Combat Medic Archive
Thread: Poisons... let's talk solutions!
Except for the ability to apply poisons without LOS, wouldn't all the heavy, constant damage and the unhealable-ness of mind damage be already upset by the Chane To Hit of poisons? I've wasted so many packs of poisons just trying to get one to stick. It seems pretty random.
I'm also not sure in how we're being to compared to BH, Rifleman, Swordsmanprofessions who have their mind damage based on weapons that they buy one time and use until it gets destroyed while Combat Medics have to craft each pack of poison they use. Poisons that doesn't always affect the target and can take tons of wasted resources. Poison packs that require a lot of different resources and most cost a bundle, some reaching 10c per unit while also requiring to travel to far-off planets. At least, on my server this is the case with the crafting.
I'm not sure how Elonara is doing all of this damage to all of these people without ever getting shot back, even once. All it takes is a profession with knockdown, and there's a lot of them out there to kill anyone without ever getting hit back. (just two of the marksman elite professions have a ranged knockdown, much farther than a CM can ever throw something) Ok, maybe she catched a group of enemy-factioned players not paying attention to a red dot on the radar coming at them. I'm not sure how she got near that many players in the first place to throw the DoT. Most people's radars are set to 128 meters. I'm not at master level yet but I'm pretty sure we don't have as much range as 64 meters (which is the max range of all ranged combatants).
In my opinion, mind damage should be the same except with LOS. There should be something else out there that can do high damage other than guns and melee is not viable in PvP. Any BH can own you from far away. If they're going to lower mind damage then they should raise the Chance To Hit like say in a ratio of 9:10 success rate. If poisons aren't going to dothe samedamage then they should hit most of the time. As it is, I'm wasting a lot of packs and taking a bit of damage to my mind just trying to apply one to a mob, making me easier to kill with headshots or just random hits to the head. Add to that my function as well as Healer and my mind pool is all but drained if I even survive a big battle.
I've posted on this .. and generally new to these forums .. (Been lost in SWG-Discussion/SWG-Rant 
I think 'mind' poisons.. and mind damage in total.. is a problem/issue with a combat workings of the game.. not a class flaw. Rifleman gets mind shots.. mind bleed for sick amounts of damage. and no way to defend against it.. aside from having a larger mind pool.. (mind is capped)
As for the rest I've made a post .. as to avoid spamming I will post the link here.
Please read if you have a moment as it addresses a wide variety or problems.. with some probable solutions and would appreciate feedback on this .. possibly so we can get some working consencus as to what is wrong .. and constructive ideas to improve or fix exsisting problems and/or flaws.
Linkage below
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=combat_medic&message.id=3586
Lots of people have opinions (NERF IT! NERF IT!). Sorry, this isn't the thread for that. This is the thread to discuss possible fixes for CM poisons.
Ipersonally thinkthat poisons should stay non-LoS. As should grenades and traps, once those're actually usable, and against players (in the case of traps). It simply adds something to the CM class (and theoretically commando and scout/ranger) that most players can't do. I mean, everyone else is an elite marksman, I want my combat tactics to be different! This adds a much needed level of combat... siege warfare!
I'venarrowed the bestchanges down to 3 options. First, you could keep the effectiveness on poisons the same as they are now, except get rid of Mind/Focus/Willpower woundpacks/poisons. Unfortunately this kills THE best way to take out an AT-ST. I know most people might consider that a moot point, but it's a big deal IMO and will become a bigger deal in the future. Honestly though mind poisons don't exactly make sense... what is it? A headache?
Secondly, you could keep poisons the same as they are now, and buff up the Doc's ability to cure poisons greatly. Give them cure poison/disease area stims. Make them more powerful. As it is, there are more Docs than CMs, so this would be an effective solution. The downside to this, is that Docs are already waaaayyyy more useful in PvP than CMs are. I know I might get flamed for saying that. But trust me, I'm both a Doc and a CM. Doc keeps me alive, CM gets the kills. But being a master of both, I know that Doc is better at keeping me alive than CM is at getting me kills.
The third solution would be to totally overhaul poisons and diseases. Some ideas along those lines could be making poisons tick every second, maybe making them exponential (to a certain point). So that it wouldn't be too powerful at first, but left unchecked for a long time (a long time is like 20-30 seconds in PvP, lol) would be a serious threat. You could make generic poison stims that damage all 3 pools in much lower amounts, say, by 1/3 the damage they're doing now. As in, take the mind damage we're doing and divide it over all 3 pools.
I can't think of any changes that could be done with diseases, without making them either worthless or overpowered.
If anyone has any ideas, criticisms, or whatever, feel free to discuss. No shouting NERF! please. =)
1) Keep non-LOS and reduced just mind poison not even mind diseases just mind poison to 50% of what it does now in order to bring it inline with rifleman and BH eyeshot damage.
2) Make Dots LOS but keep damage...(not a favorite of mine but still) sitll think mind poisonwould be overpowering in this solution but at least we would have to risk our necks.
3) now my favorite...raise the effectiveness of all dots 20-30%, make all dots do 10% of full damage on the first tick 20% on the second 30% on the third up to its max damage have it tick there for a few mins before tick downward from 100% to 0%. This would really give the CM dots a feeling of lingering death. This would alos fit with the current power of the doctor cure line as it would make dots easier to cure at initial levels and harder to cure as it reached its peak making it more valuable for a doctor to heal it now rather than later...I think this would be great and really give meaning to the words Damage over Time. When i think poison, i dont think snakebite u are dead 10 mins later...i think get hit now....first 5 mins u feel fine...5 min later oh kind of feel weak....10 mins later omg mu guts are on fire some one kill me now andput me out of my misery...Testing is crucial to see how much ramping the damage needs to go up every tic in order to maintain effectiveness 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% isnt a bad rate either....
4) the most sinple solution...have SOE remove mind damage and think of another way BHs, and rifleman can be viable in combabt.
Ok, i'll speak my mind.
Here's how I see it: We should be doing damage. It's harder to get to master CM than it is to get to master BH. No doubt about it. We essentially have to master Markman (or get the combat XP equivalent of it) so we should be doing damage. We should be doing good damage. 50 DPS is good, it's really good, it's perfect for us as a class.
However. LOS needs a fix (it should still AOE, but you shouldn't be able to attack the target inside a building), and duration needs to be lowered to 2 minutes. Doctors need to get poison heals at novice doctor or tier one or 2.
What are YOU smoking ? BH has master marksman as pre-req (just as essentially CMs do) but after it they need 450,000 heavy weapon exp just for heave weapon 4, that's more then all our medic exp combined!!!
But to the point: I think fixing LOS so it won't work in buildings will be sufficient enough.