Project Reality Forums

Now, I know, I know, the medic system was JUST rehauled. And no, I don't want to change or add on to that.


What I'm getting at is that with these new changes medics have become a HUGE bullet magnet for the squad. And what makes it worse is that they are easy to spot in their group.

Medics are not able to provide much firing support (which I enjoy doing regardless what role I play) due to their very unique character model, pointing them out as the 'target to kill', and sometimes people will go out of their way to find a unique way to kill a medic, even if it is the only person they kill (For instance, I was only one in my squad the recieving end of a HAT on Kufrah, and I was not at the front or back of the group.

My thought is that make them slightly less obvious and blend into their own group more; Give them the same type of character model, and helmet, but add on the various medical supplies to his 'kit' so that while he isn't obvious at first sight, he is still able to be recognized with a keen eye, whether it be by his actual kit or his actions (crawling behind cover, coming up behind another enemy you had just wounded and then all of a sudden that enemy comes back).


This would allow the medic to provide fire support when REALLY necessary, and also make him less of a target during squad movement into hostile territory 'just because' he is a medic.

helmet

fully agree. really, ALL kits should wear helmets.

I don't particularly feel like a bullet magnet as medic unless I'm trying to heal som1 I have not propery prepared with smoke and cover fire. But its just kinda silly imo that some dudes ingame don't wear helmets.

Why is the defibrillator still on the medic?

because its part of the EA model iirc.

New US and UK players models are inbound, so they will be gone.

The British officer has this hat on.... I mean i understand that the officer training gives you a special "hat"

But it does point you out as a high priority target? Is it really true that all Officers in the British armed forces wear hats?

berets are used when it is deemed safe enough to do so, they are believed to make soldiers look more friendly, and are therefore used in the hearts and minds fight iirc.

ofc the historical sources of the beret are a bit different.

A few things, one you were in the middle of this hatted group i persume, well thats where i would fire, explosion would hopefully wound and/or kill everyone. Two the medic i think should be able to be spotted out of the other groups as it then makes you defend the medic, it makes the medic get down and not rush out or put his head up too much.

Also Wicca the beret is issued to all british soldiers, heck i even had one in cadets.

Celestial1 wrote:Medics are not able to provide much firing support (which I enjoy doing regardless what role I play)

This is where you are going wrong. As a medic you should not be engaging the enemy unless absolutely necessary, your job is to keep your head down, stay alive and help your mates when they get hit.

By trying to provide fire support when you are ill equipped to do so you are doing nothing but risking your own life and the lives of your squad mates.

Dr2B Rudd wrote:fully agree. really, ALL kits should wear helmets.

Mmmhm

how is the medic ill equipped to provide fire support?

He has a gun doesnt he?!!!

if he wasn't meant to he's have a pistol...or a knife....(pilot any1?)

I was on Bi ming this morning, got same number of kills as most combat soldiers and got more teamwork points than any1 else (i.e. I could both heal and provide fire)

The medic isn't a bleeding VIP, he's a soldier who is carrying the first aid stuff! if he goes down his mates could get his equipment and do the job just the same.

When I'm SLing, if my medic was cowering behind us I'd tell him to get up and start shoving rounds downrange because his added fire means its less likely that one of us is going to be hit. If we start going down, sure, he should get down and heal and leave us to it.

But seriously....come on chaps. the one common factor amongst all Blufor kits apart from pilot is that they ahve a gun, and they are meant to discharge this gun at the enemy to either kill, wound or supress them.

Its is my personal belief the some palyers have been trained in to telling their medics to hide somewhere because that means they are less likely to be punished for stupid acts of their own, if there's som1 to clean the booboo and get you back up, it means that in your mind, that rambo charge is less risky than it really is.

in the PRT we set up casualty reception points etc, but at the end of the day the medic is what is needed at the time. During Combat, he is a ironsight rifleman. When a medic is needed he is a medic.

Sorry I completely disagree. Yes I understand that he has a gun but to provide fire support is not and never will be a medic's primary role, he is there to provide medical aid to the rest of his squad. Simply having a gun does not mean that you are able to effectively provide support by fire for your squad mates. An AR is useful for fire support as are a grenadier and marksman in the appropriate situations but a medic will never be capable of effectively providing a high volume of accurate suppressive fire.

Im not saying that the medic should be cowering in the back. Im all for getting the maximum rounds downrange as possible. But when a medic is trying to provide fire support in such a way that he puts himself at risk then he is only creating problems for his squad when he goes down. Imo with the now limited number of medics available on the field it is essential that they ensure that they stay alive even if that means that they're not firing they're weapon as much as the other members of the squad, i've had squad members go down and looked around to find my medic awol or dead too many times.

The best medics are the ones who stay alive.

Aim for the red cross! No really, I just fire at the biggest treath, but if I see a somebody that looks like theire trying to revive somebody (when I am a sniper) I kill him before the others, I have always done that. With the new system I usually only have to worry about one of the lifesaveres, thank God.

Dr2B Rudd wrote:how is the medic ill equipped to provide fire support?

He has a gun doesnt he?!!!

Its is my personal belief the some palyers have been trained in to telling their medics to hide somewhere because that means they are less likely to be punished for stupid acts of their own, if there's som1 to clean the booboo and get you back up, it means that in your mind, that rambo charge is less risky than it really is.

Agree'd.

Now, I find that the helmets and vest changes (MEC medic to me feels the MOST affected by this) from their comrades makes them more visible.

And yes, the British Officer's beret does make him more of a target. I feel that it is a bit silly to have but it has less of an effect than that of the medic's. Yeah, so you shot the Officer. Who's going to bring him back to life and put another rifle pointing at you? The medic. Because the medic plays such a large role in the squad, it seems almost silly that he should stick out from a crowd.

Obviously, if you see a soldier prone into a body and pulling CPR or reviving, it's not hard to tell he's a medic. We don't need it to be MORE obvious than that.

Cheditor wrote:A few things, one you were in the middle of this hatted group i persume, well thats where i would fire, explosion would hopefully wound and/or kill everyone. Two the medic i think should be able to be spotted out of the other groups as it then makes you defend the medic, it makes the medic get down and not rush out or put his head up too much.

I believe was 2nd in line. Out of a dispersed line. Maybe it was indeed a coincidence, but I didn't feel that way after about 15+ deaths on Kufrah where I was the first one killed, whether I walked first or last, or anywhere in between.

Also, just FYI, HAT no longer has a large kill radius, so I was the only one killed in my squad by that HAT (pretty much making it a total waste)

jigsaw-uk wrote:This is where you are going wrong. As a medic you should not be engaging the enemy unless absolutely necessary, your job is to keep your head down, stay alive and help your mates when they get hit.

By trying to provide fire support when you are ill equipped to do so you are doing nothing but risking your own life and the lives of your squad mates.

I feel that this is not where I am 'going', but rather where the gameplay has taken us, that is 'wrong'.

A medic/corpsman is, from what I understand, absolutely no less than a Rifleman. He has a rifle, and that is his first job. When a man is down, it is his and his squad's job to secure the area, revive the casualty, and prepare him for medivac when possible. He is just the man who happens to be doing the reviving directly, and holds the equipment to do so. All US army recruits, for instance, are taught Basic Lifesaving skills, such as how to apply a field dressing on the wounded. Which, you know, everyone in PR has a field dressing. And they know how to use them. The medic's bag is basically a bunch of field dressings, some flesh-mending tools (sutures, stitches, whatever they carry) and maybe pain-shots, which allow him to perform some of the more serious work. Just because a Rifleman carries the ammo bag doesn't mean he's the only one that knows how to work a gun, you know?

Just because he has an ironsight rifle does not mean he is 'ill-equipped' to provide firesupport. A gun is still a gun, and I often have all of my squad's rifles pointing to a target, regardless of who they are in the squad. I would rather have one ironsight rifleman firing at a target as best they can to add some extra suppression and allow my scoped men to fire accurately than have one man unable to fire at the enemy, anyday.

Especially when it's not I who have started the firefight. For instance, an ambush could cause a very sticky situation when there's not too much cover around. And when your medic goes and makes a run for it, he may only be greeted by a grenadier round, SAW suppression, or otherwise, instead of being able to be part of the cohesive fighting unit that is your squad.

And EVEN IF you prefer your medic to be hiding behind a rock 30m behind the frontline, you can have it your way! What's it going to hurt to allow others to have the option I have presented during a firefight? It just adds another strategy to utilizing your medic to your preference and ability.

(If that last paragraph comes off sarcastically, it is not intended. I'm not sure how to rephrase it better than this at the moment.)

jbgeezer wrote:Aim for the red cross! No really, I just fire at the biggest treath, but if I see a somebody that looks like theire trying to revive somebody (when I am a sniper) I kill him before the others, I have always done that. With the new system I usually only have to worry about one of the lifesaveres, thank God.

However, for instance when someone is sniper, it currently takes only a short glance to see who is the medic in a group.

If a medic and rifleman both the same uniform, helment, and otherwise, it would take a bit of examining to tell which one was the medic (IE: Look for at his kit on his body for the red cross or the medic bag, or watch him for a bit to see if he pulls out his medic supplies/epipens/begins to perform CPR, or take a shot at one of them and see how they all react to pick out the medic from the rest of the group... you may even get lucky and nail the medic right off causing the others to scramble for the kit).

I think i've been misunderstood.

I am not saying that the medic is a non-combat kit and he should "hide behind a rock". What I am saying is that in the current PR build the medic is the 2nd most important member of the squad and as such should keep himself alive.

How you choose to do so is up to you.

It is one of the unfortunate things about this game that people place so little value on staying alive and are in-grained into the "im just gonna blat off as many rounds as I can and hope I kill the enemy before he kills me" mentality. It is this mentality that means you will almost never survive a contact with the enemy with your entire squad uninjured, and that is why it is so important for the medic to stay alive. I am not saying that when ambushed the medic should just do a runner, I am saying that he should stay alive in whatever way possible so that he is able to heal the people who will have inevitably gone down once the threat has passed. If you have 15+ deaths in a single round then perhaps a problem exists between keyboard and chair. I feel that the experiences you are re-counting to us as evidence for the vulnerability of the medic kit are simply bad luck where either you have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, or you are not utilising cover effectively.

Eventually when the player models are re-done (this is going slowly but progress being made), ALL conventional army kits with the exception of maybe sniper, will have a helmet on.

Including the british officer and his beret

jigsaw-uk wrote:...should keep himself alive.

How you choose to do so is up to you.

As for my examples, those are just horridly obvious examples of the real problem. It was on the TacticalGamer server, where our team was doing a horrible job in comparison to the US team and luck just didn't flow our way (we had no APC support, they still had all of it; we had a lack of teamwork, where they had an abundance of it; they had oil production and pushed on the other flag, whereas we had a quarter of our team at main, a quarter attempting to attack oil production, and the remaining half at the flag being attacked).

The medic's unique look is a tiny reminder in any and every player's brain that says "that one is the one that will cause me more problems", whether you recognize it is there or not.

The MEC is, again, the worst offender in this case; Not only does he have a different helmet than the others, he also has a vastly different uniform (instead of the desert camo, he gets a strange, striped vest that is not only relatively easy to spot as opposed to desert camo but is also easy to spot out from a crowd of MEC soldiers.

And just because you have your medic behind cover staying safe doesn't mean everyone plays the same way, again, 'How you choose to do so' includes the option of having him fire back.

It's not a "im just gonna blat off as many rounds as I can and hope I kill the enemy before he kills me" mentality, it's a 'Suppression over Oppression' mentality that I have. I would rather have another one of my men up and firing than one less gun against another full squad, or better yet 6 of mine to 5 of theirs.

[the medic] should stay alive in whatever way possible

Agreed, but he shouldn't necessarily be forced to stay behind the lines and have his head down. A medic is just another soldier who carries the bag, and that is how I choose to see it.

[R-DEV]fuzzhead wrote:Eventually when the player models are re-done (this is going slowly but progress being made), ALL conventional army kits with the exception of maybe sniper, will have a helmet on.

Including the british officer and his beret

Great to hear!

This is how I would have my squad lined up if I were Leading a squad.

Starting from the back of the squad:

- Officer [SL] (should be at the back as he is ordering his squad and radioing the commander, placing markers, shouldn't be distracted by firing his gun unless its heavy engagement)

- Medic (should stick close to the squad leader incase he goes down, gets wounded, or can't set a rally point)

- Specialized long range kits (providing long range fire support from the rear of the squad, i.e., Marksman, Sniper, HAT, LAT, Grenadier)

^^^^ Essentially the above would be fire team B (squad covering squad) ^^^^

- Automatic Rifleman/Rifleman scope (closer but just behind the point of his squad so he can provide suppressive fire [close quarters or long range] incase of any engagement large or small. Covering the street as the squad crosses the street etc)

- Rifleman Scope/Iron sights (right up near the point of the squad giving the extra fire a point man would need or incase the point man has be taken down)

- Rifleman Specialist/Automatic Rifleman (The specialist should definitely be on point since on some maps he'll need to breach the door, or throw the grapple and ready the area for fire team B to get through. The automatic rifleman can also [optional] take point since he is the most useful at close quarters and long range. But having him "slice the pie" at point is really effective)

^^^^ Essentially this would be fire team A whom would be on point of the whole squad and only worry about the squad's "12 o'clock" should clear. ^^^^

MrScruff wrote:This is how I would have my squad lined up if I were Leading a squad.

Starting from the back of the squad:

- Officer [SL] (should be at the back as he is ordering his squad and radioing the commander, placing markers, shouldn't be distracted by firing his gun unless its heavy engagement)

- Medic (should stick close to the squad leader incase he goes down, gets wounded, or can't set a rally point)

- Specialized long range kits (providing long range fire support from the rear of the squad, i.e., Marksman, Sniper, HAT, LAT, Grenadier)

^^^^ Essentially the above would be fire team B (squad covering squad) ^^^^

- Automatic Rifleman/Rifleman scope (closer but just behind the point of his squad so he can provide suppressive fire [close quarters or long range] incase of any engagement large or small. Covering the street as the squad crosses the street etc)

- Rifleman Scope/Iron sights (right up near the point of the squad giving the extra fire a point man would need or incase the point man has be taken down)

- Rifleman Specialist/Automatic Rifleman (The specialist should definitely be on point since on some maps he'll need to breach the door, or throw the grapple and ready the area for fire team B to get through. The automatic rifleman can also [optional] take point since he is the most useful at close quarters and long range. But having him "slice the pie" at point is really effective)

^^^^ Essentially this would be fire team A whom would be on point of the whole squad and only worry about the squad's "12 o'clock" should clear. ^^^^

Grats, you have designed a squad where two people are at the front and everyone else cowers at the back.

Gotta say guys, i agree with rudd.

I myself always find my self in the front of the squad, since im in the lead. Im winning the race on who is going to join in battle with the enemy first! It is a great honour to do so according to Bushido (The way of the Warrior)

Now, also for those of you who have seen BOB, and we all think that major ****, is quite cool.

He says something on the second episode; in my platoon, id say you were rifleman first, radioman second.

But!

Also at the battle of the bulge, we see the medics with no means of defending themselfs, and they are told to stay apart, etc. And even away from the fighting. Some of you has perhaps seen this and compared it to PR? I know i compare warmovies to PR, all the time

What about the modern day equiliant?

Wiccipedia says (lol)

Combat medic source

Combat medics are trained military personnel who are responsible for providing first aid and frontline trauma care on the battlefield. They are also responsible for providing continuing medical care in the absence of a readily available physician, including care for disease and battle injury. Combat medics are normally co-located with the combat troops they serve in order to easily move with the troops and monitor ongoing health.

So? What does this mean? That in real life medics arent really supposed to fight the enemy, but defend their wounded. But is that what actually goes on? Are they really staying in the rear?

According to the Geneva Convention, knowingly firing at a medic wearing clear insignia is a war crime.

Standard Issue Equipment

The Combat Medic is commonly referred to as a "soldier medic." With a combat unit, they function as a member of an infantry platoon up until the point that one of their comrades is wounded. Therefore, the Medic carries the same basic load as a rifleman. His basic equipment is usually (to use the United States Army as an example):

* Full Body armor
* 180-210 rounds for their primary weapon.
* Ballistic helmet
* Army Combat Uniform or the uniform of their service

So this confirms we must have new player models.

Combat medics are not usually heavily armed, but usually carry the standard issue rifle. Some also carry a pistol in addition to/or in place of their rifle.


Traditionally, medical personnel did not carry weapons and wore a distinguishing red cross, to denote their protection as noncombatants under the Geneva Convention. This practice continued into World War II.

So thats why the medics in BOB had no weapon

IMO, i usually use the medic as any other Rifleman in the squad, and tell him to kill all the enemies before he tries to revive us. Which if he would have stayed in the back, would mean that he had to fight of the remaining enemies with his rifle, and then revive us, defend us, and most probably die trying. BUT! if he was with us, during the firefight, he might have been the person who would have provided that extra fire that prevailed the squad.

So to you all i say, Combat medics should stay at the front line, with the squad.

Currently it very difficult to be medic in this patch and it not working out so well in game

Last time i'm gonna try to explain my point of view, here is my preferred squad layout, in this case for moving through urban terrain:

Pointman - Rifleman (irons preferably) equipped with rifle and grenades for close engagements and able to clear the way ahead.

Second - Rifleman specialist supports rifleman on point with grapple allowing the squad to traverse obstacles and covers the pointman from close range threats.

SL - In the centre of the squad, allows the SL to maintain command and to issue orders with a good viewpoint on the rest of his squad. Also affords protection to the SL as he is the most important member of the squad and allows the SL to cover the front men with his optics rifle.

Medic - Again in the centre, allows him to easily react to a man down situation moving quickly either to front or rear of the squad to heal. Being in the centre affords him protection and he is able to provide close protection for the SL with his iron sight rifle.

Support gunner - Towards the rear of the squad allows him to position himself in a cover fire position from where he provides cover for most of the squad. He generally has a far longer effective range than any other SM and therefore can be positioned at the rear.

Tail-end charlie/AAR - Assistant automatic rifleman, provides rear security to the entire squad and close protection for the AR. If the AR goes down it is his responsibility to secure the kit until the medic arrives. He can also assist the AR in providing fire support.

As you can see the medic is not at the rear of the squad, he is in the centre meaning he can respond quickly to an injury and should be well protected from threats. Therefore he is with the squad at all times. I have never said that the medic should be miles from his squad hiding in a bush waiting for someone to die, simply that he should a) be well protected by the rest of his squad and, b) ensure above all else his own survival by whatever method he deems necessary. His survival increases the survival rate of the rest of the squad. If the rest of the squad is down asking the medic to try and secure the bodies by killing the enemy threats is just common sense.

@Wicca medics during WW2 were not issued with rifles because, guess what, their job is to provide medical aid to the squad. I feel that this carries on into PR, with the addition of a rifle as per current RL loadouts. You also have to consider that the medic in PR does not simply represent the corpsman or soldier medics but the entire process of returning a badly injured soldier to the field.