The first thing I think I should say is that this guide is intended entirely for pubs. I haven’t played nearly enough of the class to be comfortable talking about how to use it competitively unless I’m giving a very general outline. The purpose is to address the main concerns a lot of pubbers have with heavy and to demonstrate that many of the most common complaints about how heavy plays are a direct result of certain very avoidable mistakes.

The heavy has the potential to be one of the most powerful classes in a pub setting, even without any sort of flashy skill from the heavy player. Things like movement and aim that can carry dumb scouts or soldiers won’t help you at all as a heavy player. The ability to track helps, but it’s not essential to be able to do it especially well in pubs. This guide is not a guide on how to be a good heavy. That’s not really how the class works. All you have to do in order to be extremely effective is not make huge mistakes. With that in mind, this is a guide on how to avoid being a bad heavy.

The strengths and weaknesses of the heavy are pretty readily apparent. The class has the highest health in the game. Its DPS is absurd at close and medium ranges, and it never needs to reload. On the other hand, its extreme slowness means that it can’t reposition at will, and its massive hitbox and inability to dodge much of anything means that focus fire will bring it down quickly. You can’t move and fight at the same time, and it takes you a little bit of time to go from moving mode to fighting mode.

The implications of those strengths and weaknesses are obvious: the two most important skills for you as a heavy by far are your ability to position yourself well and your ability to make good decisions quickly. The most obvious type of decision you’ll need to make is whether or not you can win the fight you’re currently in. “Win” doesn’t always have the same meaning. If you survive with 50 HP in a dangerous area, that’s not really winning if someone else can walk around the corner and kill you immediately afterwards. You’ll need to decide whether a fight is worth committing to, and you’ll need to do it very quickly. It’s also important to know who to shoot at and when.

Your ability to position yourself is what gives you options to take when you’re making those decisions. If you’re standing in a stupid place, not only are most fights going to become unwinnable, but even if you decide you need to retreat, you might not be able to. This is terrible for a heavy. You serve your team much better by staying alive than by trading for someone, especially because trades will never happen on your terms.

So keeping those two skills in mind as the most important ones to build, the most important thing to learn first is definitely how terrain favours you in a fight against other classes. There are some pretty common themes throughout all of these. You’re a stream damage class rather than a burst damage class, which means you want to fight in situations where you and your opponent are never hidden from each others’ view. You can use cover exceptionally well. Props and corners scare you. So. The classes, in order:

Against scouts, a large, open area favours you the best. You out DPS the scout at any range in theory, but it’s trivial to track them at medium and much more difficult close up. Because of this, it’s important that you position yourself so that scouts can’t open the fight close to you. If there are line of sight breakers available to them as they approach you, you’re at a significant disadvantage. If they can’t get close to you without you being able to hit them, you can’t lose. If you’re anticipating a scout trying to attack you and you have no teammates to protect you, you should hold further back from corners and chokepoints or past the corner or chokepoint so you can see them coming.

Soldiers and demomen are very similar. Soldiers will have trouble killing you singlehandedly, especially when you’re being tanked. However, they can hurt you quite a bit without taking much risk if you’re not careful. The optimal fight for both soldiers and demomen is a fight at medium range with a corner or prop for them to hide behind. Because they’re burst damage classes and you do stream damage, they’re very scary when they can fire a shot, duck around the corner, fire another shot, and so on. The best way to stop this is to hold very close to the corner or chokepoint so that if they try to use it to cornerpeek you, you can jump around it and rev. Against soldiers specifically, there’s a strong incentive for you to take the high ground. They easy to deny if they try to jump you, and they have to hit directs from the low ground. Cover is nearly useless against both of these classes. They can just splash around the edges of that cover or even just direct you, since they both have perfect accuracy and no spread on their weapons. Pyros are pretty much the same as these two. The exception is that they’re far less of a threat than a soldier or demo, they only matter when they’re running the flare, and you can’t really rev around a corner at them because they’ll airblast you back and burst you again. Pyros are good at holding corners and you need a medic tanking you to dislodge them.

Against other heavies, only two things matter at closer ranges. The first is who spins up first. The second is whether one of you has cover. Healing doesn’t matter. Current health barely matters. Your DPS is so high at that range that the one who spins up first will almost always win on the free couple hundred damage they get before the other heavy can respond. But it’s important to understand that the bullets don’t come out of your minigun. They come out of your face. So it’s possible to fight extremely unfair fights where you have their entire body to shoot at, and they only have your head. Props are your best friend against other heavies. At longer ranges, the main difference maker (assuming starting health, medic tanking, cover, etc are equal) is how many teammates each of you has around. Positioning will be less important since you’re both stand and shoot classes.

You don’t really get into fair fights against snipers. In general, an area is pretty sniper safe if they can’t shoot at you without being in a range where you can kill them. They can still peek and charge, but teammates can take care of that or you can hold close to the corner. Snipers are also a threat at any range if they have cover available. You don’t deal enough damage to stop them from quickscoping you if all you can see is their head.

        Are you able to retreat?

                Retreat faster than pursued - high ground

        Is health available?

        Can you threaten?

                Don’t need to kill or even damage

Role

        highlander

                safe zone to retreat behind

                avoid taking heals

                other classes do heavy lifting

        6v6

                waste uber - discard

                come in late

                emphasize scout similarities - more extreme form of same role

                take crit heals, do better against fewer opponents

                don’t get focused

                get in for free

        lessons from both

                don’t go in first

                        gets you focused

                        can only hit one target at a time

                        can’t pursue

                        not actually that scary

                don’t take ubers

                        you won’t do much with them

                        you don’t need them

                                uber not used on front player somewhat wasted

                                can get in for free in chaos

                fight people hurt

                        you’re a bluffer; they’re more likely to leave when they’re already hurt

                        can focus you but will choose not to on off chance it’s them you shoot

                        much less endurance even in cover

        you can go first to intimidate in pubs - avoid fight entirely

playing alone

        shouldn’t really be possible to do anything other than defend

                pubbers are bad so follow your dreams

        you can’t dictate positioning in fights when you’re on offensive - too slow

                must avoid combat until positioned well

                take poorly guarded routes - you can still win 1v1s and you’ve got sandvich/medic

                doubly important to be able to retreat