this is a controversial opinion: auto-menders aren't very good

[Zamujasa]

I personally do not think that doctoring should be more difficult than it already is when people are still dropping like flies. The menders have a slow ramp up time that requires everyone to stand still. Patches were literally just click-n-stick.

Also "inventory management" is a laugh, you could easily stuff medkits full of patches and then stuff a backpack with them. Two patches would be applied nearly instantly and heal something like 60 brute.

[Tiggersaurus]

Reminder that menders were already nerfed and rapidly healing while sprinting is not a thing anymore. So as pali said, patches are way more effective during combat anyway.

Also, I don't think we really have to make medbay more difficult and revamp the whole medbay meta, now when there is a wave of new players who can barely even use the menders. Mender removal also won't really change the fact that goonmed is quite simple overall.

This. They were already made slower recently and changed how they interact with bleeding. Please leave them alone <3 As an aside, when I play botanist I always send medbay a buttload of synthflesh patches, easy to make and use.

[zjdtmkhzt]

Damage system is fine as is,...

I'd rather see some more special illnesses that can come up and need some extra treatment to cure.

You mean like ... the p-word? :3

[Mouse]

I'd be slightly more sympathetic to attempts to make medicine require more than "one click" or whatever (unless someone isn't in crit you're going to be doing a lot of clicking if you want to effectively and rapidly treat them) if the majority of players I see were actually managing to even do that "one click".

Automenders are very effective at preventing medicine from being wasted, but given how often people dump an entire reserve tank on themselves to heal the damage from a couple punches anything that makes it so I have to run to the pharmacy less for basic meds is good in my book.

[Chayot]

I find doctoring to be difficult enough as it is. I'm not sure if it was nerfed recently(?) but I'm losing a lot of patients, A LOT these days.
I used to just slip some sulb, patch them up and boom we're back in action. Maybe restart their heart with a baton or defib.

These days I have to use a shit-ton of medicine for ONE patient and they most-often STILL die.
I find patches to be more effective these days because the time-frame to save a patient is smaller now.

I agree that auto-menders are strong. Yet I maintain that they should be strong.

[GORE]

Damage system is fine as is,...

I'd rather see some more special illnesses that can come up and need some extra treatment to cure.

You mean like ... the p-word? :3

PATHOLOGY, the PLAGUE, a horrible PREDICAMENT,...

Yeah.

[ThersitesPorter]

The issue isn't the menders, if there is an issue with medbay, it's that there is an incredible glut of supplies, some basic chems do too much (looking at you charcoal) and some drugs are used to treat symptoms that just aren't really all that dangerous.

Body temperature, organ damage, blindness, deafness, radiation, histamines, hyperglcaemic shock, and blood clots are all things that tend to either cure themselves fairly quick, or be incredibly lethal and result in people dying before they realistically get a chance to head to medbay. Usually because they either don't notice its killing them or it makes them die very quickly.

The other part of it is just a game culture problem among medical staff. Why use saline for someone with minor brute and burn damage when you can just hit 'em with some styptic and silver. We've got shit tons of it after all. Why use potassium iodide, even if they still have the radiation debuff, when you can just load 'em down with charcoal and hand 'em a mutadone pill on their way out. It'll deal with the tox damage better and even handles the organ damage better. Why use synaptizine when you can just use mannitol. Yeah, in theory it pairs well with atropine for patients in crit, but atropine tends to work pretty damn good on its own.

My guess is that your actual complaint isn't that you want healing brute/burns/tox to be more difficult, my guess is that you're getting bored with MD because there are very few opportunities to do "advanced" doctoring work. Minor organ damage does basically nothing, and so doesn't really need to be treated, and it tends to get fixed incidentally anyway because of how many medicines fix them. Most surgery is elective, minus the occasional arm/leg replacement and livers, of course.

So that leaves doctors...well...mostly treating boo boos. Which is slap a patch on it or make 'em stand still and use the automender.

Edit: If anything, you could probably make MD a bit more involved just by removing organ damage repair from basic medical chems and nerfing charcoal's tox heal a bit, so that there is some incentive to use reagent purge medicines a bit. Maybe add a couple minor annoyances with some of the lower levels of organ damage to get people to demand replacement organs. It would still have a major use case in the fact that it mixes inside of folks to create antihol.

[DJ-Fireball_did_this]

What if auto-menders took longer for non-doctors? Like you know that little progress bar from using it? Maybe the time could be changes depending on the person's actual job. In-universe it's because they have medical training and using one is a great deal more complex than it may seem, out-of-universe it's so there's an actual function to medbay and the people inside it.

[KikiMofo]

I feel what people consider "Doctoring" isn't really doctoring. Just feeding some salb and patching them shouldn't just be the end all fixer. Now I don't think it should be HARDER but I think it should be more in depth. People may drop like flies a lot but that's just kinda how things go some times. Maybe I just feel there should be more consequence for actions. Injuring yourself should end with you going to medbay or the minimedbays, not just finding the nearest patch spot and slapping your self silly with healing items. Maybe I'm getting off track though.

[The Gorog]

Yeah this has turned a bit into a discussion about our medical system in general. As someone who was never really a medbay player, I dont need it to be more complicated. I feel like making it more complicated would have too big of an impact on the balancing of combat and things like adventure zones, where you can't just be quickly dragged over to a medbay.

As for automenders, as some have mentioned already, they were created specifically to replace the old medical patches because of how strong they were.
You would just slap a patch onto yourself and be able to quickly regain your lost health, while running around and dodging whatever attacked you. Now they are severely weakened in their effect, but still let you stay mobile. 
The argument about inventory management is something that puzzles me. Couldn't you just put 20 patches with up to 40 chems into a box? You dont even need to take a patch out of it, you just open the box and click your target.

The automenders on the other hand are strong, but require you to be standing still, which is the last thing you want to do in most combat situations.
Maybe they could be slowed down a bit or decreased in capacity, as I have no clue how much damage you can really heal with one filling.

[cyberTripping]

I rarely play recently and mostly lurk, but as someone who was a fan of medical and played it both before and after menders were introduced, I think menders are in a fine spot and were a good addition. They're to patches what hyposprays are to auto-injectors, in my eyes.

If their power is really a concern, maybe the design should involve leaning into that: Make menders a bit more of a resource, where you get a smaller number of empty ones to fill up, kinda like hyposprays, and then maybe give medbay duplicates of the styptic and sulf beakers they start with. You could take menders out of the medical vendors and make them a tool you gotta produce empty from the fabricators, like hyposprays. Seems like an alright compromise that keeps them frequently used and still useful while maybe cutting back on just how easily obtainable they are by making them more of a medbay-specific tool (how often do you see random civs wandering around with hypos, for instance?)

[Frank_Stein]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

[Wisecrack34]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

[vampirate]

I'd be fine with automenders holding less resources and needing refilled.

[Mouse]

You already need to refill them pretty often.