Doctor Archive
Thread: Doctor Top 5 for 8/1/03
As many of us near mastery of a second elite profession, I think #4 is becoming more and more of a problem. I'm either going to have to give up mastery of one of my professions to survey, or trust and wait on someone else enough to do it for me. Neither seems like a very good option.
All in all, very nice work. Glad you're acting as our voice.
I know you are listing them by the amount of discussion and not importance but I would have to put them in the following order.
4
2
3
5
1
I am a strong believer in number 4 being one of the worst issue facing all medical professions. But yes, I do think a total reworking of medical forage might provide some answers.
So far the best solution I have heard is to somehow change medical foraging so that it lets medics (and subsequent professions) use survey tools -for surveying only- (not sampling). And as you increase in skillboxes, it would let you use more tools. For example: At Pharm I you can survey for organics. At Pharm II you can survey for minerals. At PIII for Chemicals. And at PIV for water.
Never let medics innately sample though, and there is no need for them to ever be certified in energy-locating tools. This way the medical professions will still have to go to artisans to buy their tools, to buy their energy, to buy their haresters, but at least we will be able to scout out good spots of the resources we require and plant our own harvesters there. A massive step in the right direction.
I know this is a little early, but I won't be on to submit this tomorrow, sit it's a little early. There were some changes on the big list, but not enough to affect the top 5 on that list, so this should look familiar to those that read that thread.
Doctor Issues for week ending 8/1/03
1.Money. This topic comes up very frequently on the Medic threads, but just as frequently, if not more so, on the Doctor forums. There is a lot of concern about how a focused medical character should be able to make money. By this I mean that we are talking about a character who's primary skills and interests are in the healing arts (which would include crafting of meds) and not, necessarily, combat. The self-sufficiency of the profession does not really exist except in a few small methods, of which the primary one for making money IN the profession would be production and sales of Small Stimpack Bs. There is a much smaller niche market for medical resources and components, but most Doctors seem to feel that resource gathering and sales, while obviously an integral part of the Doctor profession, is more of the realm of the artisan and such sales would be, in effect, making money as an Artisan, and not as a Doctor.
The other methods of making money seem to be far less reliable, or are not well supported by the game. Primarily, for those interested in providing services such as Healing or Enhancing, there is no secure method of trade to ensure that the Doctor is paid for their service while also ensuring that the customer gets the service they are requesting. Suggestions have included some form of secure trade window, like is done for normal trading, having a Doctors healing actually use packs that the customer has on their person, instead of the ones on the Doctor (and thereby the Doctor could sell the medicine to the player and then heal him with those), lowering the Med Use requirements on some medicines such that anyone could use them, thereby opening the market for more pharmaceutical products that Doctors could then sell. Having Doc-sepcific mission, like the artisan or entertainer missions. Again there is no true consensus on the issue other than that most of the Medic classes tend to rely on other methods of subsistence and take time doing those things that they may not be interested in (the usual, delivery/destroy missions, for example.) The issue is an important one amongst the player base and receives a lot of attention on the forums and in-game from many of the medics and Doctors I have spoken with.
Of notable reference are the following threads:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1768
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1197
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1650
2.Enhance Packs. There are several issues revolving around all of the enehance packs, and especially the B packs. Stuck HAMs on buffed players are proving especially annoying to many Doctor characters. Either the HAMs stick after being buffed so that the player cannot see when they are getting damage, they stick so that the Doctor cannot see that their groupmates are getting damaged (a very dangerous situation) or they simply do not scale properly so that the buffed bar simply goes out past the edge of the window and any damage sustained to that attribute is not seen until it gets below the point where it can be seen inside the window.
Enhance buffs are also being lost when crossing zones, cloning, traveling or logging yet the enhance timer remains active, as if player still were buffed. This one is proving to be of exceptional difficulty, especially for higher level Doctors who have longer Buff times. Once a character crosses a zonal boundary, such as leaving the city, the buff wears of instantly far sooner that it normally should, yet the timer on that original buff is still active meaning that the Doctor cannot reapply the buff. For a character buffed at the edge of a zonal boundary and just crossing it, that could mean a 45min, or longer, wait before they can be properly buffed again.
There is also no notification of a buffs expiration, as folks cannot see that stream of lost numbers while in First Person mode and may not notice that they have lost their enhancement. Possibly some other graphical notification of what buffs you currently have and possibly a blinking notification that those buffs are about to expire. Allowing the buffing medic or groupmates to see who has what buffs would also be very advantageous. One suggestion was made for a type of Pie Chart as an icon on the HAM, like other states are sown, that slowly cuts away slices of the color until it is getting low, perhaps blinking for tte last minute or so fo the Buffs duration.
Experimentation on Ease of Use on Enhance Packs makes them HARDER to use, not easier. Very frustrating for the lower level Medicine Use individuals who gains access to higher level Doctor Crafting in that they cannot use these packs in the same way they had gotten use to being able to use Stim Cs at a lower Pharmacology level.
Enhance Action B+ packs use simple Organic and Inorganic resources, while the rest of the B+ Enhance series uses Avian Meat and Reactive Gas. It is often considered a problem in that the Action packs should be brought into line with the rest of the Enhance packs, or the stringent requirements on the other packs be lessened.
And finally, Enhance A packs can be made at a lower skill ability than Advanced Wound Treatment and are given a low enough med use requirement that most Doctors will have no problem trying to make and use one as soon as they acquire the ability to do so. Unfortunately trying to use the packs without Advanced Wound Treatment means that they do not work, but they also do not give notification of why they do not work. This proves to be very confusing to many new Doctors. Same for Cure Poison Statepack.
More information on the last item can be found in the following thread:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1168
3.Factories, more often then not, do not pull subcomponents from crates in Factory production. CSR response is simply that we will need to pull the items one by one from the crates in order to get the factories to work correctly. Apparently not everyone is having this problem, but it is proving to be probably the most frustrating concern amongst Doctors at this time. Even a temporary fix, such as increasing the input hopper size so that more individual components could be placed there since they have to be pulled from the crates by hand. 100 is simply too prohibitive a size for making items with multiple components without baby-sitting the factory. Relatedly the ability to drop a crate into the input hopper and then double-click to drop an item directly out of the crate into that hopper would also be of some help in alleviating the problem. By the same respect there are times where are crate will not even dump an item into inventory. The whole crate just seems to be stuck and will not give up anything. For more information you may wish to reference the following threads:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1201
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1224
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=2466
4.Docs seem to feel the NEED to survey for their own resources and dislike the need to use skill points in Artisan in order to do so. (Let's face it, anyone getting into the Doc level had to craft to get there, so the SWG version of a focused Doc is, in fact, a crafting profession and they want the abilities to self subsist in that capacity as Artisans do.) One could argue that this is related to the problems with using the /medicalforage command being of no real value to the profession. Since CHers seem to have been given the ability to heal pets without having to take Novice Medic to do so this request doesn’t seem to unreasonable to many Docs. The other problem comes from the idea that Dcotor’s could always just buy their resource needs. However, Docs have many very specific resource needs (Dantooine Berries, Class 4 Liguid Petro Fuel, Avian Meat, Lokian Wild Wheat, etc.) that very few, if any, other professions truly need. Considering the prevalence of the Money issue for Docs, the market for surveyors to cater to the medics market is simply too small to be successful in comparison to what a survey could make catering to one of the artisan professions.
For reference the following thread may be of interest:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1540
5.Docs are feeling a bit hampered by the crafting requirements of the class. While there are a few who simply do not like crafting at all, many seem to feel that crafting is acceptable, but only if it improves with use. An example pointed out on the forums was that a Stim E will often heal for 1500-2500, or about 600-700 xp a heal. That 1 stim E provides about 500 crafting xp. Since there are 41 charges on a stim E that means a difference of 41*700=28,700 healing xp, as compared to that 1 stim providing only 500 crafting xp. A ratio of 57:1 instead of the 3:1 that would be expected for proper scaling of raising the skills evenly. Admittedly compared to the time it takes to use those charges enough stims could be made to equalize that ratio, but it is requested that the metrics be looked at again now that Factory XP is back to where it should have been and that self UXP in components has been fixed, keeping in mind that there are folks who are just grinding the meds for these lines to catch it up to their other med levels.
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1383
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=2020
Some have also suggested that Doctor is simply too easy to Master or just too hard to gain Crafting XP in. I am still uncertain whether this is intended or not and whether or not it is really balanced enough compared to possible speed of gain rates for other professions. It may be a situation where, as Holocron has told us before, the game simply does not start until you completely allocate all of your skill points and that philosophy being somewhat counterintuitive to how many other MMORPGs are played. Or if this is truly a valid concern that having Master Doctors within this time frame is unbalancing to the game. Perhaps guidance of the Dev thinking on the issue is needed, or the rate of gain should be adjusted. The crafting requirements will definitely need to be more balanced, however, in most players’ experience.
Personal Pet Peeve. Since I get to have one of these to rant on, I would like to have the ability to send a complete list of all the issues I currently have that have been brought up in the Doctor community. As it stands my current list is running out to 50 items (some of which have or may have been addressed by the upcoming patch) and some of those items are obvious bugs or would be very easy implementations to handle. Some of those items will probably never make it to the top 5 simply because a bug for which there is no workaround or that is blatantly obvious to most of us can only be talked about so much and may never get the level of attention needed to make it into the Top 5 I am sending you. While I think it is safe to accept that we might be pushing it to think we can really delve into the Devs’ time enough to get a response even on the Top 5 issues, I think it would make everyone feel more comfortable knowing that their requests and interests are being fully represented.
Admittedly we do not all agree that some of these items could, should or would be implemented, but I have gathered them together nonetheless and I would hope that the Developers would at least give it their due consideration. I think folks really just want to know that their pleas have been heard, even if the answer to those requests is No. We just want to make sure that you have a full understanding of ALL the issues that are being discussed (even if the listing is a rather distilled form) and we would be more than happy to accept that only the Top 5 will receive the highest attention and possible chance comment.
Zarlor - Doc Correspondent
Dearic, Talus - Eclipse
I know this probably should be handled by another profession...but they seem to be more worried about pets...or color pallets.
My concern is with Tailored clothes that add stats to Healing abilities, either dancing or medic type skills. I had a friend make me a wookie set of 3 clothing items that combined give me +33 Inj. Treatment, +27 Medicine use, and +28 Wound treatment. Now other than the "equip'd when loging out" bug that resets the skill stat numbers, there is a fact that these +stats do nothing for the acutual skill. I have posted on the tailor boards many times but to no success. I know these skills + do nothing by the fact that it was very impossible to see a difference with the clothes on or off. But training up a lvl to gain a +5 would show a very noticable change in my heals.
I am asking others to please try these type of clothes out, and/or post your stories involving these. The crafters don't seem concern'd and would like to see this issue taken up to the DEVs.
The stat mod items being totally bugged and utterly useless is a well-known bug right now. I don't think we need to include it on our Doctor list; the devs are well aware of it, and it's a pan-profession problem.
dudes for me point 2 is the most importand atm, if u wnat kill something without those exploiting/cheating tamer pets u need buffs.... but atm my buff last 20-60 seconds wow .... we cant hunt any hard stuff atm wich is crap since im so damm borred by craftign and cash missions!
MAKE those damm enhpacks work, iets 1 month after release and they still dont work and never worked in beta ....
For me, the enhancement bugs are the most troublesome. Whenever I buff myself I lock my HAM bar in place. Any damage I take is not reported for the duration of the buff. It doesn't matter if I am incapacitated, my HAM still shows the state it was in when I buffed. If I buff a friend, his HAM bar locks to me. For him, he was able to see damage received for both my health bar and to his and would have to just report it to me (we speak on the phone during game play).
I encountered a new bug last night with buffing. After I buffed him, he DISAPPEARED. I couldn't see him and attempting to target him through hot-keys would result in a "too far away" message. His group icon indicated a distance of (2m) but it might as well have been (2millionm).
The reason I classify the enhancement as most troublesome is I try to apply the 'workaround' method. If I can get around the problem, then it is an inconvenience - not a show-stopper. While money is an important concern, there are ways around it. Destroy missions, selling stim B's on the bazaar, deliver missions, tips (albeit low most of the time) are examples of money-makers. Enhancement buffs have no work-around for many people.
Please consider re-evaluating your prioritization of the top five -- enhancements are killing some of us (literally!!!)
Dakani
Scylla