Well, as derailed as this train already is, I guess we might as well finish running it off the tracks.
I'm not really expecting good faith discussion given responses like the above, despite the volume of text you've output. But what the heck, I'll respond anyway; other people who are reading but not responding might get something out of this.
Medic can still heal just fine. Nothing about that was touched. Even the Healthrower's absurd heal potential wasn't touched.
Just the part where you can take 4x the punishment most other perks could before the game can finally tell you "that's it, you've officially gotten hit too much to allow you to continue." Maybe once in a while burst damage will actually kill a Medic. If the main strength of the Medic was supposed to be the party sponge, that would be another matter, but the game already has 3 other perks who can do that (one dedicated, two off-tanks). The Medic should be able to keep the team alive in exchange for the team keeping the Medic alive, which Medic can absolutely still do.
Okay, and that's not for nothing, but leaving aside that this game has arguably
the most ridiculous aim assist I've ever seen in a first-person shooter...
"Platting" this game leaves a lot to be interpreted. "I earned the vast majority of achievements with solo Kaboomstick Demo/Locust Survivalist/Zerk/Right-Side Combat Medic" tells a very different story from "I earned all plats in 6P HoE games by playing Commando/SWAT/Sharpshooter." Both are equally platinum where the trophy system is concerned but communicate completely different things on how much technical skill and knowledge one has, especially given that this game has gotten overall much easier over the years depending on how you approach it, which is the opposite of how games should develop; as the game ages players will (should) improve and they'll need more of a challenge to stick around.
There are quite a few CD players who haven't platted the game because they skipped over the old map achievements where you had to beat all the easier difficulties as a point of pride.
If
that's the route we're taking, well, I learned it existed during the time I was playing KF1, and I've been playing it since the literal first days of Early Access when there were only 4 perks and the skill trees were completely screwball.
I probably don't even have as many hours played as some of the people still posting on this forum, but the vast majority of those hours have been in HoE and Controlled Difficulty servers (with of course Suicidal taking the 3rd most crown) because the CD servers I can actually semi-regularly play on forcibly discourage players with annoying perks in favor of precision stacks.
I was responding in kind to your assertion that Berserker is useless above Hard, and that Medic's nerfs were lumping it in by association with Berserker (as being useless above Hard, that is). There is concrete evidence in both visual, textual, and other forms that the above assertion is complete nonsense unless you're inexperienced enough with Berserker that you can't play it well above Hard.
Such is often the case with posters who drop by to hyperfocus on one thing and then never post on anything again. A good example would be the numerous one-time posters who suddenly came out of the woodwork when Berserker got nerfed from "unkillable" to "actual risk/reward", and of course there will now be Medic players who do likewise. There's frequently an overlap of both because the playerbases for Medic and Berserker players tend to be on very similar Venn diagrams.
I don't want all the classes to be nerfed because some of them are fine for the core loop that the game was originally built around. Some are a little bent even if they're not broken, some are too good for how easy they are to play, some are actually skill-indexed...some perks themselves aren't broken but their weapons certainly are problematic.
Tying into that "platinum" thing from earlier: This game's difficulties and such are so all over the place that the perks themselves are their own difficulties. Solo mode is almost always easier due to the reduced everything from the Zeds' side. The chaos perks and chaotic weaponry in general are much, much easier to win with overall than the precision perks and headshot-based weaponry, which is the main problem with this game on the whole that I have been working to bring to light (and hopefully address) in my various longposts.
Berserker and Medic were the biggest outliers because their design (and especially interactions with each other) were effectively allowing bad players to skip the primary difficulty curves in this game, which is not good design. Firebug and Demo in their current states are also very, very effective for the effort required to play them and do in fact need to be looked at; that being said, Demo and Firebug also actually die when they take hits and are slow, so they can't get away with some of the shenanigans that the two former perks can.
Medic, again, is still exactly as good at healing other players as before, so: define "fun." This is a common complaint I see in video games when a distinctly broken thing gets nerfed, and nobody can exactly tell me what their definition of "fun" is when it comes to games like these.
Back 4 Blood went through this when the devs introduced
a hilariously overpowered ability called "Expired T5" that singlehandedly broke the game so hard everyone and their mother started running it because it meant you didn't have to aim, or prioritize targets, or really do anything normally associated with a first-person shooter. So every single lobby had at least two people on the hardest difficulties running only this unless you stuck with a premade group that went on an honor system of "don't use it." Once the inevitable nerf happened, people came on the forums for the first time ever to say that the game was unplayable and such as, and that skilled players don't know how to have fun, and so forth, etc.
The ones who weren't complaining were the ones who had already been practicing the harder difficulties, memorizing general breakpoints, and training their aim and mechanical skills. Some of us have fun by pushing our skills to the limit on the game and don't particularly enjoy find it fun when things that break the learning and skill indexing are introduced, especially when those things are extremely easy while being extremely effective. On the hard difficulties.
(Also melee is even more busted in B4B than it is in this game but we'll just sideline that for the moment)
TWI did sort of do that, except aside from having it locked it down to a weekly so you only see it once every blue moon (there are currently 20 weeklies on rotation, seriously!)...
That difficulty was a complete mess at the start and wasn't really any harder for Zerkwall/spam teams, although it sure did take a dump on precision teams. As it turns out, while faster-moving trash is cool and fun, spawning literally every Fleshpound raged takes agency away from kit-dependent precision players while making absolutely no difference in the usual "wall of fire and explosives" strategy that most people use to clear the game. Yes, it technically made the game "harder," but in the worst way possible. I'm pretty sure they gave up patching it after the one time they bothered, sort of like the versus mode. It was certainly more reasonable once they took away the "Oops! All Raged Fleshpounds" aspect of it, but then they didn't give the Zeds any benefits to counteract that, so in the end it didn't really wind up that much harder than a standard HoE game. Maybe taking some more hints from CD players would've helped?
And that's not even considering the other side to the "just make a harder difficulty" coin: power creep and the consequences of it. This was something that Payday 2 ran off with and the end result was that the game had to have numerous rebalances and up to four additional difficulties with additional modifiers in them since the game released, because Overkill Studios couldn't stop releasing broken nonsense, and in the end the game ended up being a broken mess if you actually cared about playing the game for a challenge. (Of course the game is going to get easier when you allow four players at a time to revive each other across the map through walls and have spurts of infinite-ammo miniguns and rocket launchers when the game was originally based around L4D's "stick together" and "headshots are best" principles; who would've guessed?)
When you buff players unreasonably and start buffing Zeds unreasonably to match, you have power creep. You know what's much easier? Nerfing outliers. Ideally you shouldn't introduce outliers in the first place because that sets expectations that players will be getting a flatly easier game, but when you don't do anything about them after the fact, you get a game like current-day KF2 where half the perks are playing on the equivalent of an honor system and the rest of them are playing Borderlands where you race to see who can kill the most things with the most broken weapons and nobody really dies.
And you can't just buff those perks to match because you completely alienate the skilled players who already understand how to use the precision perks if you do that, because then there's no challenge left to the game at that point, so why bother?
Even TWI themselves understand that issue. Players shouldn't have to balance the game for devs, let alone have to create their own servers where they can actually remove annoying nonsense and focus on honing their skills; that's an unreasonable expectation to put on the players and just encourages introducing more broken nonsense on the basis of "oh well the tryhard players will just ban it anyway."
Now, given that TWI has been supporting and advertising Tamari's CD tournament--which is really odd, but good nonetheless--that may change in some form or fashion.
In all my time playing this game, the vast majority of players in Suicidal and HoE difficulties are picking Medic/Zerk/Firebug/Demo/Survivalist. Roughly in that order of popularity.
That's a hard fact to sell without actual numbers from server owners, but that's certainly my 4-digit hours worth of antecdata. Probably because those are much easier to win with on higher difficulties compared to Commando, SWAT, Sharpshooter, and Gunslinger (although you tend to see Gunslinger on very kite-heavy maps because it's much more forgiving in those settings), because they're far more forgiving of bad play and allow players to do extremely well by spamming at the enemies while almost entirely ignoring the headshot mechanics that distinguish bad players from good ones. That, and for a very long time, Berserker and Medic got new toys basically nonstop on top of being already extremely easy to win with since their major buffs in the Incinerate n Detonate update.
And on the nerf bit, although this is getting decidedly even more off-topic...
(Quick point of order: Gunslinger should absolutely have something on the chopping block, but nobody really discusses that outside of the Discord. It has too much keeping it on top when mastered right now, but since it's a perk you have to hit headshots with, most people aren't going to get nearly that good with it.
The last time TWI actually tried to nerf Gunslinger was back when they removed reload cancelling and slowed down Gunslinger's reloads, and they wound up just flatly reverting everything from that patch because of how unpopular the removal of reload cancelling was because it affected absolutely every perk. They have an odd habit of doing that for some reason, like just tossing out the entire thing instead of keeping some good ideas.)
Gunslinger remains largely untouched to this day, though it could absolutely use either longer reloads or a runspeed nerf. That's another topic for another thread, which is one I've been mulling over. The rest of those perks? Most people are too bad at this game to play Commando or Sharpshooter even remotely well; Support is not easy but is arguably more forgiving than those to a degree, and SWAT is not what I'd call easy but definitely surged in popularity after the sprint speed update; in the game's current state it's easier to win with compared to Commando but harder to surpass Commando's skill ceiling (shock of shocks, SWAT also has more tankiness and speed compared to Commando, so of course it's more popular with the broader playerbase).
Sharpshooter is, in my 4-digit hours of experience, the most unpopular perk in general pub play. Sharpshooter buffs are/were one of the most common requests but most people have terrible ideas on how to buff it because it usually involves "make it run faster, let M99 instakill anything regardless of your build, and make it do universal extra damage instead of headshot damage", which is to say "make the entire perk easier rather than neuter the rest of the perks back down to a reasonable level"), and rather than buff the perk's base kit, TWI have been giving it increasingly suspect weapons.
The Storm Cannon in its current incarnation has been flatly banned on many CD servers because it turns stacking Marksman Sharpshooters from a joke team idea into legitimately one of the strongest team comps you can muster if everyone's aim is decent, but the vast majority of players don't have the aim to even bother with it because you have to headshot for the benefits to begin with. And this is the post-nerf version, mind you, where
it doesn't inflict micro-stuns with every single shot anymore on top of having AoE blasts with every headshot.
Support needing buffs is a fairly common refrain because most people insist that Support is bad in early waves, which I firmly believe is nonsense; Support is only "bad" once you consider higher-end CD cycles and that's just an artifact of shotguns being what they are in this game. Support is a high-risk-high-reward generalist when mastered with only a couple of bad weapons, which is fine.
Commando is mostly fine but the FAL shouldn't be as good as it is; currently it suffers from having really bad skill tree alternatives because why would you not take high cap mags and extra damage. That extra damage turns it from being a trash specialist into a good-except-for-Fleshpounds generalist and it leaves a lot of room for skill ceiling growth on the player's part.
Point of order #2: TWI already nerfed those perks with the armored Rioters and EDARs. That was literally the whole point of that update.
Pathfinder's aim is alright but I would take any of his opinions on meta stuff with heavy grains of salt. Fun thing to note, though: he was that guy who started the "Berserker can win by camping in a corner" thing on one of his old videos, so there's that.