Medic Archive

I'm a rifleman/handler with novice Medic & 1st aid 1 so far.

I'm trying to decide what the best route to go for in Medic is. I have 23 points after Novice Medic, and I'm not really sure if I should go FA4/diag3, or include some pharm & crafting in there. (Are the packs in crafting 2 worth it, or should I just plan on buying better from others?)

I don't really -get- what Pharm does, so any tips would be appreciated.

First, let me explain Pharmacology. Each crafted medicine has a "Medicine Use Required" rating. Your Medicine Use modifier must be equal to or grater than this number to use this medicine. Pharmacology increases your Medicine Use modifier. It also increases your Medical Forage modifier, but medical forage is pretty useless right now.

As for where to put your skill points, it depends what you want to do with your medic skills. Do you want to focus on damage healing or wound healing? Since you're a combat type I will assume damage healing. I think you should get Organic Chemistry II so you can craft Stimpack B's and use the rest getting First Aid III and Diagnostics III to increase the effectiveness of your heals. Alternatively if you think you can buy your Stimpack B's, get First Aid IV instead of Organic Chemistry.

If you are looking to maximize wound healing, First Aid and Diagnostics will do you no good and you can concentrate on Organic Chemistry and Pharmacology, which you will need to use the higher level medpacks.

Assuming you are focusing on in-combat damage healing, I would suggest first getting to First Aid II so you can get the First Aid ability to cure bleeding. After that I would probably go Diagnostics I-II and then back to First Aid to IV. You only need Diagnostics if you want to use Stimpack Cs.

Definitely try and push to Organic Chemistry II to get Stimpack Bs, though once you get there you might get turned off by the resource requirements and difficulty to make those. Might be more of a rl time commitment than someone using Medic as a tertiary wants to put in, but the amount of damage they heal sure is sweet.

If you find yourself with a lot of money, find a medic and offer to buy 10 or so Stim Bs from them.

Scorus

What he said; that was a good reply, I second it.

If you want damage healing efficiency, get First Aid IV. You will heal more per stim use.

People think Diagnostics is supposed to reduce the amount of downtime between heals,so you stimmore often,but people also think it's broken right now (I have Diag3 and I heal damage just as slow as when I started. I know my Master Medic/Novice Doctor in Beta could stim more often!).

FA4 + good Stim-B's = 250+ damage healed, max, per stim use. I know this because I sell Stimpack-B's to a Bounty Hunter. He doesn't want to waste skill points either. You might want to try this method. I'm sure there will be a Medic who will sell you Stimpack-B's -- but get high quality ones, like 21 uses @ 175 base heal!

Pharmacology only becomes important if you want to use Stimpack-C's. The problem: the best Stim-C I can make still requires Pharma3! Yes, it jumps from Med Use 5 for B's to Med Use 32 for C's! So don't use your skill points and XP on Pharma unless you really want the added healing power (a good C + FA4 probably means 500 damage healed at best). So basically Pharma dictates what medicines you can use; you can use Stim-A's, B's, and Medpack-A's and B's at Novice Medic, higher requires (at best) Pharma3.

Getting OC = making your own good medicines, so invest what you will. Maybe you'd rather spend credits and make a medical supplier friend that go up this line wasting your own time crafting.

If your real interest is in damage healing, I would also suggest that you may want to consider making a friend with a medic taht can make stim Cs. Then increade your Pharm to level 3. (Poosibly Level 2 would be good enough if a Doctor can experiment the use requirements down taht far.)

The reason is that I can easily experiment a Stim C down so that someone with Pharm 3 can use stims packs. I can probably experiment it down even to a Pharm 2 level. Pharm one might be pushing it, but once I improve in Doctor I may be able to get it down that far. This way you can have a supplier for the far more efficient and higher charge Stimpack Cs. A HUGE plus to have in combat.

Other then that I als agree about FA and Diag, but if you can buy meds or have a supplier, and would rather not make them, I would skip going up the OC side.

I'd say forget Chem totally...just buy packs...you'll never get your chem really high enuff to have enuff experimentation to juice them. And surveying/getting resources for crafting is then another issue.

My advice would be FA 4 Pharm II and the rest diagnostics...

RA 4 will give you more healing per pack, Pharm II will let you use Stim C as soon as people advance high enuff to juice the ease of use with experimentation which shouldnt take too long. (If they hurry and fix the xp cap on doctor med crafting which is preventing everyone from advancing)

Dia will speed up the rate you stim people at...its not broken, its justweird...I can stim others faster than I can stim myself...(Ne1 else encounter this problem?)

Thanks for the great tips everyone!

Yes, I'm primarily concerning with in-combat damage healing, so FA is certainly top priority.

One more little question, though.... would Pharm 2, FA3 and Diag3 be sufficient? Obviously, I'm sacrificing the higher healing potential, but since I'm hoping to be more of a "backup" medic, I hope this isn't too big of an issue.

I'd say it would be more than sufficient. In fact I would say you don't even NEED FA and may not need Diag, as long as you have a steady supplier for STim Cs. Heck you need FA even less the higher you take Pharm, beacuse the higher your Pharm the less a Medic has to concentrate on experimenteg Ease of Use for you, and can then concentrate putting those points into increasing the effectiveness of the C instead.An experimented C, for effectiveness, will probably always be better in the hands of a Novice medic, than an unexperimented C in the hands of someone with FA4. At least in my experience.

So in one shot you mght heal 50% of someone's damage. So the question then becomes do you want the Diag to eek out that couple of extra seconds in speed it might give you or will the added effectiveness be enough that you won't need to heal as often anyway? It's kind of a give or take quetion that only experience in the way you group and heal will really answer.