Combat Medic Archive
Thread: Is the Combat Medic Overpowered?
People keep saying that a CM can poison 30 people at the same time. Alright, really that is situational, it really depends on the stupidity of the opposing force. For those of you who do not understand what I mean, I will make a situation.
PA-Attacking: OMW WE ARE TEH UBER GUILD WE HAVE A MILLINO PEPLOE LET'S GO KIL PA-DEFENDING!
PA-Defending: Hey, PA-Attacking is... <gasp> attacking! And they are using their zerg tactics that have apparently won enough times that they will use it over and over again! How do we stop them?
Combat-Medic: Hey guys, I just happened to show up, and it looks like you are being attacked! Need any help?
PA-Defending: Oh woe is us! Our superior tactics are weak since we have only 1/10th the number of players as PA-Attacking, who btw is composed entirely of Fencer/Pistoleers, Teras Kasi/Riflemen, and a battalion of Jedi who are AFK at the moment in a large lake.
Combat-Medic: Wait, they don't have any doctors? Let me drop a poison or two. They only have a radius of 10m, but PA-Attacking is likely to be hit by them all.
<poison!>
PA-Attacking: OMG W3 HAV BEEN POSIONED! OUR WHOLE GUILD AT THE SAME TIME B/C WRE ARE ST00PID AND STAND IN THE SAME SP0T!!! GET TAHT CM!!!
Combat-Medic: Ack they are shooting at me! Luckily I am not a complete moron and I will run away, thus saving my life! And since PA-Attacking's members have all macro'ed their characters up, I am banking on the fact that they have never used /burstrun!
<fleeing!>
PA-Attacking: OMG TAHT CM IS RUNNING AWAY!~ TEH COWRD WILL NOT STAND STIL AND LE7 US SH00T HIM!!!
PA-Defending: Yes, the Combat Medic saved the day against impossible odds all because that PA was stupid enough to stand in a 10m circle! Huzzah! Huzzah!
And there you have it.
DarkNexus1014 wrote:
PA-Defending: Yes, the Combat Medic saved the day against impossible odds all because that PA was stupid enough to stand in a 10m circle! Huzzah! Huzzah!
And there you have it.
nef2005 wrote:
Well put, brace for the flaming, but well put. However, you must realize that it is easier for people to complain about something than it is to work within the preconstructed boundaries to learn tactics, recruit some doctors, and perhaps even give up some of thier all attacking template to get the skills required to heal their own diseases/poisons. Sadly it is the CM who is forced to learn tactics in order to be more than a healer for our side. I would also like to point out to everyone that being involved in PvP includes the risks of being diseased/poisoned. If you are fearful about this, please do not participate. If indeed you are fearful, please do not cry nerf.
Aigar
Just throwing this info into the argument:
As a doctor (trained solely for the ability to fight the ever growing CM community) I can say that for anything other than self-healing, doctor is not an effective CM counter.
Range of poison heals (and any other type for that matter) is point blank. If someone is moving, chances are you will not be able to stim them. Spreading out in order to minimize the effectiveness of AoE poison means members of the group are running. Those few that get hit can not receive heals without standing still. When they stop, both the doctor, and the heal-target are in risk of being poisoned again by a single AoE poison.
A doctor can cure poison around every 4-5 seconds, which from what I hear is as fast as a CM can throw. You'd think that this means a doc could effectively negate a CM's poisoning abilities, right? Each poison stim takes anywhere from 250-500 mind, depending on how much focus the doctor has.
If a doctor is healing poison as fast as a CM is throwing it, he hits himself for 250-500 mind every 4 seconds. That's around as much dps as the poison does if you let it tick without doing anything to it.
Everyone66 wrote:
If a doctor is healing poison as fast as a CM is throwing it, he hits himself for 250-500 mind every 4 seconds. That's around as much dps as the poison does if you let it tick without doing anything to it.
If a doctor has a base focus of 500, buffs his focus so he can barely wear full composite, and that composite knocks his focus to 10, then yes I'd say your figures are correct in saying it takes about 250-500 mind. However wearing little to no armor, and having your focus at say 400ish or so, a cure only costs you about 170ish mind. Buy some food and drink, get some entertainer buffs to pump your focus to the 1500+ and you will hardly see an effect on your mind when you try to cure. Overall that doctor has the choice to keep his focus high or not by choosing to wear armor or not etc. That is not a CM issue...
Everyone66 wrote:
If a doctor is healing poison as fast as a CM is throwing it, he hits himself for 250-500 mind every 4 seconds. That's around as much dps as the poison does if you let it tick without doing anything to it.
Appreciate you 'throwing' that info into the mix, but you must remember that the rate at which your mind bar is used when performing specials such as healing is dependent upon the way you've migrated your stats.
As a human doctor with 1000 in Mind/Focus/Willpower, it never cost me 250-500 to use a cure pack.
And, something else to keep in mind, the rate at which you currently use up your mind for specials will be changed with the HAM Revamp portion of the overall Combat Revamp(in that your HAM will no longer take damage for using a special)
Message Edited by vortexala on 03-04-2004 10:22 PM
......since when is doctor a "basic skill"?
vortexala wrote:
Appreciate you 'throwing' that info into the mix, but you must remember that the rate at which your mind bar is used when performing specials such as healing is dependent upon the way you've migrated your stats.
As a human doctor with 1000 in Mind/Focus/Willpower, it never cost me 250-500 to use a cure pack.
And, something else to keep in mind, the rate at which you currently use up your mind for specials will be changed with the HAM Revamp portion of the overall Combat Revamp(in that your HAM will no longer take damage for using a special)
Message Edited by vortexala on 03-04-2004 10:22 PM
I'm a zabrak with every stat except for health and action migrated to maximum. If you ask me, the core of the issue is both a doctor issue and a combat medic issue. Neither one takes the entire blame for being theproblem.Mind cost on poison heals is exorbinantly high. I'm not going to travel between 3 different planets looking for a non afk musician in order to sit for 10 minutes to gain a 500 point buff to my focus. Muon and brandy only help so much.
Poison heals are too inaccessible. I agree with the arguments that it is unnecessarily cruel to offer two choices to a pvping player: have a doctor within 1 meter of you at all times and stand still when you're poisoned, or die. A fix that would go a long way towards remedying the situationwould be to move the cure poison ability to a mid-level medic ability, such as the same box as bleeding treatment: First Aid II (or maybe one past... First Aid III). Cure disease could be migrated to wound treatment two, the box from which you receive cure poison.
This would mean that a much larger percentage of players would find the ability to cure poison accessible, and yet it would still require a significant skillpoint expenditure, and a supply of the right kind of medical kits.
Your theories & arguments don't mean jack. Look at reality. Reality is that CM's rule PvP, period. Ultimate pwn in PvP in the CM/Rifleman. Toss poison from range, run away spamming h2 or 3. When/if they get into range, they drop to the jawa hs. Snipershot, kthx for the XP.
In larger combat, it's all about the AE's. Here are the issues. These are the same issues as what I've posted about back in Nov/Dec. Things haven't been fixed, or balanced.
1: Ability to poison vs ability to cure is way unbalanced. You can poison from up to 88m on great packs, and hit a large number of people. Someone take your base? Throw poison onto a target outside the base, & watch them all get hit.
If you want to cure, it takes a high rank doctor standing next to you to cure 1 poison. The problem is that with each AE, 5-30 people are being hit. Each doc can cure 2-3 people before a poison tick. Himself, & 2 other people. That means that to completely nullify the abilities of ONE CM, you need to have 1/3 of your force having 4-0-2-0 Doc. If they're using multiple CM's, it doesn't matter how many doctors you have. It's basic math. 3 people throwing poison every 3 seconds= 1 poison/disease landing every second. Doc can cure himself once every 3 seconds. The doc can't even keep himself cured before taking a poison tick in this scenario, let alone curing other people.
2: The Extreme range on packs make it possible to do really abusive stuff. Particulary where there are a lot of objects, CM's can literally avoid retalliation for minutes. Example: We're assaulting a rebel city. I find a group of rebs, get LoS on one, chuck poison & disease from range, and run into houses, & other objects that block LoS. They might get within 64m of me, but it won't matter, because they won't have LoS. On the other hand, for me, LoS isn't much of an issue. All I need is LoS on one PC, or a rebel NPC, a mob, or even a covert Imp that I'm duelling (That's a dirty one
).The conclusion here though, is that having the ability to attack/kill people without them having the ability to retatlliate is very unbalanced. Granted, my PA is generally using excellent tactics when we use our CM's, but that still doesn't change the fact that these tactics shouldn't be so easy to use/abuse.
3
oison/Disease is nearly impossible to avoid. Crafting potency 120-140 packs isn't very hard. It's very rare that more than 10% of the people I hit with an AE will resist my poison/disease. So, it can't be resisted, alright. How about staying out of range of the CM? No go there, the CM can throw farther than you can shoot. Alright, what about hiding inside this base here, or behind this rock? Shoot, that won't work either. AE coding means that you cannot hide from my attacks. So what now, cure the poison/disease? Only Docs can do that, and there's never enough to counter the ae ranged vs single target point blank imbalance.CM's with attitude: I don't want to hear it. Don't give me BS pat answers. I've probably been a CM longer than you have, I know this class better than you do. I have better packs than you do, and I play my CM smarter than you do.
Zarlor: You've been the only person I see here taking other people's concerns seriously, and attempting to give serious answers. My question for you is this: Have you really participated much in PvP, particularly in base fights? To me, it looks like you haven't.
Sometimes, I feel like Bria is the only server where Combat Medics completely own the large PvP. In my PA, 1 in every 3 members is a CM, or has a CM alt. The easy way to win a battle these days is to simply bring more CM's to the plate than they do.
Adune wrote:
Zarlor: You've been the only person I see here taking other people's concerns seriously, and attempting to give serious answers. My question for you is this: Have you really participated much in PvP, particularly in base fights? To me, it looks like you haven't.
Yes, a few. But here's the point that I think everyon who comes in here seems to keep missing. Your arguments are all over the place and there are big parts of them that I feel are very, very valid. The issue comes in that folks think some of us are arguing that CMs are just fine the way they are now. They simply fail to read exactly what we are really arguing.
I've gone over this lit many times, but I'll go ahead and do it yet again.
Issues with CMs: (There are the heart of the problem where many of us actually agree there is an imbalance with CMs)
LoS: There are issues with how AoE DoTs go thorugh walls/floors that can be exploited. Those are acknowledged as bugs and the Devs are looking into them.
Range: It is possible to launch a DoT longer than the standard 64m combat cap. This is also an acknowledged bug and being looked into.
AoE/Resists: A proper counter does not exist for AoE. Some changes have come in on that front primarily because in some ways Resists are a form of counter to AoE DoTs. This issue has partially been acknowledged on the Doc Issues list (Take a look at the Master Doc Benefits issue over there for more details.)
Mind Damage: We will certainly see some changes on this front with the Combat Revamp. The biggest possibility here, however, will be the removal of the exploit that had arisen from being able to heal mind damage back in Beta. The removal of that exploit means mind damage healing, at a more accessible level than where it exits now, will likely be seen to come back into the game. Mind would then be just another pool to damage.
Where CM is fine:
Damage: This is the one area most folks come in here to argue about. They are insistent that Damage from Medical DoTs is simply way too high. They then proceed to offer up all of the arguments above as to why the damage is too high. Yet I would offer that damage is not at all the problem (in fact I have often argued that it is likely a bit low and it is definitely way too low in PvE), that the problem is those issues outlined above, most of which are in the process of being fixed, changed or looked into. It is those problems that make medical DoT damage SEEM to be unbalanced, when that is simply not the case.
Now none of these issues should be viewed in a vacuum. Proper balance,I feel, would also require some changed in Doctor and some additions to CM abilities which I have mentioned many times on this very forum.
The biggest issue folks on this forum have, however, is that many CMs come here to share information and discuss the profession with each other. Instead we have many folks who want to come here insisting on CM nerfs who are, apparently, completely unaware of the issues and their level of recognition by the Dev team as outlined above. And when we try to show them how these things are being worked on, they simply get more insistent that we are just defending our profession blindly and that changes MUST happen NOW! Unfortunately the realities of MMOGs, of any programming endeavour, is that coding takes time. THe fixes above take time. Time to find the issues in the code, time to make changes to the code, time to test the code and to recode, reconfigure and retest if the changes have unexpected results, back to more testing and public testing and finally to live.
All I've ever really tried to do here is to offer that patience is a virtue. There is littel more any of us can do about the situation and compl;aining to US doesn;t do anyone any good, other than to disrupt the normal informaiton flow on this forum, turning away folks who are trying to come here for information instead of trying to just raise our hackles. (And reall, what do you expect. If I came to another profession's forum to comaplin they were a problem, despite some acknowledged bugs and issues that those folks already know about, you think you wouldn't get defensive about it? It would be disruptive and, in the final assessment, unproductive.)
And that is where things stand.
Well put Adune.
The below is my current AoE Mind Poison C stats.
Changes: 38
Potency: 141
Effectiveness: 227
Range: 34
Area Effect: 33
CM Use: 83
This poison ticks at 454 at MCM (169skill pts)level for a 45.4 dps. The question, is this poison overpowered or appropriate?
If you where to apply the 75% PvP reduction the dps would be 11.35.
Examples (weapon damage used are factory made ones with a good damage slice, other than the geno)
BH 0040 (174 skill pts), 150 max dam Tangle, using eyeshot vs. a 38% stun comp helm doing an average of 200 per hit in 2 second intervals.
200 minus 50% for the AR1 of the composite = 100 minus the 38% stun = 62 divided by the time = 31 dps
BH 0040 (174 skill pts), 300 max dam Geno Stun pistol, using eyeshot vs. a 38% stun comp helm doing an average of 450 per hit in 2 second intervals.
450 minus 50% for the AR1 of the composite = 225 minus the 38% stun = 139.5 divided by the time = 69.75 dps
As we all know a BH can fire quicker than every 2 seconds and the pistols can be powered up for greater damage.
Master Rifleman (92 skill pts), 290 max dam Ion rifle, using headhit3 vs. a 38% stun comp helm doing an average of 400 per hit in 2 second intervals.
400 minus 0% (Ion AP1 rated)for the AR1 of the composite = 400 minus the 38% stun = 248 divided by the time = 124 dps
As we all know a Master Rifleman can fire quicker than every 2 seconds and the Ion rifle can be powered up for greater damage.
Some can argue that the combat classes are subject to addition factors as, defences, movement, range to target, etc... to why the MCM is overpowered. But the reality is that a MCM has next to no defences, easily hit during the time interval required for the actually throwing of the poison.
Continue to call for the 75% reduction in the dps of the MCM, perhaps you may achieve your goal. That way when your all buffed up with dancer/musician buffs, plus under the effects of several brandy and canape your mind regens quicker than the poisions ticks.
This way you can still run around saying 'I pwn jOO sucker' Stop harping the MCM and go into the chef forum and ask the devs to fix the resist food, go the doc forums and suggest a time effect vaccine, improved but limited 7m AoE cures.
And to all those trolls out there, your bridge is missing you.
RedAnubis wrote:
Some can argue that the combat classes are subject to addition factors as, defences, movement, range to target, etc... to why the MCM is overpowered. But the reality is that a MCM has next to no defences, easily hit during the time interval required for the actually throwing of the poison.