Medic
Basic Responsibilities
- Reviving downed team mates
- Healing injured team mates
Reviving and Healing Team Mates
Here are the basic mechanics for the brand new. To revive a person that is down you will bring your bandage up by pressing 5. If you get a medkit instead, press 5 again and that will swap you back to your bandages. A person that is incapacitated but not dead yet will have a red blood drop surrounded by a red circle with a mixture of a dotted and undotted circumference. The undotted portion indicates how much time they have left approximately with a full circle indicating around 240-260 seconds. Take note of this for prioritizing among groups of downed team mates. You will take your bandage and hold left click on someone until the bandage is out of the package. You can move a little bit away, but if you go too far the process will stop. Sometimes the bandage will not get applied, so you need to keep trying until the animation for tearing the bandage out starts. Sometimes you need to move around closer, further, or change your angle to get the desired person bandaged. Medics are not the only people who can use bandages, but the time it takes for them to revive is much shorter and they have far more bandages.
Healing isn’t much different from bandaging. You bring out the medkit and left click to apply it to other players. If the player is bleeding or incapacitated, you will need to bandage them first. When the player is up and injured you will see a circle with a medical symbol if they are stable and blood drop to indicate they are bleeding. Their amount of health left will be indicated by the undotted circumference. A less precise indicator is the color of the circle and symbol with green indicating nearly full health, yellow about half way and orange to red indicating less than half or a quarter.
Those are the basic mechanics.
Best Practices
Vulnerable State
There is a period of time after a revive where a player will die if they are incapacitated before the time is up. The default is 60 seconds and this will decrease if the player is partially healed. Because of this it is best to drag players to safety if you can first. Safety is a position that is highly unlikely to take gun fire in the form of cover or having lots of friendlies around and very few enemies. If a building is nearby, drag them inside or around a corner so they can’t be struck by gun fire. On the other hand if there hasn’t been gun fire for a minute and friendlies are walking freely, just start picking people up out in the open as that will save time.
To drag you will press the f key while crouched on the players neck or ankles. Figuring out where to look while doing this is the hardest part but give it a try where you can. With practice you will be able to do this easily in the midst of a fire fight with few problems aside from bullets.
Priorities
If you do not need to get anyone else up specifically try to prioritize healing by who has the least amount of time left. Priorities will change with the situation you are in. If there is enemy armor around, you need to get your LATs and HATs up first. Your squad needs a rally put down? Get the squad lead up first. Need ammunition? Prioritize a rifleman who has ammo, ask first. How can you tell which kit is which when they are lying on the ground? You can use your map and mouse over them to see who is who. Another approach is to learn what equipment will show on the bodies of different kits and this works better in a pinch. You can also just ask, and the people who are down can help direct you where you need to go.
One kit you should try to prioritize picking up is other medics. You can pick people up faster this way as there are 2 or more of you working on reviving compared to just you. This is crucial when you have a squad sized element or more down in an area.
Pertaining to priorities is should you heal completely first before moving to the next person or just get people up? This depends on the situation. Invasion will require keeping ticket losses to a minimum and you should get people out of their vulnerable state before sending them back into a fight. You may also be facing another squad coming in the next 30 seconds and one guy with a rifle won’t be enough but you can spare the tickets. Pick people up quickly and heal as you can in this situation. You should heal everyone at least a little bit so they can regenerate stamina. Without stamina weapon accuracy will be poor. It doesn’t take much just a slight heal will give stamina regeneration back.
Bandage Management
Because you can be incapacitated like everyone else, you want your team mates to have bandages for you when this happens. That means if they are bleeding, you stabilize them. If there are team mates down, you try to revive them instead of non medics. This will cause you to run out of bandages faster than if you just focused on reviving, but if you go down your team mates can at least pick you up. If they have to bandage their own wounds they now have only 1 bandage to revive with. Given enough time away from an ammo crate they may not have a bandage any more. Medics on the other hand have 9 bandages with full supply.
Being more active with bandages will mean you need to stay on top of keeping yourself stocked. If you are near supply crates, that means making a trip back to the crate when needed. Friendly vehicles are also a great source. And any time you see a rifleman if you are not fully stocked ask for ammo. If need be talk the rifleman through how to give it to you as new players gravitate toward this role.