I don't know about the rest of your metas, but where I play, no one ever doctors anyone. You'll occasionally see a paramedic being used, but for the most part, they're functionally specialist operatives. As shown in the past, ITS is a great place to test tweaks to rules like this. Nearly all of the TAG buffs were piloted in ITS as well as some of the army composition rules. I don't have any preference for exactly how they're changed, there are probably other threads full of ideas like removing death on failures of the roles, to giving them a Tactical awareness like ability that essentially gives them one free doctor roll per turn. I'll let CB figure out what they want to try, but the main point of this is to ask them to try. What's the worst that can happen? Doctors are OP for everyone for one season?
Doctors heal stunned state so I keep kazak doctors in TAK fireteams as a principle, remembering every time Vet got critted by a warcor. Doctors are still more valuable for vanilla armies that cant enjoy double medkit shots, your meta sounds weird.
Doctoring doesn't kill on a failure (just wastes the order), but medikits do would be an excellent change.
I was actually surprised by the number of people who responded to my survey that use doctors as much or more than they did in N3: https://forum.corvusbelli.com/threads/doctors-and-order-economy-in-n4.39853/
see medics constantly, classifieds and mission bonuses and often embedded in fireteams to give them a relevant specialist, that may occasionally throw out a b2 medkit shot when there is nothing better to do or out of desperation. Doctors only turn up when they can embedded in a fireteam for the same reasons as the medic but also to support the primary gunner to keep it moving, or if they have deployment shenanigans such as hidden deployment or AD. it also varies on faction to faction.
Been thinking about this a little more and lately I've seen people (myself included) throwing an engineer in group 2 for no other reason then to burn those 5ish orders get your ARO bots back up. Now if your list relies more on weak pathetic meatbags and not glorious robots then you could quite easily do the same with a doctor instead. they aren't functionally specialist operatives, they are far superior. SpecOp is a MASSIVE drawback when compared to a typed specialist (FO, Doctor, Medic, Engineer, Hacker, CoC) as SpecOps never get bonuses or do a classified and don't have any secondary effects in the game (like healing, fixing, bricking, and enable nuking), making them incredibly inefficient when compared to their typed counterparts. Additionally, SpecOp is often a baseline ability which can be a massive pain in the ass in certain missions quickly making that entire entry a liability in that scenario (something I've ran into a lot recently for tournament prep).
In theory, I think of this as the main purpose of doctors. Something like a linked Orc Feuerbach with a prone palbot next to him is a prime candidate. I never do it myself, because in Haqq our only good AROs are Daylamis, and nobody is doctoring those guys. Once they're out of ammo they can bleed for all we care. I'd be more likely to do it in SAA, except that a Trauma Doc needs like 3-4 command tokens to actually manage to heal somebody, and I need those command tokens for repairing TAGs. But, in theory I think that's what doctors are for? This is where we tend to see them in Haqq. Not a lot of other factions have the option, I think.
The Palbot helps a lot. Set it up right, and those Orders spent getting an ARO piece or unluckily-critted attack piece back in the game can also help develop the position of a BS12 Combi Rifle and Specialist. I'm by no means a top player, but the number of objectives I've taken Turn 3 with a well-placed Trauma Doc or Machinist working off their Turn 1-2 healing Order pools to get into the midfield is a lot higher than you'd expect.
I believe the main reason behind Doctors not seeing much use is the nature of ITS games as such. If you have your Doc (or their REM: Servant) next to an Unconscious model, it takes 1 Order to try and heal it. But if you need to spend several Orders to reach that model, it becomes difficult to justify. Orders are precious commodity (always were, but now, when we are under Limited Insertion or Tactical Window rules, they became even more scarce), and every time I need to spend a number of them to have a shot at healing a model, I have to ask myself: is this a justified expense? Assuming I'll succeed, will I have enough Orders left to achieve the Objectives? Maybe it is better to let the model lie Unconscious, and concentrate on those still alive, who can get things done and win me the game. Back in 2ed, before there was a 3-turn-cap on most games, I doctored a lot. If only to have one more Order next turn - but with a 3-turn cap, doctoring will often consume more Orders than it will bring back. Now, I don't criticize the 3-turn-cap of ITS. It is reasonable assumption if you want a game that is bound to end in a predictable timeframe (especially in a tournament context). I don't criticize the Limited Insertion / Tactical Window format - I have seen (and played, I admit) enough 2ed (and early N3) horde armies with 2 full Combat groups. Sometimes 3 Combat Groups. However, both those factors contribute to the limited usability of Doctors in N4.
More armies that you think at first can embed doctors in fireteams (Aleph, Starmada, CJC, BJC, some Pano sectorials, Most NA2's, TAK) and can make use of it.
Huh. So much for my haqqocentrism. TAK is probably better off with a paramedic since they don't have cubes, but for the rest, I had no idea it was that common.
Doctors can be useful situationally. It's not always about the orders but sometimes about a key piece you need the utility of. It's often worth doctoring a beefy HI with a heavy weapon worth a lot of pts back, for example. The problem to me is that N4 fixed paramedics so well (flat PH roll, link team burst bonus on medikits, any success on which counts as a success regardless of failures - which can be done at range) that they often outclass doctors. Hence why I think a failed doctor roll should not harm the patient, just waste the order. However a failed paramedic / medikit should still kill. That would give them both a place - medikit would be the high risk / reward play - doctor would be the safer but often slower option. It's a littlle like that with command token rerolls already but IMHO not enough (B2 medikit is like a reroll you don't need to spend anything for anyway). It's weird and bad feeling having your doctors kill your own troops anyway.
And thats before we start talking about options with asymmetric deployment options such as Delta doctors and tomcat doctors, which can mitigate the order expenditure by appearing next to the patient. Though I do think Haqq may be the only faction with access to doctors with infiltration and a marker state.
For me, I only get one in Yu Jing, in all sectorals too. I'll take it in missions that might need points on a board or similar. In my Dahshat, since I have Ghulam doctor, I take him every time. It's almost unfair it's a Ghulam are already WIP14 and then +3 on top of that. And in DH I can have a lot more of them.
If a doctor/paramedic can't reach his patient and make his roll for getting them back up in one order. You're better off leaving them down unless getting them back up is required to have a shot at completing objectives. For me, this doctrine means I will only take Doctors/Paramedics in links, or paired with servant bots beside hardy ARO pieces (like the Blackjack or Gamma.)
I would say that a paramedic/doctor in a link is almost mandatory. Cause you can keep your main gunner going that is close by. And with a burst of 2 because of link bonuses, you have a good chance of getting someone up. If you make your plays that a doctor/paramedic is close to the ones you want to keep in the fight, they can do wonders
