Characters / Team Fortress 2: The Demoman

Main Character Index
Offense Classes (The Scout | The Soldier | The Pyro)
Defense Classes (The Demoman | The Heavy | The Engineer)
Support Classes (The Medic | The Sniper | The Spy)
Non-Player Characters

The Demoman

Real name: Tavish Finnegan DeGroot

"What makes me a good Demoman? If I were a bad Demoman, I wouldn't be sittin' here discussin' it with ya, would I?!"

Voiced by: Gary Schwartz (English), Francesc Rocamora (Spanish), Dmitry Polonsky (Russian), Stefan Günther (German)

"Come an' get me, I say! I'll be waitin' on ya with a whiff o' the old brimstone! I'm a grim bloody fable, wit' an unhappy bloody end!"

The Demoman is a black Scotsman wearing an eyepatch, with a knack for explosives and strong alcohol. A Boisterous Bruiser and a cheerful drunkard, Demo enjoys nothing more than blowing everything to bits while chugging on Scrumpy (a harsh cider coming from western England). Abandoned at birth by his parents, his talent with explosives resulted in the deaths of his adoptive parents, and his family welcomed him back in the DeGroot clan. Since then, he's been working as a mercenary. On account of his lack of an eye, and blood heritage, he considers himself something of a Last of His Kind. He shared his class update with the Soldier, much like the Sniper and Spy. The update revealed the Demoman's lifestyle; along with working three jobs, he lives in a mansion in New Mexico with his blind mother. Meet the Demoman!

With a fairly average 175HP and 93% base speed, the Demoman's true worth lies in his projectile-based weaponry. He primarily uses a grenade launcher which fires its projectiles in a parabolic arc, and whose grenades can bounce against obstacles before exploding; thus, he's the only class capable of indirect fire, dealing explosive damage without even seeing the enemy. His secondary slot is occupied by a stickybomb launcher, allowing him to lay down explosive traps and detonate them on command. Thus, he can defend choke points easily and eliminate his enemies in one massive blast. On the other hand, his projectile-based weapons make him abysmal when fighting at close range. His default melee weapon is a bottle of his precious scrumpy. However, with alternative weapons the Demoman (known in this role as the Demoknight) can specialize in melee combat, donning a protective shield with a unique charge mechanic in place of his sticky launcher, a longsword or other similarly powerful blade (or golf club?), and even a pair of agility-enhancing boots in place of his grenade launcher (though this comes at the cost of leaving him utterly defenseless outside of melee range).

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A-H

• Achilles' Heel: A truly skilled Demoman is a force to be reckoned with, but even the finest of Demos can still be dealt with if need be:
  • Scouts are agile, making Demoman's projectile weapons harder to use and his mid-range superiority difficult to maintain, their scattergun is devastating if they can get close to the Demo where they can easily damage themselves, and despite their low health, their speed allows them to easily skirt around well-placed stickytraps. There's a reason Scout is seen as Demo's hard counter. In competitive and ranked matches, taking out the enemy Demoman to make it safe to push is the Scout's main job.
  • Pyros are the soft counter to Demo: a good Pyro can flank and get too close for the Demoman to deal with, much like the Scout, and their close range damage is even more devastating than the Scattergun. However, the Pyro has one tool that the Scout doesn't — the Compression Blast. Since all of the Demoman's non Demoknight-centered weapons (shields and boots, that is) fire projectiles, a competent Pyro with use of the airblast can completely shut down a Demoman's offense by reflecting their fired pipes back into his face, or shut down their defense by airblasting their stickytraps and rendering them useless. In the hands of a skilled player, an enemy Pyro is the scariest thing the Demoman can face on the battlefield. And don't think Demoknight helps much either, considering the Pyro can roast him even with the Chargin' Targe (which itself is meant to counter the Pyro's main advantages) and simply airblast the Demoknight every time they're within the not-inconsiderable range of their melee weapons.
  • Since sticky-trapping practically requires the Demoman to tunnel vision, Spy can shut this down by backstabbing him while he's preoccupied (or even when they're busy looking forward to airblast stickies). After the enemy Medic and his principal buddy, Demo is likely one of the most important targets for a Spy to take out if they're even halfway decent. Thankfully, playing as Demoknight can make dealing with Spy a little easier (especially if it's one that relies on their knife), since it's much easier to chase after and whale on them with a BFS.
  • Contrary to his usual playstyle, Demoknights are utterly crippled by enemy sentry turrets, especially if you opt for boots instead of a grenade launcher as your primary weapon. None of the shields provide any bullet resistance, and being limited to close range damage means there's almost nothing you can do against a zoning sentry except try to find your way out of its line of sight or wait for your team to destroy it for you.
• Action Bomb: The Ullapool Caber is a stick grenade... that Demo carries around and swings at people. Combine with a shield of choice to become a suicide bomber that runs into a crowd of enemies and critically explodes for massive damage.
• Affably Evil: Most of his in-game behavior can be attributed to his intoxication. When he's seen sober in the comics, he's always shown to actually be quite civil and friendly towards pretty much everybody, ranging from buying a mansion for his mother to live in to jovially sharing the story of how he lost his eye to a group of trick-or-treaters. The implications being that, without the alcohol clouding his mind, this is his true personality, though he still remains an unapologetic mercenary.
• Afro Asskicker: The Demoman's very first cosmetic, "Demoman's Fro", is a small afro (and associated headband) not unlike that of Jimi Hendrix.
• The Alcoholic:
  • Notoriously, with a particular liking for scrumpy (a type of fermented apple cider). When he isn't blowing things up or cutting peoples' heads off, he's guzzling alcohol by the gallon. He's just barely a Functional Addict thanks to his job; when he loses his job in the webcomic, he's a miserable drunk.
  "Have ye heard aboot the Beer of the Month Club? Well, I joined the Beer All At Once Club."
  • Enforced with one of his Taunts, the Scotsmann's Stagger, which has the Demoman drunkenly staggering about, chugging on a bottle of alcohol and spouting barely-understandable slurred sentences.
  • The Demoman is so dependent on alcohol that his body has developed the ability to ferment it from his own bone marrow in times where he can't get access to anything to drink.^note This is something that, surprisingly enough, can actually happen in real life, called auto-brewery syndrome. Though it's caused by gut bacteria rather than having anything to do with the bones or other organs.
• Anti-Structure: As what would be implied from being the Demolitions Expert, Demoman is by far the best class at destroying enemy buildings, with his grenades and sticky bombs able to deal incredible burst damage, with his sticky bombs being especially effective given how he can easily set them to instantly light up an immobile building faster than an Engineer can possibly repair it. That his grenades fire in an arc with travel time also means that Demomen can attack from cover or by peeking around corners well and away from sentry guns effective line of sight. The Loch-n-Load in specific has a direct damage buff against enemy buildings.
• Arbitrary Weapon Range: In direct combat, Demoman is most effective at mid range, where his sticky bombs can fly the entire length of their arming time before landing and his grenades can still hit for their full damage on direct hits. At short range, he runs the risk of self-damage and his stickies can't arm fast enough to ward away attackers, while at long range, his grenades don't fly far enough and he needs to slow the rate at which he shoots stickies in order to charge their velocity. Even Demoknight, a subclass viewed as being best in close range, is most deadly at mid range, where his shield can build up a full crit during its charge.
• Ascended Meme: "Demoknight" was (at first) officially the "Close Combat Kit" before the fan nickname stuck. There's even an itemset named "One Thousand and One Demoknights".
• Ask a Stupid Question...: He treats the Directors opening question in Meet the Demoman like this and answers back as such.
  "What makes me a good Demoman…?" If I were a BAD Demoman, I wouldn’t be SITTING here, DISCUSSIN' it with ya, now would I?!
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: The Demoman's various weapons are all offensive-focused; the few that aren't serve as utilities that benefit only the Demoman, helping him fight harder. No support to be found here, just raw damage.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Demoknights are easily the best at melee combat, but they give up their ranged weaponry and their capability to blow people up at range, which negates his ability defend points with stickies, control crowds, and destroy an engineer’s buildings… the primary roles he fills.
  • The Ullapool Caber. As fun as it is to smack someone with a grenade and blow up everyone around him, 9 times out of 10, Demomen are better off using means that DON'T involve themselves blowing up as well. Also, the Caber is a one-time-deal. You hit an enemy with it, he blows up, and if you manage to survive the explosion yourself, you're left with a scrap of a grenade that does pitiful damage and can only be restored by going all the way back to your team's Resupply Cabinet (located next to the spawn point).
    • It also has a high chance of knocking you (or your enemy, if they survive it, although it's rare) into the air. Doing so can leave you with barely enough health to survive the fall. If you got an enemy after taking a hit, surviving the Ullapool's explosion, then the only thing you have to worry about is landing. And that's not counting the Shield & Caber combo.
    • Not just that, but thanks to this game's wonky hit-boxes, you could hit the enemy, it wouldn't register, and you'd blow up and lose the caber's exploding ability and not hurt anyone but yourself.
    • Finally, if combined with a shield or Kritzkreig Medic, the caber can crit, dealing up to 390 damage in one hit. Though almost close to being close to the damage of a fully charged headshot, it deals the most damage out of all melee weapons in the game.
• Ax-Crazy: Played with. He seems completely insane in combat, but that’s only because he’s wasted. When he’s sober, he’s one of the most pleasant people on the team.
• Badass Boast:
  • "What makes me a good demoman? Well, if I were a bad demoman, I wouldn't be sittin' here discussing it with ya, now would I!"
  • "So... t'all ya fine dandies, so proud, so cocksure, prancin' aboot with yer heads fulla eyeballs... come and get me, I say! I'll be waiting for ya with a whiff of the ol' brimstone! I'M A GRIM BLOODY FABLE, WITH AN UNHAPPY BLOODY END!"
  • For someone who is extremely sensitive about his missing eye, he gives us pretty good ones:
  "I came here to kick ass and have two eyes! And I'm all out of eyes! Well, half out."
  "Let's give 'em a sportin' chance! Someone, take out me other eye!"
• Big Damn Heroes: Played for Laughs. His liver came back, in "The Naked and the Dead", to short-circuit the blood bots with alcohol so he can personally deal with the rest who have his team strangled at the end of "Old Wounds".
• Bilingual Bonus: His family motto is "In regione caecorum, rex est luscus." This is a famous Latin quotation from Desiderius Erasmus. The meaning? "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." (However, the seal seen on this page misspells "regione" as "regionem".)
• Bizarre Human Biology: Somehow, he managed to create alcohol out of his own body.^note As mentioned above this is a real thing that can happen, just not as shown.
• Boisterous Bruiser: "Oh, they're gonna 'ave to glue yew back togeth'r, IN HELL!"
• Booze Flamethrower: He exaggerates this with his Spent Well Spirits taunt; he downs his skrumpy and the contents of a grenade, blows into a lighter flame, and creates a mini-mushroom cloud.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The Pain Train (a weapon shared with Soldier) is one of Demoman's few melee options that has no real Demoknight application, being identical to his stock bottle in terms of combat ability and having simple upsides and downsides that are strictly passive: in exchange for taking 10% more damage from enemy bullets, Demoman gains an increased capture rate on objectives like payload carts and control points, putting him on par with the Scout. Still, objective capturing is a common gameplay element to allow this benefit to be useful, and since Demoman mostly relies on his projectile weapons and otherwise lacks any other utility-based melee options, it can be worth it keeping the Pain Train in your pocket if the bullet vulnerability is worth risking.
  • In terms of Demoknight builds, Demoman can opt to trade out his grenade launchers in exchange for the Ali Baba's Wee Booties/Bootlegger (both reskins of the same, functionally identical weapon), which passively grant Demoman a bit more health, movement speed, turning control, and charge speed for your shield on melee kills. Equipping boots instead of a grenade launcher deprives you of your last remaining ranged option and limits you exclusively to your melee weapon for damage (and in turn, virtually your entire worth as a class pick), but these passive durability and mobility buffs may very well make all the difference with the amount of heads you'll be able to cut off.
• Brave Scot: When he's on your side.
• Close-Range Combatant: If played as a pure Demoknight (Wee Booties, a sword, and a shield), the Demoman forgoes ranged weapons entirely in favor of running at people and chopping their heads off.
• Cluster Bleep-Bomb: "I'm a black Scottish cyclops. They got more (extended bleep) than they got the likes o' me."
  • As it turns out, the censored line in "Meet The Demoman" was "They got more feckin' sea monsters in the Great Loch at Ness than they got the likes o' me".
• Continuity Nod: The old Demoman model in Team Fortress Classic also had an eyepatch and knit cap.
• Cool Crown: Prince Tavish's Crown is a royal crown he can wear.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Demoknights in general have some amazing potential damage output and can snowball like crazy once you get as little as two heads, but unless you opt for just a partial build with a Grenade Launcher at the handy, you're extremely relegated to melee range, with there almost nothing you can do against Sentries or Heavies except waiting for your team to clear it for you. In MVM, it's arguably even starker a difference since he can chain crit boosts on kill off of low-health robots, but it's nigh-useless against anything that doesn't fall in one hit to a crit sword.
• Dash Attack: With the Chargin' Targe, Splendid Screen, or Tide Turner equipped, the Demoman can gain the ability to charge for a brief period of time. This gives him a temporary speed boost to outrun even a Scout, the ability to ram players head-on, and it crit-boosts his weapons. The latter item can even give him full turning mobility.
• Demonic Possession: This seems to be the relationship between him and the Eyelander, although the few times it's been seen in canon comics after its unveiling in the WAR! Update, they seemed to at the very least tolerate each other's presence, and considering how the voice lines and actions for the Demoman are unchanged even with the Glowing Eyes of Doom and all, it may be less of this and more of a case of Symbiotic Possession.
• Demolitions Expert: He's the resident explosives specialist, with his grenades and sticky bombs being extremely effective at destroying enemy Engineer buildings and pretty solid when used on enemies themselves.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • In public servers, a Demoman can usually get away with just laying some clever traps, and may even fare well in direct combat. In competitive play, Demomen have to learn all the potentially useful sticky jump locations on a map and be able to execute them perfectly (and thus be able to get to the central control point faster than the enemy Scouts), has no hit-scan weapon and so must rely on prediction, and has low mobility without the aid of sticky jumps. When played well, his trap laying and insane damage output make him possibly the most powerful unit on the field because of his area denial abilities — for instance, at mid on Badlands, if a Demoman can arrive fast enough, he can set traps all about the enemy's side and also fire grenades behind the enemy Medic, preventing an escape while the Soldiers jump above to fire down on him. In a game of territorial control, a Scout picking off the enemy Demoman is often the perfect opportunity to push forward and advance.
  • The Loose Cannon is a very funky grenade launcher with a few unique stipulations: it fires grenades that explode after a set timer that's much shorter than the others, the grenades don't explode on impact and thus can pass through multiple enemies, the launcher itself comes with a charging mechanic that allows you to control how long it takes for them to explode, and if an enemy is both impacted by the projectile and its resulting explosion, the explosion mini-crits them in what's known as a "Double-Donk". Actually landing that sweet spot requires immense diligence and knowledge of how far you should be standing from your opponent(s) relative to how long you're charging up, but a successful Double-Donk can deal ridiculous levels of burst damage, annihilating entire groups of enemies with only a few seconds of preparation. Even in cases where a Double Donk hit isn’t an instant kill, such as against a particularly healthy player or an Ubered attacker, the sheer knockback of the blast is going to send them either skyward or flying backwards and often with almost no health remaining, effectively neutralizing them as a threat by ringing them out or leaving them open to an easy finishing hit.
  • The Scottish Resistance, which can deploy more stickies at once, do so at a faster rate, and the ability to detonate clusters separately, but its sticky mines take 0.8 seconds longer to arm. The fast pace of the game makes it almost unusable for direct confrontation, but players who are able to micromanage their sticky placements, find clever trap locations, know to fight only when it's advantageous, and are able to land direct grenade launcher hits when caught off-guard can become the most fearsome defensive powerhouses in the game, rivaling even the Engineer's fully-upgraded Sentry Gun. The Scottish Resistance can guard multiple entry points to make approaching always unsafe, set up and manage distinct sticky traps, disarm enemy Demomen's stickies, or even just for direct combat if they are very good with predicting their target's movements.
  • Hybrid Knights; the practice of equipping a sword and shield like a Demoknight, but instead of equipping boots, the Demoman opts to keep his grenade launcher. This is especially true if they opt to use the Eyelander; this results in a Demoman without access to stickies, the same health as a Medic, and just faster than the Heavy. However, the Eyelander gives the Demoman a boost in health and speed for each kill gotten with it, up to five kills. If played with care, a Hybrid Knight can very quickly landslide into a Demoman who has more health than any class outside the Heavy (which is further boosted by the blast and fire resistance of the shields) and is almost as fast as the Scout, while still having a ranged weapon that can be just as potent as his sticky bomb launcher if the player is good at leading its shots. Skilled hybrid knights can easily tear a server a new one just by themselves, while being incredibly hard to take down without the team working together.
  • Trimping involves using a few quirks of the physics engine to allow a Demo-Knight to make incredible jumps by charging at an incline. It's not immediately intuitive, can be tricky, and you'll need some detailed map knowledge of trimping spots, but once you get it down you can make jumps that you can't do with stickies and even cross a map in a few seconds.
• Diminishing Returns for Balance: Subverted, like with Soldiers. While stacking your team with too many of one class usually leaves you open to getting walled by their hard counters, a team filled with Demomen who know how to aim has just enough versatility in their stats and weapons to blow away the opposition in front of them and keep them at bay without the use of an Uber, and many of their usual counters simply don't scale up against massed Demomen. They lose out on range against Snipers big time though, but that then becomes a matter of whether the Demomen have the area cleared enough to close the distance sticky-jump towards a Sniper's perch to try and deal with them personally.
• Disproportionate Reward: Inverted. According to the Demoman's mother, his late father didn't get much for some of the jobs he did.
  "Yer da walked fifteen miles in the rain to blow up the Queen of England for a nickel!"
• Dreadful Musician: With the Bad Pipes taunt equipped, it turns out that he's really bad at playing the bagpipes. ^note  However the original taunt on the Steam Workshop had Demoman playing them extremely well. Surprisingly, he can still use the Shred Alert's electric guitar just fine, and seems to play the piano well enough in Expiration Date.
• Dressed to Plunder: The Demoman has an eyepatch by default, but the "Swashbuckler's Swag" outfit adds a peg-leg, a bottle of rum, and a captain's bicorne with piratey Flavor Text.
• Drinking on Duty: Tavish is not only the most cannily competent drunk around, he can also instantaneously sober up when the situation requires it. The man's liver is the stuff of legends.
• Drunken Master: The Demoman is nearly always drunk on the battlefield. He may come across as a boozed-up buffoon, but make no mistake, he is an expert at his craft. After all, if he were a bad Demoman, Meet the Demoman as we know it wouldn't have happened.
• Evil Weapon: The Eyelander appears to be one of these at first glance, although when the sword and its owner is not on the clock, its Ax-Crazy fixation on taking heads gives way to an actually quite personable demeanour.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: He has tea with his blind mother every day in the mansion he bought for her. She nags him a lot about his work, but on the whole, it looks like she loves him just the same.
• Eyepatch of Power: He's a "Black Scottish Cyclops."
  • At one point, he gets absolutely furious at the Medic for being able to perform medical miracles (or/and abominations against nature), yet seems to be unable to give him another eye. Medic just sighs and informs him he's already regenerated and implanted a new eye — more than eight times already. Every year, it works normally until it bursts out of his socket on Halloween and grows into a new MONOCULUS!, and every year, the Medic removes the traumatic memories so he never remembers. This also gives Demoman some slight brain damage, triggered by attempting to remember, and which turns him into his cheerful lunatic self.
• Eye Scream: He was originally said to have lost his eye in an explosives accident. He says himself that he lost it to a wizard who removed it to remove the bragging rights of an evil spirit. And on his first day of work as a janitor.
  • And look what happens to his other eye in "Meet The Sniper"!
  • In "Expiration Date," he gets a fork launched into his eyesocket. Fortunately, it was the one covered by an eyepatch.
  • And his possessed eye literally uses slowed-down versions of the Demoman's screams in-game!
• Foe-Tossing Charge: A long enough charge with any of his shields can launch the victim into the air on contact. Follow it up with a crit swing, and the result is often a headless corpse flying off into the distance.
• Foil: He's pretty much the anti-Sniper.
  • Story-wise, the opposites are clear. The Stoic Cold Sniper vs. Boisterous Bruiser with a Knightly Sword and Shield. Camper van vs. mansion. A father who engineered inventions of tomorrow such as an Underwater City and rocket ships vs. a family lineage that apparently traces back to medieval times. Estranged from his parents who dislike his profession vs. living with and doting on his aging mother, who approves of his profession to the point of being worried when he's got a day off. The Sniper originates from the blazingly hot Australian outback, whereas the Demoman comes from the chilly Scottish highlands (the British Isles are, moreover, nigh-exactly on the opposite side of the world from Australia). Furthermore, the Über update reveals that while Sniper spent years in the Australian Outback, the Demoman hasn't even been to the beach.
  • In-game, the Demoman is a highly versatile class that fares well at close-to-medium range with attacks that deal area of effect damage. By comparison, the Sniper is a highly specialized class that solely focuses on the precise elimination of targets at long-range. Teams can usually do with having lots of Demomen, but having lots of Snipers cripples their ability to fight.
  • In "Blood in the Water", the Demoman shows a rather contemptuous attitude towards the Sniper and his parents' lodgings. This is reciprocated by Sniper knocking out Demoman via sedation, and then intending to bury him alive until Miss Pauling talks him out of it.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: Defensively-minded Demomen trying to cover multiple chokepoints with Sticky Bombs have to watch their traps and listen carefully, and frequently prone to getting flanked and rushed down. In other words, the class necessitates tunnel vision.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: After taking a head with the Eyelander, Nessie's Nine Iron, or the Horseless Headless Horsemann's Headtaker, the Demoman's single eye glows his team's colour and becomes brighter with each additional head.
• Golf Clubbing: The Nessie's Nine Iron.
• Grenade Launcher: Armed with weapons that shoots grenades and sticky bombs.
• Grenade Spam: Demoman is designed to be able to spam a lot of explosives really quickly. With his default loadout alone, you can dismantle an enemy offense alone, given the right positioning: he has 4 grenades and 8 stickies to blast open the enemy team. Just be mindful of his incredibly long reload after.
• Grievous Bottley Harm: Carries a bottle of alcoholic beverage with him at all times, and uses it in melee combat.
• Hidden Depths:
  • Seems like nothing but a drunken wreck on the surface, but Demoman greatly puts value on honor. When Miss Pauling lies to him about Soldier's betrayal of their Fire-Forged Friendship, he looks very forlorn as his boss' assistant leaves him to think by himself. In addition, he immediately props up an injured Sniper in the comics despite how Sniper almost went through with killing him just one submarine-trip prior.
  • When not drunk, he's also surprisingly polite and competent. He's very well-mannered when Miss Pauling visits him in WAR!, and he's capable enough to simultaneously tackle being a globetrotting mercenary in addition to two other unknown jobs, all for his mum.
• Hilariously Abusive Childhood: His real parents abandoned him at birth, visiting him only after he had lost an eye and his adoptive parents honing his demolition skills at the Crypt Grammar School for Orphans. It's allegedly "a long-standing, cruel, and wholly unnecessary tradition among the Highland Demolition Men".
• Hypocritical Humor: One of his domination lines toward Snipers is "I hate you bloody campers! EVERYONE bloody hates you!" Yet defensively-minded Demomen ^note the intended way to play the class, if the Defense designation is any indication tend to lay stickybombs at crucial chokepoints and then sit there, waiting for a ripe opportunity to detonate them.

I-Z

• Improbable Use of a Weapon:
  • The Ullapool Caber is a "potato masher" hand grenade. It's a melee weapon. "A sober man would throw it."
  • Killing someone with a critical strike from a sword results in the target being decapitated by a vertical swing.
• Improbable Weapon User:
  • One of the Demo's default weapons is his beloved bottle o' scrumpy, which he holds by the neck and swings around as a bludgeon. It allows him to safely fight at close range, where his grenade and sticky launchers would also hurt him plenty.
  • The Nessie's Nine Iron is a golf club that is functionally identical to the Eyelander—a longsword. Thus, it deals as much damage as its basis and can even decapitate his enemies.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: It seems average, until you realize this guy's lack of two eyes means he lacks depth perception; this sort of aim for a guy like him is uncanny.
  • That's why he is constantly drunk when on the job. Since he is seeing doubles, depth perception is regained.
• In a Single Bound:
  • Between his and Soldier's rocket jumps, Demoman's fling him a lot further at the cost of dealing more self-damage.
  • Can be invoked with the Sticky Jumper, a sticky bomb gun which does absolutely no damage. This weapon is meant for the purpose of practicing sticky-bomb jumping, but since the weapon does no damage, you can fly across the map with little to no harm to yourself for it.
  • Even Demoknights can get in on the action by "trimping" (see Super-Speed for more details).
• In-Series Nickname: His name is shortened to "Demo" by the Scout, Soldier, Heavy, Engineer, and Medic, and probably by the rest of his teammates.
  • Miss Pauling almost always shortens it, and lampshades how strange it is to call him otherwise.
• In the Blood: His affinity for explosives, as explained by his retconned bio.
• In Vino Veritas: The Demoman seems quite reasonable and calm when he's sober, as in his update comic. Presumably he's just drunk during the game itself, then.
• Katanas Are Just Better: The Half-Zatoichi.
• Large Ham: "THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!"
• Last of His Kind: Despite still having a mother that's black, Scottish, and alive, he remains of this trope since he has one eye while his parents lost both.
• Leitmotif: Drunken Pipe Bomb.
• Lethal Joke Item: The Sticky Jumper replaces Demo's normal stickybomb launcher, deals no damage whatsoever, and was primarily meant for training... but it's more often used for its sticky-jumping potential, as no damage means no self-damage, and you can abuse this to leap across absurd distances almost instantaneously. Some people have crazily-awesome strategies that send a full-health Demoman armed with other weapons rocketing into the enemy before they even know what happened. In fact, the Sticky Jumper is such a Game-Breaker that Capture the Flag explicitly forbids a Demoman from taking the intelligence if he has it equipped.
• Lightning Bruiser: He's the fourth fastest class, and proper use of stickies to stickyjump can allow him to sail through the air with speeds similar to the Soldier's rocketjump. As for the bruiser part, his area of effect damage is absurd, with both of his default weapons absolutely splashing enemy teams with damage. His normal stickies do 120 damage on direct contact with the explosion radius, meaning two stickies is all it takes to kill every class that isn't the Heavy or overhealed. His 175 health is nothing to sneeze at, either - equal to the Pyro's and surpassed only by the Heavy and the Soldier. All-in-all, the Demoman is probably the highest damaging class in the game if he can successfully get off his traps, and his grenade launcher is no slouch either.
  • Demoknights also fit into this archetype. They trade off the main loadout's powerful area of effect damage for increased health, damage reduction, an extremely fast dash attack, and a powerful, long-range melee swipe.
• Lobotomy: Its revealed that Medic scooped out a part of Demomans' brain in order to stop him from pestering Medic into restoring his missing left eye for the ninth time.
• Long-Range Fighter: Demoman excels at mid-range explosive lobbing, but if someone manages to get in his face, he's usually dead from either explosive self-damage or just getting rushed down. He does usually lose out to Sniper, the greater Long-Range Fighter of the roster.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: The Chargin' Targe and Splendid Screen don't actually stop attacks, but they do increase resistance to explosion and fire damage. Charging also removes all debuffs, like fire or Jarate.
• Mad Bomber: He's very proud to shoot his explosives all over the place.
• Major Injury Underreaction: "Oh, that smarts.", a relatively silent voiceline playing whenever Demo is taking damage. Any damage. This could be a reaction to a stray pistol bullet, or to getting blown to bits by a direct rocket blast.
• Man in a Kilt: Not in-game, but the Demoman wears one in his family portrait, and an opposing Soldier may mock him for being "an Englishman in a dress".
  • With the advent of Nice Crate 2012, the Demoman can get an in-game kilt.
• Master Swordsman: Demo is not only the Team Demolitions Expert, but also a very effective Multi-Melee Master: combine one of his three shields (including a ship steering wheel) with one of his MANY swords (Claymore or Zweihänder, Battle-Axe, Golf Club, Katana, or Scimitar) and be one hell of a force to be reckoned with.
• Mighty Glacier: Played with; per the official wiki, the Defense Classes possess the highest firepower, but are slow to deploy. His Grenade Launcher is hard to aim and can be easily dodged, his Sticky Bombs have a priming time, and his running speed is below-average (but still a bit faster than the Soldier's). All this allows the speedy Scouts to get up in his face and take him down while dodging his explosives. On the other hand, his explosives deal some of, if not the highest burst damage in the game (the Mighty part), and he can subvert this by Sticky Jumping to become a Lightning Bruiser, albeit at greater health cost than a Soldier's Rocket Jumping.
• Odd Friendship: Per the comics, the RED Demoman has this with the BLU Soldier. Despite being on opposite teams and coming from vastly different backgrounds, the two have formed a strong bond with one another, having gone to baseball games, hunting, eaten whisky and ribs, and fought the police together among other things.
• One-Handed Zweihänder: Averted. The reason Demoknights can use a shield and a two-handed weapon simultaneously is that the shield is attached by an arm brace.
• Organ Autonomy: The comics depict his insides working this way. For whatever reason, they all share his eyepatch, even though none of them have eyes.
• Pimped-Out Cape: The King of Scotland's Cape is a royal cape and a cosmetic of his.
• Pirate Parrot: The Bird-Man of Aberdeen parrot pet and its zombie equivalent that sits on his shoulder. Also, as of Halloween 2013, the Mann-Bird of Aberdeen bird head that changes the Demoman's head into a parrot head that is modeled after his pet parrot (except for having an eyepatch). It's only one of his many pirate-themed cosmetics.
• Post-Mortem One-Liner: From his video, after blowing half the BLU team to smithereens: "They'll have'ta glue ya back together... In Hell!"
• Powerful, but Inaccurate: Demo's weapons deal tremendous splash damage, but he lacks hitscan weapons, requiring prediction and more careful aim. Indeed, in competitive environments, the Scout is considered a Demo's worst enemy in single combat, as they can easily dodge his explosives while closing in and making him eat a face full of lead.
• Pretentious Latin Motto: His family has one, roughly translated as "In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is King."
• Punch-Clock Villain: The WAR! Update reveals he's quite reasonable when not working (or drinking).
• Puny Parachute: The B.A.S.E. Jumper (a parachute backpack he shares with Soldier) is relatively small for a parachute.
• Retcon: Tavish's original backstory was implied to be that he lost his missing eye in an explosives accident before meeting his birth parents. Come the third annual Scream Fortress in 2011, this was changed to losing his eye due to Merasmus magically removing it so that he doesn't have to deal with the Bombinomicon's bragging, implied to be after being adopted by his birth parents.
• Savage Spiked Weapons: The Pain Train, a broken wooden handle with thin bent nails and a railroad spike in it.
• Saying Sound Effects Out Loud: "Ka-BOOOM!"
• Scary Black Man: On the enemy team. And besides, a black Scottish cyclops charging at you with an enormous sword while roaring at the top of his lungs is generally enough to give anyone pause.
• See You in Hell:
  • One of his more famous quotes, used at the end of Meet the Demoman:
    "Oh, they're gonna 'ave to glue yew back togeth'r, IN HELL!"
  • Also, Double Subverted with another one of his quotes:
    "Awww... There's a new angel in heaven... IN HELL!"
• Self-Made Orphan: As explained on his trading card, but then thoroughly Retconned. The updated bio on the "Meet the Demoman" now states he managed to kill his adoptive parents and that his real parents only took him in when he discovered his love for explosives, reasoning that they decided to abandon him until his abilities finally aired.
  • This Retcon is more like Flip-Flop of God — when "Meet The Demoman" originally came out, he allegedly blew up his first set of adoptive parents in an attempt to destroy the Loch Ness Monster. With the website redesign, the current canon uses this original version.
• Shield Bash: Demoknights end their charges with one of these and an automatic crit from their melee weapons. Sometimes the bash itself is enough to finish an enemy off.
• Signature Headgear: His eyepatch, and to a lesser extent his beanie, which he always seems to wear underneath his optional other hats.
• Skill Gate Characters: A sub-example of this is the Loch-n-Load. Its grenades come out much faster and follow straighter paths, which makes it much easier to aim and wield than the standard grenade launcher. This means it's a common choice for players who struggle to reliably hit their shots. However, a player who can reliably hit their shots with the standard grenade launcher will find the Loch-n-Load to be a strict downgrade for anything aside from sentry-killing. The Loch-n-Load is a bit notorious for its habit of making prospective Demomen worse at the class, since it can be troublesome to unlearn its physics once you want to try a different launcher.
• Stereotype Flip: Well, one generally doesn't expect a black man to be so aggressively Scottish.
• Super-Speed: Demoknights can move at absurd speeds with the help of a Chargin' Targe, outpacing even a Scout, albeit while moving in a straight line. They can also use their charge on a slope to "trimp", sending them flying into the air farther than even sticky jumping can. Combining it with sticky or grenade jumping can have the Demoman cross an entire map in seconds.^note  Though if you actually look at his stats, he isn't moving that fast - "only" about 32 mph/52 kph.
• Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors:
  • Forms a firm triangle with the Engineer and Scout. Demomen bombard Sentry Nests (and the players repairing them) with indirect splash damage from outside their range, Scouts take advantage of Demos' lack of hitscan weapons and get in close, and Sentries annihilate Scouts before they can get into effective range.
  • Demo shares a secondary triangle with Heavies and Pyros. Like above, Demomen can shell slow-moving Heavies from a distance and can take advantage of Heavy's dependence on line-of-sight, Pyros can menace Demos at close range and reflect their explosives back at them, and Heavies shred down Pyros with higher health and damage at flamethrower range.
• Take a Third Option:
  “If I were to pick up this cowering-plate, I would have to put down my second sword,” a Scotsman thinks. “And surely that is madness.” The Chargin’ Targe solves this riddle by turning the useless shield into a deadly weapon you can run at people with and then bludgeon to death.
• Taking You with Me: Generally speaking, if an enemy gets right in the face of a non-Demoknight Demo, it's light's out even if you pull out your melee weapon. Sometimes the best you can hope for is to fire a pipe directly at them, killing you both.
• This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: As contentious as his effectiveness as a Demoknight could be, there's little doubt that Medieval Mode is almost exclusively designed for the Demoknight.
• Throw Down the Bomblet: Uses explosive weapons.
• Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: In "The Naked and the Dead" comic, Australium-extracting robots try to kill him by drawing out his blood. Unbeknownst to the rest of the cast, Demoman's body has started producing its own alcohol, keeping his blood alcohol high even when he hasn't had a drink. The robots malfunction when exposed to the high alcohol levels, allowing Demoman to destroy them.
• Trap Master: His stock stickybomb launcher can lay down traps to cover a wide area, but his unlockable weapon — The Scottish Resistance — is where this truly comes into play. He can place up to 14 bombs and rig multiple locations ready to explode. Around corners, above doorways, hiding them in bushes, trapping health pickups, there isn't a single place safe from stickybombs.
• Tsundere: One of the Demo's 'Thanks' lines, "I didn't need your help, ya know...", which plays if a teammate helps him kill an enemy, hints at a touch of this.
• Twofer Token Minority: "I'm a black Scottish cyclops! They got more &#%$*@!@&#&!#*$ than they got the likes of me!"
• Tyke Bomb: Demomen are abandoned by their biological parents until their bomb-making skills manifest themselves, which somehow work.
• Undiscriminating Addict: He is shown using various substitutes for his typical alcohol: a deleted scene in one of the comics has him willingly inject himself with the Sniper's caustic sedative, one item's description mentions he drinks wood alcohol (something usually added to keep people from drinking chemicals with alcohol in them), and one taunt has him chugging whiskey and the contents of a grenade. The Naked and the Dead also has him swigging fom a bottle of hydrogen peroxide.
• Unorthodox Reload: He reloads his grenade launchers by dropping the grenades into one barrel (even the Loch n Load which loads three grenades in a weapon with only two barrels), in the case of his default grenade launcher, four grenades into one chamber when he has six to work with. Unlike Soldier, whose cartoonish reload was an intentional stylistic choice, Demoman's default reload animation is likely a bug. Similarly to Soldier but unlike his primary weapons, his Stickybomb Launchers reload its massive reserve of over thirty head-sized stickybombs by simply pumping four-to-eight of them into the chamber from who-knows-where.
• Villainous Friendship: The RED Demo formed one with the BLU Soldier at one point, and was sincerely heartbroken when the Administrator tricked him into thinking Soldier betrayed him. That said, even on the battlefield post-friendship he’s got some sincerely forlorn things to say to his former friends, mixed with comically petty taunts that no normal enemy of the Demoman would get.
  (Unintelligible drunken slurring) I love ya, man… (More unintelligible slurring)''
• Violation of Common Sense: Sticky jumping. Especially considering it's more Difficult, but Awesome than rocket jumping, because more than two bombs will kill you if you aren't overhealed.^note Unless you have the Sticky Jumper, then self-damage isn't a factor, at the cost of not being able to hurt anyone else, but it's intended as a practice tool, not a proper weapon to be used in real matches. Some people still manage to make do with only the grenade launcher for a ranged weapon, or using the Sticky Jumper for Demoknighting, however, as sticky-jumping makes for an excellent ambush tactic when utilized properly on certain maps, especially for terrorizing Snipers.
  • Another example lies in the Ullapool Caber. To put it simply, you're using a stick grenade as a melee weapon. The flavor text on the item even reads "A sober person would throw it."
  • The entire idea of the Demoknight. You take away the Demoman's explosives and give him a sword, shield, and funny shoes to fight against a team of mercenaries wielding rocket launchers, high-powered sniper rifles, and miniguns.^note Funnily enough, the Demoknight style can be very useful against enemy players, but unless you forgo the shoes in favor of having a grenade launcher, it makes you very vulnerable to sentries.
  • The entire idea of the Demoman. When working on explosives, one should preferably have two eyes and be sober. Yet he appears to have enough skill and/or family talent in him to just ignore his disadvantages.
• Violent Glaswegian: In the game itself. Lore shows he's surprisingly non-confrontational when not on the battlefield, though.
• Weaksauce Weakness: According to the webcomic, solid food and water. Because he's spent an entire decade consuming nothing but alcohol and aspirin, his body's ill-equipped to handle any normal meals, which causes his nervous system to register normal food as poisonous and knock him comatose.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Despite his seven-figure salary, Demoman's mother disapproves that he 'only' works three jobs, pointing out that his dad had twenty-six jobs. Most people guess that she wants him rich enough to care for both of them even after he goes completely blind. But on the whole, it looks like they love each other a whole lot just the same.
  Mrs DeGroot: "No Demoman worth his salt ever had an eye in his head past thirty!".
• Workaholic: As mentioned above, a clan trait; he works three jobs, and his own dad was known for working twenty-six at once. Also, according to the "Bombinomicon" comic, he lost his eye at the age of seven when his mother sent him to look for jobs from a ghost on All Hallows' Eve and he wound up having his eye stolen by the titular enchanted tome.
• Wound That Will Not Heal: Demoman's left eye is revealed by Medic to be a case of this in that every time he tried regrowing Demomans' missing eye to replace it in his head again, it functions normally until Halloween night where it comes to life as various monsters to attack the Team. And this has happened at least EIGHT times before Medic resolved to just scoop out the part of Demomans' brain that keeps asking Medic to grow him another eye again.
  Medic: The point is: in my medical opinion... and as a man of science I do not say this lightly... That eye socket is HAUNTED.
• You Kill It, You Bought It: An unlisted feature of the Eyelander (and equivalent reskins) is that killing an enemy with "heads" in their possession instantly grants you their entire collection plus one for killing the enemy himself. This applies not just to other Demoknights, but oddly enough also works on Snipers using the Bazaar Bargain (which also collects "heads"), as well as Medics using the Vita-Saw and Soldiers using the Air Strike (which respectively collect "organs" and generic kills, which appear to rely on the same stacking counters in the game's code). This can also work the other way around.
• Your Mom: Mentioned as one of his Domination one-liners: "Dominated! An' I've been shagging your wife!"

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"Oh, they're going to have to glue you back together...IN HELL!"

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