Aleflippy beat me to the punch on this one, but right now, the Medic's only real weakness compared to other perks is that it has some
--and I stress that word--
some bad weapons on it. A weakness that can be solved by just not using joke-tier weapons.
The only thing given a partial nerf recently is 1) Medic's ability to sponge damage, which can also be resolved by just not getting hit in the first place, and 2) the Healthrower being not quite as good at mowing down trash Zeds, which was only marginal because with its insane ammo reserve it will still be able to do that given the stat nerfs, it'll just take a bit longer.
It was taken down from "unreasonable" to "slightly more reasonable."
Nothing about being able to heal other players--which is Medic's
designated role--was touched in the slightest. The point is to make it less of a "clutch crutch", a design
inherently harmful to team-based games, and to ideally egg players into playing that supportive role by making them less viable as solo YOLOs.
Healers and support classes in any kind of any kind have ALWAYS been designed specifically to be weak so they'll HAVE to stick with their team. Even if they aren't team players, they should be because otherwise they'll get mauled pretty easily. Team Fortress 2's medic is a perfect example of that.
This, and then some. I'm sure TWI made the Medic intentionally strong to entice players, but the class is
way overtuned by any reasonable metric when compared to other games.
Imagine if the TF2 Medic had triple its base health. Because that was Medic's old damage resistance stats. To the point where most players ignored Symbiotic Health--the thing that gave you all the OP buffs you could give other teammates--because Resistance just gave you insane DR without having to work for it. "Why would I give myself buffs when I could just tank hits?"
Imagine if TF2's medic outran the Scout without using the Quick-Fix. Because that used to be its passive speed boost.
Imagine if Team Fortress 2's medic got a version of the Sniper's rifle that could use Crusader Crossbow darts to heal players and could no-scope hitscan enemy players for most of their health from across the map while inflicting slowdown. If that sounds somewhat familiar, that's because it's literally the HRG Incision.
Imagine if the Medic could self-heal at will while killing other players and also reduce incoming damage from enemy fire. Because that was basically the old Hemoclobber.
Imagine if the Medic got a six-shot revolver that allowed you to heal players with
homing versions of the Crusader's Crossbow darts while killing players in a couple of bodyshots
or a headshot, and also weakening any player it didn't kill outright. Because that's the current Hemogoblin.
Imagine if the Amputator's AoE healing taunt was ready on command and could also give speed/damage res/attack buffs to the Medic's team, and that he didn't have to stand still to use it, and that he could also use it to damage the enemy team. Because that's the healing grenades, the 501 grenades, and the Healthrower.
Medic started the game with 4 kinds of weapons based off a modular system, and those were plenty good; any further medic-ing than that was addressed by "stop getting hit so much." Which was fair because back in the earliest days of the class
it used to give armor with darts. If you were to travel back in time to the major boards/forums in 2016 and tell players back then that Medic was getting a healing Railgun that inflicted Berserker's EMP, they might suggest you were
trolling. If only they knew!
Much like the Berserker nerfs, the main thing this did was bring to the surface the sheer amount of people who play Medic because of how insanely forgiving and OP it is more than actually being useful to the team (which they sometimes are, but only incidentally).
Medic is simultaneously an incredibly strong team support player, a fairly strong gunfighter, and one of the two best "clutch crutch" classes in the game. Which "clutch" characters are, by definition; due to how this game gets
easier as players die off, the supposed-to-be-weak healer class gets even stronger as other players are eliminated from the game--the very thing they are supposed to avoid!
if everyone goes down, wouldn’t you want that last player to be able to self sustain?
By the time you hit the last of 4 difficulties, two of which are labeled "harder than Hard," no.
Clutches are supposed to be the exception rather than the norm because a team that fails to live as a team should die as a team. And having classes dedicated to averting that principle means that more self-interested players will be drawn to that playstyle by virtue of them being selfish perks, which is bad design; it reinforces a circular problem of the Medic picking the "I don't trust my team" perks, which means the players don't trust the Medic because they're playing selfishly, and so forth.
And clutch plays are the exception where other perks are considered. If you asked how many players are clutching lategame waves with Commando compared to Zerk or Medic, I guarantee you'd get a far lower number because Commando is slow and somewhat squishy compared to other options. You cannot run away from the threat of death because on HoE Zeds will straight-up catch and kill you for trying; the last man standing scenario becomes a DPS race and is far more likely to end up in a wipe unless the remaining enemies were already more manageable to begin with, and the wipe will come far more quickly if and when that happens because the player can't drag it out.
When you have characters with self-healing to erase mistakes, speed to avoid taking hits, and tankiness that means getting hit is less of a punishment anyway, the threat of the clutch failing is basically non-existent because the player is at no threat of dying; it's that the foregone conclusion of them winning (after all the others have died, on the hardest difficulty) takes forever to pull off. By that point, everyone's weapons have probably despawned and everyone's lost most of their money, so why bother?
I'm just worried that with these changes, more selfish players will appear
Voting to kick is always a viable tool if they continue to insist on being disruptive.