Doctor Archive

I'm finding the amount of crafting to bea little much for me. I really enjoy healing and keeping my group alive, but I can't stand crafting; I never play crafters in online RPG's. In hindsight I probably should have chosen a different profession, but if I didn't play a medic I probably wouldn't have played this gameat all. I play with a group of friends and I always play a healer; I just really enjoythe role of keeping everyone alive.

I think a fundamental design mistake was putting the medicine crafting branch into the same tree as the using profession. This creates two problems:

a. People who just want to heal are still forced to grind out crafting experience to master their chosen profession.

b. It is very difficult to purchase high level meds because no one is making them, because there is no market, because anyone who needs them is making them anyway.

Perhaps a better solution would have been to create a Pharmacist advanced profession derived from the artisan base profession.

Someone has to keep my group alive, so I'll keep at it. But I certainly wouldn't complain about any chances made to ease what I at least consider a burden on my profession.

Caetlyn

Combat Medic / Doctor, Radiant

I actually thought that's what they were going to change farmer into back in Beta...boy was I wrong...

There are technically 2 professions to being a doctor the way the game has been made. Theres doctors and pharmacists. Docs are able to use the medicines and heal and stuff. Pharmacists are able to craft the medicines. If you wish to do both of these things then the easiest way is to set up harvetsers so you can get resources, get a factory and make your own medicines..

Of course you don't need to do this if you don't want too.. It's a player run economy.. go buy the medicines from a pharmacist if you don't want to craft them. After you see thatthereare 2 seperate jobs.. it gets easier to understand why the devs set everything up the way they did. If you want to do both jobs.. then its gonna be more difficult for you than if you bought the medicines from another person.

Lumache the easy way to make doc craft xp is toruna factory and let it grind stim "A"s using crappy orgs/inorgs and then craft med kit "C" or stim "C" in yourhouse next to a personal craft station. this way you can get xp from the factory and from experimenting yourself.

I rather enjoy it myself.

I don't mind the crafting, as I've always been a crafter type. If you knew what an "old school" LGM weaponsmith on Daoc had to go through...

What I do mind is not having enough lots to harvest everything I need, though. I also dislike having to travel all over creation for various components. Buying them is out of the question for me on my server, as everything is priced beyond reason. I also hate the fact that I lose any extra cash/power that I put into a harvester if the resources shift; it's quite a dilemma for me as to whether or not I spend more money by dumping it in the harvester or by traveling to check on them every two or three days.

I find that crafting is a great inputus to get out of the medic center. Part of my enjoyment of medic is the variety.

When a center is full and well staffed, I grab a few delivery missions and go to a different town. I tend to travel about until I find and understaffed center and I make money doing it. If I run out of meds, I wander out looking for materials, or I buy reasonable off the market. (Unless it's over 800oc, I'm not paying over 5cr/ea.) I make my own meds, and get a kick out of tweaking them. Eventually, I take on a destroy mission or two, to work on my gun skills. When I'm dead, I walk in with wounds to the med station so that other medics can get XP off me.

All of the above influences my crafting. I am making money, finding resources, or finding someplace to heal with my meds.

Vema Gara, Itinerant Medic

I find that I actually don't craft ENOUGH believe it or not.

I have a factory. I spent a few days just doing a few runs of stuff. I made factory crates of healh wound C's / action wound c's / 2 crates of stim D's / a crate of each of the stat wound packs / a crate of all 6 enhance packs.

I heal so much with each of these that I find it hard to run out quickly. They last a long time. My stim D's get 32 charges and heal anyone full in both health and action with one shot. When I group with my friends in dungeons or where ever I use like 6 total stimpacks a night. And that's a long night.

I don't waste my time on advanced stuff. I heal more then enough with what I have now. Why run around the galaxy looking for advanced components when I heal more then anyone has now.

My advice to anyone who says they have too much crafting to do is:

1. Get a factory

2. Don't make advanced stuff unless you plan to simply use them in the med center for healthand action pool wounds.

3. Don't go above medpack C's for stat wounds. Most of the time stat wounds aren't big enough to waste your time on this. I actually think medpack B's for stat pools are probably good enough too.

4. Make stimpack D's. I love them. More charges then C's. A lot more healing power.

I don't bother with selling meds anymore. Everyone undercut the pricing on them so badly it's a waste of my time.

I always have more then enough meds at all times. Having in factory crates I'm able to carry them all with me too so when I need another I just get one from a crate! I think if enhance packs were usable outside of campsites I would use them up a lot more. My problem is we go into a dungeon....I buff my group.....we're halfway into some dungeon and the buffs wear off. Not like we are going to run out to rebuff. We end up playing most of the time without them on.

Utini

Phomeister:

You are technically correct in that you can ignore the crafting side of the tree if you are willing to forgo mastery. But really, how many of us would be here if we weren't planning on mastering our chosen profession?

As designed, mastering Doctor requires 96000 medicine crafting experience. By the time they get that exp most Doctors have the infrastructure required to just make their own meds, rather than buying them from other players. Sure, you could just get a bunch of crappy organics and inorganics and churn out 2233 BEC's, but then you aren't really playing, you're grinding. I don't think that's what the devs had in mind.

So most Doctors craft anyway, which kills any potential market for higher level meds. You just have to check the bazaar to see this in practice. If your server is anything like mine, you'll find tons of stim-B's, a handful of C's with the difficulty experimented down, and practically no D's and E's. Unless you're suggesting a Doctor can get by healing with B level meds, buying them just isn't feasible.

ajderamo:

All excellent suggestions, and what I pretty much do myself. Don't get me wrong, I don't think there is anything particularly difficult about crafting. I've got 9 harvesters and a factory running, and enough resources stockpiled to last me several months now. I don't find it hard or challenging, I just find it boring. Maintaining harvesters and factories takes time away from what I really want to do, which is heal. If I had the option of purchasing meds I would, but as I said above, I haven't found that very practical.

Caetlyn

actually tehre are a lot of doctors that dont plan to master it..i know i dont..

i just wanted treatment and crafting mastery b/c

1) Revive and buff

2) CM components are still based on doc components

But i know a lot of people just in it for the treatment mastery

Its true, I know a bunch of people who want to do the doc thing but have no interest in crafting.. I bet if all the crafting/pharmacist doctors out there started posting more sorts of medicines on the bazaar, that you'd find most of them would sell. They may not sell right away, but they will sell if your prices are reasonable

I dunno if I'm missing something, but gathering the resources for crafting seems to take very little time for me. Also, after playing an artesian on another server, the amount of crafting a doc needs to do is much, much less.

The way I gather resources is thus:
I spend about 6 hours (one play session, on a weekend) running missions out of Theed on Naboo - they pay about 2k a pop - and I'm able to make about 10k an hour. Then I shop for a little bit to buy what I need (except for advanced components). I spend another play session (about 6 hours, if I'm on a weekend, 4-5 if I get the time on a weekday) to get the advanced components. With survey 4, I can get about 650-750 of whatever an hour. Then I've got 5 days worth of playing to do the stuff I really like doing. To me, 2/7ths of my play time on the parts of the game that aren't as fun for me is OK. And, honestly, after healing/grouping etc. for 5 days, I rather look forward to the break.

Lastly, how many other crafters find such an eager market for their stuff? My massively experimented Stim B's sell like crazy - I usually pop 10-20 of them on the bazaar, selling them after about 2-3 hours - and I make about 200 credits profit on each. My artesian, on the other hand, is lucky to sell anything, even though the quality of her weapons and armor is outstanding. To me, crafting and being able to sell it is a wonderful thing.

So, I guess, no, I don't think a doc has to craft too much. We don't have to make nearly as much stuff to get mastery, the stuff we make can actually sell, and - perhaps most importantly - the stuff we craft is universally useful. *EVERYONE* uses stims.

No matter how much we don’t like crafting it is a necessity if you want to be able to res on the field. Without doc crafting you cannot make a res kit. This is a very important aspect of healing to me beings I don’t want my grp members to have to go to a cloning center if I should fail to keep them alive

I personally don’t mind crafting.

I do however mind one of the components required in crafting the factory made items. I for example will be placing a PA on my land, not leaving enough for a factory. And most of these items cannot be found on the bazaar. This would be the only aspect of med crafting I would like to see changed.

____________
Shylo Sanvant
Master Surgeon
Sanvant Supplies
Bria Galaxy