These are the situations where a lot of Soldiers think they should charge forward to start getting some actual kills, but my experience suggests it’s more effective to be content with scoring occasional, partial damage on a few people to build up your crit chance, which is when you start really causing carnage in the awkward, dangerous, sub-optimal situations you spend most of the game in.

Although maybe the change Alex Holland mentions will change this.

On the subject of Soldiers, not sure if everyone noticed a subtle change in the update notes – they no longer get a 40% damage reduction off their own rockets, except when rocket jumping. Presumably this was brought in to make bounced rockets nice and lethal, but it should also reduce the fruitless death that occurs when meeting a Soldier in a narrow corridor – at present he’ll just fire rockets spastically until you’re dead, then walk away with barely a scratch. I’m looking forward to seeing a lot more soldier-killed-self reports in the top right.

Soldier, though, I enjoy more the more I play him. He deals avoidable damage in survivable chunks, so the key to the whole class is staying alive long enough to build up a good crit-rate. Almost no-one playing him seems to realise this, or keep an eye on their health, so they die too frequently to ever become truly effective. If you play him cautiously, settling for damaging groups of enemies rather than securing kills, you ironically become a crit-spewing death factory that can rampage through the entire enemy team.

The other thing that makes him satisfying to play, for me, is that he has no nemesis. He’s a great Spy hunter, a great Heavy slayer, a great Sentry tackler, and Snipers tend to aim poorly if there’s a rocket coming towards them.

The only class I still can’t get into these days is the Soldier. He’s just so boring and difficult to play for me at the same time. I doubt I’ll ever give him a serious look until the inevitable unlocks. I have a similar feeling to the demoman actually – while they may be arguably the best all round classes, I find playing as them either too similar to other FPS in that unless you’re good, you’re terrible, and it always feels like other people playing as them are doing better than you.

However, Scouts hate Pyros, and there are going to be a hell of a lot of Pyros about. As such, I’d second Tom’s recommendation of the Medic – it’s a very easy class to get started and be useful with (although it’s also very deep when you get into it). The Engineer is a bit complicated for beginners, I think – it took me a while to understand the whole build/destruct/repair/metal stuff.

Because the classes are so different, there’s always one you can play with some success no matter what your skill level. The Medic is a great starting class, because you can be genuinely really useful to your team while hanging around and watching what’s going on, learning how the game works. It’ll be a particularly good class to play after today, because everyone’s going to be on fire all the time and you’re the only one who can put them out.

So you should be fine. I think an Engineer is the easiest to start with (you don’t even really have to know how to aim ;) )… pyro’s are pretty easy to play too… spies and demos are really fun.

Uni work is now over, and now I find myself intimidated out of even beginning with TF2. I envision servers rammed to the gills with people who have been playing for half a year, which coupled with my poor FPS skills generally would lead to frustration, torment and despair.

Am I right? Do people know of servers where the standard of play still has the endearingly amateurish quality I heard so much about in the first few weeks where no-one knew what they were doing?

That makes it significantly worse than the shotgun for everyday scrapping, but great for stirring up a hornet’s (or engineer’s) nest from a distance. Reload would be too slow to make it a consistently effective long-range weapon, thus not breaking the Pyro play style.

Imagine one-two combos with that and the Axtinguisher!