Stock

I use stock not because it's consistent or whatever, but because I don't like the others for one reason or another, and here are the reasons why:

The Backburner

The Backburner is very buggy about being behind someone meaning that stats SHOULD say that you get random crits, but only when you are behind someone. Yeah, a much more boring reason compared to my other ones, but hey, a mediocre weapon should have a mediocre answer!

The Degreaser

I honestly don't think the Degreaser should be the meta. Because stock already has such a fast deploy and holster speed, the Degreaser's deploy and holster speeds aren't going to be much faster. Plus, afterburn is what makes Pyro balanced and essentially taking it away (because, let's be real really 2 damage per second compared to stock's 8 is pitiful) makes Pyro unfun to play.

The Pholgistinator

I don't like the Phlogistinator because of no airblast, but that's not the main reason AT ALL. My main reason is how much it takes to get MMMPH in the first place. Believe it or not, when you equip the Phlog, you don't have crits up your ass 24/7 like some people play it out to be, no no no. You have to earn those crits by doing a full 300 damage without dying once, and it HAS to be fire damge. NOT afterburn. That actually takes quite a lot and if up against a good team you'll need to find an unaware enemy that is alone to get the damage that you need. Multiple times. Not to mention, even when you get full MMMPH you can still die before and after you do the MMMPH taunt, meaning if the enemy team is being backed up by a sentry or good sniper, you might as well just uninstall the game because you can't do shit about it.

The Dragon's Fury

The Dragon's Fury is an interesting case. I think it's a really great way to encourage Pyro's to get better at aiming and I do use it fairly often, it just doesn't fit my support playstyle. The way the airblast works on this weapon is it take a whole 5 rounds out of 40, meaning you can only airblast 8 times on a full tank, which would be fine, if 5 rounds wasn't so god dang much! It takes around 3 rounds to kill a single player, and because the fire attack goes through other players, it would usually take around 6 or 7 rounds to kill 3 people. BUT with the airblast that take 5 rounds, you can kill 3 people with 10 to 15 rounds! Wow, so much better. Plus, the airblast is REALLY slow. Slower than it takes for a soldier to fire another rocket. You see the problem here? The airblast on this thing is so unreliable that it might as well not be there.

The Conclusion

So, yeah. All the other flamethrowers are pretty goodn't. But they're not necessarily bad, either. They have their uses, I just prefer not to use them for one reason or another. But just know I'm not saying you shouldn't use these weapons, I'm just saying their not my cup of tea. If you wanna go around using the Dragon's Fury airblast religiously, then I'm not stopping you. Ethan out.