Looking for a new leash on life

I’ve been Medic for a long time. A very long time. So long in fact that I’ve become disillusioned with the class. I have more hours as Medic than any other class, perhaps more than all 8 other classes combined. I’ve also come to some rather big conclusions as well. It’s time for me to move on, I think.

Thing is, Medic is actually a really easy class to play as. All those claims that Medic as a class was overpowered? They’re completely, 100% true. But Medic NEEDS to be overpowered and simple to play, otherwise no one plays as him. Too unrewarding and no one wants to play as a healer, too strong and you end up with the Combat Medic in Team Fortress Classic, used for his agility and strength rather than his ability to heal. It’s why many games with healers end up with them being soldiers with part time med kits or prancing little sissies. We can learn a lot from characters like Medic, as well as lesser healers like Taric from League of Legends.

The way I’ve come to see my own namesake though is getting me down. I see playing Medic as no better than playing Heavy, without any of the aiming. All you have to do is not die, be in the right place and get full Uber, and two out of three of those things are what you do as other classes anyway. Yet somehow people still manage to fuck up playing Medic. Really we should be ashamed of ourselves.

At the same time, I’ve become one of the things I hate the most: a stereotype. A girl gamer that plays nothing but the ‘easy class’. The sissy little child who can’t aim or do well but has loads of friends because she’s not spitting bile all over you like the majority of other people you meet in servers. And I hate that. I need to move on, do something new. There’s a reason over the last few days I’ve been playing more and more Skyrim and gone and changed my Steam username. Long before I was Medic, I was Phovos the Raptor, a character completely of my own design, based on years of my own internal evolution. Yet here I am, copying an already existing and not that unique being – someone who’s literally a walking stereotype of 60’s and 70’s evil scientists.

I do want to start playing Demoman. If my competitive experience has taught me anything, it’s that not a single fucking person in Europe wants to play the damn class, or at play Demoman for me. The ONLY person who genuinely tried was Davjo, but a mute Pokemon who deep down wants to play Demoknight just doesn’t work out that well in a competitive setting. I blame myself for a lot of the team’s failures simply because I never organized scrims, nor could I play any other class at the level I can play Medic at. But as I said before, playing Medic is piss easy.

Maybe I just need to give TF2 even more of a break. I’ve pretty much stopped playing now. Between the 4v4 scrim from the end of October and the second third of the previous 4v4 season (week 8, because we didn’t make play-offs), I’ve played, what, three times? And almost all of it testing stuff out for other people, none of it playing for myself. While it’s fun sometimes playing on Odoroki’s server, it’s also rather stressful, especially since the only thing I was ever good at – spamming the Scorch Shot at giant robots – was recently patched out. Typical.

I’ve barely been keeping up with updates either. I said before that I kinda miss the idea of Halloween, I’ll miss the wacky stuff this year, but I find myself simply not giving a shit. It’s simply not very healthy.

I’ll probably end up changing my mind about all this within a week or so. But I need to say these things, or at least write them down and get it all out there. Otherwise it burns inside me.