Doctor Archive
Thread: Compiled List so far
Ok, afte readin through the patch notes the following items are either fully or partiall addressed by the new patch. Interstingly not one of them is in my top 5 for Doc (well, at least one would be on my personal top 5). At any rate just be aware the the following items may no longer apply for this list: 6, 7, 10, 19, 21, 23 & 24.
Here is the list I've compiled so far of community issues I have seen from various forums and just talking to fellow Docs. This is a preliminary ordering of that list and it's pretty extensive. Some of these do overlap with Medics, but I think they are important enough or have Doc specific repurcussions to make them worth keeping on this list, but in some cases because they are also a Medic thing and less of a Doctor thing, they may have a slightly lower priority.
Please keep in mind that I am only allowed to present a top 5 list to the Devs. There are a lot of issues here, and more than a few that I, personally, would rather see in the top 5 right now than the ones that are in there, but so far based on the number of posts, responses and just general hubub having to do with the topics, these are the order I happen to see things being in. Feel free to berate me because you think my ordering of these is stupid if you must, but please help me out by giving me a better order if you think there should be one.
I will probably be compiling the final Top 5 list for this week this evening or tomorrow to send off for us and I will post that email here for everyone, as well. I don't expect the Devs will respond directly to me, or anything, but if they do and they do not, for whatever odd reason, disallow me from sharing the information I will post any of their responses here as well. I really think, and hope, that any responses they have will be posted directly onto the forums, though.
I'd say that the first 10-15 issues all probably have pretty darned good reasons for being in the top 5, but I'm trying to rate based upon what it seems, to me at least, the community at large is most concerned about. So without further ado, here are the topics I have seen so far.
1) 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 corrently. Apparently not everyone is having this problem, but it is proving to be probably the most frustrating concern amongst Doctors at this time. 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
2) Mind damage appears to be a major concern amongst both Medics and Doctors. It seems to be a fairly major issue discussed in multiple threads on multiple boards out there in the community and perhaps part of the problem is simple frustration in being the person everyone is counting on to keep them going when you can only watch helplessly as someone's mind is being damaged and there is nothing you can do. Suggestions have ranged from leave it as is, since it is a balancing factor to keep combats from being too long to either letting Doctors or Advanced Medics (or Combat Medics, even) heal mind at a 1:1 rate or possibly better (although most admit that healing at a better ratio would be fairly exploitable since a medic could then stim their mind faster than they would lose it) or even giving mind stimming ability to entertainers or chefs. One of the more popular suggestions is to simply reduce the amount of damage give with mind hits, or reduce their frequency.
While there may not be a consensus on the issue there does seem to be a HUGE amountof interest and concern on the topic and I am sure the community would at least like to get some feedback and or considerations from the Dev team on what they see as the balancing factors between mind damage, healing mind damage and perceived problem with nerfing the Rifleman profession.
I would suggest referencing the following threads to get the majority of the viewpoints involved, but should a tighter synopsis of these threads and their suggestions be needed, please don't hesitate to ask me for one. (I know, one of these is from the Medic forum, but there are a lot of Docs piping in on the issue, and one is from an outside forum that sees a good deal of traffic and interested from the Doctor community.)
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1299
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=medic&message.id=785
http://dynamic6.gamespy.com/~swgcraft/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1315
3) 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. 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.
4) 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.
5) Enhance buffs are being lost when crossing zones 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 have, 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. Same situation if a player clones, the timer will be active, but they will no longer be benefiting from the buff.
6) /diagnose. This is brought up quite often that the Doctors in particular, who are using much higher level secondary wound healing packs, get very frustrated with patients not informing them of the levels of their secondary wounds and by using a secondary wound pack to heal, say, 1 point of damage with a charge that would have the potential to heal over 100 wounds, easily. Doctors are having a difficult time understanding the exploitability of the command, but feel it would be acceptable to place a /diagnose command on a timer, such as the one used for wound packs, to help prevent the perceived abuse of the command. Another suggestion was made to scale the /diagnose command such that a lower level medic would not receive as true an account of the actual wounds levels, which a Master Medic or Doctor level character would be told more exact results. Those results being the would levels for all secondary wounds, or at least Strength, Constitution, Stamina and Quickness and possibly including Battle Fatigue (since we receive no notification of it affecting our healing until it hits 400, when it actually begins to affect healing at 200) and Health and Action levels as well, just for convenience.
7) Resuscitation packs are accidentally being used instead of heal packs when pulled from the radial menus or through the /healdamage commands. This can cause a great deal of problems by instantly causing a great deal of damage to a fellow player. Doctors seem to prefer that these packs be left to a separate method of calling into use. (BTW, I am also seeing this complaint "Allow resuscitation on non-grouped individuals" It sounds to me like this second complaint is actually a fix for the exploit. What is the current state of this? Could somebody check for me?)
8) Some have suggested that Doctor is simply too easy to Master. 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.
9) There is concern that the above mentioned resuscitation packs instantly causing massive wounds to another player could possibly used as an exploit. And some have reported that the packs are being used in this manner by those with less than Level 4 Doctor Wound Treatment.
10) /heal command (wound, state, etc) does not work with the macro given, as a type must be specified. Doctors would like a way to get it to simply use the appropriate pack for the first type of wound/state it comes across on the selected target, much in the same way selecting the Heal Wound option from the patients Radial menu works if you do not select a sub-option for the specific wound. As it stands having the macros instantly implemented upon training (so they show up as /healdamage and /healstate) confuses the first time user because they cannot simply pres the appropriate toolbar button and have the macro work in the same way the /healdamage command does.
and one more I jsut got...
42) Radial menu on enhancements doesn't seem to be working properly. With the inventory open, if you select a target then radial menu on the enhancement kit, use on target, the enhancement hits on you.
Well, we just got word on the Medic forum from Q3-P0 about some fo the stuff coming down the development pipe or Medic changes that will modify this list. Be sure to check it out at:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=medic&message.id=3265
Obviusly this will help to resolve a few of the items on the list above.
Since I haven't had too many comments here or other places (except to add a couple of issues that will go to the bottom of the list) I will be sending the top five items off to the Devs today sometime. I noticed in the Commando forum that their correspondent got a public reply from Q3-P0 that seemed to suggest that when the Devs check out what we send to them they will try to respond publically for us. So I sure hope we do get to see something like that. Especially since a few of the issues would be a lot more focused for our own discussion and consideration if we had a few insights into what the Devs are wanting to accomplish in those areas (like the Mind Damage issue).
I'll try to post the actual email I send for everyone to see later.
Outside of that, there are quite a few ways to make money in this game. To be fair, you listed the issue from the perspective of making money as only a doctor, but you do have 110 skill points or so left over after being a doc. I'm sure we are meant to use them. My current character is currently moving up the doctor/TK areas. I use my TK skills to earn the money I need for my doctoring skills. Money is not an issue for me at this point, but I am sure it is for others, so I do understand.
Well, like I said. It's not like this is my personal top 5 issues list. This is the issues that all the Docs on these forums, other forums and from perosnal discussions with players happen to bring up the most often.
As for some of these being cross-profession, that doesn't make it affect Docs any less. The factory problem is certainly an artisan problem, but Docs (more so than Medics, for example) are just as like to have and use factories and virtually all of our medicines require components to go into them. So it's definitely a problem for Docs, even though it happens to be a problem for Artisans as well. Maybe if the issues show up on other correspondents' lists it will be seen as a higher priority with the Devs since it affects so many different professions.
As for money, well this id the Doctor's list and folks eem to bring up a LOT how difficult it is to make money AS a Doc. There are many problems involved in trying to charge folks for heals a so many of the topics on the issue bring up that I don't think Holo or Q have realy realized yet. So I can only stick with what is obvioulsy affecting our profession directly. And sticking to the idea of strictly operating as a Doc for money is an issue and I think more than fair to bring up since this is a list for Doc specific issues.
Finally, the Dev rquest was for issues for the profession, not just bugs. So the scope of the list is widened in that respect. I could vut down the overall list I have by probably 10-15 items if we took out the issues and stuck with what appeared only to be bugs.
So this is just a list of what the community in general seems to be dicussing the most often as hot topics affecting folks in the Doctor profession. I simply can't speak to topics that step outside of that, such as making moeny in other ways.
Eh, while number 2 and 3 are important issues, neither are actual bugs, so I wouldn't expect the Devs to be as rushed to work out fixes on those. Out of curiousity, why are you only submitting the top 5? Submit the whole frikkin list, lol (minus the ones that will be fixed according to the Medic thread).
In my opinion, the utter uselessness of foraging should be in the top 5... but that's just me. Seems like many of the Medic fixes were centered around fixing, or adding, abilities... so I think getting a better forage might be more likely right now than getting a fix to the balance issues with the mind bar. /shrug