Combat Medic Archive
Thread: Some ideas to balance combat medic while still retaining deadliness:
KaylBreinhar wrote:
1) Disease should have an extremely long delay until the first tick to simulate an "incubation period." Diseases should also get gradually worse over time. No more 600 first-tick diseases.
600 tic diseases are most common from high BF multiplying the tic of the disease. As far as the time it takes to tic, it is long enough as it is. 40 sec is plenty of time for you to get to a Doctor to have it cured.
2) Poison should have an antidote that might save your life but also take you out of the fight for an undetermined time. Best RL examples would be atropine and/or praldoxime chloride for RL nerve agent exposure.
So what you are suggesting is a grogginess timer like the one that a player gets after being revived?
3) Poison should be shortlived and possibly carry with it a persistence factor somewhat like the logic behind approaching the Sarlacc. Real chemical weapons are extremely deadly very fast but they're only deadly for a short amount of time. The persistence factor would also enable area poisons to be used to affect an escape/form a defense by creating a "zone of death" an enemy would have to circumvent, further giving CMs a support role.
Giving CM the ability to blanket an area with poison is just begging for grief situations. Add to that, that the DEVs would have to code some way in the game for CMs to effectively "attack" an area without a viable target and you are asking for a coding nightmare since there is no valid argument to fulfill a request.
4) Area Poisons and Diseases should hit all PCs friend or foe within their radius to prevent the idiotic doctrine of throwing lethal chemical and biological weapons into a mob and only affecting/killing ENEMIES.
Then ALL area and cone attacks should follow this same rule.
5) Range exploits should be fixed. If the poison/disease pack SAYS it has a 32m range, it shouldn't be tossable at 33m. If an entire group can't take down a CM at 32m (32m inside killzones of ranged professions) before he gets off a toss. This one HOPEFULLY will be fixed soon anyway.
Long ranges ARE NOT AN EXPLOIT. CMs have the ability to toss poison at the rated base range plus their bonus which is scaled to double at Master.
6) Make a component for armor that can be added to give inate poison/disease resistance, like a true MOPP 4 (military terms for fully-sealed NBC [Nuclear Biological Chemical]) defense suit. Chemical and biological warfare depends on two things to succeed - 1) your enemy is unprepared, and 2) your enemy can't resist. If a raiding party is decked out in full protective gear, the only thing you're going to do is piss him off more because he'll have to go through decontamination.
I would be happy to agree to some form of protection like this but only if CMs were the ones to make these items or at the very least, craft the specific components necessarry to make them. Give us some form of income.
7) CM toss time needs to be linked with the Medic wound heal time instead of the damage heal time. With BE Brandy a CM could get area poisons and diseases for nearly every stat out before he'd have to rest a bit. However, most CMs would merely get wound treatment speed mods to compensate for this, so perhaps a different mod altogether is needed for poison/disease delivery time.
Toss time is coded as an application of a stim and as such follows the same timer as healing stims.
8) Devise a "gas grenade launcher" somewhat like a tear-gas launcher with accuracy mods but no speed mods. Fire the "containers" of agent in a way that it hits the ground and disperses in an expanding pattern instead the entire radius all at once - this would give CMs the ability to target high-value PCs but enable people on the outskirts (since people who huddle in PvP nowadays deserve to die) chance to escape the AoE.
How exactly would a CM benefit from this? What value would this add to the profession?
9) Biochem grenades shouldn't "follow" PCs. You don't have laser designators. They're glass vials, not laser guided bombs.
If you are requesting some form of accuracy be coded in then you should be aware poison accuracy is determined by potency already. The only difference is that CMs control the potency, the victim controls the resist. Get some food and items to increase the resistance and you will see more poisons "missing".
10) The more lethal the agent is, the smaller the radius of effect and shorter the range should be. Not exactly "realistic," but fair in my opinion for Spider Venom-enhanced super agents. If you have something that'll null a raid of 20 people in ONE TOSS they should have a better chance of being able to take you out before you can.
This balance is already in place. When an AE Poison is made it has 3 things that can be experimented: Charges/Range, Potency/Ease of Use, and Effectiveness/Area. the AE poison starts with lowered base stats and is then experimented to increase the range, potency, power etc.
However a CM can experiment the subcomponents in such a manner that the base stats start out so high that only one thing needs to be increased with experimentation. Currently my poisons start with bases of 120 potency and 40m base range.
At Master with 12 points to spend I can dump all my points into effectiveness and get those base stats plus increased damage. Is it my fault I am able to do this? No any CM that has farmed the hell out of resources for months on end or spent a mint acquiring the necessarry resources can easily do this.
11) Give CMs area anti-toxins/antidotes. Not full cures, but rather the ability to slow the effects inflicted by enemy CMs. It makes no sense to toss the stuff and not have reliable cures/antitoxins on yourself.
I totally agree. In fact I think Doctors cures should depend on CMs providing components to them to make those cures.
And before you tell me I don't know what I'm talking about, CM was my last holo prof, and I stuck with it for over a month to really get a feel for it, and y'all ARE overpowered. TKMs are ELATED at CMs becoming the most overdone profession of the game since it takes the emphasis off of them for once. Who you really need to be mad at aren't the nerf criers, it's the mass influx of PvP knuckleheads that are making your profession 800 times more visible than it was. THAT'S what calls the nerf stick down from on high. Not a bunch of people screaming "NERF!!!"
Playing a CM for a month will not give you a true perspective. Our class takes months on end to become the high damage, John Elway tossing, dealers of death and destruction the nerf-criers make us out to be. Having a benefactor supply you with the resources and credits required to maintain this costly profession is something anyone can do and you can't base a nerf on that either. Try having to scrounge for 5 rare resources that typically have horrible stats and you still have to pay 10 -15cpu for. A CM has no reliable form of income. Try playing that for a few months with no one else backing you and then come back and tell me how overpowered we are.
I think these new suggestions are fair and still enable you to retain your lethality while still giving PCs a little of the chance they'd have in real life to avoid/weather such attacks.
I don't think these suggestions are, for the most part, fair to any CM. I don't think you thought this through very thoroughly. That's just my opinion though...