I found it rather odd that the Technician could heal crippled body parts with ease, with those techno arms on the back, but cannot do the same for the Armadillo. I mean, we’re in the realm of fantasy here. Some soldiers get completely shot to hell, all body parts are nearly bled dry; falling off and along comes the Technician, waving it’s magic techno arms and “poof”, soldier is a good as new.
Well, if that can be done for a soldier, why not for a vehicle? I mean, you could say “realism”, but we currently don’t have any form of this in our time, so who knows what kind of techno-magic the future might bring for instantly repairing vehicles. In terms of balance, yeah I don’t know. I just thought I’d mention it, because I felt like both should have their “parts/limbs” repaired by the Technician OR >>>
Speaking of Limbs and getting hurt. I’d really like it if the soldier limbs could be removed by shots as well. Same goes for the Queen. Rather than seeing her legs all bloodied up- it would be equally interesting to just see her dismembered, piece by piece, just like you can do to the Crabmen.
So maybe, remove the ability to heal limbs. Let them get shot off and have them get cyborg limbs if they survive the ordeal.
MediKits should have the heal limbs (they arent repaired unless you are T-800 minimum). Note that in original EU medikits had multiple uses.
Technicians should repair vehicles
I believe current Tehnician is just provisional answer to our rant “we have limbs disabled and we are now eternal persons with disabilities” in BB1 days.
Hope it will NOT stay this way.
Similarly, Technicians could have stun but not should be the only one.
Yeah, it would make more sense for the Technician to heal car parts too, though that might be a little OP…maybe increase the willpower/TU requirement for Vehicle Heal to balance it.
Well, if you guys ever played Fallout Tactics: The Brotherhood Of Steel you might remember that you had a First Aid Kit and a Doctor Bag. Healing an unusable limb simply cost more than 1 round. Damaged vehicle parts also needed more time to repair than simply 1 round. Problem is that I’m not entirely sure a “more than 1 round” ability can be implemented into this game.
I believe technician will also repair damaged vehicle parts. It is just not implemented as Armadillo is a new thing and it’s properties were scrambled at the last moment before release of Backers Build.
I do agree, technician having healing is a very bad idea in my opinion, especially given how much more powerful this skill is, compared to regular medkits. Not only it’s a yet another “magic” class ability, it makes very little sense in the context of what tech is supposed to be. I expect tech to be all about operating support equipment(auto turrets, drones, scanners etc) as well as field repairs. Advanced healing equipment and first aid should be field medic’s domain.
FXCom team had to reduce the amount of support classes due to the size of the deployed xcom team. Usually, there simply was no place for more than one dedicated support class. Hence, their tech had to double up as a medic. PP does not have that limitation as team size is expected to be generous. Thus, there is no need for mashing field medic and field technician together, keep them as two distinct classes please.
But why? Game is in the future. As you said, those mech arms can be treated as advanced healing equipment, so advanced piece of tech. And technician is expected to be experienced soldier. Why he can’t have also medical training, especially when half of New Jericho soldiers probably will have some symbiotic or cybernetic arms and legs?
His healing is more advanced than regular medkit, and is it should be like that. Medkit is common good which can be used by anybody, and technician is quite unique class with advanced knowledge and equipment. Snapshop just need to limit how many times he can use it (and this was already announced).
Because mashing those unrelated classes together does not make much sense neither from game design nor from in-universe perspective. Just as I mentioned in my post above, medic’s and tech’s areas of expertise do not overlap much if at all. Having an “uberclass” with most of the support abilities sans psi makes a rather potent but characterless class. Not to mention that its specialization will be limited by having to deal with two unrelated skillsets at once. You’ll get the same medic-engineer hybrid FXcom had but with no actual reason to have those two mashed together other than “well, FXcom had it that way”.
For me It feels that Technician should really be a late game class(or get access to mech arms later in the game), because mech arms looks like a very sophisticated piece of tech that can perform different complex actions. And while I do belive that he can fix some wounds with mech arms, like dislocation or can perform cauterizing of a bullet hole(or laceration), I don’t think that it would be possible to “repair” a badly fractured limb in a middle of a battle even with this wonderfull piece of tech.
In today’s world. We don’t know how it will look like in near future. Some nanobots could replace many treatments and medicines. I would see highly specialized doctors with technical skills healing us with sophisticated machines.
That’s true and the support class in X-Com can also heal both Electronic and Biological units. So you know what, just like with X-Com 2’s specialist, perhaps the Technician can choose to go for a “heal robotic” or “heal biological” units route. That would make things perhaps slightly more logical with possibly even different types of techno arms just to more clearly point out the difference.
OR, seeing how you put up to 14 soldiers in your squad eventually, the Technician might just lose the ability to heal normal soldiers all together and it’s added to a Medic oriented class, which might actually be quite logical tbh.
I still don’t see what is illogical with technician healing both types of targets (flesh and metal). Even if technician skill tree will differentiate both path, I suppose it would be bad to limit possible choices to one of the branches. So many people here cry for unlimited advancement and non-class characters that now I’m surprised that technician doing both things is criricized. Maybe you miss 50 class specializations from Long War, but modding community will surely do their job.
I think we do need some way to fix or mitigate limb damage.
I don’t know if you’ve played BB1, @Omkara, but back then people were (quite understandably) complaining that seeing their soldiers’ arm crippled by a lucky shot early on - rendering them useless unless they had a pistol or rocket launcher - was not very fun.
I think the Technician’s current ability does go too far in the other direction, effectively trivializing limb damage, but this is still an improvement over the previous situation (in which having limbs crippled could break the mission for the player thanks to a lack of tools to fix it).
And remember - BB1 and BB2 are very much works in progress. It’s not really balanced, nor are the devs claiming it to be.
The reason for my opinion is two-fold. Firstly, from the purely in-universe perspective, there is not hints of sufficiently advanced nanotechnology available for any of the factions. Surely, some of the factions have some advanced tech but so far I doubt any of them will have nanotech powerful enough to be universally applicable to any object, be it biological or technological. NJ specialize in cybernetics and bionics and sure, field technician can provide repairs for damaged prosthetics and cybernetic implants but such actions should certainly not count as healing and should not be applicable for any non-cyber enhanced soldiers.
Secondly, from a purely game design perspective, mashing two support classes into one makes very little sense. By doing that you will reduce the tactical options player will have when picking soldiers for a mission or leveling support characters. So even if(assuming FXCom-styled two-branched class progression) “wet tech” and “chrome tech” will be two distinct paths for technician, it will still be very limiting as the only customization options for this class would be either going healer or going repairman.
Whereas if those two classes would be separate, we will be able to have more options for each of them, e.g. Field Medic(specializing in advanced healing) and Bio Scientist(specializing in experimental bio warfare) vs Field Tech(repairs, including cyborg repairs for NJ and support equipment use) vs Combat Robotics Specialist(auto turret & drone control, advanced vehicular weaponry control, remote APC control).
First off: in current version technician CAN heal vehicles (at higher cost), just not it’s “limbs”. Also not only technician can do it, everyone can. just drop the arms to the ground and have someone else pick them up. I once had my whole team repair the armadillo from nearly dead to full in a single turn that way.
I too think Technician should not be able to heal, but i ALSO think he should not be able to heal vehicles/robots, at least not in such high numbers. Make Repair-kits (just like medikits) for that. In-combat heals should always cost something OR be very inefficient imho.
I DO think he should be able to restore lost ARMOR on both living and mechanical units.
Who said anything about magical nanomachines? My assumption is that the Technician fixes up limbs with WW3 era tourniquets, bandages, stimulants/painkillers, and medical braces. Which gets them into fighting shape in the short term…but in the main game, when you have to worry about downtime between missions, those soldiers will still be spending a lot of time in the sick bay.
I was addressing the notion about technician’s “healing” being equally applicable to both machines and humans, I simply wanted to point out that PP does not seem to have such advanced technology.
Even if technician skill tree will differentiate both path, I suppose it would be bad to limit possible choices to one of the branches. So many people here cry for unlimited advancement and non-class characters that now I’m surprised that technician doing both things is criricized. Maybe you miss 50 class specializations from Long War, but modding community will surely do their job. 