Any speculation on what the horrible pyro achievements are going to be?

By definition most of them will involve burning people and are therefore wonderful and not horrible

a quick question about the achievements involving "friends", do ppl have to be on your friend list to count or do group lists like GFF count? this might have been mentioned before but I missed it

Sparhawke I know they have to be on your friends list, but I'm not sure if they have to be on your list before you join the server if you get what I mean.

As for my two cents on the Pyro achievements, I'm willing to bet money unlike the medic that they will involve every other class in some shape or form. Burning engineer buildings to death, some kind of teamed up one with the medic and I would be amazed if there wasn't some kind of Pyro vs Pyro achievement since that scenario makes their main weapon much harder to use.

Well you got to have some achievements which is going to use all the weapons at the classes' disposal and then some that are going to be just crazy, like "Kill X amount of people with the axe", "Burn 3 pyros without dying", "Burn 50 spies in disguise", etc.

This is actually pretty easy and will only get easier during the initial rush of initiate pyrotards. Chop chop whoosh.

Well it was an example. It would probably be like 5, which still doesn't seem much. =p

Btw, did you make your signature, with free hugs and all? :p

Alas no, I uninstalled GMod before the fingerposing for TF2 came in and haven't got around to putting it back yet.

Pyro with what looks like a flaregun in Meet The Sniper, this is going to be great.

Btw. Meet the Sniper character vid released, love these vids :)
Gametrailers.com - Team Fortress 2 - Meet The Sniper Trailer HD

At around 1:16, you can see one of the new Pyro weapons. A flare gun perhaps?

Also, the achievement names + images have been leaked:

TF2 Pyro Achievement List Leaks - Shacknews - PC Games, PlayStation, Xbox 360 and Wii video game news, previews and downloads

Those 1000/500 scare me. Burn 1000 enemies? =/ Burn 500 of your friends!?

Full Pyro preview's out: Pyro Update

3 unlockables, a flat buff for the default flamethrower, and (implicitly) damage from taunts

I am liking that compressed air blast idea, it'd surely help pyros against soldiers and being able to push people apart to break ubercharges? just nice... but I'd really love they'd relase these in batches so people don't go whoring that one class all along.

But people didn't end up whoring Medic in the long run. Things'll be sketchy for a week or two, but for the long-term health of the game it's much better to put out frequent, smaller patches. Having a lot of pyros on a server is a much better problem than waiting another 3 months for Valve to balance two loadouts at once.

Everything about this update sounds pretty awesome. I've never played Fastlane, but Turbine is one of my favorite maps. I'm not sure whether I'll end up using the air compressor or the backburner (probably the air compressor), but both look pretty good.

Pyro is one of my most played classes, and those achievements seem to be right at a good amount of challenge. There seem to be a handful that pretty much require cooperation from enemies, though.

Oh god, this is going to be just like in the star wars games when my friends and I would shoot a rocket and then force push it back and forth.

If this can also push stickies and grenades I could seriously see Pyros getting a lot more impressive.

That second upgraded weapon also looks sweet enough that I might join one of those lame achievement servers to get the Pyro unlocks (I'm still three or four away from getting the Kritzkrieg. :().

I like most of these Pyro achievements more than the medic ones, they seem to be a lot more reasonable on average. I also like how most of them are cumulative things instead of stuff that doesn't actually happen within normal gameplay. Those Lumberjack ones are going to be really lame, though. Getting six kills in a single life as a pyro is hard enough.

Also, lol, 1,000,000 health is equivalent to killing over 2000 fully healed heavies.

Great update especially the new flamethrowers as already said. It not only gives them a whole new method of play but also once you have both of the guns you pretty much still have the option to play in the classic style too.

As for the achievements once again some of them are never going to happen in normal play conditions, but at least they're better then the medic ones. You could say it's like they want players to use achievement servers or something x.x best examples from that list being, BarbeQueQ, OMGWTFBBQ and Got A Light? Some of the others are tough, but at least they might actually happen in a normal match.

For those who don't know, it's not like the Medic Achievements, where you have to obtain 12, 24, and 36 respectively for each milestone. It's now 15, 20, and 25, meaning you can skip up to 10 ridiculous achievements and still have all three new weapons. This is great since I doubt I'll ever be able to deal 1 million damage without farming it. Now, we can actually do achievements and feel something came out of it.

I'm very excited just to try out the new push back functionality of the Pyro. I don't play Pyro enough to have a full appreciation of what this may mean, but I can see myself getting more into it now, not just because of the achievements (I promise!) but for the fact that the push back seems to address one of the Pyro's main weak points, which was the long range game.

Could a Pyro possibly be quick enough to push that ground rocket back in a soldier's face? And if this thing lets me push around stickies on the ground, then Pyros will be ridiculously invaluable now on Payload and CP maps. I guess we'll have to wait and see tomorrow during Pyro Fest 2008.

Haha, just watched the sniper video. Great! I thought the double-headshot was a little over the top with the demoman, but the opening was possibly the best thing ever. Also, saw this comment on the page and it seems quite possible!

Edit: And, of course, for anyone that hasn't seen Team Roomba's pyro video, you need to now: TEAM ROOMBA PRESENTS: Meet the Pyro on Vimeo

Thing is, the pushback also says opponents as well. So seeing an uber-rush with a pyro, and then at the end of that, compression air blast in the group = Chaos. :D

I honestly don't get why everyone wants this Hunted thing back so much. I haven't played it myself but from what I can put together it's more or less like Payload except the cart is a useless little man who dies if you give him a cross look, on top of being player-controlled for some godawful reason. Who the hell's going to want to play the empty suit in a game where you can't even get a medic half the time?

VIP maps were good in CS since the VIP was able to get a pistol.

I remember spending a ton of time on Hunted back in TFC days, and they were actually able to make it a decent percentage of times. I think it will be a lot more difficult with Ubercharges now, since the offense can just uber up two guys and find the VIP to slaughter him. I think it might be best if there's some, like, "No uber" area around the VIP or he gets some ability to remove all ubercharges (friendly and foe), otherwise it would be a bit too unbalanced.

Edit: I was also thinking, might a pyro be able to Air Pressure Jump now with their ability?

Timing and practical issues of being next to a soldier as he rocket jumps aside, no, I don't think this works.

A) Sounds like the compressor pushes the rocket in the direction you're aiming, so it would likely just hit the ground nearby.
B) You would also push the soldier with the compressor.

And you do know that any gun can push stickies now, right?

No. Designer Robin Walker says they experimented with this, but found it wasn't as fun as it sounded. They tried relegating it to an unlockable weapon, but then players got confused about what the air-blast could and couldn't do.

Everyone's running around being pyro (literally, my entire team), I'm working on my medic achievements finally. In one game alone I'm like halfway through a couple and almost have my burn ward achievement.

True, but aside from other stickies and rockets, the other weapons aren't really very effective when it comes to spam. The shotguns can only move one at a time usually. In addition, a demoman may not want to use one sticky to move others if he's guarding another point with his stickies and a soldier may not want to waste time reloading a rocket after shooting one at a bunch of stickies.

The compression blast seems to be useful since it's relatively quick, not *too* much cost of ammo, although I guess a pyro would have to be daring enough to get up close to the stickies. In any case, I haven't really tested out its effectiveness in this regard, since everyone and their mother is playing pyro right now.

EDIT: Bah, not as great as I hoped I guess. Looks like the spread isn't that big (makes sense) so you're pretty much only pushing one sticky at a time still. However, since we had 6 pyros doing it at one point, we guarded the area right after CP1 in Stage 3 of Dustbowl (the little open raised area) pretty well for much longer than we should've, bouncing away stickies from the SGs.