Droid Engineer Archive

---

duncje wrote:

---

Daker-Naritus wrote:

(1) Ok, so we are losing the medium armor rating...is the effectiveness % exactly the same as before? People have been reporting nerfed effectiveness... Are you saying the reason people have been reporting reduced effectiveness %'s is that they are using used droids (where the armor has been damaged)?

The droid armor currently on Test is max 20% resists, AR0.


And will remain that way, for the foreseeable future (but always has the possibility of tweakage).

(2) If droid armor is ruined over time like normal armor, I assume that it will work such that it can be repaired and will reduce in maximum condition with each repair...Is that correct? If so that is a VERY good thing, as it means that combat droids wear out, correct?

Daker, you're backwards on this. The armor was supposed to wear out since beta. They apparently pulled the degradation of the armor (or it plain didn't work), and we basically had droid armor that was extremely more effective than it was supposed to be.


More effective than it was supposed to be for a period of time..but it reduced and reduced and so on over time. That won't be the case with armor after P7. The damage 'soaking' will basically be infinite. So, no decay on armor to fix.


Hence the "adjustment" now to AR0, 20% resists.

---

---

/bow

Respectfully,

---

BlueMorgoth wrote:

---

Sodan-droiddreamer wrote:

There is a buff system in place for BE'd pets, chefs make new foods that bufs pets, pets can be healed the same stims as players use, pets never run out of batteries, pets have special attacks that their masters can use, there are a HUGE variety of pets, pets can be tamed without costing anything, and, lastly, I hear word of BE'd 10k HAM CL 10 pets. In this context, its a HUGE nerf and it puts droids out of balance.

---

Need to do some extra research here Sodan rather than just spouting rumours. Those 10K CL-10 pets were bugged ones introduced just after the BE patch and can no-longer be made. Since then the devs have corrected this situation by forcing the CL higher on first tame or by drastically chopping the stats. Thus idiots you see offering to sell CL 1 Rancors are just ripping people off because the pet can't be tamed by a non-CH.

As of this patch, almost all your points are moot. Taking them one by one:

- Ability to be mounts is offset by our ability to have modules (item storage, crafting stations, med etc).

- Variety of availablepets is heavily restricted to the CH levels of the player. Sure a master has access to probably 80+ creature types/sub types but that required a specific profession and skill point cost to have access to those. Access to non-CH pets is extremely reduced. There's only one mount (Kaadu), and everything else is almost useless. Droids would have been somewhat close to this had the DC profession been introduced. (Though think about the EU where you see lots of droids, but little variety in the types of droid chassis: evolution on multiple separate eco-systems vs corporate-driven mass production).

- Pets run out of batteries now - they need feeding. If they don't get fed, they don't like to fight, run etc.

- The new droids have a limited range of special attacks - ranged and melee on the R2 and probots. Sure we don't have dizzy, poison etc, but again, I feel this would have been given to us had we had a full set of combat droids coming. On a personal opinion, I feel it is wrong for droids to have various state attacks like pets, but should have various damage type attacks. ie we swap poison/dizzy/kd attacks for energy/blast/cold etc.

- Stims, we'll we're getting half that now. Using human stims on pets seems a bit of a non-issue to me from the perspective that the costs are about the same for the same heal levels (on Bria at least). I don't know anyone that I've sold my meds to for pet usage. They buy pet stims for pets and normal stims for PCs. The reason is that a PC Stim B barely does any heal on a pet, yet anyone can use a petstim C or D and get huge heals for no skill point cost.

- Pets being tamed for no cost. Ya, we're not all Jawa's here

---

FYI, Sox, I'm not trying to be argumentative. Just want to hear your response. There has to be a good balance. So far with this MAJOR armor nerf, I don't see it.

---

AudioOrgana wrote:

---

TheRealTK421 wrote:

---

duncje wrote:

---

Daker-Naritus wrote:

Daker, you're backwards on this. The armor was supposed to wear out since beta. They apparently pulled the degradation of the armor (or it plain didn't work), and we basically had droid armor that was extremely more effective than it was supposed to be.


More effective than it was supposed to be for a period of time..but it reduced and reduced and so on over time. That won't be the case with armor after P7. The damage 'soaking' will basically be infinite. So, no decay on armor to fix.

---

LOL.

Nobody ever really noticed the decay in the first place.

The damage "soaking" doesn't matter if the armor is absolute crap, the bot won't last long enough to even test.

I know you have to put a shiny happy face on things, but this is a great big NERF, any way you cut it.

Audio

---

EXACTLY! I was thinking I was going to be ok with these changes. Now that I understand what is really going on I am pissed...

If you calculate the amount of real HAM (taking into acount the effects of the medium armor and extra 20% resistances), the HAM droids now have is almost half what they did have.

Another one of those issues not properly explained in the patch notes so the devs can try to sneak it past the player community... *sigh*

---

BlueMorgoth wrote:

Need to do some extra research here Sodan rather than just spouting rumours. Those 10K CL-10 pets were bugged ones introduced just after the BE patch and can no-longer be made. Since then the devs have corrected this situation by forcing the CL higher on first tame or by drastically chopping the stats. Thus idiots you see offering to sell CL 1 Rancors are just ripping people off because the pet can't be tamed by a non-CH.

---

Actually, they can still make nasty CL 10 pets. Unless they changed something just within the past couple of days, they can still create 10K HAM pets that can be used by non-CH.

Go read this thread.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=bio-engineer&message.id=58671

Good point on the buffs Sodan, neglected to add those in my reply. I'll do a search on the links with the details later this evening. Bit limited in time right now as I'm about to step out the door to go to training for a few hours. I know it was in the dev-tracker somewhere, just have to go find it

There are Chef foods that can buff pets (the best one is Vercupti and with high-end resources can add about 1400 to health/action/mind), You can only feed the pet when it says it's hungry, not at any time (which you could previously). Until this next patch, you need separate foods for both pets and PCs. Pet foods cannot be used for humans, and vice versa, so you still need to carry two crates. With this patch, Vercupti is having it's pet-only modifier removed so now usable on pets and PCs. There are, however, a heap of other foods that are restricted to pets. A good guide that I use for my customers can be found here:

http://www.gamekast.com/swg/foodtables.html

A CH can "enrage" a pet, which is a bit like the TKM meditate line - a short-term buff to all three HAM attributes. Don't remember the timing or the amount it adds though. For the hungry state - I've only seen it act like droids do - if in combat, the pet will continue in combat and then tell you it's hungry once combat is over. It doesn't halt on the spot. Similarly with droids in that they keep fighting, but give it a command or try to heal wounds and it will tell you low power.

Ranged v melee attacks - in the way they are used in droids they're effectively the same thing as specials in a creature. In a droid you can instruct it to use the ranged attack or the melee attack. By default droids will use the ranged attack if you just issue "attack" (I think I've got it the right way around). By default pets use the melee attack. If you want it to use specials, you must tell it to. If I remember the rules correctly, if you are not a CH, then you can't instruct the pet to make a special attack. The pet will make them based on a random selection, but it's not like you can tell the pet to spam "dizzy attack" as a non-CH. Direct instruction to use the specials is limited to CH-only.

That's all for now. Must run and go throw people about a room for the next 4 hours I'll edit or reply once I get back and find those posts for you.

---

BlueMorgoth wrote:
Good point on the buffs Sodan, neglected to add those in my reply. I'll do a search on the links with the details later this evening. Bit limited in time right now as I'm about to step out the door to go to training for a few hours. I know it was in the dev-tracker somewhere, just have to go find it

There are Chef foods that can buff pets (the best one is Vercupti and with high-end resources can add about 1400 to health/action/mind), You can only feed the pet when it says it's hungry, not at any time (which you could previously).

---

Oh no there is more, you can as a DR Buff the stats on a called pet. That is right a Frenzied Graul with a 10k hame and only 80 on secondaries can have 3k on his physical secondaries now as long as he remains called out. which means a virtual meat tank! once it is stored and recalled the buffs vanish but having the possible 3k to it's secondaries makes it almost impossible to kill.

---

Olepi wrote:

---

BlueMorgoth wrote:
Good point on the buffs Sodan, neglected to add those in my reply. I'll do a search on the links with the details later this evening. Bit limited in time right now as I'm about to step out the door to go to training for a few hours. I know it was in the dev-tracker somewhere, just have to go find it

There are Chef foods that can buff pets (the best one is Vercupti and with high-end resources can add about 1400 to health/action/mind), You can only feed the pet when it says it's hungry, not at any time (which you could previously).

---

Oh no there is more, you can as a DR Buff the stats on a called pet. That is right a Frenzied Graul with a 10k hame and only 80 on secondaries can have 3k on his physical secondaries now as long as he remains called out. which means a virtual meat tank! once it is stored and recalled the buffs vanish but having the possible 3k to it's secondaries makes it almost impossible to kill.

---

I see. So BEs put crappy secondary stats to lower the pet lvl, but then the secondaries can be buffed by a doctor. So to review, pet lvls are lowered by low but doctor-buffable stats, CHs can enrage them and pets can be buffed by food. Meanwhile droid armor isgetting nerfed and there is no droid buffing ability. NP.

---

Sodan-droiddreamer wrote:

I see. So BEs put crappy secondary stats to lower the pet lvl, but then the secondaries can be buffed by a doctor. So to review, pet lvls are lowered by low but doctor-buffable stats, CHs can enrage them and pets can be buffed by food. Meanwhile droid armor isgetting nerfed and there is no droid buffing ability. NP.

---

let me give you an example. My toon ON Kettemoor is a master Doctor. My maint oon on bria is a master CH. the CH pets have a HAM the initial pools are their max , almost all secondaries on all creatures BE or not are set to nearly or around 80. Hence the need to Heal them with pet stims because they heal at such a slow, slow, rate.

Now a friend of mine had a pet NON ch class 10. he called it out while he was working on rifleman and i being a Dr accidently was targeted on his pet and buffed it when i meant to buff the owner. to my shock i buffed the pet. So i tried all 6 stats and sure enough it enhanced the creature he sent it to fight for him and he had instant tank. a class 10 pet was just turned into a class 25 pet in a matter of seconds.

That advantage alone will out compete any combat dorid they have initialized with the new release. which is really a nerf of probots and droids with armor.

Pretty lame honestly.

My friend then stored his creature to see if the buffs lasted the duration and when it was recalled they were gone.

---

Sodan-droiddreamer wrote:

I see. So BEs put crappy secondary stats to lower the pet lvl, but then the secondaries can be buffed by a doctor. So to review, pet lvls are lowered by low but doctor-buffable stats, CHs can enrage them and pets can be buffed by food. Meanwhile droid armor isgetting nerfed and there is no droid buffing ability. NP.

---

---

Olepi wrote:

---

Sodan-droiddreamer wrote:

I see. So BEs put crappy secondary stats to lower the pet lvl, but then the secondaries can be buffed by a doctor. So to review, pet lvls are lowered by low but doctor-buffable stats, CHs can enrage them and pets can be buffed by food. Meanwhile droid armor isgetting nerfed and there is no droid buffing ability. NP.

---

let me give you an example. My toon ON Kettemoor is a master Doctor. My maint oon on bria is a master CH. the CH pets have a HAM the initial pools are their max , almost all secondaries on all creatures BE or not are set to nearly or around 80. Hence the need to Heal them with pet stims because they heal at such a slow, slow, rate.

Now a friend of mine had a pet NON ch class 10. he called it out while he was working on rifleman and i being a Dr accidently was targeted on his pet and buffed it when i meant to buff the owner. to my shock i buffed the pet. So i tried all 6 stats and sure enough it enhanced the creature he sent it to fight for him and he had instant tank. a class 10 pet was just turned into a class 25 pet in a matter of seconds.

That advantage alone will out compete any combat dorid they have initialized with the new release. which is really a nerf of probots and droids with armor.

Pretty lame honestly.

---

Well, so much for spreading rumors, it was worst than I thought! Lets be honest with each other. This system is just plain not balanced. If droid armor and HAM is brought in line with creature pet armor and HAM, droids still lose because they can't be buffed.

Am I correct in assuming that pets actually have armor while droids do not?

---

Sodan-droiddreamer wrote:

Am I correct in assuming that pets actually have armor while droids do not?

---

---

Virtanis wrote:

---

Sodan-droiddreamer wrote:

Am I correct in assuming that pets actually have armor while droids do not?

---

Some higher level BE made pets can have Light armor, if they're made with good DNA.

---

But after the patch no droids will have armor? Doesn't that seem odd? Mounting armor plates on a droid chasis seems a lot more believable than on creatures. What, is it tough hide?