Combat Medic Archive

The people who usually complain about Combat Medics being useless are the people who play LOTS of first person shooter games. If you want to grab a weapon and run straight into a bunch of tough NPCs and just SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT, go play another game. SWG requires strategy, and tactics. As a Combat Medic, you have Warning Shot and Suppresion Fire, why don't you actually use them?

I soloed 6 Singing Mountain clan Rancors tonight, without dying even ONCE! Poisoned them, diseased them, and used the special shots I have. If you actually use your brain and develop a STRATEGY, you can win.

I am also able to solo Anchorhead, *without* cloning repeatedly. Just buff myself, throw on the Composite helmet, and pop some Breaths of Heaven/Bivoli Tempari. Occasionally a Muon Gold. You just have to be smart and think about things first, not just run in and shoot.

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joydiv66 wrote:

Does anyone realize that if mind were healable, then I could stand back and heal while my group killed what ever they want in the game? Is that what you want? To be able to attack and kill with no fear of dying?

It would get boring so fast.

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DAoC only has 1 HAM pool yet ppl die in that game all the time.. One of the points of this thread (and a thousand others) is how flawed a 3 HAM pool system is where all 3 can be attacked but only 2 can be healed. This leads MANY ppl to wonder just what exact advantage spending the additional (what 63?) points for master Combat Medic gives them. This also affects Doctors, buta doctor has MUCH more versatility for alot less cost (buffs+revive > ranged heals). This, in turn, leads to a questioning of our profession. I, for one, slowly questioning my template.

Does anyone realize that if mind were healable, then I could stand back and heal while my group killed what ever they want in the game? Is that what you want? To be able to attack and kill with no fear of dying?

It would get boring so fast.

yeah we propably could kill just about everything in the game. the thing is that the heals in SWG are just too strong. heck a well experimented stim B usually fully heals a player. now cut heals by 75% for example. this still allows the novice medic dabbler to decrease his downtime. however self-healing in combat for those soloers out there will hardly be worth it. keeping people alive during a large scale battle will actually be a challenge for a CM.

now this would reduce the redundancy in higher level heals and at the same time steer combat away from that nasty blue bar as all of a sudden there actually is a POINT to attacking health and action. (while at the same time the medics will still get head/eyeshotted and use much more mind as of now, heh, never said this idea was perfect)

I really should have titled the thread differently. Well I'm actually still going full-bore after Combat Medic again. My brother got a helmet and doesn't suck anymore. I still think my graul mauler is a better tank,but I'm not scared of him dropping to a freaking sharnaff on Corellia. I was actually steering towards doctor, and I went out hunting with a bunch of people (like 10) and they had three TKA's tanking (all wearing HELMETS) and man I was a busy-body. Now I still gritted my teeth when someone took a bad shot to Mind and starting screaming for a heal with 50% health and 5% mind... and I'm thinking... why bother? You'll drop before you run out of health?

But it's an occurence that happens much less often. As far as the solution to healing mind? The most effective I know of would be allowing mind heals, but making them cap out at 50% of the Mind drain from a Medic, so you cannot effectively heal someone's mind pool. You can fix them, but you're effectively dumping twice your Mind bar for every bit of them you fix. I'm sure with Muan Gold it would turn into an exploit though, so it will just have to be the fatal flaw.

I did turn into a **edit** with some guy yesterday. He kept talking saying to my group, "I only group with people better than me, so who wants to duel me? No DBs..."

I guess he was a high end TKA or something, but burst run, a graul mauler, and a nice mind poison made short work of him. Then I pumped one of each of my diseases into him and said, "That's a coincidence, because I only group with people that aren't morons!" I got a few hate tells on the way out of the city as the diseases rotted him away (hey he said no DBs) but this is why I hate PvP.

instead of arguing over what Eugee does and doesnt understand about the CM profession (and I think that he has a good grasp on it, as do most of you, but NO ONE has a full grasp of it), let's try to fix the main problem here that he's brought up in this post and solutions to fix it: the stupidity of people falling constantly to mind damage with a HEALER CLASS OF ANY SORT standing around.

i understand where he's coming from with the PC tank buddy system. in my PA, there is a single melee character. when we go on guild hunts, i find that i am almost exclusively babysitting him. My pets are even set to follow and guard him instead of me. he eats up a large percent of my B Stims (at least after the group's pets do). but of course, after a time, i have to say "dude, your mind. watch your mind... you're losing your mind..." and when he lets it slip, its lost, and he's incapp'ed. Then all i can do, as a healer, is stand over him and say "now look what you've done. you lay there for a minute or too, and think about it... when your mind comes back." I was originally a CH/BE. I dropped BE cuz it is gimped to heck and back. I added CM because I got tired of having to babysit the tank and then having to dash halfway across tarnation to heal the Dancer/Tailor in the back that has a gun and somehow drew aggro to herself. I figured that CM would be the answer to that problem, but I'm now seeing that I traded the problems in BE for the problems of CM.

anyway: the solution, KRMarx's suggestions. BE's pet stims heal health and action AND MIND. one fell swoop. it makes the trick command essentially useless except for the healing of mind wounds. my suggestion is for the devs to add stims that can heal the mind, but insert them at the upper tiers of the doctor and CM's skill list, and make a variety of them. make multi-faceted packs that heal all 3 HAM (and even dull down the mind heal portion if they want, say only 1/2 the health/action portion), but in small quantities, and them make mind stim packs that heal just the mind in a larger portion. in fact, i dont see why they dont have health stims and action stims as it is (or is that a doctor thing). say a Health or Action A-Stim would heal base 200,a Mind A-Stim would base heal 100, and the Multi A-Stim would heal 100/100/50. Of course, there might be B-, C-, and mebbe D-Stims later, and don't forget to factor in the medic classes skill mods to increase these stats. And if they are worried about healers abusing the mind healing effect, dont forget that healing USES the mind of a healer, nullifing the mind heal effect on the healer himself.

of course, these stims would have a high medicine use stat on them, so no average joe could use them; heck only a medic with pharm IV (or mebbe its master medic) can use C-Stims, so there's no way Joe Blowe could use a stim on the third and fourth tier of a doctor or CM's skill tree.

Something else that disturbs me is that healers, with all their Organic Chemistry Science cannot come up with a chemical compound that can heal the mind, but Smugglers can temporarily stimulate regeneration of and even increase the capicity of the mind with their spices (aka drugs, aka illegal chemical compounds...?). Why can doctors not create an Enhance Mind/Focus/Willpower stim that does not give as great a boost as, say, Muon Gold, and *without* the whiplash after the effect wears off? A tinkering with the drugs that makes Muon Gold do its thing, but safely. of course, this same drug is what would be used in the affore metioned healing stims. i speculate that doctors are not allowed to make Enhance Mind/Focus/Willpower Stims so that Smugglers cand do somethingthat no other class can, and that is bogus (aside from the fact that they can make stupid bank off the stuff...).

I speculate that the reason behind not allowing healers to heal mind is to give entertainers something to do <chuckle>, and that is all well and good, but if they wish to take away a healer's effectiveness in combat by not allowing him to heal the mind, they why is there no "Combat Entertainer"? I know that class simply sounds rediculous, but it is a necessity. i come from DAoC, whereyou have a fatigue stat that dictates how often you can use special abilities. of course, you dont automatically die when it runs out, but you can run away when its empty, and you cant do extra damaging attacks when it is either, so you are good as dead if you arent simply powerful. Someone mentioned Bard classes in this thread, and that was their purpose: to keep the party's fatigue bar regenerating at an accelerated rate. A class like this is a necessity in any game, and if they arent going to allow the already created classes that can only heal the body to do it, then they need to enhance the mind healing class, or create another class that can. Other than Smuggler, LOL! i do understand that in the day and age SWG is placed, having half nekkid-twi'leks prancig aboot the battle fiend and a band running amidst laser fire is as silly as the class "Combat Entertainer", but if a Squad Leader can inspire his team to run faster and fight harder, why is there no class that can shout encouragements that heal the mind.

those are my suggestions to the mind heal problem. the dev's had a good idea in mind when they came up with it, but it is illogical. if they were going to make it so that the mind bar had to be healed differently form the other two, then they should ALL be healed in different ways and require seperate, yet multiple, ways to do so. another suggestion:try to think like a developer. this is their idea, their baby. The 3 HAM bar is something they came up with, and it is an integral part of their project that i doubt we will be able to persuade them to change. but, we should be able to persude them that this part has a flaw, and it needs some thinking and refixing.

i dont post often, so feel free to copythis rantand post it elsewhere if you agree with me and think it may do some good in another thread.

They took away the ability to heal Mind in beta, because two healers could just keep healing other and be masters in a few hours, by healing each others Mind pools.

The fix is to either make non-combat actions drain a fourth, unhealable bar, or else make Mind heals less effective than they amount of Mind they drain, so you cannot achieve a perpetual loop of healing. The fourth bar would actually work WELL. But it returns to the idea of HP & Mana in EQ. One bar you can heal, one bar you can't heal.

As it's a basic game mechanic, I don't forsee it being changed. I just warn anyone I group to wear a helmet or stay the heck out of the melee. If they lose their mind I'll still heal them, I need the XP.

Eugee you may also want to think about getting some of the better foods, like breath of heaven and vercupti, they increase focus and willpower, which increases mind regen and lowers specials costs. If you have more than 1 melee fighting, in the example with the 3 TKAs, establish a rotation system so that when someone takes aggro and starts losing mind, to pull out and let another tank get it from him/her.

You'll have less incaps that way.