Medic Archive

Holo, back in Beta you said (at least I think it was you) that there might be a grief issue with being able to look at people's wounds. I couldn't figure out why that sounded wrong at the time, but it occurred to me later that if anyone can already look at a player's HAM wounds (just target them and mouseover the bar!), there's no reason why a medic shouldn't be able to /diagnose someone and get a list of all nine of their wounds.

Here's a proposal for diagnosis command/system that would probably make most everyone happy.

/diagnose should be a command gained at Diagnostics I (NOT at Novice Medic). At that level, targeting someone and using the command (or using it off the radial menu) would give you a message listing their wounds, in a simple format like this (let's say you used it on me after I'd been wounded):

Adili: HEA 45, STR 52, CON 21; ACT 50, QUI 21, STA 0; MIN 41, FOC 22, WIL 35; BF 129

(The numbers listed are the CURRENT NUMBER OF WOUNDS, *NOT* the current cap. This is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL, otherwise we have to sit there wondering what their stat caps are, and the skill is useless. Also please note that the coloration should look like it does above, for easy reference when we're reading through someone's wound list.)

Now, here's how the actual usage of the skill would work:

You would only be able to use it every X seconds. At low levels, the skill would be inaccurate, e.g.:

- Diags I: Displays values plus or minus 75% from the actual value (so that if I had, say, 100 Strength wounds, it would display a value from 25 to 175).
- Diags II: Plus or minus 50% (100 Str wounds = range 50-150)
- Diags III: +/-25% (100 Str wounds = range 75-125)
- Diags IV: 0% (perfect accuracy)

(Alternatively, Diags IV could be 10%, and then one of the trees in Doctor could take care of the remaining 10%, only reaching 0% at Master Doctor.)

The idea is that at low levels, you can keep diagnosing the person to try and figure out how many wounds they have, but since you have to wait X seconds per attempt (e.g. 15), you can't just spam the command and find out in a few seconds how wounded they really are. As you get higher level, you become more accurate, and can tell at a glance exactly how wounded someone is. This would give /diagnose a utility that increases as your diagnostics skill goes up (what a concept!).

The main function of this would be for us to see whether or not someone had any wounds at all, of course. If we diagnose someone and it says they have 1 strength wound, well, if we're at Diags I, then we know they have at least 1 but could conceivably have many more.

Discuss!

I think /diagnose would work better as a high level skill if they were ever to add diseased (maybe they already have diseases -- I just haven't come across it yet) so we could figure out what's needed to cure them.

The only reason I would need to see how many wounds people have is if I were planning to charge on a per-wounds basis. Otherwise, it's a fairly useless command. If you want to heal all of the health or actionHAM attributes, just do:

/healwound health
/healwound action

and it'll take care of all of the sub-attributes. More types of things for medics to heal (at higher levels) might be interesting.

I dont think just using a healwound health and action heals stat wounds. I may be wrong on that butI thought the other night I healed a guys wounds to full then did some strenght and stam meds on him and it was saying that I healed 8 pts strength.

If healing wounds and actions takes care of the stats as well then the whole line of stat meds is useless.

I second the /diagnosis command it will make healing the stats alot easier. If its a mater of seeing the guys stats dont show there stats just show us how much damage they have to them and make it only usable in the Medical Centers or in a camp.

I really like this idea.

/healwound Action or /healwound Helath does not heal secondary wounds. But you can use /healwound to do it by typeing /healwound constitution, quickness, stamin, or strength.

I suggested in Beta that for /diagnose it simply has the same time delay as the heal commands.

But to tell you the turth I was also wondering what Holo meant by an intantateous /diagnose command being exploitable. I think he mentioned it's use primarily in a PvP setting, but I have to admit to being stumped on the exploitability of the command. I guess i'm just too stupid to figure it out, but would love to hear what some of your more creative geniuses out there have figured out on this.

I will say that I think it is interesting to see the idea of making /diagnose more effective as you gain skill in it. I hadn't considered methods of making it incremental like that. Nice work!

I thought of a somewhat alternative idea for this skill.

Instead of increasing the accuracy of the skill, you could start the skill off by giving less information to begin with. For example:

- Diags I: Only HEA, STR; ACT, QUI are given.
- Diags II: CON and STA are also given.
- Diags III: Battle Fatigue is also given.
- Diags IV: MIN, FOC and WIL are also given.

This wouldn't be quite as useful, but if the original idea is unworkable for some reason, this is a reasonable alternative.

Dirtside, what you says makes a lot of sense. There is no point to saying how healthy someone is rather than how wounded someone is. A medic doesn't say to you "oh you have 20/20 vision, but here have some Visine." He says "Wow that's the worst rash I've ever seen, have some ointment."

If diagnose is a problem in PvP why don't you make it so that skill only works on people of your declared faction (and undeclared or covert can only diagnose other undeclared/covert).

And I'm sure the color coding would be quite useful as well.

I'd suggest though, that rather than making it so someone with an inferior skill level has a higher % off when he diagnoses, it should be a number range. Like

Diag I: +/- 70 wounds

Diag II: +/- 50 wounds

Diag III: +/-30 wounds

Diag IV: +/-10 wounds

moosh

Hmm .. while this is an intelligent thread, I think the approach is too complex.

To get around the PvP problem of being able to /diagnose an opponent's wounds and act on that information, I would implement an opt-out toggle: /diagnose off

The opt-out would make it impossible to /diagnose someone. If you're a PvP player and you want your wounds healed, simply toggle /diagnose on. As a medic, you would simply not heal someone if they left it on ...if they forget,just say "please stop hiding your wounds so I can treat them". Sure beats "please press Ctrl+C and list the wound numbers on the right-hand column and keep me updated as I heal them".

Hiding wounds in PvPis movie-like ...picture a characterhiding a bleeding wound under their jacket and squaring up to an opponent as if nothing was wrong.

I'll also add that to eliminate (or at least greatly reduce) the griefing potential of this for pvp, this command should only be allowed under the exact same conditions that you can heal their wounds. So only in a camp or hospital and not someone of another faction or someone with a TEF.

Though, to me, the griefing potential of this command isn't that big. But then again, I don't play PvP so I may miss something here.

I like Dirtside's original idea here. It makes a lot of sense and I fail to see how you can exploit it. But that potential can also be eliminated by adding in the other excellent suggestion (can't see right now who made it) that the skill could not be used in a situation where the wounds couldn't be healed. In other words you'd have to be in camp or a medical center.

The idea of giving MEDICS the /diagnose ability effecting PvP is the biggest crock and cop-out I've ever heard! "All right men! Set your phasers to Constitution! He's weakest there!" Get over it.

The medic profession needs this to be able to do our jobs more effectively. Why dont all you fighters concentrate on being smarter fighters and explorers first, and let the medics worry about the healing. Any dweeb who thinks he could get the medic skill and get high enough to get the /diagnose skill (probably wind up being Diagnostics I or II) just so he can get some kind of imagined targeting edge, is going to be so ineffective as a REAL fighter that it wont matter. He'll be the one getting constantly killed, not binding his clone, and sitting in the MC all day almost dead from wounds.

This is the stupidest argument against a new function I've ever heard. I would have thought people could have come up with something more legitimate. The medical profession needs this and it will likely be implemented soon. Now, lets move on. . .

Huh? The PvP problem is not seeing the wounds you have inflicted during combat, the problem is having someone /diagnose your enemy in advance, so that you know what stats to target.

Morven, I wasn't aware that you could target the secondary stats, like Str, Con, Sta, Qui, etc. As far as I know, the only pools you can directly damage are Health, Action, and Mind. Am I missing something? So far, nobody's managed to explain exactly *what* PvP exploits are possible with a /diagnose command.

And even if it is possible... okay, just disallow it the same way you disallow cross-faction healing. If you can't heal someone due to their faction, you can't diagnose them either. Simple.

Well, the secondary stats affect how your HAM behaves ... how fast each bar can regenerate and how much is used in each pool. Therefore it gives you info on your enemy's weaknesses. In newbie one-on-one PvP with insignificant buffs and very little mitigation (e.g. armor), fights can be over pretty fast ... but as we all get more advanced I think being able to diagnose your opponent's secondary wounds would be more of an issue.