Combat Medic Archive

We have all heard the comments about how in PvE combat medics do 10x less damage/time than your average elite combat class. However, empirically I have noticed very different results, and wanted to see what everybody's comments were.

Basically, I was in a group of 4 fighting a 200K HAM Tusken Observer. The group consisted of a master combat medic, a master commando, an expert TKA, and a master pistoleer. After all was said and done, I think I did about 1/4 of the total damage to the Tusken Observer, not bad for a "horribly underpowered PvE" class. (I know this because I tossed an action and a mind disease in addition to the health poison and disease to raise battle fatigue of the mob, and nobody else was doing significant wounds to the action and mind.)

Keep in mind that there were many mitigating circumstances. In particular, the commando did not have any cryoban grenades for cold damage, and the TKA was not spamming specials (just tanking so we could attack the mob). Then again, the extent of my participation was tossing a few diseases, an occasional poison, and then sitting next to the TKA and acting like a giant mind stim.

From what I can gather, the key isn't that combat medics are *underpowered* in PvE, they are *different*. (I'm sure everybody can understand that from our perspective of PvP and PvE combat compared to how others perceive how the combat "should" go. And I'm sure we have all done the "patient waiting for a mob to be poisoned".)

Basically, the longer a combat goes on, the more damage we can do. If a mob has 80% resists to all, 100K HAM, and we have a small party, we will do a significant percentage of damage. (If you can get a mob to 500 battle fatigue, a disease suddenly does a non-trivial amount of damage.) On the flip side, if a mob has 5K HAM, kinetic vulnerability, and we are in a large party, will do a very small percentage of the damage.

The same can be said with the size of the party. I recently paired with a master pistoleer in the tusken fort, and I was pretty happy with the total damage I did with my area poison to 10 of the mobs in close quarters. Then again, I'm sure that everybody can speak to "that battle where I threw a poison, but all the mobs were dead before the first tick".

So basically, before ranting about how little damage we do in PvE, think about the situation. It's true we do not do the *most* damage in combat. And frequently, when doing general hunting, poisons are relatively weak. However, it's not as if our damage is always just minor and we are just walking medicine chests.