Medic Nerf analysis

Hi guys. Just played a night of play as the medic with the new (and admittedly strange) balancing choices that just got made for the 360 version of TF2 and thought i would put together my idea of what is going on.

The first question that comes to mind is why nerf the medic on the 360 and not on the PC. The thing to consider with that is what is different between the 360 and PC versions. The main difference is the players. When i see medics in tf2 lately mostly all I see is ones who are obsessively healing one person and using uber for an offensive push and the strange 'crit hoe' medics i've been seeing lately who shoot needles until they get their first crit needle then save the rest to kill enemies, thus ignoring the fact that they are playing a medic and not a soldier or scout. In my opinion the changes were to force a change in behavior for the first of those two types of medic. Lets look at exactly what has been changed to get to my point.

It seems that healing has been severely slowed now i notice that anyone who does the standard tactic once i put my medigun on them of standing out in the open and spamming fire at the enemy gets cut down the moment more then one person or a demoman starts shooting at them. This severely reduces the effectiveness of the 'butt buddy' strategy of medic use where you follow one person around, turning them into an unstoppable killing machine until the enemy is smart enough to kill you instead of trying to kill them. Now killing them is not only possible, its almost preferable since medics are usually hiding behind corners and hard to get to without getting behind the enemy line. This has two effects, medics are less likely to have the same partner for the entire game because it's very likely their partner will die and they will still be able to retreat and secondly, the medic is less of a target, thus giving them more opportunities to build up uber as long as a spy or scout or pyro isn't going on a medic stomping run.

The second thing i noticed is that the healing operates on a curve, the more health a person has, the faster the damage they do have is healed. If you are in the red and near a medic it's usually faster to just run for a health pack then to expect the medic to stand next to you for half a minute to get you healed, and chances are with these new updates the medic would appreciate you being smart enough to retreat. This has numerous effects. Firstly it makes buffing a very important thing for a medic. Every person you buff is one less sliver of health you have to heal when things hit the fan, secondly it means that when making a push it's no longer smart to rely on one person to be the damage sponge as it takes too long to heal them. Thus instead of a 'medic combo' strategy. I suggest teams adopt a 'medic pack' stratiegy. When you are using a medic (or preferably multiple medics) the best way to outlast the enemy as you push forward is to have the offensive classes that push forward pop out from behind cover and do as much damage before getting about a third of their health in damage, THEN run behind cover to trade attention to a fully healed and buffed person to keep the enemy busy as you retreat and get healed and buffed by the medic. Lather rinse and repeat. This would work best if you had no less then three people doing this, and two medics would be preferable.

As a side note I also noticed that it is now possible for me to get an uber before a control point match starts just by obsessively buffing everyone on an 8 man team with noone purposefully damaging themselves. I don't have enough experience to say weather or not that was possible before the medic changes though. It merely serves to me to show how the game has been changed, the medic is not going to be effective as a single ally buff anymore. You HAVE to switch your healing target often to be any help now, it's just a shame that they had to make all these negative changes to the class to

yes, you are correct.  You have to heal multiple targets to be effective.

Your last point was intentional by Valve to put an end to probably one of the most silly gaming rituals in history.  Nothing else should have changed for the 360, so you're probably just experiencing some weird scenarios that haven't popped up before.  The whole crit-saving thing was a horrible exploit, so that was justifiably fixed.  Oh, and healing works slightly differently than you think: The rate at which your patient is healed is proportional to the length of time since they last took damage.  Players with only a little bit of damage probably only took a hit recently, while those at 1HP are more likely to have been screaming bloody murder for the past two minutes and looking for you.

Also, keep in mind that when you buff a player to above their maximum health they also say above their maximum for longer than before as well.

Thanks for the corrections and clarifications guys. All in all i think that the changes are going to be positive in the long run. If for nothing else then helping a smarter breed of medic come to the 360 version.

I'm pretty sure it wasn't intentional because despensers also heal undeniably slower than normal now. It's pretty rediculous, it takes a whole minute to heal 300 health.

yeah...they totally f---ed the medic up on the 360. I have 89 hours as medic on 360 so i noticed a couple of major issues. I'm gonna do a buncha tests tonite, i'll post videos here tomorrow of all the problems. LAME

Why dispensers too though? Every 100hp takes approx. 20 seconds to heal at a dispenser. This just kills the heavy class, I pop out and get hit by 2 rockets, have to wait 40 seconds till I'm full again. If your 6v6 team doesn't have a medic on defense then you're royally screwed. Most other classes would benefit from finding a health pack but sometimes your speed just doesn't cut it. The medigun is also useless when it takes a full 15 seconds to heal someone out of red, and you have 2 other people who need health. It's frustrating but I guess we'll learn to live with it. My confusion is why Valve would put manhours into patching the 360 and not just give 'em what the PC users got. This patch seems to have done more bad then good, but that's just my opinion.

Yeah i don't know what their deal was with nerfing the dispenser, now it's going to be used even less for helping teammates and even more for just engie camping.

It isn't listed here so most likely it was unintentional. Which means that a fix will (hopefully) be coming sometime.