The best Medicine Skill Choices In Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord

The medicine skill in Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord might seem underwhelming to new players. The main purpose of this skill is to prevent your units from dying in battle and turning lethal blows into injuries that can be healed over time. In the late game, a high medicine skill will save the player time, money, and grinding required to replenish your losses after each battle.

By investing attribute and focus points, you can passively level up your medicine skill as you fight bandits and other armies. Choosing the right perks can make the payoff more impactful and tangible, even from the early game.

Since perks are unlocked in a predetermined order, and you are given a choice between two, we’ve organized this list by the best of each perk choice in the order that they are unlocked.

1 Preventive Medicine

Medicine is one of the best skills to outsource to one of your companions and appoint them as the surgeon of your party, and these perks mostly work as effectively for them as they do for your character. But even then, Preventive Medicine is extremely valuable for your character, even if you don’t want to invest fully in the skill.

By just putting one focus point in the medicine skill, you can reach level 25 very early on and pick the Preventive Medicine skill. This perk increases your hit points slightly, but its most useful effect is that it heals 30 percent of your health after each battle. This means even if you go down in the fight, you don’t need to wait to heal up before you engage in another fight. You can still command your army without relying on auto-resolving if you are caught off guard.

2 Walk It Off

The next perk choices in the medicine skill depend on your playstyle and the stage of the game. Triage Tent increases the healing rate for your party if you are staying at a settlement or are stationary on the map, while Walk It Off increases it while you are traveling.

While the bonus given by Triage Tent is stronger, Walk It Off can be more useful as you spend more time traveling in most playthroughs. But if you are playing more defensively or are at war with a stronger kingdom, Triage Tent might offer more benefits. It might even be worth switching between these two perks, depending on the situation.

You can reset the perks of any skill for yourself or one of your companions in any city. Visit the arena from the city menu and talk to the tournament master. Choose the dialogue that says “I’m not happy with the habits I developed while learning my skills,” and choose the skill you want to reset. This will cost you 40 denars for each level in the skill you want to reset.

3 Doctor’s Oath

Doctor’s Oath can be one of the best and riskiest perks in the game. In combination with certain roguery and leadership perks that add various benefits to taking prisoners, the Doctor’s Oath allows your medicine skill to also apply to enemies, turning casualties into injuries that you can take as prisoners if you win the fight.

This can be extremely valuable, especially with a high medicine skill, but having this perk will also make losing battles much more punishing. Typically, when you lose a close battle, the enemy also suffers many losses, making them unable to participate in other battles and leaving them vulnerable to following attacks. But if you have helped save their soldiers, they can heal up and come back much quicker.

4 Best Medicine

If you have chosen Triage Tent earlier in this skill tree, then Good Lodging is the perfect choice to maximize the benefits of waiting in settlements after a large battle. This can be a uniquely powerful combo if you have recently declared a new kingdom with one settlement and are constantly under attack from more powerful kingdoms. You can defend multiple sieges with very few casualties in between.

But for a more general use case, Best Medicine is the more consistent perk. Keeping your morale above 70 can be easily achieved with a little investment in steward and leadership skills. The secondary benefit of both perks is similar, and it is a nice bonus to gain some extra relationships whenever you are waiting in a town.

5 Siege Medic

Siege battles can cause a lot of casualties before the battle even begins. If you are not careful and plan your sieges carefully, you might be unable to finish your siege successfully due to this. Siege Medic is a great perk to alleviate some of those casualties and make stretched-out siege bombardments safer.

Veterinarian is a great perk for specific play styles. If you focus solely on mounted troops such as Khan’s Guards, the cost of mounts can get out of hand very quickly. Having this perk can save you a lot of money in the long run by saving some of your horses over time.

6 Pristine Streets

The perks at this level are mainly governor perks. Bush Doctor increases hearth growth in bound villages, and Pristine Streets increase prosperity in towns. Prosperity is a more valuable option for your governors to have as it increases the town’s income.

For your character, both perks offer similar benefits to the healing rate when waiting in a settlement or a village. As waiting in towns is much safer and more common, the secondary benefit of Pristine Streets also outperforms the other choice at this level.

7 Health Advice

Perfect Health is a great perk for shorter campaigns, especially if you keep up food diversity for your party. In combination with some of the previous perks, with high morale and a decent food variety, your healing rate would be quick enough to go from battle to battle with minimum downtime.

But, if you like to play your campaigns for a long time and perhaps for multiple generations, Health Advice is extremely valuable. Older characters are typically more powerful due to how much experience they have gained, and delaying death due to old age will be crucial. Of course, this perk would not be useful if you disable character deaths.

One of the ways to make the early game smoother is to start the game as an older character as they get extra focus and attribute points. By disabling character death, you can avoid the main drawback of starting this way and enjoy a campaign with less grind in the early stages.

8 Physician Of People

Clean Infrastructure is solely a governor perk, but even in that aspect, it loses out to the Physician of People. Loyalty is the most important attribute of your settlements, and when you are choosing perks for your governor, you should pick any that increases loyalty.

For your character, Physician of People also offers a great benefit for leveling up low-tier troops in the late stages of the game. If you happen to lose your entire army, starting from scratch can be quite frustrating. But with this perk, you can more safely send out weak troops to fight bandits with significantly fewer casualties.

9 Fortitude Tonic

Cheat Death, like Health Advice, can prolong the life span of your character. It negates the first time that your character would die due to old age and halves your chance of dying in battle if you fall unconscious.

But Fortitude Tonic is much more impactful in the short term. Combined with multiple perks in medicine and athletics skill trees, you can increase your hit points significantly, allowing you to survive much longer in battles and tournaments.

10 Battle Hardened

The final perk choice in the medicine skill is between Battle Hardened and Helping Hands. Helping hands is another great addition to increasing the recovery rate of your party, but it might not be as impactful as Battle Hardened.

Battle Hardened gives a flat amount of experience to your wounded troops after a battle. Once you are at this level in medicine skill, most of your casualties will be wounded troops, making this one of the best ways to level up low-tier troops with just a few battles.