This is not meant to be a fanfic, really, just a story about how I chose my favorite and most played class. They are different.
Short backstory:
On December 25th, 2004, I was skiing. There was a thin layer of snow above ice because the previous day was warm and it snowed during the night. Long story short, skipping all the fuzzy details, I had a skiing accident from going too fast and not being able to properly turn. The results were that a rock broke my skull, went into my brain, and damaged the part of it that controlled my right hand. To this day I have motor control issues with that hand.
Incapabilities:
Fast forward 6 years, 7 months, and 7 days, it is August 2nd, 2011. I had just downloaded Team Fortress 2. I was after the large F2P wave hit, so I knew nothing about the game other than the abilities of each class (told to me by a friend), and all the people that were bad at the game when it became free actually knew something. The only gameplay I had ever seen was the BlueXephos announcement video that it was free. In other words, I was as bad as the original F2Pers, and in some aspects, worse.
I was using a desktop computer, so I had to use a mouse. From my experience in Portal 2, which I had bought in late May, the only way I could properly shoot and aim was to use my fully functional left hand. That left my right hand to do all the other things on the keyboard. The only keys I could properly use were the spacebar and the "W" key. I had no idea how to chat in any form, so I couldn't ask for help, and even if I did, which I didn't, I would not be able to apply it.
First impressions:
I knew nothing about the quick server find button. I clicked on the button that said servers, and saw this list of letters, numbers, etc. I randomly selected something, and it took me to a loading screen. My friend told me about his favorite class, heavy. Needless to say, I sucked. To the extreme. No words to express it. Then I remembered the Meet the Engineer video. He could build sentries to fight for me!
Little did I know how I could upgrade them.
When I built my first sentry, I put it in a random place, in Badwater Basin, underneath the map room. When building it, I never stopped hitting it with a wrench. All the others were doing it, why not me? I quickly ran out of metal and I was confused. Why does it not have 2 miniguns on the side? Where are the rocket silos? Why did the upgrade numbers stop going up? I ran out to battle engie, and I died. Many times.
So did the sentry.
One of the times though, I died, and my sentry did not. It was damaged, and I noticed wrench sign next to the information about it on the left of the screen. I hit it once, wondering if that would fix it. Then I noticed the metal amount in the bottom right of my screen. I saw a correlation between the metal numbers and the upgrade amount. I kept hitting it, until it reached level two, and continued hitting it.
The only thing I knew about getting metal was that you could get it from dropped weapons. So I went out to find some. I needed to fight sometimes, and as a result, I noticed that when I went to a dropped weapon, not only did my metal numbers go up, but so did the ammunition amount.
I then learned that ammunition boxes also serves as metal for engineers.
Sentry placement:
Once I figured out how to upgrade, the next step was trying to figure out how to be useful. While the level 3 sentry is a powerful piece of machinery, it needs to be properly placed to be useful. Pretty early on I realized that a good place to put it is a place where there is plenty of traffic for it to shoot at. A short time later, on a round on defense on cp_gorge with an annoying BLU scout, I realized that the target has to be directly in the field of vision of the sentry, and by that I mean the middle. If you target the minigun or the rocket silos from the side, there's no way it can see you if you are sticking out just enough to just see that part of the sentry. Also, in my experimentations of how to upgrade it, I found out you can pick up sentries, and turn them. I only used the picking up part until I became a more advanced player.
Not to mention that it is very easy to avoid a sentry if you see it. If you've ever played ctf_2fort, you would know that there is an entrance to the intel in the courtyard. One of my early experiments with sentry placement was putting the sentry right there, in the entrance. Though I found out rather quickly that because that is a spot easy to, well, spot, for the other team, an uber can be used to rather efficiently destroy it, and while that can apply to most sentry placements, this one is special because of how easy it is to spot. It becomes useless because they expect it, and you end up only killing one or two people. Maybe more, if you're lucky and the other team is full of idiots, in which case, you would have won by the third kill.
Another thing that I noticed is that flamethrowers are annoying. Because of their spread, if you hide around a corner, and around the corner is a sentry, you could just spray. If you are lucky, , which people usually are, after few seconds the sentry is destroyed. I first figured that out on a pl_goldrush round. Anyways, due to this easily exploited game mechanic, if there is a sentry on the wooden overhang in ctf_2fort, a pyro can stand under it, just standing slightly out of the shade of the overhang, they can shoot flames up and destroy any sentry above level one that happens to be there. I just observed it. I never bothered to place sentries there.
Discovery of the sentry range:
The first weapon drop I ever got was a Jag. Now I see it as a "sign" of sorts. Then, I saw it as a way to build sentries slightly faster. On cp_badlands, there is a small spot next to a wall by the second point where you can place a sentry, and next to it a dispenser. It defended the point well, but then it started getting damage somehow. I could hear that it was not aiming at anybody, but there was no hidden place to shoot the sentry from without getting shot at by the sentry itself. Apparently, it was a sniper. I kept rebuilding the sentry until we captured the middle point. When moving the sentry, closer to the point, I saw a team colored sphere surrounding me when I carried my creation. After placing it down with the sphere just out of reach of the area near the stairs near the middle point, I waited. Shortly after, the other team captured it. When running from the stairs, I noticed that the enemy was not getting shot at until, for some random reason, they stepped forward.
From that point onwards, I started calling it the "Sphere of Influence." While I know that the definition of the term has nothing to do with sentries, I saw it fit. It is the sphere in which the sentry influences the surrounding area.
Final lessons:
People very often see or say is that a mini-sentry is very useful for attacking due to the relatively rapid building speed. What I have noticed in the past three months is that the default sentry, when previously built and assisted by a Jag when rebuilt, builds at the same speed as a never-before-built mini-sentry. While you might be skeptical of how that is useful, the answer is that if you manage to dodge attacks while building the sentry, you get mini-sentry that deals twice the damage and has 50 more health. How is this useful? Well, when ninja-neering (doing sneaky things as an engineer), you can do this to surprize the enemy if you are fighting one on one. In a duel with my friend, he, as a sniper, was trying to defeat me. What ended up happening was that he expected a regular sentry, because I was not using a gunslinger, and he did not know that it was previously built. As a result, he was very perplexed when he hit it and it did not instantly break.
Battle sentries are just as useful as mini-sentries, maybe more. Unless you only need it to take down an enemy sentry with a mini-sentry with a Wrangler. Then it is annoying to build it. At that point, it's fine to stray. But that's just what I've learned as a self-taught TF2er. Once I finally grasped a hold of how to play, I went to, actually, discovered, the Team Fortress 2 wiki. I then found out that everything I was doing was correct. With all the other classes, I will explain in later chapters, each one being written in accordance with my playing time.