Bio Engineer Archive
Thread: Hot Issues
Akelan,
I agree with you that getting MBE will provide you with the bare bones necessities to play the profession...
There is a huge difference between having the min requirements and playing a professionand being successful in a profession.
Mask scent is a must for creature clones. Using level 70 YMPW is not realistic... they are not common enough to make multiple creatures with on a routine bases...
Without them, how many other non-aggro creatures can provide you with Armor and 60% kinetic (a must have for PvE pets)?
Without Artisan to survey you are dependant on other to give you WPs or to buy resources on the market. On the first part, I have never seen Artisans selling WPs... Trying to find a reliable artisan to survey all your mineral needs is very unlikely... On the second point, you could never compete with other BE, cost wise, if you bought all your stuff off the market...
Without combat, you are depend on hunters for meat... you need 20k of meat pet full run of BSN BTW... since doctors drive the cost of most meats up to an insane level, unless there is a good dath carn meat spawn you better expect to drop 20-100+cpu for meat.
How about merchant? With no vendor your sales **will** be severely cut... I made 2million in my first month and a halfof BE without a vendor... I made 15 million in 2 weeks with a vendor... Pleasenote that I consider myself a casual MBE.. that is I take few orders every now and thenand dont spend a lot of time "working" in game.
When you add it all up, while you can function as a MBE without anything but BE skills, you wont be successful. You'll get by and make a few credits... but the minute you by one AV-21, one semi UbEr gun, one semi UbEr loot, ect ect ect you will have you bank account wiped for the next several weeks to months...
On Bria, 20mill is about middle class... I would like to see a MBE with only MBE make 20mill as fast a one can with any elite combat profession and scout hunting 4... Hell, right now there is a doctor who routinely buy herb meat at 100cpu.... I can get 17k of it per 3hrs... so in about 18hrs of hunting (3 hrs per day for 6 days) I just made myself a cool 10mil... Try that with bare-bones MBE 
Message Edited by SomeUser on 06-03-2004 10:10 AM
Vezek I quite agree that all the additions are GOOD to have, but I think, if it came down to convincing SOE that we HAVE to have them to succeed as a BE, we would be at a very strong logical disadvantage. The arguments all run on the side of "it's useful to have" this or that, and "almost essential", or "it makes it easier, better, more lucrative, etc." and I support them, but they are not "it's not possible without" and that is the defining factor.
BTW, I do quite well without Artisan skills, and I was a resource merchant of some significant reknown early in the game's history on another server than my current one. I use several friends that are Artisans with good survey skills, and tell them what I need to find. They survey, find waypoints, and I usually tip them 10-20K for the WP if it is for me alone, or help them find a market (and sometimes offer to buy what they harvest if it is something I want to stock up on) if they harvest there as well.
They rely on me for good advice on what to harvest, and who to try to sell it to; I rely on them for the locations I need to harvest. It works quite well; 10K is quite reasonable for the time I do not have to spend searching, and my friends are doing quite well based on also harvesting those things that a BE, Chef, Medic or Doctor are likely to need, as well as having a good resource for whether or not something else they find a high concentration of is worth harvesting as a sale item.
Pretty much all of them have some killer pets too, whether CH or non-CH, to guard them while they survey, as well as to help them hunt for the organics I often buy from them.
Yes, it does mean I cannot do it all myself; but it also means I am free to invest some skill points in enough CH to field a formidable pet or two, and hunt for some of the better organics I need as well. Sometimes the investment in people is worth more than the investment in skill points. My lady and partner is a master Architect and runs a vendor for me, and I provide her with the pets for decorating, which she is quite skilled at doing. Our mayor is a master tailor, and I trade tissues for the mask scent, taming and healing enhanced clothing I need. We also share waypoints to any high-value resource, or nearby energy and common resource, and will have many of the core citizens of the town drop a harvester on something one of our crafting citizens needs to stock up if it is nearby, or of exceptional quality.
All of our templates are trade-offs, and how well you use those skills points in the things you need is as important to your success as the experimentation we do on our clones, but we're not limited to the skills WE alone have if we work together.
LLan
Akelan wrote:
I quite agree that all the additions are GOOD to have, but I think, if it came down to convincing SOE that we HAVE to have them to succeed as a BE, we would be at a very strong logical disadvantage. The arguments all run on the side of "it's useful to have" this or that, and "almost essential", or "it makes it easier, better, more lucrative, etc." and I support them, but they are not "it's not possible without" and that is the defining factor.
All of our templates are trade-offs, and how well you use those skills points in the things you need is as important to your success as the experimentation we do on our clones, but we're not limited to the skills WE alone have if we work together.
It is not, IMHO, about what we **need**. It is about having an equal potential per SP investment as other professions... This problem is not unique to hybrids like BE.. It is likely the worse for BH... Look how many SP a BH has to spend to be a master... Is there any doubt that those same SP couldnt be spend in riflemen/CM which would not only give you better defenses but also much more killing power?
My point I am attempting to make
The justification the DEVs have used is that we can make powerful creations and that we can craft powerful tissues and additives...
ROFL
Creatures are a joke. Tissues hardly sell, and every chef want additives forbare-bones cost or a free schematic.
**if** we were rolling in the money making powerful products I wouldnt complain... But when there isnt enough SP left over afer mastering bio-engineering to give me the same versatility and profitas what can be spent SP wise in other "artisan"professions.... That is when I say, "Hey... wait a minute"
Maybe if SOE does something about rebalancing creatures to be powerful and useful again... Maybe if SOE curves the ease of making additive schematics (IE sub components on the BE side for additives with the extra step moved from chef to BE)... Maybe if there are some new and more useful tissue for tailors and tailor clothing decayed a little faster and was unusable with it reaches 0 condition (dunno if they fixed that).
I personally would like to see BE either balanced (as stated above) or moved to a "regular" elite profession rather then a hybrid one that requires two basics... something more along the line of the artisan tree...
Akelan wrote:BTW, I do quite well without Artisan skills, and I was a resource merchant of some significant reknown early in the game's history on another server than my current one. I use several friends that are Artisans with good survey skills, and tell them what I need to find. They survey, find waypoints, and I usually tip them 10-20K for the WP if it is for me alone, or help them find a market (and sometimes offer to buy what they harvest if it is something I want to stock up on) if they harvest there as well.
And did you keep *any* of your vendors? If so, you failed the "only artisans should have vendors" test. If you do have vendors, how many items do you have for sale (if it's greater than 150, then you failed the proposed limit test). We are a crafting profession. We cannot craft anything directly usable by ourselves except CL10 pets. They tell us we can create powerful creatures, but then they nerf them when someone figures out how to make them powerful.
I point out again that any other crafting profession (excluding doctors, rangers, and CMs) has novice artisan whereas we do not. That gives them an extra 15 skill points when it comes to getting the vendors. They only have to invest in 3 skill boxes, whereas we have to invest in those 3 and novice artisan. Like NancyJ said, until they make a system for merchants to actually *be* merchants (i.e. consignment sales), BE's get screwed.
Don't get me wrong, I love this profession. The B-E community isn't completely full of whiners like most other on these forums, and it's very hard to be a master be. It's damn easy to get the title, but to actually be the best of the profession takes time and dedication. I actually feel the only two classes in this entire game that got content were us and BH (and I mastered BH back in my hologrinding days). I don't plan on leaving, but if they nerf vendors to hell and back, I'll go back to playing Natural Selection until Guild Wars or World of Warcraft comes out. I mean, what's the point of being a B-E if I can't sell my products (I'm speaking specifically about the 150 item limit, but also mentioning the removal of "poached vendors"). Sure, I could drop master doctor and pick up novice artisan, and grind up chef or tailor. But I shouldn't be forced to do so just to be able to sell product (read as - you can't be a master B-E, artisan 0/0/3/0, and master anything but another artisan based profession or Creature Handler as you only have 91 skill points left after that assuming you have exploration IV, and if you don't share with me exactly how you make a CL70 creature please
. Hell, if you only go master be with master chef, artisan 0/4/3/0, and scout 4/0/4/0, you only have 14 skill points left over - not even enough to pick up another novice profession 
).I guess all I'm saying is we need a way to sell the stuff we make without making an extra 15 point skill investment. I'm getting tired of hearing the whining from the merchants about their vendors being poached, when they get extra abilities (map registration, lower fees, etc). Granted, when someone drops the required skills the map registration should be removed, but damn - vendors (in *my* opinion) should be available to all - even if it's only in the form of the bulky one.
Bracci wrote:
but damn - vendors (in *my* opinion) should be available to all - even if it's only in the form of the bulky one.
I agree with everything you have said until this point
I dont think everyone should be able to have a vendor.
My proposal would be that all master crafting professions get one vendor at master... It should be the bulky version, have a higher maintenance, have an item cap, **and** have a max price cap lower then the merchant vendor... I say between 100k-250k.
I think Merchants should be able to have a much higher item cap **and** retain the ability to sell things for 99mil... perhaps a scaling system where the higher you go up on the merchant tree the more items you can store per vendor... Then at Master Merchant you should be able to have atleast a 500-1000 item limit per vendor.
Merchant's should also have a UI that allows them to easily sell items of other players.. The sales would go directly to the player with a % being cut being given to the merchant.
This would save some data-space, stop everyone and their moms from using vendors as storage, allow non-business 3/merchants to sell a limited amount of items, and give merchants a nitch in the SWG economy.
This is obviously just a brief overview of the situation. Their are a lot of awesome ideas being floated around the merchant forums... However, it isnt fair that a skill given to one class can be kept without having to invest any SP. It obviously dilutes the merchant's role as well as cause problems that range from "monopolies" to mass empty vendors on the planetary map.
Message Edited by SomeUser on 06-04-2004 03:20 AM
I would love to see creature type on the name of DNA samples, it would make it so much easier to find what you want, instead of having to store the separate types in individual bags...
Also i believe the CL during experimentation is a MUST HAVE...