So I recently decided to do a round of playing fresh characters of several guilds. While I have not gotten to them all I have to say baby Empaths have it pretty bad.

Empathy is one of the worst skills to train at low ranks. Only thieving really compares (a decent script helps this a lot though). It can take ages to transfer any significant wound. The requirement of having to seek out, or be sought out, by other players for healing makes this bit tough. The slow transfer times makes it very easy to get snipped by older Empaths. The best way to train is to sit glued to another Empath and listen to a class.

Then once you have the minimum 40 ranks + link/GoL buff for empathy to learn manipulate you need who knows how many combat ranks before you can start using it to train. I was under the impression that manipulate had a generous training scale but it doesn't seem to. The wiki indicates things like west gate goblins are capped at 20 ranks of empathy and they surely are not teaching me any at 42 ranks. I already don't want to do a lot of combat with my Empath. I really don't want to sit around watching defences gain mindstates waiting before I can do Empath things again.

Leeches don't teach well after the thing that happened in the sand maze thingy years ago. Perceive Health is just another "how well can you script" exercise and trains poorly and requires an average of what 100 between attunement and empathy to pull off each time? Textbooks and the like are great for scholarship and first aid but worthless for Empathy.

The original skill Transference was introduced to encourage Empaths to actually heal and not just hang out in the sitting room listening to teaching classes. I don't think that carrot is needed anymore in DR today. I mean I'd rather heal people to learn empathy then manipulate in combat or tending leeches off or running a perceive health script. I just don't want to have to be so dependant on other players wanting or needing to be healed and that's a choice you have to make early on or be stuck back training combats to reach the point where you can learn via manipulate.

A task based NPC healing system would be great but also not in the card for quite a while. I'd settle for some form of, I don't know, empathic meditation that trains like summon admittance, or like bardic lore practice or some item sold in the empath shop that you fiddle with that trains it. Or even change to anatomy charts to make them train better and in a similar way to first aid(the first study and last full understanding). Or even my least favorite idea boosting perc health exp and reducing the skill needed to pull it off.

>>Lyneya had some great ideas for this for "newbie island"

Yeah that'll be great in 3-4 years when it's done and maybe we get healer tasks off the back of it. And really the issue isn't how hard it is for new Empaths to learn empathy. That's just a side affect. The issue is how sucky empathy is as a skill to train for no other reason then to "encourage" players to heal others.

<<or Empathy needs some sort of not-healing, not-combat thing that it can govern and award experience. And it needs to scale nicely from zero to 1750, while also being interesting and fun to engage in. Easy, right?

At this point with the limited bandwidth the GMs have I'd happily settle for a "meditate empathy" that put you in a 20 sec RT and just awarded scaling exp or for charts to teach on both the first and last study the taught like first aid. I'd grudgingly settle for a significant boost to perc health exp as well. I wouldn't love spinning those scripts back up, but it'd be better then the current situation.

Now thats a neat idea, I hate the compendiums & such, I just dont see my characters whipping out a book to start studying it. Thats me, I know others feel differently.

I've just started walking my young characters through RC to learn app better, something like this might be interesting.

Very good suggestion IMHO (grins)