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I collected all up all of the feedback on my item from this and other threads. Thank you to everyone for providing their thoughts. (Mark, if you want to throw a few thoughts in as well, I'd love to hear them). I think that the overall consensus seems to be that the item was fairly solid (potentially publishable), but that opinion on whether this was a Superstar was split.
The original item (so people don't have to dig back through the pages)
Ring of the Medic
Slot ring; Price 13,000 gp; Weight -
Description
For those proficient in the art of healing, this simple silver band enhances their use of the Heal skill to allow the wearer to quickly remove an assortment of conditions. A wearer of the ring with at least one rank in the Heal skill may take a full round action (which provokes attacks of opportunity) to attempt to remove one of the following conditions from an adjacent individual. With a successful Heal check that meets the required DC, the condition is removed immediately.
DC Condition
15 Dazzled
20 Dazed
20 Sickened
25 Confused
25 Deafened
25 Nauseated
30 Blinded
30 Stunned
Each successful removal of a condition in this manner increases the above DC values by 3 until the next dawn. This penalty continues to apply even if the wearer of the ring changes.
If the wearer of the ring fails when attempting to remove a condition he or she may attempt to do so again (requiring another full-round action). Different conditions affecting a subject must be removed individually, with each condition requiring a separate full-round actions.
Construction
Requirements Forge Ring, heal, creator must have 12 ranks in the Heal skill; Cost 6,500 gp
The collected feedback.
These were just my thoughts during voting:
Ring of the Medic - Didn't really strike me as a ring item. Underpriced. CL 11 item, but 12 skill ranks needed to create.
130) Ring of the Medic:
One of my keep items. I like the fact that it tries to keep Heal a viable option long into the game after the first few levels. I like it a lot. At first I was worried that you could just spam attempts until you succeeded, but the cumulative +3 penalty takes care of that nicely. Though perhaps just denying retries might have been a better option. Nevertheless, I'm a bit disappointed that this wasn't advanced, but perhaps the judges thought it wasn't exciting enough or found some balance problem I just cannot see. Nevertheless, thanks for one of my favourite items and I hope to see from you next year as well.
Stuff about fixing throwing weaponsAs I mentioned in another topic, I agree with the sentiment. I also want throwing weapons to be good. This also extends to the Ring of the Medic, which wants the Heal skill to be useful (though that one was pretty well received I think). I also want skills to be more useful.
The thing is, items in general/RPGSS specifically isn't the place to be patching the game.
Edit2: Why not patch via items? Because then the item becomes a necessary part of the fighting style. This is part of the reason I really didn't like Agile, it became about having the right magic weapon to be viable in your combat style. I like items to enhance and expand on capabilities, but not to be vital backbones.
Ring of the Medic:
Pretty straight forward Heal skill augmentation allowing the skill to be used in a way normally reserved for spells. Good idea, well presented, and not exciting in the least. A solid ring and that’s about it.
RING OF THE MEDIC: Kudos for trying to keep the Heal skill relevant. The choice of DCs is odd, given things like Nauseated can be suppressed by a 1st level spell, and both Blinded and Deafened are removed by the same 3rd level spell, remove blindness/deafness. A high level cleric with maxed out Heal might pick this up as a convenient way of removing annoying conditions and free up some spell slots. I'll just come out and say it though: I found it kinda boring =(.
167) Ring of the Medic
The Good: The heal skill is under utilized and this is a great item to push more use.
The Bad: healing items are a tough sell for superstar
The Ugly: This isn't a far cry from an item last year.
Overview: 4 stars for em I like it but not contender like it.
Ring of the Medic - Publishable - Personal note, I WISH that Heal could naturally do something for most of these effects, using DCs almost exactly what you have set. I'd need to look closer at where you rank various conditions, question other little bits, etc. but I like this -- a lot. Price may or may not be an issue, I'm unsure. The fact that you have to make a skill check I think helps to keep it low. Also, that Check goes up (why by +3? seems an odd amount, +2 would have been my suggestion, +4 isn't bad, +5 would be fine too). Anyways, I really like this item, and I would get one if I played a healer in the party. I'm curious to see Mark's response to it (wasn't on this page).
Some of my own thoughts on the item and some comments on the concerns:
Ultimately, I was trying to create an item that did something completely new that didn't necessarily have a precedent. And when I thought about it, a magic item that enhanced a skill to let you do something new (and possibly magical) with the skill seemed like a pretty good candidate. The core idea centered around giving new uses for skill checks. When I thought about what type to make the new item, one of the best candidates seemed to be rings - bonuses to skills is a power that many rings possess. What I was trying to do, at its core, was a new type of enhancement to a skill, so rings made a lot of sense to me.
I wanted an item that would be useful in a number of situations. I considered several different skills and spell-effect combinations before settling on the Heal skill. Given how often players get gimped with conditions, removing conditions seemed like a very good effect to enhance Heal with. And for the spell, Heal seemed the natural fit. CL 11 is the minimum to cast Heal, so that set the caster level. In hindsight, judging from the comments, I might've been better off picking a flashier spell/skill combination (such as Jump and hooking a Dimension Door-type effect to its use).
The DCs. These were somewhat arbitrary, but I did do some benchmark examinations of typical skill bonuses vs. the level where some monsters where the effects are. The numbers were close enough, typically making it a dice roll whether or not you succeeded, which is what I was trying for. Auto-success would make the conditions less meaningful, which I didn't want to do.
I did think about taking 10 and taking 20. Being in combat will preclude someone from doing these (generally), which was the big case where I saw the item being used. And after combat, taking 10 or 20 seems reasonable.
The formatting of the table. I recognize that usually DCs are listed in the second column rather than the first. I wasn't quite sure how to make a table that looked nice, so I opted to flip the order of the condition and DC columns to make the table look better (as the DCs were all 2 digit and the columns would line up if I just made a list with a couple of spaces).
Costing. I wanted an item that would be useful to a wide range of levels. So that required a fairly low cost. The standard formula gave 1800 * 6 * 11 = 118,800 (requiring an action fit more with command word than use-activated). Way more than I wanted. However, first off, Heal really does three things, it heals hp damage, cures ability damage, and removes conditions. This only does about a third of those. So lopping 2/3 off the price of the the basic cost to 39,600 seemed reasonable to start with. That was still higher than I wanted. So I looked at other ways to reduce it even further. And there are really three. First, the ring requires a full-round action that provokes rather than a standard action that doesn't to use. Only affecting one condition per attempt made this even more action-intensive to use in a subset of the use cases. Second, I tacked on a limitation that made the item (effectively) no longer unlimited use: the +3 penalty to the DCs for every time you succeed. (Why 3? I had +5 for every two uses in my mind as being about right and settled on just having this just be a +3 to simplify bookkeeping). The third is simply that success isn't guaranteed. That you have to put ranks into Heal to make the item more useful. This last one doesn't have a good parallel in any existing item and the 10% reduction in cost for requiring a rank in a skill to use didn't seem high enough, as one would need more ranks to make it more useful. So the skill investment is a sort of hidden cost decision that the player has to make. I also evaluated the item against other items in the price range and decided that 13,000 gp (roughly a third of what spell formula yielded) seemed like a pretty good place for the item.
One other note on cost is that I toyed with the idea of granting a bonus on the skill too, but decided that having a lower cost and no bonus (go get another item if you want a skill bonus) was a better plan. One could theoretically increase their skill bonus (and enhance the effectiveness of this ring) by purchasing additional items. I was ok with that - the effect of buying more items to make this more reliable is that they just spent more gp to get the effect (effectively increasing the cost).
Other odds and ends. I wasn't actually looking to patch the Heal skill with this item. I was mainly trying to pioneer a brand-new space for magic items. One item that I would change is reduce the required number of ranks to create the item to 9 (I've been playing 3.5 a lot recently, and I think that my mind added 3 to the number of ranks rather than remembering the +3 bonus.)
Again thanks for the feedback! (And if anyone else wants to throw additional thoughts in feel free to do so).