Combat Medic Archive
Thread: Official Combat Medic Correspondant Problems List
Nice post...Think we should focus on the bugs before the playability IMHO
1. Fix AOE...It really can't be that hard...
2. Link AOE heals to the proper med use.
3. Fix crafting bugs 13 CDRM Ranged E is insane
4. Fix factory bug so they pull from crates. The bug is inconsistant and effects some people and not others. It a pain in the butt.
Then we can worry about playability...
5. Poison/Disease need a complete overhaul and re-evaluation.
6. Unlink CM components from doc/medic line. This is further gimping those CMs without doc crafting master. Either disconnect doc and medic crafting so that components only use medic experimentation, which IMHO would destroy the medical profession since it would gimp compononts and seems extremely difficult to do given that medic and doc both use the same type packs or give CM a entire line of components usedfor CM above completeseperate from doc/med. I have posted extensively about this idea and refer you to my posts here on that subject for more details.
7. Create /healranged in order to be able to choose between /healdamage. I use both stims and ranged and I use them hotkeyed and not macroed. But for all you lazy people out there this should help.
As for ranged state packs...would be nice...but unfair...would be like saying CMs should be ranged cures too..heck why not ranged rezs too. Would be nice for CMs, but ultimately unbalancing...
Mind heal issue...
Mind healing would be to unbalancing for any medic classes to have.
1:1 ratios would not be as effective as many people think. I personally wouldnt spend 1/2 my mind pool to wake up an mind incap player with a tiny mind heal just from him to get hit again and go mind incap again. Any minor mind heal would actually hurt since u would justwake a player up with a tiny bit of mind, just so they could take 1 hit and go mind incap and put them 2/3s of the way to incap death...
Mind healing is less of an issue of if medic should be able to heal it or not and more of a general gameplay issue as a whole for the entire game...the whole idea of mind damage needs to be reevaluated. It is not as simple as just giving medics a mind heal as that will directly affect classes that do mind damage...
Besides there are already mind buffs out there...called spice...talk to your local smuggler...honestly i find that lets give mind heals to CMs just because they have CM in their title to be amusing...doctors can be just as powerful as CMs in a different way in combat. Let's give out class some loving but try to avoid the CM4thewin mentality. Mind healing is something that needs to be carefully considered along with class balance.
And besides, say I buy your mind spice/food will I THEN be considered overpowered?
No, I'll be able to do the job I took this profession for.
I think mind buffs would be good for the chef class...they are one of the most unpopular classes IMHO. Givening them mind buff would help them out a lot...
Also food/drink is limited to how much you can eat..this will prevent mind healing from being abused...Will also stop the powergamers from hardcore xping
Giving mind healing to a class that uses mind heal HA is overpowering.
Mind was purposely put out of the range of CM and into the line of entertainers to assure balance...
I find most the mind incap happen whena grp tries to fight mobs over their level and the battles range on for a long time...
this game was designed with downtime in mind...its not all about chain pulling mobs that are uber...
thats a good suggestive solution jingo, I like it.
as for the ranged/normal heal, I think everyone would be made happy if the following situations exhisted. first, make 2 different commands for healing. one for ranged, and one for normal. that way players can choose if they want to range heal, or normal heal and thereby select their choice of pack. however, there are people that would rather just macro craft ranged heal stims and not bother with normal stims. so alter thenormal heal skill so that if one is in proper low range to first use a normalpack if one is present, and if not, and the CM is of the type that just likes to use one stimpack (ranged only), then allow the normal heal skill to select from a present ranged pack at any range (even low ranges below 7). so, then everyone's happy. those that like to craft both types of packs and save themselves money in the end, and those who dont care about the wasted resources and would rather make lots of one type with factories and such. no ranged packs would be wasted since the system would be coded to look for regular D's first so those of us cheapskates would be happy, and the more carefree crafters would be able to just macro ranged stims... everyones happy.
now, on to a blance issue. I still have to say that we get the least for our time. CMs have to run around the galaxy finding horribly exotic resources (some that dont exhist in the game) and wasting travel funds in the process (not to mention harv/power maintenance as well) to get their wares. then they have to spend money for factories (more destroy missions or sold resources for profit) to make their wares and at the end they arent even as close to as effective as a health shot 2 that any pistoleer can get after a few weeks of running destroy missions on lok with a probot to keep you safe? couple that with the fact that mastering our second tier profession costs us the 3rd most possible points (second only to BHs and Commandos) while TKA's which require half the points are WAY more viable combat characters than we are? thats just not balance. we're COMBAT Medics. we should be both supporting combat and aiding it. if it takes me 2 weeks to get a bunch of high level packs out that last me for not a long time and cant even come close to doing the damage that a pistoleer can do per second, I think i'm entitled to believe CMs to be a weak and unbalanced class. the issue here is in this little equation:
effectiveness/(time spent as a CM) < (effectiveness/time spent of any other combat class)
this is a comparison between ratios here...
the solution? make attempt to make that less than sign (<
an = sign. the way you do that is by simple math, balance the equation. either increase the effectiveness of CM abilities through any number of better poison effectivenesses, decrease the time spent to use a single skill by eliminating the "exotic" nature of resources and factory requirements (ie, no more "nabooian wild berries, " just make it "wild berries"), or alter the other side of the equation. decrease the effectiveness of other combat classes skills, or increase the time by making them craft 6 different things from exotic resources and use a factory for the glory of using 20-50 charges of any of their skills instead of pulling a trigger 20-30 times.
I am a firm believer as far as roleplaying goes that CMs should spend a vast majority of their time in the field, and while maybe tied down to minimal harvesting, should NOT be tied down to owning a factory. I should be able to fund my field functions of healing and combat support through tips and mission rewards alone, but I cannot. because in a real player run economy, where people are greedy, it is not possible to exhist in the field andmake the cash needed to purchase the resources off the bazaar I need since they are rediculously exotic and even the normal ones are overpriced versus the funds I get from missions. my income through missions and tips is lower than my expenditures of exotic resources in crafting. and no,6 times out of 10 no one will bother to tip me, let alone tip me enough to make up for this deficit. maybe i'm playing the game wrong for all I know, but it seems almoast impossible for a CM to be relatively self sufficient.
Nohup1 wrote:
Elenora, I know you want to see mind pool healing/buffing put into food or spice. But don't say it's overpowering for medics to have. We're worthless without it.
And besides, say I buy your mind spice/food will I THEN be considered overpowered?
No, I'll be able to do the job I took this profession for.
Midless without the ability to heal mind wounds? Thats a joke right? Have you played this game? lol
CM's easily make a huge difference in a battle, especially in PvsP. I did some PvsP last night and saved multiple people from DB's. 2 people were Incapped and before the DB'er could get to them I was able to throw heals on them from where I was and save them. Even a doctor couldnt of saved them in time due to the distance away. We are far from useless without mind healing.
You need to consider that if CM's got the ability to heal the blue bar....why would we need entertainers anymore? Thats their like one and only purpose. Sorry but that isnt feasible and it will never happen because if we get the ability to heal mind, they might as well erase Entertainers from the game.
IMO the greater solution like Elenora and I stated is chef's food and drink buffs. They are awesome and work well. You can easily and cheapily walk around with 2000mind all the time just by keeping a few foods/spices on your person. I dont see this as broken in any way. Plus the fact that you can re-organize your stats bar to lower something else and increase mind also helps.
mind incapacitation and ranged death-blow cured me of wanting to PVP for a long time.
Leha, A FREAKIN MEN. I have no idea what i'm gonna do when I wanna be a master pistoleer and a master combat medic. where am I going to get my resources from? since nobody really mass sells any med items for a reasonable price in any galaxy to my knowledge, its not like I can go to the bazaar and pick up what I need. all that exotic med crap nobody wants to go out and get to sell, cause medics are so few and far between. miners are going to concentrate on the resources that give them the highest yeild. their bread and butter so to speak is the minerals needed for all the billion aspiring weapon and armorsmiths out there. nobody wants to get anything for the like 2% of us that are CMs. Hear this guys, in a Market Economyof such a small population, there is no possible way we're going to get this stuff for sale on all the servers. The demand is really low and therefore the supply is also going to be low. simple economics folks.
that being said, so fine, we have to find our own materials. great. why dont we call this profession COMBAT medic and then prevent someone from mastering a single combat branch by tying them to being an artisan for survey. every point Leha made is right on. our profession should have a medical survey built into it. yeah sure, medical forage... riiiiiight. /laugh. maybe if you made medical forage actually work sort of as a survey skill but only for organics, waters, and chems it'd be fine. let us buy minerals from the bazaar. i'd be fine with that, cause the market is flooded with good minerals because of all the demand. make me buy minerals from the bazaar and survey for those organics that no one else will mine for me, and i'll be the happiest camper in this galaxy. but requiring to have us have a handle on 5 differnt skill tree branches just weakens us in the end. I dont need CM, Med, Mark, weap specialist, AND artisan. holy **edit** thats a lot of skills and it cant even all be done. /cry
http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com/in_development.jsp?page=In%20Development
Combat Medic
Reworked the way area healing and area damage over time medicines function. They should be much more reliable now and they shouldn't use a charge for each target affected.
Fixed a problem with area stimpacks requiring Medicine Use. They should require Combat Medicine Use. This fix only affects newly crafted stimpacks, so old ones will still require Medicine Use.
Fixed a problem where the Combat Medic's effectiveness skill mod was not properly increasing the power of medicines that do damage over time..
filthy_mcnasty wrote:
GENERAL ISSUES THAT ARE NOT SPECIFICALL COMBAT MEDIC RELATED:
VERY specific resources require for medicines and components. This affects ALL crafting classes. You have 81 skill pts available after Mastering Combat Medic (and getting the required skills for Novice Combat Medic). It might be wise to spend some getting Surveying 4, or buying a few harvesters to supply yourself with resources and a source of income.
Though you have 81 points left after reaching Master Combat Medic, it does not make sense to put 29 points into getting survey 4. Though it makes sense to have the skill as you're moving up the ranks, and it even makes sense to have it as you are a master, it does nto make sense to hold on to it when you are deciding the overall fate of your character. When you get novice Combat Medic, assuming you used one gun type for your combat exp, you will have novice second tier gunman, rifleman for me, and halfway through the first skill of the profession. So in my mind, it follows logically that you would want to master that weapon class in the long run. This is indeed the most popular plan for combat medic I have seen, 2nd lvl gunman/combat medic. There is alsothe doctor/combatmed/novicemarksman combo, but this message applies less to them. So it is impossible to master the rifleman skill and combat medic while haveing 29 points in artisan skills. This seems absolutely absurd to me.
If you think about it, you are wasting 29 points in a profession that has nothing to do with combat medic. I have no intention of crafting anything Artisan oriented in the long run, yet I'm forced to waste points in a profession just to be able to play my chosen class. Let's just take a look at some of the other non-artisan crafting classes to compare. First, we have the scout. The scout needs to craft traps and camps, but their crafts are almost completely self dependent on their own profession, needing skins/bones/etc that they get from scouting, not from artisan. The little bit of surveyable materials they need can be bought at barely any cost to them. Then we look at the major example, the bioengineer, the only actual crafting class apart from artisan tree. Of course they survey to rise in Organic Chem, but when they become a bio eng, they have their own skill tree to gather resources necessary for them: DNA Harvest. I do not know any bio engs, so I don't know how much surveyed resources they requrie. However, they still have their own internal way of gathering resources apart from getting skills in another non related profession. Medic, you can hardly argue against it, are very very crafting dependent. It's not like smugglers who can craft spices if they would like. Our whole livelihood depends on crafting: we can not get any real medical xp without it. So logic follows that: Shouldn't medics have an internal way of gaining resources apart from having a whole different profession under their belt that they have no intention of actually using? Medical forage would be the attempt at providing medics with this, but as we all know, it is completely worthless (even though a whole tree of medic gives points to improve it). No other class is restricted in this way of being forced to get another profession like medics are. Other classes might get survey to speed things up a little, but survey would be the first to go if they had to decide. Now why should I have to surrender Rifleman skills instead just to continue my career as a combat medic.
For all of you who would say that I should suck it up, sacrifice survey and get rifleman, and pay for all my resources: does it really make sense that I shoudl be forced to make such a decision? It's just bad game design. It's not possible to survey for harvesters without at least 15 points wasted. And why should medics be forced to giving up such an absurd amount of money just so that they can continue to exist. Other professions may need to spend a little to craft some of their goods (Scouts), or would spend it to speed things up while being able to get it themselves anyway (advanced artisan classes). But we would have to buy everything just to continue to play a medic. If this doesn't sound outrageous, then I don't know what to say. Being a combat medic doesn't leave you with 81 points, it essentially leaves you with 52. Survey+Artisan is just another branch of medics, making the requirements so much more.
Now I will look into why I should have a skill like rifleman at all. First of all, being restricted from being able to have it mastered because I am a combat medic is another game design issue. Combat Medics are not a self sufficient profession in itslef. This means that it is really not possible to be a CM and just that, without having to team up with people every minute. When a CM poisons another enemy is s/he supposed to sit still and let it bash on him until the medicine wears out? The nature of our profession requries us to go out into the field, but how can we do that without a strong weaponing skill. Bounty Hunters and Commandos would be self-sufficient hyrbid professions. CM would be more like the Creature Handler or Ranger, helpful skills to have in combat, but clearly not meant to stand alone like the Bounty Hunter or Commando. Surely if ranged 4 is a requirement, SOE must have intended that the CM pursue the higher level weapon skills. Yet, this is not fully possible with the survey 4 requirement.
Another thing to think about: Smugglers (a hybrid support class like CMs) too were once in the situation I feel CMs are in right now. They are also a non self-sufficient class. They are a mostly support class, but they require fighting exp. Their skills as a smuggler do not allow them to do this very well, so they undeniably need pistoleer. However they used to have an additional requriement in beta to what they have now: Business 4. this is obviously very limiting for the smuggler to get the skills he needs. Businessman doesn't logically help the smuggler class anyway, except for being able to sell his spices, and it would require at least 29 points. They would probably need engineering or domestic for a few lvls too, because i can't see people grinding novice artisan crafts for 4 levles of crafting. They would probably get survey for a few levels as well to supplementtheir resouce needs. Granted they could surrender these, it is more time down the drain. Seeing as business is a real burden to smugglers and not a benefit at all, SOE eliminated the requierment. AndI think Commandos once required Engineering 4 as well. Obviously this is a baseless requiremnt. Even though commandos are more or less self-sufficient in being able to fight without a support profession, SOE was wise in getting rid of this requirement. So that leaves us, Combat Medics, as the only ones left to have Artisan requirements (even though survey is not a written requirement, it is stilla necessary one) that are a hinderance: restricting our skill choices while not really supplementing our ability as a medic.
The Bottom Line: Medics need an adequate way of obtaining their own resoruces from within their profession. Maybe surveyshould be a helpful skill to have, but not necessary as it is now. It just doesn't make sense that the medic class is so intricately linked and dependant on the artisan class, which they don't really intend to pursue. Why is combat medic a medic/gunman/artisan hyrbid. It's too much to do in one character.
Thanks for reading my rant.
Leha Longshot - Flurry - Novice Rifleman, Novice Combat Medic (Novice Artisan with survey 4 AAAARGH!!)
I agree with Nohupl and Leha. The two biggests issues:
1. CM need a means to heal Mind damage in combat. Entertainers heal wounds in camp (like a Doctor) and battle fatigue; not in combat. Allowing CM to heal Mind DAMAGEin combat does not take away from the entertainer's ability to heal Mind WOUNDS (wounds are the black part of the HAM). In PvP the ability of the rifleman to inflict damage that cannot be healed in combat is unbalancing. CMs need the ability to head Mind Damage.
2. We should not be forced to keep Survey in order to pursue our profession. There should be a survey skill for medical components that is part of the Medical tree. That 15 points to pick up novice artisan is killer.
I agree with most of what is posted here for improvements and I think those will be tweaked over time, but these are the two major changes that need to be addressed IMHO.