WaffleHousChef

Heavy Lock-on and Healing Your Teammates

The most common task for a medic in TF2 so far has been locking onto a Heavy Weapons Guy and riding them until they are dead. This is usually a good strategy since they have a ton of hitpoints and benefit from the 50% bonus more then any other class. This reduces the chance they can get insta-gibbed, making it easier for you to be able to heal them since they can generally survive long enough to benefit from your healing.

The problem is that while this is a good general strategy, people who play medics can get tunnel visioned into just doing this one task. When you're playing medic you can't neglect your other teammates, but there are obvious tradeoffs here.

First off, when you're in a cluster of your teammates and not actively taking fire, scan around while you're locked on to your heavy. Always be watching your two heal popups. You get a "Currently Healing" popup and a "Target" popup. You can use this to lockon to the heavy, but yet use your target window to constantly scan your surrounding teammates for damage. Don't worry about scanning around becuase you can still heal your locked on target even if you are facing 180 degrees from them if they are still within range and you don't let off the mouse button. If you see a damaged teammate and your Heavy isn't getting hit, shift your heal to your teammate, then re-target your Heavy to keep an eye on them or keep scanning your team for the next heal target. This obviously benefits you in multiple ways from both sides. Healing your other damaged teammates fills your Ubercharge much faster than ignoring them and your teammates go into the next encounter with full health. When everyone around you is full up again or your heavy starts to take fire switch back to them.

The difficult decision is when you're actively in combat you have to evaluate if your heavy can survive the encounter or not, and how hurt your other teammates are around you. This just takes experience and is pretty advanced medic technique, but just keep in mind that sometimes it's not the most optimal thing to just blindly keep healing the heavy when you have hurt teammates nearby.

Another thing is that you should pay attention to medic calls in your area. Prioritize the people yelling for medics for target scanning, but keep in mind that some people call for a medic when they've skinned their knee and are down 1HP but others wait until they are bleeding from several holes and are almost dead. So, while medic calls help you identify hurt targets, you still have to use your judgement on what order to heal them in becuase you can't tell how hurt they are from the call alone.

Also, be wary of someone spamming the heck out of the medic call. Many times enemy spies will sit in front of you and try to get you to heal them by spamming the heal key to distract you from healing your team. As a medic you can't go around spy checking everyone that you are going to be healing or you wouldn't get any healing done. You pretty much have to trust your teammates to clear spies, and sometimes they won't and you'll end up healing a spy. Such is the life of a medic, just keep in mind that not everyone who is calling for a medic is a friendly, so you have to use your judgement while assisting your teammates.


A note for teammates, sometimes I don't have the time or inclination to heal you if I'm actively healing a target. Sometimes if I'm locked on and under fire, you're going to have to wait for a pause in the action before I can heal you. I do my very best to heal everyone around me, but you just might fall prey to a lower priority. If we're in a forward press, I will priortize assault classes on healing and neglect camping classes like Engies or Snipers. If we're on defense just the opposite. If you're playing a kit that's not in sync with the current combat conditions where I'm standing you're down on the healing queue, and I'll get to you while I can, but I'm going to try to keep the classes topped off that can be best used in the situation first and foremost.

Sirusblk

Spot on with the tunnel vision. I've run around as a scout crying for medic and a medic refuses to heal me chasing after the heavy whose far from combat.

Also the great anti-Heavy/Medic combo is either a spy or a sniper. I prefer the sniper. Getting to say "wanker" never gets old

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Exploding_Silver

As I get better at Medic these are the things I have learnt;

Heal fellow medics, if they are 70% to uber then thats not to be wasted. Medics on fire seem to just burn and burn, help them out !

If you are in a crowd and say, a pyro lights everyone up, repeatedly click the left mouse to give everyone a shot to stop the flames. I think each time you click the left mouse afresh, the ray goes to the person infront of you who needs it the most.

Tell your primary healing pal verbally that uber is ready

Time your uber to not waste any seconds of it, if you ubber and spend 3 seconds getting to the corner then thats 3 seconds invulnerable from no enemy.

Switching uber half way through ! just takes judgment in the situation

To get rid of turrets uber the soldier

If a pyro is flanking the tunnels, follow them for just the best fun !

Position yourself to look around while healing

Do you best to tell your heavy of spy attacks (sry Bom I did try my best), or tell them of who they could shoot next, eg "Bom, 2 on your right"

Run around at 90 degrees to the enemy, it makes you more difficult to hit.

Even in some situations it may appear to be better to ubber a non heavy, still do the heavy as an uberred heavy just has a scary psychological impact

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RandomGuy

Don't get heavy-locked. Buffing that heavy to 150% is not worth teammates dying around you. The heavy can take the most damage before he needs healing so use that buffer. Always be scanning and switching targets. Your ubercharge will grow much faster this way too.

How to use the ubercharge is a critical decision.

Heavy: This is the most common and obvious use, but not always the best. The heavy is the slowest class and is slow to begin dealing out damage. This restricts the situations where ubering a heavy is the best to just outside critical areas that the enemy wants to defend. Anywhere else the enemy can just retreat for ten seconds and the heavy can't catch them. Even in well-defended spots the uber heavy often fails in the face of upgraded turrets if they are being actively repaired.

Soldier: The soldier is a good choice as well but suffers speed problems as well, limiting the range of the uber push. However he can reach significantly farther than the heavy. The soldier does stand a bit better chance of taking down turrets, though. A big problem with the soldier is he has trouble sustaining damage throughout the uber time due to reloading.

Demoman: The demoman is a great choice to uber in the face of overwhelming turrets. He's also a viable choice to defend a point if swarmed by enemies. Otherwise, the demoman is not a good choice because of very slow reload times. Also, his ability to lay down indirect damage (around corners for example) is not helpful when he's ubered.

Pyro: The pyro is my favorite uber target. His sustained damage is excellent when there is no need to hide or turn back. In wide-open areas he's useless but most situations where you want to use uber involve tight spaces. The confusion created by the flames can also disguise the fact that the pyro is ubered, so the enemy might not run away when they should.

Medic and Engineer: These are not great choices but if there is no alternative they could be ubered with good results. The reason for this is they are reasonably fast-moving and they have the two best melee weapons in the game. Most likely the situation where your options are limited is if the enemy destroyed your front line troops and is swarming the objective. An ubered wrench- or bonesaw-swinger might be able to keep them at bay.

Scout: The main problem here is staying in range. However, if the scout realizes he doesn't need to run around like crazy to stay alive because he's ubered, he can get up in people's faces and put out serious damage.

Spy and Sniper: Going uber just does not jive with the playstyles of these classes. In a pinch you could use a sniper with his machine gun.

The best way to use uber, though, is not to pick one target and stick with him until the uber runs dry. Switching targets is once again preferable if you have multiple heavies, soldiers, pyros or a combination. Keep your opponents guessing. Once they see that glowing enemy they will stop firing at him (turrets excepted). So why bother ubering someone who wouldn't be taking damage anyways? If the enemy switches their fire you should consider switching your uber.

Your medigun also heals while it ubers so use both abilities at once if you can by ubering an injured teammate. This also makes the uber last longer. Even if there is only one teammate with you, don't turn on the uber until one of you starts taking damage, especially with a heavy.

WaffleHousChef

I can't remember if this has been mentioned yet or not, but Uber will clear flames instantly. If you are in a mass of friendlies and all of them are burning (Fire! Fire! Fire!) you can pop Uber and hit them all in turn for a split second each and use it as a mass fire extinguisher to douse them all.

I'll often swtich uber targets quickly to extinguish flames on near by friends and go back to my main Uber target if they are still under fire (usually from turret clearing.)

Pyro is certainly the most fun class to Uber, but they have a distinct disadvantage in that they are a fairly lightweight class and that combined with their limited range one or two upgraded turrets can stop them stone cold due to knockback. This is best used out of range of fixed defenses or in places where the Pyro can jump on the defenses from a very short distance (walls, corners, etc.)

MagnaCentipede

" Going uber just does not jive with the playstyles of these classes."

Someone once dropped Ü on me as a spy. I wanted to say a dirty word.

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Arf

I Uber'd to save myself from a Pyro and then started dousing all my teammates who concluded that they were uber and it was time to counter-attack, everyone was killed.

Funniest thing I've seen a Medic do so far is Uber an enemy Spy and then keep him Uber'd. Which just goes to show that while in other games the Medic is pretty much guaranteed usefulness to your team on TF2 it is hands down the worst class to play poorly.

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MagnaCentipede

I love watching medics stagger around confused when they're healing a "teammate" and I keep beating the guy senseless with the aluminum bat.

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Sirusblk

I think I did that, I was wondering why a heavy just sat there and didn't do anything

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Arf

It wasn't on the TG server, I remember hearing..

"Stop ubering him!"
"How? I'm trying!"

It was pretty epic.

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Sirusblk

I saw it again last night. It was cool we had a red shiny medic running around with a blue shiny spy in front of him stabbing people :P

Just stop healing and switch to your syringe gun. How hard is that? Stop firing at least and you're fine...

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McQueen17

I made the experience, that a ubered pyro is worth most when you use him as a last stand. Times and times again, my pally and I breach a complete front with medic/ubered pyro in the most crimson situations. We even managed to do a almost complete enemy team kill AND a capture in one 10 second run. That was fun.

Though, what I originally wanted to say is, that it doesn't matter how "lightweight" a class is. Even a ubered (?) heavy won't make it forward against two Stage 3 Turrets/Soldier/Demoman. So the pyro might even be the better alternative if you're facing multiple targets just because he can inflict more damage without the need to aim, once you're face to face.

Avs

Any setup where a level 3 turret has maximum range will stop any class running at it with uber. So with a pyro that doesnt have the ranged firepower to kill a turret that far away, your best bet would be to simply have some uber'd class like a spy run in there and kill the turret out of disguise. Or have some soldiers team up on the turret while someone is taking all the oncoming fire with uber on.

Sirusblk

3 direct hits with a rocket will kill an enemy turret and the engi banging on it, mix one critical in there and it's probably less.

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Sirusblk

Well yes, but it's important to test the range, most of the time a turret will always have at least one clear shot at a certain angle.

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