Droid Engineer Archive

First off, I'm not a DE, but I am a customer (and I'm STILL waiting on a retroactive fix for pre-patch-made droids to be finally customizable...).

To my mind, combat droids are a bad thing. Period. Just like CH's are. And honestly, if I could nuke the CH profession out of existence (at least as a combat class) I would. Creatures and droids should be utilities and should supplement people the way vehicles currently do. They should not be surrogate fighters for you. This game took an immediate turn towards the negative when the devs designed surrogate combat entities for players, be they creatures, droids, or whatever. Yes, droids are better than people walking around with a giant torton or whatever, but only marginally so if those droids are primarily designed for combat.

Personally, I want droids for utility purposes. I want droids to manage my harvesters when I'm not around to do it (either logged off or off planet). I want droids to help me craft, slice, etc. I want droids to power other droids on their own and droids to repair my droids on their own. I want a whole garage full of 'em, all wandering around doing their thing without me having to watch out for them.

Droids are supposed to be automated assistants for various tasks, usually utilitarian ones. They're NOT supposed to be an additional tank. People who want the combat droids basically wanted them because a.) they were sick of looking at combat pets (which I don't blame), and/or b.) they were pissed that their high level combat pets were gone and wanted new ones to fill the void in their lives. The devs went with it because enough people complained and because the devs don't see the inherent unbalancing problem with surrogate combat entities.

Basically, including tanks or mobile gun platforms WHILE allowing people to also use personal weapons is always going to be unbalancing. Two identically skilled and equipped carbiners match off against each other. One has an e-11, the other has an e-11. However one has a ch pet/combat droid/faction pet as well and sics the thing on the other. Which one has the advantage EVERY TIME? The one with the pet. There's no drawback to owning pets and there's no benefit to NOT owning pets. As a result, you get what we saw with the CHs, where EVERYONE wants to own a pet because why the hell not? That's a problem, but the devs either don't see it as such or don't care.

I'd LOVE for there to be more utility droids, for us to be able to have up to 8 of them out at once, and for them to operate the way harvesters do (IE: keep working autonomously when I'm not around). Sadly, that won't happen any time soon because quick fix bandaid solutions like combat droids are the easier ways to appease the masses.