Droid Engineer Archive

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Jenden wrote:
More precisely, Droid's still get a 20% reduction when the owner is in a group, while the owner gets a new bonus (something like 20-40%), effectively making harvesting by hand in a group much more desireable than harvesting by hand alone.

As far as status update... still working on it.

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From what I have seen, first hand, the penalty seems to be less then 20%. I could be mistaken, but when I was trying this out the other night, in a group, the droid appeared to have a penalty more in the ball park of 40%. I was grouped, but wasn't in the area of the person that I was grouped with, so my harvesting numbers stayed the same as they were pre-grouping, but the droid was harvesting far less then the pre-patch 20%.

When I get the chance, I'll hit TC and see if I can find someone that is willing to be lugged around with me, in a group, to see if I can get more accurate numbers.

Message Edited by Straker_Atrella on 03-15-2005 07:53 AM

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Straker_Atrella wrote:

Jenden, I know your working it, but this is becoming more and more of an issue for me as well. I used to sell at least a few Harvestors a week, now I don't sell any.

The more the word spreads that they don't work better then groping, the harder it will be to get word out to people that they work again.

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yea, I was selling 5-6 a day before the patch. I've sold 5 total since the patch.

...knock-knock!

Ranger Droid Discussion

you guys might be interested in some of the testing rangers have done on this.

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WTS wrote:
Ranger Droid Discussion

you guys might be interested in some of the testing rangers have done on this.

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Thanks for the heads up on this one. I posted an offering of sorts to try and help the Ranger community come up with some numbers on what effects the changes had to havester droid usage.

there seem to be multiple issues going on... not just the 40% group penalty.

there also seems to be a cap that a ranger hits for harvesting. using both food AND droid doesn't seem to give much additional advantage over just using one or the other.

I don't know if this will help you DEs much or not, but here's some info on the new group harvesting changes, as well as current info on the creature harvest mod for scouts/rangers. (Scroll down to the Creature Harvesting Modifier info). Hopefully, those numbers and the group bonus percentages depending on what skill level of scout/ranger you're grouped with should help in your testing.

The recent patch that removed the group harvest penalty (was -40%) and added the new grouping bonuses, also gave rangers a +60 mod to harvesting in the master box (total of +150 creature harvest mod for masters).

One of the theories (mostly affecting master rangers) is that the droid harvesting ability was capped somehow, and can't take into account the large boost that master rangers have for harvesting (150)... possibly it's using the "artificial" cap of 125?

The main problem is, when grouped with other players, the harvest droid isn't taking into account the new +20% (grouped with scout), +30% (grouped with a ranger) and +40% (grouped with a master ranger) bonuses.

Droids still stack with veghash (creature harvest bonus food), and when we had the -40% to harvest while grouped with others, droids seemed to "read" that penalty. But somehow, group harvesting bonuses seem to have been left out when using a creature harvest droid.

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frightwig wrote:
I don't know if this will help you DEs much or not, but here's some info on the new group harvesting changes, as well as current info on the creature harvest mod for scouts/rangers. (Scroll down to the Creature Harvesting Modifier info). Hopefully, those numbers and the group bonus percentages depending on what skill level of scout/ranger you're grouped with should help in your testing.

The recent patch that removed the group harvest penalty (was -40%) and added the new grouping bonuses, also gave rangers a +60 mod to harvesting in the master box (total of +150 creature harvest mod for masters).

One of the theories (mostly affecting master rangers) is that the droid harvesting ability was capped somehow, and can't take into account the large boost that master rangers have for harvesting (150)... possibly it's using the "artificial" cap of 125?

The main problem is, when grouped with other players, the harvest droid isn't taking into account the new +20% (grouped with scout), +30% (grouped with a ranger) and +40% (grouped with a master ranger) bonuses.

Droids still stack with veghash (creature harvest bonus food), and when we had the -40% to harvest while grouped with others, droids seemed to "read" that penalty. But somehow, group harvesting bonuses seem to have been left out when using a creature harvest droid.

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To be a bit more accurate, droids are still getting the -40% or so penalty if you're in a group (my guess is that was hard-coded into the droids since they have to check to see if the owner is part of the group, not if they are, and it was never changed with the new updates). As far as the master ranger bonus thing, we've never been able to nail down a specific formula, but its a relation between the droid's skill and the owner's skill. There has always been evidence of low rated droids who's owners have high ratings harvesting less than the owner, and there's also evidence of a logarithmic benefit. My guess is that since rangers now have a much higher rating than the droids (usually about 40 pts) and at that high level the droids percentage was already small, it looped around into the negatives.

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Jenden wrote:

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frightwig wrote:
I don't know if this will help you DEs much or not, but here's some info on the new group harvesting changes, as well as current info on the creature harvest mod for scouts/rangers. (Scroll down to the Creature Harvesting Modifier info). Hopefully, those numbers and the group bonus percentages depending on what skill level of scout/ranger you're grouped with should help in your testing.

The recent patch that removed the group harvest penalty (was -40%) and added the new grouping bonuses, also gave rangers a +60 mod to harvesting in the master box (total of +150 creature harvest mod for masters).

One of the theories (mostly affecting master rangers) is that the droid harvesting ability was capped somehow, and can't take into account the large boost that master rangers have for harvesting (150)... possibly it's using the "artificial" cap of 125?

The main problem is, when grouped with other players, the harvest droid isn't taking into account the new +20% (grouped with scout), +30% (grouped with a ranger) and +40% (grouped with a master ranger) bonuses.

Droids still stack with veghash (creature harvest bonus food), and when we had the -40% to harvest while grouped with others, droids seemed to "read" that penalty. But somehow, group harvesting bonuses seem to have been left out when using a creature harvest droid.

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To be a bit more accurate, droids are still getting the -40% or so penalty if you're in a group (my guess is that was hard-coded into the droids since they have to check to see if the owner is part of the group, not if they are, and it was never changed with the new updates). As far as the master ranger bonus thing, we've never been able to nail down a specific formula, but its a relation between the droid's skill and the owner's skill. There has always been evidence of low rated droids who's owners have high ratings harvesting less than the owner, and there's also evidence of a logarithmic benefit. My guess is that since rangers now have a much higher rating than the droids (usually about 40 pts) and at that high level the droids percentage was already small, it looped around into the negatives.

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How about for the average dude who buys the Harvester Droid, because (in the past) it gave him a bonus, grouped or not? I mean the one with only Basic Scout of maybe a couple boxes of Hunting Methodology tree? Is his 100+ rated harvester droid now nerfed back if he joins a group of people? And even if the droid is part of the group?

Enquiring minds want to know!