Playing the Medic

I've been playing Team Fortress 2 as my relaxation game these days. A session can fill anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour, and the combat is simple enough to be enjoyable without needing too much skill. The situation often arises as a team gears up that nobody has chosen to be a medic, and that's where an interesting phenomenon begins.

It's theoretically possible to play without a medic, especially if your team is on defense, but it involves a lot of dying and waiting for respawn timers. As a medic-less team prepares to begin the round, people start calling for a doctor with the classically unspecific line "somebody switch to medic." More often than not, the suggestion is directed towards the snipers, a class notorious for not pulling its weight. People don't want to be medic because it can be boring, but the person who finally makes the switch gets a bit of instant goodwill from everyone else.

For this reason, I'm often the one to go medic. I've only been raged against once as medic (pretty impressive considering the state of most online multiplayer), and that's because its very dangerous to offend the team doctor-- he decides who gets healed and who doesn't. Medics are the glue that hold teams together.