Combat Medic Archive

If you give a real life doctor a piece of wood and some rope, there is no reason tho expect them to be able to make a crossbow. So why should a doctor, who has no experience with ranged equipment, be able make an area cure simply by throwing in a dispersal mechanism provided by a combat medic?

It would make more sense to me if rather than trading components back and forth between doctors and combat medics, if we traded finished goods back and forth. In real life, you make an innoculation by using a sample of a disease, not by using a petrie dish and some agar. And a disease isn't a disease until the final combine. So, for example, a combat medic would create a disease, then hand the disease to a doctor, a specialist in healing people, who would then find a way to neutralize the adverse effects and create an innoculation. Or a doctor would create a cure disease, then hand the cure to a combat medic, who specializes in ranged actions, who would swap out the delivery mechanism and find a way to turn it into a ranged cure.

The base stats of the final item would be almost entirely dependent on the initial item created. So, for example, a combat medic could experiment the range of a disease cure, or the area of effect, but not the effectiveness of it. To further simulate, we can make the area cures be weaker and have fewer charges, as each dose would be spread out out and thus less concentrated. And the charges (quantity), effectiveness (strength) and potency (virilance) of the disease a combat medic hands the doctor, the charges (quantity), duration (strength), and change to resist (virilance) of the innoculation. The doctor might be able to experiment the ease of use, or tweak the product a little ("maybe we can use a *little* less sample and still make an effective innoculation"), but experimentation should not be the be all and end all.

A byproduct of this change would be to change how ranged and area stims work. Currently, somehow because we are making a long ranged stim rather than a close range one, we use the same components but have twice as many experimentation points. I would rather have it that we get a completed stim C, then add a little metal and a dispersal mechanism (or whatever else the devs want) to change the delivery of the medicine to be ranged/area. (I keep imagining sticking some solid rocket boosters and wings to a car...) Of course this would have dramatic rammifications on the economy so may not be implemented, but I think the idea and the logic are valid.

(Seperate because not part of the base idea.)

This integrates my idea of cross class abilities. (This is another discussion, found in the thread "Who gets area cures, and other cross-class abilities", http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=combat_medic&message.id=30005)

Imagine that the area cure has both a combat medic use and a medic use, and needs a doctor ability to cure. So, for example, a combat medic can experiment the combat medic use of a ranged cure down to 0 (so any doctor can use it), at the cost of range. Where as if a doctor got a little combat medic support, the doctor could use a much longer range or larger area cure. And a combat medic normally wouldn't be able to use the cures, but if got the "curepoison" ability from doctor, then could.

Another side effect would be that to use the best cures, a doctor would only need to get combat medic support (one tree), where as a combat medic would need the would treatment speed track as wel as the medicine knowledge track (two trees). This partially compensates for the fact that doctor uses much fewer SP than combat medic does.