Medic's New Item & Related Strategies

Hi!  Just got done playing around with the new medic updates, both on the recipient side and the medic side.  I love Team Fortress 2, and the updates are great!  I especially love talking about tactics and such, which is why I decided to make a thread on how these new updates will be used by us, the players.  By the way I've finally gotten around to playing a bit on tf2f servers (I'm usually on sourceOP's valve-maps server) and if you've played with me my in-game is 'nom nom nom'.

Just to outline it for those who don't know, the medic updates (4/29/08):

[Primary]
Krietzkrieg (sp?): Heals like a regular medigun, but the ubercharge gives the recipient 100% crits instead of invulnerability.  While crits-charging, the medic is also vulnerable.

[Secondary]
Blautsauger: regular ol' needle gun, every needle-hit gives you 3 health back.  To balance this out, this gun can't crit at all

[Melee]
Ubersaw: my favorite of all, every hit landed gives you 25% on your uber-meter (both crit and regular ubers), but fires 20% slower

[Thoughts on the Krietzkrieg:]
Ah... what can I say?  This gun is rather fun to use.  It is identical to the regular medigun, except for the new look and of course the crits-charge.  The Crit-uber can allow for massive DPSing, especially with a soldier/demo. 

However, the Krietz-Medic is much more vulnerable than the Uber-Medic, since they can never attain invincibility.  The regular old Uber-charge is an all-around better choice since you will still get crits while Ubered, but both the medic and the recipient is invincible.  For this reason, I think that krietzkrieg is much more of a situational weapon.  It takes much more care in its use, since it won't save you in a desperate situation as well as a regular uber would.

[For the medic & the recipient of the Kritz-uber:]
You should NOT treat the krietz-uber like the game-breaker that regular ubers sometimes are, although there are times it can be such.  Don't rush in head-first and recklessly, unless it is a planned and coordinated attack.  Otherwise, you should try to gain higher-ground so that you can make the most of your crits and also increase survivability.

[Kritz-uber vs. Regular-uber]
Regular uber will win 100% of the time since DPS means nothing to the ubered.

[Kritz-uber & Soldier]
The krietzkrieg uber is also not to be used for a suicide-like rush forward, and thus the regular uber is better to take out sentries, or push a heated front.  However, krietzkrieg is deadly when under the right circumstances.  Small, confined and linear spaces are soldier-food... also, a krietzkrieg'd soldier can use 1 rocket to jump, giving him 3-guarenteed crit rockets in a row (which is a lot!), and then probably 1 or 2 more before the uber is off (I actually did this as a soldier a couple times in goldrush and found it extremely effective).

[Kritz-uber & Demo]
Krietzkrieg demos are likewise deadly, more with their stickies than with their pipes (sounds like a weed reference o_o) and also you get the chance to throw out 8 glowing crit-stickies out there without blowing'em (if you so desire). 

[Kritz-uber & Heavy]
Heavies are not a bad class to crit-uber either, due to their endurance, they are able to survive more than your demos and soldiers.  Also a critting heavy will take out anything that is stupid enough to be within medium range of them with no cover, and possibly long range (but they'll likely find cover more than half the time).  Remember that over long range, although individual crit-bullets have no distance damage fall-off, there still exists a large spread.  Krietzed Heavy is less effective over long-range as well

[Kritz-uber & Pyro]
Effective, but difficult.  Pyro's are weak, especially if you're facing good heavies and so

cool. Here's my thoughts on the weapons and some interesting findings:

Crit gun:
Really awesome addition. A few people i used it on tended to treat it like an uber, which it is not. i think the most benefit would be for a demoman stickies. The stickies stay crits after they have been shot so this means that to defend multiple entries, less stickies are needed to do deadly damage. But of course it would be situational.

Vampire Gun:
Very cool and interesting gun. I used it plenty of times to kill pyros chasing me, easy kills. The trajectory of the gun seems to be a little smaller i think but overall, if you're used to the needle gun you'll be perfectly fine with this.

An interesting thing I found that the vampire gun gives you health even if you hit an uber. I haven't done any testing to see if it sucks health but I do know that you gain health even if you hit an uber. Also, you can get criticals through the crit gun, not sure if you suck more health though.

Also another idea: Spy checking made easier? I haven't tried it out yet. Say you see a guy and you think he's a spy, shoot him with your vamp gun and if you gain health, he is an enemy. Else, he is just a friendly. I think this should work and if it really does, this method can give you a guaranteed way of spy checking along with the pyro check.

Ubersaw:
This one is also my favorite weapon. Granted it's slower, I already try to time my shots so that they all hit so the slower speed doesn't affect me too much, most of the time at least lol.

I would really like to know if it charges your uber if you hit an enemy uber with it, such as the medic while they are occupied with someone else.


Also had a cool idea, 2 medics, one with crits and other with uber, use it on the same guy. Crit guy would obviously have to hide int he back to use the uber medic and heavy to block. This could potentially be really useful, ubers and crits at the same time. I'm not sure if this works though, someone must give it a try.

Well, that's just my thoughts so far.

-You can uber & critcharge the same guy and he'll have both. If the ubering medic multis between the fighter and the 2nd medic, everyone is invincible.

-In the middle of using a charge you can whip out the ubersaw, hit someone, and go back to the medigun and your charge will last longer.

-Blutsauger means you can hold off a heavy from med-long range without getting killed. If it's a lone heavy you might be able to take them down.

-You can multi critcharge people but the 100% crit effect seems to leave immediately after taking your medigun off the person, not like the regular uber where it lasts a second or so afterward.

Quote:

Do you know if the guy being ubered (if he's a medic) can build his own charge while he's under the effect of another uber? This is HUGE. This means that a pair of medics, both with invuln. uber, can run around with infinite ubercharge; one keeps the gun out, one keeps the saw, and they switch every 10 seconds.

Yeah, that works too.

Quote:


This sounds suspiciously like an "exploit" to me, I wonder if we'll see a patch from valve.

wow people have the ubersaw already?

Quote:

Spend a little time looking around the forums.

Cascade, what is the point of an indefinitely ubering pair of medics?  It's not even guarenteed since once you run out of one uber without succesfully hitting 4 times with the uber-saw, it's another long-time wait before you can begin the chain again.  Much better use on stronger classes.  But you are right, ubersaw is a big deal.

Coldshiver, I'd prefer spy-checking with that instead of spy checking with the blautsauger, since needles are slow and inaccurate and if you shot a spy that far away, you'd be hard pressed to chase him once he realizes he's hit and does the whole 'invisible' + 'run away' thing.  Plus, how can I resist an easy uber-bar fill-up?

Cyn, I didn't know you can lengthen your uber time with the ubersaw!  It's great news!  But considering that 25% = 2.5 seconds of uber, and that it takes almost that time to switch to bonesaw, hit, and switch back to uber and retarget your recipient, it doesn't seem extremely useful... any in-game experience of this actually helping out during a game?

I'm going to play s'more medic today, and then come back with more experience.

I hope they make these additions for ps3