Combat Medic Archive

just too early to tell how the are going to "balance" combat

Its looks like attacks may hit all ham instead of a specific one. How can you heal your mind when it will use mind to heal? Or it will be specific ham attacks allowed but stims will heal specific ham's? I don't know but I hope it is well thought out.

I think they are having a hard time is because it "is" so balanced. How can you balance something when it is "your" choice to become whatever you are? That means you balance off what the players comments are. So when that is examined you discover that it is not out of balance but have to soemthing to quiet the nerf sayers. Something has to be earned in the game, something to strive for or it isnt worth playing. How in the world are you going to heal your mind using your mind? And if they make stims for the mind and everybody can use them we can sit there all day and attack each other and watch the grass grow. If they make uber poison foods and can defeat are attacks then the Rifleman are next. Than we make health poison and then pistollers are next. So on, Ifthis keeps up every combat class will be nerfed to nothing and we can all be tailors.

Rhen is right, I think it applies to all HAM costs, though. So instead of taking damage for spamming specials you're taking off some of your maximum HAM, which will be quite interesting. Will it regen like damage? Will the HAM costs be the same ( which would suck cuz you take a couple hundred mind when using a stim )? The devs don't often give away secrets and they seem to really wanna surprise us with things so I doubt we'll learn about the balance until the patch. All we can do is speculate.

THe deal with mind is that specials, including things like healing actions (which is what launching DoTs is considered), will be coming from a seperate Specials Bar. THere will likely be such a Bar for each of the standared HAM. Think of it as a secondary set of HAM bars that is kind of like a Mana bar in other games.

So if you launch a Stim it will take off of this unhealable Mind Specials bar. That specials bar doesn't take "damage" like your standard Mind bar would, it just gets smaller as you perform actions and regenerates at some rate. (We don't know yet how secondary traits will affect these new bars, though.)

So with this it would now be impossible to heal mind and heal the damage your healing action did all at the same time. Instead you would use up your Mind Special bar while healing that mind damage, so the reason for mind damage removal from stims back in Beta (the healing the pool you use do heal from exploit) will no longer be possible. So maybe stims will get mind healing added back in.

IF we get mind healing back into stims, then the Mind bar will no longer be any different from Health or Action. And that is how I see the revamp affecting mind in this way.

At any rate, it is looking very much like it will likely be 2 seperate specials bars, one each for Health, Action and Mind, just like we have HAM damage bars now. Special actions will come from these new bars and no longer affect our damage bars at all. Everything else stays the same including targeted damage to specific bars. (Although Special costs and damage levels might be tweaked some.)

Oh, and didn't the revamp get pushed back? I thought it was looking more like Publish 10 or 11?

Well, Gary Gattis state of the game letter explains that the combat revamp is basically an on-going effort.

"Publish 8 (Droids Rebuilt)"
"We have made a decision to address major combat issues only and not do the full combat balance at this time. After the Crafting Experimentation experience, we realized that we need to spend more time than a single publish to truly accomplish our goal, which is to make combat fun and engaging. To have the depth to combat that I think everyone wants in the system we want get much more player feedback and balance on these types of things. We will be developing the Combat Balance separately in a Sandbox over a long period of time, with plenty of Test Center and correspondent participation. We will release this one when it is ready... and not before."

werd

Actually, Zarlor, as I understand it, it's not a seperate bar like a mana bar for your standard rpg. It's the same bar. What using a special would do is lower your maximum value. What that means is, if you use say low blow for 54 action when you had 600, you would then have 546 action. Damage would be calculated as normal so if you spam low blow down to 50 action then get hit for 100 action, oops. You just screwed yourself over. However, if you got hit for 200 of your 600 action then usedlow blow, you wouldn't have 346 action, you'ld still have 400 but your maximum action would have lowered from 600 to 546. It's a special system totally independent from damage though with consequences related to damage if you don't manage your ham well. The nice thing is, the devs have also said your maximum value will regenerate MUCH faster than what we currently know.

I like the way the systems sounds and I can't wait to try it. I am a bit worried what that will mean for medics though. At least it will put an emphasis back on healing wounds like it was before hologrinding No more waiting for the med center to auto heal my wounds because all the medics are humping the tumblers. It shames me to see that as a former master medic.

They canned that system I thought. But your guess is as good as mine!