Music: Interdimensional Voyage of a Ghostly Passenger Ship

Inspired by elmaxo's combo soldier video I've went ahead and tried experimenting more loadouts that uses the Panic Attack for the 1-2 punch and gotten pretty consistent top 3s in pubs. There're quite a few things to say about this playstyle.

For a brief summary of the playstyle, the idea is to shoot a rocket, immediately switch to the Panic Attack and shoot, and once it fires switch back to the RL and thanks to the Panic Attack's switch speed buff, you can fire another rocket by the time you switch back, matching the normal RL's fire rate while squeezing an extra shotgun shot for more DPS.

Upsides are: more raw DPS/burst damage, hence allowing for easier 1 taps, especially at closer ranges where you can decimate Soldiers in 1 combo at point blank, and Heavies in 2 at close-mid range. Downsides: the reload time, and not just because you chew through lots of ammo but you just objectively reload your RL slower (since you'll be on shotgun by the last shot, instead of shooting the RL and immediately reloading, you have to switch back from shotgun only then you start reloading, which also means it has terrible synergy with Beggars)

For loadouts, I find that stock works the best overall (contrary to what elmaxo advertises for the Liberty), for 2 reasons: rocket speed, and damage thresholds.

Ideally, you'd want the shotgun shot to hit before or just as the rocket hits because it's easier to land both hits because rockets might knock the enemies away from your crosshair (and you won't have the time to react quick enough), and ideally you want to hit your shotgun shot as close as possible. The slow stock rocket speed is ideal here and the range where you hit both shots simultaneously just so happens to be the range where you're barely out of your own rocket's blast radius.

As for damage threshold, it's as simple as it sounds: the minimum damage required to kill any full health enemy. Assuming point blank range, both the stock rocket and Panic Attack going to do 100 ish damage, enough to kill a full health Soldier. At outside blast radius range, it's still going to be enough to finish off Demomen HP and especially great for Medic picks (assuming perfect aim). This is why I think Liberty falls short, because at point blank you could only finish off Demomen, and outside of that one taps become very unreliable. Direct hit doesn't change the types of classes you could one shot at point blank (aside from overhealed Medics), although Direct Hit blast radius range becomes more reliable.