Heavy, the iconic character of Team Fortress 2, is probably the largest and probably most dangerous class in the game. The big health pool and massive fire power from his trusty Minigun, the Heavy is no pushover. The Heavy's Minigun can inflict heavy damage at a high rate of fire, allowing him to mow down opposing babies, cowards, and teeny-men in seconds.

Heavy has the biggest health bar in the game. That allows him to take much more damage. On the other hand, the main weakness is that he is also the slowest class in the game. And this is making him the target for Spies and Snipers. Basically, Heavy is a very liniar class, also known as specialist, which means he can't fit in every situation. Mostly beacuse of his speed.

Let's get quicky over Heavy's stats.

Heavy's role is much more important than you might think. The ability to have tank on your team is incredible, with Medic's overheal, you can crush opponents like an egg. Heavy is useful on both Offense and Defense. As you can tell by his speed, the attacking may be harder. But luckily, there are teleporters in the game. So if you're playing Engineer and you have Heavy on your team, build one.

Remember, diffrent weapons can change your role.

• Minigun
  
• Natasha
  
• Sandwich
  
• Fist of Steel
  
• Gloves of Running Urgently

• Tomislav
  
• Second Banana
  
• Dalokohs Bar
  
• Family Business
  
• Shotgun
  
• Buffalo Steak Sandvich
  
• Eviction Notice

• Brass Beast
  
• Huo-Long Heater
  
• Panic Attack
  
• Warrior's Spirit
  
• Killing Gloves of Boxing

How Heavy should play on Defense
Understand that defensive play tends to emphasize more power to less mobility. You want to be able to stop attackers in their tracks with powerful onslaughts that may take time to prepare or reduce your own ability to chase.

How Heavy should play on Offense
In offense, these are the weapons you should use if you plan to be following the front lines. They allow you to stay in battle, but also give you some fast firepower in a pinch. Instead of sitting and eliminating, you charge and destroy. These typically include buffing yourself and allow more movement on quicker notice than others.

How Heavy should play in any situation
In most situations (Attack or Defense), you have to be around your team and being the core in the push (along side with the Medic). You will mostly use the stock primary and sightgrades including the glorious Sandwich.

The Heavy's main physical weakness is lack of speed in return for high firepower and defense. His other weaknesses are psychological: everyone will shoot at the huge Russian dude simply because he's the largest threat. In a middle of the fight, you have to know when it is a good time for retreat. Usually when you have 150-120 health, it is the best time for a health pack.
You have to learn the damage of your Miniguns, the amout of damage you can take, it will all come with a several games of Dustbowl.

There you go. That's the basics of Heavy: always know how to manage your health and ammo, and don't get caught away from your team.

As a heavy, you must be slow and deliberate in your movements. To get good at this, you must know the map well in addition to having "gamesense". We'll talk about gamesense later. Basically this allows the Heavy to stay where his enemies will be, not where they are actively attacking and thus catching him at a vulnerable point.

A properly positioned Heavy can cripple an entire team with nothing but a health kit, sandwich and some situational awareness. If you happen to get seperated from your team, don't waste your time and retreat, sure one Scout with pistol can't kill you but if you get face-to-face against just respawned enemy team, you won't be happy.
Heavy is the force to be reckoned with. Large amount of health and ammo at his disposal makes him the ultimate team carrier just by his position.

Heavy wants to avoid:

• Open spaces. Scouts and Snipers flourish here, and they are some huge problems for a slow Russian man.
  
• Blind corners. A coordinated assault can take down a Heavy once he is committed to jumping around the corner. You should always move around corners judiciously, because you may be overwhelmed on the other side and you will be unable to run. But on the bright side, you can surprise unprepared enemies from those corners. However you must know, what's behind them first.
  
• Any ambush point that's separated from your team. Although you can hit solitary enemies when they pass by, you will be dead meat if three or more players come around the corner; they can easily decimate you before you waddle away.

Heavy wants to be in:

• Tight places. Designed particularly as traps for Scouts and Snipers, they allow the Heavy to mow down enemies very easily because of the lack of bullet spread. Beware the way you came for Spy attacks, though.
  
• On the defensive end of blind corners. A heavy can be a powerful force of area denial when he stops an unaware team at the corner.

The most common and actually best Primary that Heavy has. His beloved Sasha has solid DPS without any slow speed downside. Reccomended for beginners, advanced players and expert players. Also I want to say that every primary has 200 ammo so I won't be mentioning this next time.

• Slows target on hit, scaling with distance
  
• 20% damage resistance when spun up and below 50% health
  
• -25% damage penalty
  
• 30% slower spin up time

This beauty takes down Heavy's DPS role and exchanges it for a more supportive role. The obvious upside and the real meat of this gun is that it can slow or even stun targets on hit. As you can see, this weapon was designed as the giant middle finger for scouts or rocket jumping Soldiers. You can protect yourself from Pyros or other classes when you have time to spin up. The smaller damage output doesn't even matter at this point beacuse it is support weapon. Also you can stun someone in the corner and beat him down.

• +20% damage bonus
  
• 20% damage resistance when spun up and below 50% health
  
• 50% slower spin up time
  
• 60% slower move speed while deployed

Definitely on the defensive end of the spectrum. Some of the players threw this into the garbage disposal beacuse of the amout of slowness that this weapon gives. And sure the slower speed also does increase when spinned. On the other hand, the 20% better damage can be really seen and it's really stronger than the stock.
But the slow spin-up allows enemies to get the drop on an unaware Brass Beast heavy and mow him down before he can react. It's also not good in prolonged firefights, because you can't dodge slow projectiles such as flares or rockets like your normally would. In open spaces, Snipers laugh at your 10% move speed and gun you down. It's still an excellent minigun for holding points with a little preparation involved.

• 20% faster spin up time
  
• 20% more accuracy
  
• No barrel spin sound
  
• -20% firing speed

Definitely emphasizing mobility and ambush tactics over straight-up damage and holding power, the Tomislav is a potent adversary that pairs well with the Gloves of Running Urgently. It gives the heavy the ability to strike from unexpected places, unseen and unheard. An ambushing Heavy is an almost certain death sentence. I love Tomislav so much due to it's changing playstyle. Slower firing speed means smaller amout of damage per second. However, Tomislav has better accuracy which means it can hit more bullets on longer distances.

• Casts a small ring of fire around the user while spun-up
  
• Additional four ammo consumed per second while spinning
  
• +25% more damage vs. burning players
  
• -10% damage penalty

Definitely a defensive minigun that should only be used if multiple Spies are on the opposing team and your team has a good defensive hold in the form of dispensers. The fire ring doesn't prevent Spies from backstabbing you, but if they gets closer, they can get pretty messed up.

The stock Shotgun is usually outclassed by the Family Business except when up-front firepower is needed vs. sustained shots. Both shotguns work relatively similarly: they should be pulled out when traversing tight areas where an ambush situation wouldn't allow you to spin up your minigun in time. They can also be used to heckle long-range classes without the mobility loss of the Minigun.
Unfortunately, every shotgun for Heavy and every other snack is massivly overshadowed by nothing else than Sandwich.

• +33% clip size
  
• 15% firing speed
  
• -15% damage penalty

The Family Business is extremely similar to the stock Shotgun, but should be used in situations where you need to stay in a fight and are out of minigun ammo. Strictly speaking, it shouldn't be used unless you're desperate / playing Fat Scout (the two are not so far from each other) because a situation where you're using your secondary gun is probably not a sustained firefight.

• +50% more pellets per shot
  
• Deploys 50% faster
  
• Has a fixed pattern (no random bullet spread)
  
• -20% damage penalty
  
• Successive shots become less accurate

An effective ambush weapon, players who chase a fleeing Heavy for a juicy pick are often in for a surprise.

• Heals all your health when eaten; eating takes 4 seconds
  
• Has a 30-second recharge time, or can be recharged with health packs
  
• Can be dropped as a medium health pack for your team

With such a large health pool, it can be difficult without Medic to stay alive. Many people call it the best Heavy secondary, and they aren't necessarily wrong. The Sandvich works well with a team or alone, since you can drop it as a health pack or heal yourself. Also equip Sandwich when you have a pocket Medic. He can give heals to you but with sandwich, you can do the same to him.

• Heals 200 health when eaten; eating takes 4 seconds
  
• Has a 10 second recharge time, or can be recharged with health packs
  
• Can be dropped as a small health pack for your team

If these stats sounds familliar to you then it means you are starring at the weaker version of Sandwich. Weaker? Not so... Second Banana works as a personal health pack which restores only 100 HP less than the Sandwich but unlike Sandwich, the Second Banana recharges twice as fast which means at the time you're eating it, you will have another one in a shot time. You can see that the Banana heals less health and you can throw less health. It is very intteresting sightgrade to the Sandwich.
Think like this: If you have a Medic, use Sandwich and if you don't have Medic, use Banana.

• Adds +50 max health for 30 seconds
  
• 10-second recharge time
  
• Can be dropped as a small health pack

Before Jungle Inferno, this was the secondary for the loner Heavies. But sice we got Banana, which is better in every way possible, the Dalokohs Bar can be used as a help in 1v1 Heavy battle, which we will talk in a moment.

• Gives a 35% speed bonus and mini-crits for 16 seconds
  
• User is restricted to melee weapons
  
• Can be dropped as a medium health pack
  
• Recharges about 30 seconds

The "who need bread?" description could be replaced "who needs minigun?"

This snack has 2 uses, one is the obvious way when you want to punch your enemies in their perfect teeth. The seconds use however is for rollouts. When you choose to have other melee than G.R.U or Eviction Notice. But the fact that you don't have the restoring health ability, the Buffalo Steak Sandwich still stays in the "meme weapons" group.

"Who needs big guns when you have raw steaks?"

These are often used by someone who have dreams of becoming a Saxton Hale, sadly this melee is one of the bad ones which means the "someone" will never be like Saxorn Hale.

• Critical hits for 5 seconds after kill
  
• 20% slower swing speed

KGB (gloves) can confer a nice bonus should you have to defend yourself in a melee fight. However, the Minigun's spin-up time makes the crits nearly irrelevant, so you should carry a shotgun with the KGB. But what are you doing in a melee fight if you have your potent close-range shotgun?

• When active, grants 30% faster speed movement
  
• -50% slower switch-from speed.
  
• Maximum health is drained while item is active at a rate of -10 per second, to a minimum of 100.

As you can see, the GRU have the ability to make Heavy fast like Engineer while equipped in exchange for his own health (Heavy's health, not Engineer's). This wouldn't be a problem if the drained health wouldn't recharge so slowly. Be aware of your health management even more when using this. You can throw yourself into a big disadvantage while using this.

• +30% damage bonus
  
• +50 health on kill
  
• +30% damage vulnerability while active

Heavy's melee weapon does 65 damage, Warrior's Spirit does 85 damage. That means you can kill Pyros, Demomans and Medics with two punches. As a small bonus, you get 50 hp when you kill someone with Warrior's Spirit. The problem is that you're taking 30% more damage when active. This downside sadly negates the two previously mentioned upsides. Warrior's Spirit can be also used as a combo with Buffalo Steak Sandwich for extra damage and speed.

• -40% damage from ranged sources while active
  
• +100% slower switch-from speed
  
• +100% damage vulnerability from melee sources while active
  
• -40% maximum overheal on wearer
  
• -40% health from healers on wearer

Definitely more of a weapon to pull out while traveling sightlines. The Fists of Steel are excellent protection from long-ranged picks. They can also be used to tank fire for an escape, but suffer in melee-on-melee combat thanks to the huge vulnerability. Also make sure that you enter the fight prepared beacuse the slower switch-from speed can be really big disadvantage sometimes.

• +40% faster swing speed
  
• 15% faster move speed while active
  
• Gain 3 second speed boost on hit
  
• 60% less damage
  
• Maximum health is drained while item is active at a rate of -5 per second, to a minimum of 100

The Eviction Notice has exactly the DPS of the stock Fists (assuming you land all your hits), but have a higher crit chance (as more hits = more crits) and can provide a heavy with a buff in melee combat. It depends on you if you try to use GRU or Eviction Notice for speed buff or rollout.

• Critical hit forces victim to laugh (stun)
  
• Always critical hit from behind
  
• Critical hits do no damage

An acceptable sidegrade. There's not a whole lot to say about it. Small secret (not so secret) stat is that if you go 1v1 melee duel with a Heavy, who's using Holiday Punch too, then every hit will cause enemy to laugh and vice versa.
Also there's a super advanced tactic that if you happen to force an enemy to laugh and you have medic, let the Medic kill / tauntkill the victim with Übersaw and therefore, increase the über.

There's a rule which says that Heavy is strong as his position. How to avoid hard attacks when you don't have the strong position? In this chapter, I would like to introduce you main counters that Heavy has. And how to proctect your fat well-muscled body.






The fact that Heavies are targets in Sniper's priority list makes you - as Heavy pretty helpless when you spot any in a long distance. Well, obviously the best act you can do to avoid heatshot is to don't peak that sightline again. But simply when you suddenly appear in a open battleground with no backup around. Please, if you see a Sniper, DO NOT spin up your barrel and start to shoot at him. Sure you can deal at max 3 damage to a Sniper while he can deal 450 damage to you.

How to avoid headshot then? Equip your Fists of Steel.
A fully charged headshot will do 270 damage to you while you have the Fists of Steel out - not enough to kill you in one shot even when not overhealed. Maintain a good health level when in open areas!
If you happen to not have Fists of Steel, solution to this situation is: remain mobile and aware, especially in open areas. Almost all maps with Sniper sightlines have some kind of cover within them, be it rocks, buildings or trees. Use this well.







Spy and Sniper is considered as the main Heavy counters. A Spy alone won't backstab awared Heavy. So think like every moment, there's a Spy behind you, beacuse one time, there will...
A Spy is capable of taking you down instantly should you become distracted and forget to check behind you, but otherwise you are one of the best classes at eliminating him from the battlefield, particularly if using Natascha. Advice that applies to other classes when dealing with spies really applies here.







For such a small baby man, he can do surprising damage to you, especially if you are unprepared, and dodge your shots very well. However, a Scout that does not know how to dodge properly will have a very difficult time doing anything to you, as your Minigun will shred him if he gets too close.

Solution to this is Natasha. Slowing him down will help you immensely, since it makes him useless.
If you're not using Natascha, your best hope is to remain ready for confrontation and improve your aim.







The worst thing Demoman can imagine is to have anyone in a short range, that doesn't mean you should punch the crap out of him when you see him! But if you spot a Demo, get a blind corner and wait for surprise. Watch out for stickies however, due to your limited movement, they can be a real trouble for you.

Speaking of trouble, the Demoknight is not one of the troubled classes (or subclasses if you want). If you spot a Demoknight before charging, you should be fine.







A Pyro will never win a direct fight with a Heavy if the Heavy is spun-up and focused on him, but given a second or more, will often win if he strafes around you. A charged-up Phlog Pyro is very capable of taking down a Heavy if he activates MMMPH close by; likewise with a Backburner Pyro.

The major danger a Pyro poses to a Heavy lies in the airblast. With the Heavy being so reliant on positioning. You can also get caught off guard by Dragon's Fury's fireballs.







Soldiers are really not a problem to you, although they do have a decent damage output. Without Medic or Buff Banner, Soldiers usually have about a 25% victory ratio against a competent Heavy in a 1v1 deathmatch fight.







Some of you might say that the Heavy versus Heavy is really boring, probably more boring than Pyro versus Pyro.
Instead, those people often forgets which requirements does Heavy needs to outdamage the opponent and win the deathmatch.

Several things that can turn the 1v1 Heavy battle:

• Usually wins the Heavy, who spins up faster, who has more health or who has ground advantage.
  
• If the enemy Heavy has a stronger source of healing, he will mow you down unless he's completly unaware of what's happening.
  
• Tomislav vs. Minigun: Tomislav wins at longer range, Minigun wins at short / medium range.
  
• Brass Beast vs. Minigun: Brass Beast, if spinned in time, almost always wins.
  
• Heavy, who's using any advantage snack / item has higher chance to win

Basically random criticals plays a big role, sadly no-one expects who gets them.

Believe it or not, other Heavies are often your largest threat on the battlefield. Depending on which gun you are using, and whether you have healing or not, you will be at an advantage or disadvantage to your counterpart.







The Medic is almost never a danger to you; his surprisingly deadly syringe gun can catch you off-guard if you are up close, but otherwise he is not an issue. When he heals an enemy, however, is when you should be wary. Demomen, other Heavies and Soldiers are all much more dangerous - and usually a losing proposition - if a Medic is on their tail. Be very wary.







The Engineer is a weakling in the face of your minigun, even if he has a sentry. Most sentries will go down quite quickly under your fire, especially if a medic is healing you. However, they can catch you off-guard if you are not careful, and a Wrangled sentry will usually win. Be careful, but not terrified.

Gamesense is especially important to the Heavy: most maps are designed to accommodate exactly this. If you follow the "main course" of a map (for example, a Payload track) there are multiple areas where a heavy can take a shortcut to intercept an enemy. If someone is caught off-guard by a Heavy that knows where they're going, they are almost guaranteed to be dead.

Use this to your advantage. This guide won't automatically grant you the ability to know this, but playing will. Take note of what you do while playing, and what enemies do against you, and you will develop gamesense.

Spinning before shooting is very important, not only it can increase your awarness, but without pre spin, your bullet spread will increase and your damage will decrease! Two disadvantages at once just beacuse you didn't held the mouse2 button.

Mostly, feed your Medic with your Sandwich. You can refill your massive health pool or you can help your teammates and throw them a medium health pack.

Did you know that if you spin your Sasha in air, you won't lose your momentum? Well, use it as your advantage, jump and spin, that way, you will get further to the enemy and therefore, lay more damage.

Don't rush to the chokepoints expecting like you will smash anything that moves, you're not mighty....you're just fat. And fat people play safely.

Thank you so much for reading and I hope you learnt something new here. Don't forget to rate this guide and write a comment, I read all of them and they really cheer me up.

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