M0nster's Guide to Medic (2011)

Medic Guide

Preface:

It is important to note that I personally tie the roll of the medic on any given team directly to the coordination and style of that team. I will explain mechanics and game theory(at least my limited view of these) in the best way I know how, but I truly believe that if I only give you a what and not a why that I have not improved anything, and as such I shall give both instruction and explanations as much as possible. However, sometimes the reasons you should do something might be extremely specific, and since I am attempting to write a medic guide and not a “General Chaos Theory and What the Interactions of Strange Particles Mean to You, Plus General TF2 Gameplay Guide and How Both of These Affect The Medic Class in Particular,” or “How I Learned to Quit Worrying and Love The Midfight” guide. Therefore, in the interest of brevity, I shall attempt to give broad guidelines and solid advice without being too specific about maps and odd situations.

If you are a ‘mid’ medic, then this guide will probably not help you very much, but if you are completely new or stuck in that ‘low/mid’ level, then hopefully I can help you out a little bit.

I am not claiming to be an excellent medic, or even that I practice what I preach as much as I should, but I think this will help out some lost medics who want to improve their game.

If you have read this guide and would like individualized instruction, my mentor page can be found here:
http://commforums.com/medic-teams-es...47.html?t=5447

My steam id can be found here:
http://steamcommunity.com/id/thebroletariat/

I have divided this guide into these subguides:

I. Movement and Positioning - Staying Alive
II. Healing: Heal Orders and Triage - Saving Lives
III. Ubers: The best right click since a sticky trap.
IV. Mid: Don’t Panic
V. Other Mechanics and Important Notes: Tricks of The Trade

I. Movement and Positioning

Medics are important. Hopefully even if you’ve never played medic before, you understand that the medic and what he does is the essence of any TF2 match. Therefore, as a medic yourself, you want to maximize a your time spent alive and healing more than anything else. In this subguide, without overlapping the intentions of the subguides, I will explain the principles of good medic movement and generally good positioning; In certain maps and situations, you’ll have to fend for yourself, but I want to give you the tools to effectively decide an efficient course of action regardless of terrain.

1. Play Safe

Well yeah, but what do you mean? I mean don’t be an idiot, you nerd. Stand in a way so that whatever you’re healing is between you and whatever is trying to kill you. Your pocket will change over the course of a battle, but their job is always the same; make sure you stay alive. Don’t make their job harder by walking in front of them.

This also means don’t peak corners. Let your team do that for you. Abuse your healbeam as much as possible so that you can stay alive. Unless you’re in a tight spot, a good distance behind the front lines to stay is the distance your healbeam dictates. Keep them healed, but play far enough back to be safe.

A lot of medics know this, but when it comes time to push they still run through that choke neck and neck with their pocket. Don’t be that guy. Always play it safe, even when you’re being risky. Weird strategies are not improved by bad mechanics, so even if you’re hiding in spawn to kritz on some nerds, still play smart.

Safety in numbers, guys. You have a pocket that you love and trust more than any other pocket in the game to have your back, but you two shouldn’t try to take on their entire team, even if their medic is down. Playing safe doesn’t mean don’t take risks; I believe that this game is based off of aggression, risk taking, and advantages, but if you take those risks intelligently, then you’re far better off than taking big risks with little to gain.

2. Movement

A large part of movement is playing safe, like I said above, but it’s also important to have mechanically sound button mashing when you need it.

Can you dodge a rocket? It depends. Due to the speed and splash radius of a rocket, it is hard to react to a rocket without the proper amount of time. This dodging is different than hitscan dodging, and it works based off of how your opponent aims. Most good soldiers take a split second to gauge your movement and ‘flick’ a rocket in that direction to hit you directly for up to about 110 damage. You don’t want that. You don’t want that at all.

Due to the difficulty of dodging rockets because of how fast they are and how they splash, it is better to make your opponent miss than it is to dodge as a reaction. How? Set up a pattern and break it. My favorite dodge pattern is one I picked up from a lot of soldier ammomod and MGE training mod; pick a direction, and go that way, pause, then keep doing it. Normally, nobody repeats a dodge ad nauseum, and that will earn you the precious seconds needed to be saved. If you couldn’t have survived for five more seconds, then chances are you couldn’t have escaped at all. There are many other schools of thought in terms of dodging, but from my background as a SSBM and SSBB player, I’m fully aware of the power of patterns and abusing your opponent’s natural tendency to assume that since you did it once, you will always do it.

Can you dodge a hitscan weapon? No. They can miss, but you can’t dodge it. The best advice I have on dodging hitscan weapons is the same as my advice for projectile weapons: abuse their reflexes, dodge in a way that reduces that 100 damage shot to 40.

A big part of movement isn’t in the do or die situations that you imagine when I say movement. A bigger part of movement is playing safe. Keep your eyes up and don’t take spam. Ever. Just don’t do it.

To avoid spending five pages talking about team positioning, I’m going to cut this short and edit/update it until it conveys the information I want, how I want it, but for now, that covers major things.

II. Healing

This... This is complicated, so instead of covering all my bases, I’m going to give broad advice and follow it up later with specifics.

In the beginning of the round, tell your team to crouch. I do it every round as part of my ritual; I do the same thing every game to get myself in the right mindset.

Here’s the general deal(It changes slightly with different maps, but this is the heal order in its most general form)for rollouts:

1. Buff the demoman enough for his initial sticky jump.
2. Keep the heal beam on him until he jumps away from you(until your healbeam no longer reaches him)
3.Buff the soldier that isn’t equalizing to mid(if he can’t, buff the one that needs the bigger final buff to jump away) right before he rocket jumps. This is important, because the advantages of healing him with crit heals(the more time that has elapsed since you last took damage, you heal faster, and at the beginning of a round, everyone has crit heals).
4. Buff the scouts at the very last second to a full buff. This means they will still have a good bit of the buff by the time they get to mid. This is super important to not be lazy about.
5. Return to your pocket and keep it on him untill you are almost at mid(where your roamer jumps away).
6. Buff your roamer to max buff right before he jumps, and keep it on him until the heal beam breaks.
7. Buff your pocket until he leaves you or you can buff your demoman.

That’s it. You should be at mid now, and then you should check out the midfight section.

Heal Orders:

This is also complicated. After a few guidelines, it’s important to make your own judgements about who gets the heals. I’ll go more in depth on different posts later that fully explore these topics in minutia.

Heal Order Rules of Thumb:

1. Keep your demoman healed as much as possible.

2. Keep your scouts healed on the flank as much as possible.

3. Your roamer should not be soaking up too many heals, but if your demo/pocket are buffed, then spread the heals to everyone on your team.

4.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sigma
Defensive healing is suited for when your team is retreating, and your goal is to not die while you regroup. Here, you heal the person most likely to take damage next, prioritizing the demo and pocket/disregarding the scouts, so you can hopefully get behind a choke with everyone alive so you can stabilize.

Aggressive healing is suited for mid fights and pushes you're committed to winning. Here, you place a low priority on your soldiers and focus on anyone with crit heals, then your scouts, then anyone in a good spot to do damage. The reasoning behind this is that if you look at your team's health not as a number of hit point, but a number of shots you can take before dying, you heal more efficiently by healing your scouts. Soldiers take around 100 every time they get hit, since they're slow moving and easy to direct. Scouts need to be splashed and are harder to land meatshots on, hence they're more likely to be taking around 50 damage a hit. Healing at 24hp/s, you need 4s to heal a "hit" on a soldier, and only 2s to heal a "hit" on a scout -- hence in mid push, you maximize the number of "hits" you can take before your team is down and the push has failed by prioritizing the scouts. Add in the fact that scouts tend to have crit heals more than the other classes (no damage for movement, less likely to take spam), and you have the full picture.
5. Get the heals to the people who need them. If you are in a corner at 150 with your pocket fully buffed, then you need to buff your teammates who are all at hurting.

6. You are not as important as their entire team. It is more important that you get the right heals to the right people than that you stay alive for a little bit longer.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Sigma
Not sure if it's worth noting, but I'd like to dive a bit deeper into this point. In a "defensive" mode, you always want to stay alive. In an "aggressive" mode (mid fight or committed push without ubers/post uber), it's a bad idea to focus the medic over fragging classes. The reason is that if you use 3 shots to kill the medic, that's 200-300 damage you didn't do to a soldier/demo or 100-200 damage you didn't do to a scout. It takes 6-8s for your medic to make up for that health difference, which is time enough to kill at least 1 or 2 fragging classes from the other team. The result of the ensuing 5v4/5v3 is rarely pretty for the team with the medic.

The main outcome from this is that when you're committed to winning a point and not thinking about a follow up push or what have you, as a medic you should be moving up aggressively to put heals on scouts/whoever is in a good spot to do damage. You either get to heal in the optimal way, or the other team focuses you down and your team gets the aforementioned advantage.

While this sounds clear-cut, I would like to note that if you don't get a wipe or at least win the point and get their medic after you die, you'll have a disadvantage on the next engagement. Also, if you misjudge the situation and go play suicidal when it's not really a committed push, then die to 1 or 2 guys while you're in no position to punish their combo, you're basically screwing your team. In short, there's a time and a place.
7. Know when to spread the loving. Know when to concentrate it. When your pocket is under heavy fire from their everything is a bad time to chase your demoman down, buff him, have your team die and then come onto the forums and scream at me cause I told you to heal your demoman more.

8. Trust your team and heal them correctly regardless of emotions. I see too many otherwise good medics say something along the lines of “Whenever I’m in situation x, I know I should do y, but I don’t because he never protects me properly.” Don’t be that guy. Fix the problem, don’t hold grudges.

III. Ubers

What can I say about ubers? They’re unfortunately more complicated than what they are at face value.

The basics:

When you activate your ubercharge, you become invulnerable for a period of time. Whoever you are healing is also invulnerable. When you switch your healing target, you lose 10% of your dwindling uber, the uber flickers and fades from the original target, and your new healing target becomes invulnerable.

You are not immune to physics in any form: projectile physics(juggling somebody by shooting at their feet), pyro airblasts, and body blocking still affects you.

Before I talk about milking ubers, I want you to repeat this five times:

“Nobody can drop an uber but me.”

If you’re going to be risky with that uber, be damn sure you can back it up with good awareness, reflexes, and timing.

What makes an uber effective?

Oh man. This is the big one. What is it? Is it your team? Aggression? Splitting? Focusing?

Without going over what your team should be doing, which is a different post entirely, you should be making sure that at the end of the uber, your team has more people up and more health spread out over the entire team than their team. If you achieve that, then it’s a good uber.

How do you make that happen, though? Uber the people that need it, before they get hurt.

That is a broad statement, so let me walk you through a few more specific situations.
1. If you’re walking through a sticky trap, uber yourself and the pocket(whatever class he is at the time), then uber your other teammates through.
2. You’ve ubered in, your pocket and their pocket shoot four meaningless rockets at each other. Abuse their reload time to let your pocket or demo sit their unharmed and uber your scouts or *shudder* roamer if they need it.

An uber in and of itself cannot change the game. It has to be well done, well planned, and well oiled to work at its max capacity.

The nitty-gritty provided by Sigma:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sigma
Fun facts:

1. The uber drain rate is 12.5%/s while you have 1 target ubered and are connected to him.
2. For each player who is flashed as a result of your uber, the drain rate increases by 6.25%/s (a flash lasts 1s). So, 18.75% with 2 players ubered (1 connected, 1 flashed), 25% with 3 players ubered, etc.
3. When you hit 0% uber, you and your current target are flashed for 1s.

My wording is specific here for a reason: these are some things I didn't realize until I went tic-by-tic in a demo of me ubering different patterns of bots in spawn. The meaningful in game consequences are:

1. If you uber and your pocket jumps out of heal beam range, even if you do not flash anyone else, your drain rate increases to 18.75%/s for 1 second or until you reconnect with him. You get longer ubers if you're connected the entire time, but since that's often impractical, the result is that you have a half-cost flash when your pocket jumps (since you'll be draining faster anyways -- the only penalty is when you switch back and whoever you flashed is causing your drain to increase).

2. Right before you hit 0%, you have a free flash. Why? Examine:

-You have 5% remaining before your uber is out, with one target ubered.
-You switch targets. Your original target is now flashing for 1s, and your drain rate is at 18.75%/s.
-Before you hit 0%, you attach to another target. Due to fact 3 above, you and your new target and now flashing for 1s.

Hence, you can have an 8s uber on 1 target, then 1s with 2 players ubered right at the end. From what I've seen, almost all experienced medics do a flash right at the end of their uber, but I don't think many consciously realize why it's a good idea (I had the habit before I went and found these results).

In case anyone cares, the 3 facts above also apply to the kritz drain rate. You don't get flashes with kritz (hence fact 3 is kind of a moot point), but you still have that increased drain as a result of switching (bleh). Still well worth it to switch a kritz though, since typically you shoot 1-2 crit stickies, then 15 scouts and 22 soldiers are on your head and a crit rocket is the right tool for the job.

IV. Mid Fights:

Alright, well assuming you followed my previous instructions for a proper heal order on your way to a mid fight, then your job rolling out is supremely simple other wise:

1.Don't break the beam.
2.Keep running forward.

That's it. If you do those two things, then you'll get to mid properly. I see a sad amount of medics who spend a stupid amount of time turning around and catching people with their heal beams, and walking around corners the long way, and then they get to mid late, and they can't buff their demoman and scouts because of it.

As for mid fights, these are a game of their own, so for now(I plan to do in-depth map analysis later to help raise general competency on a per-map basis), I'm going to give general, stream-lined advice.

1.This is an aggressive fight. You want to be with your team getting the heals out to the people who need them. Especially on badlands mid; if you're behind boxes with your demoman while the rest of your team is on the mid point or further, then you're messing up. When I go over this map with low/mid medics and demomen, I tend to tell them to get out from behind boxes regardless, and until they have the gamesense to know where to be, this usually works out as good advice. Not just on badlands, either; if you're back in corner on gran mid, or behind house on snakewater, or behind pride rock on yukon mid, then there's a problem.
2.Get the heals to the people who need them, for the highest returns possible, in the smartest and most effective way possible. As a rule of thumb, get your buffs to the scouts at mid after you've topped off your demoman(who will/should be your primary target as soon as you get to mid).
3.You are not as important as their entire team. Oftentimes, newer teams(and experienced ones) get hyper aggressive on a medic, and they'll over extend or over commit more than needed. One of the things I love doing as medic is to 'trade up.' I see that they jump two soldiers on me at the very beginning of a fight, then I call the jump, and I call where they'll be landing(presumably on top of me), and because they wasted one rocket jumping two me(2/8), and at least two each as they try to pick me from the air(6/8), then they don't have much to defend themselves with after they land, and my team will get two fragging class picks to their medic picks and then overwhelm their team with numbers. It's a specific example, but especially on granary mid, this is a commonly and widely used strat. This also means you need to not be hyper sensitive to your death. If you get all the right heals to all the right people and then die simply because of the hard to dodge nature of a bombing soldier, then it is all right: A mid fight is not won and lost solely because of the death of a medic.
4.Know when to fall out. This isn't entirely your call, but it is super important that you understand how necessary it is that you know how to do this properly. If you get to mid and your demoman gets wrecked immediately, then there is a high likely hood that you will be at a heal and man deficit that will be almost impossible to come back from(on evenly matched teams). That is not to say that you shouldn't go to mid if your demo is picked early. Stay aggressive at least for a little while; you don't know what might happen. Typically if you're two down or at a massive heal disadvantage, it is wiser to save your uber and run than it is to keep fighting at mid. It can oftentimes be the difference between holding second and losing the entire round. I'm sure you've all experienced the mid fight syndrome where the whole round is decided in about twenty seconds at mid.

Posting this now, but only because I'm on crappy island internet. Needs work.

Tricks of The Trade:

This will probably be the most eclectic and lengthy segment in the end, simply because there are so many small and interesting things that add depth to the medic class. I encourage all medics to add their input here, whether it be map specific, or advice on binds and configs.


Uber faking: There are a lot of complicated binds out there that make you call random things instead of “I am Ubercharged,” when you get to 100% uber. The problem is, that if you only press it when you have 100% uber, than the bind is useless for hiding information, for the only reason you'd be screaming about dispensers, other than being a general asshat, is to mask your uber. The other medic isn't stupid. He knows. I recommend using your 'medic' key, but slightly differently. As soon as you're in a situation where it might be an uber race, start calling medic every couple of seconds. Do it before you mask your call, and after(so that they can't gain that information by gauging when you quit calling for medic.

Configs:

I used TF2mate:
http://clugu.com/tf2mate/ Who did this? I need to give credit.

With Chris' fps settings and the rest basically default. Having no view-models on can be kind of odd, but the added awareness is extremely important, especially for medic.