A Medi Gun for every situation

When you play Medic, everyone’s relying on you. In the competitive scene, people rely on you even more. They scrutinize you, right down to your weapon choice. What Medi Gun you take will make or break a game. Assuming they’re allowed, since both the Quick Fix and the Vaccinator are currently unfavourable for numerous reasons. Not because they’re both bad… But anyway, that’s beside the point. With any normal Medi Gun, you’re stuck with it until you die. If you pick the wrong Medi Gun for the situation, you screw up everything. So what if there was a Medi Gun that can adapt to almost all situations?

Alright, normally, I don’t try to create weapons. Most of my ideas are bad. Then again, Valve’s ideas aren’t much better. The Panic Attack and the Iron Bomber for example are both fine examples of Valve’s competence. And just like Valve and the recent stock Demoman changes, I occasionally have a good idea. This idea of mine popped up in the Create a Medi Gun thread, and I fancied expanding on it and tweaking it.

Back to that multipurpose Medi Gun. When you think ‘multipurpose’, who do you think of? Soldier, of course! No, not Demoman. All he does is damage. Soldier can fill any sort of role, from aerial bombardier to suicide Medic killer to sentry buster to team buffer. The Buff Banner, Battalion’s Backup and Concheror all work very well for him. And since Medic and Soldier go together hand in hand, it occurred to me that Soldier basically has mini Ubercharges, and they’re ripe for the Medic to steal. Thus, the idea of the Buffbacker was born. Now for some stats.

The Buffbacker
Level 2 Medi Gun
+2 health per second
Ubercharge also increases based on every 150 damage done by your heal target.
Press Reload to cycle through Ubercharge types.
-25% Ubercharge rate
-25% Ubercharge duration

Ubercharge applies one of three affects in an area of effect, identical to a Soldier’s banner.
Buff Banner: Nearby allies deal minicrits.
Battalion’s Backup: Nearby allies take less damage from crits and gain damage resistance.
Concheror: Nearby allies gain a speed boost and a percentage of damage dealt heals them.

The idea behind this Medi Gun is simple; Once you’ve got Uber, you can decide between one of three Ubercharges, depending on your situation, in a very Vaccinator-like way. Like the current Vaccinator, you’d be unable to change Ubercharge types while you Ubercharge. Each Ubercharge works exactly like a Soldier’s banner, but with a lower duration (six seconds instead of eight for Medi Guns and ten for Banners), since Medic has to carry all three backpacks at once.

Another little thing to make this more like the Banner weapons is that this Medi Gun builds extra Uber for every 150 damage done. The Uber increase is small, only 5%, so that a lucky random crit doesn’t instantly fill your boost. To doubly counter this, the Buffbacker has -25% Ubercharge rate, taking 50 seconds to fully charge, assuming your pocket does no damage. This may make it poor for rollouts, but if you can survive that early start and get a couple of kills, you and your entire team will be away.

So why the harsh penalties? Simple. Because your Ubercharge is an AOE effect. It’s the same 450 units of the normal Soldier banners, but with the freedom of choice. On top of Medic’s healing, which a Soldier can’t do, this makes for a powerful pushing weapon AND a powerful stalling weapon, but only if your pockets are good enough to get kills and defend you, making you more reliant on your pocket to build Uber.

The only issue at the moment is during setup. We can fix this with a hidden upside, that your Ubercharge builds at stock maximum rate and ignores the 25% penalty during setup time. If the enemy team starts with full Uber and yours doesn’t, you’ll instantly be at a disadvantage.

The weapon may seem a bit powerful. I think it is. But it’s certainly an idea worth testing out.