You’d think I was a Sona main…

If the casual person were to come up to me while I was playing TF2, they’d see why I’m called Medic. Over the last few years, I have slowly ditched my other persona (Phovos, Tahnok and Ar/Elkay) and kinda stuck with just being called Medic, occasionally splitting into being The Medic or BLU Medic if Medic alone is not available. I’m almost completely tied to this username now, no one calls me anything but Medic. Of course, such a username does mean that people make huge assumptions about what I do in other games.

I’ll be honest, I prefer tanky gun people. My Borderlands 2 character is a Gunzerker called Heavy. He dual-shotguns everything to death and switches to machine guns if he runs out of ammo. My favourite Skyrim character, an Argonian called Lokmahro, runs around with a sword and shield bashing people to death and setting their corpses on fire. In Left 4 Dead, I play somewhat passively and try to run through as quickly as I can, but that doesn’t count because there’s no real class structure in L4D and reliably shooting Bohrok with human hitboxes in the head is tricky. In my brief stints in Killing Floor, I was more drawn to the Firebug class than the Medic class. Because flamethrowers, fuck yeah.

In my other most-often-played game currently, League of Legends, I get the same funny looks. You go around calling yourself BLU Medic, you’re going to get some funny looks, and the occasional person spamming MEDIC! in chat. Surprisingly though, in over 1000 games, I’ve only had that happen twice. People are too busy trying to win. But with the name BLU Medic, you’d think I was a Sona main. You know, that champion I used in the Battle of the Healers. Yeah, Busy McBigtits here. Alternatively, people assume I want to play Soraka, the banana-throwing goddess of the stars, but I’ll pass on that too, since healing people for the cost of my own health and mana pisses me off.

There are other healers too. Lulu and Janna both offer healing on their ultimates, but they’re still squishy little things. Janna in particular. Also she’s a bit of a, um, uh… phone whore? If I’m going to play a healer, I’ll play Taric, the fabulous gem paladin. Otherwise, you’ll find me playing Vel’Koz, or, as of late, Garen.

Garen is a tank. Not just any tank though. A Demacian tank. Play-wise, Garen is actually a really simple champion, with obvious as hell strengths and weaknesses, leaving room for smart opponents to kill you. But Garen is so anti-Medic it hurts. While Medic is soft and squishy and dies to a stiff breeze, Garen can withstand anything as long as it doesn’t deal a percentage of his health or sustained damage over time. Garen starts fights for his team, while Medics only push forward with their pockets when they have full Uber. Garen charges in shouting the name of his country, while Medic doesn’t really seem to care and is just there to satisfy his own morbid curiosity.

But maybe Medic and Garen aren’t so different after all. There is one direct link between the two characters. Both Medic and Garen have regenerating health that gets better over time and rewards pulling out of a fight and retreating to heal up.

Perhaps there’s more to it than that? Garen is basically an unstoppable wall pushing his team forward, charging in behind his confidence and heavily built armor, being incredibly hard to kill. A Medic with his Ubercharge does the exact same thing – enabling your team to push through the roadblock ahead, kill the enemy team and secure your objectives. I suppose really, they’re both initiators.

Maybe I should just main Sona after all…