Doctor Archive

I just had a thought concerning two issues we have a doctors. I was reading yet another thread on how useless medical forage is, and figured why not ditch that aspect of the tree. Then I asked myself what to replace it with. Why not move medicine use to the treatment trees (in both doc and medic) and dedicate a tree to mind damage however limited the healing might be?

This doesn't address how hard it is to get resources, (I use guild members to survey for me if I'm not doing it for myself and will do when I am forced to drop artisan), but covers two issues that have been mentioned.

Just a thought.

Antil Holadi

I think it's a holdover from beta when A meds had three slots for one organic each. Personally, I think they need to either have it yield much higher results, remove it all together, or give medics their own artisan-style survey skill tools.

I'd probablyvote to remove it, except that it leaves our skill modifiers a little light. I'm two crafting boxes away from MD, and I buy all my resources even though I'm also a Master Artisan. I hate babysitting harvesters.

It would be much, much easier if Medics and Doctors had /moneyforage so they could pull extra lost credits out of the cushions of their couches.

Escia

I was thinking about this last night when grinding out BECs for crafting exp. I found I'd often end up with one to five items left. We all know those stacks are completely useless to us. What if a mortar and pestle item were added to the game to combine ingredients into new ingredients.

For example: I have 2 flowers, 2 fungi, 4 hides, and 4meat. Throw them in the mortar, gind them to a dust, and recieve 6 unknown organic. The stats wouldbe based on a combination of the items ground together. If everything were the same type, the output material would be of that type as well (e.g. 12 different types of avian meat yeildssix of the same unknown avian meat)

Though it's not a perfect fix for medical forage, it will at least allow you to use the 12 random organics you forage instead of foraging for 12 hours to get six of the same item.

They could even make larger versions, like factories so you could experiment to get a nice organic, then grind out a large quantity of it.

Yes. Dev responses to date on the issue are as follows:

(*Dev Response:
Holo wrote in a thread on /medicalforage on 6/29/03:
“This here is a proposal to tackle JUST one aspect of that. It felt a bit like we got overwhelmed with the sheer number of ideas proposed for medics, so I want to present just two things (one of them based on suggestions from you guys during beta) so we can discuss them, before we move on to tackling other things.

OK, the first suggestion is this:

·Make medical foraging find small herbs/bacta globules/bugs/whatever (think: aloe and penicillin mold) that can be used to make medicines. Not resources, in other words. Because they are not resources, we do not need to worry about undercutting the surveyors and scouts.
·Make the A level stims and wound packs use ONLY these.
·Make higher level medicines use smaller amounts of these, so that profession interdependency increases as you go up.

This would make new medics trying to make medicines a lot better off, I think.

The second suggestion is based on beta tester ideas:

·Make tending use a small device. This device lasts a long time but does eventually break, and is made by artisans.
·Have it have charges.
·Each item that you can medical forage up gives it a charge.
·Take out the current wounding/battle fatigue effect of the /tend commands.

Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=medic&message.id=192&highlight=#M192

Holo wrote presumably as a response to our initial Top 5 issues on 8/22/03:
“Healing tasks that aren’t making it in this update, but are on the list as high priorities:
…
·Investigate making /medicalforage more useful.”

Ref:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=394421

Holo wrote on 8/29/03: “We agree with many of the issues you raise, but most of them are not easy to fix. We'd rather fix medical forage than remove it, for example. The group bonus isn't that easy to do. And so on.” Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=443645#M443645

Ben “Marvelin” Hanson wrote on 9/30/03 on the Correspondent Forum:
“I don't want to make it like sampling since I feel that undermines the artisan skill tree. If as a medic you want something that works just like sampling, you should grab novice artisan. So the trick is, that it needs to be different from sampling but not more efficient than sampling for the artisan (I don't want /medicalForage to become a staple skill for non-medics). If you have some suggestions pass them along.

You can tell the players that this is on the radar for a complete revamp. I'd love to hear their ideas given the restrictions that I outlined above.”

Zarlor passed along the following summation from Ben “Marvelin” Hanson’s response on the Correspondent forum on 10/28/2003:
“The SOE team is leaning towards adding a whole new set of items and such (medicines, components, and component enhancements) that can be yanked from the ground, sort of like scout, but with items specifically useful to medics. No final decision has been made, yet, but that's what they are considering at the moment.”
Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=17920 )

We all do, it's been utterly useless from the beginning, and the devs have stated
"we'll investigate it". <--usual "make players happy response", as that was said months ago.

Basically if it's going to work, it should pull up more than 1 of the same resource, like 4 or 5, similar to surveying. Maybe even 8, to bring it inline with surveying, and to make it useful (seeing stim packs usually require 8 or multiples thereof). Now I realise some surveyors may jump up and down saying that this would be too powerful, and they might be right. What makes it different though is that a) we can't forage for metal, b) we cant forage for meat andc) we don't get a choice of what we find.

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MasterNerfSlayer wrote:

We all do, it's been utterly useless from the beginning, and the devs have stated
"we'll investigate it". <--usual "make players happy response", as that was said months ago.

Basically if it's going to work, it should pull up more than 1 of the same resource, like 4 or 5, similar to surveying. Maybe even 8, to bring it inline with surveying, and to make it useful (seeing stim packs usually require 8 or multiples thereof). Now I realise some surveyors may jump up and down saying that this would be too powerful, and they might be right. What makes it different though is that a) we can't forage for metal, b) we cant forage for meat andc) we don't get a choice of what we find.

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i read on another thread that medical forage actually DOES have a use, but not the use it was meant to have...

since medical forage samples a random organic from any of the possible harvestable organics of the planet its useful to find the best resources to go out and survey for instead of having to find a high enough concentration to sample each resource once.

sounds like an okay idea to me, but i really wish theyd make it more useful...

here's my suggestion... make medical forage skill so that it finds special organic items.... not a resource with a unit count but an item.... and these items can be placed as optional components during medicine crafting (schematics would be changed to allow for these optional components)..... as the med forage skill goes up.. u are more likely to find more potent organic items that u can use in the med crafting.

-duck