First of all, this guide is written for Hell on Earth difficulty. It is also assumed that the Field Medic is level 20+ since many of the strategies hinge on the Field Medic having access to their most important skills and fast healing dart regeneration. If you haven’t yet reached level 20 you probably should not play on Hell on Earth difficulty anyway. However, many of the gameplay tips are still applicable at level 10, and learning this gameplay style early on will prepare you for the higher difficulties. The easier difficulties are, well, easier, and using these strategies even at a low level should make anything below Hell on Earth a cakewalk.

The Medic is the backbone of the team. In 6 player Hell on Earth difficulty, a Field Medic is practically mandatory for the team to succeed. It is definitely possible to succeed without a Field Medic, but your chances are reduced significantly. I regularly see teams wipe on wave 1 because of a combination of unskilled play and the lack of a Field Medic. The Medic gives the team more room to make mistakes, being able to heal the damage they take and bring them back to fighting condition in a matter of seconds. A Medic that chooses the right skills, knows when to heal, and knows when to shoot can make even an unskilled team seem relatively unkillable.

The Medic has 2 primary objectives: Damage Mitigation, and Damage Negation. The former involves reducing and repairing damage taken. The latter focuses on avoiding damage entirely. They are separated into 2 parts because different situations call for a different priority of actions. These two objectives can be accomplished a multitude of ways.


Damage Mitigation

• Healing. Repairing the health that a player loses when taking damage.
  
• Coagulent Booster. Applying damage resistance to a player to reduce incoming damage.

Damage Negation

• Adrenaline Shot. Increasing the movement speed of a player to allow them to evade damage.
  
• Killing/Focus Injection. Eliminating Zeds that threaten to deal damage to a player.
  
• Tanking. Using your body to block and/or distract Zeds from a player.

Aside from the last bullet point, you will maximize your effectiveness by performing as many of these actions as possible at the same time. In order to accomplish these objectives, one must choose the right skills.

You need the buffing skills in order to do your job effectively. If you are playing with other people (which is what this guide is designed for) then pick all the skills on the left. Yes, all of them. Don't pick Resilience. Don't pick Combatant Doctor.


Resilience is not necessarily a BAD skill. Having 50% damage resistance with 175 armor at level 25 makes you incredibly tanky. It's just that the alternative is so much better. You cannot regenerate armor (aside from getting armor from the Support), and Resilience only takes significant effect when your health is low, so what do you do when you run out of armor? You can't heal yourself very quickly, and with every heal you apply to yourself, your damage resistance goes down. On the other hand, with Symbiotic Health, you don't even need armor. You can apply as many stacks of healing as you want to yourself, as long as someone in your line of sight is not at full health. And most importantly, Symbiotic health applies all of your buffs to yourself as well as your patient. You can have 50% damage resistance with 50 health, or you can have 25 extra health, much faster self healing, +30% movement speed, +30% damage resistance, and +20% damage. By level 20, Symbiotic Health makes you damn near indestructible, and it isn't reliant on you having armor, or having low health, and Resilience needs both to even compare to the benefits of Symbiotic Health. You need this skill to do your job better by buffing your own speed with Adrenaline shot, which brings us to the next skill.


Adrenaline Shot is the clear choice. Some people will try to defend taking Combatant Doctor by saying that having +10% movement speed all the time allows them to stay alive and reach their patients more quickly, but that is simply not true. It is a selfish choice for people that aren't even good at being selfish, because they're robbing themselves of more movement speed when they actually need it. When you buff yourself with Adrenaline Shot you gain +30% movement speed rather than the +10% offered by Combatant Doctor. That is 200% more bonus movement speed. With proper dart management, you can maintain that movement speed for most of the wave. I estimate that I have +40% movement speed for at least 75% of every wave after I obtain an HM-401Tech Medic Rifle. If there’s no one around to heal, you can just heal yourself with your syringe and you will get +10% movement speed, matching the bonus from Combatant Doctor.

Stat increases mean nothing without context. If you don't need to dodge anything, or be anywhere quickly, then movement speed doesn't matter. If no one is taking damage, then you probably don't need the movement speed to get line of sight on them to heal. Your teammates should stay in your line of sight anyway. Don't take a skill that is only useful when your team has poor positioning. If you take Combatant Doctor your teammate is probably going to die anyway because they don't have the extra movement speed to evade the damage that brought them to low health in the first place.

You know who needs movement speed more than you? The person taking damage. Your patient. They need to be able to evade damage, and that's what Adrenaline Shot helps them do. Healing can only get you so far. Beyond that you need to enable your team to reduce or evade damage. Time and time again I have watched players die because they took a chainsaw to the face that they could have dodged if the Field Medic had taken Adrenaline Shot. At least once per game, I save someone's life with Adrenaline Shot, but I cannot recall a single time Combatant Doctor would have allowed me to save someone.


This one is a no brainer. Acidic Rounds is hands down the WORST skill in the entire game. The strongest poison that you can apply does 3 damage per second! That is 1/5 the damage of a 9mm pistol bullet with no damage bonuses. To make things worse, everything bigger than a Clot has massive resistance to toxic damage. You will be doing 1 damage per second to most of your targets. As if things weren't bad enough, it also throws Zeds into a panic state, moving them closer to your team while being extremely difficult to headshot. If anything, this skill is nothing more than a detriment to your team.

Focus Injection is probably the least useful of the buffing skills. First of all, you need 4 darts to reach the maximum bonus of +20% damage, whereas the other 2 buffing skills only need 3 to reach +30%. The damage bonus doesn't always make a difference in the number of shots it takes to kill a Zed, but it can be the difference between a 1 shot and a 2 shot. I would take this skill even if it did literally nothing, because that is better than Acidic Rounds.


Coagulant Booster is one of the most useful skills in the game. +30% damage resistance will be the difference between life and death for both you and your teammates more times than you will notice. Coagulant Booster + Adrenaline Shot + healing of 10HP/second for you and your heal targets will make your team extremely difficult to kill by comparison. Coagulant Booster can and will save you and your team from getting 2 shotted by Fleshpounds, bursted down by Scrakes, and mauled to death by trash Zeds.

When you heal, it regenerates at a fixed rate of 10 HP/second. It doesn't matter if you shoot 1 dart, or 10 million darts, it's 10 HP/second. Coagulant Booster not only increases your effective healing, it also increases your and your patient's effective health pool instantly. To demonstrate what I mean, here is an oversimplified equation to determine if someone dies:

Without Coagulent Booster
IF [ (damage taken) > (Health) + (HP/sec)*time ] THEN you're dead

With Coagulent Booster
IF [ (damage taken) > (Health*1.3) + (HP/sec)*time*1.3 ] THEN you're dead

Battle Surgeon is not nearly as useful. It's a permanent Focus Injection that only applies to you, the person that should be spending the least amount of time shooting Zeds. Assault rifles are best suited for trash, and you can 1 shot most trash in the game with the HMTech-401 Medic Rifle without the damage buff.


Take Airborne Agent. I even take it in solo. It just offers so much utility. The gas doesn't heal you unless you heal a teammate with it and you have Symbiotic Health, but it offers so much utility. You don't even need to fire a single bullet to kill a group of Clots, Stalkers, and/or Crawlers. Just stand there, fart on them, and watch them choke on it. I use this skill to kill trash more than I do to heal. It's essentially a mobile Healing Grenade that goes where you go. A new healing explosion triggers every time someone resets Zed Time. With a skilled Commando on your team you can fart on your enemies 7 times in one Zed Time trigger.

Zedative is okay, but not amazing. Slowing large Zeds can be useful, but it isn't really necessary. If you need to be the one helping your team with large Zed takedowns, it's more a problem with the rest of the team than it is with you. The poison damage isn't that impressive either. It doesn't deal damage to the head, so if your team is trying to decapitate a Zed, it isn't doing anything. Not only that, but the massive toxic resistance still applies here, so you aren't doing as much damage as you might think. Although I highly advise against it, you can take this skill if you want. Honestly, the Zed Time skills aren't the most useful ones, but you can get the most consistent value out of Airborne Agent.

This weapon is considered by many to be the best tier 1 weapon in the game, and is the best weapon in the game in terms of value vs. cost and weight. for only 200 Dosh, and 1 block of weight, this weapon increases your healing potential by 150%. No matter what class you are playing, you should buy an HMTech-101 if you can fit it in your loadout, and if you cannot fit it in your loadout, you should at least make a conscious effort to consider it. The ability to heal from a distance is invaluable. The darts recharge over time, so you have an unlimited supply of them. Also, this weapon does 20 damage (9mm pistol does 15), so you can 1-shot headshot all Clot variants except for Elite Alphas. You spawn with this weapon as Medic, so never sell this weapon. The only time you should ever sell it is if you have 1400 Dosh, no one will give you any, and you need to sell it to buy the 1500 Dosh Med Rifle. If you sell it, you should immediately buy it back after the wave ends.


This gun isn't that good. It actually does less damage than the pistol per bullet. However, all Clot variants are weak to SMGs, so you can still 1-shot headshot them. You will quickly realize that anything bigger than a Clot (even Stalkers) are a pain in the ass to kill with this gun. But you aren't buying this weapon for its damage or killing power, you are buying it for the extra darts. With the SMG and the Medic Pistol, you are doubling your dart output. Every medic weapon has its own dart charges that get used up whenever you fire a dart. That means if you fire 2 darts from your Medic Pistol, you can switch to your SMG and it will be fully charged. Your pistol will regenerate darts while you are using the SMG. If you quickly switch weapons every time you heal, you can keep a constant stream of healing (and buffs) focused on your teammates, ensuring you will get through the early waves.


In all honesty, you should probably skip this weapon entirely. Per shot, this is the weakest shotgun in the game. It fires 6 pellets, each pellet dealing 20 damage, for a total of 120 damage if every pellet lands. For reference, the SG500 fires 7 pellets, dealing 140 damage total, only costs 200 Dosh, and weighs 5 blocks vs. the HMTech-301's 6 blocks of weight. On the other hand, the Medic Shotgun has the advantage of being mag loaded, holds 10 shells per mag, and is semi-automatic. It also has a lot of stumble power, so you can spam into a raged Scrake’s legs to stumble it, but it doesn’t offer much more in the way of utility. It's still better in the hands of a Support, who can make use of damage and penetration bonuses to turn it into a respectable trash clearing weapon. In the hands of a Medic it’s simply too weak to be worth it.

As for its healing capabilities, it's pretty good. The pistol and SMG require 50 out of 100 charges per dart, but the shotgun only needs 40 charges per dart. Unfortunately, it's not worth the 1100 Dosh, and you should just save up for the rifle. Once you have the Medic rifle and pistol, you shouldn't need any more Medic weapons for additional healing, unless maybe you're low leveled and don't regenerate darts fast enough.


THIS is the gun you've been saving your money for. It's your bread and butter. When people give you money, this is the gun they're expecting you to buy, so do them a solid and buy it. Getting this rifle early massively increases your team's chance of survival while they are saving up for their more powerful weapons.

Of all the Medic weapons, it has the best healing capabilities. It only uses 30 out of 100 charges per dart, allowing you to shoot 3 darts before running out of charges. Also, the lower dart cost means you should almost always have darts available to shoot.

It's a damn good trash clearing weapon as well. It does a respectable 35 base damage per bullet, holds 40 bullets per magazine, has a high rate of fire, and low recoil. It feels like a cross between an assault rifle and an SMG. The downside to this gun is also its plus side; high rate of fire. It's full-auto only, so it is very difficult to tap fire such that you only fire 1 bullet at a time, and you may find yourself chewing through ammo. However, the high rate of fire, mag capacity, and stumble power make this the safest assault rifle for killing Scrakes as a Commando. Of course as a Medic, you should let someone else take care of the Scrakes, but it's always a viable option if you're the last person alive.

This gun increases your ability to defend yourself drastically. You are by no means a DPS class, but If a Zed gets in your face, or you need to save a teammate, you can 1-shot headshot anything smaller than a Gorefast, and 2-shot bodyshot stalkers and Crawlers. With the HMTech-401, you are an underpowered Commando with insane healing capability. With this and the HMTech-101 Pistol, you should have darts available at all times, and be able to maintain a never ending stream of healing. Once you have this, you don't really have a use for money anymore, but you can choose to buy more weapons later if you desire.


This gun is, okay. It adds something unique to the Field Medic's arsenal and has some interesting properties. The healing capabilities are identical to the HMTech-301 shotgun, and it's strong enough to kill most trash in 1-2 headshots, but the primary purpose of this weapon is to debuff large Zeds. After shooting 2-3 blood sucking syringes into a Scrake or a Fleshpound, it will apply a relatively strong "bleed" DoT (damage over time) and for a short time reduce the Zed's damage 30%, slow it 30%, make it attack 25% slower, and make it easier to stumble, knockdown, stun, etc. You can tell the debuffing effect is active if you see a syringe sticking out of the Zed's head and/or it's body looks emaciated. The nice thing about the bleed effect is that it's considered "ballistic" damage, which most Zeds don't resist as much as poison. The effects offered by this weapon sound nice on paper, but aren't that useful in practice.

Unfortunately, it somewhat fails at its intended purpose, which is to make large Zeds easier to kill. Despite all the debuffs it applies, it does NOT increase the amount of damage done to the Zed, so takedowns aren't really made any easier. Skilled players are usually expected to be able to takedown large Zeds on their own, so the debuff likely isn't going to change anything. Often times it makes takedowns more difficult, because debuffing the Scrake or Fleshpound will likely result in you raging it. If that wasn't bad enough, the raging will come from the DoT, which is all body damage, contributing no head damage to the large Zed.

This weapon would be really nice if it didn't have so many drawbacks. It has an outrageously slow reload speed, weapon switch speed, and low ammo capacity. This makes killing trash Zeds a pain, and killing large Zeds inefficient, and harder than it needs to be. You'll be spending more of your time reloading rather than shooting. The slow weapon switch speed makes the strategy of shooting healing darts and then switching to another medic weapon and shooting more darts far less effective, reducing your effectiveness at your primary role.

This weapon feels much more suited for solo play, where you can kite large Zeds and let the DoT kill them over time, but it isn't very useful for multiplayer. The Homogoblin is also an expensive addition to the Medic loadout. You're better off giving money to your team mates instead.

Aside from your rifle and pistol, you have a lot of room to fit whatever weapons you want into your loadout. You can carry anything that weighs 7 blocks or less, and it doesn't really matter what you pick. You can get another Medic weapon, or choose to off-perk something that offers more utility and can get you out of a sticky situation. There are too many weapons to choose from, and tons of possible loadouts, so I'm just going to go over loadouts that stand out to me.

All Medic, All Day

• HMTech-401 Assault Rifle
  
• HMTech-101 Pistol
  
• HMTech-301 Shotgun

This loadout is better for someone who doesn't have the dart regeneration to constantly heal with the rifle and pistol. Every weapon has the capability to heal, and you can pull out the shotgun to clear a line of Zeds, take out a group of Gorefasts/Gorefiends, or stumble the occasional Scrake. I don't really recommend this loadout to any Medic above level 15. The shotgun is expensive, doesn't offer very much firepower, and feels kind of redundant. You can kill the same things, with or without the shotgun.

Big Zed Killer?

• HMTech-401 Assault Rifle
  
• HMTech-101 Pistol
  
• Pulverizer

If your team is having trouble killing Fleshpounds quickly, this is a pretty good loadout to have. The heavy swing from the Pulverizer will do considerable damage to Fleshpounds, turning you into a highly specific big Zed killing hybrid. Unfortunately, the need for this loadout hinges on your team being defective in some way. If you're swinging at a Fleshpound, you aren't healing, so make sure only to take on Fleshpounds when everyone is healthy. Also, you can block and parry Fleshpounds and Scrakes with the Pulverizer, so you can tank for a teammate if you need to. Sadly, this is a pretty expensive loadout, requiring you to purchase tier 3 and tier 4 weapons.

Unreliable Scrake Hunter

• HMTech-401 Assault Rifle
  
• HMTech-101 Pistol
  
• Crossbow

This used to be the meta loadout, but the unreliable crossbow stun makes it a bittersweet weapon choice. You can stun a Scrake by shooting it in the head with the crossbow and allow your teammates to finish it off, or the stun effect won't happen and you will have done more harm than good. Fairly often you'll just rage it, and rage your whole team because you raged it. I wouldn't bother with it, but some people find uses for the crossbow against medium zeds and whatnot.

Utilitarian

• HMTech-401 Assault Rifle
  
• HMTech-101 Pistol
  
• Double-Barrel Boomstick
  
• Katana (or SMG)

This is my go-to loadout. The Boomstick does so much damage it doesn't even matter you're off-perking it. If you were going to buy the Medic Shotgun, I recommend you buy this instead. It does more damage, costs almost half the price, and weighs 2 blocks fewer. A shot from one barrel can kill just about anything that isn't a Scrake or a Fleshpound. Is a Gorefiend giving you a hard time? Not anymore.

The absolute best thing about the Boomstick is jumping and firing both barrels (alt-fire) sends you flying backwards from whichever direction you’re aiming, allowing you to dodge Scrakes, Fleshpounds, Husk fireballs, groups of trash, you name it. You can even dodge attacks from the bosses that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to. I’ve managed to dodge last minute rockets from the Patriarch using the knock-back feature. You can aim downwards and fire it to knock you up in the air and reach places too high to jump. Fire it at the ground just before you land to negate fall damage.

The Boomstick gives you so many options and offers a degree of utility that no other weapon can match. As a bonus, you can use the Boomstick for big Zed killing if you need to. You can kill a Scrake in 3 alt-fires if 22 of the 24 pellets land in the head. The Katana is perfect for parrying if you’re out of Boomstick ammo, and it can de-rage Fleshpounds with minimal damage to yourself and others.

The Boomstick is considered to be the second best weapon in the game in terms of value vs. cost and weight, the Katana probably being number 3 on that list. With this loadout, you have arguably the 3 best weapons in the game. Although this loadout is expensive to acquire, it is robust and cheap to maintain. Since the extra weapons in the loadout are both tier 2, the cost is split, meaning you can just use the Boomstick if you can't afford the Katana, and it still works, rather than you needing to save up for a tier 3 or 4. If you're low level and need more healing, you can always swap the Katana for the SMG.

Hemophiliac

• HMTech-401 Assault Rifle
  
• Hemogoblin

If your team composition relies mostly on body damage, this may be a worthwhile loadout. If your large Zed killers are Firebugs and Demolitionists who aren't decapitating Scrakes, the slowing and damage reduction capabilities of the Hemogoblin will be extremely useful. They'll also be easier to stun, stumble and knockdown, rendering them unable to fight back against your microwaving and explosion creating team mates.

If your team composition revolves around decapitating large Zeds, i.e. Sharpshooters, Gunslingers, and Supports, you're better off giving them money and skipping the Hemogoblin. The slowing effect stacks with Skullcracker, which is nice, but other than that, it's relatively useless. You're better off firing darts into whomever is doing the takedown.

The downside of this loadout is primarily in opportunity cost. You can't switch weapons quickly to keep a steady stream of healing and buffing. You may be spending a lot of time reloading your Hemogoblin rather than healing and killing trash. You don't really get any extra tools for decapitating large Zeds if you're the last one alive. You can't kite large Zeds as easily as you could with the Boomstick. You have to use your knife to parry Fleshpounds if you want to de-rage them, resulting in you taking more damage than if you had the Katana instead.

The Hemogoblin is just too expensive and has too many drawbacks to justify a purchase, while bringing very little to the table. The slow switch speed hinders you from performing your most important job, healing. This may be a decent loadout for the boss wave, but the Boomstick and Katana are arguably better, allowing you to dodge and block the boss, rather than simply slowing it down and reducing its damage. Unless your team is set on killing large Zeds with body damage, I recommend going with any other loadout on this list.

Field Medic is actually a pretty cheap class to maintain. They don't use much ammo, generate Dosh by healing teammates, and only need to buy 1 weapon to be perfectly capable at doing their job, even in the later waves. Managing money as a Medic is pretty straightforward. It boils down to one overarching idea; you need your rifle, and everything else is a luxury that you can do without.


The first thing you should try to do is get your HMTech-401 Assault Rifle. Don't give money to other people until you have your Medic Rifle, except in highly specific circumstances where someone (trustworthy) promises to help you get your rifle after helping them get their tier 2 or tier 3 weapon, and the 2 of you combined don’t have enough for the rifle anyway. In most cases, the Field Medic obtaining their rifle is the most important thing for the entire team to do. People may tell you that the Field Medic doesn’t “need” their rifle for wave 2. But it’s not about what you need, it’s about the most optimal decision. Nobody “needs” anything above a tier 1 on wave 2 if the Medic has their rifle. It offers the most benefit to the team than any alternative combination of purchases in the game. It dramatically increases the chance of everyone on the team surviving the early waves, thereby ensuring no one receives a Dosh penalty and increasing the global Dosh pool of the team.


Do not buy armor during the early waves. In fact, NEVER give money to someone in the early waves if you suspect they will waste your hard-earned Dosh to buy armor. It is meant to save you from being bursted down by large zeds, which don't even spawn in the early waves. Only 1 or 2 Scrakes will ever spawn during the early waves, and you shouldn't need armor to deal with them. Your armor will be shredded by non-life threatening damage and waste your money. This delays you (and everyone else who buys armor) from getting better weapons, and will decrease the survivability of your team. A good rule of thumb is to not buy armor until Fleshpounds show up. Even then, you could probably live without it.


A lot of Medics don't even look at the other weapons, and save their money for the rifle. If no one is giving you money to buy a Medic Rifle early, you can always buy the SMG. It will double your healing and buffing output, and comes with 240 bullets. Don't buy any ammo for it, use it for 1 or 2 waves, and if you can sell it and buy the rifle, do it ASAP. It only costs 650 Dosh, and sells for 487 Dosh. You only lose 163 Dosh (not including the free SMG ammo) for buying the SMG instead of going through a wave with just your pistol.


If you can just barely afford the rifle, buy it. You don't need to fill it with ammo, you don't need armor, and you don't need grenades. You should be able to get through a wave with the included bullets. You're buying it for the healing capability first and foremost, and you shouldn't be shooting it nearly as often as a Commando would.


You will have plenty of weight available to carry other weapons after you have your rifle and pistol, but it isn't necessary to have any more weapons. You should hardly ever be using any other weapons. Give money to the other players and help them get their loadouts. You are well equipped to do your primary function, but the other classes most likely need several weapons to do their job properly in the later waves. You should be the last person on your team to have their final loadout. You are one of the cheaper classes in the game, so give money to the more expensive ones, such as Support and SWAT.

Obviously, you should heal low health teammates, but it gets more complicated than that. What if several people are at low health. Then heal whoever is at most risk of death. Low health players that are on fire are top priority, because they have no way to dodge or block the damage over time they are receiving. When an on-fire player receives healing, both the duration and the damage of the DoT (damage over time) are reduced by half, reducing total damage taken to x0.25 the original amount, and that's not even factoring in the damage resistance buff.

This means you only need to fire one dart into them to save them (and their armor if they have any). After that, heal low health players that are running from Zeds. Berserkers are usually lower priority compared to the other classes, because they have massive damage resistance already, and can block most Zed attacks. Also, DoT duration on Berserkers is reduced 20%. You should still heal them, especially if their health is low and they're taking damage, but other teammates in the same situation are usually worse off.


Remember that your objective is to mitigate and negate damage as much as possible for as much of the wave as possible. This means applying as many stacks of your buffs as possible to every member of your team, and to keep them stacked for as long as possible. Once you see a teammate take ANY damage, fire 3 darts from your rifle into them. As long as their health isn't full by the time the dart hits, the buffs and healing will be applied to both of you. Assuming you're at least level 20, this will make both you and your patient extremely hard to kill for the next 5 seconds, overall making your job easier.

After firing all the darts from your rifle, switch to your pistol and look for other people to heal, resetting the timer on your buffs, and increasing the number of players that have your buffs. All Medic weapons have separate dart pools, so switching between them allows you to keep healing while the weapon you don’t have equipped regenerates darts. After you fire 2 darts from your pistol, switch back to your rifle and it should be full (or almost full) of darts again. The darts in your rifle regenerate so quickly there is no reason not to fire darts constantly. This is the crux of playing an exceptional Medic as opposed to an okay Medic.

If you're using the Hemogoblin, you may want to avoid using this strategy, due to the insanely slow weapon switch speed. This is my main gripe with the Hemogoblin.


The timer on your buffs reset every time they are applied. For example, if you fire 4 darts at a teammate, they have maximum stacks of buffs for 5 seconds from the moment they receive the 4th dart. If you heal them 1 time before the buffs wear off, then the timer is reset again. This means you can maintain full stacks of all your buffs if you just fire 1 dart every 5 seconds. Hypothetically, you can maintain full stacks of every buff on every player in the team for the entire wave, assuming you can hit them all and they are constantly taking small amounts of damage. Although this will probably never happen in reality, it is something to work towards.


Most of the time you're better off shooting healing darts at teammates rather than throwing a grenade. Darts regenerate, heal more, apply faster, and they don't stay localized to one area. Healing grenades only have a base heal of 5 HP/sec, whereas darts heal 15 HP per dart (at a rate of 10 HP/sec). If you're just healing one or two people, you don't need to throw a grenade.

Save grenades for when:

• You think you're going to lose line of sight on a heal target.
  
• Zeds are body-blocking your heal target.
  
• you feel overwhelmed with too many heal targets and there's not enough time nor darts to heal them quickly enough.

The biggest problem with grenades is that it takes a minimum of about 2.5 seconds from the time you start the grenade throwing animation to the time the grenade emits its healing gas. Compare this to the < 0.5 seconds it takes to fire a dart. Teammates can die in the time it took you to throw a grenade. Therefore, grenades are most effective when you throw them down ahead of time, moments before the damage starts rolling in.

You can also choose to use grenades offensively to kill a bunch of trash coming through an area or behind a large Zed, or to kill trash around your HVT killer. In my experience, grenades have hardly ever been a lifesaver, but they have their uses.


This applies to every class, but for Medics especially. Keep your head on a swivel. If you've been looking in one direction for 3 seconds, it’s been too long. Take a quick look around at all your teammates. It doesn't matter what you're doing. Shooting Zeds or healing teammates, you need to keep looking around and make sure no one is being killed while you're off in your own little world.

There is almost never a reason to pocket a single player. Let's suppose there is a Commando with 50 health (max 125) who is being chased by a Scrake, so you fire 4 darts into them. They will begin regenerating 75 health over the next 7.5 seconds at 10 HP/sec. It doesn't matter if you fire 4 darts, or 4 million darts, it's 10 HP/sec. You are mitigating and Negating as much damage as you possibly can on that target for the next 5 seconds. Firing more darts at them is not going to help them survive. At this point you should either heal someone else, or shoot trash that threatens the Commando. You can turn and shoot darts at them periodically to keep their buffs and healing active, but pocket healing them will not save them. It could even put the rest of your teammates in danger since they aren't receiving any healing.


Healing darts take about 0.2 seconds to lock-on their target. Medic weapons cannot lock-on while you’re running, so if you try to heal your patient while running, you will most likely miss. You should stop running for a second, and wait for the lock-on noise before you fire. Your gun does lock-on while you’re reloading tho, so you can still lock-on to a target while reloading, cancel the reload animation with a melee bash, and cancel the melee bash animation by firing darts.


You can't reload, switch weapons, self heal, heal others, or shoot while running. However, if you jump while running you will conserve your momentum while in the air. During this time you can perform any of these actions whilst maintaining your running speed. You should get used to jumping while running before you do anything. Are you being chased by Zeds and out of ammo? Jump, and reload in the air.


Some people say that Medics should never kill trash. They say that if you're killing trash, you aren't doing your job, which is healing. But that isn't necessarily true. You aren't just a healer, you're a protector. Healing and Coagulant Booster mitigate damage, Adrenaline Shot lets the patient evade damage they otherwise would have taken, and killing Zeds stops attacks from ever happening, negating damage that otherwise would have been received. If a teammate is swarmed by trash, heal them with as many darts as possible, and then start shooting. Over time you will get used to the heal-shoot-heal rhythm.

I'll give an example. Your Demolitionist is being swarmed by Crawlers. You fire 3 darts into them, but they're still taking a lot of damage, and they can't seem to get away. You should NOT fire more darts into them. They won't heal any faster, won't gain any more speed, and won't gain any more damage resistance. This is where you start killing. Spray at those Crawlers with your rifle and kill as many as you can before the Demo's buffs wear off. Then fire another couple of darts to reset the timer on them and reapply some healing. You have now saved your Demo's life, whereas a heal-only Medic would've just watched their teammate die.

It also may be necessary to kill Zeds when they are in the way of your heal target. Darts don't go through Zeds' bodies. At this point you should try to shoot a "hole" through the weakest Zeds and fire some darts.


Tanking is not something you should have to do very often, but it may be necessary in clutch situations. If a teammate is running from Zeds, and they have low health, fire 3 darts into them, and start shooting whatever trash Zeds are following them. Then get between your patient and whatever Zeds are left. If there is anyone around available to heal, keep firing darts. Your self-healing, combined with damage resistance, will allow you to tank a surprising amount of hits, especially if you have armor. After a second or 2, run away. The Zeds shouldn't be able to catch up to you with your ridiculous +40% movement speed. This should buy your patient enough time to heal up, compose themselves, and get back to killing.


If a teammate is out of line of sight, see if there's anyone else you can heal. Fire 3 darts into them, and use your newfound movement speed to dash to wherever you need to be. If there’s no one you can heal to boost your speed, you can heal yourself with your syringe if possible to boost your speed 10% and get to your patient faster.


Focus Injection is different than damage increases from other sources. Passive and skill bonuses are additive, shown below:

DMG = Base DMG + Base DMG X (Passive + Skills)

But Focus Injection is multiplicative:

DMG = [Base DMG + Base DMG X (Passive + Skills)] X (1 + Focus Injection Bonus)

Instead of multiplying on the base damage only, Focus Injection multiplies on the base and bonus damage. It may not seem like much, but it's the difference between a level 25 Gunslinger 1-shot or 2-shot bodyshoting a Stalker with the M1911, 0 stacks of Rack Em Up, and 4 stacks of Focus Injection (72 damage vs. 75 damage). The more damage bonuses your patient has (I'm looking at you, Sharpshooter), the more bonus damage Focus Injection will do.


If you see your Demolitionist, Support, Sharpshooter, etc. getting ready to kill a big Zed, fire some darts into them. It can turn a 2-shot kill into a 1-shot kill, and 2 shots are twice as easy to mess up as 1 shots. If your teammate is at full health, it won’t buff you, but it will still buff them. The darts won't lock on though, so you need to be accurate.


If there’s just one Scrake or Fleshpound, you probably don’t need to use a grenade. Just fire darts at whoever gets hit. Save your grenades for when there are 3+ large Zeds, because if things go south, they are probably going to attack several of your teammates at once, and your attention will be split between them all. If you see 3 Fleshpounds/Scrakes marching in, especially if some of them are already raged, throw a couple grenades BEHIND your team. Chances are they’ll be knocked backwards, hopefully into the AOE (area of effect) of your healing grenades. This has the added effect of killing and weakening trash Zeds that are trying to swarm your team while they are dealing with the Fleshpounds/Scrakes. The healing grenade applies buffs with every tick of healing, and is affected by Symbiotic Health.


If your support is keeping a door welded and it’s taking a lot of damage, throw a healing grenade at the foot of the door. The poisonous gas will go right through the door and kill most of the trash Zeds trying to break it down. This will allow you to kill plenty of Zeds without opening the door or letting it break down, and the Zeds will take much more damage than they normally would, because they’ll be standing inside the grenade the entire time. Just make sure you don’t throw multiple grenades at once, because the DoT from the poison does not stack, it only resets the timer on the DoT. It’s best to wait a few seconds after your grenade wears off before throwing another one. Use this tip at your own discretion, in case you want to save your grenades for healing teammates.


The most use I usually get out of Airborne Agent is the ability to kill trash Zeds in a 360 degree radius around me for about 10 seconds. If Zed time triggers, run up to a group of Crawlers, Clots, or Stalkers, and fart on them. No bullets required. Bonus points if they're attacking a teammate, which you will now be healing. It's not amazing, but takes some pressure off (-_-) you and your teammate. Just be careful around Gorefiends. They don't die easily and can spin2win you to death if you're not careful.

Thanks for reading this guide and I hope this makes you a better Medic, and overall a better player. Thanks to Uncle With Benefits for proofreading this guide and providing feedback, and to Evil Lain for their input on the "Jump Before you Stop Running" tip in the Advanced tips section. Let me know if there is something I got wrong, or there are some important tips you think should be added to this guide.