Bio Engineer Archive

I'm not all that experienced a BE with regards to pet crafting, but have been doing it for a while. I logged on to TC-Bria last night and created my BE on Lowca. I was only able to test for about 45 minutes late last night and I wasn't as lucid as I'd hoped to be.. (Patch took forever to download).

Ranged appears to not be carrying over in DNA samples of creatures with known ranged attacks (Blurrg varieties).

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PsyberOwl wrote:

I'm not all that experienced a BE with regards to pet crafting, but have been doing it for a while. I logged on to TC-Bria last night and created my BE on Lowca. I was only able to test for about 45 minutes late last night and I wasn't as lucid as I'd hoped to be.. (Patch took forever to download).

Ranged appears to not be carrying over in DNA samples of creatures with known ranged attacks (Blurrg varieties).

While individual stats in DNA may be increased by sampling a higher level creature (as from a mission lair), that doesn't mean that the heightened level equivalent will carry through. Mixing some Level 73 Lantern Bird DNA into Jaxes still only gave me a little increase over their CL 32. I didn't try a pure level 73 lantern bird critter though to see what it produced.

Level variance did seem as affected by experimentation. I made one clone from Arachne Queen (65) and Widow (63) DNA and it came out about 64-65 with all 10 Experimentation points in it. I don't know if this was a fluke, if I mis-read something or my eyes were just too blurred from being tired.

I don't know if this is helpful or not.

The Bar-erras Clan

Lowca Galaxy

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for the time being, I'm not testing mission spawn mobs for DNA... if only because a mBioE/mScout is CL19.

Message Edited by lammergeier on 05-25-2005 04:45 AM

Oh, and does this include droids as well or just non-CH animals?

I saw that non-ch pet thing in the patch notes and shook my head. It's a pointless nerf that I believe does compromise what limited appeal non-ch pets have post-cu.

99.9% of the people out there fighting are carefully watching their xp meter, and more often then not that is the very purpose of them being out there.When I go out now you wouldn't believe the whining when we get a level 80 mission rather than a level 82 mission. So the very thought of owning something that costs you xp is almost unthinkable. No way would you use it. You go to an entertainer to raise your xp-gain by 10%, then you go to a BE to reduce your xp gain by whatever %, lol, makes no sense.

Non-ch pets were actually useful post-cu for "pulling" a single creature out of a pack so that you could gang up on it and kill it without disturbing the rest of the herd. But I can't see it being used that way anymore.

Coupled with the fact that pets won't tank anyway makes non-ch pets 100% useless to people in any kind of grouped combat situation in my book.

I don't think this seriously damages their desirability to non-combatants however. What I'd like to know though is "why" they thought this nerf was a good idea. It just seems pointless to me. The only thing I can figure is that it may be an admission that they don't have a good way of dealing with some of the "uber" pets that slipped through, and they want to make sure there is little benefit or incentive to owning such things.

Message Edited by ArthurDentOnBria on 05-24-2005 10:38 AM

I came to that same conclussion Arthur but what they're doing is throwing out the baby with the bath water because they can't figure out how to respec the uber pets.

I agree. I fail to see what the Non-CH XP loss is accomplishing. How many people do you see using Non-CH pets in serious combat anyway? Furthermore, the "they could've done worse" point is a little insipid. We shouldn't be accepting these seemingly arbitrary and unresearched decisions on that principle alone.

Arthur, what happened to your sig? There's a 'Droid' where the word 'Bio' used to be?

So does this apply to droids as well? You don't need a cert or skill points to use a combat droid. I own one. It's saved me on more than one occassion. It's a nice combo to go with a CL10 pet. Should it also be a cdef equivalent? Will I lose loot rights because my droid killed the NPC instead of me? They might as well take non-CH pets out of the game entirely if this is going to be the case.

This is indeed a nerf. It isn't a respec. A nooby that is going to try to get all the xp they can getis not going to purchase a product that might cause them to advance at a slower pace or create a situation where the pet has loot rights instead of the owner.

A mid level combatant is not going to want something that, in all intents and purposes, has no benefit. The first shot fired by the combatant will pull aggro onto themselves. The pet isn't even a distraction any longer. This happens in most cases already. Now we're asked to reduce the amount of damage done by the pets or risk penalizing the owner for using it.

I own a CL10 that does more damage than I do with my novice rifle skills. I made the animal specifically to hold aggro. It is a pre-curb pet that passed the respec with it's stats intact. I use it when I need to escape aggro from DNA sampling and when I'm gathering organics for tissue products. This nerf takes that away from me.

I rate this up there with the other bonehead, moronic moves, the developers have made so far.

I sure assume so. But then again I'm in no rush to even make any of those right now due to the fact that armor cannot be crafted for them, and their regen is messed up etc.

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Spazzers wrote:

So does this apply to droids as well?

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In the droid vs non-CH pets arena, I have never understood why you can have a CL 18 droid, but only a CL 10 pet. Pets are pets -a CL 10 droid should be equal to a CL 10 BE pet. If a player can have a CL 18 droid, why not a CL 18 animal?

I have to agree with Spazzers on this new "patch". It sounds more like a nerf to our Cl 10 pets than a fix to anything. Who wants to go hunting with a pet that will take your looting rights or xp? At least give CH xp for using one....that would make a (very) little sense.

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Aleskander wrote:

In the droid vs non-CH pets arena, I have never understood why you can have a CL 18 droid, but only a CL 10 pet. Pets are pets -a CL 10 droid should be equal to a CL 10 BE pet. If a player can have a CL 18 droid, why not a CL 18 animal?

I have to agree with Spazzers on this new "patch". It sounds more like a nerf to our Cl 10 pets than a fix to anything. Who wants to go hunting with a pet that will take your looting rights or xp? At least give CH xp for using one....that would make a (very) little sense.

As for why they may have done this, I can almost but not really understand. It's to prevent an exploit where players could pull a high level NPC or mob into a lair of mobs to kill something way higher than they are. They just don't bother to differentiate between CL 10 pets and any other non-CH mobs.

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From what I reacall, the reason behind why a Droid is CL18 and not CL10 is due to the difference in crafting abilities for a BE and a DE. Non-CH BE crafted petswere much more flexible for HAM, damage, specials, and resists. Droids, on the other hand, had a much more linear crafting progession. Armor was set at 20%, with HAM maxing at 6k, 4.5k and 3.2k for the 3 different droid types, with a maximum damage of 190ish, for a fully maxed out Probot. It was explained to me that droids needed the CL18 rating in order to accomidate what little flexiblity there was in the crafting system, since 20% resists was supposed to be limited to CL18 pets and above. So, in essence, Combat Droids were given the CL18 rating to compensate for the major flexibity in BE pet crafting, from a certain point of view.

Now that the CU has changed certain things, droids still have the CL18 rating more then likely due to the DEV team not getting around to changing the code. There are a massive number of Droid related bugs that popped up shortly prior to and durning the CU. Hopefully, now that BE crafted pets are getting a once over pass to fix some of the post-CU issues, DEs will be next on the line up of 'pet' fixes.

As for the looting rights issue....Droids are effected by this change as well. Your toon must contribute to at least 25% of the total damage done in order to gain looting rights. This was an approximate value from shortly after the code hit TC-Prime, from my own testing. The issue of reduced XP was added during the CU Beta due to issues with both of high-end non-CH pets and Combat Droids. This was done around the same point in time as pets/droids being removed from the increased group level damage mitigation, which allowed a Master CH/Other to have, in essence,3 CL 80 pets and1 CL80 droid.

The XP change was added since it increased XP gathering effectiveness of anyone between Level 1 and Level 20ish by a significant ammount. During CU testing, I was able to use a fully loaded Probot to get my toon from Level 1 to Level 15 in a matter of hours, by taking on CL 15 mobs with little to no difficulty, using the droid as my damage dealing source. This was before the Health and Health Regen on the droids was changed though.

One other item to consider with the XP reduction....

Engineered pets/droids don't level match like they should.A BE'd CL10 pet is stronger then a wild CL mob and a CL18 droid is stronger then a CL18 mob. I hate to say it, since my first love is DE,but I think when the DEVs finally get around to balancing Droids, there is a possiblity that the CL18 droids are going to be hit with a big ol' nerf bat to bring them back in line with non-CH BE crafted pets.

I agree with Spazzers that nerfing non-CH pets seems unnecessary and a bad move. Most pet crafting BEs I know sell way more CL10 pets than anything else. I think that Aleksander might be onto something though -- maybe the devs were worried about the scenario he pointed out (pulling a high level creature into another one with your pet, letting them duke it out, and getting lots of "free" XP since your pet got one hit in). Seems far-fetched that the devs would over react in such a way but I haven't heard any better justifications.

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ArthurDentOnBria wrote:

I don't think this seriously damages their desirability to non-combatants however. What I'd like to know though is "why" they thought this nerf was a good idea. It just seems pointless to me. The only thing I can figure is that it may be an admission that they don't have a good way of dealing with some of the "uber" pets that slipped through, and they want to make sure there is little benefit or incentive to owning such things.

Message Edited by ArthurDentOnBria on 05-24-2005 10:38 AM

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Barafu wrote:
......................................Most pet crafting BEs I know sell way more CL10 pets than anything else...........................

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Message Edited by Joker9125 on 05-24-2005 10:40 PM