Droid Engineer Archive

I would just like tooffer my vote for the greatest need of the DE professionbeing that the items we makeshouldbe made more useful/effective in their intended purpose. Combat droids should be more powerful (not uber by any means, but the current strength of combat droids is a joke). Medical droids should be callable from anywhere. Storage droids - one item? You're kidding me, right?

To this end, there should be more functionality added to the droids in general.

Keep up the good work, Ms. DE Correspondent.It's appreciated.

Acinoyx, et al...

When I said the grind is killer, a huge portion of what I meant was that making large amounts of things that you often have a hard time selling (because the item is broken or you have so many of them), is part of the bad grind. You agreed with my reasoning I think but didn't know it. There aren't a lot of things we can make, and of those things, many don't work properly. Part of it IS comparing yourself to other professions where they make items that work, are in demand and grant good XP. They often haveother problems (like architects being undercut very badly by people who are just grinding so they can make a PA hall), but most of the other professionsdon't appear to have the problems we do, which directly effect the saleability of our items.

I don't like waste, so I tend to not destroy anything I make. I would have preferred that things be MORE complicated or resource intensive but grant larger XP. That way you won't make so much, progress will still be slow, but the tendency to make a bunch of stuff and just dump it or destroy it will be minimized. Heck, I would just be happy with things that work consistently.

It also sounds like you have a lot of time, which I don't. I think these things SHOULD take a while; that I am not arguing. I didn't want to be a fighter though. I have played tons of MMORPGs where that's whatI did and I wanted something different from SWG (at least for my 1st character). Spending points trying to train up carbine or what have you and afford armor so I don't get my butt handed to me by a swarm of gorgs when I do a destroy mission for cash to feed my harvestersjust isn't something I want to do. It would have been better had they designed the profession where you could eke out an OK existence without having to do a bunch of destroy missions. Other professions can do this; we should be able to as well.

Part of my problem is I am disillusioned- DE has the potential to be just kicka**, but I can't help but feel that the ball was dropped on a golden (and unique), opportunity. SWG had this unique opportunity because they are drawing on a well established history and droids are a huge part of it.

Galatea (Gorath)

Master Artisan, Novice Droid Engineer

Right - this is a really small thing, but it still really bugs me...

When I try to get out two droids - which I know is not possible at the moment - I get a message reading:

"You can't control any more pets. Store one first."

Heck - I don't have any freakin' pets - I have droids! ...so the message should be:

"You can't control any more droids. Store one first."

How about the lack of availability of Extrusive ore. The short supply of this resource serves to exacerbate the grind - lower DE's are forced to create MSE droids or useless parts which is a complete waste.

My apologies if this has been mentioned already or if it's not appropriate as part of the discussion.

Brill

I notice that we have a lot of redundant parts, and parts that come from the general crafting branch that offer us no xp toward DE at all.

Why does an advanded probot require two droid brains (one put in the chasis, and then one when you build it). We already know that most of the A.I. chips required in some of the droids are pointless.

Why do i get only general crafting xp when i build a microsensors suite. perhaps divide the xp total among all of the applicable professions that would use this item.

Fix the probot and combat certs! Make **edit** WELL SURE THAT DROIDS WILL NEVER PERMA DIEWHEN CH PETS WONT. Equal treatment or we cant compete. Get the probot fixed! Oh, and combat certs and get the probot fixed!

To add to that, change the stats on the dz70 and the probots. As of now they cant compete, and a sale of these droids cannot be warrented by a serious player who solely wants these droids for combat and not just looks.

Dz70's die with one hit from the easiest prey (and all of you fellow DE will seriosly attest to this statement not being exaggerated). I think that the current HAM of the probot should be that of the DZ70's (810), and theHAM, attack speed and damage of the probot should be close to double that(1500 HAM sounds fair, compaired tothe 6500 HAM creatures that most CH have).

I believe that this would allow lower level DE to be able to sell something (because everyone knows that they cant move a single MSE), while maintaining the integrity and desire of seeking out a higher level DE that can make probots. Lets face it people, you can't give a DZ70 away for free much less sell one! Lets cahnge this, while warrantling the desire of custokmers to buy probots again!

Havn't read all the replies to this thread, so my apologies if I repeat someone else:

Please add the cluster module issue to the list. Cluster modules fitting in service module slots should not be permitted. It defeats the purpose of droids having a cluster module slot instead of a service module slot. Whether or not the service modules nested in these clusters work or not just changes the severity of this bug. This one should be marked as urgent for fixing.

Pardon me for not reading Page 3 of this thread before posting, but I wanted to comment on this. I understand how frustrating the grind can be for some of you. It is a very tedious process that can take some time and effort to master, and even more time to actually master the skill your grinding for. But a little background information. If none of you have ever played Everquest, then the true pain that comes from grinding a crafting skill is not something you've experienced in full. I am an old EQ player, I spent nearly 3 years of my life playing that game, and still yearn for it at times, but alas. I was an Enchanter, one of the hardest classes in that game to play, some say the hardest, both before and after many changes that altered that perception. It took me all that time in casual and not so casual play, almost always playing daily, but for varying amounts of time to reach level 61, out of a possible 65. This also includes time spent playing other characters, and even "quitting" the game twice for a few months at a time.

I was also a jeweler. It took me nearly as long, over 2 years to master that skill. EQ has no macros. It has no UXP, and it also has lootable equipment that FAR surpasses anything a crafter can make. It also had no built-in bazaar system for the first 3 years the game existed. Much like this game, most of what I would make would be useless to myself and others. Scematics (or recipes in EQ) were not built into the game but had to be discovered as new ones were introduced. This meant newbies with no knowledge from others (ie website, other players) could waste considerable amounts of time and materials making NOTHING, and gaining no skill-ups from it. Unlike this game there is no practice mode to auto-destroy your useless craftings. Resources to make said items had to be bought from NPC vendors, using up nearly 50% of my total accumulated wealth during my entire time playing. There were most definately people out there who did it faster than I, found ways to exploit the system, had friends to help them with cash and statistic boosting equipment to make it a bit easier, but it still required intensive grind and persistance to earn just a single point of crafting experience and it was RANDOM. Gaining a single point boost to a crafting skill could take HOURS, or minutes, depending on the whims of a random number generator built into the game system. And the higher you got, the harder it got to move up, skill-ups taking longer and longer to gain, all the while expansions are coming out for the game that make the items you can craft more and more laughable to the other players. Every once in awhile SOE would throw us a bone, and new items would become available that were still mostly laughable, but still better than what we could do before. Yet...

Despite all this I still found the will to continue crafting, continuing moving toward Master Jewelcrafter. I did succeed in the end. I did make it. And throughout that time I still found a market for some of my goods. Even if most of it was useless, not all of it was. I would not suggest for a second that I enjoyed this grind. I would not suggest for even a moment that SWG should have ever adopted such a horrid system as EQ had (and still HAS) for crafting. Crafting in SWG is much easier, less time consuming and far more marketable a skill than it ever was or will be in EQ. It can be worse people, much worse.

What I am saying is, enjoy what you have. Come together as the crafters of EQ did becuase they had no other choice, it simply would have been too painful otherwise. Learn use the power of your voice to get SOE to make changes that benefit everyone who holds the title Droid Engineer. Get them to work on bug fixes before you concentrate too much energy on new things, else as some have said some bugs will never be fixed. EQ is a game nearly (perhaps more than) 4 years old. There are still bugs from the very first days of the game present in it that never got fixed, mostly because they were overlooked so long that coding a fix would potentially disrupt half a dozen other game systems in the programming. Be constructive with your ideas for this class, it has tons of potential. But remember always that in a game like this politics are supreme. Anything that potentially unbalances any other part of the game will not be looked upon well by devs or anyone else working on the SWG project. Thier jobs hinge on being able to make the maximum number of people happy for as long as possible. You will never get everything you desire put forth or implemented. Some ideas sound great until put into the context of another class. This is why Smugglers raised such a stink over slicing in droids, and why if it does ever make it in, it will have to be vastly inferior to any skills possessed by the PC class. This is the way of MMORPGs.

I will never post often, but I will always try to post well...

Kolphe of Kauri Server

Novice Droid Engineer

Onielara of Luclin Server (EQ)

61st level Enchanter and Grandmaster Jeweler (250)