Team Patcher Early Impressions

Cal

As a preface I play Trauma Surgeon/Force Multiplier as my main build on live so I'm a tad attached to it.

With the Trauma Surgeon class buff, my larger (6m) buffs and heals are hitting nearly 30m+ (balanced stats, mainly resistance and IS regen clothing). That basically allows 1 or 2 TS/FMs to support a large fighting force on a large-ish battlefield (Mara NW for example, where people can get really spread out for a TS/FM). This would also make buffing mid-fight a lot easier, which is nice. To counter-act that though, Sweep Party 2.0 has about a 5s lapse window between its duration and cooldown, so you'd need 2 Sweepers to keep an entire group under SP2.0 (a nice trade-off for the 30m radius). Also, group buff durations are still 5-10m so they'll have to be applied mid-fight a lot.

An ability that I've normally ignored, Delete Upgrade 2.0 now appears a lot more useful thanks to its 150 Buffer Fill (and that I can actually hit people with it now)!

On the healing front, it really comes down to the two top Class abilities, FM and TS. With TS, I can get a lot of healing out fast, but I'm burning IS. With Force Mulitplier, I can heal more efficiently, with my (really) low HPS heals becoming almost area HoTs. The ability to spam heals is hindered by the fact that Panicked Heal (the OMG bombed, emergency heal) healed me for all of 1 damage.... still, I'm extremely glad that my heals might actually be worth the IS (rather then being a Sweep-bot).

Force Enhancer is another OMG button, either letting me finish someone off that pesky Destroyer that needs to die (now) or letting me survive for those couple extra seconds for back-up to arrive. As it stands now, both aspects of it are underwhelming. It doesn't really increase survivablity much as it's only on 16% of the time and I'm still getting clobbered. It also doesn't increase my DPS enough to really be worth the IS cost.

With DPS, understanding that fights are meant to take a lot longer, I've had duels last 10mins+ (since I had lost all my buffs by the time I died), I never really had a chance to dent my opponent (a couple of tests against various Gunman builds), but it did take forever (10mins), I guess that's just the tank aspect of FM shining through. Still, this didn't feel like the kind of tanking where I waited for a mistake and pounced on them, this was the sort that depends on who goes to make a sandwich first.

That's really my main compliant with Team Patcher right now, it looks like it will do its area support job wonderfully, but the burst DPS aspect of it is all but vanished and it cannot last forever beacuse of its terrible small-fight IS-efficiency (.5 HPS/IS versus Physician's 2 HPS/IS).

Should TS/FM be the ultimate area support class while at the same time being very dangerous in combat... no, but possibly increasing the power of Force Enhancer (maybe even increasing the cooldown to 10mins to balance that) would allow it to be dangerous for a little bit...

hopefully that made some sense there.

SkyBruin-ML

Nice post Cal,

I too run a patcher loadout most of the time on live. But mine is usually and upgrade master/doctor loadout.

I set this type of loadout up on CR2 and had some surprising results. Using the new upgrade master buff gives a surprising kick to many damage forms, even if it is not giving the correct amount of IS boost. It essentially acts like all of the damage boosters players use from their various trees each giving a 25 point dps boost for all damage types. I had some good results of doing Hard missions with this loadout and was challenged but came out on top, even when facing 2-3 con orange npc's one of which was a three chevron.

I haven't tested this out much in pvp but I see this loadout as a fast emerging favorite since I threw in the doctor viral attacks as well to give me the possibility of being able to use three types of attacks (ballistic with a gun, melee with fists plus the awakened melee specials, and the doctor's viral attacks) alll this and the ability to buff and heal.

This is my kind of loadout.

Cal

Yeah, the one thing that limits me a bit with Trauma Surgeon is that the old CT buffs (Weapons Boost and Combat Training) are now two seperate 5m buffs (may be 10m) that can't be activated at the same time, so I've found myself just going with Weapons Boost for the Ballistics bonus rather then Combat Training's Melee (just a preference there really).

Still it may be worth the memory space to load both if people seem to be specializing in either Melee or Ranged defenses/resistances.

HCFrog

Were you using Harmful Code at all? I was checking that out yesterday and noticed that it does some pretty decent damage now, it's not the pointless ability it used to be SMILEY

bonobi

I agree HCFrog, the harmful code is nice to have for a patcher...the lower level ones shouldn't put out too much damage as a level 50 though because they should have to load up physician in order to get a high level attack like 3.0. This is so that physicians have at least some sort of attack...but they also need a longer reuse timer cause being able to do that much damage you can kill people in 2 hits...physicians should be able to help out with that much damage but not be a force in offense which the current timings gives.

Cal

I'll have to try it, I actually had to make it just now SMILEY

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