Bio Engineer Archive

Attack stats of probot
Speed 1.56
To Hit 0.31
Damage 50-50 (50-59)

Dewback
Speed 2.33
To Hit 0.26
Damage 30-40

Its not the issue of being forced out of the market, it's the fact we know that the devs don't want players to have pets which are too powerful. They moaned about the old rockbeetles with thier light armor and 3500 of HAM, this was such a concern they remade the entire system. Now it seems that they'll need to revise the droids as well or else you can bet I'll be kicking up a stink along with others about how they can justify one and not the other.

The next 2 publishes are focused on DE love. They're creating combat modules for the existing droids - would be interesting if someone could get hold of one of these new combat droids and pit it against a non-CH pet on Test

The droids have been made a bit tougher actually, like i said the damage for the probot is now 70-80. Everything else is the same too.

Alright, time to offer a DE opinion on these shenanigans.

The probot you are using is in fact a second edition pre-nerf probot. The first pre-nerfs actually had 3100 HAM, but they are no longer in existance. After they were nerfed, this second batch appeared with 820 HAM and an attack speed of 1.5 with 50-60 damage. The damage indeed was nerfed again (we're on third-edition probots, about to move into fourth edition...more on this later). the damage is now 70-80, but the speed has increased to 2.5. While the damage is higher, the speed of the probot effectively limits the amount of damage over time that it deals, as compared to the one you were using.

The probots, while not dangerous to build, do pose considerable problems during construction. The DE needs to assemble a total of 15 subcomponents (or thereabouts) in order to build the final creation, while risking critical failures that could wipe out the ENTIRE work twice (once for the frame, the other for final assembly). To add to this, we have to be master artisan as well or invest a considerable amount of time and money into gaining master-artisan components, and happen to have a whole host of incredibly rare minerals for hte droid and its usual compliment of modules. Neutronium, extrusive ore, intrusive ore, steel, fibreplast, inert petrochemical, are the minimums. Add in useable features like L6 armour and modules (IE medical) and you have to find link-steel aluminum, lidium extrusive, and duralumin.

In my hayday at the top of the DE profession, I had every single subcomponent factory crated or had subcontractors building them for me. Even so, it took me a minimum of 8 minutes and the possible risk losing a fairly large amount of rare resources every time I built one. Add into that the fact that almost no one has to use the droid (literally 90% of the people DEs sell to have to be educated... repeating the same thing to people endlessly really drains a person) and you can lose a large portion of an hour selling a single probot. And this doesn't even cover the amount of time it takes to set up factory runs on all the different types of pieces with all the different types of minerals that have to be recovered.

And getting back, the fourth-edition probot is promising to add in a further14 subcomponents in order to build them to the same quality as they are today. You should really consider yourselves lucky, as all you have to do is go out andsample something a few times, which at CL10 is not really dangerous. We have to go through a crafting hell and back in order to build these droids, and these are thetop ofour profession. CL10 creatures are the bottom of yours.

Hope that helps in clearing up probots a little.

Message Edited by TheWoody on 03-02-2004 10:55 AM

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TheWoody wrote:

You should really consider yourselves lucky, as all you have to do is go out and tame something. We have to go through a crafting hell and back in order to build these droids, and these are thetop ofour profession. CL10 creatures are the bottom of yours.

Hope that helps in clearing up probots a little.

Message Edited by TheWoody on 03-02-2004 08:07 AM

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The creature Handler Boards is that way --->

This is the Bio-Engineer forum.

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ArthurDentOnBria wrote:

Battle #1 probot vs dewback

player1: "attack"

*dewback races toward probot at breakneck speed*

player2: "attack"

*low power*

player2: "oh **edit**"

*one hour later*

*probot explodes*

player2: "my probot is down, we'd better call it a night, let's try this again tomorrow"

player1: "ok, I think I'll go run some missions with my dewback"

*next day*

player1: "attack"

*dewback races toward probot at breakneck speed*

player2: "attack"

*probot cowers, take pot shot at dewback*

*one hour later*

*probot has lost 100 pts health, dewback has lost 4k of health*

*player1 heals dewback*

*player2 calls player1 a cheater*

*player1 suggests that player2 gets a dewback*

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The dewback would be much more likely to cower than the probot in my experience, also the next patch is doubling the life of batteries and introducing damage repair kits - which sound a lot like stims to me

They are stims, the droid battery life is something like around 30 minutes now from what I can tell. The DEs will also be able to make what is essential petstims and wound kits for droids. I posted this on the DE forum as you can see, they have been kicked around for so long they don't care that by CL10 standards the probot is overpowered, you can see how they attempt to justify that. Frankly I look at it this way, the devs claimed our invalid pets were overpowered. They claimed the old rock beetle were overpowered too. They were nerf'd and I agreed with it for the sake of balance. Unless they follow through with that line of rebalancing to include these droids then I'd say we have a rock solid case for non-ch pets to be rasied in their power.

There is literally nothing the devs can use as a valid case why one is overpowered and the other is not. They are either all overpowered or they are all balanced.

Agreed, if/when they give people the ability to heal droids, and power droids better, and if the droids maintain the same armor, and the same damage, then yea, we've got a problem. Right now, there is obviously no such problem. It's very very very rare that when I go out hunting I see a probot. Tons and tons of pets, no probots. SOE has always been extremely short-sighted tnough when they make changes, and usually make no effort at all to maintain "balance". Oh well, as I've said all along, if balance shifts way out of whack, I'll probably just become a DE. Might be time for a change anyhow, lol.

Very good points, Arthur.

Theres a difference between something making sense and something being balanced.

Docs cant heal overt patients of either faction for game balance, though it makes sense that a neutral doctor would heal someone regardless of their faction affiliation