Musician Archive

I've been thinking a lot recently about the musician/dancer trees and the way the healing gets split to take up half of the skill tree.

It seems a bit like short shrift to have a function that doesn't benefit us at all getting broken up into two seperate functions that don't benefit us at all. It feels like the devs got in a rush and decided to just use "filler" to finish out the entertainer professions. IMO, there's really no good reason for mind healing to be seperated from fatigue healing. Is there any chance at all that some entertainer might decide to "specialize" in mind wounds? I'll wager that most of us don't even factor healing into our advancement plans except as something we have to do as a neccesary evil. Every musician or dancer I talk to who decides to forgoe master level also decides to forgoe ALL of the elite healing levels and spend the skill points elsewhere.

Ideally, I'd like to see mind and fatigue healing folded back into a single tree and have the mind tree replaced with something else. I'm not really sure what that could be. It would have to be something that wouldn't cause a huge problem due to the current masters already having "mastered" it.

One possibility - Performance recordings. I know it sounds wacky, but it could be interesting. The artisans would make the recording rods (plenty of those around as useless loot anyway). The musician/dancer would "record" a session of performance. The amount of time required would depend on the level of recording ability. A droid engineer would download the rod into a data module in a droid. A melee would activate the recording in a camp and receive a one-time mind would/battle fatigue healing session equal to the dancer/musician healing ability of the performer. The recording would then erase itself. (Chalk it up to copyright licensing. :smileyvery-happy This would only effect the owner of the droid, so each member of a hunt would need his own recording.The size of the data module would determine the number of recordings it could hold, or we could just have a rule of one per droid.

Imagine - A smuggler goes to the local droid store and asks "What's in stock today?" "I've got a FlawedDiamond, an Adara, and a Trubacca." "Gimmee the wookie, I'm in a jazzy mood today." The actual "recorded performance"animation would just be a generic "hologram" of a dancer or a musician, similar to the way that R2 projected Leia in A New Hope. The distinguishing factor would be the rate of healing due to the healing skill level of the entertainer that made the recording.

Of course, this would require some major changes to the game engine but it has the side benefit of creating an entire new chain of economic dependencies.

A different way to go would be to leave the skill tree as-is and make the elite healing skills meaningful. Let the novice and higher musicians and dancers use the outdoor stages to do their healing. The effectiveness and range would be proportional to their healing skill level. This would exclude their entertainment healing level so a novice dancer would heal the same outdoors as a novice entertainer heals indoors. The microphones would finally have a use and the masters would have some incentive to move out of the cantina and into some new venues.

Anyway, the gist is either make it worthwhile to have two healing branches or combine them and give us at least one other branch that IS worth having.

Comments? Alternative ideas?