idea medic awarness

title say it all, if medics know where u are in the map ( not the radar) and they know your hp it would be easier..

how? how it might be accomplished? with a build it on radar only avabile for medics.

Actually something I'd like to see is a way to make players who use the "Medic!" taunt to be somehow indicated on Medic players' screens more prominently. If you've played TF2 you probably know what I'm getting at.

What about an arrow that always points in the direction of the player with the lowest hp.

Before we get all excited about this idea, and it sounds like a good one, we need to wait for Dru and Shan's decision on the medic/engineer weapons.

How about little health bars over dots representing other players in the radar?

the thing about hp in radar is that i might dont let you see other dots and they can overlap ç.. in map would be better..

Well what i think the best thing to do would just make the dots for teammates on the radar show as red/yellow/green/blue depending on hp.

I am personally satisfied with the current medic awareness. I can spot people with yellow or red above their heads fairly easily ("ooooh, red! lotsa xp!") and people tend to know to be at or near a congregating point between rounds if they want to be healed. And if I do say so myself, I am fairly vigilant about healing people - I have to be - if people die and leave me to fight monsters at my own level, I'm in trouble.

As a suggestion to bolster the medic class, how about a medical sentry similar to the engineer defense sentry.

A medic could leave a healing sentry at a central point or the "base" that would automatically heal a small amount of damage every so often to those standing nearby. There could be upgrades to it for greater healing per second, or faster cooldown between heals, or larger radius. Maybe allow for a remote activation of a healing blast/sphere around it.

It would use up monster points of course so there would be a tradeoff on spawning certain monsters and the sentry. So a medic would have to decide on a Titan meat shield or an XP generating sentry.

This addition would seem relatively easy to code since there are already sentries coded, and would add to the support role a medic can play for the team.

Actually, that sounds good, how about a "medic rod", same effect as a sent, but it moves with you, make it act just like the rod (use a little adren when on, and when someone is near you and needs HP it converts adren to heal people in range as needed. If you can make it not waste adren on people who are fully healed like the spheres do i think it would be an excellent tool. With healing using the medic weapon one of the hardest things is trying to hit a teammate when they are trying to dodge everything they see, a rod like tool for healing would solve that issue.

A "medic rod" is something I have thought of before, but this is basically the same idea as the sphere (just centered on the Medic player instead of in a single location).

I am not sure such a thing needs to exist. I just think the healing sphere should provide healing comparable to the healing blast per adrenaline. A healing aura (rod) seems like it would be a useful advancement of the sphere, but why have a higher level version of a questionably useful tool? Why not just make the one that's already in the game better*?

*Especially because introducing any new artifacts means more clutter to scroll through when you want to find the item you are looking for.

Wail wrote:

A "medic rod" is something I have thought of before, but this is basically the same idea as the sphere (just centered on the Medic player instead of in a single location).

The difference is it would overcome both of the major problems with the sphere, the sphere is relativity slow at healing (only 15 hp/second), and the sphere uses a relativitly large amount of adren (7/second). For example, with 250 adren, the number of people in it does not really matter because the blast is just as effective on many people, the sphere can heal for 35 seconds and deal a total of 530hp of healing, meanwhile the blast can deal 400 hp instantly and uses only 50 adren. That makes the blast very effective, but the time delay makes it difficult to use, people run and it can be ineffective with distance. A medic rod could activate instantly, heal at a much more reasonable rate (like 100hp/second) and would also scale to use an appropriate amount of adren, if everyone is fully healed it uses only a small amount of adren (say 1/second), but when healing a teammate uses something like 1 adren per 5 hp (which is worse than the blast but much better than the sphere). If you had it on in a base and some small rocks did 40 damage to 5 people you would instantly spend 40 adren and bump them all up to full health.

The reason I would like something like this is it allows medics to do something exactly like the adren shield that AMs have now, only medics would share it with those around them. There are so many times I or others around have died because there was just no way to heal fast enough even though I had plenty of adren to spend healing.

edman007 wrote:

Wail wrote:

A "medic rod" is something I have thought of before, but this is basically the same idea as the sphere (just centered on the Medic player instead of in a single location).

The difference is it would overcome both of the major problems with the sphere, the sphere is relativity slow at healing (only 15 hp/second), and the sphere uses a relativitly large amount of adren (7/second). For example, with 250 adren, the number of people in it does not really matter because the blast is just as effective on many people, the sphere can heal for 35 seconds and deal a total of 530hp of healing, meanwhile the blast can deal 400 hp instantly and uses only 50 adren. That makes the blast very effective, but the time delay makes it difficult to use, people run and it can be ineffective with distance. A medic rod could activate instantly, heal at a much more reasonable rate (like 100hp/second) and would also scale to use an appropriate amount of adren, if everyone is fully healed it uses only a small amount of adren (say 1/second), but when healing a teammate uses something like 1 adren per 5 hp (which is worse than the blast but much better than the sphere). If you had it on in a base and some small rocks did 40 damage to 5 people you would instantly spend 40 adren and bump them all up to full health.

The reason I would like something like this is it allows medics to do something exactly like the adren shield that AMs have now, only medics would share it with those around them. There are so many times I or others around have died because there was just no way to heal fast enough even though I had plenty of adren to spend healing.

I know where you're coming from, and I see the value of the item you're proposing.

The main value of what you're proposing (IMO) just comes from filling in the gap that comes from the particularly low value of the sphere compared to the blast on DC. The Healing/Adren ratio for the blast is 8:1 best case (400:50) but only 2.1:1 for the sphere. If the sphere were set at a comparable healing ratio to the blast (ie it healed 54 hp per second given its current adren drain rate) then the sphere would see quite a bit more use.

Currently on Monster Mash I have the healing sphere set to drain 4 adren/s for 24 hp of healing, and this is actually quite powerful (FYI: Monster Mash runs monsters that are significantly harder than any monsters on DC, and the maximum health bonus on MM is 1000. I mention this because both of these factors make effective healing harder for Medics, but these settings for the sphere work out pretty well for Medics there without being clearly overpowered). Healing at 54 hp/s would probably be overkill on DC, especially when you consider this can be combined with the Medic weapon and blasts as needed.

Running spheres is interesting because you really don't need to "chase down" players anymore - Your sphere acts like a beacon, and if they need healing they will come to you. If the adren cost is low enough you can also rely on spheres for self-healing, which reduces your reliance on the Medic weapon / splash damage weapons.

You bring up that a healing rod-type item could perform both as passive healing and as a "spike" heal -- In other words, kind of the best of both worlds when it comes to the sphere / blast. I think that would be particularly hard to balance if you weren't planning obsolescence for the sphere and blast.

Sphere healing was changed in version 2.17

Szlat wrote:

# SphereHealing cost per second now 7 instead of 9, healing 15 per second instead of 10, requiring a minimum of 28 rather than 50 to run.

I am finding it more comparable to blast now.

Yeah, I know Szlat improved it with this most recent release. It's certainly better than it was before, but still not as good as blast. I think if the cost were dropped to 4 adren/s and the healing nudged up to 16 you'd see it being used all the time, simply because it's more cost-effective to top people off with 2 seconds of the sphere than with a 50 adren blast. Blast would still be superior if you really needed the health, though.

Wail wrote:

Yeah, I know Szlat improved it with this most recent release. It's certainly better than it was before, but still not as good as blast. I think if the cost were dropped to 4 adren/s and the healing nudged up to 16 you'd see it being used all the time, simply because it's more cost-effective to top people off with 2 seconds of the sphere than with a 50 adren blast. Blast would still be superior if you really needed the health, though.

It shouldn't be a complete replacement for blast. Later waves I find it difficult to keep up with the wounded (bodies flying all over the place.) I will use a sphere at this point, because in the 2 seconds it takes to charge the blast, the wounded may bounce out of the blast area, or behind an object.
Sphere also acts as a beacon for the wounded to crawl to for healing.