Fiddling with the medic

Problems with the current Medic

• Armament and Vaccination do the same thing: These two skills provide the same bonus (albeit to a different degree and with different penalties). Since they stack, if you choose one it’s asinine to not choose both – get the benefits of two active skills for the work of one.
• Vaccination+Armament is too powerful: Getting 15+ points of armor because you got hit once is ridiculous. This makes level 20 an enormous power spike for medics – getting vaccination is literally on par with everything else you’ve gotten on the way.
• Enforcer and Combatant are only useful very early in the game: These are only taken for the first wave, after which you switch away to the alternate skill. This isn’t interesting – it’s tedious. The real choice you make here is “am I willing to make the minor effort to switch these skills every game, or am I too lazy to get the minor benefit?”
• Regeneration and Laceration are useless: Lacerate hits for 2% of the bullet’s damage once per second and doesn’t stack; it’s effectively 1 extra point of dps which is obviously useless. Regeneration offers a similarly low rate – 0.4 hps – which means you’ll be manually healing unless the damage is negligible. Unfortunately that denies you the ability to benefit from armament, which makes regeneration actively counterproductive.
• Acidic Compound is a crappy version of Sedative plus Lacerate: Acidic Compound might be useful if you could use it more often – but then what would be the point of Sedative? The immediate damage plus the entire DoT is still less than a single AR bullet, which hardly constitutes a meaningful power bump.

Proposed new skill tree
Every level

• +8% syringe recharge rate
• +2% syringe potency
• +3% bloat bile resistance
• +1% movement speed bonus
• +3% armor bonus

Level 5 – Conditioning

• Healing Surge: Put that medical knowledge to proper use: Increase your maximum health by 20%
• Painkillers: Take a hit without so much as flinching: run at full speed even while injured.

Level 10 – Holistic Healing

• Armorer: Don’t just repair people – healing a target also repairs 4% of their maximum armor.
• Stimulants: You can heal targets up to 133% of their max health. Health beyond their max decays at 1 point per second.

Level 15 – Weapon Handling

• Autoinjector: When your syringe is full and your health is not, you automatically self-heal. Your syringe recharge bonus doesn’t apply to your syringe. Physician, heal thyself.
• Scavenger System: What goes around comes around: Receive 1 point of health and 1 point of armor each time you heal an ally.

Level 20 – Preventative Healthcare

• Neuromuscular Inhibitors: Your syringe, healing darts, and grenades can stun zeds for 0.25 seconds once every 20 seconds.
• Tranquilizers: Perk weapons reduce enemy movement speed by 20% on hit for 0.25 seconds.

Level 25 – Advanced Training

• Airborne Agent: They say time heals: Your medic darts release a cloud to heal teammates near your target.
• Rapid Recovery: Get your team back in the fight in no time: You heal at full speed.

Comments on proposed skills
The every levels skills are unchanged. I considered replacing the bloat bile resistance with passive health regen, but that runs into the same conflict with armorer that makes the current skill counterproductive.

The level 5 skills are designed to help you survive in the short-term (until you can get healed)

• Healing Surge is unchanged. Survival by a straightforward mechanism – more health means you can take more of a beating.
• Painkillers helps you escape crappy situations. The injury speed penalty scales linearly from 0% at full health to 30% at zero health. Between two medics that have taken 50 damage, the one with painkillers is moving about 15% faster.

The level 10 skills improve the medic’s ability to heal.

• Armorer is the new incarnation of armament and vaccination. This let the medic build a stable pool of additional health for their team and then move on to shooting zeds.
• Stimulants generates unstable additional health – the medic will has to continuously use charge to top off their team. This bonus health is easier to apply than armorer, since this doesn’t require they be injured.

The level 15 skills help the medic heal themselves – from both minor and major wounds – without being distracted from shooting and healing.

• Autoinjector provides the medic with a 20 to 30 point heal every 15 seconds at the cost of manual use of their syringe. This is particularly useful when you take a big chunk of damage – most of the hit will immediately get wiped away if your syringe is charged. This also has minor synergy with armorer, since you’re automatically applying armor to yourself.
• Scavenger System provides a slower, steadier source of healing for doing your job and keeping your team alive. This isn’t as good at dealing with big chunks of damage, since it’d take a lot of healing to recover that much, but is more efficient at healing away chip damage (also, you can still use your syringe manually to keep yourself going). This has minor synergy with Stimulants since you can always throw darts at your team to build your armor.

As the name indicates, the level 20 skills are debuffs designed to help your team avoid taking damage in the first place.

• Neuromuscular Inhibitors is the new incarnation of Acidic Compound and Sedatives. This offers the major utility of a stun without displacing the berserker’s EMP grenades. The short duration of the stun means you can only use it to land a single easy hit on scrakes and fleshpounds (unlike EMP grenades, which lock the zed for much longer).
• Tranquilizers gives your team more time to deal with big threats before they reach you but provides essentially no protection once they close to melee range. However, it’s always available and doesn’t use up healing dart charge.

The ZED time skills give the medic the ability to heal extremely rapidly.

• Airborne Agent already exists. The only change is removing the 10% healing bonus. The big effect here is that you can heal your whole team with a single dart if they’re grouped up.
• Rapid Recovery quintuples your effectively quintuples your healing tick rate during ZED time. Invaluable if one or two people need a bunch of health right now, but not really useful if they can afford to wait a little longer.

Fiddling with the medic