Dancer Archive

"The doctor line is something like "I signed up to be a HEALER""

Yeah, and healers heal health. They shouldhave no impact whatsoever on action or mind. Action is naturally affected by food because food gives you energy. Mind is naturally healed by entertainers because they soothe the mind... well okay, that last one is kinda suspect, but surely the Action thing makes sense.

Beery, your hypocrisy is showing. Your attitude is just as selfish and narrow-minded as those you would attack. Let's get that clear up front. Being American, or any other nationality, has nothing to do with game balance.

The fixes and balances that I would prefer to see wouldn't take a revision of the 3-bar HAM system or permit Chef action heals or require any drastic alteration to the structure of the existing professions.

Doctors spend 140 points tomajor in healing. They pay lots of money to maintain factories, purchase ingredients, maintain harvesters on at least four planets, and they are in the game to heal. Doctors and medics were, in fact, able to heal mind in beta: mind healing for doctors was as originally intended, though exploits chased that function temporarily out of the doctor field. At the moment, the one thing, the only thing, the major thing that brings a party to a crashing halt and sends them all back to the cloning center is mind damage. Doctors can heal everything else the bad guys can throw at the party -- except that. Combat desperately needs a fix to the mind damage problem, because the only player-agents in the field, usng their healing talents, are helpless against this attack, which unbalances every aspect of PvP and PvE. The proliferation of "unbalanced" rifle and BH mind attacks, and CM mind poisons,are due to this hole in the healing system.

Doctors are also able to provide robust buffs to Health, Strength, Constitution, Action, Mind, and Quickness. After mastering Medic as a prerequisite, doctors can do very little that is unique except revive, cure poison, and cure disease -- and buff. They can manufacture medic-level stims for curing blindness, but it does not take a doctor to use the cure. (They can be made about Med Use 30, which is Pharmacology 3 under Medic.) Just as Bounty Hunters spend the most skillpoints to be the best at combat, Doctors spend the most skillpoints of any healing/buffing class and they should, by any definition, be the best at their field too.

Chefs spend 96 points to specialize exclusivelyin buffs that can be consumed anywhere, any time, by any level of player. The chefs desperately need something which makes their profession useful to every class of player, which is as intended. Although this largely consists of fixes to the current system of factories, food stacks, and schematic diversity, Chefs need to have those 96 skill points justified with functionality and commensurate reward for time invested.

Dancers and Musicians spend 110 points to socialize and specialize in all things mind: healing mind wounds, curing battle fatigue. Many in the profession are forced to sacrifice health and mind points for a massive action pool, making them less effective field combatants, and confining them to safe areas of town. Dancers and musicians, unlike doctors and chefs,have nothing for which they can securely trade; they depend solely on the generosity of notoriously greedy people for their reward -- ub3rgamers resent having to pay for any service that they are not required to. Ub3rgamers also howl the loudest about any way they can possibly be extorted or griefed -- quick to recognize the possibilities they are, and one wonders why, but that's neither here nor there.

Smugglers have one item for which they can securely trade, and that is spice; it is one of the only branches of the smuggler profession that actually works more or less as advertised. Though smugglers do not trade exclusively in buffs, as do chefs, much of the riches of the local smugglers come from the manufacture of this product. Any improvement to the buffs of others treads partially into smuggler territory.

I know everybody knows this: I'm just trying to lay out what's wrong. Lots of tiny fixes are needed and it helps to see the whole picture.

1. Fix the smuggler so he has some use other than a slicing machine and spice manufacturer. Smugglers should not depend exclusively on the spice trade in order to profit. This fix is also a nerf: spice cannot now be experimented upon, and it should be. Novice spicers make the same quality spice as masters; masters merely get more variety. Differentiate the power of experimented spices and balance them with Chef HAM buffs.

2. Give chefs additional buffsother than the nine HAM pools. Chefs should have a buff for general skills like Alertness +20. Chefs need temporary buffs such as Weapon Speed +10. Chefs should have buffs like Burstrun. This would make chefs absolutely unique in their abilities and make them very, very much in demand. It would stop Chefs and Doctors treading on one anothers' toes; and Chefs and Smugglers would no longer bump in the marketplace. Only from a Chef could you get a buff like Unarmed Damage +25. This would not be precisely the same as the Bio-Engineer's skilltapes, but they could have similar effects: one temporary and consumable, one permanent and equippable. People would pay massive amounts of cash for these benefits.

3. Allow dancers to mind-buff themselves. Doctors can buff themselves; why not dancers? Doctors can give themselves buffs to the pools they do not use: Health, Con, Str, Action, Sta, Qui. Professional entertainers should similarly be able to buff they stats they themselves do not use: Mind, Foc, Wil. Although a doctor must have a high mind skill to do his duty, he can buff his health and action to surviveable levels. Give entertainers the same ability: allow them to skimp on their mind stats, only so they can buff themselves up for combat readiness later. Doctors are not chained to the med centers; entertainers should not be either.

4. At low levels, entertainers need a game-mechanized source of income. Whether this is a mission terminal that actually provides a mission worth doing (yay!) or a cover charge for a public cantina, or a secure trade, or targetable buffs, or some kind of community tip pool, or whatever else, it doesn't matter. However, whatever the solution is, it should strive to keep at least some entertainers where the players need them: in cantinas and PA halls, in houses and taverns, where the healing must take place. My suggestion would be some kind Entertainer Guild Theme Park that sends entertainers on far-flung missions around the galaxy to perform, at a decent profit. This will keep a certain number of entertainers in the cantinas, where the missions would be.

5. Let professional entertainers (Dancer/Musician) heal battle fatigue in camps of sufficient size -- just as doctors depend on camps of a sufficient complexity in order to heal effectively. Also allow mind buffs to be performed in camps; permit mind buffs to be periodically refreshed as doctor buffs now cannot. (A doctor buff is on a timer and cannot be added to until the timer runs out, but as an elite entertainer's buff isbased on the time of the performance, they should be able to add a bit at a time to this pool at every camp stop. This will get entertainers out where the action is, if that's where they desire to be.)

6. Make the mind-healing and mind-buffing properties of the guild theaters greatly enhance the performance. Make the guild theater's lights shine up, maybe with the name of the performer in lights, when the act is on. Allow a cover charge!

7. Allow doctors to continue to heal health and action damage, health and action wounds. Also allow doctors to cure mind damage. However, all healing should add to the target character's battle fatigue. This will prevent doctors from healing themselves indefinitely -- as they heal themselves, their ownBF increases, their stats will plummet and their effectiveness drop -- and it will not take a shred of XP away from entertainers, to whom battle fatigue cures belongs exclusively. This is a variation on the idea brought up by the developers themselves. As one possible solution, they wanted to see medics get mind wounds for performing mind healing, which to me is absurd -- all it accomplishes is to shift all of the party's downtime to the medics, while the totally healed-up party says, 'Well, that medic's used up, let's get another.' The target of a stim-heal should accrue the fatigue, not the medic; the medic should only accrue it healing himself. This will also have the effect of preventing people from spamming specials in combat, because they know that spamming their Action bar to 0 with that LLC is going to cost them heavily in BF when they are healed.

8. Give the doctors a similar payment/mission scheme as the entertainers, one designed to give doctors and medics an incentive to be in the medical centers. At the moment, many med centers are as empty or more as the cantinas, and this doesn't do anyone any good. For all that dancers and doctors are popular classes to master, I sure don't see any.

And before you ask, yes, I'm a (bad) dancer, I'm a doctor, and I'm an ID. I make most of my money, however, running missions with my PA (where two of the three skills come in handy). I would love to see dancers with more useful in-the-field skills, and I'd love to see balance returned to the mind-damage problem. I'd love to grab a chef buff that actually did me a **edit** bit of good. And I won't use spice.

"Beery, your hypocrisy is showing. Your attitude is just as selfish and narrow-minded as those you would attack. Let's get that clear up front."

Glad you got that sorted out to your satisfaction. I'd hate for my hypocrisy to be unclear.

Let's quit the ad hominem attacks, shall we? That way maybe we could concentrate on the merits of each person's argument. We are not children after all.

"Being American, or any other nationality, has nothing to do with game balance."

True, but the negativity being shown in this thread and others goes against the values that human beings all over the world should respect. I phrased it in terms of American ideals because such values are widely publicized andmost players of the game at the moment are American. I am not American by the way, so I can't really be accused of nationalism (which is what I sense in your response)on this point.