Doctor Archive
Thread: Doctor Surveying
Absolutely! So far everyone seems to want to equate this desire to have just the basic ability to advance in our own profession (and Traigus, the /tend commands still require another person to get healing XP and you get NO crafting XP without actually crafting something, so you cannot advance in this profession without crafting) as just being greedy and wanting to play solo, removing the interdependencies of the profession.
Yet this very assumption is some completely off-base because of the fact that, unlike every other profession in the game we are already completely and utterly dependent on skills outside of our profession. Every profession has some basic level of ability to advance that does not hinder the casual gamer, or the less social gamer, or the gamer whose on at odd hours or even just the ones trying to figure out how the profession even works, because the tools to make it work just do not exist. I know. I've had to teach more Medics and Doctors than I can count, because I happen to be a fast learner, read the forums and had learned an incredible amount about the profession from playing it in Beta.
I've played every novice profession and quite a few of the elites and I can say that by far Medic is the hardest one to get started in and to learn. Period. Because the tools are not there, they just don't exist at all. Money is a PART of that set of tools, but it is not the total and we cannot change the sociological standards of the player community at large so we simply cannot consider money a viable tool for our profession.
It's not some desire to be completely self-sufficent. Adding some ability to improve our chances of gaining the resources we NEED to advance in the profession, is a basic concept to other crafting professions. Providing just part of the equation, such as some form of surveying or harvesting, is a standard that those other crafting professions live by. Yet nobody is complaining that Artisans or Scouts don't have enough interdependencies.
The only other way to properly balance this issue would be to REMOVE /survey and /sample from the Artisans and REMOVE /harvest from the Scouts. Maybe make a new profession for those kinds of skills. Then we would at least all be on common ground.
Kinda gone off the reservation Zarlor, nerfing other professions to feel our pain? Ouch.
I, too, started asan artisan intending to build a harvesting empire, had no experience in beta to see what a crock that was with the way I was playing. Got tired of being poor and dead, picked up Novice everything but Brawler and ended up with more points in Medic than anything else, so there I went. I was such a noob I took a survey mission in Kor Vella and WALKED to Bela Vistal, managed to survive, and took the shuttle back home. By having a diverse skill set I was able to advance much more easily, and have a lot of fun along the way, which was the point or so I was led to believe.
Again, play the character not the profession, you are an individual not a job description just like IRL.
I will concede the problems in levelling now, the cities are empty and the wounded are just not coming into hospitals like they were, I started in Kor Vella on my server and the hospital used to be full, now it's practically a ghost town. Everyone either quit or moved out of the cities completely.
One idea to make hospitals a little more useful would be a "Call button" feature, which would allow wounded players to activate a terminal or use a command like /patientregister to indicate on the map that they need healing. Just like us, if you leave the register is cancelled, and if a doctor/medic clicks on a hospital that has been activated you can see the name of the player who has registered and send them a /tell to find out how bad it is and when you will arrive. This might make hospitals more popular.
I didn't say I was advotcating the removal of those skills, just stating where an actual level playing ground would be.
As for the hosptials and survey terminal ides, those are all great. And there are many other ides which would all serve as a reminder to pay medics and assist in the difficulties of the profession. It will not, however, completely change the culture of the playerbase when it comes to the simple concept of actually giving money to healers. I do agree that, as Traigus mentioned, money would be the only other tool that would put us back on the level, allow us to actually pay for resources instead of needing to get them on our own or find a good group of folks to back us up on. Sure there are rich Docs out there, but I have seen so many, many, many much poorer Medics, Docs and CMs that I think those who have gotten to the point where they can afford to buy resources have long since forgotten the trials and tribulations of their less fortunate brethren and tend to just want to tell them to suck it up.
Even then we'd still have to compete for business with the advanced Artisan professions because there are far too many places now that already have no interest in obtaining resources for Docs and CMs. Some extra money in our heands might open up that market some, but would it be enough?
Probably the most common complaint I have heard about paying docs/medics is "But you're getting XP for that!" I guess I see the point, maybe a little, but that shouldn't apply when I have to get resources from at least 4 planets to make one advanced woundpack. Yes, we get XP and a weaponsmith doesn't for the Scout Blaster they sell for 4k after making a crate of 25, but the difference is the weaponsmith gets 100,000 credits (before expenses) for what is a set-and-forget procedure. Your point is well taken that other than crafting, we can't get XP or even make money while AFK, unless we open a drug company (mine is BactaBasics Pharmaceuticals on Scylla) and crank Stims for the masses. And at Master, no, we don't need the XP, we'd rather have cash or some avian/herbivore meat in multiples of 22/16, thank you.
Heh, and if we don't heal people we get lots of nasty comments. I may have said Maimonedes' Prayer with the rest of my med school class back in 1994, but I have made no committment to help the sick or injured in SWG. I regularly wear my Novice Smuggler tag instead of Master Doctor, unless I want to buff for dollars to avoid this whining. Maybe we should tell them "get Novice Medic, and spend a few thousand on WoundpackBs on the bazaar then heal yourself".
I'm playing med / doc since the launch and I still think surveying should be a miner profession.
When we start true medic we don't need much resources in large quantities and we can survey them as we have skills points free.
The more we are getting closer to master the less we have skills points but our stuff becomes better and we can sell it a fair price.
With thoses creds we are able to buy resources, even rare ones, form miners.
The difficult part is to TEAM with a few friends or collegues to make fair deals. For example, my miners are happy to get cheap advanced B stims and "free" buffs.
I don't even have to survey anymore as my artisans clients informs me on swaping resources. They even ask me if this stuff is good...
The second issue is to get large quantities of nice avian and herbivore meat. The best way I found is to rent some rangers to do the job. Another time I just yelled "hunting party on Endor, newbs scouts welcome, I pay you the trip and keep you alive! You just give me the meat" worked very well. They had a nice trip and I got my meat
Even I think the primary idea to put survey in medic skills was a good one, but :
this skill would let us harvest specific rare medical components froms dangerous mobs or places. Components we could add in all our meds. This way we would be able to make top medecines, and this skill would be usefull.
Rankfahrt wrote:
One idea to make hospitals a little more useful would be a "Call button" feature, which would allow wounded players to activate a terminal or use a command like /patientregister to indicate on the map that they need healing. Just like us, if you leave the register is cancelled, and if a doctor/medic clicks on a hospital that has been activated you can see the name of the player who has registered and send them a /tell to find out how bad it is and when you will arrive. This might make hospitals more popular.
This already exists, sort of. I forget which one, but I believe that is what the little sun and moon crescent icons signify next to each medical center when you bring it up on the planetary map screen. I think the moon means that there's patients and no medic types and the sun means there's a medic around.
To me, the fact that master docs spend 140 skill points (if I've calculated correctly) and master CMs spend 169 skill points seems to dictate in and of itself that some measure of self-sufficiency be given. Asking us touse another 30-44 (depending on how well you want to survey) points just to be able to make our own medicines is absurd. Then, in order to harvest creatures, you have to be able to kill them in the first place, so that means that all remaining points MUST go into a combat profession. That's a minimum of 4 novice professions in order to do ONE job. It's an undeniable rip-off when observed from a skill points vantage point. Our hands are effectively tied if we want to do our jobs well (and who doesn't, besides the holodocs). The elite artisan professions spend less skill points yet have more self-sufficiency.
As for our superpowered combat skills, have you taken a look a PvP lately? It's all about the blue bar, and all of our actions require using mind (which is the way it should be). Not exactly useful when you're busy curing your own poisons while being hit in the head for 500 a pop by a rifleman. Though that's a problem with PvP in general, it means that our superpowers aren't that great in that situation.
I'm not looking for total self-sufficiency within the profession, just some.
i know this is well documented by our humble correspondant but i feel a need to say something here.Right now master doc leaves you with some really bad options as to how to use the rest of your skill points.
pistoleer. which is pretty much not good enough with the nubbed up speed you have because you don't have the speed and accuracy of a bh nor the ranged knockdown and delay of the smuggler.
carbinier- same thing as pistoleer except worse.
rifleman- come on really jsut silly.. to use stims on friends you have to be close to shoot enemies you must be far.
combat medic- how about i have enough resources to watch already thank you
master ch= nogo and its worthless if you cannot master
artisan. hey you can master weaponsmith but falls in line with the same thing as combat medic. but you can survey your resources.
entertainer of some sort. okay i spent all day behind my crafting station let me go stand in a different spot for hours on end.
politician yeah no
so what you are left with is the melee classes. which i just don't like being stuck with..
Its pretty obvious(to me)that we should have more skills for our skill points.
The question is which one's? well artisans have survey but i think it wouldn't be unfair of us to ask for the ability to survey for only the resources that we can use in our schematics. I mean back in the old days of witchdoctors and medicine men they would scour the lands for certain flowers and other such items that had medicinal value that many others would simply overlook. So it seems like a perfectly reasonable thing that we should have such abilities. i mean somehow i know what i need but i have no clue what it looks like? i don't buy it. Every other crafter in the game can /harvest or /sample the resources they need(except entertainer who isn't really a crafter sicne there isn't a huge marketability of their items nor any good excuse whyt hey should be able to survey.
On a further note i saw in one fo the devs responses that they were considering scout level surveying. This is no good. it is currently darn near imposibble to pull enough good meat off an animal with hunting 4. without it is just too difficult. which leave the followingoptions that i can see as far as changes go
pull the schematic and remove the requirement for meat(or atleast make it less important in the end product)
require less meat
make meat easier for rangers and scouts alike to pull. currently the avian creatures just don't drop enough except for a few advanced planets. when a good meat pops you have to drop what you are doing for 3-5 days to go get it because we cannot pay people enough to sit there and pull this stuff for 3-5 days... they just get bored with it.
make it more fun to get meat. put a butcher/farmer class into the game where you can have cattle you can kill(yeah right) but wouldn't that be heavenly... i mean bioengineers could craft better cattle and pull meat off of them in some grotesque act...anyway
So basically doc is nubbed up because it has to have master medic to be a mster doc which only makes sense but doesn't leave enough options afterwards. i mean after you master commando you can go smuggler to low blow and pistols all the way up the speed technigues and accuracy tree... master pistoleer still allows BH allows ranger(makes sense). but doctor and combat medic? hmm should i use my ranged stim b or my stim b? duh no contest.
my 33,467 cents
Your post demonstrates that you have unrealistic expectations for doctors in combat. You just spent a large number of skill points to get Master Doctor, of course people who have more skill points in elite combat professions are going to dish out more damage, have more combat special abilities and greater capacity for climbing multiple trees. It seems sort of frivolous to expect otherwise
But doctors can self-buff, rezz, cure poison/disease, heal state effects and have the best self-healing in the game. Really uber self healing. Heal entire black bars of wounds in 2 shots with mediocre Wound C packs.
One template you didn't mention here is MasterDoc/TKM. This is a very effective combo perhaps you have overlooked.
Master Medic
Master Doctor
Master Combat Medic
Marksman 3.3.0.4
That means I can buff, use area stims, defend myself
So in battle with group I dont need to be next to the target to heal.
I'm master doc/cm, and I think its pretty lame that novice scout is essentially required in the game to call you mount/ride, but yet novice artisan is required to even see what resources are on the planet. All I wanna do is see the list, I don't care what the quality is, can drop novice scout and get nov artisan to come sample if I care enough.
Anyways, I never carry a weapon, and notice that when I'm hit that I fight back hand-to-hand. Yes, thats right I don't have novice brawler, BUT I can use basic brawler skills. Why aren't brawlers shouting about this? Its very unfair to them.