Doctor Archive

I don't want this to turn into a debate over what buff variability should be (use the poll thread for that), but I did want to confirm my suspicions on what I thought buff variability actually was.

To see what the real variability of doctor buffs is, I ran a series of 3 experiments. In each case, I had a master doctor apply 20 buffs to a rock beetle. THis was done in 3 environments - in the city by a 110 med module droid, in the city by a 85 med module droid, in the wildnerness in a basic camp (healing modifier of 0.65). I specifcally looked the the ratio of actually buff vs. base effectiveness

110 Med Module (Low buff/Avg buff/High buff)

1.10 / 1.86 / 3.17

85 Med Module

0.95 / 1.71 / 2.46

Basic Camp

1.30 / 2.19 / 2.86

I would like to retest with a really low med module droid, but it is reasonably clear that the med module does make a difference. It also appears that the camp type does not make a difference. Adjusting for med module types we get:

110 Med Module (Low buff/Avg buff/High buff)

1.00 / 1.69 / 2.88

85 Med Module

0.11 /2.01 / 2.90

Basic Camp

1.30 / 2.19 / 2.86

My prelimary conclusions are as follows:

1) The base variability for buffing is 1x to 3x the experimented effectiveness.

2) Medical module of droid does probably affect the level of the buff (moving the best case range to 1.1x to 3.3x). More testing with very low level med module droids is needed.

3) Basic camp does not appear to hurt buffing. This surprised me a bit. More testing with different camp types is needed to see if ranger camps are different.

4) I did not test whether doctor skills affect buffing. I suspect that wound treatment skills do affect the range (either by lowering the top end or lowering both the top and bottom), but I do not know this.

5) I did not test whether droid type effects duration.

6) More data overall is needed. I don't have any reasonable explanation on why the camp buffing was better, on average, than the 110 droid buffing, other than 20 data points may be inadequate.

7) The distribution of the buff appears to be linear throughout the range of possibilities. In other words, on an 800 buff pack, 900 appears to be just as likely as 1300 or 2300.

I would be open to any suggestions on further tests to run. To the extent that I am able to, I would be happy to run tests on "does x affect buff y" sorts of tests.