Droid Engineer Archive
Thread: FYI: Probot nerf
Alright Holocron, hows this for an idea. Since you want to do certs, and everyone on this board will most likely agree that the xp requirements for this profession are wildly out of wack (especially now since our only useful thing is now being nerfed) How bout we try a combination of these suggestions
1) combine the Droid refinement and Droid construction skill trees into one. Make a new skill tree in the droid engineer profession that contains the certifications and base this off a different pool of xp then droid crafting. Something like repair/customization.
2) keep the probot at its current level of power...FOR THE DROID ENGINEER. if you sell a probot, its power is reduced as you suggest, but an engineer, a droids creator, should achieve some great bonus for having the droid. Coming from Everquest, i see this as the difference between a mage who can give people level 20 pets and he keeps his level 50 one.
3) reduce the xp tree or increase the results.
4) increasegeneral usefulness of the droids (this is easy to say but manysuggestions made here that really make sense such as repair droids that reduce or eliminate maintenance costs for harvesters, binary load lifters that canpatrolthe waypoints of your harvesters and collect them for you, etcshould be implimented)
Holocron wrote:
ASHRID wrote:
Hmm if they are exploitable isnt it better to fix the exploit than nerf the droid? (wont this exploit just turn up again with something else in the future?)
It turns up with all pets, but it's exacerbated with the prbot because anyone can use the probot, whereas the pet case is limited mostly to CHs.
I am not sure how else to band-aid the problem while we put in certs...?
How about using maintenance fees to band aid?
Perhaps DE could be the ones to supply the maintenance?
I think there is a difference between a "newbie" getting a probot and rampaging through the wilderness and a Master Artisan et. al. who may be a "combat newbie" but has wealth and resources (and is NOT a newbie) running around with some decent droids. Clearly not as strong as they are now.
If players has to pay a DE to fix or replace their droid when it dies right away:
1) Only players with resources (ie, not newbies) would be able to afford day to day use.
2) DEs would have a purpose.
Can players twink? Sure.. but it will run out quickly. A player would need continuous twinkage to maintain the pet.. or related DE/Artisan skills.
I am not a DE.. although I have eyed the profession as I accumulate gcxp. Believe or or not, the nerfing and the certs is going to attract me to DE.. it will be a profession with value rather then "just another crafter".
Regards,
Artuk
Guys -- isn't it obvious yet they've stopped reading these threads?
They posted for opinions and discussion...almost everyone said "No, don't do it"...they didn't like the response, they stopped reading.
darkson wrote:
Hey Thx SoE to prove me right again nothing like screwing up a good game . Bounty Hunter missions are very hard as it is now u will take away a good weapon for us .
After the knockdown nerf, it isn't "a good weapon". It's our best weapon.
Nothing like a mission that takes you 45 minutes to complete, if you can do it at all, for 4500 credits. 
This might have been said.
Droid Certifications ? Too hard but a thought.
Or as your combat level (or if entertainer, entertaining?) level rises the greater potential you have of your droid becoming more power etc (in a sense the diablo2 thing, you level up your pet levels with you - altho those were temporary)
SONY I HATE U. U are taking the one **edit** bot i had to make any money. i've been playing this game since day 1 and let me tell u . i've sold maybe 5 medical bots, 2 chem crafting bots and 1 structure bot.
what the hell am i gonna do now ? wow medical modules work better. so **edit** what i might get 2 more customers. u can already drop stuff on bots to let them carry it. i don' thtink u know your own game.
the probot is not overpowered. omg i can kill a narglatch now with a probot and pistol specialist. my that droid is way overpowered.
sony i have spent time and effort on your game to become a droid engineer. nothing else works except the probot what am i to do now. tell me stand around and mine ? go hunting ? while we wait 6 mos for u to fix us. why don't u make a droid eng i know u can artificially level him and try making all the bots and see what actually works. NOTHING BUT PROBOTS.
u know what forget it. Sony i want my money back. I spent 75 dollars on the special edition version of this game and i want it back. there are other games i can go play and not get nerfed to hell
Not sure what the deal is, If their overpowered thats one thing
But i wonder if the devs realize how much they just harmed the bot. From what i gather, it now does less damage during the short time it will be alive because now it has no armor and less health than most players.
I have 1000 life points, 1000 action, and 900 mind as a player. Im a wookie so i cant wear armor. And ive honestly been 2 shotted by some of the more power creatures.
If a probot is going to be weaker than me, and cant take more than 2 hits, why exactly would i want one ? Im not sure if i'd pay 5k for one.
These especially become useless to a ranged class, as the mob always charges and swings at anything it can reach. So if the probots there taking all of 2 hits its dead. and thats just ON THE WAY to the fight, hehe.
Probots still might be useful for new players, until they can fight anything bigger than a paralope. But atleast one good thing comes of it, the new players will be able to afford a probot with their 250 starting credits because no one in their right mind with experience would pay more.
How much are these really going to help against upper-level mobs? , not at all. For a master-anything these are incredible weak, and i'd go as far to say their too weak to do anything for anyone thats even reached specialist in a weapon skill.
Not only that, Mize, but if you are fighting a creature that deathblows, your probot is permanently destroyed.
This means permanently destroyed every time you are incapped.
It makes them worthless.
The trouble is that Devs don't merely 'reduce' something, they annihilate it. Probots will go from being badly overpowered to completelyuseless in one patch. Plus, everyone will know thatDEs make stuff that sucks, so people won't bother buying anything (of course the Devs will blame the DEs for that, since the alternative is to blame, hmm, who was that again?).
BTW - can anyone here honestly say that they believe that the Devs tested this stuff at all?
Did anyone at SOE use a probot in combat? Did anyone play a Creature Handler and see what he could tame?
IMHO this is like alchemy in EQ - they just never bothered to test these things.
Ok, I have read over all the dev posts today on the subject of pet nerfs.
I will try to say this as calmly as I can. I am a droid engineer, and I have been finding it to be a very cruddy crafting profession. I work with another droid engineer, a guildie, and we are starting to become fairly successful. My name is starting to spread around Bloodfin and everyday I get tells from potential customers looking to buy one of our probots. Utility droids are nifty, but they barely sell. Assuming you do come across someone who wants an food crafting station droid, once he has it, he never needs another one. Utility droids lastforever. The market is new, and yet it is already drying up. We sell very fewutlity droids.
Probots are 99% of our income. The fact that we can sell them at all is based on:
1. The fact that they are so powerful.
2. The fact that the store/call exploit makes probots easy to maintain. Without that exploit, you have to feed theprobot batteries every 10 minutes.
3. The fact that anyone can own a probot, reguardless of skills. Anyone can buy and freely use it.
Those are the three reasons I can sell probots. If the droid becomes weaker, we will have to drop our prices considerably. If the exploit is fixed, a lot less people will want a probot, because they will not want to have to deal with buying tons of batteries all the time. And if a "Cert system" is implemented, then not everyone will be able to use the probot. This means that not everyone is a potential customer, and again, sales will drop considerably.
I hope I am making this clear and understandable. As a droid engineer, the only productI currently haveis probots. All of the impending changes listed today will murder the market. I guarentee that starting right now, with the announcement of these impending changes, I stand absolutely no chance of selling a probot to anyone who has heard this news, and if I sell a probot to someone who has not yet heard the news, then they will beangry at me.
The changes havent even gone into the game yet, and the market is already come to a crashing end. At this point, the ONLY way for you to save us droid engineers (besides fixing the manyissues we have) is to publicly announce thatthese probot changes will not go live any week soon.
As for my profession, I have no current drive to do any more. Without our only product of any value, what are we left with? The hope that one day maybe weeks maybe months from now droid engineer will be made valuable? Hope is the reason I played a stillgimped class to 56 in EQ, and regret the time I spent onit to this day. Right now, I have no drive whatsoever to gain another point of droid crafting experiance. It is now a worthless waste of time. I am now looking at the possibility of doing one of the other crafting professions. I have no choice. I would be happy to continue working on droid engineering if we had multiple valuable droids and one of themwas being nerfed, but our ONLY valuable droid is being nerfed.
I spent the last three weeks working toward the goal of master droid engineer. I could have spent that time and effort working toward another goal, like master tailor. But if I take up tailoring right now, I am WEEKS behind all of the other tailors on the server. What are the chances that a CSR will transfer all my droid skills and droid crafting experiance over to tailoring for me? I mean I worked hardfor every point I have in droid crafting. Now I feel that I am being forced away from droid engineering, and I do not deserve to lose two to three weeks of hard earned experiance. So will the CSRs do this for me? lol, hell no.
There is now (even before the changes go live) no value to advancing as a droid engineer. I am completely floored by how badly you are screwing over thisparticularplayer.
Just think of all the saps who haven't kept up with this forum.
They're going to get a nasty surprise. A 45000-credits-down-the-toilet-deathblown-probot surprise.