Medic (Long War) - UFOpaedia

The Medic is similar to a Field Medic specialized Support in vanilla XCOM. Their signature ability is Field Medic, which grants one free use of a medikit per mission and allows additional Medikit items to be used two times per battle instead of one.

Primary Weapon: Carbines, Assault Rifles, Battle Rifles, SMGs, Shotguns.

Secondary Weapon: Pistols, Machine pistols, Sawed-off shotgun.

Class-Limited items: None.

Abilities

Rank	Ability
Specialist	Field Medic For soldiers, grants one free use of a medikit per mission and allows additional medikit items to be used two times per battle instead of one. Also allows Restorative Mist items to be used three times per battle instead of once.
+1 Mobility.
Lance Corporal	Suppression Fire a barrage that pins down a target, granting Opportunist reaction fire against it if it moves. Imposes a -30 penalty to aim and reduces range of many area-of-effect attacks, including grenades. Also negates overwatch from the target while suppression is active. Lastly, enemy AI prioritizes breaking the suppression by shooting the suppressor, so it functions as a mini-taunt. Not possible with shotguns, sniper rifles, or strike rifles.	Steadfast Never panic as a result of getting wounded, allies panicking, allies getting wounded or killed, or the intimidation ability.	Field Surgeon Reduces (or, for 1 HP flesh wounds, eliminates) Wounded timer on soldiers who sustained HP damage but were not Critically Wounded. Does not affect wound sustained by sending fatigued soldier on a mission.
No other bonuses.	+5 Will.	No other bonuses.
Corporal	Rapid Reaction If on Overwatch, confers a bonus reaction shot (to a maximum three shots total) for every reaction shot that is a hit.	Smoke & Mirrors Allows one additional use of all support grenades during each mission. It also increases charges from Smoke Grenade and Battlescanner perks by 1.	Revive Allows Medikits to revive critically wounded Soldiers at 33% of maximum health instead of just stabilizing them.
+3 Aim.	No other bonuses.	+2 Will.
Sergeant	Ready for Anything If the unit fires without taking any other costly action, it automatically enters overwatch at the end of its turn.	Smoke Grenade Deploy a smoke grenade once per mission. The smoke confers +20 defense and prevents flanking for all enemy and allied units. Lasts 2 turns. Taking the perk on level up also allows an additional action after deploying a smoke grenade.	Paramedic Once per turn, this unit may use a medikit without spending an action.
+3 Will.	No other bonuses.	No other bonuses.
Tech Sergeant	Opportunist Eliminates the Aim penalty on reaction shots, and allows reaction shots to cause critical hits.	Dense Smoke Increases the defense bonus from smoke grenade from 20 to 40.	Combat Drugs Smoke grenades confer +20 Will and +20% critical chance in addition to the original 20 defense. The area of effect is also increased by 25%.
No other bonuses.	No other bonuses.	No other bonuses.
Gunnery Sergeant	Lock N' Load Primary weapons receive one additional shot or burst before a reload is required, and you may reload your primary weapon as the first action of your turn without ending the turn.	Bombard Throw or launch grenades over exceptionally long distances (+50%).	Sprinter Grants +4 mobility (roughly 3 tiles movement).
No other bonuses.	No other bonuses.	No other bonuses.
Master Sergeant	Extra Conditioning Confers 1-4 bonus health based on which type of armor is equipped. Heavier armor increases the bonus.	Packmaster Limited-use small items (including those from perks) receive 1 additional use.	Savior Provides 2 item-free medikit charges and +4 healing bonus to medikits. Restorative Mist units restore three more health per use.
+4 Aim, +4 Will, +1 Mobility.	No other bonuses.	No other bonuses.

*Perks tagged with blue are fixed even with Second Wave Training Roulette option is enabled

Stat Progression

• Note that, even without Hidden Potential turned on, there is a chance of gaining 1 extra will per level (shown in parentheses above). Psionic soldiers can also gain 1-6 extra will per psi level (1 + rand(6)).

Tactical Advice

Medics are a diverse class focused on healing and supporting their squad. Each medic lends a hand in a different way but all of them are good healers and have ways to deny the enemy good shots on your team. How you build your Medic is, of course, up to you but the perk choices they have at each rank are generally divided into three archetypes: Field Medic for healing the squad, Tactical Support who providing cover and defense or the Battle Medic providing fire support through Overwatch. If you choose to be a purist in a role or a jack of all trades it's up to you; mixing and matching between the roles is quite viable.

Perks

Field Medic is the Medic's core perk, giving extra healing with minimal further investment. This makes Medic a decent class in the mid game, when damage tanking with MECs and Biotank Assault/Infantry become an option; the added sustain provided by medkits can make the tanks armor HP go the extra mile in between successive pods of enemies, especially if Savior is taken for a large infusion of extra healing sustain for long missions. Generally a medic will heal after fights rather than during fights due to the difficulty of finding a safe spot for the Medic to stand while healing, though the perks Paramedic and Sprinter can enable them to stand out in the open to heal an injured unit and then run back into cover.

Far more important than healing damage is preventing damage, especially in the early game when good armor is a luxury and any hit could be a serious wound or even death. The bread-and-butter high-impact medic turn is to throw a Smoke Grenade (potentially upgraded at higher ranks with Dense Smoke or Combat Drugs) as their first action and then use Suppression with their second, assuming you've taken both perks of the same name; the combination of the two will tank enemy hit chance into oblivion. That being said, a medic can't necessarily keep these up for long, given the low ammo capacity of a rifle and the limited nature of Consumables. Fortunately, this can be alleviated as you rank up, the former by Lock n'Load and the latter with a combination of Smoke & Mirrors, Packmaster, and the Tactical Rigging foundry project.

As you rank up, alternatives to Suppression become available: Overwatch (with Oppportunist, Rapid Reaction, and possibly even Ready for Anything) is decent if you want to contribute some incidental damage over a firefight, though as Medics lack particularly good Aim or any good damage-boosting perks, you won't be able to come close to leading your team as a damage dealer. Similarly, picking Bombard allows the Medic to toss things like Chem Grenades and Flashbangs deep into the enemy formation from relative safety, functioning as a limited-use wide-area suppression. Due to their above-average Will gain, alongside a handful of Will-boosting Perks, Medics can make respectable Psionics, and Officers; both options also give Medics more things they could potentially do with their AP, such as Command or Psi Panic.

Lance Corporal

Probably the go to pickup at this rank as it limits a single target's ability to do much of anything for a turn, and giving the medic a way to contribute in most firefights without burning any consumables. There are some notable issues to keep in mind, however. First of all, rifle suppression does run into severe ammo economy issues compared to Gunner Suppression, so it's not something you're going to take advantage of every turn. Second, it competes for action economy with Overwatch builds; while the two are someone complementary (giving you a choice between damage mitigation or dealing damage), you still can only pick one or the other. Third, it draws fire towards your medic; if you were planning on having your medic sit in reserve, ready to patch up your squad as needed, it's pretty hard to do that if that same medic is on the floor bleeding out or dead. All that being said however, the other two options at this rank generally don't make a strong enough case for their use to justify losing Suppression.

Medics generally don't tank or try and get shot at, so for the most part the only purpose of this in the early game on a medic is to prevent panic chains (it always automatically triggers and eats one of the potential panic chain checks); if someone gets crit-wounded, the Medic that's supposed to be stabilizing or reviving him is the last thing you want panicking. But soon your soldiers will gain enough Will that panic from mundane sources is no longer an issue; fortunately Steadfast also provides a hefty will boost that's decent in the long run for officers and psionic medics. Picking Steadfast is basically an extremely long-term investment where you're expecting your medic to eventually transition away from using Suppression in favor of other options like psionics and chem grenades, but that's a hard sell because Steadfast itself isn't that impactful most of the time; even if you're rarely ever using Suppression, the handful of uses you do get out of it probably exceeds what Steadfast can give you.

If you are considering taking this - don't. The perk has no effect whatsoever in an actual battle, and its effect on the strategic layer of the game is minimal at best and equally nonexistent at worst.

Corporal

Solid on Overwatch medics, but it will take until Opportunist at TSgt for you to really enjoy its effects; for now your aim will be garbage so it's a dead perk for a couple ranks. The fact that you have to actually hit your OW shot in order to get another makes this useless in the worst case and ammo hungry all the time. It also competes directly against Suppression. All in all, it's a hard perk to play around, but at the very least the other alternatives at this rank aren't insanely powerful or anything.

Helps for not just support smoke grenades but also offensive support grenades like Chem, Flashbangs, etc. Having more of them to throw lets you use them more liberally, which improves the viability of your build generally.

One of those perks that inevitably seems to draw the ire of Murphy's Law: when you don't have it, you need it, and conversely when you have it you never need it. Realistically speaking you can complete the vast majority of missions while down a soldier, and if you're regularly finding yourself in situations where you need to revive downed soldiers you can fix that by playing better. Also, soldiers aren't guaranteed to receive crit wounds when downed, so even if someone drops you probably won't get to use this.

Sergeant

The go-to perk choice at this rank; it not only gives you a free item-less Smoke Grenade but also lets you throw a Smoke Grenade as your first action for 1 AP. With your second action, the sky is really the limit: Suppress, throw a grenade, heal something, reload, or even overwatch. Whatever build you're going for, getting a Smoke Grenade on top of whatever you were planning on doing two or three times per mission is hard to pass up.

Even though this is a free action and Smoke Grenade costs 1 AP, realistically you are spending that extra AP moving up into healing range anyways. So in theory this seems really similar to Smoke Grenade, in that you get to take a high impact turn a couple times per mission where you get to take a bonus action and then Suppress, throw a grenade, heal again, reload, or overwatch; the only difference is whether that bonus action involves running over to a wounded ally and healing them up vs. protecting your allies with Smoke. But in practice, mid-combat healing is much more annoying as there are rarely good cover spots next to a wounded ally you can stand on. Meaning if you want to heal in combat, you are dedicating your entire turn as a medic to it: you are most likely going to move into range, heal, then move back into cover. In light of that, you'd only really pick this specifically if you lean heavily on damage tanking with MECs or Biotanks and regularly find yourself in fights where mid-combat heals are viable.

Good on Overwatch builds of course, and the bonus will is also nice for officer and psionic builds. You'd take this over Smoke Grenade if your main goal with your medic is going to be to shoot and then overwatch constantly; a Smoke Grenadier medic can have two or three really high impact turns per mission where they get to throw a Smoke while taking their normal turn, which is a perfectly fine choice even on an Overwatch build... but those high impact turns only happen so long as you're not out of Smokes. Shooting with a rifle on a build that doesn't have crazy crit chance and damage stacking or HEAT ammo is generally not going to have a big impact each turn, but it's a little something you can be doing every fight as opposed to something big you can only do on occasion.

Tech Sergeant

Your only choice on Overwatch builds, as it eliminates the aim and crit penalty your Overwatch shots have been laboring under, unlocking the potential of Rapid Reaction in the process.

The +40 defense boost is obscene and renders any soldier in cover within its area of effect completely unhittable, and even makes standing out in the open on occasion a viable idea (though Ghost Grenades generally do that job better). Keep in mind however that the medic also has plenty of Aim debuff tools like Suppression and Bombard support grenades; this can render the additional defense of Dense Smoke unnecessary in most cases, though it's nice to have instant heavy cover in your pocket for emergencies.

Has a wider AoE than Dense Smoke and provide a large Will and Critical Chance bonus in addition to a wider area of effect, improving the offensive and defensive power of a broad swathe of your troops. Probably the best general-purpose pickup at this tier for a Support Grenadier thanks to the extra area of effect alone. But the offensive benefits on top of this (crit for your shooters and will for your psionics) makes this the meta pick at this rank.

Gunnery Sergeant

Exceptionally good on a support grenadier as it allows you to make much better use of offensive support grenades like Chem and Flash. Prior to this rank you're probably just throwing a Smoke Grenade with your first action and Suppressing with your second, which is solid... but with Bombard you gain the ability to toss the equivalent of AoE suppression deep into the enemy formation, all while remaining safely out of sight.