I hate Demomen. I HATE Demomen. With a capital HATE.

I have nothing against the black, scottish cyclops himself (or indeed, any black scottish people anywhere).The character makes me laugh out loud ("Bloody brilliant!" he spouts after blowing me up for the fifth time).

I hate the fact that everyone but me is good with him.

Every other Demoman, mostly on the enemy team, has what can only be described as skills. They litter the area with stickies to murder your ass before you walk out the spawn point, they can destroy Sentries in the blink of an eye, and they make capturing a point virtually impossible. This is all well and good, and kudos to them for mastering such a tricky class, but it really sucks when, in Dustbowl, the entire team of jerkwads spawn camp and put sentries and stickies down, then laugh as the reds die again and again, until one non-jerk spy caps the control point, wondering what all the fuss is about. Goddamn it, you could at least have the courtesy to attempt to go capture it, rather than stand there and yell "Kaboom" over and over again. The smiley face isn't funny any more. Stop it.

And how did we get into that position? Because there's at least three good Demomen on that team, who just happen to be jerks.

Good Demomen are skilled. They need to learn to aim for toffee, because the grenades aren't going to corteously fly to their targets. They've got to have a damn A-level in Physics to be effective with the bog-standard Grenade Launcher. They're not good at running away, but a good Demoman won't have to run away if he knows how to use his weapons. Sadly, I was brought up on Metroid Prime, Halo and Timesplitters Future Perfect, where either the lasers are too big and fat to require much aiming, or, in Metroid Prime's case, you don't need to aim, and it's a question of dodging and resilience, which you'll win most of the time, so aiming isn't my strong point. Being on the console version doesn't help, but I'd rather that game's easier access than the freaking "Let's put the commands everywhere on the keyboard to piss the user off" PC philosphy. My computer can't run TF2, anyway, so shut up.

So when I play Demoman, it's less of a question of doing my job, and seeing if I can kill at least one person before I cop it. Most of the time, no. So, playing mostly as every other class, I now foster a hate for Demomen.

My biggest issue is the class' arsenal, or te redundancy of it. The Sticky Launcher does everything the Grenade Launcher does, but better, which is stupid. It's his secondary weapon, for Pete's sake! Does it look like you can hold 40-something grenades in there? He just pulls a lever to magic new ones in! He can shoot it as far as he wants! It needs fixing, because right now, there's no need for the Grenade Launcher.

There are several ways to fix it. Lowering the clip size, making the Grenade Launcher more powerful or have more ammo, lowering the amount of stickies a single Demoman can have out, etc. I'd go for the last one, because you only need about two grenades to kill someone as it is, so eight is overkill.

I doubt Valve will read this, but hopefully, when the Demoman unlocks come around, something will be done to make me, and probably others, hate the Demoman less. Untill then, I'll just have to put up with all the kaboom.

Oh, and as for "I Has a Medic" syndrome? Goes like this:

1. Play as Medic.
2. Find Soldier or Heavy.
3. Buff him.
4. Watch as, whilst still healing, Soldier/Heavy attempts to deal with Level Three Sentry being babysat by Engineer.
5. Watch as said Soldier/Heavy dies.
6. Run off to find someone who isn't as stupid, ignoring hopeful cries of Medic from respawned moron/offer self to enemy Pyro as an atonement for failing in your Medicly duties.
   

Please, don't be stupid. Play as you would normally, then charge in when you get an uber. Not before.