Tech characters and healing in combat

We have Therapeutics for buffing, and Herbology for healing. For a techy, is there anything to do but spend actions applying healing salves et. al? I'm only level 15, but I'm starting to see an imbalance in magic vs tech characters in that healing tech characters is stupidly hard. I think there's an herbologist I can get in my party, though I didn't have room for her at the time. She's joining me come hell or high water, but I don't know if it will do much good.

Is this my only option, or is there something at higher levels that I'm not aware of yet? Will she only be good for making healing items, or will she use them on me in combat?

Being a gunslinger is easy, so long as you never get hit.

 

NPCs tend to delibaretly use healing items you give them. That is, you lose 10 HP and they rush towards you, to treat your "deep" wounds.

You might want to take a look at the higher herbology items you can make. While those can only be made by yourself you can fully heal your HP, your fatigue and cure any poison with just one item if you master that discipline. The others help your natural healing process or simply restore a bit more HP than the rather simple healing salve.
I'm afraid those are about all the possibilities you get. Not too bad though, considering a mage has to "waste" fatigue and action points on a healing spell that heals about the same amount as a healing salve (of course the other healing spell restores more HP, but then again so do higher herbology items).

 

There's always the Healing Jacket. It's basically leather armor that restores a few of your lost HP while you're fighting.

They don't seem to be very useful in turn-based combat mode, but I can remember a few times when one kept me from dying.

The Healing Jacket requires batteries, however. So that can be a drag.

 

The healing jacket is it constant form of accelerate healing potion and the regenerate spell. it truly does have it uses.

 

Will they use the items on themselves? I give worthless (to me) potions to my magical followers and they don't seem to do much with them.

Just got the half-elf healer in my group but she's waaaay behind in levels, can't hit anything, and just plain ugh. It's going to take forever to make her useful. For now I guess I can hand her my tech healing bits but she rushes into combat and dies.

 

Yeah, sometimes they'll use consumables. Usually to the point that you don't want them to have any. At least no buff items.

Jayna takes a while to get good in combat but later on she'll be your usual 5 melee, 5 dodge group member.

 

ArcanumEdit.exe exists for a reason.

 

I'm trying to play vanilla here.

 

In Vanilla Arcanum, mage followers will definitely use the following potions on themselves or other party members: Heal Lesser Wounds, Cure Poison and Potion of Haste.

You might want to keep that last one away from them, because they'll use it on themselves in situations where that really isn't necessary.

 

Like walking through Tarant.

 

And when just standing around in Tarant.

"Virgil why are you drinking that haste potion when we're just standing around?"
"So I can stand around FASTER!"

 

What about tech/magic 0 characters? Sogg likes to drink so much, I figure -- I give him potions, he drinks, no problem! But no, the big meatwall just swings a sword. Not that that isn't effective...

 

There always is the Heal skill which is neutral in terms of aptitude. You can learn it yourself (which will have the advantage of training) or depend on your followers, since both Virgil and Jayna eventually max it out. Just keep in mind that bandages are needed for that, and if a follower is the healer, you should give him the bandages only when you want him to heal, because if he would keep them in their inventory, he would use them up far too quickly (similar to the healing salves issue).

 

I actually laughed out loud at this. I haven't seen that in a while, but it's so true.

It's bad enough in combat. You expect your mage to start casting more Fire spells (or whatever attacks he has) and bomb the bad guys back to the stone age. Instead, he starts fighting hand to hand. Only now it takes forever for your follower to stop missing his opponents with that Mystic Axe you gave him. And you sit there cursing the AI that seems designed to keep him from ever actually killing anybody with his most useful spells.

So, you get about twice as long to sit there yelling things at your computer like, "For crying out loud! Just cast Fire Flash already! No! Not Agility of Fire! Bad mage! Bad mage!"

But hey... at least in combat, he might kill some dude eventually.

When you're just walking around town shopping for stuff you need to make more grenades and you suddenly see the cool little graphic that appears when you use a Potion of Haste, that's the most annoying thing in the world.

Sure, you'll probably find a bunch of them in random chests and not really know what to do with them. But it's the principle of the thing.

So, you end being a technologist with an inventory full of magical stuff you don't want your followers wasting. Which starts getting annoying when you get encumbered and have to give half your stuff to Sogg because he's the only one you can trust not to use it.

 

The only problem there is that healers tend to wait until the fight is over before they do anything with their bandages. Which can be a bummer if a tough opponent keeps nearly killing you.

 

Only if you're not in turn base. if I'm ever near death in a turn-base battle one of my followers heals me me during their turn.

 

It's hard to click on critters that move fast, which is to say all of them. Rarely am I in turn-based mode because my first runthrough is as a gunslinger. Seems like movement is cheap, and I need to stay as far away from the bad guys as possible.

My character just hit 17th, and she's still wearing a fancy dress.