Medic Archive

This has been bothering me for quite sometime now: Why on earth does a /healdamage attempt to heal lairs or enemy targets, only to say "Target must be a player...."? This is absurd. Why doesn't the /healdamage default to the player trying to heal if there isn't a valid target? Before you go and say, "Just put the /healdamage self macro up on your toolbar... problem solved." I play a Master Fencer and tend to be the only healer in my group as well (my small PA). As such, I have so much stuff on my toolbar that I really have no room for a /healdamage and a /healdamage self macro. Is there anyway this can get fixed? Ah well, thanks for listening... I guess if I am wrong about my frustration, I will here is soon.

It is something of a common problem, admittedly. But what would you offer for a solution? There are only 2 ways to target yourself in the game. Ctrl-1 or clicking on nothing to ensure you have no target (which of course causes the problems of specials being dropped from the queue while you wait for the heal to go off.)

As mentioned int he Top 5 response above clicking on your character requires a "box" around ou, but that causes problems for clicking on things close by.

One thing I would like to see is the ability to click on the box with your name and have that be an actiuon that selects you, just like clicking on the box names for anyone else in your group does.

The bigger solutions really require that the system "remember" where an action is targetted. To some extent this does happen with queued processes, but healing is not exactly a queued process (or we would see it in the queue like any other special). But it's not an instantaneous process either, like kneeling or standing would be. Implimenting any kind og change like that would likely be very code intensive and when you have vehicles and warping and faction exploits andAT-ST issues andSquad Leaders and Chefs and BEs and all the other issues in the game to deal with, while we do have at least the ability to work with that /healdamage self macro... well, that much coding likely isn't and probably shouldn't be a top priority.

It doesn't stop it from being an issue for medics, though. Which is why it's on our list of issues, of course. My best suggestion would be to vote for those kinds of issues when I move the discussion thread over to voting threads, probably next week. Voting on those issues will help to move them up on the priority lists to make sure the Devs know that those are the kinds of things that are giving us trouble and making the game less fun than it could be.

I agree, Zarlor, that there are many more pressing things to fix. This was just an annoyance of mine that keeps popping up. I will have to check and see when the voting thread comes up and participate. As to it being a difficult change... I am not sure it would be. I am no programmer mind you, but I would think the games programming language version of a "if not, then" string would solve the problem. (ie. IF target NOT valid, THEN default to character) I realized this is WAY over simplified, butI can't imagine theequivalentwould be that much more difficult to put in.

Oh well, I guess this is mostly a problem for me anyway and I will continue to play with this frustration. Thanks for the response though, Zarlor. I didn't know about the voting thread on this forum. I shall look into it.

I should have the voting threads up this week, since there hasn't been any commentary on the discussion thread (which I can only take to mean nobody has any issue with the language I used to describe the issues. )

As for the IF, THEN statements.... it sounds to me like the coding is very segmented and that such a statement would have to be placed in many different places int he code. TH has been trying to push recently that we, as players, have made many assumptions about how easy any particular thing should be to code, but in thier system apparently this just isn't the case at all. Perhaps it is too modularized, I don't know, but they have been saying the whole system is a whole LOT more complex than most folks seem tothink it is.

I bind a lot of commands to the keyboard instead of using the toolbar (similar to UO).

I bound Ctrl-A to "/healdamage", Ctrl-S to "/healdamage self" and Ctrl-Q to "/peace". I did the same for specials and a few other commands I use a lot and it frees up a whole lot of room on my main toolbar.

Just a suggestion.

I'm a TKM and am now working on med skills for doc. I work heals into macros that I use for combat. Hopefully that'll help you a little if you use macros.