Skills

Level 5: Symbiotic Health vs. Resilience

Level 10: Adrenaline Shot vs. Combatant Doctor

Level 15: Focus Injection vs. Acidic Rounds

Level 20: Coagulant Booster vs. Battle Surgeon

Level 25: ZED TIME - Airborne Agent vs. ZED TIME - Zedative

You need the buffing skills in order to do your job effectively. If you are playing with other people (which is what this guide is designed for) then pick all the skills on the left. Yes, all of them. Don't pick Resilience. Don't pick Combatant Doctor.Resilience is not necessarily a BAD skill. Having 50% damage resistance with 175 armor at level 25 makes you incredibly tanky. It's just that the alternative is so much better. You cannot regenerate armor (aside from getting armor from the Support), and Resilience only takes significant effect when your health is low, so what do you do when you run out of armor? You can't heal yourself very quickly, and with every heal you apply to yourself, your damage resistance goes down. On the other hand, with Symbiotic Health, you don't even need armor. You can apply as many stacks of healing as you want to yourself, as long as someone in your line of sight is not at full health. And most importantly, Symbiotic health applies all of your buffs to yourself as well as your patient. You can have 50% damage resistance with 50 health, or you can have 25 extra health, much faster self healing, +30% movement speed, +30% damage resistance, and +20% damage. By level 20, Symbiotic Health makes you damn near indestructible, and it isn't reliant on you having armor, or having low health, and Resilience needs both to even compare to the benefits of Symbiotic Health. You need this skill to do your job better by buffing your own speed with Adrenaline shot, which brings us to the next skill.Adrenaline Shot is the clear choice. Some people will try to defend taking Combatant Doctor by saying that having +10% movement speed all the time allows them to stay alive and reach their patients more quickly, but that is simply not true. It is a selfish choice for people that aren't even good at being selfish, because they're robbing themselves of more movement speed when they actually need it. When you buff yourself with Adrenaline Shot you gain +30% movement speed rather than the +10% offered by Combatant Doctor. That is 200% more bonus movement speed. With proper dart management, you can maintain that movement speed for most of the wave. I estimate that I have +40% movement speed for at least 75% of every wave after I obtain an HM-401Tech Medic Rifle. If there’s no one around to heal, you can just heal yourself with your syringe and you will get +10% movement speed, matching the bonus from Combatant Doctor.Stat increases mean nothing without context. If you don't need to dodge anything, or be anywhere quickly, then movement speed doesn't matter. If no one is taking damage, then you probably don't need the movement speed to get line of sight on them to heal. Your teammates should stay in your line of sight anyway. Don't take a skill that is only useful when your team has poor positioning. If you take Combatant Doctor your teammate is probably going to die anyway because they don't have the extra movement speed to evade the damage that brought them to low health in the first place.You know who needs movement speed more than you? The person taking damage. Your patient. They need to be able to evade damage, and that's what Adrenaline Shot helps them do. Healing can only get you so far. Beyond that you need to enable your team to reduce or evade damage. Time and time again I have watched players die because they took a chainsaw to the face that they could have dodged if the Field Medic had taken Adrenaline Shot. At least once per game, I save someone's life with Adrenaline Shot, but I cannot recall a single time Combatant Doctor would have allowed me to save someone.This one is a no brainer. Acidic Rounds is hands down the WORST skill in the entire game. The strongest poison that you can apply does 3 damage per second! That is 1/5 the damage of a 9mm pistol bullet with no damage bonuses. To make things worse, everything bigger than a Clot has massive resistance to toxic damage. You will be doing 1 damage per second to most of your targets. As if things weren't bad enough, it also throws Zeds into a panic state, moving them closer to your team while being extremely difficult to headshot. If anything, this skill is nothing more than a detriment to your team.Focus Injection is probably the least useful of the buffing skills. First of all, you need 4 darts to reach the maximum bonus of +20% damage, whereas the other 2 buffing skills only need 3 to reach +30%. The damage bonus doesn't always make a difference in the number of shots it takes to kill a Zed, but it can be the difference between a 1 shot and a 2 shot. I would take this skill even if it did literally nothing, because that is better than Acidic Rounds.Coagulant Booster is one of the most useful skills in the game. +30% damage resistance will be the difference between life and death for both you and your teammates more times than you will notice. Coagulant Booster + Adrenaline Shot + healing of 10HP/second for you and your heal targets will make your team extremely difficult to kill by comparison. Coagulant Booster can and will save you and your team from getting 2 shotted by Fleshpounds, bursted down by Scrakes, and mauled to death by trash Zeds.When you heal, it regenerates at a fixed rate of 10 HP/second. It doesn't matter if you shoot 1 dart, or 10 million darts, it's 10 HP/second. Coagulant Booster not only increases your effective healing, it also increases your and your patient's effective health pool instantly. To demonstrate what I mean, here is an oversimplified equation to determine if someone dies:IF [ (damage taken) > (Health) + (HP/sec)*time ] THEN you're deadIF [ (damage taken) > (Health*1.3) + (HP/sec)*time*1.3 ] THEN you're deadBattle Surgeon is not nearly as useful. It's a permanent Focus Injection that only applies to you, the person that should be spending the least amount of time shooting Zeds. Assault rifles are best suited for trash, and you can 1 shot most trash in the game with the HMTech-401 Medic Rifle without the damage buff.Take Airborne Agent. I even take it in solo. It just offers so much utility. The gas doesn't heal you unless you heal a teammate with it and you have Symbiotic Health, but it offers so much utility. You don't even need to fire a single bullet to kill a group of Clots, Stalkers, and/or Crawlers. Just stand there, fart on them, and watch them choke on it. I use this skill to kill trash more than I do to heal. It's essentially a mobile Healing Grenade that goes where you go. A new healing explosion triggers every time someone resets Zed Time. With a skilled Commando on your team you can fart on your enemies 7 times in one Zed Time trigger.Zedative is okay, but not amazing. Slowing large Zeds can be useful, but it isn't really necessary. If you need to be the one helping your team with large Zed takedowns, it's more a problem with the rest of the team than it is with you. The poison damage isn't that impressive either. It doesn't deal damage to the head, so if your team is trying to decapitate a Zed, it isn't doing anything. Not only that, but the massive toxic resistance still applies here, so you aren't doing as much damage as you might think. Although I highly advise against it, you can take this skill if you want. Honestly, the Zed Time skills aren't the most useful ones, but you can get the most consistent value out of Airborne Agent.