Combat Medic Archive

I would interject that you probably shouldn't overanalyze the answer. We've discussed this pretty heavily before and several of the correspondents (includng myself at the time) provided what answers we could. In effect, though, I would say what I've been saying all along, the real answer to the question is that the Devs likely don't want toget pinned down to one set of skills, thereby tieing their hands against future growth. In effect the answer is, CM is what we play it to be. If the skillset allows us to do something, then that something is what we can do.

I think the real question is not CM Vision, but CM skills/abilities taken into consideration on their own. The whole debate about the pwoer of of Medical DoTs, or Mind Healing and so on, and how those things do or don;t affect game balance. I think they would rather address specific cases, but let us play our templates however we want to play them. If the way we play them show some imbalance, then I think they wan to address the imbalance itself, not the overall "profession".

In other words we will likely forever have those who think of CMs a primary healers, others who think of CMs as primary DoTers, those who find a balance between those and all three arguing which way is the "true" CM. All of them are, and none of them are and the arguments will likely always exist and I think that is probably as close to a "vision statement" for CMs as you are likely to ever get. CM is what you make of it and viewing one philosophy of playstyle for CM as being the "correct" one would just leave you wanting more.

So perhaps we should not argue over which playstyle is correct, and therefore argue how CMs should be changed to fit into that kind of model, but instead argue over wether the CM skills in any of those playstyles appropriately fills the bill for a balanced set of skills when integrated with and compared to other full templates (not just professions, but fully completed character templates).

Message Edited by Morganite on 06-06-2004 04:38 PM

I can't speak for everybody else, but there are two reasons I wanted to know the vision of the devs in regards to the combat medic class, and if we were poisoners or healers. The first is curiosity. I think combat medic is literally the only profession for which I can't give a one linesummary of what they are supposed to do (implemented with more or less success, depending on the profession). In my mind, area stims and area poisons are so divergent such that to join the two together in a single profession is somewhat counterintuitive.

The second reason is that knowing the vision would help us see where the class was going, so we could provide input. For example, if the devs had come back saying "we meant combat medics to be primarily healers", we could more credibly give complaints about stim B's and doctor buffs making our class not work properly. If the devs had come back saying "we meant combat medics to be primarily poisoners", we could more credibly give complaints about PvE damage being low. As it is now, things more or less work, but little things could be better. Without knowing the overall purpose of combat medics, we have to point out everything, which is both distracting and wasted effort for both thedevs (to read and parse the information) and the combat medics (to comment on something which is outside the scope of the profession).

If the devs came back and said "you are foremost healers", "you are foremost poisoners", or even "your should be 50-50 split", that would be fine. However, I do want some definite commitment in regards to what we are supposed to beso I can better comment on the status quo, and get insight into what the future may hold. If nothing else, it would help reassure that the devs have a definite plan for combat medics, even if we haven't had any content or patches fixed in the past few months.

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Zurck wrote:

I am confused... why are we trying to pin our profession into one of those two molds? Why can't we be both and depending on our own personal play sytle be one or the other or a combination of both? What am I missing? I think it's a blessing that they didn't come back and say we think you guys should be x... One of the main reasons I love CM is that I can do both.

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I do as well, but to rebalance us, and all other professions, we need to know what basis they are using the balance them. are they trying to balance multiple profession templates? Or is it only the single professions? Are they trying to balance it so that if you spend 250 sp's on rifleman/fencer/tk, you should be stronger then my mcm/mws because you spent 250 sp's on combat, and I didnt? Or should I be stronger because I spent 160some sp's on 1 profession and you spent less on each one...

That in no way reflects the healing/damage dealing aspect of the class, just lets us know how much they envision a mcm affecting the battlefield.

I understand that, and I agree with a fair amount of what you said, Morganite. However, we can not control the dev's actions (such as making them read and post in the CM forums, or give a straight answer in the 19 answers thread).

Given that, what would you have the combat medic community do? Try again with a better question next week? Have Texxie run amok in the correspondent's forum (which I'm sure he or she, and all the other correspondents,is already doing)? How do you propose we address this?

Edit: Note I'm saying this in response to your post which began "I am saying both the question and format it is given undersucked".

Message Edited by jfang on 06-07-2004 06:23 PM

Frankly, I just don't think having a Dev "Vision Statement" for CMs would make one bit of difference. Sure folks may THINK that it will allow them to focus feedback on balancing the "profession", but I think the devs have made it pretty claer that they are not interested in balancing the "profession", they are interested in balancing the "template." Hence the exact abi.ity of the profession itself is, effectively, irrelavent, it is only when combining the skills in toto that comprise the discussion they are intersted in when it comes to balance.

We all know there are many skills in CM that are currently a bit unbalancing because of how they were implemented/used when compared to the skills they presumably counter. The combat balance shoudl address a bunch of that stuff, but likely not all of it. I think when all is said and done it doesn't matter who thinks that CMs should be "primarily healers and a support class" and who thinks we should be "bio-terrorist" or any level of ability in between. All of that is effectively irrelavent in the large scheme of things simply because there are no "classes" in this game, only skills organized into professions. If there is an issue with a CM skill ro ability, then address that, but getting a "Vision Statment" likely would do nothing at all to further the cause of getting those individual skills addressed, IMHO. Just a different viewpoint that I think is pretty relavent, so feel free to chew on it for a while. (hint, hint)