Using Cures on Undiagnosed Wolves

Hello all! Today I bring you something that confused me to no end when I was first starting to get illnesses: The way the tutorial for illnesses is worded directly contradicts the way the game works.

When we are first introduced to Illnesses, Tala tells us this:

"Over here, indicated by the pointing arrow, is some information about you right now. You have an illness! At the moment, it's undiagnosed, which means we don't know which exact illness or injury is causing it."

"You'll notice it has at least one symptom associated with it, too, which can give you a clue on the type of illness it might be. Some illnesses have similar symptoms though, so keep your wits about you."

These two steps, while useful for introducing symptoms, are also misleading. The implication here is that you will be able to guess what illness your wolf has and administer a cure based on the symptoms, when this is not the case. In actual gameplay, you must diagnose a wolf before attempting to give them a cure. My suggestion is to take one of these two actions:

1. Re-word the tutorial to tell the player, much more strongly, that they need to diagnose their wolves in order to cure them.

2. Give players the ability to administer a cure to their wolves without diagnosing. Perhaps there is a heavy detriment to guessing wrong (aside from loosing a use of a valuable healing item) such as the wolf losing HP, your lead catching the illness and/or requiring a diagnosis after an incorrect guess.

This suggestion is being made in an attempt to simply mitigate the confusion and somewhat miffed feelings I- and other players- got upon realizing that we had been wrong about needing to diagnose wolves before attempting to cure them. I don't think the second suggestion will affect herbalist wolves' role too strongly, as between the cost of diagnosis becoming 0SC once an herbalist is at 75-80% proficiency, and the possible detriments for guessing wrong, users will likely want to diagnose their wolves if they are unsure of the illness.

I believe something like this would be of a medium difficulty to code and/or have minor writing adjustments.

Thank you for reading over my suggestion.

On one hand, I do understand why it's required - it gives your herbalist XP after all, wouldn't wanna miss out on that.

However, I can also say that not being able to use a cure-for-all before diagnosing is a bit frustrating. It's called a cure-for-all for a reason! If that existed in reality, I doubt they'd be bothering to get diagnosed before using it. So at least, if not for any old illness situation, it would make sense to not need to diagnose before using those.

Absolutely agreed, a lot of people I know were very confused at the tutorial saying one thing and gameplay being another. It’s also very silly that I can look at my wolf’s gaping leg wound or ticks and still need to diagnose it.

I would prefer option 2 as well, I know diagnosing is an SC sink but right now literally everything is and we probably won’t kill the economy. 

I think that would be a good addition! I think there should be some overlapping symptoms. Like, each illness has five symptoms but you are only told one or two. This would mean there was more guesswork involved, upping the desire to diagnose 

Full agreement, honestly I'd vastly prefer being able to attempt a cure without diagnosing first. It doesn't even cost sc anymore to diagnose so all it does is make me have to go take extra steps to cure this wolf when I already know what's wrong.

agreed, theres not really much point to telling/showing us the symptoms if we cant even do anything about that. letting people attempt to cure without diagnosing first would not only be easier when the herbalist has low proficiency and you dont quite have the sc to diagnose, itll also make the symptoms actually MATTER. plus the incentive to diagnose anyway is still there: you get exp for diagnosing

alternatively, why not a separate item that doesnt TECHNICALLY act as a cure, rather it just reduces or eliminates symptoms for a rollover? sort of like if you have a headache, you take ibuprofen, and it goes away for a while. maybe you didnt fix the root issue but you feel better. if the illness itself isnt cured then it comes back full force next rollover. it could be useful if you dont have the means to make or buy a bunch of pox cures and your entire pup den is sick

I support making one of the changes suggested. It feels very misleading in the tutorial, like we were going to have a bit of a task to do ourselves to make sure the wolf got the correct medicine, rather than seeing the symptoms then getting them diagnosed anyway.

Totally agree, maybe add a way for the individual herbalist to "recognize" a disease?

The biggest issue with diagnosing, in my opinion, is that it costs SC. It should cost energy from my herbalist instead to balance it out more; it's frustrating to lose 20+ SC to each diagnosis just because you're herbalist isn't over ~70%+ proficiency! I'd suggest a 5% energy or 2% energy decrease instead costing SC on top of this.

It makes sense, over time, for the herbalist to eventually learn the diseases and their symptoms better as well. I also don't see why I can't just use a cure myself. I'm either wrong and lost the valuable item, or I'm right and heal said wolf. It shouldn't put a wall up just because you don't want to fork over the SC to diagnose.