Doctor Archive

Someone in SWG Discussion is suggesting that the med use = 5 on Stim Bs is out of whack with the As and Cs. Then the discussion rages as to whether it should be changed or not. (Personally I think it should be at a pharmacy level equivalent to crafting it)

So halfway through my response, I had an idea.

Two parts...

First, what do you think of setting med use = 0 for Stim As?

Second, non-medics using such a stim would cause wounds. Justify this by picturing a heavy-weight boxer randomly jamming a syringe into his leg. Makeit a 10:1 ratio. You heal 100 damage at a cost of 10 wounds. Who wouldn't take that trade-off in a close fight?

Now what do we have?

Medics of any level have something that they can sell to anyone. This is more in-line with artisan wares. Advanced components can be sold to lower level medics in order to make better stims. Give newbie fighter classes one stim to start with to get them hooked.

It's not strong enough to take away from the medic xp very much. The majorityof the healing in the med center is based on wounds anyway.

Not only does a player have to come to the medic to buy it, he has to come back to have the wounds healed.

Thoughts?

That's what I've been chanting from the top of my soap box from the begining.

1) Make Stim - A Usable by anyone.

2)Leave Stim - B Med use 5

Though I never thought of adding "Wounds" to the use of a stim A by a non-medic. Though I'd like to see the ratio something more like 50:1 rather then 10:1.

50:1 might be a little light... with an 800 HAM bar, that is a full heal for 16 wounds.

Regardless, I'm sure they could settle on a pretty good balance with a little testing.

Of course, I liked the 2/3 wound death penalty too...

In order to let anyone use a Stim, wouldn't you also have to give them the /healself command? Isn't that command earned only at Novice Medic?

If you give anyone the /healself command, that means that anyone can get +Medical Use skill enhancements, and you'll have people using C's and D's with NO medical skills whatsoever.

Don't like that idea one bit.

I'm all for letting anyone use A's, but you'd need to do something about this issue first.

Falin

The 2/3 wound death penalty was tried in Beta (it was actually a screw-up in the coding, if I remember correctly.) The Med Centers wer downright packed and Medics and Docs were working like mad to get people healed up.

There was one HUGE problem, though. Downtime.

If there were no healers around that's LOT of downtime. Even if there are healers around something like this is great for the socialite healers who like hanging out with people and chatting, but the players themselves get downright bored by having to sit in a Med Center waiting to get healed. As it is there are players who will wait until the are 3/4 wounded from not cloning before even bothering to go to the Med Center simply because they don't enjoy the wait. Add in that when they do go, they just go AFK anyway. So primarily the probmle was that it wasn't fun and didn't feel like it added much of a risk/penalty feeling to death anyway.

Oh, and on the actual topic I've been saying Stim A should be usable by anyone for a long time as well (as long as it does not entail giving the /healdamage command away). That means not Med Use 0, but usable by anyone. There is a definitive difference there.

It's also mentioned at least once on the Big List as is the idea that Med Use in general should be more granular, keeping a more even separation in meds.

I'm getting a lot of my XP right now by healing entertainers who are suffering action damage through flourishes. If they were able to Stim themselves through a universal Stim-A(assuming they aren't already medics right now) then I'd have another source of farily steady XP removed. As a Novice Doc, I'd be unhappy about that.

You use Stim As on them as a Master Doc for steady XP?

I really don't think this would inerfere enough with that option to really cut into using it as a viable source of XP gain, especially if you tell an Entertainer that you would like to do the healing for free. (They'd have to pay for the stims, otherwise, to do it themselves and nowhere near as well as you could.)

Actually I'm kind of wondering why you are healing entertainers anway as a source of XP as a Doc. That's really an area for Medics to gain steady XP. For a Doc the XP gains there are actually fairly low compared to so many other XP gaining methods. I heal in the cantina because I happen to be there and no other healer is around, or just because I feel lik hanging out there to talk with friends, in which case I'll happily stim away. But I never did it for XP gain. Sell buffs or get in groups for that. That's where you get really good XP gain. Or use high-end wound packs on the folks who forget to clone.

At any rate, I just can't see Stim As really cutting into the medic professions hard enough on the XP front to even com close to comparing to the potential credit gains that could be had.

I may be mistaken, but I think they're actually toying with removing the XP for healing entertainers in the cantina.

The XP for healing wounds is much better per point healed than damage anyway.

If you really want to grind med xp, get a buddy to hand-sample radioactives while you heal him. Add a scout camp and an entertainer to heal mind and you've got a real grind fest.

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Groupal wrote:

1) Make Stim - A Usable by anyone.

2)Leave Stim - B Med use 5

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I dont think this is too bad an idea. A's are so low a heal its not that big of a deal. And in order for even a good B to be a CH on someonethey would have to have trained up the first aid tree. So nothing new there.

I think universal Stim A's is a great idea. It widens the market for the SWG medical community so that we are not just service oriented. Right now the only people we can sell meds to are other medical practitioners, severely limiting the market. If they allowed use of stim A's by everyone, this would open up another money sink for the solo explorer who wants to be able to heal himself. I mean, how much medical knowledge does it take to apply a bandage or some burn cream (for those nasty blaster burns). What medics would lose in Exp, they could gain as a source of income.

I don't know if I like the wound idea too much. How many times have you ever used /tenddamage? Thought soo... Maybe they could make it work like the med droid modules (4 or lower) where a player with no med skills heals at 80% when using a generic medpack.

The point is other players are clammoring for a way to heal themselves without burning 15 skill points on novice med just to apply a bandaid. I say give it to them and give the doctors an expanded earning power. That level of healing will never compare to even the stim As a medic could weild anyway.....

The latest rumor is that the dev's are removing +medical_use. With the current system a novice medic could use e-stims if they had the appropriate equipment.

I don't have a problem with making a-stims usable by anyone. They don't use components so you can't get them to very high base heals using advanced subcomponents like you can with b-stims.

BUT, don't throw people a bone only to make it so painful as to not matter. If a-stims caused wounds... even at 50:1, I wouldn't use them... I'd just get base medic and use b-stims. And once I've invested 15 points, and, unless I'm really tight with IP points, for another 14 points I can use d-stims and basically get a complete heal.

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Zarlor wrote:

You use Stim As on them as a Master Doc for steady XP?

I really don't think this would inerfere enough with that option to really cut into using it as a viable source of XP gain, especially if you tell an Entertainer that you would like to do the healing for free. (They'd have to pay for the stims, otherwise, to do it themselves and nowhere near as well as you could.)

Actually I'm kind of wondering why you are healing entertainers anway as a source of XP as a Doc. That's really an area for Medics to gain steady XP. For a Doc the XP gains there are actually fairly low compared to so many other XP gaining methods. I heal in the cantina because I happen to be there and no other healer is around, or just because I feel lik hanging out there to talk with friends, in which case I'll happily stim away. But I never did it for XP gain. Sell buffs or get in groups for that. That's where you get really good XP gain. Or use high-end wound packs on the folks who forget to clone.

At any rate, I just can't see Stim As really cutting into the medic professions hard enough on the XP front to even com close to comparing to the potential credit gains that could be had.

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Did I say that I was using Stim-A's? No, I'm didn't... and I'm not.

Did I say that I'm a Master Doc? No, I didn't. I actually just trained Novice Doc.

My point was that if entertainers could easily heal themselves if they aren'tcross-trained in medic(and they'd most likely start doing it through a macro like they're already doing with flourishes) I wouldn't have needed to heal them and I wouldn't have had an easy and entertainingway to level up to Novice Doc.

Plus, the enterainers tipped me, and I didn't see a freakin' dime from anyone that I was wound healing in the med center.