Okay, so this is kinda a limited subject, but I wanted to get your opinions on it.

If it boils down to a really tense moment, should a medic tank for the pocket?
We're talking medic at full health, pocket at 30 health kind of tense moment. I've been talking to some higher level players (then again, almost anyone is higher than me) and they seem to have split opinions on it.

Also, if I do decide to tank for my pocket in-game, when's a good time to do it and when's a good time to just let him die and find someone else to heal?

In my previous experience, its usually worth it if you and your patient are the only ones alive and are defending/taking a point against a single target. An extra second or two of healing can be a big help to a solly or demo if he's up against, for example, a scout that knows he could finish him off. Confusion is also an added bonus as the other guy (usually) has no clue what the hell you're doing and wastes a second or two deciding on who to shoot next. :)

Also, both of you need to have confidence in each other or you both die. :)

I suppose it depends on the situation.. My initial though, if I have an uber charge or a good percentage in, no way, if I just deployed the uber and need to buy that extra rocket or so, might as well. (Push to last type of thing).. If we have even numbers and have an advantage in respawn times, that could work also.

Nothing I would do when I med on a consistent basis though, another one of those situational deals.

You heal the person who is either
A) Most prone to take damage or
B) Who has the best chance of making it out alive by being healed.
Also a good roamer should know when he is going to go down and it's also your job to know when and when not to heal them. Your pocket should be near you in a push, there should almost be no question in who is getting healed.


Also, if I do decide to tank for my pocket in-game, when's a good time to do it and when's a good time to just let him die and find someone else to heal?

General healing order for pushes=Buff scouts, roamer, demo, then you and the pocket push (generalization)

GL HF

Now here's some interesting theory!

I'd say last resort, but you know, there IS an applicable method for medic tanking, and that is in CTF when you are forced to uber a flag carrier by some situation like getting past spam. The medic would have to tank in said case with an uber to get the flag carrier (Who is probably more important than the medic at that point) out of danger. I could imagine this being useful on a ctf map where you bring a flag to the enemy base when you can't pocket and uber anyone else.

I'm neither soldier nor pocket, but as a scout who occasionally jumps in the way of spam to save other team mates, I know a thing or two about self-subjected damage. I've thought about this before (was considering making a blog article on it), so prepare for a cool essay nerd.

First off, at face value, medic health is generally the most important health. However, you have to keep in mind that the health of your team mates itself is a form of health for your medic. If, for example, your soldiers were really really hurt, you could abstractly refer to the medic as hurt or vulnerable because his defenses could be 1-shot and he'd be screwed. A somewhat hurt medic with a healthly group of team mates could be seen as having more "effective health" than a fully-healed medic with only, say, a pocket engineer.

You should also consider the fact that survival is more valuable than pure health. Your team is better off with four people at 150 health than two people at 300, because the cost of going to get heals is considerably lower than the cost of respawning. Health with greater "survival" impact is therefore more valuable health. Because health changes have a greater survival impact at lower numbers, health value is in this specific way relative. Additionally, the enemies' damage output will affect the scaling of this, because what is defined as "low health" depends greatly on how much damage enemies are capable of dishing out before you can fend them off or get heals.

Additionally, the medic's health's value is based very much on his team mates. A team full of kamikaze ambushers gets less benefit from a medic than a team with soldiers that synergize with their medic. This is because the medic's impact is transitive: his worth is in his ability to keep team mates alive so that THEY can produce output. When team mates are either dead, too far away for the medic to heal, or intentionally letting themselves die, the medic himself becomes less helpful. A medic is important more before he can keep a soldier tanking on the final control point and less because he can sit next to a demo while he sticky traps a door. Essentially, a medic's health's value is relative to the quantity, positioning and statuses of his team mates.

With all these in mind, it becomes obvious that there are very likely to be times when a medic's health becomes less important than another team mate's.

The situation you provided needs to be more specific. Your pocket is down to 30 health. Alright, but is he the last team member besides you alive? The last muscle class? The last one within healing range? Are his weapons loaded with enough ammo to fight would-be pickers? Is he away enough from enemies to escape alive? How far are you from a health kit? What's your uber situation? Is the status of a control point in jeopardy?

In the situation you provided, assuming whatever damage you're tanking is at least somewhat substantial (like 50-75), if the entire rest of your team was alive, and the enemy was doing well and dealing regular damage and moving frequently, I would say no, you shouldn't tank for him. Your other surviving team mates should be considered a multiplicative modifier to the value of your own health, and as such, your health is more valuable than the soldier's, even if his low health means it has extra survival value. Your ability to keep your 4 other team mates alive with full health probably outweighs your ability to keep 5 team members alive while at half health.

If the situation were different, it could be very well worth it to tank. If, for example, that soldier was the last other surviving member of your team, it would probably be worth tanking for him. His survival contributes to your health value because your output is dependent on having someone alive to assist. The fact that he's the only one left means that if he takes damage, your likelihood of survival is in jeopardy--and so is his--so your obligation to keep him alive is increased even more. His low health means that damage being dealt to him has an increased impact because of its effect on his "survival health." His death would also cause you more "effective damage" than letting him take damage instead of you because he offers you protection. Basically everything points to keeping him alive being a top priority, so taking becomes the obvious choice. In fact, if you don't think you'll ever survive to heal another of your team mates (or get an uber), it might be worth it to outright sacrifice yourself to keep him alive, should it give your team a pick and/or let you start rebuilding uber faster.

You have to keep in mind the relative value of positioning, weapon status, time, and health. The situation you provided has tons of variables impacting whether or not it's worth it to tank, and there should not be an obvious answer before understanding more of the situation. A big part of the medic's skill is resource management--specifically, knowing the values of the health, positioning, and status of each of his team mates; and using his medigun, uber, and vocal communication to affect them. Self-tanking for a pocket entails the same kinds of considerations you do when deciding who to heal. You just have to evaluate your own worth in a given situation, which can be an awkward or unfamiliar form of Medic skill.

G-Mang you had a very long post that could be summed up as risk vs reward. :P Really that's all it boils down to.

Jesus you had a very long blog post that could be summed up as "be nice." It boiled down to the details, my friend. That's the whole point. Blurting "risk vs. reward" is incredibly vague and unhelpful. My post was way more about the relative value of health and what affects that value than "risk vs. reward." In fact I'd probably say that turning my post into a "risk vs. reward" angle would completely change the theories and arguments of the post.

Jesus you had a very long blog post that could be summed up as "be nice." It boiled down to the details, my friend. That's the whole point. Blurting "risk vs. reward" is incredibly vague and unhelpful. My post was way more about the relative value of health and what affects that value than "risk vs. reward." In fact I'd probably say that turning my post into a "risk vs. reward" angle would completely change the theories and arguments of the post.
Just joking around with you man. :) Your post is great, though relative value is affected by assessing the risk vs reward of taking that rocket to the face.

As interesting as the idea is, as a medic, I would never purposefully take damage (aside from taking a hit in order to get a positional advantage). Any shot you take for your pocket had the potential to miss anyways. It's like throwing yourself at the last point when there are stickies on it. For the 1/100 times that somehow saves the round, there will be many more where you lose a potential push because you went down and someone else cleaned it up.

Also, it's unlikely that you'll actually know the situation well enough to avoid trying to make a clutch play when it's unnecessary. Most of the time it won't matter either way (you'll lose regardless), but when you're in that terrible 2vX situation, you're more likely than not to lose the round whether or not you win the current fight. I would choose a higher chance of the med surviving and fighting from better odds than focusing only on one situation (gambling that you can lose the current fight in order to have a better chance of winning a later fight).

nah I don't think it's worth it, you should never take risks as medic unless it ends up you getting an uber or the enemy medic being dead, and it being a fair chance that happens. I've only tanked once, and that was against a few medic needles when I had a heavy at 10hp, with the entire enemy team dead but the retreating medic and a demo who was far away planting stickies.

Any smart TF2 player wouldn't be trying to kill your pocket, they should be trying to kill you.

Interesting topic. I can only think of a few occasions where I have purposefully taken damage as medic, and they are all extremely circumstantial.

For example, once upon a scrim, I had just arrived to badlands yard to see my demo take a few meatshots from a flanking scout. The scout knew the demo was nearly dead and I had only just got within beam range so the scout retreated and pistoled him. I knew that with less than ~20hp the pistol bullets would kill him faster than I could heal him (+24hp per second vs 10-15 damage per round, at a rate of 6 rounds per second) so I clipped through my demo and took a clutch 2 or 3 pistol bullets that would have killed him, but did next to nothing to me. The scout was already falling back and had no scattergun shells loaded, and I knew we had both sollies nearby. The end result is I saved our demo's life by taking the damage and I regenerated all that health back long before I was even finished healing the demo. To be honest syringe gun regen is what really makes this work so well.

I'd say clipping though super lit players and taking long range hitscan damage is my only Medic trade secret and I almost regret giving it up here. I've yet to come across anyone who's done this besides me, although it is admittedly hard to tell without comms (I usually shout "I'll take your pistol bullets, get behind me!" much to my teammate's chagrin) and I doubt I'm the only medic who's ever done this. Still, a word of caution: even though I think it's a totally valid tactic, I probably only do this maybe 1 out of every 10 scrims, if that. It's extremely rare and situational.

My short answer to the OP would be, "No, never take damage as medic under any circumstances ever." My caveat would be, "It's actually ok to clip through your allies and take their long range pistol or shotgun damage if you are absolutely certain it will kill them at a faster rate than you can heal them, but only if you are 100% health with no immediate threats or spam around, and only when you have the syringe gun equipped for fast regen and can't save them with an ubercharge." :smile:

I like to clip through my scouts so they can take my dmg then refuse to heal them. The flip side to this little conversation. Hawkeye should know this one... Xeon too but he isnt on commft other wise you'd hear all kinda of whines

I like to clip through my scouts so they can take my dmg then refuse to heal them. The flip side to this little conversation. Hawkeye should know this one... Xeon too but he isnt on commft other wise you'd hear all kinda of whines

It's funny cuz it's true. "Come on, Doc!"

Any smart TF2 player wouldn't be trying to kill your pocket, they should be trying to kill you.

This isn't true. In a lot of situations, they only have two guys left, the medic and the "threat." If it's just combo v combo, it's usually better to kill threat and to finish the medic off later because the medic will usually be unable to do any real damage to your own medic, whereas a lone soldier could still get a medic pick.

To add to what Fish just said, it's also generally easier to take out heavy classes with focus fire than it is to take out medics in this manner, due to the fact that they can't dodge as well as a medic could.

If the opposing team only has two players left, medic + heavy class, your objective is to marginalize the medic's impact on the game. There are two was to accomplish this: you can kill the medic, removing him from the fight for a number of seconds and resetting his ubercharge, or you can kill his last teammate, making him entirely useless. Even if you allow him to escape after killing his pocket, the amount of time he spends running back to his teammates could be comparable to the amount of time it would have taken him to respawn. If he doesn't have much uber built up, going for the pocket is a much easier way to marginalize the impact of the enemy medic. On the other hand, if I know that he has >80% uber, then I might prioritize killing the medic more.