Gonna address this point by point, best I can. Thank you for the in depth response. I think limiting revives (whether it be through ammo on the med tool, an overheat function like the engy tool, or simply a cap on the revives you can accept in a short period of time) is a great way to encourage smart play. In fact, the current system promotes careless, unorganized play. Why worry about dying when there's probably a medic around to bring you right back up? How is that smart play? Splitting the med tool into a revive tool and an AoE healing pack is an interesting idea. However it's plagued by one issue many people have brought up in this thread. Right now it's faster to revive a dead player than it is to heal someone that's still alive. You can't tell me that's not fundamentally flawed. AoE healing med packs would be a cool way increase medic utility when you're bunkered down on an objective. Heal grenades are pretty pointless because they're resource bound and there's absolutely no reason to take them over revive grenades. I understand that engineers shouldn't be able to just repair through incoming damage, I just don't see why it should be any different for players. The big problem here is how medics become exponentially stronger in large numbers. One or two medics isn't that bad, they wont keep an army alive, but zerg outfits that roll with 20+ in their platoons are ridiculous. You're lucky if that's not something you see on your server often, as it's extremely frustrating. I think the lack of interest in people playing medic comes down to the fact that lots of people playing solo in this game, and most prefer to not play what they see to be as a support class while doing so. Rest assured, every competitive outfit is rolling more than enough medics. You can't look to the zerg and balance the game off what it does. You need to examine how the top outfits operate. They're gonna be the ones utilizing anything that falls into the realm of overpowered. All that being said, I'm not asking for sweeping nerfs to the medic class. I just hate that they're generally used as a safety net rather than the clutch, turn the tide class they could be. A few minor changes like increasing the time it takes to revive and reducing the range on revives would be simple, hardly affect most players on the micro scale, but from the macro perspective it would do a lot to limit the medic spam that everyone in favor of the changes is so sick of.
Well as I've said, coming from a Battlefield background I'm used to shock paddles being an unlimited no-cooldown instant revive to full health that also doubles as an instakill melee weapon. No issue there. While I think borrowing some mechanics from other games that used them well may improve the experience, the medi-tool itself is fine the way it is. Not perfect, but then nothing is, so fine is good enough. The main thing that's annoying is revive grenades' mass necromancy. Back in my day, if you wanted to rez a group of people you at least had to go zap each of them one at a time while you told the rest to keep their shirts on. I'm sure if my medic had rez grenades unlocked I would love them and use them all the time, but that doesn't make them well-balanced. I'm not really sure how revive grenades could be handled in a way that actually fixes them though. Maybe put a delay on them dependent on each person's distance from the grenade? So those closest to the center would rez first, while those on the edges would rez last? Sure, people would still be able to wait on the revive dialogue to sync their revives... but at least it would cause random zerglings to spread their revives out in a way that is easier to counter.
For starters I think they need their effect radius lowered. Do that, then make them detonate on impact like conc nades and they become a much more targeted, skill based tool, rather than "I'm gonna toss this your way and hope it bounces to the right spot."
The drop a med pack is actually in the game somewhat. Not to the extent as the ammo pack but in a sorta way. The healing grenade is an AOE healing area, so that is kinda like that. Also the medic ability with a large AOE heal covers that as well except a larget radius. Coming from someone who's most played class is a medic I think the revive mechanic is way too short when maxed out and the range is huge. I am in favor of the range being lessened and the res being the equivalent to I think the un-ranked med app. Also revive grenades are HUGELY over powered as they are now since a squad can try to all die within a radius of 15m and they can instantly be revived and have their shields recharging or be at full health with max nanoweave adding more health at the very least. Since you say there aren't as many medics on your server (which I am surprised) I'm sure that you may see less of this but after MLG tournaments I'm sure you might see more medics. Also I assume you keep avoiding the other portion of what Sock is saying is that you left me off that list, and my most played class is medic...... is this coincidence? I'd learn towards not
Hell no to invulnerability. Can you imagine how outright cheesy revive grenades would be if you combined their mass necromancy with that? Besides, it's a crutch that was introduced later because people whined about actually having to make sure it was safe before rezzing in BF2/2142.
Personally, I believe that reviving itself is completley fine, just the speed at which players can be revived is too high. Also i think you should at least have to put 1-2 levels of certs into the medical applicator to be able to revive maxes, however i dont think the ammount of times you can revive them should be limited.
I agree that the current system does encourage players to utilize a careless play style since folks can just simply wait for a revive. But I will have to disagree with at least an ammo feature for the medic tool. This encourages too much reliance on the engineer class since then not only would you have to get ammo for your primary, secondary, and tertiary (depending on class) but also for your class tool. An ammo requirement works better for tools that are used to expand the scope of a situation like the recon dart but not for a fundamental tool like the engineer and medic tool. A cooldown or recharge would be more preferential since logic would dictate that something at the very least needs to recharge in order to have the full effect. This brings me to a point that I remembered reading where someone in this thread talked about having a kind of drop off in the functionality of the tool dependent on the "overheat". We're using overheat as a generic term here so we'll stick with that, okay? I think a degradation should be in place for both the engineer and medic tools versus a strict shutdown as seen with the engineer tool. This way putting certs into the tool become more meaningful and encourage people to "buy" into their and stick with their class versus opting for an easier purchase to make the tool too powerful. I also encourage this approach to all of the classes since that way people are forced to specialize, learn, and become effective instead of picking up the class randomly because of flavor of the month or a perceive "OP-ness". As for the medic pack idea and the idea that reviving is faster and more rewarding than healing I can't argue against you too much. Right now it's easier and more cost effective to pick up a player rather than chasing after someone for what I perceive as nickles and dimes. I want the quarters and dollars since that allow me to effectively use my time and to put people back into the fight. Personally I would like to be able to drop a pack and let people heal themselves rather than chasing after someone. And right now the system rewards more for revives so that's how people will play their cards toward. Now if SOE all of the sudden decides to reverse this role then something would have to be done to either encourage players to accept healing or increase the amount healed and the reward to the medic. Again I don't have their goal and/or approach in mind so I'm just throwing around ideas without the knowledge of how they balance. I quoted this because I really want to dig into why we perceive this issue different. Sure we have the apples and oranges debate with engineers and medics but really the two are the same in that they "repair stuff" but the extent that this repair takes places is dependent upon what they are repairing. Engineers repair vehicles/aircraft that have a pool of "health" that is reduced differently than the health of a player. Strictly speaking there are a limited amount of methods to damage what an engineer repair versus pretty much anything being able to kill a person. I think that currently the system with revives and healing is setup to account for this and that repairs are setup in a way that they work to counter the relatively "limited" amount of damage that can take out a vehicle/aircraft. Now with this in mind I do see that a zergfit (which is what they are in my mind) have the ability to field a large number of a class like the medic and this does change the dynamics of how things play out. I can't fully explain their reasoning but I can explain why my outfit and probably why yours have a smaller amount of medics running around. We understand the importance of a well-rounded squad/platoon versus the zergfits are focused on forcing a large number of people against a wall and winning by force. Lets not get too hung up on this since these instances are just that instances where there is an overabundance of a class because it is demanded of their leadership. Lets focus on improving the system so that in the long run it forces players to play smarter and not to play with sheer numbers. Because truthfully I see quality in a medic a better asset than half the platoon because now everyone is competing to revive and not doing their job to their full extent. Utilizing the full extent works well with the medic class in general. That's why I think that there is a lack of interest in the class because people have to devote themselves to playing smart and opt for medic when the situation is in favor of them accomplishing something. If there are a lot of dead people then of course people will take advantage of the situation and switch to medic to cash in. This just shows that people want to capitalize on a situation rather than refining their abilities. That or I could be completely wrong but I'm fairly sure that is a good reason for it. So this is why I'm also in favor of changes that have a macro effect rather than a micro effect. Which is why I initially took to this thread because in the beginning it almost read like the medic class should suffer the consequences instead of everyone involved. I know this is getting old but the burden should be on both sides and that's how it should be. I won't accept that we already have this dual burden in place just because people risk dying when accepting a revive because you risk dying at any point while playing this game, even more so when dealing with friendlies because apparently some people don't mind running you over. WTSherman I'm sorry for tucking you in at the bottom of this lengthy post of mine but I did want to respond to your post in a general approach. I have played various Battlefield games so I understand where you're coming from. I also understand the frustration with the revive grenade. I don't have the full picture when it comes to the grenade but it seems like the mass revive is almost limitless. I would really like to test out the extent but that requires a decent test group of dead folk to check the limits. But I already suggested in my earlier post that the revive grenade should have a limit to the amount of people revived so that it combats the current approach to reviving swaths of people. Maybe even the range reduced but surely not an impact type grenade because it is highly situational and bouncing it off a corner to get someone back up while you're moving on is sometimes necessary. I won't devolve this topic anymore than it already has with grenades and how each grenade should work but in my opinion the revive grenade should be allowed to bounce since it does encourage some skill in getting it to stick to the area you intended it to go and also to bring up troops while on the game to reinforce an objective.
This is what I'm saying. I don't have any problem with the fact that players can be revived, but the fact that a maxed out tool can do it in one second is ridiculous.
That and the range. The more I think about it the more I agree, there is no weight behind the decision of whether to pull your med tool out to try and revive someone or make sure the area is safe; there is no risk so you just constantly revive everyone. I would like to be able to increase my squads survivability rather than just jump about reviving everyone.
I realize that medic AOE healing and the healing grenades are in the game and play a large role in providing support. I simply like the idea of being able to place a stationary object to facilitate healing with perhaps the cost of being able to use the AOE heal. I personally don't use the healing grenades since the damn things bounce all over the place so I usually use the AOE ability while healing with my medic tool. Reducing the range and building it up to less than what it is now through certs would make the most sense. But I'm still up in the air about how much or whether or not to increase the time on using the tool. I think the medic tool should have a different method of utilization when it comes to revives and healing. Healing at max with the tool seems to be pretty decent currently but yes the revive could use a reduction. But then the TTK could use some work since in situations where a medic is under fire and reviving a friendly often the revive could take too long to go through simply because someone can almost instantly kill you. Now from what I've read of this post people would say that in that situation the medic should have enough talent or brains to consider their options and not try to revive. Well then we run into scenarios where if the medic doesn't revive that person then the fight is effectively finished. But hey we can argue case by case all night, right? I won't touch the revive grenade since my latest post touches on changes that I think should be made. As for the overabundance or lack of medics that really depends on the server, faction, and current fight so again we can argue about it all night long. And yes I'm surprised by the lack of medics on my server, at least through my experience, but the opposite does occur in the overly large fights because all of the sudden we have opportunity medics popping up left and right to "farm" people for revives. That's when I get annoyed because people suddenly reduce my role in the battle because they want to take advantage of the situation. Just as you pointed out that I left you out of the list because of your class is a nice coincidence. I did so knowing that you had the experience as a medic and also in consideration for the posts that you contributed in the thread. Your posts were geared toward an approach to tweaking the medic class from a medic standpoint (at least through my interpretation) and not from strictly the view of changing the tool in a sweeping alteration. I could be wrong but most of your posts drove home the idea of adopting tweaks versus drastic changes so that's another reason why I left you off the list. Now if you were explicitly like the other posters and initially followed the posting trend to say that the medic tool was "broken" then I would've included you. But hey I could be wrong and not including you was a mistake that I didn't read into your two posts enough to see dig out the finer details.
This is what I'm really trying to push for. Small changes that would have a limited effect on individual players but do a good bit to hedge the mass spamming of medics. I've posted plenty of different ideas, don't take that to mean I want them all to be implemented together. I'm just trying to show that there's plenty of small solutions that could go a long way to improving the game.
I'm going to attempt to cut straight to the key points, as I see them. One sentence each, with a further one sentence for explanation. 1) A medic should not be able to heal from meters away. Explanation: if you want the reward (revive exp and revived soldier) you need to take the risk (putting yourself in the line of fire). 2) The respective power of "healing" and "reviving" is wrong, as it only takes one second to revive a dead guy, but four seconds to heal up from 1 HP. Explanation: The current system actually encourages the player to run in and die instead of play smart, tempting you with a one second full-HP revive that you can decide to accept at your leisure instead of the four-second slow heal during which you can still get shot. 3) A medic should not be able to "chain revive" multiple people within seconds of each other, with no cooldown, overheat, or penalty. Explanation: Other classes have a capacitor for their ability and a limiting factor for their tools: HAs can't carry endless rockets, Engy ammo packs are stationary and only last a short while, Infils can't carry endless ScanDarts, but a Medic can heal and revive endlessly? 4) A "failed revive" or reviving someone that then immediately dies again is not behavior that should be rewarded. Explanation: It is unreasonable to let players escape penalty for making bad decisions and it is also unreasonable to deny a reward to a player that makes a good decision, so a chain-revive of people that continually accept revives, push forward a few feet, and die again allows players to win (AND HENCE REWARDS THEM) after making numerous bad decisions. Who am I to make these kind of suggestions? The leader (who mostly plays medic) of a large outfit that makes liberal use of medic trains and chain revives.
Well then I'll be the first person to say that my opinions when reading this thread initially were colored by the perceived negative approaches folks had toward tweaking the system in place. It's easy to get wrapped up in a conversation and black out some of the points when trying to make a discussion in farther of a less harsh approach. I'll submit one more point that maybe opinions of the situation are colored by the faction and server conditions reflect how people see concerns differently. As far as I'm concerned this is situational and opportunistic but apparently it's more prevalent elsewhere. This does not excuse the fact that some of these concerns are also conditional and that in certain instances tendencies to recklessly spam revives are methods to keep a battle going. The same could be said with people spamming just about anything just like Sock/Subito mentioned earlier. So I would like to ask one more time that SOE have some more transparency with us and how they make decisions on the design of their systems. Maybe we as players have a view that hasn't been explored but maybe because we don't have a better understanding we can't explore it enough to offer thoughtful insight.
1. Not to mince words but you talk about heal and then offer an explanation in the context of reviving. So which is it? The point of being able to heal from a distance is because people run away or get out of range quickly for a number of reasons. It often takes a person a second to notice that they're being healed so that's why there is a healing range. As for revives I believe that the medic tool should be conditional in the sense that the range is reduced (and increased by certs in a reasonable sense) but that the range of the heal remains the same or near to it. You can argue that people that run away from a heal just don't deserve the attention but it's part of my job and mindset to keep people alive so something that helps me do that is more appreciated than a hindrance of limited range. 2. The current system is in place because of the fact that the TTK is so low. It takes less time to kill someone than it does to heal them. There are a number of different ways to counter or work with the current TTK but really that's up to SOE. Increase the healing speed, reduce the revive speed, or do nothing. If the healing and reviving are wrong then how do we go about changing it so that the system rewards people for getting heals versus the revive? It's more time effective to revive than to heal so until that changes people will keep healing. But if revives and healing take too long then people will not play medics quite as much. Some might enjoy this idea since then they have to deal with medics less but then medics become a sparse commodity and the game suffers from it. As I see it the game already caters too much to shooting versus support roles so you'll only cause more problems by changing the system too drastically. 3. This point fits into the idea that the medic and the revived share equal parts in the situation. Cause a reduction in resources for the person that died and if they continue to die and accept revives then they pay the price. Place a limit on the amount of revives per spawn or per minute for that revived player makes the most sense so far. I personally think that this limit is already in place with the engineer tool because you're limited through resources and timers on the amount of times you can pull a vehicle/aircraft. As for Heavy Assaults with rockets and Infiltrators with the recon darts both of those have their limit in order to encourage diversity in play style. Unlimited rockets means people turn the game into Quake and unlimited darts means the game turns into playing Metal Gear Solid with people paying attention to the direction people are facing on the mini-map and the "cone of vision". Engineer ammo packs have their limits to force people to quickly resupply without having to go all the way back to a terminal, much like healing from a Medic since people would have to go and heal themselves. So place the "penalty" not just on the medic but on the revived makes more sense. Or maybe have the engineer and medic tools changed (as discussed earlier) so that there is a reduction in effectiveness at "overheat" versus the tools being locked. 4. This point mostly depends on the type of player and how the system rewards certain actions. This also kind of goes back to my point in number 3 where a limit on the amount of times a person can accept a revive per spawn or over a set amount of time. Die three times in one minute? Well you can only revive once in that minute so stop dying so much. As for being a leader that uses medic trains and chain revives to justify these suggestions I don't know what to say about that too much.
Yes, I typed Heal but I meant Revive, good catch. I'm fine with a ranged heal, I too have had times where I want to tackle the person I'm trying to heal in order to get them to stop moving away from me. The implied suggestion I was making in #2 was to take a look at the revive and heal times and adjust them accordingly. I would want to reward a player that stayed alive with a shorter "back into the fight" time. The guy that died can wait a few more seconds, in my opinion. I'm definitely ok with shifting some of the burden to the person being revived. Whatever we can get to work, on one end or the other, I'm good with. The end result I would like to see, and what others would apparently like to see, is a decrease in super-speedy revives of a whole squad by one medic. As for the last bit, that was my attempt to dispel the notion that all large outfits think the system's fine and don't want to change it. I have the most to gain if it stays as-is, but I'm posting in support of changing it for the good of the game.
I'm glad to see more people coming around to the idea of reworking revives. What the actual changes may be still leaves plenty up for debate, but I think it's clear that a good number of people can see the flaws in the current system.
I think the best way is to start with small tweaks and reductions: slightly increasing the XPs for healing and the time for revives and reducing the time interval you can be revived.
What outfit uses this 'chain heal' to any benefit? I've seen people try to chain out of the spawn room to heal a buddy but once the first goes down, the others domino pretty quickly. I've personally tried to keep a fully certed heal gun on a heavy and it was nothing like a repair gun on a max. The shields go down anyway and they die quickly. Medics aren't much of a threat themselves. So platoons of them would seem stupid. Where is this done? They had to fiddle with the death stats to even get people to take a revive. The revive just to be insta killed gets old. I personally like to get restocked with explosives. So where are these ninja medic fire teams we are trying to 'fix'?
