Medic Archive

Before I turn over the keys to Zarlor, here's the Medic Top5 answers for your reading enjoyment. Be aware, none of this stuff is simple. The medic issues tend to be long term, and big in scope, as well as affect all the connected professions, as well as every single combatant in the game.

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Here are The answers to the Medic Top 5, first submitted Oct. 15, 2003.

White text, is the original top-5 question and suggestions, while the orange text is the answer. All items in double quotes ( "items" ) are direct quotes from the Devs on the individual issue.

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1.) Healing Queue... What's up with that? Heals do not appear in the queue, but they are affected by the queue. Could we have them 100% in or 100% out of the Queue? the ability to time our heals is a bit of a Voodoo dance right now. Nobody but healers have to guess when their skills are going to go off.

• Solution 1: Put heals in Queue


• Solution 2: Take them out of Queue and let them go off instantly. * Solution 3: Leave it the same and explain who this makes sense too and why.

Dev Reply: "We love this, but its very difficult (coding-wise). We don’t know if this can happen, but we will investigate. "

2.) Experimentation / crafting issues... After every patch, crafting gets weird. It does not get better, it just gets different. This time around we get a lot of crit failures. We never know what is intended or what is a weird 'this patch only' thing to learn and get used to. Along with this are several other mystery bits of crafting...

• Why does filling only 1 experiment circle always work better than filling more than 1 (begging the question 'why can we fill more than 1 at all, if it only hurts us?').


• What is our failure rate? We can see experimental failure rate.. who knows if it is accurate though?


• Why do failures sometimes make items better, and good rolls make them worse in experimenting.


• Why do stamina and strength woundpacks look damaged or 'blown up' when looked at closely?


• Why do stimpacks over A look scary, blunt needled, and more dangerous than a circular saw blade?


• Why are all the cool graphics reserved for Doc buff kits? Nobody ever actually sees any of them but docs...

Could we get a graphics shuffle to make woundkits use the great backpack/satchel looks, and give the generic med canisters to the items hardly anyone sees? (Big sellers right now are A and B packs, they could use the niftier graphics.. since a larger number of people would see them (sorry Zarlor). The good graphics are kinda wasted on Doc only meds, when they could make Con woundpacks look as cool as Con buffpacks (for example).

• Solutions: Vary...

Dev Reply: The devs and QA will be invesigating the crafting system. All of these issues have been forwarded to internal QA, along with several more issues that ahve appeared since this Top5 was submitted.

3.) Target self... Although medics can macro with a "self" option, hit ctrl-1 to target self, and click on our group HAM to select ourselves, many of us would like to click on our avatar in the world (like we can click on other players).. We can't and it is counter-intuative.

• Solution: Let us click on ourselves.

Dev Reply: The issue here is with the "targeting box" that would have to exist around the player, so we would have a place to click. This invisible box was in Beta, and people had trouble clicking on anything near themselves, without accidentally clicking on themselves.

The Devs pointed out that clicking on empty space in the world would functionally target ourselves, if we found the default hotkey item (CTRL-1) too cumbersome. This functionality, can also be re-mapped to different keys then CTRL-1. It is also possible to use "self" as an argument in "/ macros," such as " /healdamage self " (without the quotes).

4.) Medics want to be able to gather resources... See Zarlor's comprehensive listing on this (in Doc top 5). Upgrade or remove /medforage. Give us /survey /sample. Give us charged artisan items, anything... People are mad about spending 15 skill points on novice artisan. We need offical word on this one way or the other... or else this will probably show up in all 3 medical top 5's forever and ever.

* Solution: Tell us what's up, or we have Zarlor tear yer arms off.

Dev reply: This would lessen the value of skillpoints spent by other professions. Skillpoint costs are a major balance factor in the game... "Skill point expenditure is a basic challenge in the game and all professions have to make such choices. " This holds true for medical advanced professions as well (See Doc and CM Top 5 lists). The devs will continue to monitor this issue, across all medical professions.

5.) Medics and TEFs... We need to have visible TEF indicators (in our UIs), warning boxes for TEFable activities, and other friendly reminders so we know if we can get killed. Right now, healing anyone can get us killed with little or no warning. In with this...

* We can get TEFed for friendly fire by healing an opposite covert who has a TEF.

As intended: this stops several healing cross-team exploits.

* We are still seeing NPC TEFs (we are all fighting tuskans, and we start getting 'unwise to heal' lockouts on healing... this can happen with any NPC that has a faction, but does not happen all the time.

Under investigation (has anyone seen this recently?).

Standard neutral requests "to heal anyone they please because it is RP" request.

TEFs are a very important underpining concept of PVP play. There are no plans to allow "cross-team" or "neutral healing" for PVP participants without risk.

General TEF issues Dev Reply: The Devs are currently monitoring the TEF issues across the whole game. Please report any TEF abnormalities using the ingame /bug tool. A reminder that a player TEF flag has been added to the UI since this was written. Thanks Devs!

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[Edited, because I spelled 'Star Wars' wrong. doh.]

-T

Message Edited by Traigus on 12-20-2003 04:23 PM

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Traigus wrote:

[Edited, because I spelled 'Star Wars' wrong. doh.]

-T

Message Edited by Traigus on 12-20-2003 04:23 PM

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For that, and that alone, I shall shoot you next time I see you on Chilastra.

Message Edited by Traigus on 12-20-2003 05:43 PM

I think it's funny! The you can heal who ever you want is SUPER Starwarsy, but they wont let you, however the NO combat in the Medcenter is starwarsy as well,

2 things you could do...

1) put TONS of mostly UNKILLABLE NPC's in the medcenter, and anyone who initiats combat gets attack or somthing to that effect, or

2) make it so you cant equip weapons, or use specials in the area's or somthing

some cantina's held the ppls weapons at the door

i have to agree with the getting dooted out of medcenter or other buildings for healing someone with a tef. the med center is where they are supposed to go to be healed. personaly i think that any place that you can heal should have some kinda block on medics and doc from the tef. if im healing peeps in the med center and player comes in in need of healing im gana heal them. but to boot me from the med center and tef me is completely stupid. we dont kick our doctors out of hospitals for healing people that just killed someone in RL, why would we do it in game.

now i understand not making to where you cant fight in the med centers. thats fine. let them fight all they want. but to give medic and docs. TEFs for healing peeps in a med center is just plain stupid. there there just doing there job, why punish them for doing it. now out in the field of battle this is a differnt story. we are part of the battle and suceptible to the hazards of the battle.

i have to agree with the getting dooted out of medcenter or other buildings for healing someone with a tef. the med center is where they are supposed to go to be healed. personaly i think that any place that you can heal should have some kinda block on medics and doc from the tef. if im healing peeps in the med center and player comes in in need of healing im gana heal them. but to boot me from the med center and tef me is completely stupid. we dont kick our doctors out of hospitals for healing people that just killed someone in RL, why would we do it in game.

now i understand not making to where you cant fight in the med centers. thats fine. let them fight all they want. but to give medic and docs. TEFs for healing peeps in a med center is just plain stupid. there there just doing there job, why punish them for doing it. now out in the field of battle this is a differnt story. we are part of the battle and suceptible to the hazards of the battle.