Droid Engineer Archive

If you think DE is harsh, you should try Architect...33000. Anyways, thats my buddys problem.

I am Phamcar Raa on Corbantis and I am a recovering aspiring DE that thinks the EX is too high.

Well, that is my 2 cents.

Pham

Agreed with this thread. I reached Intermediate Blueprints last night (took me two days of grinding out over 200 mouse droids - 75% of them destroyed).

Upon getting Blueprints I was sooo happy...until I told my DZ70 to attack. Saw it flying towards this little mob and all of a sudden it went down and I had to start running. I was like "**edit**!?", only later finding out that it has 40hp. So I think OK, fine, lets try another droid type, hmm, what the hell is Extrusive Ore? Needless to say, I need to go to another planet now.

I love being a droid engineer. The grind is horrific though, being an architect, you pump out 4 houses and get a box (granted it's ALOT of resources but these are automated with harvesters), being a DE you have to click multiple thousands of times and spend HOURS if not DAYs to get a BOX.

1) Novice droids need to take more components or about triple the materials, less time grinding.

2) Droids need to have the bugs worked out. Currently bugs make 2/3 of what we can craft at novice USELESS - Data and Storage mods.

3) Droids need to have additional HAM, the barricaded wall in the tutorial was probably made out of material that had lower TOUGHNESS than the steel we use for our droids, and it took us more than one hit to break that wall down. Giving droids 40HP?! "Droid, go attack! Just don't get HIT!"

4) Give droids additional features
a) Languages, completely change the way languages are learned, maybe make then take days (like stat migration), and cost skill pts. Can only know two other languages. Allow droids to translate languages
b) I loved the idea about droids maintaining harvesters. Either have the droid sit at a harvester and reduce the repair cost or even be able to send it out to the harvester (alone) and have it deposit credits, power, and/or pick up the resources. This would be a HUGE push for DEs.
c) Allow droids to POWER harvesters, I saw a schematic for a power droid, not sure what they do since I do not have the skill for it. If it powers the harvester, AWESOME.
d)Survey droids - Maybe select a 5000m area of the planetary map and have the droid map and survey the area for a select resource. The better armored the droid, the better chance they have making it back. A high aggro area would be a very large risk.

5) More droid choices

6) Intertwine skills - for an archictect to make a crafting station, they will need a crafting station MOD from a DE. Upon vehicle release, the DE will make parts of the vehicle, perhaps the engine. Same with spaceships.

Oh so many ways to improve, this can be a hugely impressive skill to have...I am currently disappointed in it but going to pursue it. I'll probably be taking up another elite artisan profession though so I can feel usefull and make wanted items =)

I am not a Droid Engineer. I am not a Droid Engineer because I see very little usefullness in the entire profession. I wanted to be one but there is nothing really appealing about the profession. There are no hallmarks to reach (Besides the last couple of ranks) and there is very little that can be provided by the Droid Engineer that can't be provided by someone or something else for free. Massive nerf-bat damage incoming! Yay! :/

The Droid Engineer was a worthwhile idea that someone forgot to come back to and flush out. It's pretty evident. Throw some abilities in there like being able to re-program other factions droids for a short time or being able to make some 'paper-tiger' combat droids early in their career. That way, at least, they can have some fun going out and watching 'Toasterhead' get pounded into metal cans by a womp rat. Make them into a 'psuedo' pet class with mid-range combat capabilities and low-end combat droids. Give them their big-bad$$$ combat droid late in their career so they have something to shoot for. If you're worried about them selling these to everyone then make them player specific so they can't. Do something; anything to help these guys out. They are obviously upset with the class and I am dissapointed that it is too much of a 'going nowhere' profession for me to choose to play.

_Lord_Soth_

'.. just my two copper pieces..'

Sign...

Typical Conversation of me shouting out selling droids since they wont be seen on bazzar.

Me: Selling a DZ70 Droid! Only have one left!(Actually have 2 zillion)use /tell if interested! These go fast!

Uniformed SWG Player: What exactly do they do?

Me: They Track herds of animals and fugitives great for BH and Scouts, they also divert enemy attention when you get in a sticky situation, and they have a small attack that helps you take down tuff enemys.

SWGPlayer: Wow, nice How much do they cost?

Me: 1000+/- Negotiable

SwgP: I only have 759 credits on me?

ME: SOLD SOLD SOLD Where are you? SOLD

TRADE TRADE TRADE

Me: Thx for your buisness im sure your droid will be most useful!

SWGP: Ok,......Droid Follow...?....**edit** HEY **edit** IS WRONG WITH THIS, Attack......Its dead by a baby rill?

ME: I pres F5 and high tell it out of town ignoring all his messages

This happens Everytime, I mean everytime.

My character is Luke' on the Kettemoorserver. i agree with this 100% the XP is way to much to lvl up

I agree please fix UXP and lower the xp grind costs. I would say a 12% decrease or so would do nicely. And fixing the UXP would do WONDERS!!!

I totally agree-

What is the point of grinding and grinding only to destroy most of what we make-

Experimentation should give you more XP as well Successful Experimentation that is.

TortugusRex of Chilastra

I think some people are missing the point of this type of game. MakingtheMax LVLin an RPG should be equivalent of making Master in any advanced skill set in this game. This would mean that a power gamer should not hit it for 3 months and a casual gamer should take 6 months. By making us lvl faster then we will have a ton of people who are maxed out after 1 month and bored with the game. This does not make since on a business side either because if your bored after 1 month then you might not resubscribe to the game.

This is the case where Faster is not better. I think the speed that we lvl is either Fine or too Fast. Now the main things that do need to be changed is where when we are gaining XP we do not need to flood the market with droids to do it. If you picked up UXP then it puts more of a level ground between Power gamers and Casual gamers. UXP is very important especially if you are already guilded. If your guild knew that you were getting UXP when they used yourdroid then I think everyone guildy would have one out even if it was a medical one that they could not use.

I agree with what quite a few folks have said to this thread. I don't want it to be "easy" to become a master droid engineer. I want it to take me many months to get there. However, I do want it to be fun during the trip to master. Unfortunately fun is just not possible without some serious self-delusion taking place as the profession currently stands.

We need some serious look at the schematics we get at every level including novice. I truly believe that this will come in time. The devs are only one week into live, and they are surely stomping all kinds of truly game breaking bugs like people not being able to log in, not being able to access their characters, losing items, exploiting faction/exp/credit issues. These should take priority. I can do other things until they get around to adding content to droid engineers. However, I do want to become a master droid engineer eventually. The content has to be worked on.

Here are a few ideas I had in beta...

1) Fix use experience so that it really does trickle out experience to the initial droid crafter over time as folks use their droids. This would be great. This is what they promised all along, but it doesn't seem to be doing squat at the moment. If you really got the 150% of crafting experience in use experience the math gets a lot better. Trickle down of use experience leaves grind/destroy as an option for powercrafters that only have fun filling little blue boxes with exp, but gives another option to those that enjoy making stuff more than filling exp boxes to advance at a satisfying rate.

2) Increase the resources needed to make the droids. Since crafting experience is granted on roughly a 2:1 ratio to experience if the droid that took 100 resources before now took 200 of them it would cut the number of things you would have to sell to get your experience in half and keep the market from becoming saturated. This one is tricker than actually using Use experience.

3) Add more stuff to each level of droid crafting that is consumable. The addition of weapon powerups to the artisan branch was such a great idea. Once in a while I make up a bunch of them and drop them on the bazaar. They are always all bought eventually. An expendable item that all players see an immediate benefit from which has enough variety that you can pick and choose the best ones. Shopping for them is fun to me and making them is fun.

I have a lot of ideas for this for droid engineers which I think would be fun:

Robotic damage care droids which you could use in the field to heal with no pharm skill. They would require you to buy pharms from a doctor to load them into the droid at creation and they would use those pharms for a sort of heal over time rather than an insta heal that a medic would get by applying the pharms to a player directly. It would increase the market for the medical crafters, increase the ability of folks to operate without a medic a bit by lowering downtime, and (in my opinion) not take away the usefulness of medics because the damage in this game can go pretty fast. This is a bit tricky because you don't want to make medics unnecessary at all, so perhaps they could be made to only be usable by a medic but could supercharge the heals they applied or increase the range of them or something.

Expendable combat droids like the bounty hunter seeker droids would be cool too. Making droid engineers the sole source for those bounty hunter droids (they could get them from bounty hunter droid terminals in beta, not sure about now) would be kinda nice as the terminals sold them for less than we can make them last time I checked.

Expendable nano-droid armor that gives you a kind of damage shield for a while would be cool too. Would open up an opportunity for some cool shiny particle effects like they had in AO with the damage shields (one of my favorite things about AO).

Droid backpacks that you could equip which would boost stats a bit by giving you a kind of power assist to your movements.

Allowing the permanent droids to decay and bit and lose function needing to be repaired by droid engineers would be cool too.

Anyway, I think the experience could actually be upped more than the factor of 5 they applied at the end of beta if they just had more things for us to do to get the experience. Making 1500 mouse droids is just no fun for anyone involved.

ooh, I forgot about what xRavX mentions as his point 2 above. Right now the quality of ingredients and the amount of experimentation we do has absolutely no effect on the finished droid. I would love it if spending the time/energy to make a good product were able to be seen in the finished product. If it also made a difference in the amount of experience granted, maybe that would be a good idea too. However I really don't think the experience requirements need to be changed. We just need to be able to make things that are desired by players in large enough quantities to meet those experience requirements.

I must agree. It was a blow to work up the 28.8K to get novice (which is more than many of our more lucrative collegues like the armorsmiths), and I find I need 48K to get to the next level and I can only do it making low XP items that don't seem to sell. I was gaining more xp and recovering my costs better making armor as an artisan.

I love the idea of being a DE, but this seems highly unbalanced.

Tolim,

Bloodfin

Signed!

i just got droid enginer and i agree with you guys. Why cany we build some battle droids like in episode 1 and 2? they dnt have o be uber or anything, like 250-500 hp or something. And then be abl to use 3 at once. And then get uexp. so if they kill something we get droid exp instead. this way it wouldnt blow so much toget anywhere. i have been able to sell any mouse droids since they suck. i gave 1 away to a medic so he would heal me.