Medic Archive

14.Status of proposed replacement for /medicalforage, and linked device used for /tends?

15.Request for /sample of lesser equiv. for medics.

Due to the difficulty of retaining artisan for surveying and/or scout for corpse harvesting, this is my top-requested item on the list.

Survey is obviously supposed to be the most efficient and broad of the resource gathering skills. As it stands, it is and should continue to remain the top dog of resource gathering.

Corpse harvesting for scouts is of course specific to corpses: bones, meat, and hides. Which makes perfect sense.

Medical foraging unfortunately is the broken stepchild of all resource gathering. Both in terms of consistency AND volume possible from each use. A level 4 surveyor can yank upwards of 6-10 resources per successful sample. A hunting 4 skilled scout can yank anywhere from half a dozen to over 40! items per corpse (maybe even more on truly high level mobs).

Then there's medical foraging. It yields a whopping 1 resource per use at any skill level. What's worse, it yields random resources per use. Worst of all, it barely ever works. IMO, medical forage needs to remain specific to only gathering resources for use in medical items. What needs to change is the yield rate and the consistency of yield. Just like a surveyor or a scout, medics should be able to:

1) Know exactly what they will be harvesting. They should be able to select which organics they will pull.

2) Should get better with Pharmacology skill level increases, yielding multiple resources of a chosen kind based on skill. Read: 1 or 2 when barely trained, scaling up to half a dozen to ten at level 4 skill.

As it stands, medical foraging is useless. One would have to stand around for ages, constantly foraging one random resource at a time just to yield enough of a similar resource just to make ONE stimpack-A. Forget trying to make a stim-B, which takes 32 organics, much less a stim-C.

One point I'm unsure about and would welcome additional voices shouting out to see what opinions are, is: should medical foraging be able to find ALL the types of resources needed in med crafting or only organics. My personal vote is ALL types needed, just as a scout gathers everything they need for making their traps solely from corpses. I realize of course this is a tough call, since meds take water, inorganics, chemicals, and metals. Maybe medics can only find limited kinds of water, inorganics, chemicals, and metals. Or at very low yield levels (1/2 their organic pull rate), to preserve the high yield and broad resource status of artisan.

At the very least though, medical forage needs to be drastically overhauled to make it into something far more useful.