TF2 is not competitive, never was and never will be. Balancing should never be done around this tiny minority that consists of not even 1% of the player-base, their formats and various half-measures and alterations to the base game. TF2 is casual, but that doesn't mean anything goes.

Balancing is done for the minority of the community (not to be confused with the comp minority) that actually understands it and is able to detect its flaws, find solutions and filter out the bad ones. The rest is content with whatever, as is evident by them happily consuming the slop Valve left to fester since 2017.

Everything is based on punishment and reward. For someone to get rewarded, someone else must get punished. An unfair punishment hurts more than a fair one and an unearned reward doesn't feel as good as an earned one. Achieving this is crucial and this is why we balance. What defies this idea of fair reward and punishment the most is cheating, and the net fun it brings is negative.

For this reason, the vast majority of mechanics which operate on randomness should be removed. Precisely none of them make this a game of imperfect information where you need to strategically take it into account. This isn't poker, this is a game of thousand constantly changing variables, and you can only see a few at a time, process even less, and you have to make split-second decisions all the time. You cannot account for the variance in shotgun damage because of random pellet spread, random crits, fall damage and so on and so forth.

Movement is crucial and is as important, if not more, than even the concept of cover. Most weapons are very hit or miss by design, short-medium range, a lot of them fire projectiles, and rockets even benefit from having high ground. This make dodging very effective and staying on the move integral for gameplay. There exist weapons and mechanics with the sole purpose of inhibiting movement. This mechanic cannot be done well as it is far too dependent on map geometry, tide of battle, affected class, affected player's skill level and many other things. Many bad compromises have been made for this purpose, and as such, movement inhibiting weapons should be removed.

Lingering effects are something that's been very poorly done. All DoT effects inhibit aiming, which has similar issues as inhibiting movement. The other effects are used pretty much exclusively for revealing spies. Spy is a weak class as is, and that lingering damage is easy enough to balance as direct damage, so the weight of presence of lingering effects should be heavily reduced.

What determines how good or viable some thing is is how it performs against other things of the same skill level and how it compares to its alternatives. A common faulty argument is that a weapon is good because a good player can use it effectively in a low-skill setting. The comparison to an alternative that has the most weight is with the alternative most seen used; when balancing a medic melee, you don't look at the bone saw, you look at the uber saw.

A crutch weapon is one that rewards more / punishes less bad players than good ones. Every other weapon is a crutch to some degree, and that is only an issue when taken to an extreme.

What differentiates a class shooter from a hero shooter is the number of characters. We all like TF2 as a class shooter, even though it's not far from a hero shooter with how many classes it has. Weapons have a similar effect to having more classes, and TF2 has a lot of weapons. Weapons should be unique and not blur class limits, and many fail at that.



For more specifics and example, go to Astyl's profile and look for the balance file (TF2 Rectified). If you see anything wrong or disagree, feel free to comment.