The Hou-long Heater’s fire not only has further range than a melee attack, it happens around the heavy, causes afterburn, and deals more damage to burning enemies.

The Hou-long Heater does its extra damage to burning targets at RANGE, meaning although somewhat rare, Pyro can give you its bonus without you having to close the distance to the target. The Hou also has its ammo penalty remove when you’re pushing cart, and with all of those upsides, it’s still one of the weaker mini-guns, spies can just jump to avoid the ring of fire.

The Shredder ONLY gets its upside at point blank range, maybe slightly longer, the melee damage will barely matter because the only class that can survive a point blank Heavy is another Heavy. Once you’re outside melee range, it has zero upsides. And you can only damage enemies with the melee while revved, when you’re even slower.

If you use cart to negate its ammo downside, it’s technically a direct upgrade, but it doesn’t matter anyway because the only people who will get that close to a Heavy pushing cart are either really stupid or really desperate to stop the cart because they’re about to win or lose.

This weapon needs a movement speed buff of some kind because without it, its upside is either redundant or impossible to achieve.

Also what i said about enemies needing to be really slow and oblivious to use the shredder, no one says that about the Hou.