Droid Engineer Archive
Thread: FYI: Probot nerf
This really is a joke. I spent hours on end clicking, mining, searching for blasted resources, doing missions to afford my harvesters... Only to have my light at the end of the tunnel turned off? Ya, some Novice CH walked up to my (pre-nerf i guess) probot earlier this afternoon with a pet that had 6000 in his HAM's and a damage ratio so insainly far off it's not even funny. I wasn't looking forward to making money off this profession with the exception of paying for my habbit on those money sucking harvesters. All I wanted was to make my R2 unit... which blows cause I can't afford a factory to make the pieces that require a factory to make... because the architects want BANK for them. "But you can just sell a probot to afford my building" they say... Oh no I can't. Not anymore. No joke, people laugh when I call out "Probot for sale 5k" around the bank area. There's nothing left to look forward to... R2 is it for me, and that's only cuase I'm a die hard fan that wanted to make his own. So, with those hours spent of my life wasted, I look to you people. The programmers and say this.
People will quit. They got tired of this BS in other games and came here thinking they could start fresh, with a theme they liked. I predict that many many people will go back to playing EQ or DAoC where, the game may not be what they wanted, but at least it works.
Tech support? No, I don't think so. There's been a constant throng of posts on this subject, and, if this was a business I were running I would be making a constant effort to reply to posts. Reassuring posts at least. This Holo-whatever guy really is a jerk, his posts aren't personable... His informartion is basicly deal with it and keep feeding us money.
I'm disapointed more the mad now. This isn't customer service. Even short term this nerf will seriously hurt existing DE's and deture any new ones. Take the game offline for a full day. Make all the fixes to all the thousands of bugs that exist and offer another free month as an appology for releasing a game that obviously wasn't ready. Not playable? I'd like to think I've got an excelent computer. The insainly bad lag, the oddball spikes, the getting booted for no reason other then checking your in-game email.. you know what bugs I'm talking about.
About the only think that would make me feel any better about this nerf would be to waking up tomorrow with a force sensitve slot open. But even then, I would pitty all those people who chose DE as their profession.
*Now* let's see if we can get any decent responces to serious and valid concerns by the consumers of a game that charges 15 bucks a month to play on top of the 50 to buy the thing. Holo.. I'm sorry bro. You're fired. Try McDonalds, I hear they need a new clown.
Shoota
You overnerfed the probot. Really, really badly, too.
Look, I'm the first person to agree that a guy and his droid should not be a match for a rancor, but I just bought a probot today and just to see what it could do, I sent it out against a durni. Y'know, the little not-too-threatening bunny creatures on Corellia with great hides.
I had to come to my probot's aid... it was losing.
That can't be right. Being able to kill a rancor is wrong, but it's equally wrong to have a probot not be able to kill a durni! These things have less power than a character with Pistol 1 (or Carbine 1, or Rifle 1)! There's got to be a middle ground between Rancor-slayer and Durni-bitch. I think it needs to be found, ASAP.
If you want my suggestion... I noticed that probots are doing a pretty unvarying mid-50s in damage (there's variance, but maybe 4 points of difference between min and max). Double that. If you look at the probot solely as a weapon, that'll have it doing about 100 damage with a 1.5 attack speed, which makes it about equivalent to a fairly nice blaster. It attacks faster but can't use special abilities, that seems to balance, especially when nice blasters go for 3k and probots were going for 20-25k... although I expect the market is going to bottom in a hurry now.
And on the topic of droids that do damage... I don't think this would be as big an issue if there were any other droid types around that could help you in combat. Can you devs pretty, pretty please implement an assassin droid? I don't care what you have to do... make it take outrageous resources, make it a Master DE schematic, I don't care.... that'd be extremely cool.
Oh, and a cert system for droids? Bad plan unless anyone can get certified... droids are a way of keeping the general populace on about an even keel with the creature handlers. They can get rancors and other nasties... the rest of us can get, well... probots, if we want anything that'll do damage. I think you'll see a disproportionate number of CHs if they turn out to be the only class that can get a pet that's worth having in combat. And while their pets should certainly be BETTER in combat (they, after all, have taken the time and effort to gain CH skills, and we're just buying ours), we deserve something of our own. This is especially true for players like me who kinda prefer to solo... it's nice to have that extra gun at your side. It'd be nicer if the gun could damage things.
Just brilliant...
70k on a brand spanking new advanced probot 2 days ago. Now, it's a pile of junk.
Boy am I pissed.
Dear Holocron,
Thank you Sir! May I have Another?
Thank you Sir! May I have Another?
Thank you Sir! May I have Another?
#2. Any changes to probots must only be done to probots that have not been "Tamed" out of the deed yet. Many of us spent a small fortune on Probots because we knew what the capabilities were, changing that now is unfair. Your trend of calling people exploiters (which is in a sense what you are doing here, again) for using the game as intended must be stopped.
How do i know it is using the game as intended? You have balanced combat around the Probot very well, you put a lot of thought into it. Somehting that is a red con to becomes a white con to me when the probot is in my group, I am given more difficult missions, etc.
A player who kills a creature that is much to difficult for them with a Probot will not get very many faction points or experience for it (Both are based on the damage you are able to do, robot damage has no effect).
You need to stop making nerfs in a Vacum and ignoring the fact that you already have balancing mechanisms in place to offset these problems.
Vowelumos wrote:
To the guy a couple of posts up... No one has 3 houses and 5 factories, that is impossible, get a grip you are not helping things.
#2. Any changes to probots must only be done to probots that have not been "Tamed" out of the deed yet. Many of us spent a small fortune on Probots because we knew what the capabilities were, changing that now is unfair. Your trend of calling people exploiters (which is in a sense what you are doing here, again) for using the game as intended must be stopped.
How do i know it is using the game as intended? You have balanced combat around the Probot very well, you put a lot of thought into it. Somehting that is a red con to becomes a white con to me when the probot is in my group, I am given more difficult missions, etc.
A player who kills a creature that is much to difficult for them with a Probot will not get very many faction points or experience for it (Both are based on the damage you are able to do, robot damage has no effect).
You need to stop making nerfs in a Vacum and ignoring the fact that you already have balancing mechanisms in place to offset these problems.
The vacuum comment is PRIMO. They have no **edit**ing idea what they are doing/changing, and what it will do. Its called whiplash prioritization. Don't think.. Just do..
I expect ALOT more from these pissers.
Oh, and I'd like to add a few things.
As a Bounty Hunter, I have already felt the pain of this nerf. Nothing like trying to solo a mark with 10k HAM that can hit you for 1000 pts of damage every 2 secs! Fun fun fun.
Good god, seeing how much this nerf hurt BH's, I can't even begin to imagine how much it hurt the DE's and other non-combatants. I really feel for you guys.
Poor choice on this one. Not well thought out at all, rushed and poorly implemented (i.e. NO warning and why not fix the blasted exploit instead?). Oh, and how about a middle-ground of some sort. There aren't just 2 extremes...
Well, chalk up another profession that has to be completely overhauled and re-balanced. Don't know whether I can wait that long though.
All its stats are now set at 0. Wish I knew this was coming before I was hunting on Dathomir. My droid got slaughtered and eventually me.
Let me start off by saying I agree that our droids were over powered.
I know that several points have been made on this, but I cant find things with the lack of topic headers here.
When a droid, with 3k HP, gets into a fight and loses half of his hitpoints, it take approx 20 minutes of real time for him to be useable again. There is no means of healing your droid from damage now that yall have removed the store heal.
I know that one method of making a game last longer is to make things take longer, but yall promised that this would not have the downtime issues that EQ did. However, I see with travelling around a planet, and with droid helaing, downtime appears to be exactly what yall are trying to create.
I think the DEVS should be focusing their resources on fixing those aspects of the game that are not working. Then maybe add stuff to the game instead of taking things out. I agree, the more nerfs that come out, the less enthuiastic I am about coming home to play the game. Whats next, cut the mission rewards in half? I think what they want is me sitting in front of my computer 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, trying to make enough credits to buy a CDEF Pistol to go Bantha hunting by myself. Does that sound extreme? Well so do their NERFS.
Too much micromanaging the gaming experience. Let the game develop. You DEVS should be fixing bugs and connection issues first. How about fixing the servers so they stay up for a 24 hour period first, before you take away someones hard earned rewards.
I know hindsight can be 20/20, but please take a different tact when "fixing" DE related issues. DE is very broken right now and by further imparing a driod that worked it only makes things worse. I am frankly confused why DE and other elite driod based professions aren't more like creature handler. Why can just anyone run around with probots? The way I see it, the answer isn't to render driods 25% of what they used to because there is no system implemented yet for driod cert skills. The problem is anyone can get a probot, not the probot stats themselves. I think the dev design for the fix is not helping matters at all and I don't see the logic in it. A fatal error I see in most mmpogs are, when something is perceived to work too well, it's pummeled into uselessness. Instead of doing that, please make a concerted effort to make the item harder to get for end users. Not by making it harder on the crafter, but by making it harder on the user to gain the skill to use the item. The probot isn't the problem, the problem is the percentage of people running around with them.
I have to think, is DE really a pressing priority for the devs at this time? I know they have to prioritize their work in some fashon, but as far as I can see DE is one of the most problem plagued professions in the game right now. I don't think there is a coherient design goal laid out to address most of the issues needing to be fixed with DE by the develoeprs right now.
To help shape driods, really there should be an xp tree for driod combat use I-IV, driod medic use I-IV, driod crafting use I-IV. Heck just add itto the professions that do those type of things. Professions should have to earn the right to use a probot, not merely gut the stats on them. Also having a skill system for driods would actually help the developers better shape the stats and fuction of each driod. Actually make the modules put into driods work, and put them on a sliding scale of usefulness based on skill level of driod you're using...
In summery, empower the DE profession, please don't take more away from it. Please implement into existing professions specific driod cert skills instead of gutting driod stats. Please ramp up the effectiveness of modules based on the level of driod they're in (and the skill level required to use the driod). I know my post is buried 20 pages deep in this thread and the devs are probably crosseyed from reading the previous 1000 messages, butI do hope they gain some insight into what I'm trying to get across to them.
Gimpi Ikon, Driod Engineer, Bloodfin