Medic Archive

PvE isn't really a problem at all. Mind attacks come rarely enough that you can just move the aggro around. It's targeted mind attacks, which can not be healed that are the problem. The answers lie in either buffing up the healing ability so that we can somehow get those people back on their feet, or adjusting the ability to hit the mind pool altogether.

And whoever said that people shouldn't need heals in a fight in the first place... hello... combat medics... your saying the exact thing I'm arguing here. Medicshave role on the battlefied,that role is healing combat damage, and the ability to do mind damage makes that role inneffective far too easily.

After playing the game a pile more, and branching out into some combat skills myself I learned a lot more about how the system is designed.

Sadly, while my original solution is great for medics (and, honestly, not a nerf at all for riflemen) the real folks it leaves out in the cold are Carbineers. Having two weapons that hit health (pistols/rifles) would leave the poor action-hitting Carbineers a bit lonely for group-mates.

I think a better solution would be to give the medic classes access to make the stimpack someone mentioned earlier in this thread: something that heals all three pools, but only a very small ammount to each.

In this way, you wouldn't need to restrict its use to non-medics (no point in stiming oneself for mind damage equal to the mind-cost to use the stim, is there?) It wouldn't allow high level medic classes to keep people standing forever. It also would not be effective at all vs the ammount of mind damage snipers can do in PvP - letting smugglers/chefs stay useful, selling very high mind-buffing spices/foods.
A medic would not be completely helpess as the mind pool slowly dwindles away during an intense PvE fight, and a medic would be able to stand up those than have been incap'd by mind damage,


I think this is a generaly sound idea - what does everyone else think?
-Cutter

That still leaves mind damage to be signifcantly more powerful than both health and action damage. If you can't heal it, it should not be directly targetable. I agree that being able to healtheir ownmind pool,wouldmake medics too powerful.

Allowing mind damage to be healed would let fights last far too long. The combat system has enough counters to any single tactic built in.If mind damagewere healable, though, there would be no counter to a groupof damage dealers with healers, except to have more damage dealers and healers.That would lead to large, long, boring fights in both PVP and PVE.

I prefer fights to be dynamic. I don't like having friends knocked out or killed, but the risk of it adds a lot of tension to the fight. Removing that risk would at best halve the fun.

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2proposed fixes I'd be happy with:

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1) Keep mind damage from specials like the headshot linein the game. Give medics/docsthe ability to heal mind damage (not mind wounds or battle fatigue) because certain chems are known to boost your mental alertness for a period of time(caffine, ginseng,ghr, etc). Add a mind pool heal along with the action and health heals to the stims. However to counter act continuous stim packing, make it so that the person getting stimmed receives battle fatigue for being insta healed.

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2) Get rid of mind damage from weapon attacks. Instead, move mind damage to either health or action but with some adjustments (ie. make headshot harder to land, have it drain a good amount from health and action + give a fairly large amount of wounds). To counter act chain stimming, make high level insta heal stims give mind wounds (not damage, actual wounds.. due to the extremely powerful nature of the chems involved and such).

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As an afterthought.. what if in addition to one of the above, they gave foods and drinks the ability to provide bonuses or resists to fatigue and mind wounds? Might make the chef profession a bit more valuable as well.

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Just my thoughts. I know this would slow down solo PvE a bit. So I'm sure the powerlevelers won't like it.

hey, i didn't really take the time to read the 100 other posts about this subject, but the subject in general interested me and got me thinking as well. perhaps when the next big patch comes out and the warring factions idea starts comming into play, medics and dancers alike will start playing major roles on the battle field. i think it would be a great idea to have the medics in the army with maybe their probots or whatever healing all the players action and health wounds / dmg. then... i think it would be a good idea to leave the mind dmg and wound healing only up to the entertainers, but give them some sort of skill (high up there) that would resemble some sort of war drum or "war dance" to motivate the fighters on that entertainers team, like a paladin of sorts, healing the mind dmg slowly of all players on the field, this would give entertainers more value on the field, and also let them have a little more fun by giving them an important role while in combat, so they aren't just stuck in that smelly cantina all day anyway, i got the idea from playing warcraft today and seeing an army of kodo beasts using war drums and thought it was a cool idea... anyone else?

Give the people in your group a helmet, they work wonders.

This is effectively a long *bump* with my ramblings attached.

Or we could introduce the new class...Combat Entertainer! Then they could dance fight things West-Side-Story-Style!
What the Entertainer on the battlefield argument just about comes down to in my mind is that Entertainers really don't serve a logical place on the battlefield and trying to force themselves onto it using this type of heavy-handed method detracts from an otherwise wonderful game. If Entertainers want a piece of the action, they can grab a blaster and head on out like anyone else. There aren't Architects making on-demand bunkers or turrets (yet, though that might make another neat class for Artisan to feed into), why do we need Entertainers doing drum solos to keep people fighting? I mean, come on, not even the freaking *Ewoks* needed that. And honestly, do you really want to have to see a Stormtrooper soft jazz band at the first major battle between the factions?
Really, it's the difference between healing damage and healing wounds to me. And in that respect, the Entertainer should be no different from the Doctor -- they both specialize in healing wounds and they both have places in towns and camps to heal such wounds. If the Devs want more Entertainers involved in combat parties, set it up so that they can heal Battle Fatigue in camp. A Doctor doesn't need to heal mind wounds since Entertainers handle them and vice-versa. The medic needs a low-level base in healing both wounds and damage since it feeds into both Doctor and Combat Medic.
However, the Combat Medic doesn't really need any further advancement in wound healing simply because that's not the point of the class. A Combat Medic's job is to keep people up and fighting during a fight and (hopefully) dish out some damage of her own. The way she contributes to wound healing isn't by taking care of those little slivers of black that pile up mid-fight, she can tend to those back in camp once everyone survives while an entertainer dances their cares away. The way that they contribute is more proactive. They keep people from getting those huge chunks of black when they die by making sure that they don't get incapped. To put it in racially insensitive terms, Doctors are the Black Panthers (only really wanting to deal with lots of black) and Combat Medics are the KKK (only really wanting to deal with lots of white).
By putting in mind damaging headshots and no way to heal it on the battlefield, it effectively makes the mind stat the deciding factor when it comes to who drops first (with or without a helmet). And by doing this, the Combat Medic is effectively made useless unless the person they're healing has more mind than health and action put together (since Stims heal both). So unless you're healing one of those Nobel-Prize-winning tanks, you might as well be twiddling your thumbs.
The tough question to me is how to correct this. Most of the themes in the proposals I've noticed have some serious drawbacks:

A) Make Medics (and the professions Medic feeds into) able to heal mind damage. This would work except that Stim healing accrues only mind damage and then medics make themselves nigh-invincible except to one shot-one kills, and worse, it would allow two or more medics to sit next to each other healing each other's mind damage for XP and they could just see-saw their way to Master Medic/Combat Medic/Doctor as long as they had enough materials to keep making Stims (which isn't hard with just four well placed personal harvesters).

B) Make headshots not do mind damage. This would resolve a lot of the problem and is the better solution to me, since particular attacks pull from the mind pool and doing so would effectively make the mind pool a measure of how many spiffy attacks one could pull off before having to just flat-out tank with regular attacks. However, this also presents the challenge of rebalancing the rest of the combat system (do all special attacks rely on mind, what kind of damage to headshots do, why would you use a rifle if its damage isn't unique in some way, etc...), which I can understand the Devs not wanting to simply jump headlong into.

Neither theme seems like it's the perfect solution, but the latter seems better to me, and would be better than the current system which leaves Combat Medics as being simply less useful Doctors who have shot some stuff.

I'm done rambling now.
Hera, Master Medic now flipping coins to decide which further path to take.

Ooooooor, how about we get a bunch of dancers out in the middle of a battlefield? Soon we'll bring in some surfboards and have a 70's style beach party..

When everybody's mind is healed (which takes forever) riflemen just snipe them again for kicks while they're sitting around watching the dancers.

I won't get into what happens when Jabba comes, hah...that pimp

"Give the people in your group a helmet, they work wonders."

Um... wow... I soo didn't think of that. Oh wait, I'm wearing one now, and so is everyone else in my group. **edit**, guess my mind still get's hit just along with everyone else and there is still nothing any medic can do about it.

It's been said so many times in this thread. No class being able to heal combat mind damge is a broken combat system.

The medic/doc/combat medic doesn't need to heal this combat damage. It would be NICE if we got a HAM pack. It would be NICE to have a Mind only pack. But I don't think we _need_ them.

But it flat out needs to be addressed. First, as far as PVP goes, I don't understand why anyone wouldn't take rifles and do headshots with them. I've seen sliced rifles in the high 3 second range. Spray sticks start in the 2's. So now you have Riflemen Bounty Hunters, and possibly Commandos all able to do rediculous amounts of mind damage. And there's no slowing down of this incap. Second, the human MOB's tend to do a lot of mind damage. Take a look at any of the tusken raids. In any lost raid, 90% of the downed players are down due to mind damage. This is a testament to the effectivenessAND the limitation of medics.

Someone needs to step up. The simplest, albeit semi broken, method is to give one of the medic lines either a Mind affecting Stim pack, or a HAM pack. Reasonably, it's mind only. Programmatically, barring of self use with this pack is simple.

Something more reasonable is another class taking the job. I think it makes a lot of sense to give this task to the squad leader. Through orders and commands, he's able to do an action (self) inflicting mind heal to the group. Drop it into one of the lines such that the upper line is 2-300 per heal at a pretty hefty cost. Let it work as a TEND so that it doesn't cost medicine - just make it hurt to balance it a bit. I don't think that squad leaders are useful enough as it is, and I see this immediately creating a demand.

The biggest thing here is that I don't think this eliminates the _need_ for entertainers. Fatigue is still generated. Mind wounds are still not healed. And no one is demanding the entertainers leave their warrens of safety.

Amhran Comrac

Master medic, Combat Medic, Doctor.

I don't need to heal mind. I just want to. I want to, I want to, I want to.

Well I'm a Master Surgeon now, with Doctor's medicine crafting 2, I have the ability to Revive players now, but not the skill to make the medicine needed to do so LOL. Anyway, on to my point.

I did a heal for 1100 health, and 1100 action yesterday, 550 points medical exp as most of you probably know. I now have to agree with most that are disagreeing with the idea of a medic having the ability to heal a mind pool. Having the ability to heal the above damage to three pools would be rediculous. Now to those that suggested a lesser amount to all three pools. I can heal once every 5 seconds, and when I fill in the combat medic tree, that will get even faster, with Area effect heal add ons to most stimpacks. We also get the added advantage of adding range to our heals once we get into combat medic. So picture if you will, several fighters within the Area range of a small heal that a good combat medic can do every 5 seconds. How would you take this group out? Argue if you will, but essentially if the CM/Doctor is on his job, you can't.

Now, change the schematic, so you have the CM/Doctor mentioned in the previous paragraph, and they change the game to have, for lack of a better term, an EQ bard singing and dancing in this group to regenerate their mind faster. Even if periodically each combatant has to stop fighting and watch/listen to that entertainer, you still have a impregnable core group where equipment becomes ineffective.

I would like to hear the input from people who have high levels of armor and deflector shields, and use mind boosting food and drugs. See what their opinion on this is.

I'm still of the opinion at this point that a change is needed, I'm just a bit more convinced that it's not the medics job, and I'm not sure the entertainer doing it would be the greatest thing either. If Shields and armor were more configuarable to deflect the damage you're looking to protect, it might be a solution. That would still mean in the long run of the game, to migrate your stats to all mind, then fill the health and action, buy gear to protect all mind, then some health and action. For that reason I believe the situation is unbalanced.