[Suggestion] Make the medigun (left-click) heal shields too

Most of it is in the title, but i will elaborate a little. I'm mostly playing medic lately, it was the first class i played, prefered the engineer for a while, then got back to it and loving it again. I love "lonewolfing" with ARs and how i can fight on a frequent basis thanks to self-healing, or even sometimes survive direct fire, if i'm far enough, gaining time.
I do have a few pet peeves as such though, one being the general lack of ammo, but the other, and biggest concern is how much healing with the medigun is generally useless, and effectively brings little to nothing compared to a revive:

- healing takes longer than a revive
- it's a bit harder to use as live targets tend to move more than dead one
- healing is less beneficial than a revive from a pure survivability standpoint (after a revive you aren't in combat, thus your shields regen immediately)

Also when reviving someone in a tricky position, it's not possible to maintain him alive at all until he reaches safety, since healing is rather slow, and effective on only 500 hp, which gets broken through in 3~4 bullets at most. While this is beneficial for the medic in theory (double revive xp), i find it frustrating either as a medic or his target, and the risk of healing the guy should be more rewarding: after all when you're wielding the medigun, you're not wielding anything else.

I don't think it would change all that much in the global infantry metagame, but it'd still be a very nice addition, in my opinion. At least those of us who prefer the class and actually heal (while i'm a COMBAT medic, i do heal/revive lots and check my mini-map regularly for those) would benefit from it.

I'd gladly see that hypothetical shield regen extended to healing grenades by the way, for quite the same reasons (revive is a generally superior option).

Get the bubble thing, set up shop near a frontline and you can med people while theyre waiting for thier shield to be recharged.

And you get XP. Everybodys happy.

"- healing takes longer than a revive"

That really is an oddity that doesn't make sense. But I'd rather they just increase the heal rate and slightly increase revive timers to fix that.

For shields, just use the shield regen deployable.

I think the difference is that you can actually shoot when you are being healed while you are utterly useless while dead.

But the Medic is incentivized to let players die because healing is far too slow to be particularly worthwhile; you need pretty significant lulls in combat. Much better to revive players.

I prefer to have living human shields when I have my medic gun out. Dead player are useless to protect me and with the medic gun, I am also unable to protect myself. I only revive if I can do it safely but I can heal in much more dangerous situations. Speically with the healing aura because then I can shoot as well.

BTW, the shield refill shield is utterly useless. It refills slowly and it makes peoples frame rate drop. I used it for the directives and I will now put it way back in my locker and forget it ever existed. I have seen many friendlies destroying them because they are freaking annoying. I actually felt bad for farming the directives with that junk.

How can you get xp with that? Cobalt Vanu doesnt want to get into a bubble

If there's an enemy around you could just shoot at them for double the DPS, use your aura to heal if you have it, and then revive your teammate IF they died.

Any time you put your gun away you sacrifice offensive capability, so you need to get the most out of the time you hold your medic tool. Spending a low amount of time to make a dead enemy alive again, and at 100% health no less, is far more useful than spending significantly more time increasing a 25% health player to 100%. Especially since they may well gain 100% shields without you touching them, you or someone else may use a healing aura, and they may be carrying med kits.

I'm not saying it's useless, but you've pretty much got to have nothing better to do.

They did when they were Ceres Vanu.

Maybe having a vauge connection to a sea god makes our bubbles more alluring.

I'm actively avoiding it as much as i can, as a former Ceres Vanu! The thing hinders visiblity, and makes you more visible to the enemy, especially at night. I feel in the spotlight within that bubble, and will just go there if it really is safe enough, like a part of the bubble going through a wall and i'm on the safe side of said wall, or when the combat has just moved away from it.

I know it can be very useful at times but giving up the self healing+faster healing on others (i routinely use it in combination with the gun) for such inconvenience is a price too steep in my opinion.

How do you 'heal' an artificial creation of electromagnetic energy? Don't you mean 'restore'?

/grammarian

Seems illogical to me that the medic would have any tool to repair shields. That should be the engi option (maybe as an alternative to the mana turret?). Anyway... too late for that.

If you let the medic gun 'overheal' - yeah I know that's not realistic - but if you could overheal players with the medic tool that would provide a boost to people trying to breach a room. At least then it might be a more beneficial ability because you're right, a rez is often as fast as a partial heal, and that makes no sense.

Aside: I always thought the passive Triage ability should overheal too so as to encourage group transport in assaults.

Prepare youself for i am about to drop a bomb.

...

I dont drop the bubble where youre likely to get shot at.

The shield regen isnt all that significant if youre being shot at, so put it behind the frontline and by the time you leave youre full of shield and health and ready to get wrecked by that Pounder MAX that just refuses to piss off.

I've often thought that repairing player shields should be an engi ability. It is an admittedly very rough comparison, but in PS1 every player had a health component and an armor component. The medic tool restored health, the engi tool restored armor. With the self-healing shields in PS2 it seems less useful to have an ability to restore another players shield, but I can't think of any reason to NOT include it. Just not sure which class to give it to - doesn't make sense to give medics the shield bubble deployable and then allow engis to repair player shields with their tool. Maybe move both to engi and force a choice between an offensively oriented engi or a support engi. Dunno what the medics would get to replace it though... Just tossing around ideas I guess.

Guess what the Shield Capacitor is for?
If the time before the recharge bothers you so, you have an option to make it happen faster.

Well, medics are the only class able to regen a shield at this point. What engineers can do is repair shields generator themselves, but not actively generate the shields. Also, if it were granted, it'd make more sense to give that to medics gameplay-wise, as medics have less tools to play with than engineers at this point, and the engineers might even gain some drones soon enough.

I don't see the tactical advantage to that, unless each time their shield gets dropped, the guys on the frontline back out to the bubble, situation in which they might gain as much as they lose (ability to maintain the frontline, or just simply getting shot while going out of cover). I don't have much personal experience with it though, as i very much dislike playing with the bubble: it feels much less an active ability than the aoe heal to me.

What's that got to do with it? What i want is to regen other people shields with a single target active support ability, possibly even when they're getting shot at, i'm not talking about the medic's own shield at all.

They should add a second medigun type which charges (and overcharges!) shields but does the other things (revive/heal) worse.

Variety and playstyle options are good!

It does make sense though actually.

Revives being quick is important for people actually... reviving.

Healing on the other hand, if it healed as fast as revive (full health in 1 second) then you could have a Resist shield popped, medic healed, HA just tank damage like a MAX

It might be interesting... but it'd definitely be OP

There's a ton of space between where it is now and 1 second. That's like a 200%+ buff or whatever it is... a bit ridiculous.

Yeah, I think it could use a little buff.

It's bad enough I don't tend to heal unless I don't have anything to shoot at.

I still get a fair bit of healing in though.

More important IMO they should bump up the XP reward for healing.