Doctor Archive
Thread: Give Medical Skills back to the Medics. (rant)
pet stim b require 18 talus fungus and 24 generic fiberplast.
Pet stim C is 24 dath insect meat and 24 generic Fiberplast... good luck on getting lots of this... and 2 factory BECs
Pet stim D (yes there is a D) 24 fish, 26 dantooine fiberplast. (Schematic at master).
Mass production is hard... purchace is harder.
Since there are 34 million CH, the few Pet stims B and above made get sold almost instantly.
.............
I heal pets of friends, because I usually have regular stim D with me... and it is much faster then their pet stim As.
I ask for up front money for healing pets in oher cases.
-T
The closest a medical professional can come to making money as a healer (outside of being a pharmacist or a buff bot) is, as you mentioned, healing while on missions. Of course the profit there is huge for the combatants, but the cost of the helaing process during the combat means that the profit is a good deal smaller for the healer. That healer is keeping folks up to make money, yet taking, in effect, the smallest cut of the payout.
Not to mention that the healer generally will get absolutely NO loot from anything killed in their group. I mean, how hard is it to have a cycling loot list for a group, so that autoloot actually works.
I'm a master Doc, and have in the past been a BE, and many other professions.
First, a GOOD pet stim B, is 30 X 900+ though they can't be used nearly as fast as a Medical stim. I used to make pet stim B's that were 30 X 780, and I wasn't ever a Master BE, but that does take advanced Doctor made components and the best materials to get up to the high end. While any even fairly low level Doc can outheal any CH with even fantastic pet stim B's, they are a reasonable alternative, for the CH with no med skill. So yes, you can say that cut's into the Medic/CM/Doctor's end of the game, with some validity. I personally don't have an issue with this, since the pet stims will cost a whole lot more (3K range for a good stim B on my server) and they are fairly hard to come by.
As to camps and hospitals autohealing, this really is not an issue. If your badly hurt, the autoheal takes forever, and if your not badly hurt, you wouldn't be worried about paying someone to heal you anyhow. We are still luckier than the Entertainer profession, since they have to go to some lengths to get paid for thier services, the only one they can be assured to get paid for is buffing.
Something that does annoy me, is the fact that very few in a group hunt, ever think to tip theHealer at all. If it's a "high paying" set of missions, then it's not so bad, but if it's mostly a XP kind of thing where the mission pay (if missions were taken at all) will be low, then you'd think some of these people would toss a few creds the Healers way, since it does cost them. Admittedly, it's not all that bad at Master Doc level, since you make very good money selling buffs at places like Dathomir, but for the CM and Medic, they need to get paid for thier services.
One other thing I find very annoying myself, is the fact that I am MTKA and MDOC, and it is simply impossible for me to be tanking, while healing others. I'll happily rez if needed, or heal after the fight, but if they wanted a Healer, they should have brought one with, I wear the Master TKA tag for a reason, I go on hunts to be one of the fighters, not a primary healer, and people need to respect that.
OK.. done with my rant, just wanted to throw what annoy's me most into the thread as well 
Vorgus
Ok another rant on this..Why didnt medics get the ability to make pet stims and just BE's
What the devs effectively did was say all the CH's dont need to take novice medic..and medics and docs that choose to be stim vendors you didnt need those STIM B sales anyway.
Scoooter wrote:
Ok another rant on this..Why didnt medics get the ability to make pet stims and just BE's
What the devs effectively did was say all the CH's dont need to take novice medic..and medics and docs that choose to be stim vendors you didnt need those STIM B sales anyway.
What's so special about CH's? Any other elite combat profession needs to take novice medic for the exact same reasons, especialy Melee fighters. Combat causes damage, and Medics are there to heal damage.
Pet Stims were a nice handout to BE's while they were useless, but now that they rock maybe Pet Stims should go away.
And how is healing a pet any more XP exploitable than healing a playerfighter? The pet has higher ham so you can let them take more damage before youheal them, I guess? Still, it stinks that when I save someone's tanking pet in genuinecombat, thus saving teh entire unit in many cases,I don't even get any XP for it.
Sorry this kind of turned into a rant 
Simple Scouts certainly can make moeny off of resouce simply because the have tem. Even the starte planets have resource shifts and any time a good herbivore or avian meat shows up you have an instant market in the medical professions. Even with the smaller amounts harvested a Scout can still earn acceptable credits with low overhead. If you were not able to do so as a Novice Scout with no marksman skills, I don't know what you tell you other than you obviously weren't finding a market. The hide and bone markets also serve well adn there are times when the the advanced planets have worse quality resources. So there's penty to go around in that respect.
As for why medics make less on mission payouts that are evenly split, it's because they have a greater overhead. Yes, shares are split equally, but how much did it cost the marksman to do the missions? A gun lasts many. many missions before needing to be replaced, same wiht aror, and those are the two primary overhead costs for a combatant. A medical professionsl, however, has to accept not just that cost (to a lesser extent as they gear will likely degrade less) but also the cost of creating the meds that are used and disposed of. A cost not incurred in the normal course of strictly performing the functions fo other professions. So medics do have a greater overhead cost and therefore make less credits on missions.
In the final assessment we should also consider flexibility of template. Those stepping int othe advanced medical professions must submit to a very large SP cost, that is not otherwise incurred in allowing for more flexible templates in many other professions. In all this becomes another limiting factor to the advanced medical professionals further degrading the balance of templates based on thsoe professions.
I jsut started 2 new characters on a servr 2 weeks ago. I funded both of their start ups with the scout. At novice scout I had to pay my starting cash to get both characters to the same city (couldn't go where I wanted from the station).
I did not have enough to but novice marksman until I sold some meat. You can get a lot of meat pretty fast offa newbie critters, even with a default CDEF and just Novice scout. Doctors will fall out of the sky to buy several hundered decent stat avian meat. I was only selling 5cpu too.
On the other side...
Marksmen and advanced profession combatants can indeed face similar costs to a healer in a group doing missions... if we exclude free buffs.
Considering just stims and woundpacks after the fights, a ranged weapon user that uses a lot of powerups and very high quality guns, can cost himself a lot of credits (because Weapons are way overpriced). A player tank can rack up a lot of armor damage as well, that is very expensive as well.
I can go both ways on Pet stims. I honestly don't wanna heal pets... XP or no. But good pet stims need to be easier to make (they are far harder top make then people stims, see materials lsited above).
When the onlything CHs can find is pets stim A, and maybe a few Bs, they will always pester the doc for D and E stim heals for the high lavel pets.
Let me tel lyou, my CH has a lot of fun trying to heal just a 6k HAM pet with 150 power Pet stim As.. My ch only has OC IV and Novice (he's also a BE).. so the best stim I ahve are Bs for people... so that's nto much help.
I'm all for CH healing their own **edit** pets, but ATM, the availability of materials for pet stims makes this harder... especially if the BE wants master Doc parts to make the pet stims really good.
-T
I think what most folks who concentrate their templates more on the medical professions (and that's what I generally mean when referring to a "medical professional") do have a problem with is that we tend to complain relatively little about all of the other "healing" methods that do exist out there, we even have a significant portion of the community who think making some from of Stim A type of heal pack available to everyone would be useful. Yet when folks who are part of one of the most dependent, if not the most dependent (I really can't think of a profession with more dependencies, actually) and skill instensive professions in the game suggest there is an imbalance in how much dependency their skills require as compared to other templates less dependent on the medical profession abilities, those same folks tend to thought of as, fo lack of a better term. "not team players". THe kinds of folks who want to be completely self sufficient, which is completely ludicrous just even considering the nature of the skills we use to begin with.
I think that is where you would find the most issue in all of this. Despite the ability to prove the level of dependency required for the skill point costs involved, still we are consistently told that somehow gaining the ability to gather one portion of our resource needs would somehow make us too self sufficient. And that is where I take the most issue, really.
-T
Hey, Big Z...(haha, KOTOR! 
)
I think you may have misinterpreted my point. Forgive me as I haven't figured out quoting, lol.
"Outside of which, however, many folks want to just play the healer. Having additional skills is all fine and dandy, but what they really want to do is just heal and the payout, considering the overhead, is simply miniscule for anyone interested in being a true healer."
I think, for this discussion to "work," we must agree on considering all the professions as "exclusive" usage. Meaning, since we're treating players as exclusive medics and nothing more...meaning no combat skills, we have to treat Scout and Artisan likewise. Agreed?
Now, you had mentioned Novice Scout able to make a nice income through selling resources. If we're treating Scout like players are doing that and nothing else, then Novice Scouts have no chance of making any money by only being a Scout, at least at Novice level. If the Novice Scout in question has no combat skills, then they are very limited as to what planets on which they will be able to survive. These planets seem to be Corellia and Tatooine, possibly Naboo...although even Naboo is questionable. Corellia and Tatooine are starting planets. We both know that. Starting planets have weak enemies--dwarf nunas, anyone? Avian Meat? Required resource? So, in theory, a Scout could make a very good living selling hide, bone, and meat...however, the amount of meat a Novice Scout harvests is...nonexistent, lol. My house is full of meats I harvested at Novice Scout level and even a box or two higher. The maximum amount of any container is 40. That's from a few days of harvestingGorgs and Nunas, and I'm not a powergamer by any stretch of the imagination.
Can a Novice Scout make any credits by doing that alone, on a starting planet? Nope. Rangers will always have more meat to sell.
So, how can a Novice Scout get more meat per kill? Advanced planets. I'm looking at you, Dantooine. We're already treating the professions as exclusive, correct; they have no other skills outside Scout. How would...how would a Novice Scout be able to kill a Piket (really great spawn of Herb Meat lately!) without combat skills? They wouldn't. How would they have a chance? Grouping with other players. Player interdependency. Plus, with the group harvesting active, that Novice Scout can geta nice amount ofmeat off of that Piket without combat skills. The only hard part is getting the creds to go to Dantooine, but that's where destroy missions on the starting planets comes in. =)
As for exclusive medics, I don't sympathize with them at all, lol. Not to sound cold, but they're limiting themselves already by only sticking to one class and that's it. Z, you mentioned how medics get the short end of the stick when it comes to mission payouts. They don't. The payout is split evenly between all the players, regardless of damage done. I do absolutely no damage whatsoever in my destroy missions. My pet is sent in to tank, that's it. My pistol is equipped, but never used, unless I'm aggroed. So, I do not see how the mission payout argument fits in here.
There are 8k missions that three player groups can draw, and each player can grab two. If each player grabs two 8k missions, that's 16k for each player at the end of the night. That's even if they only do those six missions. What's preventing an exclusive medic from grouping with two other elite combat class professions and earning 16k in 1.5 hours? The Stim use wouldn't be anything terribly dramatic. That medic would make more than enough to buy Stims, then after amassing enough credits, the medic can buy the resources he needs. There is no problem there at all,because that medic can make that kind of money doing destroy missions while being an exclusive medic.
I go back to my original point, lol. People are expecting this game to throw credits in their faces. Players see those who amassed 100k in the first month and expect that to happen to them. That's foolish.
So, the mission payouts distribute evenly among the groupers, and with the right number in the group, the exclusive medic makes a very nice income. Buying B Stims costs very little; the market is flooded with them. It's a matter of planning ahead, managing money, and generally...being wise gamers. It's a matter of not throwing our arms up in disgust over an issue.
Someone mentioned looting and how it sucks, or something. Why depend on loot? I mean, it is totally luck of the draw concerning what you get. We shouldn't depend on something that is that heavily influenced by luck. Looting is a supplement. It's an augmentation. It's a little something extra. It shouldn't account for one's entire source of income in the game. That turns one into a petty thief, lol.
But also you'd run into a situation where, since we start the game choosing a character that is part of a single professions, that you make the game a lot harder to new players to understand the basic requirements of the profession they chose. This was something I brought up quite consistantly back in Beta and, I believe, was one of the driving factors in getting the /medicalforage command back when you coudl at least make a Stim A off of it. I could go back and find the posts, if you don't remember them, but when we first went went live there was also a hge set of posts by at least one individual who was so completely lost trying to figure out exactly how to even preform the basic functions of a Medic that he was ranting like mad about it, and I can't say that I blamed him, and it was exactly what I had been saying was going to happen.
So I think by proper design all professions really should have at least have basic skills to advance in that particular profession, just to help out the learning curve and get the new players introduced into the game and, hopefully, get the hooked on it. In that sense interdependency simply should be sacrificed in the name of game design, IMHO. Otherwise you risk alienating beginning players by hampering the basic abilit to get into and learn how to play the game.
I brought up /medicalforage not because it is something useless now, but because of why we got it put in in the first place. Because the argument for it has some validity. That it is usless now is, as you say, irrelavent. The argument for why it was put in there originally, however, is still very relavent. A MMORPG survives by new customers. If you make the learning curve too difficult you lose those customers pretty darned quick. Providing the tools to move forward in a chosen profession should be part and parcel of how a profession is designed in order to make things understandable for folks to get into a profession and learn it. That's where we convinced them of the need for something like /medicalforage before they turned right back around and made the skill useless. That's why I brought it up.
As for the removal of resource gathering skills, again that's just another example of a way to force more interdependency, but it would be the only way to force that interdependency on all other profession in the same way that it is forced on Medics. Now insisting on more interdependenc on the high end is another story, and I don't see much problem with that, personally. The issue I, and so many others in the Medical professions, have deals with that basic level of dependency that Medics have on virtually every other profession in the game in a way that the other professions do not have to deal with. It's the difficulties on the low end that are killing us.
Optional dependencies are awesone. More power to them. The forced ones that we need just to do anything in a chosen profession (especially as focused a profession as the medical professions tend to be because of their base skill point costs) is where the game design has simply failed those who would choose our professions.
The solution (right or wrong) that the devs came up with, was /tends.
A novice medic can do novice level heals and participate in their professions to make enough money to buy resources to heal better with resource required meds.
/Tends and medical forage were solutions to the same problem. Novice medic could not do thier job. /Tends is the newer solution to the problem, so it reflects the more recent dev opinion on how it should go (again right or wrong.. personally I hate them... very un-starwarsy.).
The devs always intended us to buy this stuff (or shell out the points to do it ourselves). Healing is 100% needed in this game (as it is in others). Buffs are not needed, but everyone wants them. Again, CMs kinda get left out in the cold. Our skills are in very high demand, but because of people on both sides of the issue, we make no money at it (in general).
The economy is obviously not working the way they intended. We should not only be easily able to buy resources, because we should be able to equal the ability to pay for them as the WS do. Docs are docs worst enemies. Docs are the reason Docs are poor.
This was all starting to turn around before &**&^&*^&*( Holocrons. As people maxed out XP, they are less likely to heal for free (even though they shouldn't have been in the first place). Now free healers are back in force.. They are mucking up every facet of the economy though. Meat prices are through the roof, but Docs don't charge more...
Docs inability to find what they need at a reasonable price is a symptom, not a cause. par of it is broken game mechanics, part of it is Docs underselling thier abilities.
In anycase. /medforage has actually nothing to do with the argument at all(see above).
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As for yanking materials from everyone....
Bad bad move. It is always a bad idea to remove a basic functionality. MMOG growth should always be addative. It makes cyclical game mechanics remove unwated stuff over time.
If I add 30 WS schematics for better guns that require dependancy, then make sure they are better then what is here now, everyone will want them and WS has a chocie about what they make.
Then 6-8 months for now, everyone complains that the old non-dependant schematics are underpowered.. and the devs replace them with dependant schematics. Everyone feels like it is a step forward, and the mechanic is changed without bad feelings... and all WS shematics now need another profession to make.
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Overall though.. nobody was ever intended to make all the stuff we are making.. Everyone was designed for schematic revocation. Materials entering the world still seem balanced towards many less items being made.
I'll bet you $2 that the devs never expected Buff Ds to be as common as they are now. There is no buff scaling as players level.
Everyone has D buffs or no buffs at all.
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Dependancy is a multi-way street. Combatants are dependant on us, but we make no money (our fault)... If we made money then the dependancy on artisans for materials would be no problem. Combatants buy equipement rom atrisans.. and finally artisans need Combatants and medics to get near the harvesters with 34 red cons sitting on them
...A lot of people are dependant on us, but we refuse to acknowlege it.
I think we are probably never going to agree on this... now all we need is Texxie...
-T