Combat Medic Archive
Thread: My post about CMs to the development/discussion board
I just posted this to the development/discussion baord..let's all got there on occasion and keep this post bumped and hopefully we can get some attention...since IMHO all the rants here have failed to even bring one response from any of the SOE people...
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While the ranged stims in the Combat Medic profession are currently working, there are many parts of CM that are broken/bugged/underpowered and make the playabilty of this class very low...
1. Please fix Area of Effect. They are notaffecting everyone in the area of effect.
2. Please fix the CM line packs to use combat medicine use and not medicine use. Many packs such as the AOE heals are linked to the medicine use and not the combat use line. This makes absolutely no sense. Being a doctor is not a prerequsite for the class and this bug makes doctor skills a defacto requirement.
3. Ranged Stim Es are obviously bugged...13 identical Chemical Release Duration Mechanisms is ridiculous. This was most obviously a typo someone made in development. I can't imagine this would be all that difficult to change.
4. Please fix the resists on poisons/disease. The resist rate on poisons and diseases so high that it almost becomes useless to use a poison for any reason. Considering using poison/disease take a combat action, this is basically like making a marksman miss with 50% or more of his attacks. This type of miss/resist rate would be unacceptable to any class.
5. The damage done by poisons/disease is pale compared to the damage done by a weapon by even a novice marksman level. Poisons/diseases is a class defining ability that should be the primary source of damage for a combat medic. If you made riflemen or TKAs do as little damage with their primary attack stills, I believe they would complain as well. Considering that Combat medic requires not just the mastery of one line of combat as in the case of a rifleman or a TKA, but requires mastery of the ranged support line as well as the mastery of an entire starting profession, the damage done my poisons/disease should reflect the large investment of time, xp and skill points needs to become a CM. This bug in conjuction with #4 basically make 1/2 of the CM class unplayable.
6. CM components for all of the CM packs are linked to the medic/doctor line of experimentation. This returns tothe issue above about basically requiring a large investment in the doctor line to become a effective CM. If a player ignores the doctor line completely, they will never be able to make the most effective CM packs even at master level. This is unacceptable as it again make doctor skills a basic prerequisite for the CM class. There needs to be a way for CMs to be able to experiment on their components as effectively as doctors can. At the very least if the components shared by doctors and CMs for stims and ranged stims cannot be shared, then at least the components for poisons and diseases can utilize the CM experimentation tree.
I do believe that these issue are fairly simple to resolve and would dramatically increase the playablity of a class that was once popular at release but hasbeenreported over and over again as being so bugged that its almost unplayable, driving many players into other professions.
I understand other classes also have problems that need to be addresses as well. But I do believe that most of the problems in the CM line could be quickly fixed.
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You forgot freaky deaky components and factory made items required to make medicines.
I know I harp on this continually but this is by far the biggest issue in my opinion. These off the wall requirements to make things that we need to do our job is the biggest hamstring we can have. 80% of the people I know who started a medic gave up in frustraition at this garbage. Even the ones I know who DID stick with the medical professions won't touch a factory with a 10 foot pole. They all say the same thing "I'm a medic, not an artisan."
This is a hard class to get right just in the playability part. It's hard work to keep 20 people alive at once. And yes, there are many times when I'm the only medic in a 20 person group, or even 30 or 40 people all at a camp I'm the lone healer. Combat medic takes time to perfect in healing, decision making, mind pool management and many other things. Don't take us away from where we belong and stick us in front of a factory.
I just got my stim Cs, I took 1 look at the factory part and now suddenly I'm trying to figure out just how much I can modify stim Bs so I'll never have to waste more time than necessary away from the fight. Great, I just payed 7000 credits for some expirement points, because as far as I and many like me are concerned ...stim Cs might as well be a bottle of yoohoo with the word "STIM" written on it in crayon. Great, I love it when 80% of the meds I could be making are totally worthless to me.
I've heard the argument about how I should divide my time and go tend harvesters and factories. I say no way, why should I? First of all, I refuse to pay the costs of upkeep of an artisan when I'm not making any profit off of what Ispending all that money to make,go tell a marksman that he has to tenda factory and some harvestersto make 5 pistols a day for the combat he'll be doing and he'll tell you to [place colorful words here].
Player interdependancy is the other big one I hear. I fail to see why we should depend on others when our job is 100% output. I don't make these meds to heal myself or to sell on the market. If you're a combat medic and you're not healing people in combat ...you're not doin your job, and that's a point blank fact.
The whole tip argument is null and void for player dependancy. For 2 reasons.
#1 It doesn't happen, especially in combat, in the hospital yeah every once in a while, but of the over 100 stim Cs and ranged stims I've used in the field, not to mention I've bought every single skill and I'm almost a master now. Why? Because I scour what ever planet I'm on and find maybe 1 or 0 combat medics. I think that 1600 credits in tips for combat healing covers 1/10th of the expenses. Tip argument just gotshot down hard with everyone's friend ..reality.
#2 I have to meet a single combat medic (all 3 of them besides me) who even want tips. We'd all much rather be able to do our job without all this artisan hassle. These are not whiners and beggars, these are people who love to be out playing the game and helping people. Every second we spend away from the field is time wasted, losing chances to learn important lessons that are critical in combat situations.
We're buried hard enough without having all these extra problems. Now suddenly we're looking for freak components and wasting time on factories. Again, if you're not in the fight doing your job ...combat medic is just a pretty combination of words for a glorified artisan. Another thing I've heard (but not confirmed) is that stim Cs take a personal chemical crafting station, my friend said he wasn't sure but he thinks that means I need to have one in my house. MY HOUSE!?! Like I can afford to own a house, let alone my own person crafting station as well as upkeep. I refuse to buy a house, main reason is I can't afford it, and the other reason is I don't want to be chained to something I'll have to upkeep for the rest of my gaming career. No thanks.
As it stands right now, this isn't a lone crazed babblerfoaming about some random thing. I'm not only speaking for myself but every single medic, doctor, and combat medic I've talked to about this issue. I'm also speaking for countless more friends who have dropped the profession all together out of frustraition directly from this. I'm sick of being in a group of 10-40 people and being the only healer, my mind pool is in a constant state of drained and I'm burning through I don't know how many stims, resources and cash a day. Ask any other profession how much cash they've dropped just to get where they are and it will most likely be tons and tons less than we do.
We HAVE to be out in the field constantly, if we spend too much time away from combat the next thing you know you'll be a slow gimp healer who spends half of combat in a panick while people are getting incapped and dying all around. I'm already seeing that this is a profession I'm going to have to stay very on the ball to be able to do with any success. As my friend told me my healing skills of "Just below God" is a standard we all have to adopt as CMs, and that can't be done on a comfy couch in a house crafting at a personal chemical crafting station while on my way to the factory. That's just one of those facts that can't be avoided, wormed around, or shrugged off. If you're not in the field you're just an artisan, end of story.
*Still refusing to be an artisan.
I purposely didnt add the crafting issue beyond the fact that CM components are linked to doc/medic tree because I thought the that issue was more generally related to all the medic classes and I didnt want to dilute the emphasis of playability issues for CMs that need to be urgently addressed...
I do agree that medic crafting needs to be looked at, but I think it needs to be looked at from a whole with all 3 medical professions as well as our chemical cousins the BEs.
Thus I purposely left out this issue to keep the focus on the CM class
FearTheGoats:
- a mouse droid with a food and chemical crafting module costs what on your planet? 1k?
- 1 day running a factory produces more of the factory requiring components, than you can use in a week. did you even try out a factory yet? did you talk about your fellow CM/Docs about sharing a factory? It's not as bad as you seem to think, but you will never know if you don't even try.
Elenora:
I think they are not realy giving much on posts here atm but will rather listen to what the correspondent has to say which should be established by the end of the week.
True, it does effect all 3 of the medical branches. I spend more time here shaking my head at the bugs with ranged stim, area stim and poisons/diseases than the other 2 boards :/ But I have yet to meet more than 1 CM on my server who can even touch them due to the wierd components. So in a way to me it's like hearing people bring up issues about flight control while 99% of the pilots are still on ground looking for the keys to thier plane.
I didn't know a personal crafting station could be put on a droid, I looked a little for the information and the only info I had (which was hearsay, admitted) was that a house and a station were required. If it can be done on a droid than I'm one happy pappy, it just saved me 10s of Ks of credits.
The whole factory thing still bothers me. Normally my time spent making stims is very small compared to my time in field, and besides resources there is no cost involved. Again I draw attention to having an artisan's upkeep and hassle with none of the income from doing it.
ok, some more insight for you on the factory issue:
- you can leave it unattended while it is running crates for you. if you go more than 2km away from the location you do not get the 3.5 exp per subcomponent created though.
- while it is not running it does not use power
- currently there is a bug that does not give you the maintainance and power that is inside back, but once that is fixed, you can just place your factory when you need it, and reclaim it at no loss when you know, you don't for a while
- true, a factory is rather slow but on the upside, it will run while you are not online/not aroundwhich is the intended use according to Holo
does that sound bad anywhere?
Also you CAN be Combat Medic without being artisian, just need to find another medic willing to sell you some of those factory-made components (thank you Valina!), everything else can be bought on bazaar (and earning exp while earning money doing tough missions in a group is still best EXP in my opinion).
Thank you for the informative post Elenora. I will look into the issues stated here.
The crafting and resource issue however is, IMO, a less than class-destroying, issue. Not to say it's not an issue, it affects all crafters, not just the Combat Medic.
As far as the Experimetation for components, Doctors have a great advantage in that line since all their medicines fall under the same skills that they got skilling up Doctor. Some possible fixes for this are to make Combat Medic medicines use the Medic skills and build upon them. Or to take the doctor medicines use a new skill to make the Doctor created medicines far less effective due to the higher experimentation values.
Personally, I would rather they change the Combat Medic skills to be identical to the Doctors so that both classes benefit from the previous class's skills. However, all other crafting classes have to seemingly "start over" when they get to their elite profession with skill pts. So it would make more sense to keep with that and change how Doctor medicine crafting works. Either way something needs to be changed to make medicine crafting between Doctors and Combat Medics fair.
- currently there is a bug that does not give you the maintainance and power that is inside back, but once that is fixed, you can just place your factory when you need it, and reclaim it at no loss when you know, you don't for a while
That's not a bug.. don't overpay if you're not going to be using it.