THE FINALS: Essential Medium Character Guide for Beginners – Pro Player Insights and Strategies for Season 1

The heart of THE FINALS truly lies in the medium contestant, which to simplify, has the blend of raw firepower and strategic utility. Players can easily be good at medium, but to be great takes the ingredients of more than just “good aim”.

Vertigo was the player of choice that I just had to ask to support me in creating a starter medium guide. He had a great couple of clips float around on some Discord servers showing off a uniqueness in gameplay that I rarely saw at the time. He’s achieved top ranks across multiple titles; Apex Legends, CS, VALORANT, and even Overwatch. Vertigo’s real “home” actually came from Warzone, where he boasted Poland’s highest KD ratio of 6.12 paired with top performances in kill-races.

So, the medium contestant is essentially a multi-layered role, with the ability to really be a “backbone” that supports and sets up crucial plays for the team’s overall success. There’s been a couple of mix-ups from the community with how Medium is considered, you’re not just a support player. In fact, Medium actually deals a very high damage per second, depending on the weapons you use, and you can actually emerge as the top fragger on the team.

It’s definitely a given that Medium should be primary to most teams’ compositions at even a more basic level of gameplay. You can go as far as to say that triple medium is a good composition, and it really can be (if you don’t mind missing out on the destruction that Heavy provides) provided that communication is consistent and everyone knows what they’re doing. That’s the beauty of THE FINALS right now. People seem to think “Oh the games meta has already been figured out, just go MLH or MMH and it’s GG”.

I truly believe that it’s not as simple as that, the games still relatively new, and that gives readers like yourselves plenty of time to find a home in the game.

If you haven’t read the light guide (Click to view) I recently published with the help of Piggy, medium’s positioning is also super important and separates a good player from a bad one. I’ve gone through a decent number of guides in my life, and whenever I read “just have better positioning” I never really fully understood what it meant. It was always something that pro players said as advice though, but yet, I was there practicing aim training over really thinking about what that meant.

Breaking it down for you, paired with Vertigo’s advice, you want to control the high grounds on roof-tops and aim at keeping your view towards as much open space as possible. It sounds simple and obvious, right? But sometimes people focus on using Medium too much for close-quarters combat, which is actually a weakness point. So, why do you want to control a wider view of the maps rather than be focused on enclosed spaces? Well, Mediums weapons really shine when fights are at extended distances and when you have the high ground, for example, against Light players. But what it really does is allow you to control as much visible information that you can get – to relay to your teammates.

A good rule of advice is that you should place yourself around 2-3 seconds away from your teammates, which allows you to quickly pull back to support them if there are any surprises. Another advantage of being in a more fluid position, allows you to help in taking out the opponent’s utility as well, which I don’t see many players actually remember to do. Yes, the heavy can help, but the effectiveness of your arsenal is too great to just be standing still holding a healing beam when your team-mate is shielded with full HP. Have fun and take some shots too!

Veritgo believes that most players, not just medium players are playing too slow around the map, essentially making them an easy target for someone with good positioning and aim. We will break down the recommended medium build to support you in this realm and how to utilize everything in a couple of guides coming shortly.

Basically though, at a rough stance, THE FINALS has close to 90-100% accuracy whilst you’re flying through the air and people aren’t using that to their advantage – for example, bounce padding mid-fight. A lot of players are used to horizontal aiming, especially if they come from games such as Counterstrike, so taking that weakness and using it to your advantage sets apart some differentials that you can apply instantly to beat the overall. There are of course certain things you’ll need to learn and simply “just put bounce pad down” isn’t going to turn you into an FPS demon.

Think about where, how, and when you’re using this ability, for example, you can even place it on walls mid-fight to throw off your opponent.

Vertigo believes that you’re the biggest threat when you deal damage, so that should be the priority over being a pocket-healer the whole time. A good rule of thumb is that as soon as you’ve expelled your aggressiveness, you then default into healing your teammates until the all-clear is given to switch back. Medium is mainly used because of the defibrillator, so the life you have is very valuable to the team, but don’t try playing hero when it’s too risky to revive.

That’s a mistake that I see Mediums make ALL the time, when they lose a fight, making them the last alive in a 1v3, they decide that they should use the defib to run back in mid-fight to revive their teammate. My tasty RPG round has its final say, paired with a few rounds of bullets and they get coined.

The above features the best content format that was inspired by this guide – essentially it covers everything here with that visual touch and examples from some really awesome clips from Vertigo, so feel free to watch it on YouTube and let me know!

From an overall stance, I’ve broken down medium into a few simple points for a plan on how you can develop as a better player;

– Start off by using movement to your advantage, pick the bounce pad & zipline for your gadgets, and really take some matches to learn what works when fighting other opponents. Sure, you’ll get it wrong a lot initially and your friends on Discord will probably question your sanity, but that’s just the sacrifice of learning.

– Once you’ve started to master the movement in the game, think about how you can pair that with your positioning, think to yourself a few times “Am I really in an advantageous position here?” then switch up and slowly learn how you can really play the game differently than most.

– After these two are mastered, the rest should be a much smoother sailing, be offensive, and play with your strengths of damage, then when you are done or see your team might be put in a position where they need support, pull off, and help them out. Rinse and repeat.

I’ve created a Medium build guide coming soon in which you can break down a few playstyles to complement everything together, this is a great read and I highly recommend it to help tie everything up together.