Doctor Archive

Well,we got a Top 5 request sprung on us last night so I wanted to pass along what I posted. THere is some difficulty involved in creating this Top 5 because of the requested breakout in teh change of the format for all of the correspondents. SO instead of asking for a Top 5 from each of the categories, like I expected, we got stuck being asked for a Top 5 overall. Well, sufice to say that we didn't really ahve a vote set up for that and this was a last minute thing, so there was no chance for me to try and offer a vote on it. So, to make a long story not too much longer, here is my best guess on an overall Top 5 that I submitted. At least I feel REAL comfortable with knowing the#1 issue (since it consistently gets a 2/3rds majority vote for it. That's enough to overturn a presidential Veto, even if it isn't enough to sway our Dev to talk about it with us.)

1. Medical Surveying

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 in the same way as Artisans do.

Since CHers seem to have been given the ability to heal pets without having to take Novice Medic to do so and that CMs have been given a basic scout skill in Terrain Negotiation, providing a partial form of /survey in the Doctor line would not too unreasonable according to many Docs. The other problem comes from the idea put forth previously by the Dev team that Doctors could always just buy their resource needs. However, Docs have many very specific resource needs (Dantooine Berries, Class 4 Liquid Petro Fuel, Avian Meat, Lokian Wild Wheat, etc.) that very few, if any, other professions, other than Medical Professions, truly need. Considering the prevalence of the Money issue for Docs, the market for surveyors to cater to the medic market is simply too small to be successful in comparison to what a surveyor could make catering to one of the artisan professions. In this way it could also be argued that rarely would Doctors be able to actually compete with Artisans on the resource market simply because their normal resource needs are not the needs of other professions. Worthwhile resources for any good medicines are just rarely found on the bazaar, unless that resource also overlaps with an artisan need, and then the price on such an item will be driven by the artisan ability to make far more profit on the item than the average medic pulls in.

Suggestions include providing survey only capabilities to increase with Organic Chemistry (the most common line for ALL of the Medical-based professions) or Pharmacology, much in the way it does for Artisan Surveying, but disallowing the sampling capability and perhaps with a smaller range. Others have noted that without some ability to sample (perhaps limiting Docs to only ever being able to sample 1 resource per sample tick, capping out resource samples so none are ever pulled up if there is more than our minimum, 8, or our maximum, I believe that’s 36, of a resources in inventory, or even just letting the survey tool show the resource values that only a Doc would use from those resources), to test the qualities of a resource if nothing else, the simple ability to survey alone wouldn’t be very useful. Suggestions have also included making the ability part of some kind of decayable survey tool made by artisans that let a Doc survey, ensuring a continued resource stream to artisans to compensate for those few Docs that try to make money as miners instead of as Docs. Or the use of a DE created resource seeker droid that might be able to locate a high concentration of a given resource within some given range and possibly provide either a single sample or at least some of the required stats for that resource, possibly even providing additional capabilities for those with the Artisan Survey skill.

For reference the following thread may be of interest:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1540
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=5233
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=14251

2. Master Doc Benefits

The benefits of being a Master Doctor seem like a bit of a letdown to some. Suggestions have included moving Resuscitation packs to that level for creation and/or use and/or raising the Med Use requirements on that pack, others feel doing so would be a nerf to non-Masters and suggest only working with additional content in this manner. Other suggestions include Inoculation packs for some form of immunity or resistance to various states. Point-Blank (Doctor centered) AoE state cures have been mentioned as well, as has the ability to harvest creatures at a low level of ability. Mind Stims, especially since Master Docs could care less about any way of exploiting something like this for XP (generally speaking.), consolidated wound packs (also look at the Inventory Issue) or a method to convert Med or Med Crafting XP at Master levels to Experimentation points (since there otherwise no need for that extra XP) or some other purchasable schematics/items.

For a sampling of the discussion see:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=7596
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=8075
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=10330
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=14389
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=14638

3. Enhanced HAMs Sticking

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 (Mostly Fixed, still seeing reports of this, but less often), they stick so that the Doctor cannot see that their groupmates are getting damaged (a very dangerous situation)(Mostly Fixed, still seeing reports of this, although it appears it can be worked around by disbanding from the group, running out to 100m away, running back and rejoining the group.), they stick for both the Doc and the player (Fixed?), 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.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=16354

4. Experimentation Issues

Experimentation does not seem to work correctly or consistently. Even with experimentation risks being listed as 0% there are still a great many critical failures, failures and some moderate and standard successes. Wholly inconsistent with the 0% failure rating guaranteed by the crafting station. Having highly experimented crafting tools and stations do seem to alleviate the problem a little, but not by very much. At least some think that having some possibility of failure is acceptable, but they do wish to have some indicator of what the possibility really is since obviously it is a greater than 0% chance and some would suggest it is really as high as a 5% chance. Amazing successes, on the other hand, appear to be far more rare than critical failures and do not produce as nearly drastic improvements as critical failures produce in reductions, there is simply no good trade-off here. Even experimenting by 1 point at a time seems will produce the same results (with less risk) as using as many points as possible. Part of the problem might come where recent experimentation with the crafting system would suggest that a crafting tool with a negative rating (up to –14.99) is far superior to a tool with a positive rating (+15). Apparently the values seem to be flipped for experimentation calculations, we think. We really would like more consistency and a more reliable, documented, experimentation methodology. Further Malleability ratings do appear to affect the difficulty levels of crafting an item, but this is not otherwise annotated anywhere, not even in the Advanced Guide on Crafting on the main SWG website. Better documentation on for experimentation needs to be made available.

5. Resuscitation Timer Issues

Resuscitation seems to now be subject to a timer that does not allow a corpse to be resuscitated. The timer is inconsistent and otherwise undocumented. If there really is to be a timer we need to know what it is supposed to be or provide the dead player with some kind of indicator or countdown timer, but some folks are reporting that even given immediate access to a corpse they are unable to resuscitate the player.

For more info:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=15729
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=18255

(Edit: Fixed the date on the subject to be the correct date.)

Message Edited by Zarlor on 11-18-2003 11:26 AM

Zarlor -- I think you did a very good job of culling out the list for the top five. Nice work. I certainly appreciate how you've always got a finger on the pulse of the profession.

Thunderheart should know that he's working with a Doctor Correspondent whom we have very high confidence in.

H.

Zarlor -- I think you did a very nice job in culling out the top five. I certainly appreciate how you've always got a finger on the pulse of the profession.

Thunderheart should know that he is working with a Doctor Correspondent whom we have very high confidence in. Superb.

H.

Zarlor -- I think you did a very nice job in culling out the top five. I certainly appreciate how you've always got a finger on the pulse of the profession.

Thunderheart should know that he is working with a Doctor Correspondent whom we have very high confidence in. Superb.

H.

(third attempt at submitting this post)

Gah! Sorry about that, really I am.

Hehe. Not a problem. THe forums are a bit wonky this morning. And thanks for the vote of confidence. (You guys really do that faaar too much, but it's better than getting hammered all the time like some of the other Corres get, I suppose.)

/bows to the almighty Wookiee Zarlor.

Keep up the great work Z! You're the best Corres. EVER and the devs really should know that they are working with someone great for trying to fix anything with Doctors

Nicely done, Z.

Perfect. That would've been my 5 choice as well.

good write up. I am one of those Docs that sells resources via bazaar or by contract. Not easy or fun spending the time to harvest everything we need. Having to spend the skill xp to have the tp survey limb is a tough decision as i need those points to reach Master Doc. I am peeved that CH and BE get the same types of skills w/o havint to master Medic. I still fell this is a great profession, justhate all the compromise we have to do and all the freebies that other professions get.

goldflame

Very nicely done Zarlor. I have to agree with that top 5 list whole-heartedly. I spend almost all of my time healing in the field, whether Dantooine, Dathomir, wherever. I don't have the SP necessary to get the artisan skill so I can survey resources, and the prices i get charged for some things are outrageous. Our own type of survey skill, for things we really need, would be a life saver. as for Master Doc benefits, I like innoculation packs, but would also like to be able to remove fire. Maybe also an area poison, and area disease cure pack, to better fight off CM's in PvP. I always was under the impression that Doc's are supposed to be able to counter the CM's in PvP. meh, just my take on that. I have no more to say, because I think Zarlor covered this topic quite well.

I agree with all of those but my close next ones are:

- "Copy clone" - The ability to target a player and store thier clone image where your last clone location is.

- Semi permenent stat augmentations (like skill tapes but applied directly by docs)

- Master should get a reduction in mind cost for healing.

- Better target cycling of people not in you group.

For the Doctor Survey issue, don't forget that Smugglers get +10 to Med Use in higher levels. Even if we could have the basic survey and not sample would work too.