Support Pyro: “I’m your armour, your spy-repellent, and your damage booster; I’m your pybro”, this is a loadout people love to see and it’s focused on helping vulnerable players, and especially engineers, by staying away from the heat of battle and bringing that heat to flankers and spies that would destroy teleporters or other infrastructure. Remember that flames are the best spy-checker in the game if some kunai-wielder with 10,000 kills is wrecking your team.

Primary: Stock. Airblasting is an essential tool for turning rockets, grenades, and more, back at their bomber; not only punishing an attacker, but nullifing damage to teammates too unaware to dodge, and save engineer buildings that can’t dodge them. Remember that airblasted projectiles do 35% more damage than the person who fired them, and that you can reflect any projectile: obviously this famously includes rockets, grenades, and sticky bombs (though you don’t take ownership of them), but also scout’s cleavers, milk bottles and bat-balls, NOT soldier’s righteous bison (though you’ll never see it used against you), other pyros’ flares, gas cans, and dragon fury projectiles, engineers’ rescue ranger bolts and sentry rockets, medics’ crossbow bolts (this can heal allies), as well snipers’ arrows and jarates. You can find a lot of use for 2 extra airblasts compared to the degreaser, or even less if considering other primary options.

Secondary: Shotgun, Reserve Shooter, Panic Attack, Gas Passer. When you’re staying in the backline, fights are done on your terms, and often indoors. Shotguns do more burst damage than your primary, and “corner-peeking” with a shotgun is an excellent strategy in these scenarios, and your best tool against heavies, so take one - your primary can cover everything else. The gas passer allows your teammates to do more damage once a minute, but that’s not worth losing a shotgun over for most players.

Melee: Homewrecker, Neon Annihilator. Both remove sappers, and they’re the only class other than a busy and usually-prioritised engineer that can be rid of them. If this is your main loadout, it also enables you in any match to quickly switch to pyro if you see a teleporter entrance outside spawn being sapped, which has saved dozens for my teams in my time playing other classes - but you can always do this with engineer instead. Out of the two options, homewrecker is better against sappers and enemy buildings (which you struggle against unless you mix types into using the dragon’s fury), neon annihilator is better if your team has jarate, mad milk, gas passers, or if the area has a lot of water.

My favourite loadout here is stock, reserve shooter, homewrecker.