In every shooter, ever, and normally most other genres, I am the support guy. I'm the guy chucking you pre-cautionary medic packs in case your about to get hurt; even if I'm playing the assault class my primary job is chucking down ammo for the engineers and medics. I like the way Battlefield recently has had it's classes, particularly Bad Company 2. But now they are, for me, radically changing it and also ruining it. I do have my reasons though and it also involves disagreeing with what DICE has come out and said is fact which is either saying they are lying or have interpreted the stats to their particular likings. 
 
I don't know if it was just me though? But I found myself one of many medics in a multi-player game of Bad Company 2. I reckon it was quite even with Assault because of the M60 and the point gain from reviving people. Whenever I saw someone down I would revive them and every time I killed someone there was a good chance they were being revived. This was particularly annoying when you kill 3 guys in a squad and the last guy runs in circles resurrecting the others who in turn resurrect even more and you end up being outnumbered. 
 
Now for those of you who don't know there's now Combat Medic and Support. I feel like my role in the game is now useless. I cant choose a support class to be one of the unique players that like to support because now there's going to be millions of Combat Medics. Why would any of the run and gun players choose another class when they can use an assault rifle AND heal people? 
 
Has anyone played the game here? What sort of classes are being picked? Most importantly: how many medics and combat medics are running around? 
 
Do people that play BC2 or have played BF3: do you appreciate medics and will you appreciate them less if there's thousands running around? 
 
(apologies for any inaccuracies, spelling mistakes or general ramblings. I'm quite tired.)

I understand your concerns, Chloe's butt.
 
In BC2, I mainly played engineer/sniper. I'd support as much as I could with both classes. With sniper, I'd throw the motion mines quite liberally, next to or in the direction my team mates were going. Motion mine assists came aplenty when I was around. 
 
And yeah, I love anyone that supports me in any fashion. It gets me all giddy and fuzzy inside, and that's why I favor team based shooters. I do plenty of supporting too so rest assured I don't play team based shooters for a free ride!
 
I guess we'll see what goes down with Battlefield 3 when it's ramping up for release. All this talk of Battlefield makes me really want to play BC2 again.

Medic is a class that can move from any class without things going to complete shit. Ok, maybe not snipers. I will, for one, appreciate this move, because I didn't quite find that mixing medic and a support gunner class was the way to go. An assault is always running around doing medium range attacking. They are pretty much everywhere, so it's a sound decision to put the medic class there and make the support class focusing on laying down suppressive fire. Also, you can still customize the depth of the assault class. If you want to be more full blown assault, you can choose the grenade launcher instead of a medkit, or was it the defibrillators?

Just because you get the medic on the assault, doesn't mean everyone will want to carry those packs, since they have to forsake more firepower and the GL-attachment. The support class will become important in other ways, like giving ammo and using the new feature where constant suppression fire from a LMG will create stress shakes on the opponent, making it harder for them to aim and shoot.

Either way. I think these classes sound like they work better than the combinations they did for BC2. Then you can, of course, argue that it sucks that they "only" have four kits, but that is of course a matter of how you choose to customize the kit.

I miss the way classes worked in BF2 where Medic was a designated class with it's own ups and downs. Kinda disappointed they combined it with assault, but at least they didn't leave Support as medics again so now there won't be revive chains of medics wielding M60s any more.

They have a new suppression mechanic so they had to rework the classes to accommodate it. No big deal. I'm confident that DICE know's their shit when it comes to balancing classes in interesting ways, BC2 was superb in that respect.

I don't play BF, but I want to know what this thread is about. AS it stands...well, perhaps OP should use less commas or something. I'm not clear on what the discussion is about here.

I CAN tell you that I usually play the ultimate support champ in LoL, and enemy teams have been known to swear at me alot. Good times.

They have a new suppression mechanic so they had to rework the classes to accommodate it. No big deal. I'm confident that DICE know's their shit when it comes to balancing classes in interesting ways, BC2 was superb in that respect.

I understand your concerns, Chloe's butt.
 
In BC2, I mainly played engineer/sniper. I'd support as much as I could with both classes. With sniper, I'd throw the motion mines quite liberally, next to or in the direction my team mates were going. Motion mine assists came aplenty when I was around. 
 
And yeah, I love anyone that supports me in any fashion. It gets me all giddy and fuzzy inside, and that's why I favor team based shooters. I do plenty of supporting too so rest assured I don't play team based shooters for a free ride!  I guess we'll see what goes down with Battlefield 3 when it's ramping up for release. All this talk of Battlefield makes me really want to play BC2 again.

Medic is a class that can move from any class without things going to complete shit. Ok, maybe not snipers. I will, for one, appreciate this move, because I didn't quite find that mixing medic and a support gunner class was the way to go. An assault is always running around doing medium range attacking. They are pretty much everywhere, so it's a sound decision to put the medic class there and make the support class focusing on laying down suppressive fire. Also, you can still customize the depth of the assault class. If you want to be more full blown assault, you can choose the grenade launcher instead of a medkit, or was it the defibrillators? Just because you get the medic on the assault, doesn't mean everyone will want to carry those packs, since they have to forsake more firepower and the GL-attachment. The support class will become important in other ways, like giving ammo and using the new feature where constant suppression fire from a LMG will create stress shakes on the opponent, making it harder for them to aim and shoot.

Either way. I think these classes sound like they work better than the combinations they did for BC2. Then you can, of course, argue that it sucks that they "only" have four kits, but that is of course a matter of how you choose to customize the kit.

I'm pretty confident that DICE knows what they're doing as far as class balance, but it'll be hard to tell how everything works together until the game is actually out for a few weeks.

I've played 600+ hours of BC2 and I think the classes were pretty well balanced. At the same time, there is room for improvement (and medics with LMGs is weird). The biggest thing about putting medpacks/defib on the assault class to me is it takes away the ability to give myself ammo when leading the attack. It's really useful to be able to re-up your own ammo and grenades (smoke for laying cover, 40mm grenade to knock out cover/ knock down objectives). I understand they are trying to address the issue of assault players rushing forward and dying and not having any medics around to revive them, but I think it's going to create more situations where the forward pushing players are going to run out of ammo and be forced to fall back to find support(or say fuck it and keep pushing with their pistol).

Another big factor is how you play and what is viable in any given situation. For example, I switched to playing Hardcore a few months after the game came out and never really went back. Medics in general are a lot less useful in hardcore mode, more often than not if you get hit in HC, you are dead. And with no radar/map it is really hard for a medic to find a downed teammate unless said medic is really paying attention to the teammates around him, and even then if the medic doesn't actually see his teammate go down, it's almost impossible to find him in time to revive. With no regenerating health in hardcore, medics are greatly appreciated if you've had a red screen for 20 minutes, but if I get shot up and have a red screen and there is no medic in sight, I just push out to die, or fight my way toward a medic.

I'm really curious to see how the Suppression Mechanic works and how effective it is. I am picturing it being like : if bullets start flying in the window I was just peeking out of, its going to make my screen a bit blurry and shaky - that could be either really cool or really bad, if I can return fire out the window without it being completely inaccurate, I think the suppression mechanic could be really cool. But, if some douche just spraying at the side of a house makes it impossible for me to peak out one of the windows and take him down, then it might suck.

Personally I liked the way it was in BF2 but that's just me, I always found it funny to see medic's dive at corpses in hope that they would be the first one to revive and get the points, ah those were the days mindless medic spam.... it worked fine too which is even stranger other the the odd time you got caught in a loop of being revived and murdered but that can still happen in the newer BF's from what I remember.   I really should just play BF2 again and stop my bitching...

Guessing you didn't play 2142, the classes worked extremely well in that game and they are almost the same in Battlefield 3.  Support was always about dropping ammo and carrying huge LMG's in the past before Bad Company games ever were released.

I'm sure DICE knows what they're doing :O

I like this change. 
 
I think it'd be cool if the Support class got the chance to choose between reviving and ammo, though. Or maybe even both. So support can be more supporty but support isn't the go to end all role, as Assault can do some healings too.

It's not a change. It's Battlefield. Bad Company 2 was the change.

I would say wait for till there is more info or until you play it yourself.  There are a lot of questions at this point.

@SeriouslyNow said:

It's not a change. It's Battlefield. Bad Company 2 was the change.

Bad Company, and Bad Company 2 were in my opinion a test bed for their development engine rather than to call it a true sequel to battlefield 2. I just started playing battlefield 2 again for giggles. The class options are kind of ridiculous.

Spec Ops

Assault

Medic

Support

Engineer

Anti Tank

So many choices I almost feel I'm missing one.

In bad company two the engineer is also anti tank, so you get mines, a rocket launcher, shotgun/assault rifle/sub machine gun something or other I can't remember off the top of my head, I just dick around with it on ps3 I don't really like multiplayer from bad company, it's just a yawn fest.

That's smart!

Now there is only 4 different classes, lets be real. Anyone that has logged as much time as I have on BF2 knows that most time everyone is either medic or support. Before everyone was using assault before noob tubes were nerfed, and spec ops when you had plastique ninja stars.

When they made Special Operations, you still had all of those classes but then those added perks such as zip lines, grappling hooks, etc, etc. And then you didn't have to argue to get someone on your team to use one of the more useful classes nobody liked to be. Most of the time only the Armor guys or commander only played engineer.

It's just more useful to condense all of those things into what everyone picks, we all know it's fun to play sniper, but it's no fun when everyone in the damn server is a sniper and not helping out the team, at least make the sniper a tad more useful or versatile in case they do try to assist. I don't think the BF3 demo sniper rifle was a camp type rifle but more of a tactical battle rifle decent for long and medium range.

I played the bf3 demo at E3 and only played Assault/Medic, Support, and Engineer/anti tank. I totally blanked out about using the rocket launcher for that class while I played since I was knifed. I just got more kills and was more useful as support so I stuck with that.

I don't think any class has a real advantage over any other besides whats really suited to your playstyle.

Karkand is a perfect example of what you fear since the first fence of the game where the US comes into the MEC territory there is nothing but grenades getting chucked from the first flag onto the hills, and guess who is there as backup? Support getting ammo points for reloading your teams nade spammers, and medics to revive the support guys and the nade spammers and to spam health bags.

Maybe you were just oblivious to this type of play or battlefield BC is just so layered that something simplistic as that doesn't happen due to the limit of crap you can throw out at a time. And all the extra perks you can assign to your load out.

Dice is onto something great, I've already dusted off my x52 in hopes that the air combat in bf2 is going to bring me another 6 years of joy and dedicated server ownership again.

Wayne

@Adziboy: I always found it strange to put the LMG on the medic class so I feel this is a welcome change. Especially with the new focus on suppression, where the LMG will become more stationery it feels appropriate to give the medic abilities back to the more mobile troopers. I know I wouldn't want to be lying on the ground with a big plus next to me on the map...but he aint moving 'cause he's keeping the enemies suppressed. You want the medic up front, running around.

It's not a change. It's Battlefield. Bad Company 2 was the change.

@Adziboy: I always found it strange to put the LMG on the medic class so I feel this is a welcome change. Especially with the new focus on suppression, where the LMG will become more stationery it feels appropriate to give the medic abilities back to the more mobile troopers. I know I wouldn't want to be lying on the ground with a big plus next to me on the map...but he aint moving 'cause he's keeping the enemies suppressed. You want the medic up front, running around.

all this 2142 class talk made me want to play BF 2142 ... 
 
anyone wanna join me?

@Adziboy said:

@SeriouslyNow said:

It's not a change. It's Battlefield. Bad Company 2 was the change.

Ermm... changing it BACK to normal means theres a change, right? Like someone said, BC2 was like a test bed for BF3 and I liked the way they made it.

Nothing's been changed back. This is the way BF2142 works.

@Adziboy said:

@SeriouslyNow said:

It's not a change. It's Battlefield. Bad Company 2 was the change.

Ermm... changing it BACK to normal means theres a change, right? Like someone said, BC2 was like a test bed for BF3 and I liked the way they made it.

Nothing's been changed back. This is the way BF2142 works.

all this 2142 class talk made me want to play BF 2142 ...  anyone wanna join me?

@Ahmad_Metallic said:

all this 2142 class talk made me want to play BF 2142 ... anyone wanna join me?

Funny you mention it, I downloaded ea's origin platform and amazingly all my games that went missing on the old ea downloader are now miraculously available for me to download and play again. So of course I installed it but there was like 5 servers with people actually playing and I had forgot all about the super retarded menu/kit selection. So I immediately was inspired to reinstall bf2

I think making it assault is a brilliant idea. From the sound of it, you get to decide what you want to do, be the traditional assault class with grenades and the harder hitting arsenal, or swap that out for the medical kit. Both gets you further in the field.

@Ahmad_Metallic said:

all this 2142 class talk made me want to play BF 2142 ... anyone wanna join me?

Funny you mention it, I downloaded ea's origin platform and amazingly all my games that went missing on the old ea downloader are now miraculously available for me to download and play again. So of course I installed it but there was like 5 servers with people actually playing and I had forgot all about the super retarded menu/kit selection. So I immediately was inspired to reinstall bf2

@Ahmad_Metallic said:

@137 said:

@Ahmad_Metallic said:

all this 2142 class talk made me want to play BF 2142 ... anyone wanna join me?

Funny you mention it, I downloaded ea's origin platform and amazingly all my games that went missing on the old ea downloader are now miraculously available for me to download and play again. So of course I installed it but there was like 5 servers with people actually playing and I had forgot all about the super retarded menu/kit selection. So I immediately was inspired to reinstall bf2

did you download the new 1.51 patch for 2142? That's oughta show you several populated servers

Yeah, EA Origin automatically will patch the games to the newest versions before letting you play.

I just am having a hard time thinking either the assault/medic, or this support role will be fun to play. Imagine people really taking those roles in earnest? Yeah, me neither. But it could totally work..we'll see soon enough when the beta starts. Really anxious, and curious for that.