Why the Heavy is a terrible class - part 1

The Heavy. He typically flies under the radar of most people when it comes to balance. He rarely gets used in 6v6 so some people think he is underpowered. Yet, those who have been playing for a while know that few things can win a 12v12 harder than multiple heavies on the same team.

So you might be asking, who's viewpoint is correct? Is the heavy overpowered or underpowered? Where does the heavy store all those sandviches? The correct answer is none of the above because the Heavy is terrible game design and here's one reason why.

A Graph

Range is arbitrary from 1 to 4 representing short to long ranges and is basically the range at which a class is best at dealing damage and speed includes stuff like rocket jumping. For example, the scout is fast as heck and deals damage best while he is right next to someone.

The red line is what I call the combat class line, combat classes being classes whose only way to interact with the game being trying to kill people. If you take your two most outlying combat classes and draw a line between them, it should slope downward and every other combat class should be at least somewhere near it. Why? Because the line creates a what I call 'zone based specialization'.

How does zone based specialization work? Imagine you have two classes, the soldier and the scout. The soldier is slower than the scout but deals damage at a mediumish range, so if he is engaging properly he can move himself to an ideal position before the scout can close the distance and kill him. Meanwhile the scout is so fast no other class can catch up to him, so if the scout wants to engage a soldier class he must first make his way through his opponent's ideal range to get into his ideal range, which is done by skillful players by waiting until the soldier is in a disadvantageous position or by waiting until the soldier is preoccupied. This creates a balance between a class having range, and a class being able to choose where the engagement will happen.


The heavy, by being a combat class not on the combat class line, can't choose where to fight and doesn't have range advantage either. So, he must now be balanced in a completely different way, which means that he is going to be a problem for designing anything from new maps to new weapons as he will create large anomalies, such as being the least used combat class in 6v6 and being crazy good in 12v12.