Bio Engineer Archive
Thread: BE Issues First run Please read and provide feedback
Ok, I've gone through and extracted the current issues from the posts above. Please respond with anything missing or you guys feel I should change. I'm also going to go through the lists of ideas. Should I give much priority to that or concentrate on things that need to be fixed?
Clone Engineering Issues
- To be fixed with the upcoming cloning changes (gleaned from feedback we've been given so far.
- Diversity - currently there are very few creatures we can make. This is reported to be more than doubled with the new cloning changes. Some of these will not have tamable versions in the wild.
- Bugged clones
- Viability - We should be able to make pets of any given CL with the stats of a creature several CL higher.
- Complete control over HAM, damage, armor, special attacks and CL - A concern is whether we will be able to lower stats during the process. If we are trying to make a CL 15 creature and it's coming out to be a CL 16 creature, can we lower the stats to fit the order?
- More information will be displayed, including Armor, special abilities, resist and CL.
- Full-grown size will vary greatly depending on the final stats. One concern is whether we will have any control over this.
- Colorizing clones
- Other issues and bugs
- Some BE's have suggested we should be able to train and use our clones. With the newly proposed DE changes, perhaps this is something that could be looked into.
- DNA is not lost when creating a DNA template.
- The resource formula for clones still has UT. UT is not found on creature food or flora food.
- Currently, once a clone is tamed, it no longer retains the creator's mark. A BE'd pet should display who made it as well as the owner.
- To date, no one has been able to affect the DPS of a creature, we can raise damage, but the speed goes up accordingly. While there is some variation of dps, it seems random. We would like to have some control over this.
- Psychology appears to have no effect on the creature or its effect is unknown.
Tissue Engineering Issues
- Stacking - There are still stacking issues. We were told some stats would not stack on a single piece of clothing but that this would be fixed later. I'll put it in this list until a better fix can be found.
- Stacking - multiples of the same enhancement used to stack on a single piece of clothing and no longer does. Is this intentional or something we could get fixed?
- Rare resources - Milk and mollusks - you have a better chance of finding a holocron it seems. Could we at least have these added to searching creature lairs and up the amount found to compensate?
- Resource availability - even with lair searching and fishing, eggs and fish are hard to get in any quantity. Either up the amounts found on a search or give us bio-harvesters to harvest these resources. Many would also like to see bio-harvesters for creature resources. These could be scout/ranger items so as not to take away from those professions.
- Chef additions - I have never had a chef seek me out for these. Many seem to feel that these are too expensive to make for the little benefit they give to chefs. Also these are not usable in all chef items. There may be more of a market if additives could be used in things like Tatooine Sunburn or Breath of Heaven.
- Pet vitality packs gain no benefit from using advanced BEC's and LS's. Using the same flora and inorganic, a vitality pack made using normal subcomponents will be exactly the same as one made using advanced subcomponents. Was this intentional?
- Many would like to see us have subcomponents for pet stims in the BE tree somewhere. Currently if we want good subcomponents we need to take points in Doctor or have one make them for us.
DNA Sampling Issues
- There should be a default macro for /sampledna like there is for every other skill. Currently, new BE's have to make one themselves.
- Many feel the mind cost for sampling is way too high.
- I'm seeing many reports from novice BE's that they are having extremely high failure rates sampling things like minor worrts, rills, flesh eating chuba, gnorts and the like. These are all newbie mobs and there is no reason a novice be shouldn't have a reasonable chance of sampling from them successfully.
- We can only sample DNA from live creatures, why can't we sample from corpses?
- Once we sample a creature to death, we can no longer harvest resources from the corpse. Given the need for meat, we'd like to be able to harvest from creatures we've killed in this fashion.
- Storage - Other crafts have stackable resources. Our DNA does not stack. While it's understood that it does not stack due to the different stats, it would be nice to have a container to hold DNA in a smaller volume. This container could, for example have a volume of 10 and hold 50 samples and only hold DNA samples. It would not need to take the place of a backpack.
Engineering Technology Issues
- Stats on a DNA template do not show until some experimentation is done. o Success will still sometimes lower stats and failures can raise stats.
- Creature experimentation is still broken - once you experiment once in any line, you lose any ability to experiment further. o 30% risk and higher on experimenting from novice through Engineering Tech 2. Since I'm a Master now, I don't know if this is still an issue. Could I get some feedback on this?
- Currently the experimentation does not seem to have as much effect as other crafting classes. Ham for example only raise by around 10-20%. How do people feel about this currently?
Ya, sums it up here for me too, if I come up with anything will be glad to post.
And yes, we are Bio-Engineers , we clone, we create, we duplicate, so why cant we have this broad range of control over what we create. If the devs dont want to give us this control, maybe they should change the prof. name to something along the lines of FUBAR. Cause to me, thats what this prof. seems like atm.
Sums it up nicely.
As to the ideas summary, my opinion is to have those as a lower priority than getting the current list of bugs fixed, and the long-awaited cloning changes done and released.
"Some BE's have suggested we should be able to train and use our clones. With the newly proposed DE changes, perhaps this is something that could be looked into."
I think that isn't really feasible... if BE can use the clones, why do we have a CH profession again? Also, from what I have seen MANY of the DE are actually against the combat droid certification thing... most of them want to craft, and aren't really interested in all the l337 kiddies swamping DE.
"Currently, once a clone is tamed, it no longer retains the creator's mark. A BE'd pet should display who made it as well as the owner. "
This is something I would love to see
"Pet vitality packs gain no benefit from using advanced BEC's and LS's. Using the same flora and inorganic, a vitality pack made using normal subcomponents will be exactly the same as one made using advanced subcomponents. Was this intentional? "
It is already possible to reach the maximum values for vitality packs using good resources... this would only add more cost and work for us (ala nerfing). My suspicion is that it might be because vitality packs do not have charges & their power is based on a different scale... but it may be a mistake.
Resource availability - even with lair searching and fishing, eggs and fish are hard to get in any quantity. Either up the amounts found on a search or give us bio-harvesters to harvest these resources. Many would also like to see bio-harvesters for creature resources. These could be scout/ranger items so as not to take away from those professions.
I think eggs are rare but reasonable IMO (partially due to low demand for those tissues). Fish, milk, and mollusks though... we need a reasonable means to harvest these. Creature harvest, mechanical harvesters, new harvesters... something. It's just too impossible right now, and being limited to stim B/C is disappointing.
The current cloning system pretty much sucks - I think that about sums up my opinion of it. I think 10-20% on the HAMs is perfectly reasonable... the real problem is our inability to affect other key areas (DPS? special attacks? colors?) & our lack of good clones. I will reserve my judgement until the day of deliverance(tm) akapatch day for clones(ETADecember 2005). 
My biggest problem with BE this week was the crappy bazaar search engine. I want to search the galaxy for Dathomir Insect, I have to page through 750 organics foods, drill into the insect meat.
How about search by OQ and/or PE?
Also, there's a category on bazaar for pet meds, it just doesn't work.
Nice to see you didn't hang around Tal. I'll skim over the cloning things on the whole since we have been told these changes are going to happen.. what I think we all want is an ETA and some firm details on how these changes work. Specifically how to make a clone under the new system. If dna is indeed the key to all of the stats then it's leaning towards making a scout/bio-eng or ranger/bio-eng combo even more viable for quickly and effectively making clones which I know some people won't like. Also they mentioned armor, stats and special moves as part of things they can change but didn't mention anything about resistances, I'd personally like to know just what we can and cannot change.
Some BE's have suggested we should be able to train and use our clones. With the newly proposed DE changes, perhaps this is something that could be looked into.
While I disagree that we should be able to use the clones we make without any additional skills (weaponsmiths need marksman and more so why should we be any different) it'd be nice for the devs to look into it as it's a much requested thing and some official word might help people stop asking for it if the designers decide it's not needed. What would be nice would be some kind of creature perks like maybe the ability to store more of them in our datapad but still only be able to call one at a time. This would allow us to store pre-tamed/trained clones for sales perposes.
DNA is not lost when creating a DNA template.
This is also happening with tissues not losing their materials, in the case of DNA I think someone point out that the DNA loses some of the stats from the slots they were plugged into resulting in damage to the dna even though it can be used again. Since dna is hard to gather this seems fair to me as it is.
The resource formula for clones still has UT. UT is not found on creature food or flora food
Well this is a known problem for the current system, i dunno about the new one but yes there is no need for us to lose 10% of the stats because none of the resources have toughness.
Currently, once a clone is tamed, it no longer retains the creator's mark. A BE'd pet should display who made it as well as the owner.
Yeah this would be a minor perk on the whole but it'd be nice to have people seeing the results of all our effort even after the clone is tamed. Every other crafted item retains the creators mark so it's only fair. A very low priority issue though like the BE pet perks mentioned above.
Psychology appears to have no effect on the creature or its effect is unknown.
While i have seen various results I would like some official explaination of this too as it's not something that is easy to work out ourselves.
Tissues are my bread and butter at the moment so there's alot of stuff I'd like to see fixed here to, since this is the enhancement part of our profession it deserves equal attention to cloning. Stacking on the whole needs to be fixed plus we need official word on this limitations of the maximum caps since we have seen evidence of a +25 overall cap for biosensors and want to know if this extends to all tissues. Eggs need to be more common or found in larger amounts, maybe you should put forward that idea which I came up with and everyone liked which gives some logic to finding eggs according to the species which comes from the lairs and the CL ratings effecting the units per lair. This would remove the aimless wandering around allowing you to instantly know if a lair has eggs or not by looking at what animals are around it. Seafood is also something we need more viable ways to gather, fishfarms or having creatures like Quenkers and/or Rancor which are classified as part-crutacean actually give you crustacean meat when you harvest them. Milk and mollusk meat need some kind of reliablesource... nuff said.
Chef/food additives... it's not a case of making them more powerful, we simply need them to be cheaper to make. If they raise the power of the food by 25% then they shouldn't require the same amount of resources as the food itself. Also with the fact chefs are nearly non-existant the food additives shouldn't be expanded upon until the Chef profession is more viable. At present the tailor tissues are far more popular in the extreme which is where the additions need to be made.
I think the fact we need to work with doctors is intentional, what I'd like to see is a way to return the favour so that we need them and they need us. Medical tissues are a very good idea with maybe the ability to allow a stimpack to also heal a little bit of mind or recover a fractional amount of wounds as well.
I'm seeing many reports from novice BE's that they are having extremely high failure rates sampling things like minor worrts, rills, flesh eating chuba, gnorts and the like. These are all newbie mobs and there is no reason a novice be shouldn't have a reasonable chance of sampling from them successfully.
I think you'll find that the 'spook' factor on low level mobs is what causes the failures and aggro. But official word on what is happening is always welcome.
We can only sample DNA from live creatures, why can't we sample from corpses?
Rather than just asking why also propose an idea, if a live animal gives you proper dna then corpse dna should give you partially damaged dna or maybe you can only sample within 20 seconds of the creature dying so that cellular decay hasnt set in yet. I'm just thining in terms of speed we dont want to ask why we can't do something and then have the devs come back and ask us what we'd like. Ask the question and propose a solution or an idea as well. That means if they disagree then we wasted no time but if they do agree then they can comment on the proposed idea.
DNA STORAGE!?! YES PLEASE!!
Ok so what did you miss? Not much really.
- It'd be nice to deal with the issue of people not liking the idea of needing maskscent to sample from red aggro mobs. We have discussed a way for other proffessions to take blood samples for us to extract dna from perhaps so that you have a new market.
- Ask about why our dna sampling now caps around CL75 when we used to be able to sample everything in the game.
- Mention that it would be wise to have 'very high quality' samples moved to DNA 4 so that you can have dabblers in the profession perhaps creating a dna trade to compensate for the people who don't have the ability to sample from red aggro mobs.
- There are now lootable enhancers for weapons and such, can bio-engineers please have something similar?
- Will dna suffer decay from the new death penalties?
- What kind of minimum and maximum CL limitations will we see for the new creatures in the revised cloning system?
Talthazar wrote:I'm also going to go through the lists of ideas. Should I give much priority to that or concentrate on things that need to be fixed?
For the priority issue. I will say:
- Primary goal: The promised clone changes.
- Secondary goal: Bug fixes.
- Tertiary goal: New contents and balancing.
Talthazar wrote:
- Resource availability - even with lair searching and fishing, eggs and fish are hard to get in any quantity. Either up the amounts found on a search or give us bio-harvesters to harvest these resources. Many would also like to see bio-harvesters for creature resources. These could be scout/ranger items so as not to take away from those professions.
I would not like to se harvesters for meat, hide and bone. I would rather se the ability to slaughter ones pets introduced. It would kill off the pet for good, and providing an amount of resources equal to what would have been harvested with the players skills.
It would give BE's, and CH's, a marked in selling untrained pets to scouts and rangers for then to raise and slaughter.
You missed two thing.
1) Have pet stim's and vitality medpacks moved to the "pet medicine" category instead of the "pharmaceutical" category.
2) Since synthetic cloth in clothing do not get the skill modifiers multiplied according to the number of identical synthetic cloth used in the same slot of the schematic, low end tailor tissue are no longer valuable. Who will use +5/+5 passive biosensors, if they can get +15/+15 active biosensors?
Will read thru this later today while I watch the late games... /sigh my fantasy football team is getting crushed this week, I should have called them Jekyll Hydes with their put up or shut up scoring
...1. XP Fix: I'm not sure why the creature creation XP is so low. In the time it takes me to obtain 5 good DNA samples, craft the DNA, and then make the creature, I could have made 4x that amount of XP grinding tissues. BE XP should be commensurate with the difficulty of crafting an item. Creatures require a lot of time; and while DNA sampling XP is "built in" to creature creation, the reality is creatures should be "worth" more XP than they are currently. It is tough to hunt down good DNA (even though I'm DNA IV) and will be more so after the incap/death penalties go live.
2. UXP Fix: BEs are about to be more than just weapon suppliers, and clothing enhancers, we are about to help fuel the creation of creature mounts. If we can't get more XP for the critters we make, we should get UXP of some kind for when they are tamed or used in battle, etc. This is a crafting profession, and most crafting professions do have some form of UXP.
3. Bioharvesting: I would like to echo everyone's thoughts that BEs should have a means of harvesting DNA in some way similar to microflora farms or chemical/mineral extractors. In keeping with the premise of BE, perhaps the ability to grow tissues in a culture to provide DNA (and even meat or organics) would be tenable. That is, after all, true tissue engineering. Perhaps allow us to engineer tissue DNA and then manufacture it in our chemical factories. Make a great DNA sample from your tissue experimentation? Great! Make a template and crank out a thousand copies. Farming would be another way: in that scenario I could breed animals to improve the DNA output of the animals over time (a la Mendel). There has to be some way that BE can be similar to other crafting professions. This may, as pointed out above, also help address the milk/eggs/mollusk issues.
4. Decrease Need for Combat: a BE is a scientist and a crafter. Few BEs can afford to be without combat skills and scouting skills in order to sample DNA. Quite simply, sampling is dangerous (even for those of us with DNA IV). It's really not reasonable to expect the theory of player interdependence to apply to DNA sampling. It is difficult, if not impossible, for me to imagine going out with my combat-skilled counterparts to have them "stand around" waiting while I sample DNA in case one of the critters goes aggro and they have to defend me. I'm all for player interdependence, people don't get much in the way of XP standing around waiting for possible aggro's. They don't gain XP through my successes. And hiring a body guard doesn't seem like a fun expense to add on to my prices. As such, I have Pistol IV, composite armor, and scouting sufficient to run like hell and mask my scent. I don't mind having these other skill lines in play, but they should either be deemed "prerequisites" of BE, or DNA aggro should be discontinued. Again, sampling DNA from wild creatures makes some sense, but developing tissues in a culture makes more. See bioharvesters above. Others have proposed tranquilizer darts. Fabulous! But do something...please !
5. Special Abilities: perhaps creature creation would mean more if the basic creature creation allowed you to make creatures that were "as good" as their wild counterparts. What I'd like to see is experimentation to customize the creature with special abilities such as +1 stun, +2 knockdown, 2+ armor, etc. I think that experimentation currently has proven not to add much except a tweak here or there. But the ability to embue your creatures with something truly unique and unexpected would in a way make up for not being able to create "custom" animals (as one would expect a real BE to do: too much of a programming nightmare that ). A 0000 BE could offer no enhancements while a MBE could add armor, add ranged attack capabilities, add resistances, increase mount speed, etc. Since experimentation points are limited, BEs could only offer so much "customization" per creature, but the value of our creatures would increase a lot. People could then buy pets TRUE custom pets. Think: bearded jax with ranged weapon spit that could do 100dmg. Cool .
6. Crafting Fix: I know the devs have been very proud of the idea of having a mysterious format of taking DNA strands of certain characteristics, mixing them into the 5 slots to theoretically form uber animals. But, beyond some obvious connections (ie, DNA with high intelligence going into the intellect slot, etc), some of it is a bit obsequious. Obsequious, btw, is itself obsequious. Perhaps the fix to this is to allow more of the DNA's characteristics to be visible to more experienced BEs. By that I mean at 0000 you can only tell the overall quality of the strand, but by MBE you can look at a DNA strand and know its relative strengths in fortitude, dexterity, intellect, etc. Experience allows you to "know" more about the DNA that you have in this manner. This would be similar to master scouts knowing a creature's level. Perhaps limiting the number of characteristics of each strand to the number of slots in the schematic. Or, don't limit the slots to intellect, dexterity, etc. But, rather, leave 5 slots open and let me mix the DNA the way I want. Think: pugoriss that has 10k HAM, does 20 damage, and an attack rate of 1.0. Not useful, but worthy of experimenting.
7. Stackable DNA: perhaps if the number of variables was limited to 5, it may be possible to have like DNA stack. One of the limitations I have when I'm sampling DNA is character space. Seems odd that I can stack an unlimited number of identical fiberplast, but can't stack DNA. The only real solution is crafting in the wild, which requires a crafting droid.
8. Make Advanced CL Creatures Tougher to Craft: odd it is that I can have Clone 3 to craft a CL10 critter. I would suggest that Blurrgs (hopefully tamable someday) which are CL50 and act currently as doorstops not be craftable by novices, and that the "achievement" of getting higher tier cloning not be watered down with templates for pugoriss or carion spat. I realize CL will soon be customizable, but I still think powerful creatures should only be craftable by powerful BEs. Also, the schematics are odd in the resources they require. Beyond the DNA template, the ingredients do not change very large amounts for big critters as for little critters. Perhaps a Bearded Jax should only require 5u meat? Or a falumpaset 150 meat? Maybe upper level creatures require more complex DNA (such as the differences between mammals and bacteria?) or more specific types of DNA (ie, herbivore, carnivore, flying animals, etc). Or the components to craft a creature could get complex: want an creature with armor? You have to craft armor DNA to add to the creature. Something to make the crafting experience more reach and feature-filled.
