here's a good way to categorize the medic's mediguns:

Uber: overheal the frontlines. Pop uber on a good defense crusher (demoman, heavy, whatever the situation calls for). Can't go wrong with the nice vanilla flavoring. Tends to favor pocketing, which unfortunately there's too many medics who let the team suffer for a personal score boost by doin that.

kritzkrieg: great when paired with another ubermedic to add extra oomph to a push. Falls short in effectiveness when the only medic is a kritz medic.

Quick Fix: the team player. Not really a niche medi-gun. Get your teammates fixed up quick. Damn great for latching onto a scout to get to the frontlines faster. Again, best paired with an ubermedic.

Played long enough to get the Direct Hit via achivements/milestones. I liked it, but crafted a Black Box out of it instead and now that's practically glued to me. Also got an Equalizer and Buff Banner from achivements. The former is now permanently my melee weapon, but I haven't even touched the latter yet due to two encounters with a Pyro.

Brief explanation: Tangled with a Pyro, ate my own rockets twice. Tangled with that same Pyro again, had him on the ropes, then he backed up against a wall and stopped moving. So I switched to my shotgun and finished him off instead. That got a laugh from him—I think he was expecting me to not have learned my lesson there.

Also broke down and spent a bit of money on keys because two of the items I picked up were crates and I really just wanted them out of the way. Got Natascha out of one of them which lead me to playing the Heavy more often.

And then the random drops dried up and I checked into that, only to find out that they won't start coming in again until tomorrow at 2:00 PM. Lame.

Finally, branched out onto servers that played things *other* than Capture the Flag. Specifically, I started trying Payload. I prefer being on the Attacking side, for one reason: Riding the payload is fun as hell, even if it's probably a very bad idea. Sometimes I just can't help myself. =/

Payload is one of those nice modes that works well for Brass Beast Heavies, since if you're attacking there's not much reason to run ahead of the cart. Combine that with the ammo resupply and you can basically do a perma-fire all the way to the goal if you have to.

EDIT: I recently got a Reserve Shooter as a random drop but I can't get myself to use it properly. I know this is supposed to be good for enemies launched by rockets and also enemy Scouts, but I always find it easier just to fire another rocket at my immediate threat. It also annoys me how this basically becomes the frontier justice without the crits if you can't react fast enough (if there was a soldier equivalent of the degreaser then I would probably use it more.)

I think it's more to dissuade a solly from rocket jumping in without uber. If you're on spire, and you see a soldier about to take you on, those mini crits hurt a lot more when he's trying to come and get to you.

I actually have a newfound love for shotgunning as a soldier. It's great for pickin off squirrely bastard scouts that hop around constantly. Hell, anyone that jumps/falls/airblasted/etc. is prey for mini-crits.

Carried over from the Steam thread. I'll start with CTF maps.

2fort: Blech. Always has a sniperfest on the balconies, one of which who will usually be good enough to asplode your head if you so much as scout jump across a doorway. Often also has an engineerfest which requires multiple ubers to push through each set of sentries (one set at the doorway covering both access doors to the basement, one set at the intel), and more likely than not the vengeful enemy team will gib you after picking up the intel. And due to the close proximity of the spawn, those L3 sentries will be back up already by the time you get back to where you dropped the intel. Horrible.

Double Cross: Boringineers that dump sentries in the intel room are also boring, but this has a lot of potential access routes, each with their own respective dangers. So I like it, even if quite a lot of people I know hate it. The top bridge usually has the heavy battles and snipers taking potshots from the balconies, but enterprising scouts, soldiers and demomen can jump over to those balconies and simultaneously have a lowtraffic access to the intel. The bottom bridge is frequented more by classes trying to be sneaky, as well as chasm-happy Pyros, but if you get through to the enemy basement, you can set up a good forward engie nest there or make a run to the intel from whichever direction, which usually isn't covered by a sentry.

Sawmill: Can't really offer much opinion on this one as I haven't played it much. Sentries don't seem to be very effective here as you can easily outrange them, while the ones dumped in the intel room are easy to take out with corner explosives/ubercharge. All access routes have fairly high traffic though, so you'll be in for a big fight wherever you go. Like every version of Sawmill, the saws are endless entertainment.

Turbine: Most hated CTF map. And yet just about everybody I know loves it to pieces, and actually pushed for a 24/7 Turbine map on the servers I frequent. Which replaced one of the normal rotation servers. :argh:
This is -always- an engiefest. They'll camp in the intel room and the main access to the intel room, and be tricky to clear out without simultaneous ubers. The other access routes are also impractical - the vent is narrow and often has Huntsman snipers/heavies/demos/pyros, and the other route goes right by the spawn. And none grant a good angle on the usual 2+ sentries in the intel room.
If one team's better than the other, their sentries will be moved up into the middle, leaving the other team stuck in their tunnels with their own sentry spam. Horrible, boring, leads to explosive spamfests. And people derive enjoyment from this. :wtf:

Well: Also haven't played this one in ages. I really can't remember much about it, short of the usual Well scenarios in the team buildings. The second spawn door being one-way only should alleviate any issues with the two doors having too much sentries/spam to muscle through. The intel room and associated sentries shouldn't be too hard to assault if you can group up at the roof access area, or even set up a forward engie nest there. I don't think you can use the waterways to sneak through the middle though, like the CP variant, due to the lack of a middle building.

2fort is great, my only issue is when half of both teams go defensive engie (it gets bad enough when you have 3 sentries on intel, with on that's wrangled so it can randomly spycheck the place.)

But there are many great ways to take advantage of the place (in the water a sentry is hard to spot and harder to avoid) and you get reasonably quick access to the place (I've started to master the rocket jump and boy you can mess up their spawn if you fire a crocket from where they least expect it.)

2fort is TERRIBLE. Part of it's due to the fact that the intel is in the most sentry-campable room this side of Turbine, and part of it's because of the infinite sniper wars taking place at all times.

Seriously, snipers just ruin 2fort. On any given day you'll have at least 25% of your team wasted on a class that will do little aside from neutralizing the same class on the opposite team. But then again, if you don't have enough snipers on your team, then you won't be able to get through because the only route that bypasses the enemy snipers (ie, the tunnels) actually alerts the other team to your presence because the splashes you make can be heard from either spawn.

Turbine is pretty terrible too, I'll admit. I like it a little more than 2fort because at least the "no man's land" area isn't sniper paradise, but it's just as limited in its approaches - you have one obvious tunnel, one vent shaft (that ALWAYS has other players coming through) and one route past the enemy spawn.

I <3 Doublecross though especially now that the scout has the Atomizer. If the intel's unguarded you can cap it in something like 30 seconds flat.

I jumped into playing Medic yesterday since the random drop system gave me two syringe guns. So far it's actually kinda fun, though my mouse is old and busted so I have to click repeatedly to actually heal people sometimes.

This brings the number of classes I've played for any serious amount of time to about five. I've barely touched on Scout, played Sniper for all of twelve seconds, and have yet to even think of trying Engie or Spy. I should rectify that—I started playing Pyro and Medic solely because of random drops favoring them, so why not Spy (I've gotten multiple pistols, one dagger, and a spy watch so far)?