(I don't have a source for the title picture. Props to whoever)

We've all seen that medic in PvP. His teammates are dying all around him, but there he is - a brave soul charging towards the enemy with his syringe gun out. Idiot noob usually

But ask anybody who can do it well and they'll tell you that it's both fun and a viable class. You're probably better off using a heal support medic, but battle medic is a good alternative. The same thing applies to MvM surpisingly.

Well most likely you're thinking "WTF is this guy talking about?" So I will try to explain some of the reasoning on choosing this alternative to the standard medic.

The standard meta has a medic playing a healing support role. Shielding against damage, kritz charging damage dealers at appropriate times, and reviving dead teammates. That's all well and good, except it gets a bit boring.

Most experienced players know that all missions can be completed without a medic on the team, and in certain cases waves can go much smoother with another damage class replacing the medic. I still think that it's detrimental to play with a medic on Mannslaughter, although I have limited experience on that mission. Hell, most missions could be done with 5 good players. I've done the last 3 waves of Bavarian Botbash with a team of 4.

So I will state that Playing as battle medic is a down-grade to a really good standard medic.

The standard medic is probably still the better loadout for your team of 6. But it's not as much of a down-grade as say a demoknight is compared to a sticky demo....or a righteous bison soldier is to a standard soldier. Don't go into the comment section trying to explain "you should just play standard medic...it's better because ____". I already realize that you ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. The point of this playstyle is that it is a lot of fun and is still viable to help your team. A battle medic isn't some helpless teammate who needs to be carried

The battle-medic requires quite a bit of cash to get to his awesome potential. As such, only two tours provide enough cash for you to be a real use to the team:

Operation Mecha Engine
Operation Two Cities

Also, since it's a downgrade to the standard medic, do not use this on teams that will struggle if you were to play in super tryhard mode. It works when there's a good group of experienced players or even when you group up and play with 2 friends - that way, no one would have the numbers to votekick you. Unless your friends are jerks

Your teammates should be familiar how to stay alive without a healing medic on the team. I did say experienced right?

The standard PvP battle medic is going to roll with the blutsauger. He is a dangerous class because he has the second highest movement speed (aka can dodge), and he can outlast most of the squishier classes because of the heal-on-hit effect of the blutsauger. If this sounds familiar to you...it's probably because it is. It is exactly like when a damage class goes 1v1 against a Giant. No canteens. Normally you would think the giant wins. Except the scout has the giant milked. Now you have a pretty good chance that you'll outlast the giant because of the health-on-hit effect.

The battle medic is not going to be a good class if he's simply trying to match the damage output of the normal damage classes. He is not a true damage class replacement. He is still a support class because of one upgrade.




This upgrade is the only way you're going to be an acceptable class.

If you're unfamiliar with mad milk (why are you reading this guide) - 60% of the damage done is returned as health.

We all know how thankful we are when we fight bots that are milked. But the scout can't fulfill all of his roles and milk everything at the same time. As battle-medic, theoretically you can milk a lot larger group of robots and have them milked until they are killed. This is the main point of the battle medic.

You're trying to trade-off your healbeam healing effects and your projectile shield ability by milking all of the bots that you can and having your teammates stay alive by dealing damage.

If they want overheal? Tell them to invest in some Health On Kill upgrades

=====PRIMARY=====

There are really only 2 primary weapons that you should be using if you want to be a battle medic.

BLUTSAUGER

Attributes:
On hit +3 Health
-2 Health Per Second Drained on Wearer

The gold standard for any battle medic. Having this weapon on you reduces the medic's base health regen rate from +3 per second to +1 per second. It doesn't actually drain your health over time. As a positive, each needle that hits the enemy provides +3 health.

The reduced health regen rate isn't that big of a loss. You're going to be firing your primary almost always so as long as you're hitting your needles, you will be regaining your health back up to full.

Since you will be buying the Mad Milk syringes first thing, the good part is that the +3 on hit effect stacks with the mad milk healing effect. So you can be gaining up to +10 health per hit. If it's a critical hit, you can gain +21 health per hit. Considering how fast you can fire needles, that's a pretty impressive health regeneration rate.

OVERDOSE

Attributes:
-10% Damage penalty
Movement speed increases based on ubercharge rate up to +10% (while active)

This isn't as good as the blutsauger. You're going to be changing out the additional +3 regen on hit and suffer the -10% damage penalty for an up to 10% increase in movement speed. The medic is a fast class. I will suggest that a battle medic have maxed out movement speed upgrades and with this additional 10% speed you'll be almost keeping up with the scout and have some great dodging ability. It's pretty fun to be this fast

====SECONDARY====

As a battle medic, you won't be using your mediguns. That's sort of the whole point. Use it only as a utility. You can use whatever you want. I myself roll with

VACCINATOR

Attributes:
+50% Ubercharge rate
Selecting resist type - 10% resistance to that damage type. 25% incoming damage to heal target is returned as health.
-66% Overheal build rate

I want to be a battle medic who for the most part won't be tempted to just fall back into healing his teammates. However, when a teammate dies, you can still be the hero to revive him. This is where the Vaccinator shines. Popping an uber can quickly revive a teammate without investing into Healing Mastery upgrades. And the Vaccinator has 4 seperate ubers to pop.

So, as a battle medic, you'll have full ubercharge before the start of the wave. You can be a battle medic and have 4 'revives' already stored.

And the +50% ubercharge rate? If there's a lull in the action mid-wave, feel free to whip out your vaccinator and heal a teammate to build up some more revives (Not because you want to heal your teammates...you want to rebuild your ubercharge)


- That's the secondary I recommend. You should only use it for reviving teammates. Don't dump credits into upgrading it.

DISCLAIMER: I do this out of sheer principle of sticking with the battle medic sub-class. You can put a few upgrades into your secondary if you so wish. Maybe upgrade a shield to protect yourself during those times you rush in to revive a teammate.

======MELEE======

Whatever you feel like. Just keep with the ubersaw so you can get your ubercharge back up when you find a distracted bot or sentry buster.

This hasn't been finely tuned just yet. I will give some suggestions on priorities though.

HIGHEST PRIORITY:
- Mad Milk Syringes

HIGH PRIORITY:
- Movement Speed
- Appropriate Resistances (Although remember that you will be a very fast class and can dodge a lot)

MEDIUM PRIORITY:
- Firing Speed
- Clip Size
- Ammo Capacity (Most of the time you're fast enough to make quick dispenser runs)

LOWER PRIORITY:
- Vaccinator upgrades (maybe maxing out ubercharge rate later on)
- Healing Mastery
- Canteens

Reasoning:

Mad Milk Syringes is the only thing that justifies your class. That should be your first upgrade for sure. Otherwise you are just a nerfed damage class.

As Battle Medic you will be towards the front lines trying to pelt every bot with your syringes so that they are constantly milked. As such, you need to be able to survive yourself - Resistances and Movement Speed will help with that. Once you've got the resistances maxed and some upgrades into firing speed, you'll find that you can tank giants quite well as long as you're constantly hitting your needles. Movement speed will assist against Giant Demomen since you can outstrafe their grenades.

The needles can do a decent amount of stream damage to single targets. If you've ever played battle medic on PvP and hit good shots against a charging scout before he backs off then you'll already know this. The clip size and ammo capacity upgrades are good so that you can stay in the fight for much longer before ammo runs. During those times when you do an ammo run or are reloading, perhaps your heavy is taking damage against a giant and it's no longer milked.

Health Regen is an expensive upgrade. But towards the end it's pretty funny to have +10 extra passive regen in addition to the Blutsauger+Mad Milk health regen (which can also get up to +10 per hit).

Just upgrade Healing Mastery. It will boost your passive Health Regen and it will also help in healing if you ever need to use your medigun.

THE FIRST THING TO DO IS TO INFORM YOUR TEAM THAT YOU'RE A BATTLE MEDIC.

It's best if they know what's going on. Especially your heavy if he has the mindset that he's going to rely on your overheal and shield. He may build his upgrades thinking that he'll have a buttplug medic instead of resistances.

----

Well, the mad milk syringes are only useful if you can hit your targets with it. The arc and slow projectile speed of the syringes can take a little while to get used to. You are useless if you can't hit your syringes. You need to lead moving targets to hit them. The syringes are slow. You can fire a barrage of syringes across the map and then hear your hitsound of them 3 seconds later.

You're going to have to practice your syringe aim. You can do it in training on tr_walkway or in private servers. Whatever. The way I did my practicing was on PvP servers.


----

Strengths:

The syringe gun has a pretty high clip size so you can spam those needles out quite well. When there's a group of bots, you want to fan out your needles to hit them all and milk them.

The battle medic does really well against stream damage targets....as long as you are hitting back with your primary. Usually any damage those bots will do can be regenerated when you hit them with your needles (best with Blutsauger obviously).

With full bullet resistance, don't be afraid to get up close to that Giant Heavy and constantly pelt him with needles. The giants are big so you should be hitting them with your syringes easily. You should be able to regain all of your health with your needles. The only problem is the short duration of time it takes to reload your clip. That's when you're taking damage and not refilling it. Remember, you're not working off of an overheal. You're working from 150 HP. Be aware and start dodging during reloads. Go ahead and tank the Giant Health-on-Kill Heavy on Manhattan.


Also because the medic is fast and will be built with resistances (while some of your other damage dealers are not), feel free to draw some aggro as battle medic and dodge. The heavy will appreciate it. You can strafe most projectiles at the proper range.

The battle medic works well against waves that have lots of giants.

----

Weaknesses:

Teammates won't get their overheal buff from you, so they'll have to rely on health on kill or surviving from the mad milk effect.

Battle medics are weak against large burst damage. A couple crit rockets are going to deplete your entire health before you can gain it back with a steady stream of syringes. Watch out for large groups of crit demomen or crit soldiers. Big groups of Crit scouts can be dangerous as well.

The team loses the medic's shield. Against the waves of crit demoman in EE you may struggle. Just stay alive and your demo/soldier/sniper should be able to take the large group down. Same thing applies to the batallion of crit heavies.

The 10 Giant Blackbox soldiers can give you some issues. Most teams that replace the medic with another damage class are usually fine because they can spit out enough DPS to kill the Blackbox soldiers in between their firing. However, you're not really a true damage class so you may find this part difficult. There are still plenty of ways to deal with them if your team is smart:

• Sentry goes up front, wrangled, and tanks for the team against the soldiers. The soldiers cannot gain health from hitting the sentry (most reliable in my opinion)
  
  
• Whoever is drawing aggro uses an uber canteen. The soldiers cannot gain health from hitting an ubered teammate
  
  
• Somebody uses a crit canteen to kill between the blackbox soldiers firings
  
  
• Your scout upgraded damage and is making up for the lack of DPS. It's an assumption that he's also marking them.
  
  
• Proper focus firing
  
  
• People dodge the rocket (not as reliable)
  
  
• Pyro Airblasting (not likely)
  
  
• Engineer spamming Short Circuit
  
  
• Heavy's Destroy Projectiles (not reliable)
  
  
• Point blank Brass Beast heavy with high DPS

----

Summary: A team with a battle medic still excels against Giants. They might struggle against large groups of burst damage bots.


Also remember that when a teammate dies, if it's safe, go and revive them with your Vaccinator uber.

The Battle medic is a very fast class. He also can milk bots better than a scout can. He can milk just as well wave 1 as he can on the last wave. Maybe the scout has 0 recharge rate upgrades on his milk for the first few waves.

So... if you're a battle medic this will free up your scout to use crit-a-cola....or bonk if he really wanted to. He doesn't have to use mad milk. The only thing you will lose is the slow effect, but that won't be missed too much if your team knows what they're doing.

Also, scout is more free to play another class. He can play spy since the battle medic can collect cash quite well with his speed and the pair of them can get at least A's on most missions. If there's a really good sniper, the battle medic can collect whatever isn't headshot cash and the scout can switch off to another damage class...maybe a pyro (who is also good at collecting cash).

[wow I just mentioned 3 non-meta classes in the same paragraph]

Battle medic is fun...and it's still viable.

You can get a good score as battle medic. Now...does that score actually mean anything? Hard to say, it's probably overinflated from all of the support points of the mad milk syringes. At the same time, you may have brought down the score of one of your teammates if they're really struggling to stay alive without the buttplug medic. It's ok though, struggling is nature's way of strengthening.

In the end the damage that you've dealt as battle-medic probably could have been matched by just playing aggressively with your Projectile Shield. The support score is still high, but not as high as the standard medic.

Lets say that in the future Valve decides to nerf the damage of the Projectile Shield (haha Valve supporting TF2?) which is quite overpowered. Then this strategy starts looking a little better. Or maybe they decide to add a bot that can penetrate the Projectile Shield. You'll have to start looking towards other strats. It's good to have different strategies in your repertoire.

----

If you're not comfortable easing through Mecha/Two Cities, I wouldn't suggest trying this just yet. It still requires knowledge of waves, knowledge of how you stack up against certain bots, decent aim, and dodging skills.

Otherwise, give it a shot.


If you disagree against the merits of a battle medic feel free to share. But don't post a bunch of theoretically bull when you haven't tried it. Practical experience is best.

A good place to try it out is Bone Shaker. Not too much crit explosive spam, enough giants, and lots of stream damage bots.

Alright, now go piss off some teammates


P.S. BATTLE MEDIC IS THE BEST TANK CLASS AGAINST A GIANT HEAVY. NO OTHER CLASS CAN SURVIVE WHILE TAKING DAMAGE LIKE A BATTLE MEDIC CAN.

UPDATE:
Here's Battle Medic replacing Scout. There was also a pyro on the team

https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=400663611

UPDATE:
Here's Battle Medic in Desperation (Operation Gear Grinder)


The team is good enough that I'm not worried about trying to go a carry class. We are playing with a spy. The lack of a scout means that there is no mad milk for the damage class to farm health off of. For these particular waves, they wouldn't need it. Normally it's run with 2-3 heavies and they have both ticks in Destroy Projectiles, which effectively neuters the Giant infinite fire soldiers.
However, Battle Medic is working just fine here. Keep everyone up and running, secondary cash collector, and I can draw aggro at times.

The path up to this point was:

Wave 1 - Unupgraded Scottish Resistance Demo to pick uber medics

Wave 2 - I went Battle Medic, but only spent 200 credits into Mad Milk Syringes so that our 2 heavies could outsurvive the Giant Heavies in this wave. It worked extremely well

Wave 3 - Unupgraded phlog pyro to help out with the tank. I may try with just stock pyro for airblasting the Giant Crit Soldiers. Perhaps I'll do unupgraded scout to help tank-busting, but also provide milk/mark on the giants.

Wave 4&5 - Upgraded as Sniper. Normally I would run this until the end.

Wave 6&7 - I felt like switching back to Battle Medic, so I used my refund and had some fun.