[Suggestion] Change in how healing works.

Currently when someone wants to get some healing they need to find a Medic, get their attention, hope the Medic wants to put away his gun for the heal tool and then look at the wounded soldier to heal him.

This is in a way teamwork, but it has many unnecessary elements that are detrimental for both players. The Medic is forced to put away his gun and look at the target to complete the task, limiting his vision and capabilities. The wounded soldier is at the mercy of the Medic, hoping the Medic is in the mood to heal him. This isnt a very natural or encouraging way for Medics to go about their business, so here is an alternative:

Medics keep their tool, but allies can simply walk up to them, hold "E" and get their health back. The Medic's task is to stand in a good and accessible spot and the wounded soldier's task is to find the Medic and not stand in the Medic's way while he heals himself. This makes it easier for Medics and means the soldier has to limit his field of view to get his health back rather than the Medic.

This could potentially also be used for other tasks. For example you could get a single ammo tick by accessing an Engineer, with a cooldown as long as normal ammo packs so it cant be spammed. This circumvents the well-known "Engi wont drop his ammo pack and gets surrounded by people asking for one" dilemma.

A more controversial change would be to allow MAX's to repair themselves at Engineers, overheating the repairtool of the engineer in the process. This could annoy Engineers that want to repair something and then find out a MAX has overloaded their tool.

Or the medic could just activate the aoe nano regen field which is an optional loadout item

I have a simpler solution which could do the job. My idea is to force the medic to prioritize healing.
So downgrade the medics guns (give heavy class the assault rifle), nerf its HP and in return decrease the time it takes to switch between weapons.
This will make the medic be able to provide fire support and quickly switch to it's healing device when necessary. The nerfed defense and guns will force this class to mainly heal and not fight, but can defend itself with a quick switch to the main gun.

I believe personal agency and the burden of choice is a more compelling than throwing something out there, free of charge. Players also have implants and injections (kits) to satisfy self-heal requirements before any of that.

This sounds like fun. I'll put myself at an even worse disadvantage by losing my primary so that I can more frequently be caught healing and chain targeted without being competitive.

So I get to follow everyone around exclusively and push heal while not really being able to compete in a fight when I need to. How engaging.

Anyway, it's been fun but you're going to have to find someone else to feed you. Good luck learning to play THIS game as it is, if you ever choose to. And good luck in life at constantly whining about changing the rules to your liking. You won't always be able to just take your ball and go home, and the irony here is the more that people behave like this, the less they understand the consequences of their actions. Can't wait to watch it all hit critical mass.

A hungry person is an angry person. Go have a nice meal pls before you reply.

You will be able to fight. There is nothing wrong with a carbine or SMG, they are very good. And your quick weapon switch will allow you to fight and heal.

Well I mean. He makes sense unlike your proposal. You essentially want the medic to die faster and have less firepower to prevent that... To make him die faster while trying to heal people. NOTHING TO SEE HERE FOLKS!

Ah yes! And why do we even have a healing ability on the current tool anyway? Because the AOE heal is never on cooldown, Medics never save their AOE heal for when they themselves are damaged or when they need to heal, you know, a group. Also Medics never have the shield regeneration device equipped! So AOE heal answers everything, hurrah!

Stop trying to discuss things like a vindictive spoiled brat that simply HAS to oppose everything someone said because you didnt like something of them once.

Nobody should ever be force into a specific role when choosing a class. It's called a combat medic for a reason. Medics have some of the best weapons in the game. Adding to that, new players in general are told to be a medic, I don't think you would you want to tell new players to pick the class with the weakest hp pool, and expect them to do nothing other then heal the salt knights in a FPS.

EDIT: Alright, that came off a little brash, my apologies.

How about the personal agency and freedom of choice to heal yourself at a Medic without impeding the Medic's agency and freedom of choice? Dont come up with non-issues for the sake of... what exactly?

His agency and freedom of choice are not impacted. The Medic can choose to heal you or he will not. In fact, the choice of not healing is also a personal expression. The other two outlets I mentioned also exist, for any soldier to exercise, if they so choose to don the suit of a Combat medic themselves. The Medic already posesses freatures and tools that permit him to heal others in a remote fashion, if he should choose. There's also a specific voice macro just for the occasion. All personal agency is preserved down the line because we are forced (by the game and each other) to decide to do something. That makes it interesting.

The "burden of choice" in deciding whether or not to put one's gun away, to choose one implant over another, to carry around healing kits, C-4, or whetever else they toss into that slot based on the terms of the engagement, is, I believe, extremely important to gameplay. What we can not do concurrently is as operationally important as what we can do, individually or concurrently, as that produces the limitations that make our interactions interesting.

Hard pass. Doesn't sound much like a combat medic to me, sounds like you are attempting to remove the combat part. If I hadn't seen other forums I would get the feeling you come from a more traditional mmo (MOBO instead... ).

In many instances your Idea would be frustrating. The key one to me is when the medic is the only one left in the room, instead of clearing and then attempting to rez, you would rather him just sit there and be a lamb to the pack. sounds very.... UN-FUN.

Forcing teamplay in a trinity style is NOT going to work in PS2 or an FPS, so stop suggesting it.

Oh it's called a combat medic...woops, mb ignore my suggestion lol.

And all that is still intact, you just get one more option to choose from. In other words MORE freedom of choice, MORE agency. If you want you could limit the health regen from "using" a Medic so that other options remain superior, but the fact that this feature would improve matters remains.

Your suggestion was an option? I appologize, if that's the case, but you didn't specify where on the Medic (what equipment slot) the feature would occupy.

I don't think this would be a very good idea.

If a medic or engineer has to rely on the competence of others to support themselves off of himself he will not provide very much support at all. Moreso however, is that incompetent allies will provide an incredible frustration to the player by constantly jumping in front of him at all times, blocking shots, and drawing attention and fire and AoEs at him.

As is incompetent allies can still be difficult to support. How many times have I thrown an ammo pack at someone requesting ammo, only for the idiot to walk away? Or the "I NEED A MEDIC" morons literally running away from the only medic in the area trying to help them. To quote Bioshock, "how can I help you, if you won't come to me?"

And even if it were simply an optional method, it would have to have a dramatic visual differentiation as to not have stupid people constantly getting in the way expecting something one cannot provide.

In my opinion the burden of support is that of the supporter. If a player chooses to aid their team through direct altruistic action he must make the choice to burden himself for the betterment of others.

You stop building strawmen out of my words, and I'll consider it.
It's too bad that fights are limited to a single medic with shield regen, isn't it?

This suggestion won't change much and is not needed whatsoever imo. There are enough healing tools or methods anyway either you are a medic or not.

Just imagine a medic in a big fight and a bunch of people rushing to him to get healed. This will be annoying and counterproductive as hell in different ways and medics will start running away avoiding everyone and in the end they won't heal anybody at all. If they want they still can run away and don't heal anyone at any situation so it's not like it will give an option to the wounded. Medics might as well start tking people for being annoyed. They will also form a big target(not only for themselves) for the enemy and will get them and their allies involved in stupid situations.

Medics are fine as they are and even if they don't cooperate at all, which is rare btw, you can always find ways to heal yourself.

Bad idea. The Medic is already the least played class and is so for a reason. The healing class is always a difficult one for games as having someone be relegated to standing around pointing a tool at allies to heal them is just not as much fun as anything else. Thats in fact the entire reason the Medic got the Assault rifle as an exclusive, to make it a more attractive class and allow it to better support allies from the rear lines than it did with the Carbines he used to have.

Its why I'm proposing this change as well. The Medic is often used as a kind of babysitter. When you are in the room with one or have used the request for a medic command people often treat it like its the Medic's privilege and duty to heal them, rather than a choice. This addition changes how Medics are treated by others and also their strategy. They'll more often find themselves surrounded by wounded who heal themselves rather than running around a pointroom or something healing players. This offers more stragetic value to the Medic who needs to find a good spot where allies can find him and heal unhindered while still offering the Medic the shooting fix that is central to the game without having to put that down every 10 seconds because someone thinks they are entitled to your attention.

How is it a strawman? Its a simple logical conclusion. You say that the AOE heal is there instead of my solution, but by extention that has to mean that the healing part of the heal tool is useless and that all Medics carry AOE heal 100% of the time. I point this out and suddenly I'M making strawmen arguments? Seriously stop acting like a spoiled brat.