Question on Mend

[lagoy]

In the description of Mend it states:
"After the first minute of tending, the subject regains partial consciousness and may converse with the Physicker but not move or act on their own."

But if you use the Physick Capstone ability it states:
"It only takes you 1 minute to Mend a patient (improved to 30 seconds with Efficiency active)..."

So my question is, what happens with the "...the subject regains partial consciousness and may converse with the Physicker..." with the reduced time with Mend? The ability to speak with someone before you complete your Mend is useful and may change what you do. So if I have the Physick Capstone, when do people gain the ability to speak? 30 seconds? 45 seconds? What about Accelerated Recovery? If I have both up, the time is reduced to 30 seconds, so how does that change things?

Inquiring minds want to know.

[Boom]

I do not believe there was an intention for partial consciousness in those situations. We should still confirm with Erica/Nick.

Feel free to make your case for it though.

Boom

[lagoy]

Sure, I can see how people could look at it either way. That's the point, part of the ability is not addressed directly, so it's open to interpretation.

Also, assuming that part of the ability is not changed, what happens if the healer chooses to 'dumb down' their skill and use the lesser version of Mend and wakes up target after 1 minute? If they decide to continue healing the target, would the minute already spent on them be totally wasted? Or would it change the time for the remaining healing with the Capstone ability?

[madraxus]

as far as I am aware the partial consciousness does not come into play if you have your mend time reduced to or below 1 minute. The Nickness would know for sure but I think the point of the partial consciousness is laying down for five minutes while someone mends you is boring and this gives them a chance to do something rather than just laying there.
as for dumbing down your mend I dont know why you would want to (but if it is allowed, Thats a Nick call) I would guess if you did so it would be treated just like normal mend. So either you use your capstone and heal the target in 1 minute or you dumb down and it is treated as if you didnt have the capstone. I dont know why would want them partially conscious rather than just healing them totally.

[lagoy]

Well clearly you if you can talk to someone, you could talk to them/question them/gather information if there's any question of their loyalty. Because, you know, players being controlled by NPCs has NEVER happened in this game before. It's one of those things that would come up at some point and be useful to talk to someone before they are brought up into fighting form. Also I can't imagine that if you had both the normal and more powerful version of a skill you would somehow lose the ability to use the less powerful version, especially if they cost character points to get both.

[Gavin]

As another player, my interpretations would be that Healers who have purchased the Capstone can choose to use one of the following options each time they Mend:

Option 1: Regular Mend (subject regains partial consciousness but can't move or act on their own after one minute, and healer continues Mending until the 5 minute count is up).

Option 2: Improved Mend (subject is awakened with limbs healed after one minute).

Option 3: Regular Mend then Improved Mend (Healer uses Regular Mend, and after one minute, subject regains partial consciousness but can't move or act on their own, Healer and others can then converse with subject and decide whether they want to stop healing them altogether or restart the skill as Improved Mend, at which point the subject would fall back into unconsciousness and the Healer could spend 1 minute to awaken the subject and heal their limbs).

The only alternative to these options I see is just flat out saying that the "subject regains partial consciousness after one minute" rule only applies to allies, due to the bonds among the Rhiven people or something like that. This would avoid the circumstance of people attempting to use Mend as an interrogation tool.

Anything else seems like it'd be hard to justify from an in-game perspective.

[ambisinister]

Greg is correct about why the rule was added in the first place: it provides an alternative to sitting in silence for five minutes while treatment occurs. If you have the ability to heal in a minute or less, that scenario wouldn't occur and any information that you would be seeking to gain from the target would still be available to you in the same time frame, or quicker if you're able.

Larry, you suggested the ability to communicate with a target while the healing is in process but before its completed could be beneficial and may impact the physicker's decisions. If the physicker is seeking to gain information that may impact what treatment options to use, then Triage and Diagnose should be able to provide all of that before mending of any sort begins. What else did you have in mind?

To address your other point, yes, there is nothing stopping a person from using the basic version of mend instead of the improved one once they pick up the capstone. It will need to be determined if we want to change the capstone to effectively function like "at any point after one minute (or 30 seconds if applicable) you may choose to complete the Mend." thus allowing the proposed scenario of "well, now that i've gotten you awake enough to talk, I don 't like what i'm hearing so i'm going to stop treating you and let you go back to bleeding out" or "well, now that i've gotten you awake enough to talk I do like what I'm hearing so let's get you on your feet now, mend."

Am i off the mark in thinking that's the area folks are interested in discussing?

*Edited to correct misattribution of posts.*

[Gavin]

I agree with you, Nick (except the part about me, since my first post in this thread was the last one, where I posed the three options).

[ambisinister]

My apologies, Gavin, that was just bad reading comprehension on my part. I will edit for accuracy.

[lagoy]

Okay, cool. That's totally fine, it was just not mentioned so I wondered. In the past we have come across groups of people unconscious and didn't know who was the good guys and who was the bad guys. In situations like that, it would be useful to talk to people before they jump up and start slinging spells or swinging weapons because someone woke up the wrong people.