The Finals: Best Medium Build Starting Loadout

The right loadout can make a huge difference in whether your team wins or loses. Sure, you need to know how to shoot and work together with your teammates, but a single choice on your part can turn an entire match on its head. Here’s my best loadout for Medium build Contestants in The Finals.

The Best Starting Loadout for Medium Build Contestants in The Finals

Medium Build is by far my favorite of the three, as it pairs survivability and speed and has probably the most effective and team-oriented equipment in the game. I’ve also always loved playing the support role, but with Medium build, you can switch between medic and executioner at a breath. Below, I’ve listed all the equipment and weaponry I use when I want to help my team dominate a match.

Best Weapon: The AKM

In my mind, there are few better weapons in The Finals than the AKM. It has one of the largest non-LMG magazines, great range, predictable recoil, and serviceable hipfire and spray potential. The AKM’s damage is nothing to sneeze at either: I can take out a Heavy in a single magazine as long as I hit a few headshots. And if my tracking is on point, a Light build melts in no time.

The only problem the AKM has is that it has no specialty. If a Light character catches me off guard or is up super close, I’m probably not winning that fight. It’s still possible to come out on top if they can’t shoot straight, though.

Best Gadget 1: The Sonar Grenade

Knowledge wins more fights than any deployable cover, grenade effect, or other obstruction. The Sonar grenade is the ultimate intelligence multiplier, as any enemy within its effect radius will be outlined for about a second, alerting you and everyone on your team where the immediate threats are. You also spawn with two of them, and I can’t tell you how many cashouts I’ve been able to either steal or help my team overtake with good Sonar Grenade positioning.

The one weakness of Sonar Grenades is their inability to tell you what other obstacles an enemy might have put up. It doesn’t detect goo constructs, deployable cover, fire, or any other environmental effect. That doesn’t make them much less powerful, as you can intuit if someone is camping by their lack of movement. Sonar picks them up either way.

Best Gadget 2: The Jump Pad

Being good at traversal in The Finals is almost as important as gaining as much knowledge as possible. Your ability to move quickly and consistently around a map, especially toward an objective and around enemies, will save you more times than you can count. Having the Jump Pad handy is good not only for easily getting around a map but also for escaping and/or resetting a fight.

You can even use them inside buildings to reach areas of destruction rendered otherwise inaccessible. I’ve done that a couple of times after enemy teams blew up the staircase and all the other means of reaching the vault.

The one disadvantage you might have with equipping a Jump Pad is that you sacrifice the area denial and damaging abilities of almost all of the other gadgets. Sure, having easy access to almost anywhere on the map is fantastic, but if you can’t keep your enemies from overtaking your position, the Jump Pad can be more a bane than a blessing.

Best Gadget 3: Defibrilator

While I’ve found it to be a little buggy from time to time, a free, almost instant revive can and has turned the tide of a teamfight in many of the matches I’ve played. In the chaos around a cashout or a vault, the value in being able to put another body on the battlefield as support or at least cover cannot be overstated.

The Defibrillator also lets you recover from a team fight much faster, whether you need to retreat or win it. The default revive timer is almost ten seconds, and that short span might still be too long if the next fight is only a few seconds away.

As with the Jump Pad, the Defibrillator offers little in the way of outright offense, and its long cooldown means if you misuse its one charge, your whole team can pay for it. Such is the price we pay for power.

Best Specialization: Healing Beam

Ever since the Team Fortress 2 Medic Medigun made its debut in 2007, healing with a beam has been in vogue in multiplayer, class-based titles. The Healing Beam in The Finals is no exception, and there’s almost no reason to use anything else if you’re playing a Medium build Contestant, as having a human up and protecting you can be more valuable than any automated turret. If you have bad luck with randoms, maybe not, but even bad players can be put to good use as body blockers or distractions, so keeping them alive can still be valuable.

Now, stop me if you’re sensing a pattern: the main problem with the Healing Beam is its lack of direct offensive capabilities. Sure, it can keep one or both of your teammates in the fight, but the thing itself can’t kill or deal damage at all. If one of your teammates is already running the Healing Beam, you can use a Guardian Turret to provide overwatch or other protection down a sightline.

And with that, you have what I think is the best loadout for Medium build contestants in The Finals. It combines lethality with teamplay, traversal, and information warfare. While it doesn’t specialize in anything, I think its ability to work well in any situation makes it a strong contender in the game. For more content covering The Finals, check out our guides on the best way to steal the cashout, whether the game has crossplay, and more in our The Finals guides hub.