Doctor Archive
Thread: A modest proposal regarding mind attacks...
So? Give riflemen a health or action shot to compensate.
It's not enough. Their other penalties (2.5 melee damage modifier against them and horrible accuracy in close) make them the worst ranged class, except for that one unique ability of doing mind damage (which they do slower in dps terms than a dabbler bounty hunter). So no mind incaps = a major nerf of the rifleman.
jebewa floated the idea of allowing mind incaps, but no deathblows unless health or action is below 0 in the combat medic forum. This wouldn't really nerf any class as mind damage can still be used to take someone out of the battle. It would however let medics keep their party alive in PvE situations as your opponent has to do damage to a healable pool in order to deathblow you. So the only way people actually would die in PvE is if the mob essentially one-shots your health or action or if the medics get taken out.
If mind doesn't incap, then taking down the mind of someone like a pistoleer in PvP really has no effect since their specials barely require any mind at all. It seems to me that an incap without a deathblow might have the greatest benefit to non-mind damaging professions without completely breaking those professions that do use mind damage.
I had an idea of making mind pool loss be crippling. Rather than incap you, it makes you dizzy, stunned, intimidated, reduces your accuracy and your firing rate for as long as your mind pool remains negative.
So that once a rifleman gets you to 0 mind, you're effectively out of the battle, but you can still run, you're not dead or incap'd.
The problem I'd have with mind damage incaping but not allowing deathblows would be having to sit there and wait for the person to get up just so I can shoot them again and try to hit something other than their mind pool. If I hit their mind pool they'd fall over and I'dhave to wait again. That would suck for both of us.
Both of those solutions still nerfs Rifleman, IMHO. Primarily because Rifleman have the added advantage of a ranged DB. Take away either the ability to have mind do an incap or for a DB to occur from Mind Incap and you take away the rifleman's ability to get Faction and creditfor a valid kill.
BTW, if mind damage does not incap, you've also screwed over riflemen in PvE. If they take out a MOB on mind and that doesn't "kill" them, then they've just wasted a bunch of shots hitting a useles pool to hit on a MOB. Guess they'll have to dro to using a D18 pistol?
Zarlor write:
BTW, if mind damage does not incap, you've also screwed over riflemen in PvE. If they take out a MOB on mind and that doesn't "kill" them, then they've just wasted a bunch of shots hitting a useles pool to hit on a MOB.
It obviously can't apply to PvE, and then you have more differences between the PvE and PvP systems. In PvP, rifleman still can use ranged DB, just only after the action or health pools are drained (likely by the pistoleers or carbineers who are currently next to useless in PvP except to confuse the battlefield). The solo rifleman would have trouble in PvP though since the idea of the lone sniper taking out enemy faction members would completely go out the window.
Not an easy issue to fix obviously.
Hiya, Rifleman here 
Thank you for thinking about us in your thread. While mind damage is not exclusively our domain (TKAs can do mind wounds, 2 Handed Swordsman & BH also do mind damage) It has been presented to Riflemen as the primary benefit of the profession.
We have some ongoing threads on our board, mostly about Eyeshot since that is one of the most deadly mind attacks out there. Most of us agree that mind damage is fine as long as there was some kind of check & balance for using it.
For example, entertainers CAN buff your mind pool & stats, but it lasts for about 10 minutes 
You also have to sit and watch em for about 30 minutes. Where assome good Doc buffs (I LOVE DOC BUFFS!!) can boost your health and action for hours and are instant.
Also, many of us (admittedly selfishly) think that any attack that directly damages the mind pool should also draw from the attackers mind pool for the special move. That is the way it is right now for riflemen (actually, all of our moves use mind), so we must be very cautious how we use specials. That would encourage some conservation when using mind attack specials.
By removing mind incap you are effectively killing off an entire profession and making useless several other professions special moves.
So you say, 'just change their specials to attack health/action/both'. Well, then you just made the rifleman profession into a worthless Pistoleer or Carbineer.
The three ranges professions each have their specific HAM pool they target. That should NOT ever be changed. The fact that each HAM pool can cause incap and lead to DB should NOT ever be changed.
The only thing that needs changing is the reimplementation of mind pool damage healing. Anything less, anything that calls for a complete change in playstyle for the Rifleman, simply causes more problems then it solves.
The only thing that needs changing is the reimplementation of mind pool damage healing.
Currently, an individual PvPer with healing support can be killed by -
1) 1-shot kills
2) Diseases (or any wound over time attacks)
3) Mind damage
Rifleman, combat medics, bounty hunters, and commandos are the only killers. Doctors are also useful during combat due to cure poison and action/health healing.
This is obviously far from ideal. Carbineers, for example, have almost no place in combat.
Add mind pool healing and how does one actually kill a group with appropriate healing support? If I have a group with 1 mind healer and 1 doctor/CM for each weapons guy, it's going to be terribly hard to take us down. Without an unhealable mind pool you are left with exactly 2 ways to kill someone who has healing support -
1) You 1-shot them
2) Diseases (or any DOT wound attacks)
This reduces the list of "killer" classes to combat medics and commandos. Maybe the occasional T-21 headshot3 1-shots someone, but that will be rare witht he 75% damage reduction. Doctors are still useful and whichever class has mind healing is now useful. And this is better? How exactly?
Because most groups don't have that many healers. WIth the right tactics and skill mixes that would probably be about the right combo to make a group fairly invincible.
But, few groups have a combo anywhere near that. Adjustments will need to be made to PvP damage as well as boosting some of the mind damaging professions in order to bring them back into line and balanced with the other professions that are so used to having their damage healed out from under them.
Balancing MUST be done in regards to how and where damage is dealt after adding Mind Damage healing. To suggest that adding the healing should be done in a vacuum would definitely not improve things. It's is not, and cannot be, a simple change.
As for who "owns" whom in PvP. Let's face it, consider the skill costs to Master the 3 classes you mentioned. I've said this time and time again, you simply cannot and should not compare a simple Master BH or Command or CM with a simple Master Pistoleer. The don't compare. The simple versions of the hgiher skill cost professions SHOULD "own" those other professions, no doubt about it. HOWEVER, balance needs to be applied against a completed template. A Master BH with some, say, Medic skills, should have an EVEN fight against a Master Pistoleer/Master Doc (or effectively any template balanced out.) Onlyt he balanced templates are really useful for comparison. In the combat classes it is really only fair to compare Pistoleers to Carbineers to Riflemen, and that's really it.
Even worse is that this balancing act is far too often created by players in a vacuum of solo -v- solo, never really taking into full consideration group dynamics. Much like several folks who have come over to these very forums crying for nerf on Docs because of the effectiveness ofDoc buffs. Of course they aren't crying too much once they are the recipients of those buffs, but they only see it as a class skill and how that skill is beneficial to a Doc in a solo environment, instead of seeing the benefits, and balance, of how that skill gets shared in a group.
Mass battles SHOULD take a lot of time, IMHO, and have a lot of chaos going on around them. No CM or Commando should own those fields (well, there is the problem of no AoE counter to CM poison, but that's a seperate issues) and both sides can have them anyway. Stay way from them, for one, and have your counters to them ready.
If the complaint is that an MBH or MBHs and MCommando are more pwoerful than a Master Pistoleer, than I think you are just on the worng track. They are SUPPOSED to me more powerful, that's why it costs so many more skill points to be one of those. That Pistoleer, on the other hand, is supposed to make up for it by picking up some other skills that counter the completed templates of those MCs.
I just don't see how adding mind healing, and then providing proper balancing with that, will somehow make those other classes useless.
Health and Action damage is now healable, it doesn't negate the Pistoleer or Carbineer abilities. Adding in Mind pool damage healing will not negate rifleman either. They simply need balance fixes to bring them in line with the damage dealt by the other two.
As for Commandos, Bounty Hunters and Combat Medics, those professions require more dedication in the form of specialization and therefor they SHOULD have an edge in combat. It's one of the perks of specializing to that extent.
And as far as a balanced group goes, it SHOULD be unstoppable. A small, yet fully balanced group should be able to take on a larger hodgepodge force by sheer use of specialized attacks and a few tactics.
A well trained, well equipped fighting force should always take out a group of ruffians.
I have to say that I like this idea. I still think that we should not be able to issue a deathblow on a mind incap; I also suggested this idea recently. I missed the fact, however, that you can't damage someone who is laying down already incapped, so there needs to be a special situation that allows a rifleman to continue to do damage to someone that is disabled due to mind incap. Perhaps a different state such as those Pecos described, although I have to disagree with the idea that you can still run. I still think that the target should be immobilized once the mind pool has been drained, for the same duration that an Incap would have you down for. It would be unfair to riflemen for them to have to chase down a moving target to finish the job, especially since they are going to have to use shots that don't focus on health or action to finish of the target.
Elsewhere in this thread, it's been pointed out that we shouldn't be comparing BH and Commandos to riflemen due to the amount of points invested to get there. Ok, so let's compare the baseline combatants first - pistoleers, carbineers, and riflemen. Currently, in PvP, Riflemen are at a distinct advantage because they can cause damage to and kill from an unhealable pool, whereas pistoleers and carbineers must overcome the healing actions of their targets. If the change for no DB from mind were to be put in, then these three would still be rather balanced in terms of solo engagements - The rifleman would be able to incap their target much faster, but then they would have to finish off their target with basic spread-damage shots. Yes, it would take longer, but in the solo encounter, their target is now down and no longer fighting back or healing themselves. The Pistoleer and carbineer take longer to down their targets, but once they are down, they are ready for the DB with no additional time needing to be spent.
In a duo situation, a mix of a rifleman and a carbineer or pistoleer would be more efficient than two riflement or two carbineers because the rifleman would be able to stop the target from healing itself while the carbineer issues the killable damage at the same time. (on a side note: I still feel that damage healing should take place over time that than be totally instant. It's far too powerful for a master medic to be able to heal thousands of points of damage INSTANTLY, especially when professions such as the pistoleer need to do their damage in smaller more frequent amounts as opposed to larger single hits - in a lag free world, a pistoleer would never be able to take down a well equipped master medic.)
In a larger group dynamic, the rifleman would still be very useful in taking targets out of the combat one by one, inflicting a type of damage that will keep the targets down longer, since it's not instantly healable, but they would still need to be backed up by the pistoleers and carbineers in their group to actually kill the enemy group. A group of all riflemen Vs. a well mixed group of riflemen, carbineers and pistoleers should have the mixed group winning more often, especially with healing support, since the lone riflemen would have more difficulty cutting through the healing efforts of themixed group to get the final deathblows.
When looking at the more expensive professions (skill pointwise), the BH would still be able to mind-incap quickly, but would still need to back that damage up with health or action - however, BH have more tools available to them to focus the remaining damage than a rifleman - thus much faster overall fights for a BH.
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I had an idea of making mind pool loss be crippling. Rather than incap you, it makes you dizzy, stunned, intimidated, reduces your accuracy and your firing rate for as long as your mind pool remains negative.
So that once a rifleman gets you to 0 mind, you're effectively out of the battle, but you can still run, you're not dead or incap'd.
The problem I'd have with mind damage incaping but not allowing deathblows would be having to sit there and wait for the person to get up just so I can shoot them again and try to hit something other than their mind pool. If I hit their mind pool they'd fall over and I'dhave to wait again. That would suck for both of us.