Bio Engineer Archive
Thread: Old Timer Bio Engineer, Had Enough?
Hello all,
I decided to write this post, maybe hoping for encouragement, or maybe just out of frustration. You see, I have been a Bio Engineer since retail. Having never played BETA, I received my game and read through the manual looking for the right character, and class. Once I stumbled on the Bio Engineering profession, it was almost a no brainer. That’s what I wanted to do!
Well, I worked hard, and played long, and enjoyed my trip to the top, one of the first master Bio Engineers on my server, which I soon coupled with another class, Tailor. Business was good at first... people were buying my pets, my clothing, and I always maintained a since of realizem about my prices, I never gouged, and still made plenty of money to buy things I wanted. It wasn't to long before I was hit with questions, questions I shouldn't have had to answer. Things like, "why can't I use a stimpack C when I have +10 Medicine Use", "How come I can't tame this pet, I am a master CH"? These questions, I had no answer to and was later to be revealed as bugs. These bugs which were not fixed for months to come. Those bugs were just the ones my customers where dealing with, meanwhile I sat there scratching my head, scouring the boards for answers to my own personal bugs, like, "why won't the factory take my schematic", "why did this clothing item not have mods when I clearly used modded components in it?"
Bio Engineering sure has changed from the first day, but now I find myself asking has it really? Are things really fixed? I am stubborn, I want this class to be fun, I really do! I purchased another account so that I may work on the Jedi profession because I honestly didn't want to give up this character. 6 months, or is it 7 months now.. I have held on to my original character choices, and now here i am righting this letter. I just don't think I can take it anymore.
There are several issues I feel that have completely ruined my outlook,
Bio Engineers, are the most restricted crafting class, our mods cap per tissue, and cap per clothing item. No matter what you do, how good of resources you use; you are confined to these caps. And quite honestly the mods aren't all that great. Pets are also now.. severally hindered by level caps, and stats. My vision probably wrong had always held a Bio Engineer as a character who can make better pets, work with science to increase and manipulate things for the better. Since are class mainly caters to CH, we need to have something they REALLY want. Those few days we had where we could make crazy pets (way overboard) but it actually gave me, and I think to many of us, the freedom to Bio Engineer that has always and now currently is missing from the class. I had a blast making 10K HAM Bunnies, I had a Blast Sampling for Days, dieing, cloning and jumping right back at it. I knew the things I made were awesome and I was proud to keep doing it. Now, you tell that to my third generation gurreck with 60% Kinetic/Energy Level 30 no armor, and 40-60 damage. That thing took me a VERY LONG time to make, and whats it worth?? 5K for house decoration?
What about our mods, you know I get asked daily even after 6 months of never having the ability to make them, for mods like, rifle speed, accuracy with X weapon, Squad Leader, Combat Medic.. you name a class they all feel we should be able to make some mods for them. And god dang it.. I agree. There are only two mods that I feel hold any weight at all, and those are the Medical, and Melee Mods (the most restricted mod we can produce). So why can't we make a variety of mods? The only thing that I have seen happen since release is the lose of mods we can make. Yet we have a whole line of chef enhancements that are not worth half the value of the resources used to make them.
The last thing I want to bring up is the nature in which we make pets. BE's are the only class that has to risk their lives to craft an Item. We go out, we sample, we get agro we have no defenses (given to us per class) we die. We die a lot! Did you bring your crafting tool with you? O crap there went 250 on insurance.. o you didn't insure your +14 crafting tool? Here's your 5% decay.. thxpleasedrivethru. We have a lot of traveling, a lot of dieing, and a lot of variables that go into crafting just one pet. Why is this process so tedious and now lackluster and ill rewarding?
I hope those who were considering this class, or playing this class that are having fun, don't take this any more then me being just out of place. If you're having fun by god have fun! Thats what it is all about. For me though, these issues, some new, some very old. have brought me to my crossroads. The crossroads in which my Jedi character sits at.. A refusal to play till things get fixed. I am not leaving, and I do enjoy this game, just not this profession, that I dearly wanted to play.
Do I have the answers, do I know how to fix things?.. well maybe but who am I to ask for fixes, like, more mod diveristy, bio implants, random elite profession mods, easier animal breeding, animal mod implenments, after-market clothing attachments, and sharks with lazer eyes, while things like Droid Engineer after 6 months of brokeness just catch a wet luggy in the face. No.. I don't have the right.. or do I?
Hello all,
I decided to write this post, maybe hoping for encouragement, or maybe just out of frustration. You see, I have been a Bio Engineer since retail. Having never played BETA, I received my game and read through the manual looking for the right character, and class. Once I stumbled on the Bio Engineering profession, it was almost a no brainer. That’s what I wanted to do!
Well, I worked hard, and played long, and enjoyed my trip to the top, one of the first master Bio Engineers on my server, which I soon coupled with another class, Tailor. Business was good at first... people were buying my pets, my clothing, and I always maintained a since of realizem about my prices, I never gouged, and still made plenty of money to buy things I wanted. It wasn't to long before I was hit with questions, questions I shouldn't have had to answer. Things like, "why can't I use a stimpack C when I have +10 Medicine Use", "How come I can't tame this pet, I am a master CH"? These questions, I had no answer to and was later to be revealed as bugs. These bugs which were not fixed for months to come. Those bugs were just the ones my customers where dealing with, meanwhile I sat there scratching my head, scouring the boards for answers to my own personal bugs, like, "why won't the factory take my schematic", "why did this clothing item not have mods when I clearly used modded components in it?"
Bio Engineering sure has changed from the first day, but now I find myself asking has it really? Are things really fixed? I am stubborn, I want this class to be fun, I really do! I purchased another account so that I may work on the Jedi profession because I honestly didn't want to give up this character. 6 months, or is it 7 months now.. I have held on to my original character choices, and now here i am righting this letter. I just don't think I can take it anymore.
There are several issues I feel that have completely ruined my outlook,
Bio Engineers, are the most restricted crafting class, our mods cap per tissue, and cap per clothing item. No matter what you do, how good of resources you use; you are confined to these caps. And quite honestly the mods aren't all that great. Pets are also now.. severally hindered by level caps, and stats. My vision probably wrong had always held a Bio Engineer as a character who can make better pets, work with science to increase and manipulate things for the better. Since are class mainly caters to CH, we need to have something they REALLY want. Those few days we had where we could make crazy pets (way overboard) but it actually gave me, and I think to many of us, the freedom to Bio Engineer that has always and now currently is missing from the class. I had a blast making 10K HAM Bunnies, I had a Blast Sampling for Days, dieing, cloning and jumping right back at it. I knew the things I made were awesome and I was proud to keep doing it. Now, you tell that to my third generation gurreck with 60% Kinetic/Energy Level 30 no armor, and 40-60 damage. That thing took me a VERY LONG time to make, and whats it worth?? 5K for house decoration?
What about our mods, you know I get asked daily even after 6 months of never having the ability to make them, for mods like, rifle speed, accuracy with X weapon, Squad Leader, Combat Medic.. you name a class they all feel we should be able to make some mods for them. And god dang it.. I agree. There are only two mods that I feel hold any weight at all, and those are the Medical, and Melee Mods (the most restricted mod we can produce). So why can't we make a variety of mods? The only thing that I have seen happen since release is the lose of mods we can make. Yet we have a whole line of chef enhancements that are not worth half the value of the resources used to make them.
The last thing I want to bring up is the nature in which we make pets. BE's are the only class that has to risk their lives to craft an Item. We go out, we sample, we get agro we have no defenses (given to us per class) we die. We die a lot! Did you bring your crafting tool with you? O crap there went 250 on insurance.. o you didn't insure your +14 crafting tool? Here's your 5% decay.. thxpleasedrivethru. We have a lot of traveling, a lot of dieing, and a lot of variables that go into crafting just one pet. Why is this process so tedious and now lackluster and ill rewarding?
I hope those who were considering this class, or playing this class that are having fun, don't take this any more then me being just out of place. If you're having fun by god have fun! Thats what it is all about. For me though, these issues, some new, some very old. have brought me to my crossroads. The crossroads in which my Jedi character sits at.. A refusal to play till things get fixed. I am not leaving, and I do enjoy this game, just not this profession, that I dearly wanted to play.
Do I have the answers, do I know how to fix things?.. well maybe but who am I to ask for fixes, like, more mod diveristy, bio implants, random elite profession mods, easier animal breeding, animal mod implenments, after-market clothing attachments, and sharks with lazer eyes, while things like Droid Engineer after 6 months of brokeness just catch a wet luggy in the face. No.. I don't have the right.. or do I?
Well for starters you need to rethink about how the new cloning system is actually offering far more freedom than the old one, you say you dislike caps but the fact is that every profession in the game which crafts anything has caps. You never find an FWG5 causing 1000 points of damage for example or an LLC causing 50-100 points of damage. The fact is that limitations are imposed on everything because of balance, it's the same for every game in existance aside from the really unpopular ones where you find people getting sick of there being something which always wins or always is the best solution. Even in some cases there are games where people police themselves and don't use certain overpowered features for the sake of keeping things fair and enjoyable.
Getting back to the new cloning system anyway, there is total freedom now to create what we want. Thats a huge step away from the old one which had fixed specials, fixed resistances and generally all you did was push them a bit higher by small amounts. You never ended up with overpowered clones back then except when you had the baby dna bug which was corrected, As for the tissues being useless, i have to disagree. They were very popular at first, everyone wanted them. Things have just slowed down because clothing isn't vanishing when it's condition reaches zero and no one knows if the skill mods still work then that happens so your seeing a saturation point now.
One of your biggest mistakes is that you rushed to master your profession, as you said you were one of the first on your server. That was why you don't find it as enjoyable anymore cause you didn't allow your char to level simply from enjoying the game and as we all know when you hit master there is alot less motivation to keep going. Thankfully this new cloning system is complex enough to give plenty of entertainment to us masters.
On the point of dying I have to disagree. I can go entire days of sampling without dying even though I suffer aggro just as much as anyone else. The secret is to learn how far you can push sampling to avoid aggro while getting the samples you need. You don't have to sample every animal you meet to death, I usually grab 3 samples and then move on if I don't fancy getting aggro'd and deathblown. We are certainly not the only profession to risk out lives to craft items. The difference is that other crafting professions can rely on combat players to gather the materials for them, we have been saying for ages there needs to be a way for other professions to bring us dna or something which we can extract dna from (the blood sample idea that I started a while seems to be a popular soltution) but your claim that we're the single most limited profession is way off, think of the tailors, think of thedoctors or weaponsmiths. They can't even get hides and meats on their own skills and they all need to deal with caps or hard limitations on their items. Compared to them bio-engineers have it easy because our clones now have such huge variety.
Well Tal-N thanks for responding, I know you have been at this awhile as well. I am glad you still have encouraging words to say, but frankly I am currenly not able to share those feelings. I do agree in that the clone system is far better then it used to be, but it still is complex and tedious to get any worthwhile results.
Some of the differences I see from what you are saying is that you must be a Bio Engineer and a combat class of some sort, that is something I am not. I have no fighting skills, and was barely able to muster the points I needed to pick up Mask scent to even try the new clone system. Tailor and Bio Engineer leaves very little room for anything but that. I am also worried about the new merchant item thing.. to a degree.. I think you'll see alot of people in the boat I am with not having enough skill credits to function. But alas I have almost completly stopped making items, so not incredably worried about that.
Speaking of cloning...you seem to have cloned your post...hehe
I have not been a BE since the beginning, but I was one before the new system. I have since finished and dropped it in favour of a different calling, but it was not because the proffession....it was a hard one to drop.
Sure, we are the middle men of society, but everything we can make is wanted. The only crafting professions that really get a constant flow of purchases are weaponsmiths and maybe armorsmiths... and thats the good ones.
I would love to see more bio-mod variety, but thats not how it is. We will soon be having more chefs to purchase our other enhancements. And as people experiment more and more, we will see more control over our pet's specials and HAM and resists...things are only just getting started for this prof. I wish I was the type to craft and gather resources and craft and sell...but I have another character for that. I had my fun, I made some money, I made pets for friends. My time is up. But for you...waiting so long for this to come...now would be the last time to leave...unless of course you wish to pursue other professions as I decided to.
I hope you see the true worth of this profession. And if you do decide to drop it, I wish you the best of luck in your future profession.
Raptorfish,
I think you're suffering from the "grass is always greener" syndrome, and are perhaps a little burnt out. Seriously, the complaints that you make, while all valid and true, and frustrate all of us, are really not specific to BE at all.
1) Caps on mods: I think you will find that other crafting classes are no different when it comes to "caps". You'll never see an architect with a heavy harvester with a rate of 20 for example, and the others are all the same. Chefs are never going to be able to make a TS better then +x, a medic is never going to be able to make a wound pack better than +y, and so forth. BE is no different than any of these. When you make a tissue of +17 you feel very good about it, when you make one that is +12 you feel very bad about it, and everything in between.
In fact I'm surprised that someone with tailor experience would complain about this point, as of course tailors, unlike BE's, have no way to differentiate themselvesAT ALLin terms of the quality of their products. One black muscle shirt is identical to any other no matter who makes it or what materials go into it.
2) Variety of mods: yep, of course, we all wish there were more. All of us get asked every day for new ones. Yesterday a smuggler asked me for a "slicing" tissue. I thought "what a cool idea!, never heard that request before" but of course I was helpless to do anything other than bring it up here. HOWEVER, try a class like droid engineer, or tailor, or weaponsmith. Those classes have not seen a single new schematic since launch (to my knowledge). Think weaponsmiths don't want to make new guns? or tailors want to make new clothes? or DE's want to make new droids? BE is no different, only we've gotten much much more new stuff to play with than nearly anybody else.
Anyhow, do what's fun for ya, changing professions every now and again is a good thing, no need to leave bitterly (not saying you are) or have a lot of regrets etc, but it really is ok to give something up that you had fun with and are tired of, and move on. You don't even need to have a reason 
I would just caution you though if you think that somehow by switching to something else that suddenly those problems you bring up will go away, because in all liklihood not only will they not, but you'll discover newdrawbacks with your new profession as well. But have fun, and see you around.
The cloning system is better than it was, but is still pretty awful. There is little rhyme or reason to CL levels, and what little reason their isis faulty.There are really only a score or so creatures in the game worth sampling. Most of them spawn on one of 3 planets. Though we are one of three class that could logically use rare trophy drops to enhance our crafts, for some reason the one that really gets the benefit is Weapon Smith. While I've tried to see where adding tiget guts to my ruger would improve its accuracy or damage, I've not yet figured that out.
6 months, and they can't add the ability to get milk or mollusks in any sane way. I still believe there are more krayt dragon pearls than gallons of milk in the universe.
Our chef components are essentially useless because of the costs to make them... either reduce the costs or increase the value.
There are a dozen things our cloths ought to do but don't - resist poison, resist damage types, improve awareness and stat related skills. I can't believe it takes that much time to add a stat enhancing cloth to the game.
I'm tired of people making excuses for the Devs. They are doing a crappy job. I can live with bugs, because I know they will happen, but so many of the problems with the game are just bad game design and poor consideration of the consequences. That I'm not very forgiving about.
I'm not very understanding about the limited resources excuse either. They rake in over $3 million a month in revenue, and I seriously doubt very much of that is required for equipment maintenance. They should have been able to hire enough people to get this game out of beta after 6 months and $20 million dollars (with box sales).
This is my second time in. I feel like I've exhausted the content again. I don't think I play too much.
Been a lot of changes.
But there is always a few minor discrepencies.
But then again as a consumate gamer having far more games than most people and playing many I suppose that can make me picky since I feel like many developer teams have access to the other products out there and should at least try to do better then the other people or at least as good.
Mattakar wrote:
6 months, and they can't add the ability to get milk or mollusks in any sane way. I still believe there are more krayt dragon pearls than gallons of milk in the universe.
Mattakar, scouts are getting the ability to milk certain animals in an upcoming release. See the scout forum for details.
For all the bitching we've done about this one issue though, I really don't think this will have that big an impact. The taming tissue will become commonplace but as I understand that tissue it really doesn't seem all that useful to me, and I think the only reason it sells for such high prices is the perception that it does more and the fact that milk is so rare.
The "milk fix" is actually being done for the chefs more than anything else.
My understanding is that it lets non wookies get those last 7 points they need to call level 70 agro pets. I get lots of tells asking for them. I tell them to bring me the milk.
It doesn't really matter if it would be a big seller or not though. Its an easy thing to fix. And there is something wrong in a game where milk and shellfish are the most precious commodities in the universe, lol.
Also, if the tissues are useless, that indicates an even larger problem than the lack of resources.
I also have been a BE for a very long time. I didn't master the profession because I saw very little use in it. We were the forgotten few. When mounts hit testcenter I worked on my master. I also worked on creature handler so I could train my own creations. This proved to be a very lucrative combination. When the mount market crashed I went back to the same BE I was before, veterinarian. I was on the verge of closing my account.
I absolutely agree the chef tissues are pointless. Besides, I've never even been asked by a chef to make these tissues. Tailor tissues on the other hand are a hot commodity. I make 3 main tissues, medical, mask scent, and entertainer heal. I've made the taming vicious tissues...once. The tissue line has some very valuable items and some completely useless items.
But...
The clone system now is so vastly different than it was before. In the old system the difference betweena master BE eopie and a novice BE eopie was so slight no one really noticed. You didn't need to be a master to make mounts either. Now all that's changed. Never in the history of the game have you seen a level 35 gnort with light armorthat does 360 damage, nice resists, two specials and a ranged attack. A fat, leathery, critter with kooky ears that can kill you in the blink of an eye. Want a kaadu with armor? Its definitely a possibility now. I own one Is the system easy to understand? Absolutely not. I, for one, find that a challenge and am having a lot of fun figuring out my own answers.
If you're worried about your crafting tools decaying the answer is simple. Insurance? Heck no! Mouse droid with storage capacity!!! Put your tools in the droid along with anything else that decays. When you die your mouse stored items are safe and sound and you didn't have to buy insurance on it. You also freed up 10 slots in your inventory for more DNA 
Before I figured out this simple tactic I was furious about the death decay (or crafters penalty as I like to call it). Decay destroyed some of the best tools I've owned. Now its not a big deal.
I agree there are some definite issues with this profession. All the professions have issues. I'm happy that our issues are more inline with the others. We aren't the forgotten few although our dev refuses to talk to us for whatever reason. Now we're the confused and uninformed 