Bio Engineer Archive

Making a >CL70 pet has its uses. If you are working for resists, you might want to bring the CL of a first gen clone high, in order to "breed in" something with a lower fortitude but better resists or specials on a resample, and have enough fortitude to be able to bring back the armor while including 2 samples of 300 fortitude in the 3 and 4 slots, for example.

While a CL 75 is not tamable, it is a valid, useful resource for multi-generational pets, so it is something that we do need to have. If we can exceed CL 75 on clones, that seems like a skill issue, the same as making a target for other pets we wish to do.

If you want a hard ceiling, that we can simply max every stat to this level and it will be a CL 70 with max hams, max damage, max resists, max to-hit, minimum speed and we get to pick the color, you will never sell another high--level pet that is not one of them, so you might as well quit now. I'm sorry, you may have a point in the idea that no other crafter can make something "too good to use", but the fact is that "cookie cutter" pets are not at all what we need to make the profession worth practicing.

There is nothing at all that differentiates one architect's large naboo house from any other architect's large naboo house. The single saving grace of our profession, based on the insane complexity and the difficulty of obtaining the DNA and surviving the crit fails with some semblance of sanity remaining is that we can do something unique. If that is not what you want, you are, I am afraid, in the wrong profession. Once the weaponsmiths have maxed out the damage cap, minimized the speed, maxed the wound percentage, and minimized the HAM costs there is nothing else for them to do but repeat it until they burn out, and throw away anything less than that, or hope that no one else has made anything better recently. I cannot imagine Bio-engineer's being cast in the same mold.

I respect your point, but I strongly disagree with the only possible solution; a formula cap that once reached = game over.

LLan

A displayed CL we have - unfortunately it is AFTER it does us much good, but the quality of the materials used to make the body at least anecdotally affects the final clone's CL. Other than that, we have to learn the system well enough to get the results we want, and it is not so simple a balance.

If we have a "stat cap" on CL 10, for example, and we are close or just over on 3 different stats, say for argument 21% Kinetic, 110 damage and 58 fortitude, which stat is reduced to make the creature a CL 10 from a CL 11 if we experiment on the "lower cl" bar? I agree it would be easier to understand, but I am afraid it would lend itself again to the "cookie cutter" clones, so a CL 10 would have X health, X action, X mind, 20% kinetic, 20% Energy, 40% to all others, do 100 damage at 2.20 or 90 damage at 2.10, with a .25 to-hit and have no specials, or perhaps your choice of dizzy or intimidate as special 1, no special 2 or ranged allowed. Please state desired type of cat body and color preference when ordering...

I'd love to know what the stats are going to add up to as far as CL before combining, but the effect would be to make things far too simplistic a combine. BE is one of the few professions that retains some semblance of being interesting or challenging to make our best products, and I sincerely hope it will remain that way, and not become too overly simplified.

I understand your wish, but to pick 5 samples that I know would make a CL 12 with the stats and profile just above what I want and hit "run experiment" 2 or 3 times on a single "lower CL" bar would make the intricacy and balance needed to make a CL 10 pet worth taming something that any holo-grinder could do as soon as they hit techniques 2 or 3. I just can't surrender BE to that level of mindless click-and-bake.

LLan

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Akelan wrote:
the quality of the materials used to make the body at least anecdotally affects the final clone's CL.

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So last nights experiment. Made several clones, all MH,AW,MH,MH,AW and made the following creatures :-

CL43 Gurrcat 11502/11268/10066 AR1 52/Vln/Vln/30/30/Vln/30/Vln 1.98/0.49/330-340 Blinding/Strong Poison/No Ranged

CL43 Gurrcat 11502/11232/10909 AR1 52/Vln/Vln/30/30/Vln/30/Vln 1.99/0.47/330-340 Blinding/Strong Poison/No Ranged

CL44 Gurrcat 10694/10837/10712 AR1 52/Vln/Vln/30/30/Vln/30/Vln 1.99/0.48/330-340 Blinding/Strong Poison/No Ranged

The interesting bit is that after the second gurrcat I ran out of the meat I had been using and has to switch to a slightlyinferior meat. That got me the CL44 Gurrcat. Its stat seem to me inferior to either of the other 2 Gurrcats but the CL is 1 higher. It could just be some random result of the combination but . . .

It is frustrating, yes, but I have to believe that given the opportunity, any other crafting profession would adapt our crafting system in a second over the one they have now. I really think ours should be *the* model for how crafting should work in SWG, and I could very easily see it applied to any of the other professions. We have the opportunity to make nearly unimited tradeoffs in the finished product. The permuations of things we can make is nearly unlimited. The things we make are probably determined much more by the skill of the player, than the skill of the toon or the materials we use. In most other crafting professions, you've pretty much exhausted every crafting possibility within the first couple weeks after reaching master. The only variability at all after that is trying to horde resources in slightly higher quality than you've used previously for incremental gains in your product. If you visited 10 different master weaponsmiths and bought a laser carbine from each ofthem, you'd see 10 nearly identical guns. They're all using the same spawns, the same experimentation, and there's very little latitude to do anything different in crafting. Not so at all with our profession. I think it's great.

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Akelan wrote:
ArthurDent, you've been at this too long - any other crafter would run screaming after 10 minutes of making houses that are missing the staircase, or where the doors only opened from one side

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Hehehe, that would be amusing yes. But boy I would have welcomed it. Architect was in fact my first advanced profession and I played that for acouple months. Let me tell you, there is not a more boring profession in the game. Back then there was no collection rate or capacity statistics (there may as well not be now since nobody will touch anything but BER 13 and 10 now), so every harvester (or house or anything else we could make) was exactly the same as anyone else could make and there was no customization available *at all*. When you made a small corellian house, you made a small corellian house, and the only challenge was seeing if you could harvest enough materials to make it and survive the undercutting by your fellow architects who made them at less than cost because they belonged to a PA, or were grinding.

ArthurDent, you've been at this too long - any other crafter would run screaming after 10 minutes of making houses that are missing the staircase, or where the doors only opened from one side

I agree though, the complexity of our crafting system is very much offset by the fact that what we do on it MATTERS in the final result more so than any other crafting profession I have experienced.

Chet, I certainly did like the intelligent thought that went into the question, it is only through recent experience myself that I realized just how useful a 70+ creature could be, in "breeding in" resists. If you want to get a chance to experiment with this, try grabbing 5 samples of bull rancor DNA, then maxing your experimentation points , first in physique, then evenly across the rest of the template or bumping a specific attribute at a time to max. The result may be >70, but as long as it is 75 or lower, you can resample from the high hardiness/high fortitude creature that will have a poor resist profile, and add in merek, surefoot brackaset, or another good resist-heavy DNA source and still get back to the armor on experimentation.

We all have a lot to learn to master any of this, which is the antidote to the level if frustration with buggier parts of the profession, and it is only through inquiry like yours and observations like Arthur's that we'll get better. No other crafters have as much leeway for improving their wares as we do, and that makes this fun.

LLan