KF2 Field Medic Guide: Skills, Loadouts and Healing Tips

The Field Medic is the backbone of a Killing Floor 2 team. This guide is aimed at Hell on Earth with a level 20+ Medic, though most tips also help at level 10 and make lower difficulties easy. In a 6-player Hell on Earth match a Medic is close to mandatory: the team can win without one, but teams without a Medic often wipe as early as wave 1.

Two goals: mitigate and negate damage

• Damage mitigation: healing, plus Coagulant Booster damage resistance.
• Damage negation: Adrenaline Shot speed so allies can dodge, killing or focusing ZEDs before they hit, and tanking.

You are most effective when you do as many of these at the same time as you can. For perk basics see Medic perk.

Skills

In team play take the buffing skills on the left side of the tree. All of them.

Level	Take	Skip	Why
5	Symbiotic Health	Resilience	Resilience is good only while armor lasts, and armor does not regenerate. Symbiotic Health lets you heal yourself with every dart you land.
10	Adrenaline Shot	Combatant Doctor	Adrenaline gives +30% speed (versus +10%), saves allies from hits they could otherwise dodge, and with darts you hold roughly +40% most of the wave.
15	Focus Injection	Acidic Rounds	Acidic Rounds is called the worst skill in the game: tiny poison damage, big ZEDs resist it, and it panics ZEDs toward your team. Focus Injection needs 4 darts for +20% damage.
20	Coagulant Booster	Battle Surgeon	+30% damage resistance for you and your patient helps against Fleshpound double hits and Scrake bursts. Healing is a fixed 10 HP per second, and the booster raises effective health.
25	Airborne Agent	Zedative	Gas kills groups of Clots, Stalkers and Crawlers without firing, and a new burst triggers whenever Zed Time resets.

Weapons

• HMTech-101 Pistol: widely seen as the best tier 1 weapon for value. 200 Dosh and 1 block of weight add 150% healing potential, darts recharge, and 20 damage per bullet one-shots headshots on most Clots. Buy it on any class if you can.
• HMTech-201 SMG: weak damage, but you buy it for extra darts. Each Medic weapon has its own dart pool, so switching doubles healing output. It costs 650 Dosh and sells for 487, a cheap stopgap before the rifle.
• HMTech-301 Shotgun: weakest shotgun per shot (6 pellets of 20 damage) and not worth 1100 Dosh. Good stumble power, 40 charges per dart.
• HMTech-401 Assault Rifle: the main purchase. Best healing (30 of 100 charges per dart, three darts at once), 35 damage per bullet, 40-round magazine, high rate of fire and low recoil. It lets you one-shot headshot anything smaller than a Gorefast.
• Hemogoblin: applies bleed and debuffs big ZEDs (reduced damage and speed, easier stumble), but does not raise damage taken, reloads and switches very slowly, and is expensive. Mostly a solo or niche choice.

Loadouts

• All Medic, All Day: rifle, pistol, shotgun. For low-level Medics lacking dart regeneration; redundant above level 15.
• Big ZED Killer: rifle, pistol, Pulverizer. Useful if the team struggles with Fleshpounds, and the Pulverizer can block and parry, but it is expensive.
• Unreliable Scrake Hunter: rifle, pistol, Crossbow. The stun is unreliable and often just enrages the Scrake.
• Utilitarian (author's favorite): rifle, pistol, Double-Barrel Boomstick, Katana or SMG. The Boomstick kills almost anything but Scrakes and Fleshpounds, and jumping then firing both barrels launches you away from threats (you can dodge Scrakes, Fleshpounds, Husk fireballs and even Patriarch rockets, or reach high places and cancel fall damage). The Katana parries and can de-rage Fleshpounds.
• Hemophiliac: rifle plus Hemogoblin. Only sensible for teams relying on body damage (Firebugs, Demolitionists). Slow switching hurts your healing.

Money management

• Buy the HMTech-401 first. Do not give dosh away until you have it, except in trusted exceptions.
• Do not buy armor early. Large ZEDs are not around yet; a rule of thumb is no armor until Fleshpounds show up.
• If you cannot afford the rifle, the SMG is a cheap interim buy: skip extra ammo, use it for a wave or two, sell it and buy the rifle.
• You do not need full ammo, armor or grenades on the rifle purchase.
• Other weapons are optional. Medic is a cheap class, so pass dosh to expensive ones such as Support and SWAT, and complete your own loadout last.

Basic tips

• Target priority: heal low-health allies first, with burning allies at the very top (a single dart cuts burn duration and damage by half, so total damage is about a quarter). Then low-health players running from ZEDs. Berserkers are lower priority because of resistance and shorter DoT.
• Fire darts and switch weapons constantly. As soon as someone takes any damage, fire 3 darts from the rifle, then switch to the pistol for the next ally. The unequipped weapon regenerates darts while you heal.
• Buff stacks last 5 seconds from the last dart and the timer resets on every hit, so one dart every 5 seconds keeps stacks up.
• Darts heal 15 HP each at 10 HP per second, grenades only about 5 HP per second and take at least 2.5 seconds to burst versus under 0.5 seconds for a dart. Save grenades for when line of sight will be lost, ZEDs body-block a target, or too many allies need healing, and throw them in advance.
• Do not tunnel vision. Look around at your team every few seconds.

Advanced tips

• Do not pocket a single player. Healing is a fixed 10 HP per second no matter how many darts you fire, so after about 4 darts switch to someone else or shoot the trash threatening them.
• Do not run and heal at once. Darts need about 0.2 seconds to lock on and cannot while you run. Locking works during a reload, so you can lock on, cancel the reload with a melee bash and fire.
• Jump while running: you keep momentum in the air and can reload, switch, heal or shoot.
• Kill trash when it helps. If an ally is swarmed, fire darts to reset the timer, then shoot instead of firing more darts. Also clear ZEDs blocking your heal line.
• Tank only in clutch moments: dart the ally, kill trash, step in front, absorb hits with armor and resistance, then run with your speed boost.
• Use Adrenaline Shot to reach an ally out of sight: dart anyone, even yourself with the syringe for 10%.
• Focus Injection is multiplicative, not additive, so it is stronger on players with many bonuses (such as Sharpshooter), and can turn a 2-shot kill into a 1-shot on big ZED takedowns. Dart the player before the shot; at full health it will not buff you but still buffs them, with no lock-on.
• Use grenades for groups of 3+ large ZEDs by throwing them behind your team. Throwing a healing grenade at the foot of a welded door poisons the ZEDs behind it; poison does not stack, so wait before the next one.
• Use Airborne Agent offensively during Zed Time on Crawlers, Clots and Stalkers, but beware of Gorefiends.

Related guides: Medic perk levels and team composition and roles.