The Terrible Heal/Hurt Gun

Long ago, some guy had a brilliant idea. They were going to play Uber Game's Monday Night Combat. A class-based third person shooter that's actually a lot of fun to play. Well, the demo is, anyway. That's what I played and that's what I liked.

The game has a class known as the Support, an overweight Italian-sounding fellow who takes the roles of both the Engineer and the Medic to serve as the game's primary support character. Which explains his name, I guess.

In any case, he came armed with a unique primary weapon: the Heal/Hurt gun. It does exactly what it sounds like: it heals and overheals allies, and hurts enemies. A little toggle twitched in the guy's brain. This heal/hurt gun, it heals people! It's exactly like the Medigun! But it also hurts them. So it's better than the Medigun! Why not give the Medic a heal/hurt gun? The "hurt" action will behave exactly like the heal action, but it'll attach to enemies and hurt them for damage equivalent to reverse healing. What's so bad about that?

The most obvious answer is that an inversed medigun would do terrible damage. 24DPS? That's miserable. The solution is to up the damage, but how much? It's a weapon that latches on to the victim. It's actually less challenging to aim than the flamethrower, so it couldn't be that much. Time spent hurting instead of healing is time that could be spent healing, or living to find more patients in need of healing. Realistically, time spent hurting ends in time spent sitting in spawn, thinking about how close you were to killing the guy currently wearing your blood as decorative face paint.

Of course, the Medigun also has to lose something in order to gain any sort of combat ability. So people start by reducing the amount of health the medigun can heal. Usually, they move on to swapping out the ubercharge. Of course, the hurt function isn't like the ubercharge. There's no conflict between healing and ubercharging. You're still doing the same job. Healing and hurting, however, are opposites and require you to focus on two very different targets. Realistically you can only be doing one at a time, even if you could technically be doing both.

Ultimately, there's no reason for a heal/hurt gun to exist. The Medic has a hurting gun: it's his sidearm, the Syringe Gun. Giving him a second hurt gun, one that's meant to be sidegraded against a pure-healing weapon, is invariably going to be bad at healing and certainly can't match the syringe gun for damage output or range. By dividing the gun's goals, it's made weaker on both fronts.