Squad Leader Archive

I think boost morale is a very important skill to the squad leader and people really need to sit down and think about its benefit before claiming its overpowered. I advocate that this skill is actually UNDER POWERED.

For those not aware. Boost Morale is an instant use skill which evens out the HAM of the group. It does not re-distribute secondary wounds. It uses up a large amount of Action & Mind which reduces its effectiveness to being used only a few times before requiring a full rest.

You cannot use it while sitting or meditiating. You need to stand to use it.

It is a level IV ability in the leadership line.

Now. If you have ever fought on a planet with enemies who use disease you will see very quickly why share wounds is very valuable. It allows you to use the group to help a player recover quickly from having their health action or mind reduced to 1. That's right your entire bar is wounded and you are left with 1 Health Action or Mind. Now given that in a camp people heal wounds automatically over time, using Share Wounds can drastically reduce the downtime. Especially if you don't have an advanced medic, or the medic died and you want to help the party recover.

Just because people claim it makes doctors less useful is not a case against Boost Morale. Boost Morale doesn't HEAL it only heals WOUNDS. You still need to regenerate to recover and the party still has plenty of wounds for a doc to heal if its after a disease downtime. Most docs prefer to be making more stims during downtime than healing wounds anyway. They get plenty of medical exp healing during combat. I have not met a doc yet who thought my use of share wounds was a problem, normally the only people who complain are players in pick-up groups who don't understand the concept that its faster for 10 people to be cured of 20 - 40 wounds than one player of 200 - 400, especially ina camp which auto-heals.

Lastly consider that all your Docs by some unfortunate incident get hit with mind disease and you don't have an entertainer handy. How do you get them sufficient mind to let them heal before you get back to a town? The only skill, and rightfully so, that can help them with this is Boost Morale (unless they are high level TKA also).

Also regardless of how you split the mind wounds without an entertainer they aren't going ANYWHERE they are just getting moved around in a more even fashion.

I propose that Boost Morale/Share Wounds also split secondary stat wounds. I believe that with the amount of secondary stat bleeding shots out there it cripples this skills intention to share the burden of wounds throughout a party so it may continue to operate with functionality while recovering. Also for the reasons already stated it helps reduce downtime which should be a Squad Leaders role.

I do not think this skill is overpowered AT ALL in high level groups and is one of the best skills we have if you have a group who know's what they are doing (and if they don't as a SL it's your JOB to educate them).

I'd like to ask the correspondent to consider this for the next submission.

- Baelish

I agree with you 100% its not overpowered and it does help in camps. I would like to see it redistribute ALL wounds though. Fix the exploit then make it work correctly.

Here's my point of view on Boost Morale: Its a neat gimmick, but to me, its pretty worthless.

I travel with Master Doctors and Master Combat Medics in squads where cloning is mandatory. Thus, we never have wounds from not cloning (thats just silly). The only time we do have wounds is when we fight something that gives disease, and that can generate a huge amount of wounds. However, our doctors can heal hundreds and hundreds of wounds with one stimpack usage. Spreading those wounds out to everyone in the group would mean they would have to use 15 stimpacks instead of 1. They hate the idea of /boostmorale and beg of me not to use it.

In a few months, there will be enough Master Doctors around that spreading out wounds with /boostmorale will be quite worthless, in my opinion.

It would be neat if this skill balanced the group's HAM bars, though, spreading out damage instead of wounds. Then my top combatants could spam their best specials and I could distribute the cost of them amongst the group at the end of a battle and allowing a communal regeneration of the damage. Or when my puller comes back badly hurt, I could quickly help him by spreading the damage around.

Btw, no one should ever say that /boostmorale is "healing" wounds... theres no healing, the wounds still exist, they're just spread around, distributed.

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Volatris wrote:

Btw, no one should ever say that /boostmorale is "healing" wounds... theres no healing, the wounds still exist, they're just spread around, distributed.

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Actually Vol, that's the exploit that I'm talking about. It CAN be used to heal action, health and mind wounds. Not to redistrubute them. Check your PM's.

yewah heal wounds needs to be changed to HAM

IMHO

Personally.. I think its 99% useless. Most squad leader -should- have some type of minor medic skills in my opinion. And you know what... its easier/faster to let the 1 or 2people get diseased and use some woundpack B's on them and heal em back up. If you distribute the wounds, you'll either have to waste small amounts of woundpacks on everyone, or sit in a camp longer.. or just have everyone slightly crippled for a certain time (which might wind up screwing things up WORSE later.) It's cool in theory, but just doesn't work out too well.

Like a lotta squad leader skills, they're decent in theory, but the benefits on most skills are just not that good. Especially when most of them use SO much of your mind and/or action points, even if you only have less than 8 people in the group. And a lot of the skills fail often.. which is a total waste. What they should just do, is add more passive bonuses to squad leader, or tweak the skills so they provide better benefits. This is an advanaced profession we're talking about, we're talking about using a lot of points if you plan on mastering it.. and right now, mastering SL is completely not worth the points.

-Z

I can think of a dozen cool ways to use a HAM-balancing special... oh man you could do some neato tactics!

I'm for HAM balancing, not wounds.

HAM balancing also helps combat medics. I've heard more than one say they're switching to doctor because doctors can do more and heal more. Their dot damage is worthless, and their healing of multiple players anit that hot compared to a doctor.... unless we implement this. That's two balancing factors added if this thing happens!

I agree that Boost Morale should redistribute HAM not WOUNDS. It would be so much more useful.