Welcome to "An MvM Guide" - Medic edition, the first (and possibly last) in a series of guides about classes in the mann vs machines mode.

This guide will cover some of the more nuanced mechanics of medic and aim to address common mistakes many new players make, including the one referenced in this guide's description (hint: you don't always need a medic!)

As for who is writing this (remember to always check your sources) at time of writing I have over 850 tours in the valve mission two cities, am comfortable doing the other missions (but not preferred) and have a metal massacre progress of 868k.

A medic offers three unique features to a team composition: The shield, revives, and canteen sharing. Medic also occupies a player slot for a better damage dealer, as he is arguably the worst damage dealer of the 9 classes (see snowplow medic section). It is important to weigh these pros against this con when determining if your team needs a medic.

Consider are a few hypotheticals:

• A team constantly dying (two or more dead almost all the time) would benefit from medic's shield, which absorbs burst damage, while the revives would keep those who do die from wasting money on buybacks or wasting time waiting to respawn (which would result in ground being lost most of the time).
  
  
• A team where 3+ players are very experienced and hold the front without crits would not benefit from the medic as they are likely not dying (no need for shield or revives) and would be much better off with a sustained damage class over the short burst of crits.
  
  
• Similar to the situation above except they are holding the front with crit canteens (for example empire escalation) would benefit from a canteen medic, since the longer duration and cheaper canteens allow for more crits overall, but would not benefit from the usual medic for the same reasons mentioned previously.
  
  
• A team that asks for no medic will not benefit from a medic.

In the previous section I mentioned the three basic playstyles of medic: the snowplow, the canteen medic, and the usual medic. If you have played in high tour lobbies you might have heard reference to the last one as "idle medic." This is because in high tour lobbies a medic who is not spamming canteens or snowplowing usually isn't doing much, thus they are "idle". This does not mean idle medic is bad, but typically a lobby that references idle medics does not need a medic as covered in the previous section.

If you find yourself in a lobby that needs an idle medic (and for whatever reason you are staying), I recommend the following upgrade path:
Loadout: Overdose or crossbow, kritzkrieg or vaccinator (if they are dying very often), and ubersaw.

• Two shield
  
• Crit resistance if the wave has crits
  
• Blast and/or bullet resistance that matches the wave and your skill level*
  
• One move speed (this allows you to keep up with busters if you can afford going after them, otherwise it allows for quicker positioning)
  
• If vaccinator - ubercharge rate
  
• Alternating between healing mastery and overheal**
  
• At this point your team likely has enough money to buy proper resistances and health-on-kill(HoK) to stay alive (if they are smart enough), and if so, you could switch class to more DPS - otherwise, canteen spec with canteens, move/jump, and milk needles if using the overdose.

*The more you play the more you will be able to gauge how many resistances you need. If you are unsure remember that there is no one who can revive you so going heavier on the resistances won't hurt.
**For the vaccinator start with 2 healing mastery and then alternate, on kritzkrieg if your team doesn't have many resistances (inspect their upgrades by looking at them and pressing F by default) start with overheal.


The idle medic playstyle is, as the name implies, pretty simple: heal, shield, and revive/krit as needed. Here are a few tips tho that can help you be above average:

• Spam clicking the reanimator revives faster.
  
• Shield doesn't protect against fire, sentry busters melee, or splash damage from a slope under you/a teammate the is sticking a bit out from your shield. There is also a chance for projectiles to phase through the shield if you are moving towards or away from the projectile.
  
• Looking straight down or up will bring the shield right up against you and let you body block without taking damage.
  
• The second tick of shield not only increases the radius but also the damage.
  
• When using your shield you should try to stay still or only move forward so your teammates don't have to worry about their cover randomly disappearing. Also for the same reason mentioned in the 2nd point that projectiles will sometimes phase through a moving shield.
  
• Uber duration on vaccinator doesn't do anything.
  
• Healing mastery increases your self heal rate which is often overlooked by most players, only $50 more than health regen and also heals your patients faster.
  
• Don't waste your life trying to revive an idiot who walks into a hoard without any resistances, you will likely die before they revive and even if you do revive them they are just going to insta die again (looking at you pyros).
  
• Keeping one person alive is better than reviving someone else and having the other person die.
  
• Heavies have 75% damage reduction to tanks, kritting anyone else will likely do more damage (besides spy).
  
• If your healing target is being aggro'd by the robots then you will receive that aggro instead. (See nuance section for more info.)

This is generally the preferred medic, if any medic, for a high tour lobby. The canteen medic exists to abuse the benefits of canteen specialist: longer and cheaper canteens. This medic is usually preferred on waves that can be almost solo'd by a demo, such as all of empire escalation, as it allows the demo to focus almost entirely on damage upgrades instead of keeping a canteen/damage balance.

My recommended upgrade path for the canteen medic is as follows:
Loadout - Overdose, kritzkrieg, ubersaw

• Canteen spec*
  
• One uber duration
  
• Two shield
  
• Crit resistance if the wave has crits
  
• Two move - two move will let you catch up to busters
  
• The other two uber duration
  
• Bullet/Blast resistance as needed - similar to the idle medic section
  
• Uber rate or ubersaw swing speed - depending on how idle you want to be

Refill your canteens every round and if your engie has two-way, you can keep canteens topped off mid-wave as soon as you pop a canteen.

*One tick for wave one is probably ok, you can always ask the demo how many canteens he expects to need if you don't know and then buy as much spec as you can afford while buying those canteens. The more experience you have the better you can judge if you can go back mid wave to buy the canteens later or if you need them from the start.


The canteen medic playstyle is also very straightforward. As one of my friends once said: "You gotta be in love with demo. You see only him. You want to shove your gun so far up his ass it will come outta his mouth."
If you don't know exactly when the demo will need kritz it's best just to follow them around and wait for them to start spamming either "Medic!" or "Activate Charge!" (sometimes they might just jump a bunch w/o any voice commands). Remember that you are probably playing canteen med because the demo is being a hard carry, keeping him alive and crit at all times is more important than revives. If you have just popped a canteen and don't need to go buy more is the ideal time to revive someone should they happen to be dead. The demo will know the best times to crit so don't try to guess when if you don't know - anyone who yells at you for not knowing is an arse and doesn't deserve your crits.

Post-publication edit July 5, 2021: There is a sub-style of canteen medic that relies on ubersaw primarily with canteens to serve as a backup. It follows pretty closely to canteen medic upgrades/playstyle, however after you are done using a charge you should immediately try to go and get ubersaw hits. This requires a bit of aggro abuse and robot memorization in order to not die, if you are not confident you will be able to get your hit(s) w/o dying then don't risk it and just use a canteen. Sentry busters and non-crit bat scouts are almost always safe to go after and for many waves the timing between a sentry buster spawn and when you want to be ubersawing line up pretty well (usually every 30s a buster will spawn as long as the sentry does not die). On mannhattan you can stand under the drop spot and get free hits on non-melee bots; melee bots will usually aggro you immediately as you will be the closest target. Also remember you do not have to be healing someone after you use a canteen so if you needed to use a canteen you can immediately go try and get more uber.

Snowplow medic is perhaps the rarest subclass in all of mvm. Also known as shield bash medic, the snowplow med seeks to do damage more than healing. In a low skill a team a good snowplow can top damage - of course this could be said of any class but this is perhaps the most unique way of getting top damage as most of your damage comes from WASD instead of mouse1. If you don't have a triple digit tour count be prepared to get kicked for this playstyle in solo queue; both noobs and high tours are not too keen on it since the noobs are usually ignored and the high tours would see a low tour playing like this as a troll.

A snowplow medic's damage comes from the shield, so the goal of a their loadout and upgrades is to maximize three things - survivability, shield damage, and shield time. Shield damage is the easiest, just max out the shield upgrade. Survivability is connected to your resistances and move speed, however your medi-gun of choice also plays a roll in how durable you are as well as how often you have shield. This playstyle requires a hard meta-counter by choosing any of the other medi-guns besides kritzkrieg.

• Vaccinator - good for the bubbles if you need to retreat and can also get you almost instant shield from reviving any dead teammate. The downside is your shield builds slowly from full health teammates as you have slower overheal rate.
  
• Quickfix - anti-knockback is very strong and the self overheal during uber allows you to get half of the shield charge (or more if you have overheal mastery). The downside is you will need more money in the overheal mastery as well as resistances.
  
• Stock - most would say the stock medi-gun is the worst medi-gun for mvm because it doesn't offer the damage boost of kritz, knockback immunity, or quick revives. Plus, the shield is already a mini uber of its own. But, in fact, stock uber lends itself greatly to the snowplow medic playstyle as any damage taken by you or your patient while ubered will rapidly fill the shield meter. In fact tanking a buster explosion will instantly charge the shield. If you have ubersaw swing speed with some move speed you can easily get 4 hits in on the buster then uber yourself when it blows up for easy shield every ~30 seconds.

Your medi-gun will largely depend on the playstyle you're most comfortable with and may take some runs to figure out what you like best. The typical upgrade path is:

• Two shield
  
• Resistances for the wave
  
• One or two move speed
  
• Swing speed or ubercharge rate
  
• Uber duration for stock or quick fix

This playstyle will typically follow the path of shield -> run into crowd -> use uber/run out when shield is fading -> build shield from teammates/uber buster/other mentioned methods -> repeat. If you have a medic popper it is best to wait for them to drop the medics before shielding but if you don't you can position your shield inbetween them and the heal target to cut their beams. This is usually difficult to do with multiple medics but if it's a giant quick fix it's as easy as just standing in front of the medic while facing the pocket.

Aggro is a term used to describe who the robots are targeting. To take aggro is to take the attention of the robots; medic is very good at this as the code dictates to always target the aggro's healer before the original aggro target. This becomes a double edged sword because if a robot is aggroing a medic who is healing someone and the medic stops healing them, the robot will start to aggro that person even if they normally would not have. This is especially problematic for classes that are hiding behind the aggro sightlines (example: under the robot drop zone on mannhattan) and spies.

With this in mind it is recommended to never heal spies during waves or anyone who is standing directly under or to the side of the robot spawn in order to prevent premature robot turning. It should be noted this mechanic can be abused with a spy and medic working together to gain infinite backstabs on a giant by keeping a medic with a shield in front of the giant healing a spy behind the giant. This arrangement makes the giant target the medic keeping the back turned to the spy. For giants where knockback is an issue (chief blast soldier; giant heavy with soldier support) a quickfix is recommended so the spy is not tossed away from the medic, and thus breaking the aggro lock. For melee giants such as captain punch, stock uber would be recommended as melee hitreg is jank and can end up hitting the spy even if they are looking the other way.

Note from proof-reading: Most of my aggro comments in this guide are based on hard or expert difficulty bots however normal bots have a 50% chance of aggroing a healer and easy bots will not aggro healers.

This is definitely something you get a feel for with experience but I will try my best to explain it.

First thing on healing is that if your overheal ability is less than the scout's current overheal you should NOT heal the scout as you will drain his overheal faster. This usually means only healing the scout inbetween waves as he will likely have more overheal mid-wave, however your overheal will likely not be needed for more experienced scouts at all so preferably you just ignore the scout after wave 1 has started.

If you are playing canteen medic it's pretty simple: always be within heal range of the demo and keep everyone overhealed the best you can; when demo wants crits you ignore everything else to either charge him or flash a canteen on him.

For idle medic your healing order will be prioritizing those closest to the robot spawn and only going to heal those in the back (engie/sniper) during down times. Remember from the aggro section that those directly under a spawn drop shouldn't be healed when robots are dropping nor spies most of the time. If you happen to have a high skill player that doesn't seem to die very often then they probably have proper HoK and resistances and thus you should focus more on healing the other less experienced players who actually need the aid of a medic.

For snowplow medic you will be doing less healing than usual. It is helpful to think of your teammates as shield batteries; the lower their health is the more juice they will give your shield. With this in mind keeping everyone overhealed to the max at all times is very detrimental to your playstyle since you will only be able to build off of the damage dealt of your heal target or from the uber tanking damage. If running vaccinator the more healed you keep your teammates the less likely they will be to die. Considering a revive will fill 50%+ of your shield this is also not helpful to your playstyle however letting your entire team die isn't really good sportsmanship. To get the best of both worlds in this vaccinator situation I recommend picking the person with the least resistances to purposefully ignore healing and hope they don't buyback in before you need to revive them.



Generally you can ignore scout revives - he has 3-5 second respawns always. If you have the downtime it's ok to do it but it's unlikely to hurt anything to ignore him. For everyone else the order is pretty dynamic in that whoever is the top damage should probably be prioritized over everyone else. Engineer will be a close second, especially if a buster is active. For anyone else you should consider 4 things; 1) Will I die trying to revive them, 2) will they die immediately after I revive them, 3) did they suicide without asking for a revive, and 4) were they doing something disruptive before they died.

If the answer is yes to 1 or 2 you shouldn't waste time on it when you could be keeping the other people alive, if they complain you can explain after the wave is over. If yes to 3 they probably wanted to go back to spawn and so they will just decline the revive, or worse is they were typing and pressed h making them buy back when they didn't want to. An example for 4 is a soldier who is constantly shooting medics before they can be popped or someone with no resistances feeding a Health-on-Kill bot or black box soldier. In both cases they are letting the bots last longer which means more time for them to kill someone else so leaving them dead would actually help your team more than harm (Unless they are a buyback gremlin in which case their buybacks just feeds their lack of funds to buy proper upgrades that may keep them alive).

If you have multiple people who died at once that aren't engie or the carry you can take one of the following approaches:
1) If they are close enough you can rotate between reviving each of them for 1 second so they don't get respawned mid-rev.
2) You can focus on only reviving the one with the least health since they will be the fastest to revive and let the other one respawn, provided the respawn timer is under 8 seconds still.
3) You can focus on only reviving the one with proper (or the most) resistances/HoK since they will be able to survive longer without your attention and hope that when they other one respawns they will buy some more resistances or HoK (Hint: they 99% won't).

Lastly if you have a spy on your team, reviving him should only be done if you are a decent distance away from the robot spawn/hoard or there will not be any robots coming for ~2 seconds after he is revived. This is because the spy will instantly pull the aggro without his disguise (and onto you if you keep healing after the revive) which often results in them instantly dying again (especially on early waves with a lack of resistances).

Robots have battalion soldier? Don't krit. (Most common encounters on wave 2 of BB/MM, wave 4 and 6 of MM)

Demo carry didn't ask for crits yet? Don't krit.

Outside of those two situations, if there are lots of robots on the field OR 1+ giants w/o uber meds will almost always be ok situations to krit. You could ask more experienced players when the next set of giants is coming for the most optimal krit time is (if you don't have waves memorized); but if you don't have a demo/heavy carry constantly asking for crits then you shouldn't worry about when to krit, just that you are kritting. If you are only kritting 1-2 times a wave then you are probably holding your kritz too much (outside of batt soldier waves where you might actually only have 2 chances to krit).

As for who to krit, it depends on what you are kritting against, but keep in mind that a high skill player with canteens who didn't ask for crits should likely not be krit as they already have the means for crits whereas other team members do not.

• Tanks - If you have a high skill player asking for crits when the tank comes then your choice is easy, otherwise... Generally your krit priority will be soldier -> damage scout -> widow engie* demo (Keep in mind heavies have a 75% damage resistance but if he is the only one without canteens you could krit him as a full firing speed crit brass beast still does a nice chunk of change). For more info on who will deal the most tank damage please check out this guide.
  
• Giant robots - If no demo carry, the krit priority** will be heavy -> soldier -> damage scout -> demo -> aggressive widow engie.
  
• Hoard of small robots - Again, if no demo carry, the krit priority will be soldier -> demo -> heavy -> damage scout -> aggressive widow engie.

*Use crit canteens on a widow engie if you have them (provided they don't have their own) as the canteen will increase the sentry firing speed whereas kritzkrieg only affects the widowmaker.
**Generally whoever is closest to the giants will be the best to krit


For other medi-guns your choice of uber timing is less important, whenever you feel like you need to use it is probably the correct time. For vaccinator it's advisable to always keep 3 charges ready if your team dies a lot since a revive will eat 2 charges most of the time.


Also the only acceptable time to krit a cow mangler soldier is if you can't retreat and he is the only one near you (besides a spy).

Medic is a fine class for lower skill lobbies but often becomes a hindrance at higher skill levels. Trading an extra damage class for the occasional 3x damage boost is just not good for lobbies that make few mistakes that a medic would correct (shield/revives). However this mistake correction the medic provides is the reason he is so strong for lower skill lobbies. Snowplow medic can be a fun compromise as you can still correct the rare mistake but continue to deal comparable damage to a damage class.