Medics have stats befitting a TEC-reliant class that does not deal TEC-based damage, if that makes sense. They've got mediocre STR, VIT, and LUC, and their HP is bad, but their TP and TEC are both pretty good. Their AGI's solidly okay—nothing spectacular, nothing awful.

Honestly, TP's the stat that medics most care about, since their higher-tier healing skills and Star Drop cost quite a bit of TP. TEC's useful, but even without any increases to it, medics will still heal plenty of HP with their skills.

One thing to note about EO4 medics' stats, compared to most other iterations of the class, is that their DS is respectable. It's comparable to dancers, a class that does not do much disable infliction, but can at least put up reasonable numbers when it comes to resisting disable infliction.

The medic class skill gives absolutely incredible value for only needing one skill point per rank. Not only does it function as a permanent, unconditional boost for the user's own healing, it also increases other party members' healing. Skills like Regen Waltz and Circle Boon already provide good over-time healing, and the medic class skill just makes them even better. In essence, it helps other party members take care of healing HP, freeing up your medic to be able to use their status recovery skills, or their attack skills, when necessary and/or convenient.

Time to talk about arguably the weakest part of the medic skillset: restoring HP. Yes, I realize that's an extremely weird thing to say, but hear me out. All of the HP-restoring medic skills come with a nasty -6 speed modifier. This is the equivalent to the speed penalty you'd suffer for equipping a drive blade and heavy armor at the same time. If you want to make use of the medic attack skills—which is something you absolutely should at least consider—you will be forced to equip either a staff (neutral speed modifier), or a mace (an extra -3 speed penalty), so that's one gear slot you can't use to mitigate the penalty.

So, you know, that severely hampers medics' ability to heal reactively, which is a large part of the class's purpose in the first place. There's a very good argument to be made that Healing, Line Heal, and Party Heal can all be skipped, leaving skill points for the status recovery skills and attack skills, which offer capabilities that other classes and even items cannot fully replicate.

Healing, at least, might be worth dropping a few points in for out-of-battle healing. I cannot say the same for Line Heal and Party Heal.

See my comments on Healing. If you do decide to invest in Line Heal, do keep in mind that the TP cost starts high, and gets even worse as it goes on, ending at 20.

Steady Hands is an incredibly powerful buff whose value is diminished on medics because of the weakness of their HP-restoring skills. Even if they didn't have speed penalties, though... Medics already heal plenty of HP just through the modifiers on their skills. Even in the case of, say, having a medic to patch up an endgame/postgame fortress that is taking literally every hit for every party member by way of Weak Shield...that's what Full Heal is for.

It has quite a bit more value as a subclass skill, but let's leave that discussion for another time.

Refresh is the first status recovery skill. It removes ailments, which are the most common of the three statuses that medics can cure (ailments, binds, and debuffs). It's useful! Medics in EO4, unlike most other iterations of the class, have stats that do not leave them particularly vulnerable to disable infliction, so you're left with the chicken-and-egg problem of "your main resource for curing disables has been inflicted with a disable that prevents them from curing disables" less often.

My comments about how many skill points you should put into the status recovery skills is the same for all of them: leaving them at rank 3 is plenty. You're not going to need them often enough for the TP cost reduction to be worth it, and those extra three skill points are better spent elsewhere. Like, say, another status recovery skill!

Far less useful than Refresh, but there's little harm in keeping it around. It's only three skill points to get it to row-target.

Squarely in the middle between Refresh and Recovery in terms of usefulness. Enemies don't actually inflict binds that often in EO4, but much like Recovery, when you really want to purge binds off of multiple party members, you'll be glad you had Recovery.

The first attack skill for medics. Nothing special, and you're not gonna get eye-popping damage on account of medics' STR not being great, but some damage is better than no damage when your medic doesn't have anything important to do, eh? The stun is not going to matter at all in FOE and boss fights, but maybe it'll stop an enemy from doing something in a random encounter. That's always nice.

I cannot spare any kind words for Patch Up. Even in the earlygame, the healing you get from it is low, and after the 1st Land, even a max-rank Patch Up does not heal much. Would not recommend putting any skill points into it.

Full Heal is a weird skill. I wouldn't consider it a full replacement for Healing, i.e. as something you can use to patch up minor to medium damage on one party member, because the TP cost is fairly steep, even at rank 4. Also, just as a consequence of the game getting more difficult as it goes on, you're going to be in a lot more situations where you need multi-target healing a lot more than you need extreme single-target healing.

The exception to that is, as mentioned above, fortresses that are making use of Weak Shield late in the game. Even with all of the different defensive passives that a late fortress can stack, they're going to need to be healed at some point, and Full Heal is an easy way to just immediately get them back to max HP. That's a good use for it! The question then becomes "is it worth the few extra SP to reduce the TP cost further," to which my answer is "it's entirely up to personal preference." You'll need Full Heal at rank 2 if you want to get Party Heal, which has the same issues as the other manual healing skills but is the prerequisite for the very useful Auto-Heal. At that point, it's two additional skill points to reduce the TP cost by 10 more. I think that can probably be skipped, but again, it's more personal preference than anything.

At least Party Heal can justify its speed modifier, unlike Healing and Line Heal...

If you're running a medic as your only source of healing, then Party Heal is likely a necessity. If you have any other healers, or even if you're running a fortress that's concentrating damage onto themselves, Party Heal can be deprioritized. Just keep that TP cost in mind, because especially at max rank, it will drain your medic dry if you aren't careful.

Finally, an HP-restoring skill I have nice things to say about! Again, the speed penalty on Revive is something I can forgive, because it's the same as later games, and it makes sense. While in the very late and postgame, you get the ability to farm to nectar IIs, which fully restore the HP of whoever they revive, they're a pain in the ass to farm for, as they come from an overworld FOE's conditional drop. A max-rank Revive, with the class skill and a maxed-out Heal Mastery, restores around 568 HP to whoever it revives, which is enough to fully restore most classes upon revival, and gets close with landsknechts, fortresses, and imperials.

Beyond how it scales into the lategame, Revive is just generally nice to have around. The TP cost is steep, especially in the midgame, but 15 TP is a lot easier to deal with than having to gather more small flowers every time you run out of nectars. Given that, and the fact that it has no prerequisites, if you're running a medic, there's little reason you shouldn't have, at the very least, one skill point invested into Revive.

Group Therapy, also known as "we took the ability to get Refresh and Unbind to party-target at high ranks and made it into a buff you have to maintain." What an annoying design decision...

As for the skill's merits on its own, Group Therapy has the same issue that party-target status recovery skills usually do. Namely, if you're in a situation where you really need to purge disables from the entire party, there's a pretty reasonable chance that the party member that could fix it witih one skill is rendered incapable of acting. If you've got that covered, through some combination of disable resistance increases and possibly Stretch, then Group Therapy can save you an extra action or two from having to remove disables from whichever row wasn't affected by the applicable status recovery skill. Having to maintain the buff timer is annoying, but if you just use it two or three times when your medic doesn't have anything else to do, you'll generally be fine on that front. Main thing to worry about there is that the final boss, superboss, and a major postgame boss—all situations where you'd want to have Group Therapy preemptively ready—all have the ability to purge all of your party's buffs. So, y'know, account for that once you get there.

Full Refresh sounds like it'd be incredible, from an action economy perspective. In reality, it's just unnecessary. There is a grand total of one, count it, one enemy skill in the entire game that inflicts an ailment and a bind at the same time. There are no skills that attempt to inflict any type of disable and apply a debuff at the same time. One must ask the question, then, what is Full Refresh for? Not helping its case is that it is limited to single-target if used alone, and row-target if used with Group Therapy.

Stick with the regular status recovery skills.

Heavy Strike, but it inflicts something useful! Its base chance is pretty solid, and medics, as stated above, have reasonable DS. I wouldn't expect Knockout Blow to consistently inflict sleep, but it'll do it every now and then. The only downside is that it's fast, which I would argue is actually a detriment with skills that inflict sleep on enemies. If you're inflicting sleep, there's a pretty good chance you want to take advantage of the 1.5x damage bonus STR-based attack skills get from it, but a sleep infliction being fast throws a wrench into that, because it's possible for a weaker STR-based attack to remove the sleep, or even for a TEC-based attack to remove it without getting any bonus. Probably best to make use of Knockout Blow when your main damage dealers are either setting up or reapplying personal buffs, in that case.

Toxin Study is only a one-skill-point skill, but it probably is worth considering the foods that it lets you eat before you drop the skill point into it.

• 1st Land: +3 LUC, +30% blind/panic resistance
• 2nd Land: +4 TEC, +4 AGI, -6 LUC, +20% EXP
• 3rd Land: +20 TP, +30% paralysis/poison resistance
• 4th Land: +30% ailment resistance, +30% instant death resistance

The first three poisoned foods are nothing spectacular—you can make a good argument that the 2nd Land's is actively detrimental to a lot of parties—but the 4th Land's poisoned food is ridiculous. +30% resistance to all ailments is very useful, in part because it results in full immunity to a given ailment when combined with a disable resistance accessory, and +30% resistance to instant death can help avoid some cheap deaths from particularly annoying FOEs.

Does Toxin Study provide some ridiculous, lasting value? No, not really. Is it worth having around? Just for the 4th Land's food alone, probably.

Stretch is a ridiculous passive. A good amount of boss fights, mostly concentrated in the endgame and postgame, have the ability to bind multiple body parts, and a few more also have nasty head-binding skills. Head binds are a huge issue for medics, since they prevent them from using their important skills, including Treat, the skill they'd need to fix other party members' binds in the first place! At max rank, Stretch gives a 50% chance to completely no-sell any binds before infliction is even attempted, which is a fantastic value for 6 SP.

The only caveat with Stretch is that one particular postgame boss's binding skill has guaranteed infliction, which completely ignores Stretch. That sucks, but it's one boss, there's still plenty more who can get utterly screwed by Stretch.

I've been down on medics' HP-restoring skills here, but Auto-Heal is an exception, because as a passive, it doesn't have to worry about speed modifiers! It's not a guaranteed passive, but what it can do is patch up enough damage from someone getting hit that you don't need to worry about them on the upcoming turn. Maybe that'll mean that someone who would've been near death for a few actions is, instead, at a safe amount of HP. Maybe it means that instead of having to use Line Heal or a madora, you can instead use Healing or a medica. If you're lucky, maybe it'll mean you don't have to do any healing at all on the next turn! Even for medics that are leaving the other HP-restoring skills to the wayside, there's little reason not to max out Auto-Heal.

If you're any HP-restoring skills, which includes Revive, Auto-Heal, and Auto-Revive, get Heal Mastery. It's a pretty substantial increase to the amount of HP they restore, and it fully stacks with the class skill. A medic with a rank 8 Heal Mastery and a maxed-out class skill gets a 62% boost to the amount of HP they heal through skills, which is incredibly good.

Auto-Heal, but instead of saving you from needing to heal damage, it can save you from most of the headaches that come with someone dying. Another skill I recommend whole-heartedly with basically no caveats.

Heavy Strike and Knockout Blow are nice-to-have skills. Star Drop is a game-changer for medics, powerful enough to redefine their role in a party. Medics go from being insurance against nasty inflictions, as well as potentially HP restorers, to being able to amp up other party members' damage to ludicrous levels. Just a bit of coordination and planning can result in your medic providing a 40% increase to all significant damage dealt by your party. As a bonus, because Star Drop is an effect, not a debuff, you don't have to worry about debuff slots with it. Sadly, Atlus did remember to flag it as being affected by diminshing returns.

There is one thing that needs to be considered when making use of Star Drop, and that's speed. Medics aren't that slow, at a base level, but Star Drop requires either a mace (-3 speed penalty) or a staff (no speed modifier) to use, and it comes with a -1 speed modifier, so your options for ensuring it goes early in the turn order are limited. One particular subclass can help with that, though...