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No, this post is not about our favourite Polish/American/Belgian internet troll.
Sorry Dummy, maybe next time.

This post is, in fact, entirely about playing medic. It is also aimed specifically at new players (and, to compensate at least a tiny bit for Dummy’s disappointment, bad players). Perhaps others may benefit from it as well. In which case, be sure to let me know :D

Medic is the most underrated class in the game, played by the most self-overrated players in the world. Understandable, really; medic is the class that is by far the most fun to play, after all!

You think airshots and meatshots are rewarding? Try dodging rocket and pipe spam while you’re on 90% über and have an enemy scout on your back, ultimately saving 3 of your players from certain death with a perfectly timed über pop.
Sound stressful? You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Unless your name is Taimou, medic is played as the thinking class, and not so much the one with insane death matching skills. Positioning is everything. This goes for all classes, of course, but especially so for the medic. Every second you are dead, your team is not being healed and you are not building your übercharge. As such it is crucial you do all you can to stay alive AND heal everyone up. This puts a large emphasis on dodging as well, as you can tell.

Anyway, enough of the boring stuff. Let’s get to the interesting parts;

There are three basic skills a good medic needs to master;
Communication: You need to be able to listen to what your team has to say and filter out the stuff that matters, but you also have to be able to communicate well to your team mates (especially so if you are the main caller!)
Staying alive: Obviously your team won’t be able to perform up to its full potential if they are not being healed or have no über available.
Über management: Your über lasts only a short period of time once it is used, so it is important that you know when to use it and how to use it.

In more detail:

Communication
The decisions you make as medic heavily depend on what is going on on the map. I would strongly advise against using wallhacks, so it’s important your team communicates enemy positions as much as possible. It is then your job to process this information and base your actions on it. For example, if you are holding badlands mid, you wouldn’t want to stand next to the house exit when someone calls there is an enemy scout in valley. Ideally, you immediately reposition yourself somewhere safer as you hear this call. By the way, why were you standing there in the first place, hmm? :)

It is equally important that you communicate your own things to your team mates, so they know what’s up. You are the one having an overview of everyone’s positions and health, your players generally do not. If your demoman calls for a push, you may cancel it out if you think your players don’t have the needed health. If you suddenly run away from your pocket to save a scout a few miles away, make sure your pocket knows you’re not there anymore.

Let your team know how close you are to über. Don’t bore them with meaningless percentages though – learn how long it will take, in seconds, until you have full über. “10 seconds till über!” is much more understandable than “86%!”. You’ll find that your team will actually realise when you have über rather than being preoccupied with trying to work out what that percentage thingy means.

When you use über, judge whether it was a useful über or not. If you were forced and had to über way too early for the push you were planning, it is a “bad” über. If you über several seconds after your opponent did and you kept everyone alive with yours, it was a “good” über. Let your team know so they know what to expect from the push.

Staying alive
In other words, positioning and dodging. As mentioned above, positioning is everything.
Well, that was a lie. It is not everything.
It’s impossible to always be in a position where you will never take damage. Unless you stay in spawn, of course, but I promise this will render playing medic extremely boring. Indeed, positioning is very important, but dodging equally so.

There will be situations where you have to take risks to keep your players alive, and that is where your dodging skills will matter loads. Dodging is not only the way you randomly smash the buttons on your keyboard – it is also about being clever. Think twice about the routes you take. If you’re ever left alone and an enemy soldier is chasing you, you’re going to die if you predictably run straight for the nearest exit. Try running around the corner, waiting half a second, and then turn back. They will never expect it!

Über management
You spend most of the game building your über. The über itself, once used, only lasts a few seconds. Think about this for a moment.

You may be able to tell that your über is important. Very important, in fact. It’s a giant waste to have to lose it at any given point where you would not want to, or to use it solely to keep your pocket alive while your demoman is taking a bunch of heat and eventually dies.

This, again, falls back onto your decision making. Can you afford to lose a certain player? If yes, then by all means don’t share the über (it will last longer!). If not, do share it, but keep in mind that every time you swap to a different player, the time your über lasts will decrease.
Everyone’s favourite asian nerd, kuma, has written an excellent blog post on übercharge mechanics. I suggest you give it a read (or several reads): http://kumadaboss.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/medic-ubercharge-mechanics/

Some other tips and hints
As a rule of thumb, though at the same time very situational, is to always keep your demoman alive. The demo is the most powerful class in the game and with experience you’ll learn that most pushes and defenses will not work out without having your demo with you.

If you play widescreen, you see more. If your window is even wider, you’ll see even more! TF2 let’s you play in windowed mode, and you can set the resolution to pretty much anything you want. For those who care, I play 1920*860, giving me an FoV of roughly 120 degrees.

Sometimes it’s viable for the medic to run onto the stickied last point so that the enemy demo will detonate his stickies. You will die, but your team will win! Don’t do this if you’re equal or lower on numbers though!

For most people it helps to watch your own demos. See how you did, take note of things you did badly and think of how you could’ve done better. Don’t make the same mistake in your next game. Every mistake you stop making is a step closer to Premier!

If there is something you struggle with in your learning process, find yourself a mentor! Mentors are players with HEAPS of experience and they are willing to share some of the things they’ve learned during their many months playing the class. They can provide insight into things you may not have even considered thinking about. At the time of writing, Fish and ThePledge are eagerly waiting to answer any questions you may have, in #tf2.mentor on QuakeNet IRC.

It can also be very helpful to watch other medics play. Have a look at VanillaTV’s Insight series by CUBE. They provide a full match recording of a player’s PoV and the team’s mumble comms. Other than that, you may be able to find POV demos on ETF2L or other demo sharing websites. Some players you should definitely have a look at are Fish, Agron, dunc, F2, Torden, Admirable, Taimou, Mirelin, ThePledge, Royze, TheSucker, dajackal, skeej, Byte, flushy, ..

Fin.

I hope this is readable and/or helpful to anyone :)

Shoutouts to Fish for being my favourite med and Admirable for being my least favourite med :D

tl;dr

:( CanFo

Last edited by Permzilla, 12 years ago

Quoted from CanFo

TL;DR :D

click people get points

Quoted from FAINTAYDAYDAYDAYDAYD

came here to troll dummy, Am disapoint.

+1

spikehimself himself said so.

LOL DOUBLEPOST ILL POST EDIT HERE

EDIT: Also, yes demoman is the most powerful class in the game, but scouts are the only class in Team Fortress 2 that have infinite skill gap, because aim. No matter how hard you try to tell me that Soldiers and Demoman will get better too, no they fucking wont after a certain time and that’s why TF2 has gotten a bit stale.

If you watch stefan/schocky, you’ll see why he is light years ahead of other scouts.

Last edited by Taimou, 12 years ago

rus>prem/aimbot/

Heh, I saw you!