R.I.P Vaccinator - 02/07/15

The gunmettle update broke the vaccinator into scrap metal. May it find peace.

A guide to using Vaccinator effectively, both for PvP and also MvM, contains everything you need to know to start using this beast properly, from strategies, screenshots to gameplay videos.

Introduction

Due to the upcomming gunmettle update that basically destroyed the vaccinator from a skill based weapon into useless scrap metal.

Fixed a bug that gave Vaccinator patients full crit immunity.
Vaccinator base resist does not grant any crit resistance.
Vaccinator Uber deploys now always take exactly 1 bar of Uber charge.
Vaccinator Uber deploys give the patient a 2.5 second bubble of 75% damage resistance of the current resist type and full crit resistance to that type. These bubbles do not disappear if the medic stops targeting the current patient. Multiple bubbles of different types can be applied to the same patient or multiple patients given the same resist uber each consuming 1 charge.
Vaccinator uber build now suffers the same penalties as other mediguns when it comes to multiple medics on the same target and max overhealed patients.
Decreased the bonus healing a Medic received for properly selecting the right damage resistance type from 25% of incoming damage to 10% of incoming damage
Added Penalty of 66% decreased uber build rate while healing a overhealed patient

This guide shall now receive no further updates. It will be left here as a reminder of a time that is now gone.

I wish to add that though these 8 years were fun, I as an individual can no longer stand the changes made to the game and that I have decided to leave TF2 [ probably for good this time around ]


Any dumb comments made like "the vaccinator sucks" before reading the guide will get you blocked. Because the guide is "how not to suck at using the vaccinator".
If you dont like the vaccinator and have no intentions of ever reading the guide and giving it a try, dont comment. Also any other dumb comments resembling thoese made by some people down in the comments list will recieve the same treatment.

I have no problems if you can present a legit argument, but what you find legit might not be legit in mine and the world's eyes. And if you are gonna attempt to tell me something I have already shown is untrue in the guide? Well...

As elitist as this sounds, I have enough of dealing with idoits who do the above. You have been warned.

To everyone else, you are welcomed to make comments and sugestions, if you wish to see something added, give a shout and I will see if its possible.
03/06
4k+ views and 70+ ratings, I am pleasntly surprised this guide made it that far, Now, I have read your comments and have added some extra sections. These arent completed yet and will be continually updated.

05/06
7.6k views and 125 ratings? When I made this guide, I never expected it to get this popular.
Split [Advanced vaccinator usage] into three seperate sections, updated and added new content to these three sections. Reuploading gifs for the initial sections. [no one watches the videos apparently]
Editing of all sections currently completed, important screenshots replaced by GIFs


07/06
Updated and edited all sections, combined barrage defender and crit killer into a single section. Expanded breaking the myths, Expanded advanced vaccinator usage. Added a few more GIFs, edited ALL sections

Introduction

This is as the tittle says, a guide solely dedicated to the least loved medigun, The vaccinator.
Let me be clear before I begin, the vaccinator requires alot of skill from the user to be effective, but it will reward you for your effort to learn to utilize it.

The vaccinator is a weapon that should be used for, to use the german word for it, Blitzkriegs, this applies to both defense and offense mind you. By defense I mean clearing areas enemies are starting to hunker down in while offense should be a no-brainer. Used correctly, it is a weapon that will allow you to support and maintain a push faster and better than other medi-guns can.

This guide will hopefully:
Explain the stats of the vaccinator
Help you understand a "what to do in this situation" delima
Touch in depth on the vaccinator and its usage in PvP
Touch in depth on the vaccinator and its usage in MvM
Have videos showing game-play from both PvP and MvM

This guide will not:
Make you a pro right away. <You are gonna need practice, alot of it.>
Allow you to make stupid comments. If you talk before you think, prepare to be publicy humiliated for entertaiment and then blocked from further comments.


K got all that? Then without further ado, lets begin.

Vaccinator stats

Stats from backpack:




What they dont tell you:

When healing, both you and your healing target gain crit resistance to that damage type

You have 4 ubercharges

You can Capture points/ hold intel / push payloads while ubered.

Uberchage builds at same rate even if patient is fully overhealed.

Vaccinator in PvP

Now that you seen the stats, I am willing to bet you think 10% damage resistance while healing is nothing right?
Well before you sit on that thought, keep in mind that
1) You are constantly healing your patient
2) Any damage done of corresponding resistance is returned to you as 25% of heals.
3) You have crit immunity of that resistance type by just healing.
4) You can deploy multiple ubercharges when ♥♥♥♥ hits the fan

But you probably dont want to listen to a lecture right? People only believe what they see after all, so here you go. I promise you wont be disappointed.

Like what you see? If you dont, theres the back button. As you can see, if used correctly, the vaccinator opens up new options and increases the pace of your combat several fold. You no longer have to sit back and wait for ubers while fearing attacks from other classes. Instead you take the fight to them.

If you didnt watch the video, its fine. I have now converted the important pictures into GIFs, they are mainly horrible in quality, they spasm when i uber and recieve heals... basically every screenshot does this and I dont know how to retify this so its still best you watch the video.

Vaccinator: Prevention is better than cure

The vaccinator is fundamentally used to prevent and minimize damage to your team, unlike its other medi-gun counterparts which seek to instead recover damage done to your team. Remember this as you use it.

The Crit Killer

Providing a passive critical immunity to the corresponding resistance type. Rings a bell?

Snipers
Ambassadors
Diamondback
Airblasing reserve shooters
Plog pyros
Backburner
Jarate
Buff banner
Fan o war
Sydney sleeper
Cow mangler
Kritz medics
Crit - a cola
Etc, etc

Congratulations, you have just nullified these people just by merely healing with the correct resistance.

For snipers, a quickscope will not be able to kill you, a fully charged headshot can still kill you as it does 132 damage, however you can uber yourself if you know there is a good sniper around



Damage from a fully charged headshot while ubered







Pyro deploying plog? No problems
He cant get past the resist, and i got healed in the mean time.





However, keep in mind that when you uber and recieve critical hits, you expand more charge

Taken from wiki:
"When the ÜberCharge is deployed, both the Medic and the heal target (if applicable) gain 75% damage resistance to the selected type of damage. In addition, the bonus damage of critical hits and mini-crits is completely negated, though at the expense of a certain amount of ÜberCharge per attack (-75% per explosion, -1% per flame particle/flare, and -3% per bullet (note that attacks with multiple pellets, such as shotguns, still only deduct -3% per shot regardless of how many pellets hit))."

Ubering when an incomming crocket is about to hit will instantly deplete your entire uber bar [All 4 ubercharges]. I am unsure if this is a bug or its normal because honestly it should only deplete 75% of a ubercharge, not the entire uber bar.
But this dosent mean you dont uber under a confirmed incomming critical hit condition, If theres a need for it, you better do it. I will touch on ubering in a later section.


The Barrage Defender

If you have watched the video you will have noticed many a time i have defended against barrages of soldiers / heavies / sentry fire / pyro with negligible health lost. So how do I achieve this? The key lies in your ubers.











Remember that you have 4 ubercharges, and that each ubercharge alone can save you from up to 8 stickybombs worth of damage at one instant without any external healing from your healing target. These ubercharges have a 50% faster build rate compared to stock, which basically means you will build one ubercharge at least 600% faster than a stock medigun will. Its actually faster than that because your uber builds at same rate regardless of patient overheal amount. It dosent just end there as any damage dealt to your healing target which corresponds to the resistance, returns as 25% health to you.

This allows you to take hits for your teammates if you are high on health while they are low on health <can be seen when I arggo the sentry off the heavy> while your constant healing recovers their hp before you switch back and regain health from the damage dealt to your healing target. I name this process Switching. [see next section for an example]

Breaking the myths

Heals here

Low on health? In dire need of another medic? Medics dont want to heal you? Well have no fear! the vaccinator will heal you if you merely resist the correct damage type.


Low on health? Lets just heal that heavy while rockets fly at him and... Voila~ back to full health.






Crashing the Sentry party

Sentry nest right up ahead! Oh no! The vaccinator cant fight sentries! Nope.
What you need to know is that sentry rockets have a slow firing speed so you can safely ignore them. When combating a sentry nest, swap to bullet resist and do switching with your patient. You will be suprised how effective it is.

Switching with your patient when combating a sentry nest, you dont even need to do this if you are healing a competent demo /soldier. Just uber him and he should have wrecked the sentry before he even takes noticeable damage





Overdose is useless

Not with the vaccinator it isnt. Overdose is a syringe gun which gives faster moving speed which exponentially increases with your uber charge up to a rate of 10%, as a vaccinator medic you will rarely expand all your charges in one go and hence can utilise this speed bonus. And before you think 10% is little, think about it this way, with that 10% speed bonus you move just slightly slower than a scout. It could mean the difference between reaching a teammate to heal and block him from damage or retreating in time before things go to hell.

Baby Steps

So how are you gonna start using the vaccinator properly?
Firstly, remember this.


This is the order that your resistance will change, you change it with the RELOAD button. If you cant get used to changing resistances and remembering the order no matter how hard you try, forget about the vaccinator right this instant, because advanced usage of the vaccinator requires you to swap just as attacks are about to land while under threat of multiple resistance types.

For this section I will be covering these few pointers
Tactical Awareness
Threat Awareness
Threat Priority
Healing Priority
Uber Priority

Your job as a vaccinator medic is to keep your team alive while they are under fire. This rings true for all medi-guns but vaccinator takes it one step further, it allows you to resist damage and crits along with healing yourself just by healing, it also allows you to spam ubers to negate a majority of that damage type so utilizing these to its fullest is the key to using vaccinator.

Tactical Awareness
Pretty standard really, keep an eye out for enemies. But instead of just registering them in your mind as "an enemy" you register them according to their classes, this allows you to constantly be ready to switch to correct resistance types. This also applies to areas where you know certain enemies will appear, for example snipers or sentry guns. An additional bit will be to keep a lookout for your teammates around you, whether any of them are in dire need of some immediate damage negation.



Which means, stop pocketing that heavy for a moment and save that demo instead so that both are alive.





Threat Awareness and Threat Priority
Normally one would not bother to look at the weapon of the enemy, but as a vaccinator medic you must be aware at all times. Different weapons are to be allocated different threat levels in your mind.

For example, a tomisalv is obviously less threatening than a brass beast and now that you have 4 ubers it basically kills it. However thats a no-brainer, let me change the threat level then. You see a beggers bazooka and a heavy coming for you, which resistance do you swap to?

The correct answer is it depends. Several factors will come into play for such a scenario, for example distance, if the beggers is far away and the heavy is nearby, you obviously do not swap to blast resistance. But despite how dumb it sounds, look at their cosmetics. If you see the beggers wearing unusuals and you see the heavy using nothing, consider preparing to change resistances. <No offense to anyone mind you>




A soldier and a Heavy attacks at the same time, which resistance do I swap to? In this case bullet, because thats doing the most damage.




The several factors you should keep in mind are:
Distance to target
Damage to your patient
Enemy skill level
Number of enemies carrying weapons of that damage type
Enemy weapon type

Enemy weapon type and skill level is a highly important factor to using vaccinator correctly, an example would be if there is a good loch-load demo whom you encounter at the same time along side a heavy and both are shooting at you, you will probably be better off swapping to blast resist than bullet

Healing Priority
Because of Vaccinators innate crit resistance, who you heals now takes alot of precedence.
A situation where you have to make a choice will be if there are snipers around, you can either
A) pocket heal a heavy which probably will survive a headshot
B) heal a class which cant and let them survive it
C) or even better, heal a sniper, let him survive the hit then get rid of the sniper





Which i failed to do so over here <too damm slow>






Krtiz Beggers incomming!! Get a heal beam on your team and foil their plans!

[Note: the guy who "died" didnt appear on the killfeed, its a dead ringer spy so I successfully saved everyone here except for the first guy who I couldnt reach in time]




Uber Priority
This part covers both Who you uber, and which you uber. Remember one thing, the moment you hit uber, you cannot change your resistances until it expires. Which means if you use it to kill a heavy, you might not be able to survive the pyro charging in. But also remmember, you have access to 4 fast charging ubers, so you can do stupid things like

without being severely screwed later on. As a vaccinator medic, your ubers save lives, an ally with low hp being hit by rockets or being chased by a pyro will normally end up dead, but a well timed correct uber will not only negate the damage dealt to your patient, it will also heal you and recover their health at the same time.

The bad
Remember, no weapon is perfect and the vaccinator is far from it. I will now cover what you should do at all times.

1. Avoid melee classes if possible, none of your resistances can help with melee. Its a sure fire way to get yourself killed by running headlong into a demoknight who knows what he is doing.

2. Always try to keep a heal beam on a teammate at all times. If you dont you are as vulnerable as anyone else. If you are being attacked without teammates to help, uber to their corresponding damage and high tail it out. Or if you have overdose equipped and sufficient ubercharges swap to it and get out of there.

3. Constant spy check, If you are really good at using vaccinator, both you and your teammates just cant die and the enemy team will soon realize that. A sniper cant snipe you, a sentry cant stop you, a plog cant crit you, a soldier / demo cant gib you, hell even a uber medic heavy cant kill you. Guess what they are gonna change to next?

4. Know your own skill level. How proficient are you with the vaccinator? If you arent very good at it yet, you might want to avoid certain situations. Or you can risk them and try learning from the failure.

That about concludes my lecture on the basics of using the vaccinator in PvP. But it dosent end here. Far from it, it begins here.

Extra: Unclassified Resistance Types

This section was added on request

Bullet Resist:
Huntsman
All Medic Syringes
Sydney Sleeper
Rescue Ranger
Short Circuit

Blast Resist:
Cow Mangler
Looese Cannon

Fire Resist:
Plog
Manmelter

Mixed Resistances:
Cow Mangler alt fire, Inital minicrited Blast damage, followed by minor Fire damage and afterburn
Ullapool Caber, Part melee, mainly Blast
Flaming Huntsman arrows, Inital bullet damage, minor Fire damage and afterburn

Unclassified / Melee: [These are unblockable]
Sandman balls
Cleaver
Pomsom
Bison

Advanced: A Step Forward

Now here is where the fun truly starts, as of this point, prepare to never stop learning new ways to deal with situations when using the vaccinator. There is a basic criteria to start the advanced parts.

You start swapping resistances according to what is hitting your patient
You can succesfully evaluate incomming threat types and levels
You start to use uber to negate incomming damage
You start feeling you can improve while using vaccinator

Once you get to the point where you are able to reliably ensure teammates and yourself dont die while using the vaccinator, you are ready for the advanced bits. Trial and error is a must here, prepare to die alot while learning.

Note: if you are unable to pull these off, its not too much of a problem if you plan to play on valve servers, these tactics are meant to be used against people who are exteremely good at what they do [like the 24/7 2fort server I love]. But if you are willing to sell your soul to the vaccinator try, you can deal with situations people deem the vaccinator to be useless in.


A Step Forward
This section depicts what to do if you dont intend to swap resistances on the go or you have just started to use the vaccinator properly.


Know your patient, know the enemy
Is your patient someone who will mindlessly charge ahead? Is he someone who will bid his time? What about the enemy? How many of what classes do the enemy have? What about the skill levels of both sides? Knowing these allows you to adapt to a situation much faster than if you dont. If you know there are 3 snipers on the enemy team, dont be an idoit and waltz around without bullet resist while travesing an open area.

Resistance and uber piortising
When you see a teammate under threat of serval damage types, there are serval ways you can go about saving your teammate
The quick and easy way is to piortise which resistance will do the most damage to your patient


In this scenario we have a poor pyro being ganged up on by both a demo and a pyro, do you leave him to his fate? Or do you be a hero and save his hide and then proceed to murder the gangers?




This is however, easier said than done, in the above scenario, do you go fire or blast? In this case, you are healing a pyro, pyros do more damage the closer an enemy is so the enemy pyro will die first, after the pyro dies the demo will still be alive and he will deffintly be spamming nades at you so the correct answer is blast resistance. Ubering will allow you to negate majority of the damage done by the enemy

Bite the bullet [and live]
As a vaccinator medic you now have a way to heal yourself on the go all while reducing the amount of damage that you will recieve. This means you can now become a meat shield for your team and come out alive.





.....................The Wrong way to do it............................................ The right way to do it.....................

This should only be done when you have sufficient hp, as can be seen in the first scenario where it was attempted while hp was in the red zone and uber came too late [came close to surviving though, heavy died at same moment I died]

Baiting your enemies
Bait them to attack you, as a vaccinator medic you are now capable of baiting enemies to attack you. This prevents attacks on your teammates and gives them a small window period to think or aim.



3 snipers? No problems!
Headshot me please. Then get your head checked later.




This does not only apply to enemy snipers, it also applies to demo stickies or even the ordinary classes like soldiers, forcing a soldier to expand his clip can be a very painful lesson for him in a moment.

Advanced: When the going gets tough, the tough get going

When the going gets tough, the tough get going
The start of mastering the vaccinator as a weapon, this section requires you to be quick on your feet [or rather hands] have good hand eye coordination and know how to apply tactics on the go.


Anticipation

Know whats around the corner. The more you play with vaccinator, the better you will get at anticipating enemy attacks. You have to know precisely what your enemy will do in a certain situation and when they will do so, if you don't? Take a plunge, guess and hope you get it right. Ubering when you know an enemy will land a hit, while conserving your ubers when you think they wont is a key factor to this. If you can do this to the point people think you are hacking / scripting, you are doing it well. Mind you as far as I know its not possible to make a hack / script for resistance changing / ubering that willl work in practical scenarios.

Swap on the go



Swapping resistances and ubering to negate the damage just before a hit happens.





What this means is to only swap your resistances to the type thats damaging you an instant before the damage hits you / patient, this is the very basic foundation of using the vaccinator in advanced scenarios while under threat of multiple damage types, if you cannot manage this no matter how much practice you try, you are gonna have to give up on a majority of the advanced bits. This is not limited to just damage done by the enemy, it also includes damage done to self by your patient




Example of reducing the damage received from ulapool caber to self the instant its deployed.




Utlise its flaws
When critical or mini crit damage is dealt to you while you are ubered, your uber bar is drained [see above section]. This sounds like a horrible flaw to using the vaccinator when there are crits, but what you dont realize is, this also allows you to change your uber resistance faster. This is exteremely important when combating classes that can minicrit you. example reserve shooter pyros.

Advanced switch
You have probably tried it on sentries by now. Now... do it on human players. As a medic, you are priority target number 1 for the enemy team. This makes use of that, dangle yourself in front of your enemies to take hits for your team then when your teammate has gotten closer, fall back and recover hp from damage done to him. This ensures several things will happen.
1.They are too busy shooting you to realize your teammate is approaching from behind you
2. Your teammate will engage the enemy in the best condition
3. The sudden change in targets is gonna be extremely annoying for the enemy
4. The enemy team is gonna hate you. ALOT



Come over here~ I promise I will heal you~






Any damage done to your patient while he is fighting the enemy will return to you as heals so you will be patched up after the fight. Any amount that is not healed can either be restored slowly from your self heal, from med kits or restored in the next enemy encounter.

Advanced: Chaos to order, Order to chaos.

The vaccinator will do just that when in the right hands, it will sow chaos to order while restoring order to chaos. Destroying your enemies while saving teammates from near impossible situations. Your enemies will fear your approach while your team will be thankful you are on their side.

[this bit is incomplete and more will be updated as time pass by when I have more footage, I dont normally record my games so it might take awhile]
Sections to be added when footage available
The sentry nest <3 sentries or more>

Chaos to order, Order to chaos.
Advanced situations where the vaccinator is used both offensively and defensively. Most if not all of these requires you to use skills from the previous section. These scenarios are placed in descending order of difficulty.


The magical Crocket
We all have experienced this situation where we are making a push when out of nowhere, a crocket comes flying by and *boom* half the team dies. This however isnt a hard situation to deal with as a vaccinator medic.




The magical out of nowhere crocket.





Remember, Bite the bullet... or rocket in this case. Run ahead and block it with your body.

The kritz party
Normally a kritz medic and his patient is probably gonna wipe out you and all your teammates near you. This rings especially true if you have no heavy hitting demos / soldiers nearby who can kill them without being hit. Well... not with the vaccinator.

Kritz? Denied.
You do not even need to uber, if its a kritz soldier, block the rockets with your body so any teammates behind your push you arent healing will not get hit.

Uber incomming!
Ubered enemy incomming! First thing you do? Run. This dosent change with the vaccinator. You can try not running but prepare to take alot of damage. What changes is that nobody will die until the enemy uber expires.



Or at least majority of your team will stay alive. You only need 1 out of 4 charges to survive a stock medi-gun ubercharge. If you time it right and there arent any other damage types anyways. If there are other damage types? Well... last GIF depicts me getting hit by a random arrow.

The dual
Two high damage classes of different damage types are attacking your patient. An impossible situation for the vaccinator? Far from it.



Heavy and a soldier attacking in this scenario.





Allocate a threat piority and uber the damage type which is doing the most damage / victim which is closest. Get rid of one of them and the rest will just click together.

The Reserve shooter
Reserve shooter pyros are annoying arent they? And as a vaccinator medic, they can both burn you and shotgun your face. Sounds like an impossible hurdle to clear as a vaccinator medic right?










The answer is NO. Its merely a matter of skill. To detail what is happening here.
First I blocked the reserve shooter's inital minicrit hit on my paitent with my body
Swap to fire resist to reduce the burn damage and let him air blast,
Swap to bullet resist and ubered to negate the reserve shooter damage
Allowed the minicrit damage from the pyro to drain my uber bar
Swap to fire resist when he started to panic and w+m1
Now compile all that to a 5 sec time frame.

Sounds impossible? No, it isn't. You just need practise and experience.
This is mainly predicting what your enemy will do in the next moment, or you can try to force him to do something that you want to do. Just remember, you are gonna fail alot of times before you get this far, so dont be discouraged if you do.

Here is a slightly better quality and lengthier GIF


The Insanity
A push done by multiple enemies consisting of heavies, soldiers, demos and pyros? All while there are snipers overlooking me and my patient? ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ I am dead!
No, dont give up here please, if you do you are never gonna improve. This is where you put all your skills you have gained with the vaccinator to the test.


Massive numbers of enemies of all three resistances, think you can survive this? Mind you I mainly still fail when such a situation happens, or barely manage to get out alive.




This is, hands down the harderst type of situation you will encounter in PvP. if you can clear this with a clear rate above 50%. You are now a god with the vaccinator.

Vaccinator in MvM

Break the Meta

Thats what the vaccinator is if used correctly in MvM. For this section i will provide two videos. One is vaccinator usage for wave 1 only. <for thoese who dont want to spend too much time> the other is a video of vaccinator usage for wave 2 to end. <this is 30+ minutes long, unless you got alot of time you might want to skip it> Both videos are on Mann up Empire Escalation.

An explanation first would be nice right?, as any medic worth their salt in MvM would know, you revive alot faster when you uber in MvM. And as anyone who have played MvM before would know, MvM has some of the harshest crit combos you can imagine




This happen on a PvP server? I will just hit disconnect.





But before we step into all that, heres the video I promised, Wave 1 of empire.

The Paladin

With a focus on using your shield as both an offensive and a defensive tool, really gives of a vibe that you are playing a Paladin. And did I mention that its actually better if you learn how to use vaccinator in MvM before heading to PvP? No? well now I did. But please for the love of all the veterans (and me) out there, if its your first time using vaccinator. Do NOT enter Mann up.

If at this point you are dying to know how its done, then you need to first recall the previous sections

Tactical Awareness
Threat Awareness
Threat Priority
Healing Priority
Uber Priority

The 5 points to using vaccinator that I mentioned, they are still in here. But they arent quite the same now. The first thing you must know that is you are fighting against bots with a set spawn and thinking algorithm. If you try to do it the way you fight against players, you will do more poorly than you should be doing.

Tactical awareness
Know what comes, this is actually easier than it sounds. On the top of your screen you have a display that tells you what spawns the next wave. It dosent however tell you where they come from, when they will do so or what will come from there. Generally there are 2 entrances they will come from. This is not as important in mvm as a vaccinator medic. As you can still make it in time when you first see the bots appear. This section, unlike PvP, includes one extra bit. You need to be extra careful with where your teammates are and whether any of them are dead / require healing.

Threat awareness
Looking out for crited bots and uber medics is basically what you should watch out for as a vaccinator medic in mvm, also when swarms of bots come rushing at your team. When to shield and when to withheld your shield, if you see just 2 scouts on the field, you dont waste your shield and end up being dead because of the 16 soldiers that pop in 30 secs later.

Threat Priority
This bit is alittle tricky, if you can pull this off in empire you will be on the right track to getting good at vaccinator in PvP as well. Why i say this?



Because things like this spawn






It will take you some trial and error, which is why dont do this in Mann up on your first few tries unless you have friends willing to carry you. What I would normally do is to swap to the resistances that is able to crit you, but there are quite a few exceptions to this rule, for example, huntsman + pyros spawning. This part depends on whether you have a shield deployed or not, If you dont, swap to bullet, If you do, swap to fire.

Healing Priority
Always, I repeat, always heal the tanker / guy drawing argo. Revives take priority if your shield is depleted while revives are second priority if your shield is deployed and there are alot of bots around. Why do I say this? Because one revive will almost fully regenerate your shield, making for alot of spammibility, doing it while your shield is deployed? Kinda reduces the amount of damage you can do / damage you can block.




Regaining a new shield in under 5 secs.





Also remember, if your shield is full just go ahead and revive if you arent under heavy fire. Because you wont be able to deplete it before their respawn timer is up.

Uber Priority
When you uber, you revive people. When you uber, you block alot of damage. This is important and is dual role, because the whole point of playing vaccinator medic in mvm is the number and speed of revives you can do, the amount of times you can spam shield and the insane amount of damage you can negate. What i mean by this?




You and your healing target can take a Sentry buster exploding in your face and come out barely scratched. Much less dead.

The upgrades

So here comes a major dilemma, what to upgrade?

For the first wave its a pretty standard 1 point to your shield first of all, now unlike kritz, max your shield if possible. If you cant, add to healing mastery.

For the second wave, max your shield if you havent, then add to healing mastery, if you still have spare cash left over, add to resistances

For third wave, add to blast / crit / bullet resistances, getting two on each will pretty much make you unkillable

Fourth wave onwards movement speed, this allows you to get to teammates who need a revive faster, also allows you to ram your shield into enemies and retreat back at a faster speed, if you still have points you can either go for ubercharge rate, or canteen specialist depending on your preference

By fith onwards you should have maxed both uber charge rate and canteen specialist and are carrying 3 crit canteens, however at this point there is bacially nothing you need to add. Overheal expert and ubercharge duration are actually harmful to a vaccinator medic. Ubercharge duration prevents you from switching resistances on the go for a longer period of time while overheal expert is useless because of your decrease in overheal build rate. So at this point you can either max your resistances, or just randomly add to stuff

After maxing the following:
Shield
Healing master
Crit resist (2 or max)
Blast resist (2 or max)
Bullet resist (2 or max)
Movement speed
Uber charge rate
Canteen specalist
Crit canteen

You can add to random stuff like:
Attack speed increase - Ubersaw
Mad milk syringes - Overdose
Attack speed increase - Overdose
Jump height (I do not recommend this)
Fire resist (I do not recommend this)
Health per sec ( I do not recommend, vaccinator heals you if your healing target takes damage)

But thats how I upgrade my stuff, you are more than welcomed to try out different ways to upgrade your medic, if you find a combo that works give me a shout.

Last notes and the 30 min long video.

This section covers any minor things which I didnt think will fit in any of the sections so I decided to seperate it out

1. Ubersaw recovers one uber charge per hit.
2. Overdose really shines in MvM as a vaccinator medic
3. You can take 6 sticky bombs detonating under your feet and still survive if you popped uber.
4. If you want easy assists on a strange Vaccinator. Go to an all crit server and heal a sniper.
5. Deploying an ubercharge while another is charging will make you lose the progress on that charge, if its nearly full consider letting the charge complete first.
6. A Strange Vaccinator counts 4 ubers in one life as 1 uber, this resets if you die, making it the hardest medi-gun to level when you are playing in a real match despite the ubercharge rate.

And here is the video I promised you... if you want to watch it anyways, Its 30+ mins long.
Wave 2 to End of vaccinator gameplay, Empire Escalation Mann Up

As a vaccinator medic, you will never stop learning new stuff [Even I am still learning] as unlike its other medi-gun counterparts, it offers you advanced multi-situational tactics. Every situation and every game is handled in a different way, if you try the same tactic for one match in another, chances are it aint gonna work. Remember the golden rule, doing it wrong is easy and painful, doing it right is hard and rewarding.

And here ends my guide to using Vaccinator. All the best to anyone who intends to try learning it from now on and I hope to see more good Vaccinator medics running around as having a challenge is much more fun than having a walkover.

This guide may in the near future contain: [depends on responses]
Advanced vaccinator gameplay Added and almost completed.
Ways to combat vaccinator medics This is done, but I am not uploading for now.
What to do when you have a good vaccinator medic on your team. No point to this
More MvM videos with the vaccinator Not gonna happen unless alot of requests
More PvP vidoes with the vaccinator Not gonna happen unless alot of requests

[Plasma_XP]

The new change for the vaccinator in the Tough Break update makes it a little more redeeming, Either way I still stick to my vaccinator, before and after the gun mettle and Tough break updates. It always just fitted my playstyle as medic, being both an offensive and defensive support class, sure it no longer heals the medic for the damage teamates would take, but it is back to building uber at a very quick pace. I especially like certain parts of the plr pipeline and nightfall maps where there is a section in which there is no set up time , yet the map is considered to be in set up, making the uber build up 3x as fast, resulting in endless vaccinator ubers. ~The Vaccinator is back!~

[Sattellight]

Ze best Vaccinator guide out zhere.
Ja, it sucks ze glitch that gave ze Vaccinator Medic and his patient full Critical immunity on base resistant, ze Vaccinator suffers slower Uber build-up rate on overhealed patients, and it only heals 10% health to you on the damaged done to your patient. It sucks but I look on ze bright side more often. You can give multiple teammates Uber each lasting 2.5 seconds and you can now switch resistances while on Uber, making ze Uber Duration upgrade not "harmful" to a Vaccinator gameplay anymore. I think ze Vaccinator increases ze skill level even higher compared to ze previous one. At first I thought ze changes made the Vaccinator not viable as a Medi-Gun but when I learned ze buffs I think it is more viable now. So ja, live with zhese changes and do better. And ja, i'm still doing better. Thanks for ze awesome guide even zhough it vill not be updates anymore. Vielen dank (many thanks).

[็]

Quite a great guide. I applaud.

[JOTCHUA]

May ye rest in peace, sweet Vaccinator. I shall still use you, as I feel like now you'll get even less love.. (It still sucks that the full crit resistance "glitch" was removed, even though it felt like a nice edge to using zhis underrated Medi gun. But you have to look on ze bright side, you can quickly pop an Explosive and Bullet Uber and spread your Uber onto each teammate in a push. giving more of a defensive edge. Plus, it's more effective at taking out sentries since you can pop the Explosive resistance first (as it does the most damage in the short term) and zhen right after pop the bullet resistance to avoid the damage over time.) But I will definitely try to live with zhese changes, even though in most ways it'll be harder to use. You can only get better with such a high-skill level weapon, right?

[Deafening Silence]

Still using the vaccinator.

[Blinks menacingly]

I find it more useful than before.

[Acejinjo]

Vaccinator is my baby, so I'm willing to try this new carppy update all it does now to help me work on being a NON pocket Medic which I tend to use it for, this gives me a pointless hard mode... Thanks Gabe.

[Klipwc]

theres no longer a point to using it... anyways updated the top part

[J_A_P_G]

The upcoming vaccinator nerf is so painful, I've been on the verge of tears.

I don't think it'll be viable after this.

[Klipwc]

Considering i am not playing tf2 for awhile thats not gonna happen probably