Bio Engineer Archive
Thread: Whats with the nerf bat being swung at BE's?
More to the point, if you're a 1/1/1/1 CH like I was until a few days ago, you can have a CL20 critter. Mine was a (still valid) 9K/7K/7K cat with armor and 44% kinetic.
Sounds to me a whole lot better than any of the non-CH critters I've seen.
There's not much of a bump at novice for sure...but there seldom is.
-Lens Larque/Master Bio-Engineer/Eclipse
Tal-N is 100% correct and I've been making similar arguments since Jan.
What it comes down to is VERY SIMPLE. SOE choose to re-balance pets in Dec (the big CH nerf). In that process they:
- Re-balanced ALL creatures in PvE to make their CL more repersentive of their abilities
- Removed armor from all pets under 35 with the sole exception of the Sulfur Mylock
- Reduced the CL non-ch could control from CL15 to CL10
Now, we all know SOE puts out code/features pre-mature. No sane person can argue otherwise. The BE system is NO different.
I for one am not advocatin nerfing BE, I'm advocating getting the BE crafting system working as intended.
IF SOE made wild CL10 pets around 1k ham with NO resists you can safely assume it wasnt intended that 6k BE CL10 pets be created.
I wouldnt go so far as to accuse some of my fellow BE on this board of actively "exploiting"... The way SOE has the system set up atm does allow for these "super pets" to be created using valid methods... However, it doesnt take a rocket scienctist to figure out that these pets are the result of loops holes due to poor coding.
I for one will not be take advantage of this loop hole as I believe I owe my customers more then that. I wouldnt feel confortable making pets that I know will eventually become invalid and only serve to throw the over all balance of the game off.
Any BE that needs money so BAD they have to make these kinda pets to be sucessful is just a sad BE.
I can no longer even walk around with my MBE title on because I'm so back logged with requests.. many of my customers are return customers... All of this and I REFUSE to make ANY uber pets (pets with a low CL yet a high ham/res/damage. IE CL20 armored pets with 60% kinetic and 8kham)
If you want a high end "weapon" you gotta have the pts invested in CH. I dont beleive in giving dabblers the power that other players invested much time/blood/sweat in obtaining. Thats what caused the CH profession to get nerfed in the first place!!
Vezek Imagine if you will, someone had a pet with
10K health
1 action
1 mind
Now picture if you will that person running around saying "I got a 10K HAM pet for sale!".
Who would buy it? Certainly not anyone who noticed the 1 action and mind. But lets say that action and mind were hidden attributes. Would people then think 'oh my god! what an amazing pet!'. Would not others say 'why in the world would anyone want to buy a 750HAM CL 10 zucca boar when they can get that! Nerf! Nerf! Nerf!'
Yet this is exactly what was happening with BE pets prior to the patch. The standard trick was to take kamiruth DNA which is armored with 0% resist all, and not experiment anything, and generate 10K CL10 pets. Everyone and their grandma was up in arms about these obscenely abusive 10K monsters. The more generations you went out with resampling, the more you could compress the level with the desired attributes. The armor upon dropping below 500 fort would convert to regular global resistance, and you would get a big drop in CL for losing armor. Did SOE look at how losing armor worked in conversion? Nope. It still works like that. You get big credit for losing armor, and gain global regular resistance as long as you dont zero out a resistance with a vulnearability.
Yet they were ignorant of the 1 action, 1 mind issue. You see part of what goes on when you go through generations of cloning without experimenting mind is the hit rate drops. A lot. Who reported their crappy 15% hit rates? What also happens in generations with no psych experimentation is dependability goes up, but courage goes down. You get pets with zero courage. They run. People were complaining about pets fleeing all the time. "Its a joke! My pet runs all the time! This is an issue! We must have action!". And so SOE marches off to adjust the code to make zero courage pets not flee. Instead of making zeroing a few attributes in experimentation have real consequences, they just knee jerk reacted to crude HAM totals.
If you look at recent dev response, they are working on this issue. Could it be that pet users are just experiencing the zeros their bioengineering pet makers put into their pets? What would you think a pet with zero courage would do? No this can not be. It must be something else is broken.
But alas, no, we had people going 'its sick! 10K HAM! its sick! nerf! nerf!'. And so SOE gave them their wish. SOE added invalid pet checks, and they upped the amount of attrtibute docking.
You see the way a clone works is like this. You take your DNA and it has attributes. You put it into a template, and the game just globally hoses all those attributes to a lower level. If you got a vulnerability, it tends to impose an armor hole, but you can get past it if you give up armor (<500 fort). So you lose say 100-150pts. Now you can recover that by applying experiments and good tools and stations. Pre nerf, if you had everything right (ie MBE, good tools, good DNA), you could actually exceed the amount lost. Post nerf they increased the amount docked and now you can not exceed what you started. My experiment here was with a lvl 6 station droid, 14% tools, MBE, VHQ samples- I was able to experiment fully only 3 attributes, and the resultant creature had a higher CL than the original wild creature and lower attributes.
Yet this did not fix the abusive pets. We still have people complaining about CL10 BE pets being too much. And everyone just proceeds about this nerf process in a same befuddled state. The fixes SOE did were horrible. They could have looked at the conversion alog for losing armor on a zero resist creature, but they did not. THey could have upped the impact of zero courage, but they did not. This would have specifically targeted the problem at hand rather than globally mess up what was an otherwise nice system. You see the dock points and recover system works if you can surpass the original, because in that model engineered pets can beat out wild pets. The validity checks they imposed are really crude and do not consider the pet as a whole creature...and they only address the symptom of the problem rather than the root cause.
What they needed to look at intensely was how much CL credit they would give for zeroing out some attributes on successive generations, and things like losing armor. Instead they just put validity checks and upped the attribute docking. Well we still can bring high level DNA and abuse the CL conversion routines to get decent pets, because that remains unfixed and broken, and the idiotic implementation of increased docking and validity checks still does not resolve that problem. For a while it was even more obvious than now. For instance I had a 55% kinetic armored pet at CL19 that survived the first round of checks, but more recently came up as invalid as they tweaked the validity checks. But there are still holes in the validity checks, and we can see that using validity checks is a time intensive, inferior way of dealing with the underlying problem of conversion routines for CL. And guess what, in their fumbling for a solution we have the problem of not being able to recover docked attributes now, which essentially messes up you ability to surpass wild. Sure there are enough things making it through the validity checks now to make it seem like you are beating wild, but as the validity checks come into play, those will go away, and we will once more be in a situation where you are better off taming wild pets than engineering.
Upon seeing all of this I was so completely disgusted I punched a holocron and quit BE. SOE is responding to misinformed fan cries for nerfs with crude measures which mess up the entire system for honest crafters, and guess what? The process continues. Witness renewed calls for nerfs. I wonder how they will respond this time...what will they break in an attempt to pacify the yammering? Why must we be yo-yo'ed about with this incompetant groping for a coding solution? Bah. How many more months til WoW comes out?
As was noted 10K health with 1 action and 1 mind is useless, even though it would have a level to it. There are a lot of issues. The more I think about it you need some sort of weighting based on resists, and then damage.
if you do say (1+kinetic resist)*(armour modifier, so 1.25 for light, 1 for none)*(each HAM) but do a sum over resists, maybe an extra weighting for kinetic, but I'm not sure, I think that makes sense.
sigma(1+resists)*(armour mod)*HAM/ some large number which would let you tweak pet level largely.
And then add points for, damage (mean damage/10 maybe?)
and then more for specials (as I said in my post, hard to know how to do that, 1 point doesn't scale well between weak poison and strong poison/spray).
IMO the 'max' level 10 pet should be like 3K each ham, 10 resists to all, no armour, 100 mean damage (say 90-110), with two specials, but not strong poison, maybe a ranged attack, and then the numbers can be floated from there, 0 blast, 0 heat but 30% kinetic, or 4K HAM but no resists, 4.5K HAM but no specials or whatever. I think also it needs to be calculated 'on the fly' rather than stored on the pet, which is I think what it is now, so if they need to tweak the algorithim they can.
How utterly selfish, I'm so glad the devs are going to ignore you because your thinking of yourself and not the community as a whole. This is the problem with so many professions, people wanting more and more and more power with no reguard for how it effects the game as a whole nor other professions. Using broken professions to justify a cause isn't an option. You genuinely think that the rangers are working as intended? Hell no, they'd tell you that they have utterly nothing to distinquish them apart from the scout. This is set to change. Every box of the CH needs to give an advantage over not being a CH at all, they deserve that. They spent the skill points and time to become a CH and your saying 'so what'. People like you don't deserve to take part in discussions like this because you can't conduct yourself with any measure of balance or look at the larger picture. All you care about is what effects you and to hell with everyone else.
Tal-N wrote:
Actually i'm sorry to be so blunt but...so what!
How utterly selfish, I'm so glad the devs are going to ignore you because your thinking of yourself and not the community as a whole. This is the problem with so many professions, people wanting more and more and more power with no reguard for how it effects the game as a whole nor other professions. Using broken professions to justify a cause isn't an option. You genuinely think that the rangers are working as intended? Hell no, they'd tell you that they have utterly nothing to distinquish them apart from the scout. This is set to change. Every box of the CH needs to give an advantage over not being a CH at all, they deserve that. They spent the skill points and time to become a CH and your saying 'so what'. People like you don't deserve to take part in discussions like this because you can't conduct yourself with any measure of balance or look at the larger picture. All you care about is what effects you and to hell with everyone else.
i'm sorry here friend, but your taking my callousness in the wrong direction. What i'm saying "so what" too is the fact that a BIO'ed Non-CH pet "supposedly renders a 1/1/1/1 CH useless. My intent is to say, that i dont understand why everyone is crying nerf at the Bio engineer. I believe someone up above made a creat point. a 1/1/1/1 CH can have a pet that is 1, superior to any of the current 6-9k non CH pets and 2, if someone was picking up only 1/1/1/1 of an elite class and looking for a significant character advantage they are seriously mistaken.
I'm also saying So what, to whatever minor insignificant "advantage" a 6-9k non-ch pet would give to Non-CH's. What would it really do for them? How would it place them above CH's? How do these new uber CL10 pet owners disgrace actual people who have taken up teh CH profession?
What i think we are seeing here is the product of some serious hard work on the part of the bio engineer, not an exploit or bug. Keep in mind that these are pets that most Elit professions would kill in 1 shot, it gives no one any advantage in PVP. Can someone use these pets to level? I'm sure they could, but i dont see that as an over balance.
Chronys, two things here:
1. Remember that the CH nerf of December was actually three nerfs in one. There was a radical restructuring of the CH skill tree which was designed to take away the more powerful wild pets in the game from "dabblers" who only went as far as 3/2/0/0 under the previous cert system to call graul maulers. There was a major change in how you advance in the CH profession, because having two pets out at the same time no longer gave you twice the XP of one pet. But the MAJOR nerf was not a nerf of CH per se, but of all wild creatures in the game. Light Armor stripped from nearly every last creature below CL 40. Massive reductions in resistance stats and special protections. This change significantly reduced the raw tanking power (the only significant combat power)of most CH pets, including some of the most popular: the graul mauler, the bile drenched quenker, the greater sludge panther, the grand wrix, the rock beetle, and others. This was all done as the first phase of a four phase "rebalancing" of combat in SWG.
2. Simultaneously, at long last, BEs got some love, and boy did they ever. Finally some high level BE creations can exist in the world as combat pets. The catch is, some of them are TOO high level; CL 1 kimogilas, for example. Creatures with HAM values, armor, and specials that are better than CHs could command at the CL 35 level, and any non-CH can call them! This really hit CHs hard; our pets had been severely nerfed, for the sake of balance, while at the same time BEs can create very powerful pets that a non-CH could control that were just "what I'll get to call when I get my third tier box" for a CH.
So the devs had a problem. It appeared that at the same time they massively nerfed wild pets, they gave BEs the ablity to craft up seriously overpowered, low CL pets. This seemed to be to many to be a case of the left hand not having clue one as to what the right hand was doing. The combat balance that was being sought was undermined simultaneously by a revamp of BE.
Are people calling for a BE nerf? I guess you might say so, but the problem here is that the BE critters might be better than a roughly equivalent wild critter, but not vastly superior to one that is rated 20 challenge levels higher than it.
Message Edited by SioBabble on 02-25-2004 07:02 PM
Siobabble,
Great post and great information there friend. However i dont come to this forum to start or incite fights. I remember all those nerfs to CH that you speak of. I used to be a master CH, dropped it. Dabbled back into it, then dropped it again.
My point, or rather question now, is why are so many people aflame about these 6-9k non-ch pets. As i've stated already. I dont believe they imbalance anything. This opinion coming from someone who has been a Master Creature handler, both in the old system, where someone could pull out 3 massive pets, and in the new system. Also coming from someone who plays "Fighter" type classes, i have been Master Rifleman, Master commando. Both in the leveling, and pvping area's i dont feel these bio pets, considering the effort required to make them imbalance anything.
However, i once again thank you for the great post.
- Investing pts in the CH tree to get a better pet
- Investion pts in a combat profession
- Do both
Skrim wrote:
I like to keep things simple so here it is.
BE should be able to make more powerful items than other crafters. The logic behind this is borrowed from the BH forums.
Novice Weaponsmith 35 SP needed
Novice BE64 SP needed not counting mask scent skills.
A wild CL10 pet has 1k ham and little to NO res.
A BE pets, without pushing the system to its limits, gives you a 10-20 res kinetic or energy with 3k/2k/1k.
No one is arguing BE pets shouldnt be better then wilds. Without pushing the system they are much better then their wild counterparts.
However, when pushing the system to the max pets are created that cause an inbalance to game play. They give players, who invested NO skill pts, an advantage that should be reserved for CHs.
Trying to explain how a 9k ham pet gives an advantage to some BEs who either dont have CH or dont know how to play it right is near impossible to do it seems 
) Message Edited by yjkoo on 02-26-2004 11:31 AM