Acidic rounds... I hope those people are proud of themselves

[Rifluvr]

You're screwed up, Tripwire. IF you were playing your own game, then you would know, that acidic rounds accounted a significant part of the battle medic's damage. By weakening acidic rounds, you weakened HRG Incision, Corrupter Carbine, HRG Vampire, even Mine Reconstructor, previously having a great DOT damage, which made playing with this least popular weapons rewarding and fun.

"Why take the right skills tree when there is a left one? Heal me while I tank with my face!" - an outraged CD player with third-party crosshair overlay will say, at the same time creating another topic about how HoE difficulty is to easy for him.

The entire left branch of skills is based on frequent cheap syringes that stacks buffs (with 101, 201, 301, Hemogoblin), or as an ultimatum crutch - blue gas that stacks buffs faster with less healing. For this simple reason, weapons with one slow but strong syringe are less profitable in left skills tree.

But very profitable in the right tree. A battle medic does not protect those who are already healthy by stacking buffs on them. He protects by PREVENTING the probability of getting damage by killing those he can kill, and heals only when it is really needed (the one big and thick heal burst - from Vampire's blood ball, from mine of Reconstructor, from Rocket of HRG Missle, from 50% syringe of Incision). Those he can't kill solo - he controls (bleeding debuffs, toxic panic, even tanking angry giants with the bat), allowing teammates to deal with them more easily while still preventing taking damage (which means no one need to be healed, except maybe you). Many of my games in HoE ended too soon in a way that a buffs-med came into an incomplete team of 2-3 people, and we lost due to a simple lack of ammunition, because that ballast not killing anyone, running like tail for those who did not need to be healed in the first place, expecting to them clear the map.

-Incision. I can live with less damage, it is still viable, but you made 2 buttons for what previously required just one. Also, in order to control the giants with toxic panic, now I have to sacrifice 50% of the syringe, risking with chance to not have it for badly damaged teammates. Why do I need these difficulties when it's easier to take Hemogoblin+buffs and not worry about it? Simple nerf for the battle meds.

-The Carbine was initially good in the left branch, due to the duration of the gas, but now none of his attacks deal DOT at all. WTF??? Exclusive nerf for battle meds.

-Mine reconstructor when accumulated, it gave an awesome big burst of heal for multiple targets + direct damage + DOT + toxic panic. It was a good analogue of HRG Healthrower for the right skills tree, often saving when the team was cornered. But the short distance, the physical projectiles that you should actually hit (especially those who are far away), or manually activate when needed, the damn slow weapon swap speed made it bad in emergency healing, especially for long-range targets (no syringe like on healthrower, as if it needed it, lmao). This gun from the category "big risk = big reward". Without DOT, the accumulation of a large mine does not make purpose (the amount of DOT was equal to the volume of the mine) except stacking on the floor which in practice turned out to be ineffective, unfortunately (big puddle bursts even if a teammate has 99/100 hp, and one wounded person can burst all your mines placed by you within last two minutes in a couple of seconds just running from/to something, but I love the idea of this gun actually). And why to spam small mines when there is an HRG Healthrower that goes through enemies and friends? Welcome to the dumpster. Nerf for battle meds.

-HRG Vampire. The ugliest duckling in the family got the most. In terms of healing with the ball, this was a mine reconstructor, only worse, even in better times. A mine reconstructor doesn't need medium-thick enemies nearby to be able to heal anyone. Also no healing button and slow weapon swap speed, made it extremely demanding to the feeling of the game flow. Vampire was initially worst in healing teammates, but now he is bad even in preventing damage. Alt-fire has lost DOT, which was one of the few giant killers in med's arsenal. They will say "git good, shoot to the head", but the this type of weapon is intended for maps / matches where carefree shots to the heads are impossible, where the enemy breaks through the fronts from every sides. Good luck sucking blood for at least a whole day, but the damage of both attacks is not enough for Tier 4 weapons IMO, or need more ammo pool (I still can deal with SC but FP just waste of time and ammo now). Just remove it from the game already, and no one will notice his disappearance.

If before "nerf of battle medics update" these weapons were practically unused by the overwhelming majority of players, now they are completely being scrapped, even by those enthusiasts who have mastered them for hard but effective use.

(Also there should have been another another paragraph about HRG Medic Missile, but this gun was broken from the very beginning and did not give any DOT from a direct hit of the projectile, only from gas, and I was too lazy to write a bug report)

You have castrated a unique style of play to please those whiners who do not play combat medics, and even more - they actively hate those who play battle medics, beforehand kicking from the server, even when there are no signs that they are not doing their job. (Yes, I am a battle med who copes with both healing allies and killing enemies, it is more difficult to do than being just a buff-bot, but it is more fun and in some situations even more helpful to the competent team.) Just leave one skill tree for every perk with boring passive bonuses to headshots, if the entire current balance of the game is built around this.

Sorry for my poor English, wrote this with the help of a translator. But I've been playing this game since Early access 2015, and I've never been so disappointed with the changes before, and I've never spammed "where is KF3" on the steam forum (I don't expect a reward from this). I would just like all the opinions and experiences of different players to be heard. At least for future games, if this was your final balance update.

 

[Aleflippy]

Good.

A medic shouldn't be about dealing damage anyway.

And it always amuse me when people are bragging about how long they've been playing while writing such BS. If you never understood that in 8 years, you've been playing the wrong perk all this time.

 

[Rifluvr]

Sorry, not interested in communication with a forum nolifer, mired in his own stereotypes. Those who actually play the game know the reason of this topic. The post was for developers primarily, if they still exist.

 

[OnionBubs]

This really could've all been avoided if poison did something useful, like a debuff. But something had to give eventually and apparently the devs are adamant on poison being a (bad) source of damage and panic incap.

It does make life arguably less annoying for people playing in any sort of team with a semblance of cohesion, though, so ultimately a loss of battle medics in pubs is a net positive.

Sorry, not interested in communication with a forum nolifer, mired in his own stereotypes. Those who actually play the game know the reason of this topic. The post was for developers primarily, if they still exist.

Implying the people who are the most outspoken regulars on the forums don't actually play the game to a point where they can regularly dissect it at a high level, which is what matters most when concerning game balance.

Also, "Nuh-UH!" isn't really a proper rebuttal to anything @Aleflippy mentioned.

A battle medic does not protect those who are already healthy by stacking buffs on them. He protects by PREVENTING the probability of getting damage by killing those he can kill, and heals only when it is really needed

This is probably the point I take the most umbrage with, because literally anyone in the game can do that. I have always said time and time again that the best damage prevention is just killing things before they can hit you, and that is ultimately a skill that comes with time and experience.

But anyone with a Medic crossperk weapon has that capacity. Even if it's just a Commando with a 401 and maybe a SWAT with a 201 on the same team. As individual players and the team collectively improve, you don't need the dedicated healing unit period because a competent team will waste Zeds before they can land their melee attacks, and the ones that do get close are dealt with in due time and the scratch damage is healed up by an offperk weapon.

The catch is that most teams (and most players) aren't that good because it involves hitting fast-moving enemies with headshots, and that is part of the reason why left-side Medic is as strong as it is. But as players improve, the Medic on the whole becomes less and less appealing as players just get better with dedicated damage perks.

But right-side Medic does not pick up the slack on that front.
Right-Side Medic occupies a unique niche in the same vein as a healing-and-defense-stacked Survivalist or Skirmisher Zerk: trading their core team abilities for self-sufficiency in a team-based game where teamplay is usually not found and the game doesn't really punish selfish play. Which is a fairly pointless niche to occupy.

Old Acidic Rounds only hurts headshot-based teams because it makes things harder to headshot when they're flailing about (and no, saying that anyone who doesn't like you making the game more annoying for them is bad does not do any favors, it only gets you blacklisted from servers).

IF you were playing your own game, then you would know, that acidic rounds accounted a significant part of the battle medic's damage.

Old Acidic Rounds accounted only for a significant part of Battle Medic's damage if you are on a bodyshot-spamming team (as poison cannot deal headshot damage) and thus by proxy you are also spamming bodyshots yourself. In which case there were other perks that do that better anyway and don't require sacrificing a slot on the team faking other players out about healing benefits.

You can get basically all the benefits from Acidic Rounds/Combat Doctor on the left-side tree by shooting things in the head and dealing damage to their head health pool, and as an added bonus, that also has none of the downsides of poison panic.

By weakening acidic rounds, you weakened HRG Incision, Corrupter Carbine, HRG Vampire, even Mine Reconstructor, previously having a great DOT damage, which made playing with this least popular weapons rewarding and fun.

Incision is still completely ridiculous even in a 6P HoE game because the high burst damage from the primary (especially on headshots) and the ability to chain-EMP things are what make it absurdly effective as an offensive tool, to say nothing of the healing darts. It's already too good on 6P games and is absurd in lower player counts, where Medic's lack of damage doesn't matter due to reduced Zed counts and health. The only reason it doesn't get used more is because the Healthrower and Hemogoblin are in too good of a spot right now because they're extremely powerful while being very easy to use, to the point where people balk at replacing them with a railgun that dishes out healing and free incaps.

The other weapons were never good on Medic anyway and only used for memes. Carbine is a Sharpshooter weapon that happens to crossperk with Medic (and badly, at that). MR will never be good as long as it cannot prebuff unless they code in something like bypassing the fixed heal tick rate. Neither will the Vampire because it means you can't perform the Medic's primary purpose on demand, which is a thing even the starter HMTech-101 pistol already does. And to add insult to injury, you start with that for free.
So I'm not bemoaning the reduced use rate of those weapons either, as the only practical purpose for those was identifying which Medics on the team were absolutely not going to be reliable healing sources.

To put it in another perspective, if the FAMAS were nerfed on Commando today, I would behave exactly as I would with most of the above weapons: shrug and continue to not use it because it's bad, and quietly shake my head at seeing it brandished about in a public lobby because it means more often than not I'm picking up that player's slack until they die and the scale-down kicks in.

Just leave one skill tree for every perk with boring passive bonuses to headshots, if the entire current balance of the game is built around this.

I wish, because that would mean some understanding and application of the skill indexing that used to apply to this game. But that's not even the case in the touted hardest difficulties.

Currently the game is balanced around a handful of perks that actually take effort to play well and a remainder of perks that do not take that effort but still get all the rewards, while actively making the jobs of most of the former perks harder. As long as players are not hosing down everything in sight with the 201 while contributing absolutely no healing to the team, the Acidic Rounds changes mean we have some harm reduction in the latter category, which I am grateful for.

Again: I would rather poison just inflict a debuff instead of damage. Then very few people would have an actual problem with it.

 

[Elvenmonk]

Good.

A medic shouldn't be about dealing damage anyway.

And it always amuse me when people are bragging about how long they've been playing while writing such BS. If you never understood that in 8 years, you've been playing the wrong perk all this time.

I miss when medic used to restore armor!
But yeah you're right. A medic shouldn't be about tanking and DPS but instead focusing on healing and helping the firebug clear out trash mobs.

 

[Elvenmonk]

I gotta agree with @OnionBubs too. The right side of the medic tree is bad for team cohesion. If the medic was instead applying debuffs, like he suggested, then a battle medic would be a lot better. You needed to choose between making it easier for your teammates to kill, so they don't take damage, or making it so they get buffs for taking damage. It would turn the medic into an MMO crowd control class and would drastically boost the DPS of everyone, including the medic. It would reward skilled medics too because you'd need to deal damage to even get the crowd control abilities to work.

Sorry for the double post! it wouldn't let me edit it into the original because I hit the 5minute timer.

 

[Rifluvr]

I miss when medic used to restore armor!
But yeah you're right. A medic shouldn't be about tanking and DPS but instead focusing on healing and helping the firebug clear out trash mobs.

Fortunately it's not up to you to decide what someone should and should not.

KF2 is not a crew RPG, and here are no roles or classes in it. KF2 is an arcade shooter, the main basis of which is the killing of the enemy, and it has perks. This means that their capabilities are interchangeable and each can do whatever the other does. 6 out of 9 perks (not counting the medic) have an arsenal for active healing of teammates. In my experience, many games were won in a full team even without a medic at all, which speaks.

Medic benefits by making the life of his colleagues easier, it is true. But heal is only one of these methods, but it is not limited to it. Almost the entire existing arsenal (with the exception of HRG Healthrower) is primarily aimed at killing the enemy, small, middle, big. The effectiveness of killing an enemy directly affects how often a team needs healing (as well as the ability of players not to receive easily preventable damage, but we'll leave that for another time).

The OG developers knew this better than you, and knew how to make the game fun for everyone. The entire right skill tree is designed for an aggressive defense path (yes, including for tanking and damaging, read it), and its effectiveness has been tested and proven in real games on HoE many times. This was originally conceived in the design of the game (if you deny it, then you understand this game wrong), and it says more than your walls of text about how spoiled generation of players can not, and do not want to learn to play without a pocket babysitter on the tail, like in some Team Fortress 2.

Medic's role in action games has long grown out of the pants "I'm a walking first aid kit" who can't do anything. You are trying to slow down something that has already run far ahead. Catch up.

 

[Aleflippy]

there are no roles or classes in it

You could start a circus, being such a talented clown.

What's the reason for having perks in the first place then? Each with their own preferred weaponry, passives, and actives?

Why do many perks have access to healing weapons (that they might or MIGHT NOT pick up) ? Because all of them are borrowed from the Medic class. But crossperking is a whole entire debate in itself.

Call of Duty might be an arcade shooter. But Killing Floor certainly isn't. And I suspect you never played on harder difficulties if you think otherwise.

You won games without a medic? Well bravo. That's something you can do on most games offering class roles. But just because its POSSIBLE doesn't mean it's optimal. A team WITH a healer will almost always perform better than a team without one.

And if we're here, bragging about subjective milestones... You've been playing since day one? Well I'm a medic main in more games I could remember. That's my calling. And the reason for that is PRECISELY because it's all about the team. You need your team to protect you because you're weak... and your team needs you to avoid a lengthy respawn time (or plain ol' defeat). I'm not against more offensive options (hell, Zenyatta is MY **** in Overwatch), but it shouldn't come to a point where you can do EVERYTHING. If you can tank, heal, kill, buff, debuff, run... What's the point of having classes?

 

[Kantai_Hibiki]

Fortunately it's not up to you to decide what someone should and should not.

KF2 is not a crew RPG, and here are no roles or classes in it. KF2 is an arcade shooter, the main basis of which is the killing of the enemy, and it has perks. This means that their capabilities are interchangeable and each can do whatever the other does. 6 out of 9 perks (not counting the medic) have an arsenal for active healing of teammates. In my experience, many games were won in a full team even without a medic at all, which speaks.

Medic benefits by making the life of his colleagues easier, it is true. But heal is only one of these methods, but it is not limited to it. Almost the entire existing arsenal (with the exception of HRG Healthrower) is primarily aimed at killing the enemy, small, middle, big. The effectiveness of killing an enemy directly affects how often a team needs healing (as well as the ability of players not to receive easily preventable damage, but we'll leave that for another time).

The OG developers knew this better than you, and knew how to make the game fun for everyone. The entire right skill tree is designed for an aggressive defense path (yes, including for tanking and damaging, read it), and its effectiveness has been tested and proven in real games on HoE many times. This was originally conceived in the design of the game (if you deny it, then you understand this game wrong), and it says more than your walls of text about how spoiled generation of players can not, and do not want to learn to play without a pocket babysitter on the tail, like in some Team Fortress 2.

Medic's role in action games has long grown out of the pants "I'm a walking first aid kit" who can't do anything. You are trying to slow down something that has already run far ahead. Catch up.

If it's as you say, then what's the point of having a medic?
Just let Developer to remove the medic, but it's impossible.
Here's a simple solution for you：
Just easy way, dont play medic and don't join games with medics, or leave the game as soon as you saw a medic.
Imagine walking down the street and suddenly being stabbed by someone, then a medical staff member, marked with a red cross, passes by. Of course, you would seek his medical help. But this medic just gives you an Band-Aid, then raises his fist and starts fighting with the person who stabbed you. In the end, you both get killed.
Or even worse, the medic doesn't treat you at all.
In your minds, this might seem insignificant, and you may think it's just you and the medic who are too weak. But any normal person in this world knows that a medic should immediately take you to a safe place [which in game is 10L 15L 20L buff skill] for emergency treatment. Only you don't think so, to put it bluntly, you are abnormal.
This is a common understanding – a medic is supposed to save people, not fight.
If you want to heal and fight at the same time, I suggest you just press ~ and enter "enablecheats, healme, killzeds". Wouldn't that fulfill your dream?
And why not just use a survivalist? Then choose the medic skill, that would also achieve what you want.
In the end, I strongly agree with the bro above, you are an outstanding clown.

 

[Rifluvr]

Obviously you haven't read a single line of what I've written, otherwise you would have noticed, that I have no issues with healing in the combat tree, the problem with depriving other cool features on top of this.

Your "solution" solves only the problem that you have just created by yourself. Pat yourself on the shoulder.

The delusional analogy has no connections with the in-game balance of Killing Floor 2. Every time when arguments runs out, there are always a pathetic attempts to pull a miserable terms of reality on unlimited frames of the fantasy, whose prime purpose is to entertain, and game's mechanics to work. What else, compare video games with food in a restaurant?

This is a common understanding – a medic is supposed to save people, not fight.

Your expectations are your problems. No one is obliged to conform to your misconceptions and stereotypes, even if it offends you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combat_medic

Even if you try to refer to reality (people without imagination are sad) doctor is initially a military profession in many countries (although this page is focused on US for some reason).


P.S.:

dont play medic and don't join games with medics, or leave the game as soon as you saw a medic

An excellent example of elitism excluding everyone who disagrees with it. These are the people you encourage Tripwire.

 

[Aleflippy]

Your expectations are your problems. No one is obliged to conform to your misconceptions and stereotypes, even if it offends you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combat_medic

Even if you try to refer to reality (people without imagination are sad) doctor is initially a military profession in many countries (although this page is focused on US for some reason).

Didn't know Hippocrates was a combat medic. Guess people didn't try to heal themselves before wars became a thing uh?

An excellent example of elitism excluding everyone who disagrees with it. These are the people you encourage Tripwire.

Just like you're free to play how you want, people are free to blame you for playing your class wrong. Being a newbie is perfectly ok. Being a veteran who persists in playing the wrong way is not. I obviously never played with you, so I have no real way to judge your skills. But claiming KF2 has NO roles is just plain wrong. It testifies that you don't know anything about the game's design.

And if anything, you're doing the exact same thing you're pointing out: refuting arguments, without backing up your own. Your last post doesn't solve anything or open up to debate: you're dismissing us, without providing any further explanation as to why your opinion might be grounded and sound.

 

[Elvenmonk]

KF2 is not a crew RPG, and here are no roles or classes in it.

They may not call them classes like Battlefield but a perk is a class. To the point I think they even use the Unreal Engine class function to determine which one you are.
I specifically bring up how I miss the OG medic's ability to heal body armor and you want to try and talk down to me about the OG medic? I maxed out Medic in Killing Floor 1 pre-DLC weapons. I ran into everyone with my syringe. I remember being excited healing darts even existed in KF2. I got my medic to level 15 before pyro was out. I stopped playing for personal reasons and then came back post PVP update. Battle Medic that everyone loved was boring. What it resulted in was people swinging the healing bat while kiting entire mobs for over an hour. It was boring to play and boring to watch. Battle Medic offered no advantages to the party and they often let people die so they could up their own kill score, despite healing people earning way more money. The other battle medic resulted in people thinking they were commando, or Swat, and being eaten alive and ignoring their job as heals. As someone who's main class in MMOs, class based shooters, and when given a chance to set up my own skills in a JRPG I choose healer. Always. I am always healer with either a big of crowd control or debuffs. KF2 is the rare example where I like being a shotgunner and pyro as much as a medic. When I used to play The Secret World people would beg me to run DPS because my DPS builds were insane despite me hating DPS.

You may think you were being useful, but you weren't. Like how when people used to spawn snipe in MAG. They thought they were being helpful but the game just pushed them further up because people did that. You were causing undo stress and I would imagine most likely kept aggroing FPs and Skrakes and then bringing them back to your squad so they could clean up your mess. Every description and rant you've gone on has given me the idea that you thought you were helpful but were costing your team way more, like most battle medics were.

My personal thoughts on the Medic perk class is that most of the skills are worthless (same with Support but different argument entirely) and the Medic could do with a retooling or bringing back some skills from when it was one of the few classes that were even in the game, or have the medic be a debuff machine. You can choose buff or debuffs. This would make having two medics on the team be useful since usually they have perk collisions. Another is to give the medic more crowd control perks where if they get killing headshots/blows the enemies explode into a poison mist activating the panic and DOT, maybe even applying debuffs.

 

[Rifluvr]

I knew that your mindset was imposed by MMO rules. Didn't have to confirmed it.

If compared with the MMO, the combat med in KF2 has the same "reputation problems" as discipline priests from World of Warcraft (post TLK era) which gameplay is around more on shielding than healing (dealing with causes, not consequences), and whose sin is only that their real effectiveness was outside of the accounted statistics, which assumes only the basic damage/treatment (not prevented damage). When someone looks at the result of how big numbers an basic healer and a disciplinarian healed the result is certainly not in favor of the discs. But this is the problem of all statistics interpreted incorrectly, or not full, or when it doesn't count everyting.

You may think you were being useful, but you weren't.

Funny, it sounds like you've played at least one match with me. I probably forgot. For all the time I've been played combat medic, I've never heard such words from competent teammates. Only from those who wanted to kick everyone for the fact of "wrong" choice (in their understanding), not for actions.

often let people die so they could up their own kill score

It's as if bad players plays badly. It's not the hammer's fault that an idiot hits people with it.
If balance decisions are now based on bad players, then why someone should listen CD and "precision servers" crowd? Although they are also bad in a full (with EDARs and with angry spawns etc.) unmodified game without crosshair.
Assuming that some of the game mechanics are always used incorrectly, or used only by bad players, you fall into the trap of false conclusions that do not allow you to see the whole picture. For MMO players, it is important to see the whole picture, if you don't do this, then you play according to someone else's instructions (guides), and you never take risks and never bring new things to the table.

Personally, my reason for playing combat medic is that I love the challenge and push to the limits the possibilities that game offer, taking more risks, responsible and effective. I rarely call something bad and not playable, because I always try to see and find an idea that is often deeper than the surface. And when it finally works it's exciting. When this is deprived, the game ceases to be interesting. I am in favor of making the game interesting for everyone, not just the audience who plays their own version of the game according to their own rules and ideas about systems that they did not create, but force others to play the way only they want. This is a limited worldview.

 

[Aleflippy]

Personally, my reason for playing combat medic is that I love the challenge and push to the limits the possibilities that game offer, taking more risks, responsible and effective. I rarely call something bad and not playable, because I always try to see and find an idea that is often deeper than the surface. And when it finally works it's exciting. When this is deprived, the game ceases to be interesting. I am in favor of making the game interesting for everyone, not just the audience who plays their own version of the game according to their own rules and ideas about systems that they did not create, but force others to play the way only they want. This is a limited worldview.

My man claims he likes a challenge, then plays the easiest perk in the game

 

[Elvenmonk]

I knew that your mindset was imposed by MMO rules. Didn't have to confirmed it.

It's not. It's just the easiest example because MMO combat design is barebones game design 101. You style stuff ala MMOs and then make it better.