Bio Engineer Archive
Thread: Is it my imagination or...
. I glance at the profession board every now and then, but rarely see anything worthwhile. Mostly just rants, whines, and posts demanding the"best" pet combos. I love the profession, but the CH forum is generally sickening.
Tal-N wrote:
Tal-N, much as I respect your views on BE issues, plus just be quiet about CH until you walk in our shoes a while.
Tal'N Chratk.Shadowfire. Commando/CH.
Only yesturday took my Gronda called Dumbo to Dantooine and solo'd a lair of CL40 Slinking voriter hunters with only novice commando skills. I shouldn't have been able to do that so I know full well that some species are overpowered under thecurrent system. I'm expecting my Malkloc and Gronda to lose their 50% kinetic resistance now, but I welcome this new system cause it's fair.
So don't start preaching to me at how I don't understand this because I haven't played it. The day a CL18 pet can allow you to solo critters that are almost twice it's level with minimal damage is the day when you know something is very unbalanced.
If you really do have experience as a CH, then your statement about rancors taking on kimo's is even more incredulous - do you have any idea whatsoever how much damage a kimo dishes out, even the small ones?
I find it odd that you see the CH element as being the problem in your voritor lair take down - would that have been possible JUST using CH skills, or was it actually the fact that even novice commandos can do ridiculous amounts of damage, esp DoT, that made that fight possible? And I am going to assume you had to use the not grouping with pets thing to get around aggro, which will be impossible with this next patch. FYI, it is entirely possible to take that same lair down with zero CH skills, so I fail to see this as any reason to claim CH are overpowered. Its simply faulty logic. Any TKA could do the same, as could riflemen, pistoleers and carbineers, and all those take fewer skill points than CH. As far as I can tell only the weapon-weilding melee types would have a problem with such a lair.
I do apologise for jumping down your throat, but my patience on being called every name under the sun, in game and out, has worn out. Just because I choose to use pets as my weapon, instead of lightning cannon or flamethowers. You have ranted left, right and centre on this forum, especially of late, about broken promises, late fixes and god knows what else- please allow CH that want to the same on their own forum the same rights.
Bah - sorry Tal 
Having a seriously bad day with several people trolling the CH forum and its really gotten to me. Plus I can't even log in and play atm to get the stress out as I keep having to go fix stuff up around the house ready for thanksgiving. Just ignore me.
FWIW, until I got so pissed off by the haters and flamers, I was actually starting to think there may be hope yet so long as the higher level pets actually stayed more or less intact (which may be the case given frther reports recently).
Anyway, once again I am sorry for venting at you.
Tal-N
Not all CH's are "kiddies" 
With that said i agree that the CH profession has been owerpowered since launch, this tend resault in those that seek power, choice that profession.. thus you get a lot of megalomanic CH's
Only yesturday took my Gronda called Dumbo to Dantooine and solo'd a lair of CL40 Slinking voriter hunters with only novice commando skills. I shouldn't have been able to do that so I know full well that some species are overpowered under the current system. I'm expecting my Malkloc and Gronda to lose their 50% kinetic resistance now, but I welcome this new system cause it's fair.
ok so as a Comando you should be able to SOLO anything on dantooine, wanna know why? CAUSE I CAN. i am comando 0,0,4,0 using JUSt my flam thrower i can take ALMOST ANYTHING in game. so dont relate your victory or loses to being CH its all on your skills that you can beat up the dant Voriter lizards. i can solo those in my sleep with out my pets, now can my Graul mauler take out a 4 pack of Voiters NO, simply put NO he cannot, if you add in my BDQ or my other graul, sure, one will die, and it will be a LONG DANG fight. so please dont sit here and say you know about being a CH. if you really did you would totally understand that Grauls and Graul Maulers are great meat sheilds, but only if you are gonna be behind them BACKING THEM UP. ohh and what do you think we can use to help take out a kraytedragon now? i already group with 5-6 people to take them out. please just shut up as far as what you KNOW about being a CH. also if you aren't part of a forum dont go in there and troll or flam people just to see if you can piss us all off. most ch are fine or happy with the changes so please dont speak as though you know what we all think.
Hello?
What the hell is everyone on about. MCH CANNOT solo anything in this game MCH + COMBAT profession can....so try nerfing the combat professions. The only reason they can is because they can do stupid amounts of damage before their pet dies.
I'm a MBE MCH with no combat skills whatsoever apart from my creatures. Even as a master using a bio Gurreck the damage he can inflict for me is pitiful. Yeah I could pull out 2 GM's and set them on a voritor lair, then I could wait for an hour while they SLOWLY wore each other down as I died of boredom leaving me with 2 trashed pets that takeforever to heal up and a whole ton of wasted stims. Ooooh feel the power.
You solo'd the lair because you could fire a gun that took off a couple of K a shot while the pets held them away from you, not because of the pets. As a MCH I can't do anything apart from defence, I defend my hard hitting groupmates, all the power players are masters at a combat profession as well. MCH is a defensive role, the combat professions are offensive, the best players are the ones who combine offence and defence to the best combination. You want balancing, take away the stupidly powerful weapons and DOT attacks...
Just because you don't have a very high hit modifier doesn't mean your weren't blasting big chunks off of those Voritors, and i'll wager it was a whole bucketload more damage thanyour Grondainflicted withits wimpy slaps against medium amour.
No i'm not a megalomaniac, I love critters so I became a MBE and a MCH......MCH should be a viable combat profession but its not, all I get to do is send them in and watch them get beaten up and this patch is looking as though I won't even be able to do that. Throw in the lovely proposed agro on the pet handler and i'm gonna be dying a whole bunch more as well.
Nice.
MCH CANNOT solo anything in this game
Last time I checked my Gronda could totally clobber Meat Lumps and Swooper gang members without my help... I could have sworn that was a solo encounter without my help. Oh and then there's the people who take their Grauls to Dathomir and have them rip Malklocs to shreads and Shearmites. As a matter of fact to say a CH (let alone a master) cannot solo without any combat skills is utterly riduculous. Now under the new system a CL50 critter will now rip through Grauls rather than the other way around now so being a master just became alot more beneficial as that CL50 rating has a meaning now.
Personally I find no problem soloing in the game as a doctor/BE/CH even though my largest creature is a dewback at the moment. Yes it does take a little while longer to kill things, however if your pets are getting trashed in the meantime well then you are not taking very good care of them are you?
Yes it is much easier for me if I am hunting with a group or at least someone that knows the right way to hold a weapon As for soloing lairs, everything isa choice, if you choose to attack a lair that everything swarms or aggros then yes you will most likely die, or at least you will be running away while your pet gives up its life for you. Now remember though, CH is derived from the Scouting profession, thus it follows that it has limitations concerning combat. Most of these can be overcome with intelligence and planning, Personally I enjoy using the greatest weapon in the entire game...... the BE Death-touch!! hehe
Simoras Ewack
Wanderhome doctor/BE/CH
Death to **edit** Wars!
A combat class with a pet is more than twice as effective as one without. SOE screwed the game up by even introducing the CH class. It ain't Star Wars. It's been pretty obvious throughout this game that the devs were not SW fans.
The game would be infinitely improved by removing CH, and increasing each player's ability to use NPC faction henchmen (pets). Squad based combat makes a lot more sense in this mileu than Beastmasters. Recruiting and maintaining NPC henchmen should be EXPENSIVE. Henchmen should evolve with the player. Getting one killed should be painful. BE's should be able to create clone armies, not doggies and kitties. Or snakes and birds.
CH are far from the most powerful profession. You must be getting us confused with TKA, pistoleers, commandos and BH. You do know that TKA are capable of soloing the final part of the act 2 badge quest, don't you? And pretty easily, from the one I saw. Yet we see them getting more increases in power patch after patch.
Why does everyone assume that CH and TKA/pistoleer are different professions? Everyone knows that CH is not the strongest profession.
The strongest profession is CH plus either TKM, pistoleer, or commando.
You can master both CH and TK or CH and pistoleer, so don't go whining that it's somehow the fault of dabblers. Those are't dabblers, they're MASTERS, entitled to ALL THE SAME POWER as any other master. It just so happens that by choosing to devote themselves entirely to combat, they can gain huge benefits because being good at CH does not make you any worse at a combat profession. You can have all the power of a TKM and all the power of an MCH at the same time.
How do you, as a master CH, propose that they balance that combination against, say, bounty-hunters, who have to spend the same number of skill credits? Doesn't it make sense that someone who spends all the points you did PLUS all the points to be a master pistoleer should be better in combat than you who only spent half the skill credits he did?
--Insomnia
Tal-N wrote:
Anyway, once again I am sorry for venting at you.
No problem, I brush off flames and things like this quite easily. One of the drawback to ranting is that you often don't think about what your saying. Asking a master bio-engineer if they even know how much damage a CL90 Kimogila dishes out it a bit like asking if a commando knows what damage a cryoban grenade does
By all accounts though the pet should have totally wasted by the time I managed to kill just a single one of them. But look at what a Gronda is like when you break down the numberswhat with the 5500 HAM, then the 25% reduction from the light armor meaning that a single pool could take 6875 damage. Then you have the 50% kinetic resistance added after that meaning that my little Gronda is actually able to take a minimum of 10312 damage which is equal to around a CL50 critter (one without resistances mind you). That just shows why they changed the system to what it is.
I apologised for venting, I didn't concede the point at all. As far as I'm concerned you deliberately enflammed an already over-heated subject (not least by starting your own topic on the CH forums basically calling everyone that didn't agree with you an idiot) and posted here with false information on rancors vs kimo's. Only later to did you add some valid comment on using a gronda to take out a voritor lair, but seemingly fail to see the issue as being that you could use the gronda AND the flamethrower and place all the 'blame' on the gronda (and hence CH). Try the same thing without using any weapon skills - you will lose. The try the same thing without any CH abilities - you will use. The issue has ALWAYS been the combination of weapons and pets. Btw, try that same voritor lair with equivalent numbers of skill boxes in the 'best' commando skills and, with skill, you might have a shot at beating it with no pet. A CH would not have that chance without using the 'no group' bug/exploit/issue (depending on your point of view).
After 2 days off, and seeing more data slowly trickling in from TC, I am more hopeful of the overall situation. I think the whole issue has been very poorly handled by the devs and TH, giving misleading information or none at all, and basically dumping this on everyone's laps then going off on holiday. CH overall have been besieged by other players gloating and attacking them, on both a professional and personal level, for several days and quite frankly experienced players like yourself should know, and do, better than goad an already tense group of people (and yeah, experienced players like me should do better than rise to that bait - but I apologised at least).
Any TKA could do the same, as could riflemen, pistoleers and carbineers, and all those take fewer skill points than CH.
A TKA can be very quickly killed as long as they're outside 10m with the person who is shooting suffering zero damage. I've personally witnessed a TKA/Doctor solo a Giant Kimogila and totally crush it within around 2 mins, she even mentioned that she can kill a Rancor in less than 12 seconds. Thats very impressive but despite all that power I could pull out a rocket launcher and kill her in one or two hits before she could lay a finger on me if needed. That is what balance is all about, not just raw number crunching but also 'how' they work and their limitations. On the whole a TKA master is deadly in close combat but totally hopeless at everything else. Taking the other extreme, I can cause major damage at range however as soon as the target gets close to me I'm toast even if I unequip my weapon to avoid the damage multiplier. Again that is balanced even though commando's are a hybrid so they should get additional bonuses over basic elite professions (but thats a seperate story)
Here you seem to be under the mistaken perception that I mentioned something about PvP. No idea where you got that from. At the same time to totally concede the point that TKA are significantly more powerful in PvE than CH are even before the nerf. Since in PvE the TKA has total control on when to initiate the combat in all but a small handful of situations, and in those can close very rapidly without the opponent ever making a move to keep distanced, the range vs hth issue is fairly irrelevent. FYI, CH in PvP are pitiful on the whole unless they take another combat profession (in which case you are no longer fighting a CH, you are fighting THAT profession). Additionally, no CH that cares about his pets is going to get involved in PvP since you can guarantee his pets will get DBed as much and as often as possible. I have dabbled in PvP but, since my weapon skills are mediocre at best and I refuse to have my pets killed in a pointless struggle, I never use them. I pride myself in never ever having had a pet DBed in any circumstance, so PvP is out.
The point here is that we seem to be in agreement that the issue is not one of CH per se, but of CH plus other professions (notably commando and BH LLC tier), yet you consistently shoulder the blame for the problem on the CH part of the equation, instead of realising that its NEITHER profession's fault, but a fundamental issue with the way the game functions in this area that needs a complete re-think instead of what we have seen these last couple of months.
As for your complaints about late fixes and such I think you need to step back again and look at the big picture. The CH has been given the bulk of the attention for the past 6 months while professions like the chef and smuggler have been given utterly none. I'd say while you have been reduced in power again and again since beta (then again you started off high so I can see why it's been a string of nerfs) you certainly have alot more working than some of the less fortunate professions so be grateful.
I think you need to go back and read what I said at the end. YOU are the one that complains and rants about late fixes and lack of attention, and have done so more and more of late. Which was what I found ironic when I saw your post whining about CH complaining about this nerf. Apparently its ok for you to complain about things that you don't like but not for them? OK, just so I know where you stand.
And FYI, none of this oh-so-wonderful dev attention has fixed the persistent bugs with pets stopping following, autostoring themselves in mid-combat or suddenly losing 50 vitality points in one fight, so you'll have to forgive me for not being 'grateful' about a bunch of nerfs, open statements by TH that CH's are to blame for half the problems in the game and a total lack of bug fixes. Yup, really grateful for all that dev attention now.
InsomniaRado wrote: Why does everyone assume that CH and TKA/pistoleer are different professions? Everyone knows that CH is not the strongest profession.
The strongest profession is CH plus either TKM, pistoleer, or commando.
You can master both CH and TK or CH and pistoleer, so don't go whining that it's somehow the fault of dabblers. Those are't dabblers, they're MASTERS, entitled to ALL THE SAME POWER as any other master. It just so happens that by choosing to devote themselves entirely to combat, they can gain huge benefits because being good at CH does not make you any worse at a combat profession. You can have all the power of a TKM and all the power of an MCH at the same time.
How do you, as a master CH, propose that they balance that combination against, say, bounty-hunters, who have to spend the same number of skill credits? Doesn't it make sense that someone who spends all the points you did PLUS all the points to be a master pistoleer should be better in combat than you who only spent half the skill credits he did?
--Insomnia
Umm, you do actually know what the word 'profession' means in this game, don't you? As you are obviously confused, creature handler is a profession, brawler is a profession, doctor is a profession, all those seperate little tiers are different professions. A single character can have multiple professions. The strongest 'profession' CANNOT BY DEFINITION be 2 professions. CH plus something, anything, else, CANNOT be the strongest profession, since it is TWO professions. Its not an assumption to state that CH and TKA are different professions, its a statement of fact. Clear now?
Now, as far as the rest of your diatribe goes, where did I say anything about fault, dabblers or anything else? If you slowed down and actually read, you would know that I am FULLY aware that the issue is the combination of professions that is the problem. Which is why I am disappointed that a more imaginative solution to that issue could not be found. yet you seem to actually be in favour of the CH+combat profession imbalance that is currently the case - well, I *think* that is what you were trying to say, your post is a little garbledas far asan actual point being made.