden tricks can he bring to the table only some know about?
Why is he seen so, so rarely?

Well, i'll be honest with you.
If I had to pick a single worst class for Mann vs Machine, this would be it.
I don't know why either, why did soldier get his rocket specialist upgrade when he was already good, when spy was screaming for some love to be a better MvM class?

Let's, begin, i'll explain to you on the way.


Here's a quick tier-list of spy weapons; this will be based off of how generally applicable they are, note that just because something is below another weapon in the tier list does not mean it is bad or inferior.
All it means is that the weapon is less generally applicable than those above it.

Anything with a Star* next to it means there's something to note and the weapon regularly requires certain skill or knowledge to execute in order to enter the stated tier.

AG-tier = Always good
A-tier = Typically good but comes with a downside which takes it away from being always good
B-tier = Useful in a number of situations, or even sometimes just a few; not always applicable
C-tier = Useful in extremely few situations when preforming ridiculously precise things and are otherwise not useful except when doing that one individual thing
D-tier = Unuseable generally speaking



AG-tier: Revolver, Diamond Back, L'Etranger = Knife = Disguise Kit = Invis Watch*, Cloak and Dagger*, Dead Ringer = Sapper
A-tier: Spycicle
B-tier: Conniver's Kunai*, Big Earner*
C-tier: Enforcer = Red Tape Recorder*
D-tier: Ambassador = Your Eternal Reward

If you are interested as to why these specific weapons are good/bad, I will cover that in the first part of spy, advanced; for now to play the mere basics of shpee this will do.



So, if you're picking spy he'll be most effective when you don't have a scout, since scout generally hinders spy.
A lot.
Imagine you're trying to sneak up on a giant robot's back, then your 20 year old child jumps in front of you at the speed of light, makes a giant pyro set you on fire and runs off without extinguishing you.
Leaving you there to die.

yeah..
This means spy is best off as a scout replacement who can't collect money as quickly, or provide mad milk, or provide marked-for-death but can sap uber medics and do more dps to giants, usually.
One of those are pretty redundant with a sniper/demoman on your team but without those people you rarely get the sapper back fast enough to re-sap the uber medics, so it's safest to just focus on collecting money and killing giants first; sapping robots second.


If you're collecting money you primarily want to stay disguised and sap at will, in this state if you begin to attack or undisguise then it's a lot harder to collect money, so I advise you don't.
Having the dead ringer out helps too.

If you're in the state of killing giant robots, grab your knife firmly and rush up behind giant robots backs, while they're out in the open without smaller ones there to protect them.
If you go in while there's little ones then you'll likely get blocked, shot and die.
If you go in and try to sap them then the giant robot will look directly at you for a solid 10-20 seconds before looking back at the thing shooting him.
In other words, take every chance to stab giants in the open that you can.
It's situational on when it's safe to do damage even with a dead ringer, so be aggressive with your stabs when you're shown them.

As a quick recap:
Don't play spy with scout together
Save saps for giant scouts/hordes of small bots/uber medics
Aggressive go for stabs on giant robots out in the open, alone, of course if your team is already about to kill them then don't bother.


How about upgrades, then?

Just like everyone else, Movement speed and Jump height is better than resistances.
Know when to pull out of backstabbing and deadringer away to suffer very little damage.

However, unlike the other classes, health regen is an amazing upgrade to have since you'll be getting relatively few kills.
Soldier, Demoman, Heavy, Pyro and so on do crowd clearing much better than you do, leaving you with the task of collecting Money and killing the big robots only.
And since you don't have any health-on-money-collect like the scout then you'll need to get something to fix yourself up when the medic can't help you, in this case it's health regeneration.
All it takes is a few levels in the upgrade and you're generally set.

As always though, crit resistance before anything else to avoid getting one shot.


As for your knife and your sapper, it depends on what the wave has.
Your sapper should get priority on waves with very few giants, and your knife on waves with more than one.

How do you upgrade your knife?
Simple, 1 point in armor penetration > attack speed > attack speed > armor penetration > attack speed attack speed > armor penetration > armor penetration.
This is an approximate, if I get a better order figured out then i'll replace it with this one here but armor penetration is a weird upgrade.

Don't be scared enough to follow this to the very point if you're in a panic but try to keep it in mind.


Oh, you want to know how you should upgrade your revolver?
Here's a helpful video to tell you how to do that



So remember:
Either collect money or stab giants, not both at the same time.
Movement speed + Jump height > non-crit resistances
Dead ringer is the only watch you should ever use, the other two are broken for MvM.
YER is also broken for MvM.
You can technically use the revolver/ambassador, they're just statistically inferior to the diamond back.
Here's how to upgrade your revolver
Spy is the single worst MvM class if I had to pick one.

See you in advanced, I suggest you do so if you want to try your best to outplay the already massive scout army.

(coming soon)

What makes a weapon good and why are you forced to use the dead ringer in MvM?
Let's find out



AG-tier weapons are always good in practically all scenarios.

• The Revolver, it's here because revolvers don't really matter in MvM for spy, technically you can always use it but you'll be using it just as much as any other revolver.
  In other words you can generally ignore revolver tiers; it's not bad but it's not good either.
  They're primarily used for killing off giant robots you just barely didn't kill.
  
  
• The Diamond Back is a direct upgrade to the stock revolver, both in normal TF2 and in MvM.
  Again, you won't be using it a lot anyways so it doesn't really matter.
  
  
• L'Etranger, while it looks good at first i'd call it only decent, you could get your feign death back a bit faster with this but it's the only stat which matters.
  The longer cloak duration is useless as you generally don't want to stay cloaked for long and bringing attention to yourself after you use the dead ringer is a risky play.
  I want to avoid over complicating things or putting in too many words but for now it is essentially a risk vs reward weapon, also it picks off giants a bit slower.
  
  
• Knife, the butterfly knife is stock and it has no bad sides nor upsides, now that i'm off of revolvers I can begin talking properly.
  Again it's another no downsides so it's not a bad weapon, weapon.
  if you have no idea what you're doing it's a viable grab.
  
  
• Disguise kit, let's you disguise, you don't have a choice.
  
  
• The Dead ringer is the only viable spy watch for Mann vs Machine as the other two are unviable.
  If you feign your death with the dead ringer then robots will look away from you instantly, letting you immediately get back into action.
  
  However if you use any other spy watch and cloak normally, robots will continue firing to try guessing your location making it hard to get anything done.
  The other two watches also lack the power of a speed boost to help you get away or damage resistance to help you survive.
  
  
• The Electro Sapper, It's the standard-use MvM sapper, nothing worth mentioning except it's only good at sapping buildings when it lacks the upgrades.
  
  
• The Red Tape Recorder, most people look at this and assume it's just a clone of the normal sapper for MvM, however it has a special trait which makes it distinct from the normal sapper.
  If you sap an engineer's buildings with this, they will not intentionally try to unsap it.
  Of course if you try to sap the sentry, the thing which it is wrenching at all times then it'll be accidentally removed; sap their teleporter however and they'll be completely oblivious to it.
  
  This sounds amazing!... what's the catch?
  The catch is the same as normal tf2, it takes longer to destroy these buildings typically unless the engineer has a building health bonus.
  And you can't sap robots if your upgraded sapper is on a building.
  There are no differences besides that.
  Simple as that, observe, decide, act.

• The Ambassador, while revolvers again don't matter it is technically statistically inferior to the diamond back for the rare cases you do use it so this is why it's here.
  Again revolvers, even the L'Etranger rarely do anything for spy aside from finishing off targets.
  
  
• The Big Earner has some benefits, it's useful when there's snipers, engineers, uber medics or similar to pick down but otherwise the -25 max health penalty hurts since spy isn't getting the majority of kills, rarely any.
  It's a good hit and run essentially, you can quickly dart out of robot's views but without any snipers/engineers/uber medic/etc it's a loosing battle.
  Aside from that it's a normal spy knife, nothing too special about it.
  
  
• The Spycicle is another one of those always-good knifes and may even be a money-loving spy's favourite choice, however since it's difficult to use on waves full of pyro spam, when they rarely occur, it's technically not always good.
  Thus it falls down here; you're usually safe to use it whenever though.

*crickets*


Again. Revolvers don't matter but if for some reason you're facing an army of vaccinator medics, for some reason your sapper isn't enough and for some reason your team just can't bother focusing all three of their damages types at once for one second.
This is your solution.
Enforcer.

• The Your Eternal Reward, or YER, is bad because of the short delay between backstabbing a robot and disguising.
  If this delay wasn't here then spy would be so much better of an mvm class than he is today, same if the sapper had an upgrade to come back quicker.
  It has a downside with no upside in short since the upside does not function properly in MvM.
  
  
• The Conniver's Kunai looks great on paper since there's so many robots to backstab but then you remember that you rarely get to actually have the killing backstab on robots.
  If you can consistently get the backstab then hey, it's a nice knife but if that rarely happen then just don't bother.
  It destroys your max health pool nearly by half.
  
  
• Invis Watch, Cloak and Dagger
  Like I said for the dead ringer they just don't work for MvM.
  Robots will continue firing to try guessing your location making it hard to get anything done once you cloak.
  These two watches also lack the power of a speed boost to help you get away or damage resistance to help you survive.

Just before you finish, let's have a quick talk about canteens

Where and when is a good time to use them typically?
Note that if possible, it is preferable for a medic to be the one buying canteens with canteen specialist as they gain a discount and a duration increase.


Critical Canteen - $100: This is not a substitution for dps upgrades, what it is, is a solution to you struggling during a certain part of a mission.
If you can't kill a specific robot, tank or horde and a kritzkrieg isn't enough or you need another medigun then use this.
Remember you aren't getting your $100 back after beating a wave with this, use it only when you must as it's very expensive.

Uber Canteen - $75: Use this when you absolutely can't survive at all or you're a pyro/heavy who really needs to pit a bomb without dying, again only use a canteen when you need to.
A pretty self-explanatory canteen.
You aren't getting your $75 back after beating a wave with this.

Ammo and Clip refill - $25: A super cheap critical canteen to keep the dps coming. without needing to reload, use this when you need more dps on a gun which needs reloading without spending a full $100 on crits; alternatively ammo packs and engineer dispensers are disabled on your server/map.
Despite it still being much cheaper than a $100 critical canteen, you still won't get your money back after using this.

Return to Spawn - $10: Use this when robots are spawning at, well, spawn and you need to get there fast for something important; like an engineer or a bomb.
Otherwise it doesn't serve a lot of purpose on most maps.

Building Upgrade - $50: It's easy to make the mistake of spamming this when wrench attack speed is more than enough; use this only when you need a sentry/dispenser up instantly since everything is going wrong and you're getting pushed back.
Remember to keep your sentrygun near the bomb at all times, preferably even body blocking it.
Something lesser known about this canteen though is that it will also fully heal any buildings you have, letting you save a sentrygun in a pinch if you can't switch off your wrangler.


That's all I have to say, just remember any money spent on canteens you can not get back after winning a wave.
Only use a canteen if you absolutely must or have luxury money.
Engineer has a lot of luxury money.

In here i'll answer any questions which don't quite fit in with other areas.
In other words, ask away and I shall answer.

Question: What should we do if we don't have any money collector classes?
Answer: Simple, pick the money up yourself and don't kill robots in places where you can't collect money; for example really deep in enemy lines with 3 sentry guns protecting it.


Question: When is a good time to stall?
Answer: When you're having trouble, or when you know a certain wave will be tough or you just don't want to gamble it.
Sometimes you're on a timer to kill x before y spawns in which case you should just focus on killing it but for the majority of missions, especially very difficult ones, stalling is a viable tactic.
Honestly, stalling as a tactic is ridiculously powerful and can make insanely difficult missions trivial.

Common forms of stalling include but are not limited to: Scorchshot, Airblast, Knockback Rage, Loose Cannon, Shortstop Shove and Body Blocking; in order of best first.

tl;dr if you're in a really hard mission, try stalling, push robots in to pits, push robots in to death pits, maybe even just push robots backwards.
The more time to kill robots the easier it is; just remember that tanks are unstallable... on the majority of maps at least..

Well, assuming you've read through your favourite class of choice and a few other basics of other classes, congratulations; you're no longer the bottom of the barrel of mvm and may even be able to carry teams with enough practice!

Really, well done.
Practice is key to true progression however, keep playing Mann vs Machine and your skills will most likely sharpen as long as you keep soaking information in and treat everything as a lesson.


Come back whenever you need to refresh your memory or maybe learn something new about a different class; maybe skim through the basics since your team really needs x or y class.
I'm excited to see you out there on the battle field; just remember

The tier lists are not strict rules of what is good and bad, it's just a tierlist of how generally applicable weapons are, the more scenarios a weapon is good in the higher tier they are.
Any and all weapons can be better or worse depending on your situation, if anyone makes a strict "this is good and that is bad" tierlist without giving context, they are wrong and are not accounting for scenarios/situations.

Reading tierlists properly is vital, and it is important to list what your tierlist is for before making one.


Well, have a nice day and Bon Voyage.

Guides on a similar subject:
https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=376575386

https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1697451843



pew pew