Reflection Therapy: Keeping it relevant at lower skill levels

Have a new general feature to suggest, or think one should be tweaked? Share your ideas here.
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jerc
Posts: 80
Joined: Sun Feb 13, 2022 3:26 pm

Reflection Therapy: Keeping it relevant at lower skill levels

Post by jerc »

A complaint I've heard from new physickers a few times is that they feel like their therapy skills are irrelevant until they hit their Medical skill cap for Maximum Duration.

So, I've got a couple of suggestions to level the playing field a bit to make lower skill levels feel useful:
  • Scale the cooldown with the effect duration. This is probably the biggest problem - If any reflection therapy, regardless of its potency incurs a 7h cooldown, players are extremely disincentivized to get any less than the maximum duration possible, i.e. the capped physickers. If it instead scaled with the effect duration (something like 10-20% longer? Keep some gap between effects), they wouldn't feel like it was a "waste" to visit a less skilled therapist; they'd just have to do so more frequently.
  • Make therapy feel like work. Right now it's instant and doesn't incur any appreciable RT (edit: 30s. peanuts for ~7h). Instead, make it one of those "You will continue doing whatever until you 'stop'." sorts of tasks for both the therapist and the recipient. Each step would increase the effect duration in the recipient the same amount, regardless of skill level. More skilled therapists would simply be able to do so for longer sessions. This way, the cost of getting/giving therapy actually scales with the effect produced, and there may even be a point after which longer sessions are more trouble than they're worth.
Agelity
Posts: 94
Joined: Mon Sep 11, 2017 9:48 am

Re: Reflection Therapy: Keeping it relevant at lower skill levels

Post by Agelity »

I mentioned it on Discord, but I had another thought that there could be group therapy that can involve multiple Physickers and if they're together it can scale (the scholar's side-by-side.... of sorts), so that even novice Physickers could join in and both benefit + give benefit. Would require a longer cooldown to justify how good it'd be, but it'd at least heavily incentivize having people join in and participate while giving a little bit of additional relevancy for Physickers with lower medical skill.
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