Combat Medic Archive

I've been giving this topic a lot of thought and trying to catch up on every thread and post in regards to it so that I might get the best picture possible on the pros and cons. So far I've made it clear that I am very con on this, though I'm willing to see what happens.

But, I came across a post (I believe by Austrian) that got me thinking very hard. And then got me worrying very much

MMORPG's being what they are, you will have people that will look for ways to grief and do it as often as possible. Mention the name Mimi to any Rebel on Eclipse. If you're not familiar, she's a Combat Medic/Doc that took advantage of the revenge TEF system to systematically wipe out each and every rebel who stood in her way in AH. Nothing could be done about it. In that particular setting, with the way TEF worked then, an Imperial CM could have a field day farming FP in Anchorhead. Many many people saw this as griefing and exploiting and led to many of the NERF cries directed at CM's.

When I read Austrian's post I realized that this change could quite possibly make CM the single greatest Grief class in the history of MMO's. Maybe an exaggeration, but I think not. By removing the ability of poison to incap, we have actually been granted a power that no other class possesses - The ability to put our opponents at death's door, from a range they can't respond (with the uber-range poisons), with a HAM bar so low they can donothing at all, and then disease each and every single HAM stat they have.

They may not fear death at our hands any longer, but a CM will be able to 1v1 turn their opponent into nothing but black rot.

Now, I won't do that. And I'm sure many of you won't do that. But do you think every CM is not going to do that? There will be griefers who see this as the ultimate tool to cost another play countless hours and wasted resources healing. And they will do it! What will the outcry be like from players when CM's start rotting away their stats repeatedly just to grief?

At least with the current system, other players have incap and death to protect them from grief play such as this. Remove poisons ability to incap and some will see it as giving poison the ability to gimp a player in prep for disease griefing.

I could be wrong. I hope I'm wrong if this does go live. What do you think? At the very least I hope the Dev's have considered this possibility.

Thank you for your time

now this agreat argumant to remove the +1 hp cap for poisons

Great post !

I don't know, I still haven't seen these "uber range" posions/diseaseses, but don't you still run into the problem of being killed? I mean, there's nothing stopping your opponents from running up to you and shooting/slicing etc you to death. And since you have to stop moving to throw anything, I don't see any single CM being able to stay alive long enough to disease all stats.

But I do wonder, with posions not incapping, don't we run into the same problem we had before with CM's posioning incapped players? Imagine, you're down to 1 HAM point, but you can't die from it. Posions typically last for quite some time don't they? I personally remember being posioned for 15 min one time during the posion incapped players phase. So now, instead of being incapped over and over for 15 min, you could walk around with 1 HAM for 15 min. Your only options would be to keep healing that particular bar, or sit in a cantina for 15 min listenting to music while your posion wears off.

Again, this seems to be primarily a PvP issue and shouldn't affect PvE too much.

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I personally remember being posioned for 15 min one time during the posion incapped players phase. So now, instead of being incapped over and over for 15 min, you could walk around with 1 HAM for 15 min.

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e Ailix,

Thanks for this post. The issue of griefing is the standpoint that's close to me. You never end it, but I think we have to be conscious of it.

However, i'm really not sure that I'm convinced by what you're saying. It seems to me that your argument goes back and forth between poisons and diseases. You can't blackrot someone with a poison which is the extent to the change. Diseases always have stopped at 1hp and hold you there.

There is a huge grief potential pending wiht AOE diseases but that is actually a separate discussion. I have a hard time seeing this potential change as increasing the griefing potential instread of lowering it. Now the incap chicken doens't happen. There is no need for grace periods. They are shorter even if you don't have a doc to cure because of the lack of grace periods.

Currently a griefer can hit someone with no doc around and have them suffering for a long time because of the grace periods between incaps in which neither damage nor time passes on the poison. That would not be the case going forward.

While I have listed my support of this change, I remain open minded to constructive arguments to the contrary. If there's something I've missed in understanding the original post, please hit me with it again.

Jacore MD/MCM, Tempest

Thanks Jacore and everyone. I'll try to clarify it a bit further. like I said, I could be wrong (and hope I am) but it seems as if this is likely.

I'm going to try and do this by way of example.

Situation A) Current Rules of Poison Incapping:

I am using uber-range poison on mindat 80m. My opponent can do nothing to me at this range so it's basically a free shot. Now I merely remain outside of weapons range until the poison incaps. Then I run up and DB.

In this situation I 'could' run up and start throwing diseases before incap, but would be leaving myself vulnerable to the opponent and would 'maybe' get off one or two before the poison incaps or I am beaten.

In effect, the incap from the poison has PREVENTED me from griefing my opponent by tossing all kinds of nasty diseases on them. You've got to look at incap in a slightly different way than normal to see this. Don't look at it as a bad thing leading to death, but rather as a system to protect a helpless player from whatever an opponent wishes to do (short of L337 speak).

Now for

Situation B) New Rules of Poison reducing to 1

I am using uber-range poison on mind at 80m. Once again I have gotten a free shot and remain outside of weapons range. BUT in this case I will now throw some action and health poison which is now unhealable because of my opponents low mind. And with very little mind and soon very little action or health I can walk up to them with impunity and start dropping every disease in the book on them. They will be utterly helpless to respond with anything more than an occasional normal shot from their weapon. Something my buffs will handle or I can easily heal.

In effect, the 1 Point rule has allowed me to reduce my opponent to complete ineffectiveness so that I may do whatever I will to them. I don't have to fire my weapon and incap them. I can keep them juggled on death's door as long as I wish. Poison DOT ends? add another. Heck, maybe drop some of my Doc skills and pick pistoleer back up to get a knockdown on them. Now I can poison as long as I wish, Disease as long as I wish and keep them knocked down as long as I wish! In an absolute worst situation a griefer could keep someone locked down in one spot until that player finally logs out.

Think hard on this, every weapon in the game will eventually incap an opponent. In a sense, this protects players from having multiple nasty attacks and bleeds dropped on them. Make poison a "1 Point Wonder" and we have a tool that NO other class has either a similar attack or defense against.

And even though disease currently does the 1 Point thing, it is soo much slower and doesn't seem to have the range of poison that it is nowhere near as effective in this type of griefing as poison will be. If there are 'uber-range' diseases out there, let me know, I've never seen them mentioned

This is all what I mean by Unintended Consequences. Rather than fix the actual problems, we are being giving something completely different that has the byproduct of Masking (not solving) some of those problems. The thing to look at is "What NEW problems will this semi-fix create". This potential abuse for massive griefing is, I believe, one of those new problems

Hope that clarifies! And if I'm wrong on any of this, please feel free to suggest where I may be mistaken. I may still think I'm right, but I will give thought to any aspect you think I may be mistaken.

Edit to that post

I am mistaken on the idea of using pistoleer knockdown, as that would do damage and effectively incap them. Of course, given the ability to reduce all stats to 1 with this, an incap at that point may last a very long time. Far long enough to keep them out of the 3-incap death window.

Ailix,

It's good to be thinking in this mindset...unintended consequences is often the middle name(s) of MMOs.

I think you have found a valid example in which this might not be what they'd like to see. We should find more, or at least try to.

However, after they are found, 2 things must be examined: propensity and severity.

How often is it likely to happen and how bad is it given that it does? I think you've touched on some elements of the severity but let's look at both.

On the severity yes they might be hit with multiple poisons if the said griefer or non-griefing CM decides they just either can't/dont'/won't clone within normal weapons range and finish this guy off because apparently his say LLC might drop me in one shot. In this case what we know is that under the new rulkes the duration of this grief will be less than today because the poisons continue to tick...no grace period. Severity is undoubtedly less in the proposed change, not more.

But the fact that severity is less is meaningless to overall griefing is the propensity of it is much more. I think this is part of your argument. I wonder if it is. In my mind what you've laid out here is a valid tactic (given that we're allowed to keep 80m poisons which i think ultimately we willl not) for dealing withsomeone like a BH.

You might poison their mind to knock out the 0040 medic most have. Then go for action to disable specials. I think the flip side of the coin of the times when this is an unintended consequence on the bad side, we must also look at the new valid tactic for 1 on 1 that has developed (again ignoreing range). Is the propensity for the bad outcome greater than that of the new tactic for us? I'm not sure, but my hunch is no.

Ultimately if we can find the net effect of unintended consequences (when paired against new tactic goods) exceeds in damage the amount the devs think they are fixing with this, they will not follow though. Discussions like this are much more useful than some of the silly ranting to date.

Jacore MD/MCM, Tempest

This thread has got me wondering if this change could have the unintended consequence of actually making diseases work again. I mean we have long since suggested here that Diseases are a viable method for putting attrition into the game. Diseases can cause enough wounds that, hopefully, any attacking force will have to sit out for a while to get healed before they can come back on the offensive.

Doing so on someone incapped or on a corpse left many felling like they were griefed. Why? Because they were defensless and utterly helpless at that point.

But, in this instance if you are trying to disease someone, they at least have tha ability to try and do something, anything, to stop it from happening. Running, if nothing else, preferably running in a direction to get them help. But they can do something. Chances are we can probably still run them down (we do have TN +50 and BRE +10 at Master level, after all) and disease them, but at least they could do more than just lay there.

Now we can;t stop people from yelling grief. As someone else mentioned you can give some folks free ice cream and some of them will still complain they are griefed by it being too cold. However we may ahve some justification here for this being a more viable tactic.

Look at the threads complaining about CM griefing. How do they really break down? Generally on the survface the complain is that the poison/disease is too strong. But the heart of the issue really comes down to a couple of things. For poisons folks got stuck doing the incap dance because posions woudl APPEAR to be lasting far longer than they should. In fact poisons were working for exactly as long as the should but if someone went incap it put a 5 minute delay timer on the poison where it was still on, just not doing anything. Constantly falling incap left the victime with very few options and only maybe 4 minutes before falling incap again to try and find a cure. In effect the victim was helpless. No strategy was going to counter the fact that they would be under the effects of a poison, doing an incap dance, for 45 minutes.

With disease the root of the problem is again helplessness. Nothing can be done about being diseased if you are lying on the ground incapped or as a corpse. And especially if it happened while you were a corpse because other bugs would pile on creating the chance for a perma-incap situation. Utter helplessness.

Yet bleeds do the same things our poisons and diseases do. They drain damage, and they cause wounds.In some cases they can be stacked and be at least as effective as a poison (although the bleed state does drop on incap, unlike what poisons currently do). And there are no complaints about nerfing bleeds. Maybe it's because people feel like they can at least try to run from whoever put the bleed on them, because at least they weren;t helpless when they got bled. It was a fair cop, so to speak.

So maybe it will be seen as a new grief method. Or maybe it won't because at least the victimwon't be so helpless anymore. Just a thought.

Good points, both of you

Jacore - I like to think that the vast majority of CM's would not use this kind of tactic, so you could be right that the change will lessen the current class envy towards us rather than raise it due to griefing. IMO, that's a good thing. If the change does go live I plan on at least testing out this 'tactic' to see how easily it can be accomplished. If KaveDawg could try it out on TC, that would be even better (assuming he can make the long-range poisons there).

Zalor - I agree with the idea that the change will make disease much more useful and used. That was actually my first thought when I read about the no-incap. But that's what started me worrying also. The two times I've ever used disease on a player I was immediately bombarded with nasty /tells about how I was a griefer and keeping people from playing. With this change poison becomes slightly redundant and the usefulness of disease will raise quite a bit. Since they would be functionally the same thing (reduce a HAM to 1 point) the only real differences will be that poison is quicker, but disease is more permanent. Giving those options, and being a Master Kiter in city situations, disease will definitely become my weapon of choice.. I lovingly anticipate all the future /tell You Griefer! coming my way, lol.

You got the point of this thread exactly, Unintended Consequences. And like you pointed out Zalor, not all of them may be bad. Disease becoming useful is a good thing for the Combat Medic, maybe not as good a thing for everyone else I think most people are getting caught up in the heat of the moment worrying about how the change will affect their current playstyle, and I agree with you and KaveDawg that it will most likely be slightly minimal, though I reserve final judgement on that. Examining what this change can mean in the long run, both negative and positive, will give us all a better idea of whether it's a good thing or not.

What I am worried about, as a BH.

I have torso shot, which lights somone on fire...Which is a nice health pool bleed, however if causes some nasty nasty wounds. (like 200-300 if the person stays up with heals.)

What if I get killed, will the person just stand there at 1hp and take wound damage? Their whole bar may turn black before it wears off....