Combat Medic Archive
Thread: Master CM AoE Disease: What Should be Done about it?
The issue is that, with the fix of the AoEs hopefully coming down the pipeline, the cries of 'Nerf!' and 'Griefer!' will probably increase tenfold.
My question to you all, is this an issue that should be addressed preemptively?
Should the effectiveness be lowered dramatically?
Should an AoE Cure be given to Doctors at the same time?
Should the 75% reduction in PvP be implemented, or if it already is should that percentage be upped?
Is this even an issue to worry about?
The reason I bring this up is because I fear the aftermath of what will happen once the MCMs AoE Disease is fixed. People will be dropping left, right and center with fully black HAMs and the backlash may be so enormous that the Devs will have no other choice BUT to swing the Nerfbat in the CM direction.
What say you, my fellow Medicos?
*thanks to Jacore for bringing this up in another thread
Thanks for starting this again Texxie,
I greatly fear that if we don't preemptively craft our own response, we tacitly hand the nerf bat to spectators who'd love to swing for the trees to ameloriate their displaced anger.
I think the easist 'parital fix' to the degree of grifing/sidelining is an across the board 75% reduction to all bleeds/poisons/disease durationsin PvP. They just don't need to be this long and given the new grace period is coupled with 3/10 incap=death....we have problems.
That limits the severity of griefing, but not the propensity.
I am glad to see that Z say the Med Dev is looking at rescaling cures to equal our offense. It's needed. But I personally do not think that AOE is the answer for docs. That wouldencroach CMs investing in ranged support and the defining aspect of CMs which is Range (implied by AOE).
WhatI do think is possible is a multi-use skill (like D&D cleave). Docs get an increasing % chance to reapply to another patient within the same round upon success. That way a master doc has a good percent chance (not only to cure poison in one application) but also cure many afflicted people in one round. It's AOE but with an important twist. They must regroup around the Doc. The Doc can't fire this at range or radius.They must be within 6m of a doc to get it done. That's anacceptible tradeoff that preservesthe uniqueness of CMs. If you think about this the programmers could code this as an AOE that must be self-targetted with a 6m radius (not affected by med use) with a positive chance to resist that decreases with doc med use. If CMs have resist to stick, the Doc must have some failure rate at blanket curing within their range.
Likewise, I think Master Docs might need a cure-multi state ability. A master level pack that has a lower % chance to cure multiple states with a single application.
The skills for these cures must continue to reside in the speed line as it effectively encourages Master Doc existence and not just Master Surgeon purchasing packs.
As to whether it's an issue to worry about, my vote is an emphatic yes. I don't want to lose skills or reasonable power in this game, but personally I'm challenged to find a constructive role for AOE diseases here that isn't sidelining/griefing/anti-griefing.
Personally, I'd trade AOE diseases for an AOE state bomb like dizzy or blindness. That's tactical, powerful, group oriented,in line with our character and doesn't grief.
My thanks in advance to all who contribute.
Jacore
No offense to you combat medics that play nice, but those diseases DO need to be hit with a dramatic reduction in at least duration, if not effectiveness as well.
When combined with the rediculous state of "revenge" TEFs and complete lack of a death penalty, one CM can harrass and RUIN an entire play session for other players. If someone starts a TEF/Mind Disease campain on a small town with no master Doc, you only have two choices, leave or stand around being miserable looking for entertainers to patch you up after a rediculously long disease wipes out your entire mind bar.
I'm sorry to all you combat medics out there that play nice, but I hope they BEAT that portion of your repetoire into the ground.
Geldaran,
I make every attempt to be sporting in PvP (including not using AOE poisons during revenge tef until i have normal tef since those in the AOE radius can't target me) but you can bet your arse if they touch the duration of our poisons without doing the same to bleeds I'm gonna be among the loudest ones screaming foul.
As Z has aptly pointed out the stackability and duration of multiple bleeds greatly exceeds the pure damage potential of what CMs can do. Even with the proposed change to first aid, any change to our durations had better be applied to all DOTs.
Jacore
1) Keep the current damage the same (at least until the implications of the other fixes are fully known).
2) Fix the crafting so the combat medicine usage comes out right.
3) Make the disease end on cloning every time. Keep the wounds of course, but take on no new wounds.
4) Fix the issue with getting more wounds than HAM resulting in permament incap (until a CSR can rescue you or you are drug out into the open where a doctor can fix you). Always clone with a minimum of +1 non-wounded stat so you can at least move.
5) Make corpses immune to disease. If you are incapped, fine - you can pick up a new disease (after all, you are breathing). If you are a smuggler with feign death, you can pick up a disease. If you are truly dead (but waiting to hit the clone bar), you can't get diseased. If you want to remove new diseases from incapped people, I could live with that as well (big griefing potential knowingly diseasing ).
6) You disease or poison, you pick up a TEF.
7) Make a single cure disease C cure a disease C application. I don't know if cure disease has the same issues that cure poison has (multiple applications from a master doc to cure), but the initial fix is the same - make a single application cure for doctors.
I think that poison and disease damage can be looked at long-term, but nerf them now, and we'll never get the damage back if it proves to be too big of a nerf. Right now, the damage seems about right, particularly compared to weapons bleeds. Have you seen the mind bleeds that a T21 rifle can do? Dwarfs a well-crafted poison C without the crafting requirements.
Agreed. Poisons and bleeds I don't have as much of an issue with, but if they weaken one, all of them need looked at and balanced accordingly.
My issue is with diseases, specifically mind disease. It is absolutely absurd what disease can do to a player if you can't find someone to cure it immediately. Specifically there are 2 CMs I know of that will sit in a heavily factioned town for long periods of time diseasing people, getting killed, using their "revenge" TEF to disease someone else, rinse and repeat.
Specifically there are 2 CMs I know of that will sit in a heavily factioned town for long periods of time diseasing people, getting killed, using their "revenge" TEF to disease someone else, rinse and repeat.
Which brings up #8, which I forgot -
8) Fix revenge TEF. Commandos waltzing to 10m of your AT/ST before flaming it or comabt medics getting in range to throw their most powerful area poison or disease after a death is a problem with the revenge TEF and not with the flamethrower or poison.
The other responses came while I was typing up my post and I basically agree with what everyone has said. Before the devs nerf damage, I would ask them to look at a) root causes of the complaints (is it really combat medics or revenge TEF that is the problem? Is it really poisons or mind damage in general that is the problem?) and b) Look at increasing counters to CM offensive meds before looking at reducing damage.I don't havea problem with a well-prepared opponent countering my weapons (with doctor meds for example). This is no different from a PvPer wearing the best armor they can by to help them live in combat. I do have a problem with making myoffensive meds nearly useless against all opponents, prepared or not.
In the current PvP "landscape", disease is a viable weapon, I use it as a grief ender. People have this odd concept that anything that causes major wounds is "griefing" because it means they can't come right on back and attack again.
I had a commando yesterday decide that because he was mad about taking some major wounds, he was going to RTEF a bunch of us repeatedly with a flamethrower. End of story, I had to fight him long enough that he and I were the only TEFs on the board and diseased him and ran. Game over, he spent the next half hour in the cantina instead of continually putting people to the torch.
Basically, they view their own "griefing" as ok, and anyone's attempts to remove them from the running (read never-ending Zerg attack) as bad.
What does this mean?For some absolutely asinine reason, people in the SWG community have been brainwashed into thinking that there should be NO consequences for their actions. That wounds aregriefing because it requires them to PAY for the decisions they made.
We ask where the sting of death is? Start asking yourself where the sting of combat is. Right now it's only in who gets DBed the most, andgod forbid you have to take some downtimeafterit's over.
The only things that need to be fixed are corpse-infection (bug) and duration (15 minutes is a bit too much...or at least impose a 3-incap death rule for PvP)
Kirill,
I understand where you're coming from, I really do.
Yes the commandos have large grief potential now. Yes, some of them don't view lather, rinse repeat as griefing. I would almost go as far as to argue that the majority of commandoes don't do that. On Tempest, I really see the majority only really doing it to cull the AT-ST population (don't wanna make this a GCW thread though)..
My question is how can we take the example of a single commando who is griefing (or even a small group), extrapolate that to the class, and use it to justify AOE disease as anti-grief? There are CMs on my server that I know will start using AOE diseases to grief. The fact that we can be the grief police isn't a justification for an arms race.
And, how can you effectively taret the griefer with an AOE in the first place? You're going to get collateral damage quite often. Single Disease may be anti-grief but there is no basis for characterizing AOE disease as anti-grief. It's WMD. More to the point, look at what the suicide bombers among us do now. You die, get revenge TEF, and use that TEF to throw an AOE at an entire mob...only 1 of which can target you frequently. Most of the rest are completely unsuspecting and helpless tarets due to the mechanics currently in AOE blast rolls.
Our griefing capacity will be an order of magnitude or more greater than commandos, and so will be the calls for our lynching.
Jacore
Kirillian_NaJax wrote:
In the current PvP "landscape", disease is a viable weapon, I use it as a grief ender. People have this odd concept that anything that causes major wounds is "griefing" because it means they can't come right on back and attack again.
If that is aimed at me, I have to take issue. My complaint is NOT about taking wounds in the course of an honest fight and having to sit on the sidelines to get healed. That's valid and how they SHOULD work. My problem is the rediculous number and difficulty of repairingwounds a mind disease causes. I understand commando's can do nasty health wounds. Anyone with novice medic and a good wound pack B can fix that in a relatively short time. It takes agood doc to cure disease, or a long time with a good entertainer to fix the absurd amount of mind wounding a CM's disease can do.
8) Fix revenge TEF. Commandos waltzing to 10m of your AT/ST before flaming it or comabt medics getting in range to throw their most powerful area poison or disease after a death is a problem with the revenge TEF and not with the flamethrower or poison.
Yes, much of my issue is with the revenge TEF as well. both problems would be mitigated by getting rid of that moronic revenge flag. Maybe PvP would actually require some strategy. That doesn't change the fact that the mind wounds are excessive, even if they couldn't exploit that damned auto-covert/TEF.
Geldaran wrote:
If that is aimed at me, I have to take issue.
Sorry, that wasn't aimed at anyone specifically. I apologize forit appearingthat Iwas singling you out.
I have been putting a lot of thought into the concept of griefing in the SWG community lately, and I'm starting to come to some very sad conclusions. The concept is skewed, as it is beginning to grow intothe meaningof not just uncontrollable, intrusive and obnoxious behaviour, but into anything that creates a serious consequence for a player's chosen actions.
I'm a firm believer that combat and death should have dire implications upon the health of the participants. I don't cry about serious wounds; hell, I sit in the cantina/med center and contemplate what I did wrong and what I did right.
The grief isn't in the device, AOE or Single. It's in the RTEF. Until that's fixed, we can't honestly decide what's wrong and right, because DBing those PCs simply brings them back again and again in some non-stop cycle of childish amusement.
Oh and since that's half a hijack (the subject IS griefing in part, but I ignored the other), I'll try to address the rest.
Doctors' methods of treatment should be, at a minimum, as powerful as our attack. I don't know about AoE, because that's "our turf", but possibly the introduction of a cure pack D, which will cure without fail on the first shot?
This, however, would have to balanced in some manner as to not nullify our usefulness against doctors.
Kirill,
Thanks for these posts...I'm glad you've been thinking of it, as these issues have been heavy on my mind as well.
I would challenge that RTEF isn't the main issue, but rather it's the no cost of death that encourages people to run out of the cloning center blasting. It's that dynamic that encourages the best potential griefers in the class (commandos and CM) to actually do it.
But if you fix that...or other changes to RTEF, I would challenge that the implements still matter. 2 classes can sideline with massive wounds, and the devs are talking of removing the DOT from flamethrowers. That would leave just us, and now we might have our sidelining ability vastly increased. Fix the RTEF, we can still put other people out of the fight...and that won't go well in the community as a whole.
And us responding anything lik we spent ___ skill points so deal with it, or we spend all this on resources so we're entitled, or'get a doc'won't cut it. It will fly about as far and stink (not quite as bad) as Bounty Hunters defending eyeshot by saying we spent ___ skill points so deal wtih it, we should be the best, or 'Get a composite helm, spice, food, and wear a PSG 24/7'.
The response against commandos for the wounding was massive. If the hatred against us with AOE diseases doesn't reach the proportions of rebel hatred to AT-STs before the commando fix, I'd be stunned.
As for the docs, I'm not sure that we won't have to yield a bit on the AOE front. Doc's are the counter to our offensive skills. They can't be a counter if we can disease/poison N every 8 seconds and they can cure 1(maybe) every round. I'll yield a multi-cure to them....but never range.
Jacore