Development Cycle Archive
Thread: Publish 7 Feedback: Droid & Droid Engineer Enhancements
But, as almost the entire postings on this thread have stated, what is not acceptable is the ninja armor nerf. Please fix it or suffer a mass exiodus......
Ive been a master DE for awhile it was my last holo ive been keeping it in hopes that it would turn out to be a cool proff. Bad idea
Shislkah wrote:
This post is for players who want to know how the Droid Invasion publish ended up so weak where droids are concerned. The answer is, Forum Users. The Devs came to the DE forum in January with a plan involving REAL combat droids, including droideka. At that point I was a DE who was thinking of dropping it, and I was totally jazzed to see their plan. Then the most peculiarthing happened, DE's used the forums to collectively say "We are only interested in crafting, combat droids aren't part of the continuity." Overthe course of a week or two some very perplexed Devs (who had been hearing "Give me droideka!" for months prior) listened to the "DE community" (or that 10% of it that makes their voice heard) and decided that the customer is always right. This publish, as far as droids, is exactly what the DE's asked for: no meaningful combat, no new droids, and a couple slots on a the Adv. BLL.
Go to the DE forum and read the neat stuff posted from January through early February by the Devs, and read how players ground it to a halt in mid-development, resulting in this publish.
Personal Note: No skill is worth being angry and bored, if it's not working for you, drop it and get a new skill that you enjoy - this will solve 90% of your in-game problems.
Quoted for Truth.
This is exactly what happened. DEs shot themselves in the foot and ostracized their customers. The entire playerbase was looking forward to combat droids, and I daresay they would have been fine if it was implemented via a new droid commander profession. The DEs ruined that vision by complaining about a lack of "utility" droids. I was amazed when I saw the Devs agree to shift course mid stream.
Utility droids = futility droids.
Totally useless and not worth the effort. This publish was a huge disappointment.
OK, .....
.... i dont even know where to begin.
can someone plz explain to me, before droid invasion i was able to make probots that do 60-70 damage with 20% armor and about 600 ham (in other words scrap metal), now i can make probots with 1200 ham 40% resists and 140-150 damage (embarrasing scrap metal). This new patch was ment to revolutionize the droid professions, enabling players to make "combat modules". Sony probably wasted $50,000minimum onprogramers to make this latest patch, now did at any stage ONE of them programmers stop and think for a second, *hmm lets try out the new droids*. NOOOO none of them did, all droids are as crap and useless as before. So much for this combat module, if i put 3 combat modules in a probot i get the same result as if ihad none in an old probot. CAN SONY plz explain to me which creatures in game can i attack with the probot without it dying...... .If they actualy reply to this im expecting the following answer "why combat droids do serve a huge purpose, they can attack butterflys, meatlumps, and the odd duni". This is absolutly shocking. If any of them had some (even the slightest) amount of common sence, combat droids should have as MINIMUM requirments 3k HAM, 300-400 damage per 1-2 seconds, 50% all resists and a change to hit of over 75%. anything lower than this would never live through 5k mission. I propose a droid handling skill be implemented, taking up only 10-20 skill points which allows players to control higher level droids. So those that do invest the 20 points into the skill can use droids just like master CH's can use level 30+ pets.
Publish 7 has "shame shame shame" written all over it in fluro yellow ink, and you have to start questioning, what kind of game designers is sony employing.
Here is a portion of the In Development post from January:
Any of those three sound fun to me, and if you disagree, compare to the current patch. Now here are some responses from the same thread, wherein we learn what Droid Engineers supposedly really want:
To get droids in the hands of players there are two basic categories of droids that have to be considered for the balance:
Droids that everyone can have which would be level 10 or lower to fit in with the overall combat balance. These are droids that anyone and everyone can have. This is identical to how pets work now with non-creature handlers. These “common” pets aren’t meant to have the ability to leverage combat advantages because it amounts to “free combat power without earning it”.
The second class of droids that are part of the challenge are the high end combat droids that players can spend points to earn the right to use such droids. The amount of skill box points and experience points that a player spends to have this droid operating ability is very important. Here again, the analogy to creature handlers is identical. Creature handlers spend skill points for the high end creatures; that is why they get the combat advantages. They pay points and earn experience for the privilege. The key design challenges are:
The cost of droids (ala having them as power pets and combat tools) has to counterbalance the combat advantages they give to the player. The core advantages are:
The power level of the pets Number of pets (droids in this case)
The design has to fit into the existing skill/experience point scheme
Given these design challenges, there are three basic approaches to adding the class of high powered droids to the game (not to be confused with the droids and combat modules that all players will be able to posses.)
The first approach is to take the existing Droid Engineer and re-vamp it so that it changes from solely a crafting profession to a hybrid profession. This profession would be half crafting and half combat droid operating. The majority of the Droid Engineers have stated that they prefer it to be a crafting only profession so development has discarded this as an option. (I mis-spoke on the Droid Handler issue. My apologies).
The second approach is to find some “skill stack” in all the professions and add a droid mastery tree to that as-of-yet-unnamed skill stack. The pitfall problem with this approach is that it is impossible to tell if some unforeseen combination of skills and/or professions is going to create an over-powered combo that will have to inevitably be nerfed in power. Any form of “droid certification” would be included in this category. The fact that there are so many professions and combinations simply makes it too tangled to depend on this approach. Additionally, this would greatly increase the amount of damage players are able to do at any time, causing huge balance issues.
The third approach is to add a “Droid Master” profession. The idea here is if you want to control high level combat droids, you must invest skill points in the profession the same way creature handlers do.
It was the clash between these two movements, on the one side the Dev's who were halfway through developing combat droids (they had begun work on choice #3 in the background while still discussing it with players), and on the other side this strange upswell of "say-no-to-combat" DE's in the forums, that resulted in the current Publish 7 Droid changes. I don't have a specific plan I advocate, I'm just pointing out that this one really isn't the Dev's fault, they stopped to listen to the community and the community wasted its breath - we got what we asked for.
"What I'm asking is this Thunderheart, Where are the droid fixes you PROMISED us? Personally I could care less about combat droids. What I want to know is, how am I going to sell the droids that I can make now?"
"Thanks for the post TH, but as a Master Droid Engineer I am dissappointed that the devs focus here seems to be completely on new combat droids and modules."
"Give me a SURVEY DROID over a combat droid ANY day."
"combat droids should have the smallest priority, in fact: you shouldn't introduce them before the profession revamp takes place!"
"Combat modules? That's it? That sound about as exciting as combat droids. I want a droid to take some of my work load off."
What I really can't understand is why the Devs removed the AR2 rating from level 6 armour. Before that my probot was barely usefull for me. Now, even with the "enhanced" HAM and damage, it is completly useless for me when trying to do a dificulty 12 mission (the highest I can get) or maintaining my harvester. And the repair kits don't really help during fights, usefull AFTER a fight to get the droid into working condition again, but that's it about them.
Are combat droids helpful to non-combat and new characters?
No. Not at all.
Are combat modules stacking?
From my experience, yes. They seem to work like intended
Are your droids no longer susceptible to poisons, bleeds, /warcry or /intimidate
I guess so. Didn't had a chance to test all.
Are the Droid Damage Repair Kits and Droid Wound Repair Kits working properly?
Yes. But I don't think anybody want to use them on a regular basis. Simply to expensive.
spearbearer wrote:
I don't have any problems with the fact that we didn't get any new combat droid chassis. Without some kind of certification system it is just not feasible to add combat droids with a CL above 10.
Thanks to this publish I can not call out my R2 medical crafting droid anymore. It suddenly has CL of 13. It has no weapons of anykind, med craft module and storage module. I just get information to go and see pet change program when I try to call it out. What about the close to 300 advanced stim components I have stored in there? Would really like to get em out of there, before the bot get swapped away.
Also my old mount (Kaadu) that I got after pet changes, is now uncallable also. It has pet level 10, and I still can not call it out. Just tells me to go and change it again.
Dunick