Project Reality Forums

Medic
Assault Rifle with 3 magazines
Hand grenades
Medic packs
Shock Paddles
Unarmored
Thanks to self-healing, revives and a powerful weapon, the medic kit could be renamed "Half Your Team" and be accurate. Medics carry 90 rounds of ammunition, 2 hand grenades, and limitless capacity to instantly heal troops with thrown packs and zap them back from the dead. The class has only one weakness; a finite supply of ammo which runs out after twenty rezzes. A Chinese or MEC medic is a Special Forces soldier who turned in his pistol and C4 for an even better gun and a Ph.D. A U.S. medic simply has burst instead of auto. Anyone see the problem?

Suggestions
Remove dropped medic packs. This forces a medic to hold the healing pack close to wounded troops instead of running up and down a defensive position, dumping aid packs into foxholes. Healing will now be a slow process, and self-healing far less useful.
Replace Hand Grenades with Smoke Grenades. This drastically reduces the medic's combat potential, particularly in close quarters. Smoke grenades help him protect his squad and allow him to dash behind the smoke to a downed man. This also adds more smoke grenades and the tactics involved to the game.
DEFIB/REZ CHANGES

Rezzing has to be changed, there is no way around it. Although removing grenades reduces the medic's combat power, and removing dropped packs prevent instant healing, the medic can still wait for players to die and then zap them for teamwork points and full health. Well-inteded suggestions that the defib be limited to only a few shots a minute are not only contrary to reality but very damaging to the idea of only one medic in a squad and will be a nightmare if the first rez attempt misses or is bugged. Two or three medics will be almost mandatory to keep players rezzed back at any useful rate. The following changes should reduce the effectiveness of spam-rezzing, increase the time needed to revive and encourage players to stay alive for pack healing without rendering medics near-useless in their critical role of reviving teammates.

From
1. Defibulator charges and batteries. As it stands, the defibulator is "realistic" in that it doesn't always work the first time and needs a second or two to recharge, but unrealistic in that it never runs out of juice. The solution lies in limited rez attempts. A defibulator battery will operate like an ordinary magazine, each battery being good for a small number charges and thus revive ATTEMPTS. At between four to eight zaps per battery and only two batteries on a medic, the medic has to reload his defibulator for five to ten seconds, creating a serious pause in spam-rezzing and creating a dependancy on the ammunition resupply class. A medic can no longer zap, zap, zap entire squads back from the dead over and over. He must now practice triage; reviving his squad leader and ammo bearers first, reloading, and then attempting to heal the rest of a downed squad. Squad mates who do not respond to the first or second zap, or who cannot be easily reached, may well be passed over. A real level of skill in reviving in the best order will make good medics stand out from the crowd.
2. Rez Effects. When you get zapped by a defibulator, you do not pop up and start seeing straight, much less moving and shooting at full health. Rezzing should restore the player to life at the very limit of "bleed" health (above or below, depending on play testing. I'd start at "below"). This forces the player to cover, since only one bullet could kill him. But jumping up and running away will be difficult for a recently zapped man. The "Shellshock" effect should be applied at the highest possible setting, causing the recently rezzed to be at a serious disadvantage if he attempts to fight or run. A good low crawl back to cover should be the only action a shell-shocked, still-bleeding soldier would consider, and exactly what the Project Peality mod should strive for.
3. After rezzing, the squad will not be truely combat effective until the medic breaks out the pack and starts wrapping people up to non-bleeding health at least ("Stabilizing" right after a rez would only take a half second to put the player back above bleed level but longer if the medic left for more rezzes). This increases the down-time of a critically wounded soldier.

While it will take a lot of work, these changes to rezzing will keep the medic a valuable part of the squad who must spend more time healing instead of shooting and is still capable of keeping a squad alive if he is the only medic in it, unlike suggestions of severely limiting the shock paddles to a few charges a minute.

Rezzing has to be changed, there is no way around it. Although removing grenades reduces the medic's combat power, and removing dropped packs prevent instant healing, the medic can still wait for players to die and then zap them for teamwork points and full health. Well-inteded suggestions that the defib be limited to only a few shots a minute are not only contrary to reality but very damaging to the idea of only one medic in a squad and will be a nightmare if the first rez attempt misses or is bugged. Two or three medics will be almost mandatory to keep players rezzed back at any useful rate. The following changes should reduce the effectiveness of spam-rezzing, increase the time needed to revive and encourage players to stay alive for pack healing without rendering medics near-useless in their critical role of reviving teammates.

'[R-PUB wrote:GRB']
I think the mini-map needs to be completely altered in a way that it mimics a GPS system and shows very little pertaining to what is going on around the player. The 3D map needs to be removed completely.

'[R-PUB wrote:=BONG=Happy']It should be a topographic map.

Juhani.fin wrote:Change the shock paddles to something more realistic like morphine.. i don't think medics in real war run zapping ppl with those shock paddles.

Would you like to do CPR in 50lbs of battle gear?