Doctor Archive

I found out that one of the other correspondents decided to post their big list of issues and simply put those issues up for vote. Then they rank them based on how many got which positions. So an issue that is ranked at number 1 gets 5 points, while one rated at number 1 gets 1 point. Issue with the most points is the Number 1 issue. This might help to get us around the issue of just what folks are talking about the most and focus it on what folks really feel AFFECTS them the most in playing a Doc.

Please either just vote based on the list, but if you have an issue you do not see on the list feel free to rank and list it. For example:

1) #28

2) #2

3) #6

4) #12

5) Not enough Doctors select Wookie as their Race!

(I didn't check those numbers and this is NOT my list! It's just an example. I'll even make a seperate post with my vote, 'cause i want a voice in this too, you know!)

As usual I will probably post the final Top 5 and send it to the Devs on Thursday evening or Friday morning.

This list is pretty similar to the last one you've seen, but there has been some wording and/or consolidation changesso you may want to make sure you read through the whole issue again to be clear on it. (Yes,I know the lit is long and a bit wordy, but I'm trying my best to make sure the issues are fully understood.)

I should note that other correspondents have said they have gotten emails requesting they NOT send in their Top 5 lists until further notice. I have to admit I haven't recieved any emails from the Devs beyond a response to a personal request for a Master Doc on Test Center to check on how TC patches affect our issues list (shot down on first request, no reponse on the further request with clarification.) So I'm still sending mine in as per my original directive.

So her is the list I have of Doc Issues. PLEASE add your vote to the end of the list and we'll see if this works out a little bit better than my trying to figure it out based on post value and forum ratings. (For you fast readers, please wait for me to get all of these things up before posting, the last one will be labeled (Final))

1.Money. This topic comes up very frequently on the Medic threads, but just as frequently, if not more so, on the Doctor forums. There is a lot of concern about how a focused medical character should be able to make money. By this I mean that we are talking about a character who's primary skills and interests are in the healing arts (which would include crafting of meds) and not, necessarily, combat. The self-sufficiency of the profession does not really exist except in a few small methods, of which the primary one for making money IN the profession would be production and sales of Small Stimpack Bs. There is a much smaller niche market for medical resources and components, but most Doctors seem to feel that resource gathering and sales, while obviously an integral part of the Doctor profession, is more of the realm of the artisan and such sales would be, in effect, making money as an Artisan, and not as a Doctor.

The other methods of making money seem to be far less reliable, or are not well supported by the game. Primarily, for those interested in providing services such as Healing or Enhancing, there is no secure method of trade to ensure that the Doctor is paid for their service while also ensuring that the customer gets the service they are requesting. Suggestions have included some form of secure trade window, like is done for normal trading, having a Doctors healing actually use packs that the customer has on their person, instead of the ones on the Doctor (and thereby the Doctor could sell the medicine to the player and then heal him with those), lowering the Med Use requirements on some medicines such that anyone could use them, thereby opening the market for more pharmaceutical products that Doctors could then sell. Having Doc-specific mission, like the artisan or entertainer missions. Again there is no true consensus on the issue other than that most of the Medic classes tend to rely on other methods of subsistence and take time doing those things that they may not be interested in (the usual, delivery/destroy missions, for example.) The issue is an important one amongst the player base and receives a lot of attention on the forums and in-game from many of the medics and Doctors I have spoken with.
Of notable reference are the following threads:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1768
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1197
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1650

2.Enhance Packs. There are several issues revolving around all of the enhance packs, and especially the B packs. Stuck HAMs on buffed players are proving especially annoying to many Doctor characters. Either the HAMs stick after being buffed so that the player cannot see when they are getting damage, they stick so that the Doctor cannot see that their groupmates are getting damaged (a very dangerous situation) or they simply do not scale properly so that the buffed bar simply goes out past the edge of the window and any damage sustained to that attribute is not seen until it gets below the point where it can be seen inside the window.

(Possibly fixed in next Patch) Enhance buffs are also being lost when crossing zones, cloning, traveling or logging yet the enhance timer remains active, as if player still were buffed. This one is proving to be of exceptional difficulty, especially for higher level Doctors who have longer Buff times. Once a character crosses a zonal boundary, such as leaving the city, the buff wears of instantly far sooner that it normally should, yet the timer on that original buff is still active meaning that the Doctor cannot reapply the buff. For a character buffed at the edge of a zonal boundary and just crossing it, that could mean a 45min, or longer, wait before they can be properly buffed again.

There is also no notification of a buffs expiration, as folks cannot see that stream of lost numbers while in First Person mode and may not notice that they have lost their enhancement. Possibly some other graphical notification of what buffs you currently have and possibly a blinking notification that those buffs are about to expire. Allowing the buffing medic or groupmates to see who has what buffs would also be very advantageous. One suggestion was made for a type of Pie Chart as an icon on the HAM, like other states are shown, that slowly cuts away slices of the color until it is getting low, perhaps blinking for the last minute or so of the Buffs duration.

Experimentation on Ease of Use on Enhance Packs makes them HARDER to use, not easier. Very frustrating for the lower level Medicine Use individuals who gains access to higher level Doctor Crafting in that they cannot use these packs in the same way they had gotten use to being able to use Stim Cs at a lower Pharmacology level.

Enhance Action B+ packs use simple Organic and Inorganic resources, while the rest of the B+ Enhance series uses Avian Meat and Reactive Gas. It is often considered a problem in that the Action packs should be brought into line with the rest of the Enhance packs, or the stringent requirements on the other packs be lessened.

And finally, Enhance A packs can be made at a lower skill ability than Advanced Wound Treatment and are given a low enough med use requirement that most Doctors will have no problem trying to make and use one as soon as they acquire the ability to do so. Unfortunately trying to use the packs without Advanced Wound Treatment means that they do not work, but they also do not give notification of why they do not work. This proves to be very confusing to many new Doctors. Same for Cure Poison Statepack.

More information on the last item can be found in the following thread:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1168

3.Factories, more often then not, do not pull subcomponents from crates in Factory production. CSR response is simply that we will need to pull the items one by one from the crates in order to get the factories to work correctly. Apparently not everyone is having this problem, but it is proving to be probably the most frustrating concern amongst Doctors at this time. Even a temporary fix, such as increasing the input hopper size so that more individual components could be placed there since they have to be pulled from the crates by hand. 100 is simply too prohibitive a size for making items with multiple components without baby-sitting the factory. Relatedly the ability to drop a crate into the input hopper and then double-click to drop an item directly out of the crate into that hopper would also be of some help in alleviating the problem. By the same respect there are times where are crate will not even dump an item into inventory. The whole crate just seems to be stuck and will not give up anything. For more information you may wish to reference the following threads:

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1201
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1224
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=2466

4.Docs seem to feel the NEED to survey for their own resources and dislike the need to use skill points in Artisan in order to do so. (Let's face it, anyone getting into the Doc level had to craft to get there, so the SWG version of a focused Doc is, in fact, a crafting profession and they want the abilities to self subsist in that capacity as Artisans do.) One could argue that this is related to the problems with using the /medicalforage command being of no real value to the profession. Since CHers seem to have been given the ability to heal pets without having to take Novice Medic to do so this request doesn’t seem to unreasonable to many Docs. The other problem comes from the idea that Doctors could always just buy their resource needs. However, Docs have many very specific resource needs (Dantooine Berries, Class 4 Liquid Petro Fuel, Avian Meat, Lokian Wild Wheat, etc.) that very few, if any, other professions truly need. Considering the prevalence of the Money issue for Docs, the market for surveyors to cater to the medics market is simply too small to be successful in comparison to what a survey could make catering to one of the artisan professions. In this way it could also be argued that rarely would Doctors be able to actually compete with Artisans on the resource market simply because their normal resource needs are not the needs of other professions. Other suggestions include providing survey only capabilities to increase with Pharmacology much as it does for Artisan, but disallowing the sampling capability. Others have noted that without some ability to sample (perhaps limiting Docs to only ever being able to sample 1 resource per sample tick) to test the qualities of a resource if nothing else.

For reference the following thread may be of interest:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1540

5.Docs are feeling a bit hampered by the crafting requirements of the class. While there are a few who simply do not like crafting at all, many seem to feel that crafting is acceptable, but only if it improves with use. An example pointed out on the forums was that a Stim E will often heal for 1500-2500, or about 600-700 xp a heal. That 1 stim E provides about 500 crafting xp. Since there are 41 charges on a stim E that means a difference of 41*700=28,700 healing xp, as compared to that 1 stim providing only 500 crafting xp. A ratio of 57:1 instead of the 3:1 that would be expected for proper scaling of raising the skills evenly. Admittedly compared to the time it takes to use those charges enough stims could be made to equalize that ratio, but it is requested that the metrics be looked at again now that Factory XP is back to where it should have been and that self UXP in components has been fixed, keeping in mind that there are folks who are just grinding the meds for these lines to catch it up to their other med levels.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1383
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=2020

Some have also suggested that Doctor is simply too easy to Master or just too hard to gain Crafting XP in. I am still uncertain whether this is intended or not and whether or not it is really balanced enough compared to possible speed of gain rates for other professions. It may be a situation where, as Holocron has told us before, the game simply does not start until you completely allocate all of your skill points and that philosophy being somewhat counterintuitive to how many other MMORPGs are played. Or if this is truly a valid concern that having Master Doctors within this time frame is unbalancing to the game. Perhaps guidance of the Dev thinking on the issue is needed, or the rate of gain should be adjusted. The crafting requirements will definitely need to be more balanced, however, in most players’ experience, some suggesting either making it easier, or making the rest of the line harder or somewhere in between.

6.Mind damage appears to be a major concern amongst both Medics and Doctors. It seems to be a fairly major issue discussed in multiple threads on multiple boards out there in the community and perhaps part of the problem is simple frustration in being the person everyone is counting on to keep them going when you can only watch helplessly as someone's mind is being damaged and there is nothing you can do. Suggestions have ranged from leave it as is, since it is a balancing factor to keep combats from being too long to either letting Doctors or Advanced Medics (or Combat Medics, even) heal mind at a 1:1 rate or possibly better (although most admit that healing at a better ratio would be fairly exploitable since a medic could then stim their mind faster than they would lose it, even though once you hit Master, who really cares about exploiting Healing XP anyway) or even giving mind stimming ability to Entertainers or Chefs or as a form of /rally command for Squad Leaders. Even the ability to create Enhance packs, of the usual Doctor skill ability, has been suggested as at least a better method of staving off the damage potential in a manner befitting what Docs are capable of compared to food and spice buffs. One of the more popular suggestions is to simply reduce the amount of damage given with mind hits, or to reduce their frequency.

While there may not be a consensus on the issue there does seem to be a HUGE amount of interest and concern on the topic and I am sure the community would at least like to get some feedback and or considerations from the Dev team on what they see as the balancing factors between mind damage, healing mind damage and perceived problem with nerfing the Rifleman profession. (Personally I don’t see it since the other weapons skills are already “nerfed” because they can have the pools they damage healed right out from under them, but somehow riflemen just lucked out, plus they could benefit from a mind heal themselves since the majority of their specials use mind. Not much of a nerf to them, IMHO.)

I would suggest referencing the following threads to get the majority of the viewpoints involved, but should a tighter synopsis of these threads and their suggestions be needed, please don't hesitate to ask me for one. (I know, one of these is from the Medic forum, but there are a lot of Docs piping in on the issue, and one is from an outside forum that sees a good deal of traffic and interested from the Doctor community.)

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1299
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=medic&message.id=785
http://dynamic6.gamespy.com/~swgcraft/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1315
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=2177

7.Allow First Aid to be a skill which improves. For example if a patient is hit hard enough to bleed it may currently take a Medic with FA2 6-10 times to cure that bleeding. Perhaps once someone is into the Doc levels of wound treatment their skill would reduce the number of times needed to stop the bleeding to, say, 2-4 times or even less. Other suggestions are that this improvement top out with Master Medic, or that the improvement, being trauma related, be given to Combat Medics. A suggestion for a craftable bleed state pack, a Band Aid if you will, could even be created for this purpose to ensure a resource drain for the skill improvement.

8.Heal consistency. Since wound/damage healing and, especially, buffs seem to have such a wide range of healing levels we would like clarification on how this massive variability is generated and were wondering if it would be possible to reduce the variability ranges we are currently seeing. I think most folks seem to suggest that they can live without their Enhance Bs buffing for 500 on rare occasion if they can get rid of the occasional 150 buff and maintain a more consistent level of buff. Buffs are considered part of the bread-and-butter of Doctors and some level of consistency in them that we could determine from our base enhance number on the pack and our skill level would make these buff far more marketable. There’s nothing worse than selling a buff for a flat rate and telling the customer they buff averages out to a, say, 300 point enhancement, only to have it go off for 150.

9.There is concern that there is a lack of Doc specific content, such as missions to craft medicines or to heal an NPC someplace or to go someplace to heal folks until X number of wounds have been treated and so forth. Such missions could be construed as a method of alleviation of the issues concerning how Docs make money.

10.Schematics requiring Matching Factory components do not check the components statistics for use, so using two factory produced Advanced Biological Effects Controllers, for example, in a factory produced Stim D provides no better results than any other BEC. By the same respect, Advanced Liquid Suspension defaults to a name of Liquid Suspension on item creation, instead of Advanced Liquid Suspension and this seems to cause a good bit of confusion as well.

For more information take a look at the following:

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1283

11.(Possibly in next patch?) Medicine Organization and Inventory Management Persistent pack window size and position would be a big help. Doctors often need to organize packs and subpacks in order to keep their different medical needs straight. And we need a LOT of medicines of a lot of different types. Having these packs/satchels/pouches, etc. remember what position and size they were when last opened would greatly assist us in keeping things orderly and finding them quickly when needed.

(In next Patch, at least Sort order is) Relatedly they are interested in persistent inventory sorting/positioning. For example I may put something into my inventory and it is at the bottom of my inventory screen. If I hope a shuttle and change planets or have to log for some reason, that item may no longer be in the same position. Even if I were to change view and specifically tell the pack to sort by one of the resource columns, such as by Name, the above situations would still resort the inventory according to whatever method it is that it uses. It has also been suggested that some kind of Medic Bag exist that would allow a Doc to put all of their medicines in, allow sorting and that would also be searched, alongside of type level inventory, for the purposes of finding medicines with the use of some medic-related commands. Another possibility was mentioned of consolidation med-packs into single type. Like having a Healpack-C instead of one each for Action and Health, or a Curepack-A for curing ANY state, not just dizzy or blind, and so on and this may also help to greatly reduce database bloat.

We would also like to see better management of medicines that are in inventory, such as allowing searches from the /healdamage command to search for a stim in packs if it cannot find it in upper level inventory. Not to mention the inventory drain created by volume 5 crates seems a bit excessive when someone can carry a 10,000 stack of hides that is only volume 1.

And finally, many would like clarification on the methodology for heal pack selection from inventory when using, for example. the /healdamage command. Is it simply the last Stim in the inventory chosen? The strongest? The weakest? The one with most/least charges? Alphabetically? By Stim serial number? Could it be made to be more consistent and possibly follow one of the methods listed above, such as always using the pack with the least number of charge, or the highest base heal rate first. Perhaps we can at least try to sort our packs in this manner, if nothing else.

12.Grouping for Medical classes in the Med Center has been brought up. The consideration would be that healers could group, in much the way Entertainers do, for minor healing gains and/or minor XP gains or even for simply lowering the variability of heals as man would simply prefer some greater consistency there. The suggestion for auto-splitting /tips was also brought up in conjunction with this idea, perhaps with a /tipsplit or /grouptip type of command for the patient.

13.The 60 second stat drain after Resuscitation persists beyond 60 seconds. Food/buffs/spice seems to rectify. Possibly this is related to stats getting stuck at lowered levels after taking wounds there until those stats are kicked back to normal by doing something to affect the stat.

14.Some people have mentioned they would like to see Quickheal skill actually be useful. The mind costs and damage accrued are too prohibitive for actual use, and would never be used as a “last ditch” method in combat, simply because by the time a last ditch effort is needed the Doc will already have too low a mind level to use the skill. Suggestions tend to be along the lines of greatly reduce the mind and damage requirements of the skill, but greatly increase the BF and wind wounds accrued through it’s use.

15.(partially addressed in patch for /tendwound, it could possibly affect /healwound as well.) /heal command (wound, state, etc) does not work with the macro given, as a type must be specified. Doctors would like a way to get it to simply use the appropriate pack for the first type of wound/state it comes across on the selected target, much in the same way selecting the Heal Wound option from the patients Radial menu works if you do not select a sub-option for the specific wound. As it stands having the macros instantly implemented upon training (so they show up as /healdamage and /healstate) confuses the first time user because they cannot simply pres the appropriate toolbar button and have the macro work in the same way the /healdamage command does.

16.Damage/State timer like we have for wounds to let us know when we are ready to heal Damage or a State again. As it stands now we simply have to continually hit the appropriate method of healing or attempt to keep an internal track of times between heals. Relatedly the State packs seem to ignore Diagnostics level in that they notify the Doctor that he must wait, say 3 seconds before doing that again, but after three second is continues to give a command stating you must wait before you can do that to what would appear to be the full delay of someone who had no Diagnostics skill at all.

17.(In next Patch) /diagnose. This is brought up quite often that the Doctors in particular, who are using much higher level secondary wound healing packs, get very frustrated with patients not informing them of the levels of their secondary wounds and by using a secondary wound pack to heal, say, 1 point of damage with a charge that would have the potential to heal over 100 wounds, easily. Doctors are having a difficult time understanding the exploitability of the command, but feel it would be acceptable to place a /diagnose command on a timer, such as the one used for wound packs, to help prevent the perceived abuse of the command. Another suggestion was made to scale the /diagnose command such that a lower level medic would not receive as true an account of the actual wounds levels, which a Master Medic or Doctor level character would be told more exact results. Those results being the would levels for all secondary wounds, or at least Strength, Constitution, Stamina and Quickness and possibly including Battle Fatigue (since we receive no notification of it affecting our healing until it hits 400, when it actually begins to affect healing at 200) and Health and Action levels as well, just for convenience.

18.(Fixed in Patch) Resuscitation packs are accidentally being used instead of heal packs when pulled from the radial menus or through the /healdamage commands. This can cause a great deal of problems by instantly causing a great deal of damage to a fellow player. Doctors seem to prefer that these packs be left to a separate method of calling into use. (BTW, I am also seeing this complaint "Allow resuscitation on non-grouped individuals" It sounds to me like this second complaint is actually a fix for the exploit. What is the current state of this? Could somebody check for me?)

19.There is concern that the above mentioned resuscitation packs instantly causing massive wounds to another player could possibly be used as an exploit. Some have reported that the packs are being used in this manner by those with less than Level 4 Doctor Wound Treatment.

20.There should be a graphic display of heals in combat queue. The fact that heals actually queue up in the combat queue already confuses a large number of Medics. Most Doctors have come to understand how heals do queue up, but it would be very nice to actually see at what position they are queued at.

21.(Occurring less often. Partially fixed?) Incapped players seem to always change location from where they, apparently, dropped down, even when you are on follow. As such the player who may not have moved since the last time you were close enough to heal them just a few seconds ago, is somehow no longer within healing range, even if they look like they are at your feet.

22.Notification of when a TEF might be incurred to allow the Doctor to NOT heal a character that would give them a TEF in a potential deadly situation and some representation for covert characters to know when they are under the effects of a TEF.

Also, better documentation is needed to explain the TEF healing problems. Many neutral Doctors cannot understand why they cannot heal a factioned player, or why they cannot heal an otherwise apparently unaligned player who had just been in a duel or some such. Some notification other that it being "unwise to heal such a person" would help to provide clarification. (Personally I like to see it as to heal a Rebel is to bring down the wrath of the Empire, while to heal an Imp would also bring down their wrath, since they only trust their own Docs.)

23.Docs are interested in seeing a share of Faction Points in the same way that we will be getting, presumably, Combat XP.

24.The ability to turn off auto-retaliate when fighting has been requested. The reason being that for healer characters the actually fighting process slows down their heals. Some medics prefer to avoid having any weapons in hand in an attempt to not have attacks being fired off from them that might slow down their ability to heal.

25.The Factory deeds for Food & Chem. Factories need to be renamed. They currently state on Food Factory and far too many medics, and far too many architects, get confused enough by the name to think that some other factory is needed.

26. (In next patch) Potency in schematics is useless Please remove or change it (perhaps to Potential Energy instead?) As it stands most Doctors feel as though they are losing something since 15% (or whatever the proper requirement is) of a products final resource will be relying on a 0 for its number.

27.The Battle Fatigue affecting your heal rate should be giving notification at 200 instead of 400.

I just noticed number 51 was incomplete it should read:

51.Factory crates sometimes to not give up the last item in the crate or sometimes just stick on spitting out an item on occasion.

1) #3

2) #2

3) #10

4) #13

5) #33

#1 - 3

#2 - 2

#3 - 47

#4 - 10

#5 - 40

1) #3 hard not to vote for this 5 times

2) #4

3) #6

4) #17

5) #22

1. #3

2. #4

3. #6

4. #10

5. #23

3.Factories, more often then not, do not pull subcomponents from crates in Factory production.

2.Enhance Packs

42.The ability to target self when clicking on your own HAM bars, such as in a group, that would function in the same way as using Ctrl-1 would

17. /diagnose

6.Mind damage

Akuma novice Doctor Eclipse Server

WOW! Lotsa work on this Zarlor, feel like you should be getting paid for all the hard work you put in. Anyway I appriciate your efforts.

Here is my vote

1) #2 Enhance Pack - Our buff should definately need fixed ASAP

2) #3 Factories - If I have to unpack one more crate I'm gonna scream

3) #1 Money - Who here DON'T need money?

4) # 22 TEF - This is getting more and more of an issue. Atleast no TEF when healing in Medical center please!!!

After the top 4, I am not as sure.

5) #6 Mind Damage

6) #24 on/off auto-fight

7) #23 Sharing of Faction Points, Combat XP

8) #49 More Perks for Master Doctor

Now I want to talk about #50, New Stimpacks for B.E. for the pets. I feel very strong that it should come with some change.

A) B.E. gets Stimpack that heals pets only BUT then this should be ONLY way pets gets healed. Regular Stimpack should NOT heal pets. No Doctor Stimpacks, No Combat Medic Stimpacks.

B)B.E. Should be required to master Doctor's Medicine Knowledge & Doctor's well as Medicine Crafting.

1. #17

2. #1

3. #3

4. #20

5. #1

heres my vote and i think zarlor is doing an awesome job

/tip zarlor all the devs money

hehe

heres mylist

22 - TEF notification would be nice heh

9 - i think medical missions would be cool

7 - First Aid ..well yes..the higher up u are, the less band aids it should take to stop the bleeding

4 - i do use survey ...and cuz all of my PA knows i use it , i am now director of resouces for it (see tag heh)

38 - the cure state pack thingys

The reason I have no factory things in here is because I have yet to set one up. Normally ppl give me the crates and say "here pull things from this for me" and i say "okie dokie". I haven't had anyproblems with it yet, but once I get a factory ... we'll see hehehe