Doctor Archive
Thread: Do You think a Doctor has to Craft 'Too' Much?
The bazaar is very limited phomeister, since you can only have 25 items on the bazaar at a time. This severely limits the variety of medecines that get put on the bazaar because with so few bazaar slots, you have to cater to the larger demand. For specialized medecines, doctors need to form business relationships with med crafters and handle their trades face to face or through player vendors.
/sales pitch on
On that note, I am slowly ramping up my production capabilities and if any non-crafting doctors would like to negotiate bulk medecine purchases, just send me an e-mail in game!
/sales pitch off
I still think the doctor crafting strikes a nice balance betweencrating grinding and player satisfaction.
I wasn't forced to go artisan, but I chose to do marksman/scout to help out my early medic abilities (with organic resources...for inorg, I bought off of bazaar -_-).
And currently, no, I do not think that a doctor has to craft 'too' much...because yes, there are different styles of players as people have mentioned, but also the main reason to craft that much is to get the res. packs and also most likely reach master doctor. Just thank the devs that we do not have more than one tier of skills devoted to reaching master...because then I would freak out 
(without a factory at least, which I don't use )
And yes, I also do think that medical exp is way much quickly gained than the corresponding amount of crafting exp to go with it (or maybe none, if you bought or got the medicines from someone else), but crafting DOES have a place in the medic/doctor tree unfortunately, so if you want to personally make those 'bring back from the dead' kits, then you'll have to semi-grind over two weeks (or more), or just keep churning out those medicines (excuse me, now you can practice making them...have fun!) I personally am making stim B's right now to actually make it worth my time to craft.
One thing that a lot of the comments don't seem to take into account is the problem of the 'casual' gamer. I work 40 hours a week (right now during summer). During the fall I'll be a student so I'll probably be working less, but taking classes, so I'll have even less time. My weekends are often taken up (or a significant portion of the weekend), by other 'obligations' I have (family events, plans with friends, student group events), etc. When all is said and done, I have like 2-4 hours per night to play, and maybe 4-8 hours per day on the weekend.
Now, I understand that a casual gamer is going to inherently be at a disadvantage to players with more time to spend in the game. My problem is, it seems to be on the verge of impossible to play a medic profession as a casual gamer. I have to basically spend ALL my in-game time during the week working on producing medicines. This leaves me like one day on the weekend to actually spend grouping with people and healing them. During the week I used to spend my in-game time surveying/sampling, and hand-crafting meds. Now I've "moved up" to harvesters and a factory only to find I've become a slave to the maintenance fees on the equipment. Harvesters and Factories haven't gained me any time, which is what I thought was supposed to be the whole purpose of them.
The main problems I have right now:
1) I can't make money being a medic. This is a problem I know has been discussed, and has even made it into the Medic and Doctor Correspondent "Issue Lists". I'm glad to see that it is getting attention. Anyhow, this means I have to spend a bunch of time running missions, or selling 'excess' resources, or doing something other than being a healer in order to make money to 'feed the machines'.
2) I usually only run my factory on one 50 or 100 unit production run per 24 hour period (because I usually don't log in until like 6pm, and have to log off by 10 or 11 pm, so I only have time to put in one run, and possibly start a second run, before going to bed), yet I'm paying just as much maintenance as someone who plays a lot and is constantly able to put more schematics and ingredients into their factory to keep it running effeciently.
Changes I'd like to see so that I can spend less of my in-game time 'crafting' or generating creds to feed my harvesters and factory:
On the factory, have it consume a lower rate of creds when it is not actually crafting. This way us casual gamers can still get some small benefit of a factory without having to pay the same amount as a 'full-time' gamer who is producing 3-4x as much stuff per day with it. And additionally, to give us the OPTION of keeping our factories running more, allow us to either 1) Put a higher crafting limit on schematics (maybe cap it at like 400 instead of 100), and/or 2) Allow us to queue up multiple schmatics, so that when the factory finishes crafting the first schematic, it start processing the second schematic.
I have no issues with the actual medical crafting. It is the accumulation of quality resources which drives me crazy.
Medics shouldn't be forced to go artisan. Let us use surveytools for surveying only, maybe even stick the certs for said tools in the pharm tree in place of medical forage bonuses. Would certainly be incentive to pick them sooner.
During this time, you have a wound macro running, to heal people that come in. I tried this once sitting in Bestine when none of my friends were around and I filled out an entire skill line of Combat Medic and was only close to finishing Intermediate combat crafting. The fact that filling out the -first- box of crafting xp in Combat Medic(Doctor Crafting requires more xp per box) takes the same time to fill out an entire skill line in the profession while sitting in a half-dead Medical Centre is completely absurd. I can "Master" an elite medical profession several times before getting enough xp to get Mastery in medical crafting.
The time/xp load for the Elite Medical professions definitely need to be shifted around a bit. Currently it is far too easy to make the neccessary Medical XP for master levels, and it is far to monotonous to make the crafting xp. I feel the crafting xp requirements should be cut in half, and the medical xp portions should be tripled at the least. I think almost anyone who has suffered through the monotony of medical crafting(aside from people who afk'd by their factories when they gave 100% xp) would gladly have taken this alternative instead. And guess what? It would most likely take less time as well.
Actually, Merrin, you just proved the Devs point on this, to a certain extent. The idea being that you should be able to complete all of the level 1 skills at around the same time. The metrics they were pulling in Beta showed this to pretty much be the case for all Medic professions. The deal here is that healing provides XP for 3 different skill lines. Crafting provides for only 1. So it should take about 1/3 the time in healing to fill in one box of the other lines as it does to fill in that one box of crafting.Since that one line seems to take 3 times as long as any 1 box in the other lines, it probably seems a lot longer to craft up than it should.
Truthfully I am no fan of the grind either. I hate haveing to craft anything just to craft it so I can get XP. I'd rather just run factory runs as I need to and notworry that I'm only getting a 10% boost from it when I probably could have crafted, with 3 personal tools, all of the same number of stims in 1/3 the time it takes that darned factory anwyway and for full XP. I'll be so very happy when I finally finish out that line. I don't mind the crafting, mind you, it's just crafting for XP. I just want to craft what I want to craft when I want to craft it. That's why I will be so very happy when I've finally used up all my skill points right whereI wanted them to go. ThenI can finally just play the game howeverI want to without ever worrying about XPs again (well, unless I give up some skills to go up in something else.)
ok example...Stim E
I heal for 1500-2500 with a stim E = like 600-700 xp a heal...
1 stim E = about 500 crafting xp
41 charges on a stim E...
ok scaling problem?!
41 x 700 >>>>>>>>500 x 1
With regards to Item 1, you can make a schematic work for more than 100 now. Instead of using the slider bar, type in the number of uses you would like the schematic to have. I usually set this to 1000.
Lucreel wrote:
. . . And additionally, to give us the OPTION of keeping our factories running more, allow us to either 1) Put a higher crafting limit on schematics (maybe cap it at like 400 instead of 100), and/or 2) Allow us to queue up multiple schmatics, so that when the factory finishes crafting the first schematic, it start processing the second schematic.
"ok example...Stim E
I heal for 1500-2500 with a stim E = like 600-700 xp a heal...
1 stim E = about 500 crafting xp
41 charges on a stim E...
ok scaling problem?!
41 x 700 >>>>>>>>500 x 1"
Elapsed game time needed to legitimately use 41 charges of said stim E >>>>>>>>> Time spent to craft said stim E. In terms of xp over time, it doesn't seem so imbalanced.
Just thought I'd throw that out there.
I don't think we craft enough, if you look at a weaponsmith are crafting is nothing.
Level 4 crafting is just 33,000 divide that by stim b which is 211 exp total, is only 157 units. Manually crafting those take 1 minute to craft and put together with 3 food/chem units that's riughly 160 minutes or 2 hours 20 minutes.
From level 1 to level 4 is 96,000 exp needed, folowing same formula. 455 units = 455 minutes = 7 hours 35 minutes.
Note: I know there is a failure rate that will add some time, but bottom line is 10 hours crafting and your done. Yes, it's a pain, but really it's nothing time wise compared to spending 8 hours at the Tusken for to earn 120,000 exp when you need 125,000 just for your 1st level of one skill tree.
Zarlor wrote:
Actually, Merrin, you just proved the Devs point on this, to a certain extent. The idea being that you should be able to complete all of the level 1 skills at around the same time. The metrics they were pulling in Beta showed this to pretty much be the case for all Medic professions. The deal here is that healing provides XP for 3 different skill lines. Crafting provides for only 1. So it should take about 1/3 the time in healing to fill in one box of the other lines as it does to fill in that one box of crafting.Since that one line seems to take 3 times as long as any 1 box in the other lines, it probably seems a lot longer to craft up than it should.
Um devs must have some pretty flawed logic then. Lets look over what we have here: I complete 1 skill line (intermediate, advanced, expert, master) of a Medical XP line at roughly the same time it takes for me to complete the INTERMEDIATE level of crafting.
XP Requirement to hit mastery in a medical xp line: 150,000
XP Requirement to hit Intermediate Doctor's Crafting: 15,000
XP Requirement to hit mastery in Doctor's Crafting: 96,000
I by the time I hit Master Doctor's Medical Crafting, I would have gotten the xp for 6.4 mastery lines. If 1:6.4 = 1:3 then the devs need some better math. This is churning out the best possible xp/time items (bio effect controllers) as well. The majority of medics out there grind out stims for xp, and those are twice as slow as just turning out Bio Es. So to the averageplayer the 1:6.4 ratio would turn into a 1:12.8 ratio.
Message hijack.
One little semi-secret. LEAVE THEED, the no-build, no mission area around it is terrible.
From Theed I was lucky to get 2 missions completed with 3 burst runs. I moved to a different city can do missions which pay 200 less but I can do a thoses 4 missions in2 burst runs, and be on missions 5 and 6 before I can do that third burst run.
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