Let's start by talking about the sort of mindset a Pybro needs to have in order to maximize his effectiveness and synergy with the Engineer. First of all, a Pybro needs to understand that the nest, and the safety of the engineer come before doing anything else. Keeping the sentry gun safe, and making sure there is an engineer present in order to repair damaged buildings within the nest is vital to your success as a Pybro.

NOT
- Chasing off people who peak the sentry.
- Chasing after spies who have obviously already made a successful getaway.
- Dying in a 1v1 away from the nest, allowing the enemy team to roll over a nest as though as if you were never there in the first place.
- Prioritizing frags over the safety of your engineer.
- Running off, far away from the nest in general.
- Not being there, or being dead, when you are needed by your engineer the most.

As a Pybro, you will by default be playing defensively. By far, the most useful trait of a Pybro is patience and being alert, ready to spring like a trap on an enemy assault on the nest or gun. Pybro is a defensive sub-class of Pyro and is most helpful and supportive right next to the engineer, or sitting behind a sentry gun in the safety of the nest. You have to be there when you are needed, and if you get distracted or bored, or start chasing after people, you won't be there when you need to kill the spy, or when you need to destroy stickies or reflect spam, or disrupt an ubercharge. So fair warning, I advocate for a very boring, very patient and relaxed Pybro play style, that is centered around being as useful to the Engineer as possible. If you feel like doing any of the above, don't be a Pybro. PLEASE. It's infuriating to see your Pybro run off, die and then immediately get all of your buildings sapped the moment he's gone or looking in the other direction. The way I see Pybro is like this; 99% of the time Pybro is sitting idly by, maybe extinguishing teammates if he see's them in trouble, lighting up huntsman arrows etc and the rest of that %, that 1 % the Pybro is required to display short bursts of absolute and unimaginable skill. The enemy spy, demo and medics are just waiting, waiting patiently for the moment you're dead, for the moment you aren't there to make a decisive strike. So you have to be doing the same thing they are; waiting patiently for the next coordinated assault on the gun. I can't stress that enough.

A Pybro can;

- Remove sappers from friendly buildings.
- Clear entire areas of spy prescence.
- Reveal cloaked spies.
- Reveal disguised spies.
- Destroy enemy stickies with the Scorch Shot and Pyros assortment of Shotguns.
- Reflect enemy projectiles away from friendly buildings and most notably away from, The Sentruh Gun with airblast.
- Disorient, disrupt, ambush and seperate, enemy uber pushes with the Airblast.
- Deny a non-medic assisted zerg push with the gas passer.
- Utilize the detonator/scorch shots AOE flare explosion radius to punish players attempting to peak the sentry gun.

Of course, this depending on the loadout the Pybro goes with.

Pybro is a defense oriented sub-class of Pyro focused on the supportive aspects of the Pyro class. Utilizing airblast to extinguish fellow teammates, using The Homewrecker to get rid of sappers. Lighting up Huntsman arrows, punishing enemies that peak the sentry gun, etc. Pybro was popularized with the release of The Homewrecker.

Combating Spies

Your first duty as a Pybro is to be as attentive as possible to the possibility of enemy frenchmen invading and destroying your friendly, coveted, nest. Which you should hold above all else.

Stick around the engineer's nest, and spycheck EVERYONE. Get into the habit of puffing at every single moving thing you see. If you can deny the spy the ability to even get close to your sentry gun in the first place, you won't have to use your homewrecker to begin with. If a spy manages to sap the sentry gun and your engineer is present, resist the urge to smack the sapper immediately. The first thing you need to do is kill the Spy sapping the sentry gun. Your Engineer will snap right to getting the sapper off the gun or any other friendly building that might be targeted by the Spy, who has unlimited uses of the sapper and no cooldown. This is why you can't ignore the spy and go straight for the sapper. By all means, if the spy has already been dealt with, smack the sapper off and get the sentry gun up and running again as fast as possible.
Puff your flamethrower around whereever you think the spies might be. Spies have areas around maps that they tend to hide around in. And could be anywhere, so regularly spycheck the general area for spies regularly. This gives you something to do when nothing much is happening as well. So it keeps you busy. If you slip up on this at any time, a spy could easily capitlize on this and disable a sentry gun to assist a coordinated enemy push.

Make this a habit so you don't slip up, and spies won't be a problem for you or your engineer ever again.

















Handling peakers

There will be a regular stream of players attempting to chip away at the sentry gun, your engineer may not have the skill/ability to handle them all by himself, and may resort to simply healing the gun or coming out of the nest and putting themselves in danger. This isn't a desirable outcome as peakers mixed with uber pushes or sticky pushes will wipe out the nest very quickly, regardless of how god-like you are as a Pybro. You're going to want to make sure that an uber push or a sticky push is a more isolated incident by handling peakers. How? You might ask, well, you have 2 secondary weapons that make this a responsibility of yours as a Pybro. The Detonator and The Scorch Shot. Which allow you to reach out and touch enemies whilst their behind corners, or behind cover, etc, without putting yourself in too much danger. You'll set them on fire and if they don't run off to recover and more than likely be dealt with by someone else, they will die by your hands or the sentry gun. Your added DPS to people attempting to peak the sentry gun and chip away at it's health will likely result in their demise.

But of course, you aren't only dealing with players who attempt to peak the sentry gun with hitscan, you at any point in time may be expected to put on your pro pyro goggles and utilize your airblast to it's fullest extent. Any projectile in the game may be thrown at your nest, which is your job to protect at ALL costs. If you don't have your airblast game sorted out, you will be a terrible Pybro and be wasting a slot on your teams defensive roster. Sit by the sentry gun, and make sure it is unaffected by enemy projectiles, rockets, pills, arrows, crossbow bolts, jarate, milk, being thrown into the nest, there are dozens of things that you need to learn how to reflect in order for you to be an effective pybro it's mind boggling. Be prepared to put your life on the line in order to keep the sentry gun functional. If you mitigate even half of the damage that projectiles would have done to the sentry gun, that may be the difference between your engineer being able to keep the sentry alive, and the sentry gun dying.

A combination of the above will be essential to your success as Pybro.

Combating Demomen

And so we come to yet another massive threat to the texan stronghold. Sticky pushes are an underrated threat to engineer nests that not too many people understand comprehensively. It takes just 2-3 successful stickies to instantly destroy a sentry gun. You've got to either destroy those before the demoman gets a chance to detonate them, or airblast them away from the gun before the demo gets a chance to detonate them. Demomen may also resort to pills during this period as well, which 3 direct hits = dead sentry.




A single demoman can wipe a sentry blindingly fast, his projectiles have arc which can be abused around angles to allow him to safely destroy a sentry gun. And around certain areas, he may have to resort to quickly peaking the gun in order to properly place his stickies or pills. Handle the demoman like you would any other peaker but emphasize on airblasting and destroying stickies. The Scorch Shot can destroy stickies as well as punish people around corners who are trying to peak the sentry gun. Shotguns work great at destroying stickies as well. They take time to arm in most cases and if you can't airblast them away, destroy them as expediently as you can. Reflecting pills back at the demo, burning him with the scorch shot / detonator and giving him constant fire ticks and punishing him for trying to attack the sentry gun in the safest ways possible are vital to dealing with demo's as a threat.

If you chase the demo for an elongated period, it's fairly likely that you'll get sticky trapped and die. The nest would follow you soon after, so cautiously deal with demomen. You may be forced to fight him in order to save the nest so have your airblasting and shotgun / scorch shot aim sorted out before attempting to save nests from these 1 eyed scottish monstrosities.

Combating Ubercharge

The only class that can actually effect the uber after it's been activated is the Pyro. The Pyro's only option is to airblast the medic pair away from the nest, long enough for the ubers duration to be depleted, at least to the extent that it depletes before the ubered pair manages to destroy the sentry gun. Wasting as much of the medic's precious uber charge as possible should be very high on your list of priorities as a Pybro. If you die attempting this, this is a valiant death as a Pybro and it is a valuable way to spend your Pybro's life. In fact, the most difficult duty to uphold as the Pybro is denying uber. This is that 1% of time where you have to display the largest amount of raw undisputed skill.

If possible, seperate the pair and keep the medic away from his patient for as long as possible, so that the uber runs out and can no longer roll through the sentry gun. Alternatively, if the class that is currently being ubered is a projectile class, if you have the mechanical timing and skill necessary, you may be able to more easily deal with projectiles as opposed to hitscan. Although an enemy soldier could switch to his shotgun at any time. Etc. You want to eat up as much of the uber as possible.


Other Responsibilities

With your primary weapon, you can light huntsman arrows on fire before the sniper utilizing them runs off to the battlefield to get some work done on the enemy team. This doesn't take much ammo or time, and it buffs your snipers first shot with his bow. It can mean the difference between getting a frag and not getting one for your huntsman sniper. It's not really super important but it's nice. I mean, you are a PyBRO afterall, right? Be a bro.

Extinguish teammates, like, if you see a teammate about to die around your defensive area, around the nest, make sure to airblast him if possible, as long as it doesn't put the nest in danger for you to do so. There is no reason not to. Be a bro.

Only some pyro unlocks should be considered for pybroing, in my opinion. I'm pretty militant about some of these so forgive me if I sound ridiculous. Allot of my choices for my preferred loadout have to do with my strategies in assisting the Engineer as much as possible in the above section of this guide.

Primaries Let's start with the primaries, or more let's start with why you shouldn't be using any of them except for stock; and my arguments for why that is the case.

As you can see if you've read the earlier portions of this guide, there is an incessant need for Pyro to airblast consistently and constantly. Rules out all of these;



Why the degreaser?!?!? You might ask. Feel free to keep using the degreaser if you can consistently airblast, but the stock flamethrower does allow you two more airblasts than the degreaser counting from full ammo. Meaning, if you can consistently airblast every projectile sent at you, you have 2 more projectiles you can airblast as opposed to 2 less. That's a big deal, as 2 pills taking into consideration other forms of damage a sentry might be taking at the time could mean a dead sentry gun. I prefer the primary with the most airblasts available to me because airblasting is an essential mechanical skill that Pybro's have to build up in order to improve.

The dragons fury is very gimped when it comes to it's airblast, the backburner has a very low number of plausible airblasts, the phlog can't airblast AT ALL. Airblasting is essential to protect the sentry gun and the nest, it might be one of the most vital abilities that the Pybro brings to the table. It makes the sentry gun many times more survivable.

Stock has the most independent airblasts available at any given time and because of how much I stress airblasting as a vital Pybro skill, I recommend stock over any other primary.

Secondaries The Pybro's secondary needs to destroy stickies, help with enemies trying to take down the sentry gun, that the sentry itself may not be able to deal with very easily. Which is why I recommend all of these secondaries here.



For what I suggest above the others, it's gonna have to be The Scorch Shot, and let me tell you why. When comparing the Scorch Shot to the other two flareguns, we have to take into consideration that, the only two flareguns which can reach around corners and chokes are the detonator and the scorch shot. The detonator takes a lot of skill to use, IMO. And that doesn't make it nearly as accesible as the Scorch Shot, there is no timing when it comes to getting stickies off the gun with the Scorch Shot. It's effortless. The Scorch Shot destroys stickies and punish's people trying to peak the sentry gun. Pyro has an assortment of shotguns that can destroy stickies which allow them to fill a vital role for handling Demo's.

The Gas Passer stands alone and I leave that up to your preference, a non medic assisted push can be denied, or delayed with the Gas passer if used correctly and I would consider that pretty strong if you wanted to stop an unsually big rush that would have otherwise contained far too many projectiles and enemies for you and the sentry gun to normally handle. Just remember you are sacrificing a lot for that ability. Take that for what it is, I guess.

All of those circled work but I don't personally believe them to be the best. The Scorch Shot is the right balance of what I think the Pybro needs to fulfill his duties in protecting the nest responsibily. If you prefer shotguns, feel free, if you prefer that to the AOE of the flareguns, that's great, that probably means you can hit fat meatshots better than me. If you're really good with the detonator and you don't care about extra knockback, use that instead of the scorch shot. I think it's really up to preferance between the two and it depends on skill.

Melee

This is pretty straightfoward, if your nest is situated in a place with water, or you are working in coordination with a milk man scout or jarate sniper, you would use the neon annihilator. IF you're in ANY other situation you use the glorious Homewrecker.

Mechanical skills that you'll need to work on.

- Understanding flaregun projectile mechanics and getting a feel for the projectile velocity and arc, hitting consistently with said projectile repeatedly.

- Airblast timing and the various projectiles related to airblasting, as each projectile travels at different velocities, learning how to airblast each one on a dime will improve your airblasting ability.

- Shotgun aim, as the shotgun is a hitscan weapon being able to reliably aim it is tantamount to using it at optimum ranges.

- Gamesense, positioning, map knowledge, etc. Also goes along with when to use the gas passer, understanding how the game is going. As the gas passer has a long cooldown period, if you don't use it at just the right time, it's useless. You might as well have no seconary equipped if you can't use it at the right time. It's sort of like an uber, IMO. There are right and wrong times to use it and that requires good game sense.

It should be obvious, but no matter what class you are, adjusting to the unique movement speed of Pyro and learning to dodge projectiles and mastering movement are key to improving survivability and your effectiveness as a Pybro.

There are downloadable training maps and servers to help you learn how to do most all of these things. I suggest you check them out.

In conclusion, Pybro can be an incredibly powerful asset to your engineer but it requires dedication, patience and large amounts of mechanical skill when the time finally comes, and the nest is being assaulted. Thanks for reading!