Doctor Archive

The issue with mind damage is easily solved: Simply give medic-types a stim to heal it.

There's no reason why a sniperis be able to target the mind pool and do damage, but a medic can't target to heal it. Damage (not wounds) is damage, no matter what bar takes it, so there is no reason to place mind damage (not wounds or BF) in a separate category from health and action.

For those of you worried about a balance issue, just have the stim heal on a 1:1 to 1:1.5 ratio of mind pool used vs mind pool healed. Thus, if you healed for 400-600, you'd use 400 mind pool to do so. So what if it heals a little more mind than you used. It's not like you can use them very fast: Master Doctor stim delay is 3 seconds, lower level medics are even slower. Not exactly break-kneck healing speed. The benefit of healing yourself is no where near that of healing others, and healing others is the whole purpose of the doctor class. Alsodoctors with ahigh willpower never have a problem managing their mind pool anyways, so the issue of doctors using it on themselves isn't really an issue.

Stimpacks in general are already designed with another built in balancing feature: They require time and resources to make, take up inventory space,and have a finite number of charges.Even if you go through them like water, there's only so many times you can heal before you run out and have to get some more. That would require taking the time to gather resources and craft them.

Some would say that only a doctor should be able to use them, but I disagree. I would say that only a doctorshould be able tomake them. This would distinguish the doctor from other medic professions and garantee a means to earn credits within the player economy, since everyone will want to use them, just as they do normal stims.

The only other fix to the mind damage issue I can think of, is eliminate taking damage on the bar during combat altogether. While this sounds drastic, it solves the most problems.

Some say the solution to this problem is a difficult and complex one, but the reality is that it's a very simple one. It's simply a matter of which option to choose: allow mind healing stims or eliminate mind damage in combat, making mind damage occur only by using skills or specials. Personally I feel stims are the better choice since it promotes the thing the devs want us doing in the game: gathering resources, crafting, stimulating player economy, and enjoying the profession we all chose.

If a stim heals more mind than it uses, why take mind at all? There has to be some sort of disadvantage to repeated healing.

And they have not provided us with what their thinking is to help us focus the dicsussion on positive solutions. That's where I hope this correspondent thing will be a big help.

I don't necessarily expect the Devs to say, "OK, you plyers what a Mind Heal, here it is!" But I do hope they will say, "Here is out thiking on Mind Damage and her are the things we really aren't willing to do with it. Talke those things into consideration and Discuss." That would at least help to focus the discussion better. As it stands we all just look like we simply cannot come up with a consensus on solutions and Holo stated in Beta that he didn't know what to do about some of the medical classes issues because of that.

That's a good point Elenora, Is mind-pool a metaphysical state-of-well-being? or is it brain-damage.

2-handed weapons, rifles, poisions, eye-shot, etc, All hurt mind-pool. Those seem like things which cause brain-damage.

Things like shell-shock, long deployment, intense action, dying, seem like the things that would hurt the concept of "mind". But those things don't hurt mind-pool, they increase battle-fatigue.

Plus, what the heck are mind-wounds???Woundscaused by being shot through the eye by a BH, but only healable by an watching someone dance?

And a medic using a stimpack on a friend causes as much damage to "Mind" as getting hit in the head with a staff?

The more I think about it, this combat-system is really borked up, It's like the designers got confused somewhere between design and implementation. (either that or they ran out of time)

Can we get aruling on this devs?

Well I see the mind pool debate from two sides, one is I really like how it exists now for a few reasons. Mainly because if we could heal it like we could other wounds fights would really be about having the monster focus on one person and they get all the heals. It gives a hard limiting factor to how long battles can be, it also gives them a pool they can draw from for skills that they want to be very intensive and difficult to do for extended periods of time. Essentially I like the way it gives them a strongly limited pool to work with as well as ensure that one person with the best skills and gear is going to get all the spotlight, you'll need to take turns being the tank and that makes the game more fun in my mind.

That being said, I hate being helpless and wish I could do something to facilitate the healing without making it superpowerful. Thinking about the mind pool as a limited resource that they will want to keep supressed I can suggest a few things. Basically I would like to see a small stim A for mind damage but I would like to see it linked to the wound timer instead. This limits the heals in two ways helping to keep mind damage important and scarce as well as making the timer sufficiently prohibitive to have the "mind spam" healing issue come up again. Also unlinking the timer between normal stim heals would make it more of a safety net to give people time to respond when someone takes a massive head blow, and when your taking heavy damage fighting larger monsters you'll need multiple people to be working in tandem to ensure people survive for meaningful amounts of time. They can make the crafting of the packs as prohibitive as they want in order to make us use it sparingly as well if they like. They have alot of controls to tweak this as I see it.

As for which class can do this? Honestly I think it's something doctors should get and not combat medics. Combat medics really do outclass us in the stim healing and are much more impressive healers in that regard. In the context of mind damage as either mental fatigue or headtrama I feel a doctors particular expertise is going to give them an advantage in treating this sort of damage. That being said it seems entertainers are the favored mind class so if possible they should be given perhaps a small regen to mind damage when in a battling context - but doctors should still be given a way to respond to sudden large amounts of mind damage. I have no experience with PvP combat so I can't comment on its effects in this area but I suspect something along the same lines, combined with enhancment packs working correctly and more higher end food becoming availible we'll see the focus from mind wounds decrease slightly. When your starting out though it's rough. Just my thoughts.

The problem with BF regenerating in camps automatically is that it takes away the entire market for entertainers. The problem with making BF the new "Mind Pool" for specials is that it doesn't regenerate, and if it did entertainers would be out of a job.

people sit in the med center and auto healing and there is still a huge need for medics

I think making BF more of a issue as it is now is a good idea...it will make people value entertainers more...

could help solve the tip problem for entertainers...

I think there should be some auto healing of BF ic. u can sit in the cantina and lose 1 bf every 10 mins. lol at that rate people will realize that entertainer's time is worth something more...

next time someone complains about tipping for healing...u could always say well, u know u could jsut sit here for the next 6 hrs and heal your wounds automatically....

It is a problem with the rifleman class being able to spam head shot 3, in my humble opinion. All would be well IF, like in real life, a sniper usually only gets one good shot and better make it count. To be able to sit at 60m and to spam headshot , noone has a chance of defense.

PekoPekoPeeker, that's why I have it that your BF will recover 25% of the BF you gained in the last 15 minutes (once again the actualnumbers wouldneed to beplay tested, but we'll use these numbers for my example). For example, lets say you have 100 BF (you've had this BF longer then 15 minutes), and get into a big fight and now you have 200 BF. With no entertainers around, if you make camp you'll lower the BF to 175. With a master entertainer there, your BF would be 110. I think this provides a good solution, as you can regenerate some BF after a battle, but not all of it. It also makes entertainers more valuable on the field (i.e. they can charge to come along with a hunting party). And even with a master entertainer, you'll still need to go to a cantina to heal all of your BF. That should make is so the entertainers who like working the cantinas will still have customers.

Very well good post. It has been on all our minds, you layed it out clearly. If only we could turn this into a memo and have it on the desk of the devs when they get to work in the morning for them to think about....


Rortt

actually a rifleman isnt that big of a threat considering that BH and pistoleer can do mind damage while running at close range and at pistol speed...and both have knockdowns

right not rifleman have range issues and cant sniper from that far in fact i was hearing rumor that it was like impossible to target outside of 60m...

then there is the pistol issue...pistols shoot at 60m with just as much accuracy as carbines and rifles...right now pistols are completely over powered...

Umm, Pistoleers do not have a dedicated mind damaging attack. That's only BHs that can do it with pistols. Pistoleers can only target the health pool specifically with BodyShot ./ Healthshot. All the other special attacksdo random pool damage. Pistoleers' MeleeDefense 1 skill is a melee range knockdown. DisarmingShot2 at Master Pistoleer is acting like a ranged AoE knockdown, but that's not what it's description says it's supposed to be. So, look to see it get corrected at some point.

GAH people it is not that hard, I have been harping on this for days.

There are currently stimpacks in the game that DO heal mind damage, they are called Damage Stimpacks, although right now they frop from mobs.

So how do they work, well first of all you have to have health or action damage to begin with, if you do not have any damage to those stats then you cannot heal. THen the mind damage healed is rougly half of what is healed in action or wound damage. So if a person had dropped 400 in mind and 60 in health, a damage stimpack would only give back 30 mind.

So look at this this way, if I havea mind pool of 1000 and a health pool of 700, the most I would ever get back from the heal would be 350. However that would be enough for me to get an incapped player back on his feet, and possibly enough to keepa player in the fight long enough to bring weapons to bear on that single shot rifleman.

This really seems like a plausable plan that could work it would not over power the game and would not take a lot of work to implement since the items to do this already exist.