Ever Notice How Team Fortress 2 Medics Heal Faster Sometimes?

If you’ve paid close attention to the rate that Medics heal in Team Fortress 2, you may have noticed that they sometimes (seemingly arbitrarily) will heal significantly faster than, say, when you’re in the midst of battle. The new official Team Fortress 2 blog has already proven itself useful, revealing why this is and how exactly it works.

The absolute basics: the healing rate increases as the amount of time the heal target has not been damaged increases. In other words, the longer you’ve avoided taking shots, the faster a Medic will be able to heal you. More specifically, “If it’s been greater than 10 seconds since the target was hurt, the heal rate is increased. The amount of increase ramps linearly up to 3 times the base heal rate at 15 seconds since the target was hurt. So if you’re healing a target who’s been hurt less than 10 seconds ago, you’ll only be getting the base heal rate of 24 health a second. If the target was hurt 12.5 seconds ago, you’ll be healing at 48 health a second. If the target hasn’t been hurt for over 15 seconds, you’ll be getting the maximum heal rate of 72 health a second.”

Valve’s reasoning for this is because they wanted to encourage players to retreat. But given the rate at which Medics healed, having to retreat and find a Medic to heal you didn’t save you much time over just continuing to attack, die, and then respawn. So this was the solution to encouraging players to retreat without affecting the capabilities of a Medic in the middle of a firefight.

This gets me to wondering what other layers of hidden complexity this game (and for that matter, any other game) contains.

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