Hero Idea: Medic Guy

[Blackshot]

Not every Dota 2, Team Fortress 2, Overwatch or Marvel Rivals character and concept needs to be in Deadlock.

With that being said, I was wondering how to make the OW / MR typical "shoot at allies to heal" mechanic work for Deadlock. Because the things that make it make sense in those games is the fact that it's a constant tight knit combat situation (one that I like to compare to tug of war, because there isn't much leeway to branch off and be effective otherwise). Your allies will almost constantly move and try to dodge your opponents while said opponents will try to focus on you usually. So that adds great difficulty to your job as a healer in those games. Applying the same logic doesn't work to Deadlock, because Deadlock fights consist of a lot of smaller skirmishes. But I believe to have found a viable solution to this problem by having this heal ability inflict self damage, increasing with every missing enemy in the vicinity. So it only makes sense to focus on healing when you can afford to and when there's risk involved.

Medic Guy:
(I have clearly run out of name ideas)

"Vitalizes allies with friendly fire"

"Medic Guy (MG) sacrifices his own health for that of his allies until he gains back his strength with lifestealing bullets to the enemy or during his invincible period. Enemies shall grow fearsome when MG reduces their stamina or defends allies with stamina, protection and healing effects."

Gun: I think this hero shouldn't heal allies in big bursts but instead provide slower and steady healing for better predictability for enemies.
Maybe a gun like Calico's but with 15 instead of 10 shots in the magazine and better accuracy and without the circle shaped shot pattern.
1 - Big Shot: Shoot a fast projectile that deals little spirit damage and discharges 1 stamina from a hit enemy and applies 15% stamina recovery reduction for 8 seconds. Hitting an ally has the opposite effect (adds 1 stamina). Can be self-cast. Medium duration cooldown.
2 - Mystic Haven: Throw a destructible gadget at a short range. The gadget reduces incoming damage for allies and heals Medic Guy and his allies slightly when he shoots at it (without Medic Guy losing health for healing). Very large area of effect. Long cooldown
3 - Doctor's Orders: Infinite ammo and bullet lifesteal for several seconds (regardless of range). Medium duration cooldown
4 - Paramedic: Passive: Shooting allies heals them and damages you (6 to 1 ratio). The more enemies there are in the vicinity the better you heal. Active: Become invincible for several seconds and increase heal rate for your own health.

As an example for the passive ability of Paramedic: 1 shot at an ally heals them (let's say) for 10 health but damages you for 60 (at base level) and when no enemies are nearby (at 40m distance). The heal scales with spirit power and heal booster items. And this 6:1 ratio improves for every 2 enemies that are near you. So if 1-2 enemies are here, it's a 5:1 self damage to heal ratio. 3-4 enemies -> 4:1, 5-6 enemies -> 3:1 ratio. And the ratio or distance are factors that can be improved with ability perk levels also.

Paramedic tier 1: Increase enemy detection range
Paramedic tier 2: Decrease cooldown of active ability
Paramedic tier 3: Improve all healing ratios by 1 (starting at 5:1 with no enemies around)

For the gun I also thought it'd be cool if the Calico shot pattern was like a counterstrike recoil pattern (instead of all pellets shooting at the same time). But that's just a bonus and having this sort of recoil feature could be reserved for a different hero or just scrapped entirely.

Big Shot tier 1: cooldown reduction
Big Shot tier 2: discharges / adds 2 stamina and applies 30% stamina recovery (or recovery reduction)
Big Shot tier 3: The projectile penetrates the first target and is able to hit two more targets.

I have thought about an actual Uber or Kritzkrieg like ultimate which you would apply to an ally or hold on to them like in TF2 but found that to be an unfitting and problematic concept to integrate. Heroes in Deadlock can be very agile so having to keep up with an ally like that would be difficult and weird. The ability would likely be too strong and last but not least: It could lead to toxicity in matches because the most egotistical or dominant players would demand that you buff them.
But since the ability kit as it stands lacked tools to make up for your health deficit I found it suitable for MG to have an ultimate to use ideally when it's not just useful to the team but also when he's already low on health from healing so much (or fighting, depending on your role in the team).

 

[gibnewitems]

I've just got done reading your concept. To put this bluntly, those kinds of support designs barely work in OW/Rivals (I don't play Rivals, so I will mostly be speaking of OW). Support designs in those games are healers first, supports second (if at all). In those games, the design philosophy is "your job is to spam healing, everyone else will be very mad if they don't receive the massive heal spam that the game is designed around."

In Deadlock, even the heroes with the most support-coded designs aren't locked completely to being a heal bot. Kelvin is by far the hero that leans the most towards support (especially in organized play), yet looking at his kit, he only has 2 abilities that straight up heals. Dynamo has just 1. Dynamo has more abilities that buff his gun than abilities that heal. It's deliberately designed to be this way. Deadlock's current design is "you can heal, but it's not your primary job." Granted, this core design philosophy does get a little murky with items such as rescue beam, but overall, it still holds up.

A hero that could heal using just left clicks would instantly become meta overnight. Consistently high healing values that aren't gated behind a cooldown (the ones that you'd see in other hero shooters) would destroy the absolutely brilliant design of Deadlock. Hope you like long teamfights where nobody dies because someone far away pressed left click a few times, because that's what you will get with a design like this.

Deadlock's gameplay does have problems. It's not a flawless masterpiece. However, I enjoy that teamfights actually end within a reasonable amount of time. I enjoy that supports primarily support their team through ways other than healing spam. I enjoy that poke damage actually lasts more than 3 seconds because it isn't getting immediately healed up in the most low effort way possible.

With that rant about game philosophy out of the way, let's talk about your concept, specifically the passive healing shot effect.

Overall, it seems to be messy and convoluted. The way that you balance out free and consistent cooldownless healing is far from a viable solution. Why are we giving a better damage to healing ratio for more nearby enemies? Do we really need to make this ability stronger within a scenario where it is already strong? Especially with the heal scaling with spirit and heal boosting effects. Come mid or late game (when most of these big team fights tend to happen) the damage tradeoff won't really be that much of a tradeoff. I believe you have vastly underestimated the amount of important team fights that a typical game of Deadlock contains.

With that out of the way, here's how I would fix this concept.

• Scrap the damage for healing mechanic entirely as a passive. Rework paramedic to be an active ability that empowers your primary fire with a healing effect for a short duration. This makes it far more proactive of an ability, brings it in line with other healing abilities, and improperly using it can actually be punished by a smart enemy.
• Replace/rework Mystic haven. I can already see that mystic haven having damage resist as well as aoe healing will get a little problematic.
• Replace/rework Doctor's order. This ability would conflict with the new active design of Paramedic.

 

[Blackshot]

Overall, it seems to be messy and convoluted. The way that you balance out free and consistent cooldownless healing is far from a viable solution. Why are we giving a better damage to healing ratio for more nearby enemies? Do we really need to make this ability stronger within a scenario where it is already strong? Especially with the heal scaling with spirit and heal boosting effects. Come mid or late game (when most of these big team fights tend to happen) the damage tradeoff won't really be that much of a tradeoff. I believe you have vastly underestimated the amount of important team fights that a typical game of Deadlock contains.

With that out of the way, here's how I would fix this concept.

• Scrap the damage for healing mechanic entirely as a passive. Rework paramedic to be an active ability that empowers your primary fire with a healing effect for a short duration. This makes it far more proactive of an ability, brings it in line with other healing abilities, and improperly using it can actually be punished by a smart enemy.
• Replace/rework Mystic haven. I can already see that mystic haven having damage resist as well as aoe healing will get a little problematic.
• Replace/rework Doctor's order. This ability would conflict with the new active design of Paramedic.

First of all I appreciate you for your time and effort.

Does the ability seem messy and convoluted? Maybe it is, I could see that.
And you're right in the fact that it sounds like I'm underestimating the amount of ((near) complete) team fights; the amount of times you find yourself with a lot of teammates and enemies at once. It's not just little skirmishes with Deadlock, especially not in the last third of the match time.

The reason for why the heal ratio should improve with increasing enemy count is because the danger for this hero would increase too.
I'd like to make it clear though that the healing ratio and the exact heal amount that I proposed originally are just an example. The ratio could be made much worse, hence healing could be much less effective. Crank the numbers to something that essentially turns your health bar into a reasonable cooldown on your heal (if the player chooses to actually go for a "sacrificial" playstyle) and suddenly the character won't seem meta or OP anymore. This style of healing by the way already exists in Dota 2. The hero Pugna (who's not necessarily a support hero at all mind you) can drain life from an enemy unit with a channeling ability and use the same ability to heal an ally by depleting his own health bar.

Lastly, why would mystic haven be problematic? Perhaps I should specify that 1: the healing amount everyone gets is meant to be quite small and 2: the healing does not work through walls. And since it's destructible it would have a similar balancing philosophy behind it as Seven's ultimate.