Pentadact: By the way, I've just tweaked James' master code to make the titles of Link posts links to the links. Because I kept clicking on them, dumbly expecting a behaviour I hadn't coded.

Pentadact: Er, I may have oversold it a little. Most people focus on the idea that everyone would have been running around with double-health, and that's my fault: Valve stressed that they hadn't settled for sure on those figures, and I reported them anyway. There didn't seem another way of communicating the severity of the changes they were talking about.

My thing about the Medic is, he's not fun enough for people to play him as often as they play the Engy, but he's so powerful that he's every bit as essential to success. So often success is just a case of which side has more people prepared to sacrifice their real class preference to go Medic and help the team.

The Overhealer seemed like it would make him even more essential to the team, and even less fun to play: you lose the one moment of true joy the Medic has right now - Ubercharge - and add a whole lot more holding down fire on friends so they can go out and have more fun than you.

Overall, I'd like to see the Medic become more fun and slightly less essential. In terms of unlocks, I'd like to see some that cater to what roBurky plays - what the Control Point guys call a Shadow Medic (after the more aggressive build of Priest in World of Warcraft). Medics who take breaks from healing to bonesaw the surviving enemies, hunt Spies, pick Scouts out of the air.

I have a couple of ideas for this, actually - there's a big old Unlocks post in my drafts folder I've been adding to for ages, I should probably make it live.

roBurky: I'm assuming people won't usually want to link to me linking other people, but the Comments link still takes you there, after a fashion.

Pentadact: Yeah, that happened while I was away, and I thought the forums would be full of fireworks and bunting. I've played Soldier since, though, and it seemed the same to me: I still got an absurd number of crits.

The formula for how crits are intended to work is biased towards the most damaging classes, rather than the most useful or highest scoring, and the stats show exactly what you'd think: Soldiers do the most damage by some margin.

Pentadact: Nothing wrong with things that alter the game balance, so long as they don't... make it rubbish. I'd been thinking about a negative-healer too - it feels like it'd be fun - but not as a replacement Medigun. I'd replace the Syringe Gun with it, so it's only ever a backup weapon. I hadn't thought about letting it charge Uber; might be quite a nice risk/reward thing, given that the more Uber you have the less you want to risk your life. But I wouldn't want to incentivise an alternative to healing people who need it, and it might do that.

One interesting debuff for a Medic unlock would be to prevent it from gaining ubercharge by healing people above their normal maximum, so that it would only get you anywhere when you healed people who really needed it.