Doctor Archive

That's how it is in many other RPGs, and I think they were trying to get away from that a little. Unfortunately, it doesn't work very well, at least in the case of Mind pool damage.

Great post.

I like the idea of mind-pool not causing incapacitation, It makes rifle-users more of a support/debuffing class.

Assuming of course that when someone's out of mind they can't use specials/heal/whatever. A couple of rifles in a group could then really help out in a fight. And when solo, a rifleer could bring someone down to no mind and then beat them down at his leisure.

I like the idea. Any devs listening?

I don't think the devs really read the profession forums. The correspondents are supposed to do that for them.

You might be right. I did add this thread to the list of links for the Devs to check out on the issue (assuming Mind Damage stays in the Top 5 by then), though.

It's such a hard-to-solve issue, I'm sure it will still be around in at least the near future.

Zarlor I think you might want to keep this issue up as number 1 on our weekly issue list from now on because it really doesn't make sense and it does seem very unbalanced.

If we can heal mind bleeding.. why can't we heal mind damage? If riflemen can shoot people in the head why can't we heal that damage? It is damage and we are the ones that should be healing it. I guess what really doesn't make sense is that riflemen do mind damage. like the poster said, its not causing psychological damage.. its causing physical damage. So riflemen really should be doing health damage, just massive amounts of it because it's directed at the head.

and again ill say.. If you get hit in the head with a baseball bat you don't go to a nightclub to get fixed up.

Zarlor will put as #1 what the most people want as #1... just convince lots of people that this should be at the top and it'll go there. The correspondants are just information gatherers.

Oh, and another problem with this system. It makes Mon Calamari and Zabrak the best player tanks in the game. Why? Because of their large Mind pools, or speedy mind regeneration. This also makes no sense, since usually characters who take the brunt of attacks would be expected to have lots of health.

Now, a hot topic on the Doctor and Medic forums recently has been the lack of a suitable way to heal mind damage. Some are arguing that it should be healable, since they watch as time and time again their comerades fall due to unrecoverable mind damage. Others point out that mental health is not in the realm of the Doctor profession.

Both are very valid points, based on sound information. Both are 100% right. But how can they BOTH be right, you ask? Well, the game tells us two different stories about what the mind pool really is.

The first explaination given describes mind damage as psychological shock. Entertainers soothe this shock, healing wounds to that pool. Doctors and Medics cannot heal damage, since their realm is that of healing physical damage.

However, another conflicting view is brought forth by the very mechanics of the game. Attacking a creature or player with a weapon will occasionally deal mind damage, and with riflemen's special attack "Head Shot", the damage is almost exclusively to the mind pool. Head armor guards against mind damage as well. When your mind bar drops to zero, just like the other HAM bars, you are incapacitated. Judging by these indications, mind pool damage is simply damage to your head.

Unless our friendly devs would have us believe that getting punched in the face is equivalent to psychological trauma, this makes no sense. Snipers don't kill their targets' based on their mental health. Entertainers can't heal a black eye.

You may be asking, "what does this have to do with mind heals?" This point is absolutely CENTRAL to mind heals. Doctors can't heal a weary mind, but they can bandage a broken nose. We must decide between these two worlds, one where mind heals make sense, and the other where they do not. The latter will limit mind damage or its sources, and make snipers do damage where they actually should: the other two pools. The former will allow doctors and medics to heal mind wounds and damage, leaving battle fatigue to the entertainers.

This issue needs to be resolved before considering the possibility of Doctor or Medic heals to the Mind pool.

The game also seems set to draw a clear distinction between psychological shock and actual damage to the nervous system. This is why battle fatigue is not mind pool damage, and mind pool damage is not battle fatigue.

However, there's a game balance problem with making mind damage treatable by the medical professions. Self-healing. If I could heal my mind pool in addition to my health and action, I'd never die and never experience any serious downtime (besides stim crafting hehe).

Exactly the problem...

the devs created a divided system with mind damage and its basically throw the game into chaos...

lol ud think they would have realized this long before the released the game..

very well put...

Yea, balance issues of self-healing are something completely separate. If the mind pool were to become another normal HAM, our stim use would have to deplete something else, probably...

there are two things u could do,

one is to make mind damage healable and make stims create BF rather than draw mind

two remove all mind damage from the game make mind basically a mana pool. Then make the effects of BF much worse as they are now in order to slow down power xping and give entertainers jobs...