For a long time in game, medic squads have been rather weak and not many people use them except for noobs who just got the squad. This boils down to a few reasons, the larger ones being the inability to bring any ammo pouches or a secondary weapons which makes them unable to fight for near as long as assaulters or especially guerillas, and having no specialists like engineers, radio operators, AT gunners, ect. available. So without further ado, here are my suggestions to improve the medic class in a few different ways.
Improving the squad structure
The medic squads can only have medics in the squad, which severely limits the tactical aspect of the squads, since every other squad type in the game except for vehicle squads can have engineers, AT gunners, or radio operators, which automatically makes the squad weaker (ie. no rally points, arty, no AT weapons). My suggestion is to increase the maximum amount of members in the squad by 2, and to provide options to get 1-2 engineers, 0-1 radio operators, or 0-1 AT gunners to the squad to increase the multi role ability of the squad closer to other squads.
Fixing limited ammo
Medics don’t have enough ammo for combat typically, usually only around 4-5 magazines or so get drained fairly fast, especially with low capacity SMGs with high ROFs like the PPD 34, Beretta M38 (20), and Beretta 1918, which means ammo is frequently low. Since medics are unable to take ammo pouches, or any pouches for that matter, I propose giving medics an extra 50% ammunition, similar to how Guerillas have their ammo bag included when buying the soldier. This sounds like a lot as a stat, but large ammo pouches give 100% extra (and guerillas by default have a built in large ammo bag when you buy them), so it wouldn’t be near as much as with the large ammo bag, which shouldn’t make them too powerful, but enough to fight longer.
AI behavior
As is, AI medics typically don’t heal other soldiers very often compared to what they could be doing, and AI soldiers also don’t usually interact with the medic boxes, which means you get a lot less points from healing than you could. My solution is for all AI medics to try to heal downed and injured soldiers much more often, and for AI soldiers to go to medkit boxes and interact with them if they are within 20 meters and don’t have as many medkits as they can carry, and given how most soldiers can pick up one extra medkit than what they spawn with, this would be very helpful towards score.
Availability in other squad types
The only other squad types that medics can be in are APC squads and assaulter squads (to my knowledge), and aren’t available on any other squad type. This is a simple fix, just include medics in the specialist selection upgrade path on other types of squads, preferably next to assaulters
Weapon variety
This is more of a nice QoL thing, but a lot of people want to be able to use bolt action and semi automatic rifles of medics since they were frequently used by them, which shouldn’t be hard at all to change.
What are your thoughts on the suggestions, forum dwellers? would these be fair changes, not enough, or too much?
, this alone could make medic squads viable.
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