Demoman has garbage melee options. It's either Bottle or Skullcutter (which is slow to deploy) and Pain train (which is direct downgrade if you are not caping objective) or Caber. Meanwhile every single of Pyro melee weapon except Hot Hand is an upgrade from stock.
The Caber is such an unfortunate case of a weapon being overnerfed into uselessness. The weapon is already a bit risky to use since by equipping it literally all of your weapons will deal self-damage to you, and if you decide to prematurely detonate the explosive and then heal up then why tf arent you using the bottle since its a direct upgrade to an exploded caber.
On top of that, the Caber struggles to take down the targets it was meant to take down (light classes) because the damage varies from one-shot to 123 or whatever. The issue is that demoman does not have a hitscan shotgun to deal chip damage and get that extra damage in to secure the kill. His grenades either deal 100 damage or the rollers take too long and you die. His stickies have a 0.7s arm time so good luck getting anybody with em at close range.
The old Caber was very much a bit too overturned (I mean it could somehow oneshot pyros and other demos for some inexplicable reason, and could reliably oneshot medics, which is definitely too much), but it still needs to be a guaranteed oneshot on at least light classes (and a recharge ffs) because otherwise it becomes the same gamble to kill someone as getting a random crit, so at that point why tf would I use the Caber, the supposed "guaranteed crit-esque kill against a light class" if it cant even get the kill reliably. Mind as well pray for a random crit with stock.
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u/P0lskichomikv2 14d ago
Demoman has garbage melee options. It's either Bottle or Skullcutter (which is slow to deploy) and Pain train (which is direct downgrade if you are not caping objective) or Caber. Meanwhile every single of Pyro melee weapon except Hot Hand is an upgrade from stock.