Miserable Medics Sharing Tips: The Thread

[Mech__Warrior]

The CLB can be equipped on the belt, much much better than your medical belt.

[Biolock]

I've been playing on CM for a little over three years now, and while some of the newer players probably don't know me, I've played Alex Crossman as a combat medic since day one, and only on very rare occasions deviated from that role. I don't have any interest in providing advice for completely new medics unless they ask for it specifically, as anything they're going to want to know is easily accessible VIA wikis. Here I want to talk to the vets, the players who already know what they're doing.

- Consistency is key. Everyone is going to talk about "The best medic loadout", or what you absolutely must carry in order to maximize your efficiency as a medic. I say, fuck that. Carry a loadout you as an individual can navigate efficiently, make sure you can stop bleeding (Both internal and external), and treat toxins and burns. Other than that, carry what you can handle; and once you've decided what to carry, stick with it, learning the loadout so you can swiftly navigate it when the seconds count. I can look at a medivendor, without looking at my inventory, and tell you exactly what I have on my persons, learn your contents, constantly changing your loadout breeds inefficiency.

- Don't sacrifice firepower for medical capabilities. Many of the guides I've seen suggest carrying an SMG, or (God forbid) only a sidearm in lieu of being able to provide medical assistance with one hand at all times. That's great and all, but anyone with a whiff of military experience will tell you that the best medicine on the battlefield is fire superiority. It makes no sense to be providing medical aid when the rest of your squad is getting their shit pushed. When you come into contact with the enemy, you neutralize the threat before you treat the casualty or risk taking more casualties. No one in space station 13 has ever bled out in 15 seconds... ever, which we know is more than enough time to finish a fight and ensure you're not now dealing with a guy who's got his hand chopped on top of three hugged guys and another fracture case.

- This one is exclusively oriented to the experienced medics who are treating someone when, all of the sudden another medic, looks at his hud, and sees someone in critical... and immediately butts in and begins performing his own medical treatments. This is actually a GOOD thing. You don't need to see that the red flicking on the person's heath hud has stopped, or that their health is above -1. You, being an experienced and savvy medic, know that if they're not bleeding, and they've got no active ailment afflicting them, that they WILL recover. So unless this other medic plans on sticking his knife in the dudes chest to check for a pulse, he's only going to accelerate the recovery of the patient. Don't be salty he took your patient, be grateful he freed your hands and you can now go and provide medical services where it's more heavily needed.

- Also, as an addendum to that last tip. Don't be outwitted by the medical hud. If it's flickering read, signalling critical, but you know you've done what you need to do to save the patient; go help someone else who needs it, you can't speed up time, but you can help extend someone else's.

Those are the tips I have off the top of my head, I'll comment some more as thoughts come to mind.

[ZDashe]

I'll drop some tips for the vets too, which the others have not mentioned yet.

1. During less intense periods, patch up even single bullet wounds or papercuts. Compounded brute damage increases the chance for more serious injuries, which would need medivac (broken bones).

2. During intense periods with many casualties, patch people up without scanning if you must.
- I save my tricord hyposprays for these occasions. Hold one in hand, run around jabbing people with minor injuries indicated by the healthHUD, while going towards critical patients and perform proper triage, after getting them to the rear.

- After removing facehuggers from perfectly healthy people, you can just patch their face up without scanning. The time needed to remove the facehugger is enough for you to whip out an Advanced Trauma Kit, patch him up, and stow it back in your bag.

This is my most important tip:
3. During combat, prioritize GETTING PEOPLE ON THEIR FEET.
- People got screeched by the queen? Stomped by a crusher? Stunned by neurotoxin from a sentinel/spitter? SHAKE THEM UP!

- In immediate danger with multiple casualties, prioritize those that are not yet in crit. It's all about efficiency at this point. The more marines you can heal quickly who can stand and run fast, the more people can help you fend off attacks, or move the wounded off to safety if people need to retreat. This is situational, use your own judgement to determine if you are safe enough to linger and treat critically injured patients. Sometimes it's better to let one person die and 3 others live, than to have everyone in crit and totally helpless. You can always drag the dead to be cloned. (I find myself in these situations when I'm the only medic on the field during an assault).

- If you have no time to patch people up and everyone needs to retreat, don't be afraid to use Oxycodone. Shake them up and tell them to "RUN!!" while you drag the others back to safety.

- Prioritize Tramadol pills for people who are suffering from burn damage. (e.g. Boiler acid cloud)

[completelynewguy]

Remember that pain's both a concept and a threat to the Marines. Always shove a pill of tramadol or two down a patient's throat after treating their injuries. (Like Jesse Eisenberg in BvS shoving a jolly rancher down a senator's throat.)

[hawkshot86]

Also always remember to eat lots of burgers if you're bleeding out. Learned that one last night.

[Renomaki]

Also always remember to eat lots of burgers if you're bleeding out. Learned that one last night.

That is probably due to the amount of Iron inside of a burger.

Iron in general is great for bloodloss, so popping an Iron pill is good if you are bleeding out and need more blood.

[KingKire]

Alright, so i tend to play cargo alot, and i must ask, what do medics like to recive from a fresh shipment of crates to the planet? Rated from "i need this" to "why did you include this", what do medics like in droppad crates?
What do they like to see in dropships/droppods?
Do you like pills, auto injectors, or bottles to deploy?
Maybe you guys like bottles of one thing and pills of something else?
How much is too much?
Stasis bags? Bodybags? Folded roller beds in the crates?

[Disco Dalek]

Alright, so i tend to play cargo alot, and i must ask, what do medics like to recive from a fresh shipment of crates to the planet? Rated from "i need this" to "why did you include this", what do medics like in droppad crates?
What do they like to see in dropships/droppods?
Do you like pills, auto injectors, or bottles to deploy?
Maybe you guys like bottles of one thing and pills of something else?
How much is too much?
Stasis bags? Bodybags? Folded roller beds in the crates?

Custom made wonder drugs
Peridaxon/dexalin plus pill combo
Peridaxon bottles
Quick clot and dexalin plus auto injectors if there's extra
Trauma and burn kits
Dylovene, tramadol, and kelotane pills
Inaprovaline and dylovene bottles
Stasis bags
Roller beds

Stasis bags and roller beds are still a welcome sight, just rarely needed unless specifically requested. That's my opinion at least. Hope it helps.

[Ikmalmn]

Ikmalmn grabs his emergency defibrillator out of his medical backpack

Ikmalmn puts the emergency defibrillator paddles onto Miserable Medics Sharing Tips: The Thread

WEEEEEEEEEE WE WOO WE WOO DUT DUT

Defibrillation successful

Miserable Medics Sharing Tips: The Thread gasps!

Ikmalmn shouts "Thread revived, now get posting marines! Those xeno's ain't going to beat our ass this time!"

[Ikmalmn]

Alrighty, slight forum RP aside, I was planning to revive this thread due to it being linked directly from the wiki on the subpage of medic. Seeing that people will probably come in and learn from the wiki for guidance, they will probably click this link for the thread which is by far I'm my opinion, the better link of thread out of all the links for tips.

With the greytide drawing closer and the number of new medics rises, we must educate and help their poor souls to become a better and robust medics! Hand out tips and ask questions, we veterans of the medic roles are willing to help and guide!


I'll first of all start with a tip on what many new medics have not acknowledge yet and that is when it says that "infected wound detected, disinfect wound on X limb"

From what I saw, new medics simply inject or give their patients spacecilin/antibiotics. Which is kinda the wrong thing to react when dealing with this simple problem. All you have to do is very simply, apply a ATK (Advance Trauma Kit) onto the wound again. To which, it will get disinfected. Done and easy!

[Karmac]

Remember stage 3 infections are only curable by ODing your patient on spessacillin

[Challenger]

Never use stasis bags unless it's a situation that FORCES a medevac, like delimbing or larval infection. Otherwise you're putting someone out of the round until they get to cryo on the Almayer where they could normally have taken two splints and a pill and kept fighting.

Also get good at pain management. Learn what puts someone in paincrit and what doesn't. 20 burns on the left hand and 15 on the right leg? That guy's gonna go down in a minute if it doesn't get treated, burns hurt. 20 oxygen loss from low blood and 60 brute to a splinted leg? They'll be able to walk around even without any patching, though rather slowly. Someone's at 100% health but missing a hand? Tramadol alone won't get them walking, you need to add inaprovaline (a mild painkiller that stacks with tramadol). Phantom pain's a bitch.

Pain is REALLY important to know to keep YOURSELF alive so you can go out there and treat more people. Yesterday I played a round of WO where a hunter got me in a river with no one around and I took tons of brute damage and lost my entire arm. I pre-dragged my pocket tram bottle to my sprite to open it, popped one as soon as I got up, scanned myself with a health analyzer, patched all the burns I got from my assailant bleeding over me, took my reserve medkit out of my bag and dropped it on the ground, click dragged it onto me, took out the inaprovaline pill bottle, click dragged THAT onto me, and popped two inaprov pills, then got to work healing the rest of myself. Constantly dosing myself on inaprovaline and tramadol after that got me up to orange-yellow pain indicator and I shuffled around healing people a bit slower than usual for a solid twenty minutes until a doctor could replace my arm.

[Sargeantmuffinman]

Do not, revive a marine, 10 meters next to the combat zone.

Drag them out of the hot zone first.

[Ikmalmn]

If the damage is LESS than 25 brute/burn. Be reluctant on using pills. Just slap that ATK (Advance Trauma Kit) or ABK (Advance Burn Kit) on their ass and it'll heal almost instantly soon after. Unless the situation differs (in combat, surplus of pills), save that pill for someone else.

The ATK alone will heal around 10-15 brute and it is easily self healed by the patient. ABK heals around 10.

Also, when dealing in a situation where for example, there's multiple critically wounded and 1 dead deffibable guy. Prioritize the critically wounded first and do triage. Person with a damage organ gets healed to stabilized condition (which means he won't die just a few seconds later) . Then the guy next with bleeding. Then the dead deffibable guy. The last thing you want is to have medic tunnel vision and only focus on the dead guy when the other critically wounded patients could have died. Which is going to be a waste of your limited defib charge.

Remember, stabilized does not mean being in the orange or red. Stabilized means that the patient health is increasing and not going down. To which point, you can simply ignore them to prioritize others.

[Garrison]

If you can get your hands on a Hypospray, use it to administer your low dosage pills like bicaridine or peridaxon. Easiest way to do this is to drop it on the ground, open your pill bottle, and insert them into the Hypospray. Bear in mind it holds 30 units (anymore and the meds are wasted) and that if it hits 0, you'll need to inject liquid medication into it using a syringe. You can also use a syringe to take the meds out.

Be careful when treating a crit patient with toxins. If he's got Dylovene and you give him inapprov, it'll turn into Tricord. However, you can also use this to your advantage since your anti tox pills and inapprov are around 25-30 units, you can exploit this chemistry to give someone a max dosage of Tricord.


What goes through my mind when gearing up as a Field Medic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf5Sezj0QKI

[Challenger]

Oh god the inaprov anti toxins pill thing.

25u anti toxins + 30u inaprov = 50u tricordrazine. Now your patient's gone blind.

Every advanced medic does this. Don't do it.

[Garrison]

Oh god the inaprov anti toxins pill thing.

25u anti toxins + 30u inaprov = 50u tricordrazine. Now your patient's gone blind.

Every advanced medic does this. Don't do it.

Touche, I overlooked the fact that the synthesis usually gives more then what you put in. Any tricord dosage over 30 will render your patient blind/retarded.

[kooarbiter]

How often do you other medics find dealing with Tox damage? Acid spit/clouds only do burn and infections are pretty damn rare

[Melioa]

@kooarbiter usually when another medic overdoses some poor marine on tricordrazine and then books it so they don't get yelled at.

I'm far from experienced but a useful trick I've learned somewhere is that you can 'reset' the 40 second defib timer even when you fail to defib a patient due to heavy injury. This has let me bring a few others who have had monstrous amounts of damage to stable condition so they could get patched up proper.

Also, as a medic, getting familiar with one or two of the more lucid marines in your squad can give you loyal helpers. Especially valuable when everyone's scattering, and there are three bodies that need dragging and several angry ravagers that would like to add you to the pile.

[Ikmalmn]

I'm far from experienced but a useful trick I've learned somewhere is that you can 'reset' the 40 second defib timer even when you fail to defib a patient due to heavy injury. This has let me bring a few others who have had monstrous amounts of damage to stable condition so they could get patched up proper.

There's a slight correction to this, the timer, which is 5 minutes, will only reset upon a successful defibrillation. If it fails, it insteads heals 10 of everything on the patient. This is very helpful when you have a patient who is above the successful defibrillation threshold of 200 (in total of all the damage) for which you can keep defibbing him until they get below the threshold. Keep in mind that you have only 8 charges in those defibs, so make them count!

How often do you other medics find dealing with Tox damage? Acid spit/clouds only do burn and infections are pretty damn rare

Toxin damage are rare, but do happen, so it useful to keep a pill of it. Also, keep in mind that infection can be very easily be healed with your advanced trauma kit.

My tip is too mix your Dylovene (anti-tox) with another uncommonly used pill like Dexalin. This way, you can save 2 spots for the price of 1!

[Symbiosis]

The biggest thing I see Medics run out of is quick clot. Using QC Autoinjectors takes up a TON of inventory spots in your medic belt. If you take 3-4 you've got far too few, and if you take 6-7 you're probably skimping on other stuff.

So what's the solution?

Bicaridine/QC mix in an Inaprovaline bottle. Syringe 10 QC injectors, 6 Bicaridine injectors, then put 'em in a bottle. The Bicaridine should help heal the damage the QC causes, and even without a hypospray a syringe takes 2-3 seconds. Just be careful to only use one injection per! 2.5 QC is enough to do the job.

[Karmac]

I mean you could just grab syringe cases from first aid kits and dump whatevers in them and then use them to hold 6 QC's.

[Challenger]

Also you don't need 2.5u of QC in your mix. My hypo mix has never failed to stop internal bleeding and it gives 1.6u QC per injection. Honestly you could probably pull that down to like 0.25u or something and it'd still work. Any extra just applies more brute damage to the patient.

[Garrison]

Also you don't need 2.5u of QC in your mix. My hypo mix has never failed to stop internal bleeding and it gives 1.6u QC per injection. Honestly you could probably pull that down to like 0.25u or something and it'd still work. Any extra just applies more brute damage to the patient.

Could you elaborate a bit on this? Cause I've always been doubtful on mixing drugs with a hypospray. Usually I just use it as a quick means of administering Peridaxon or Bicard/Kelo

[Challenger]

it's just basic math. Hypos store 30u, inject 5 at a time.
Take a bottle of inaprovaline, syringe out 5u, syringe in 3u QC, it's 55u inaprov, 3u QC which is 95% inaprov 5% QC. Pour that bottle directly into a hypo and you know that each injection of 5u will have .95 * 5 = 4.75u inaprov and 0.25u QC.