Combat Medic Archive

(This is not completely combat medic related, but it is related to nerf cries, and inspired by Gnuut's comments. The intent of this post is to try to provide some insight into why players pick the templates and fighting styles they do, the implications thereof, and how to change that.)

One of the major problems with PvP, as discussed in this forum, is that people very much have a "single player" mode of thinking in this game. Therefore, everybody you face is a Rifleman/fencer (or whatnot) with no counter to combat medics, and we all know the arguments which follow from this. It seems that a major cause of this is the PvE system in the game.

Currently, the PvE system is rather broken. By "broken", I mean when I see a cons yellow (very dangerous), or red (almost certain death), even when I'm not buffed I literally say to myself "great, another 5 minutes before I can check my factory". This is amplified by the fact that for combat medics, the primary attack is not an equipable weapon, but the problem exists for all professions. I have heard TKMs complain about accidentally killing two enraged racors (you know, the big things which almost killed Luke in Jabba's palace) while link dead, or a pair of riflemen/others killing x hundred year old krayt dragons. And when was the last time a buffed and prepared elite combat class (of *any* kind) gave a second thought about fighting a squad of 10 of the empire's fearsome stormtroopers.

Quite simply, people's templates support individual playing because the PvE system supports individual play. There is no benefit to grouping with a group (as individuals are so strong, and the penalty for dying is so low), and a group is much slower and harder to control than an individual. So people set up and get good at individual play (to the point of buying a second account to create a buff-bot). Then, in a venue where they can not effectively solo everything (such as PvP), they are surprised they lose to a contingency they as designed by the skill point system can not prepare for, and automatically assume something is wrong with the PvP system which they died in, rather than the PvE system which caused them to have false expectations.

Analysis of one potential "fix" for this "problem" is in the following post (as it is not the main intent of this posting).