Droid Engineer Archive

I posted this as a reply to another thread without really thinking about it but when I was finished I thought this might actually be a really good idea. Im no DE but Im a droid fan and still buy droids regularly regardless of how badly they've been nerfed. As it stands, there really is no purpose in getting different droid chassis' other than coolness factor. If you're looking for functionality though, youll be walking around with nothing but R2s. But specialized abilities in droids might be able to fix this problem. And what I thought of for 2 droid types(and the creation of a new type) I think could in-and-of itself make the DE class valuable again. Please look it over and add your comments:

Creatures should have the battle market cornered pet-wise. It is clear from the movies that creatures in theSW universe are very powerfull and made good use out of, and they pwn droids.However, I think droids need to be much more usefull for support and utility purposes. As that is the inherant purpose of droids. Maybe allow droids to do chores for you? They have Load-Lifters afterall. Program the thing to run to your harvesters each day and unload them for you then take them back to your bank. Have him take along your protocol droid that can operate the harvesters for you and deposit maintenance/power or change the resource. Make surveying droids too so the 3 can go together and get the whole job done: The load lifter unloads the hopper to take back to town, the surveyor surveys the area and can take samples to see what quality it all is, and the protocol droid programs the harvester if needed. The owner could do all of this remotely by buying a droid communicator like the one C-3PO uses to communicate with Luke on the death star.

And to clarify what I mean by remotly, this should not be just taking over your droids controls. Because that would defeat the purpose of having droids doing the work, should just run there yourself then. But perhaps a scenario like this:

Pull your 3 droids out of the datapad.

Order them to group with one another.

Give the group(or perhaps the group leader and the other 2 follow him) the waypoint for your harvester and give them an order to travel there.

When they get there an EMail is sent to you informing you of the fact. When this happens, you use your communicator to take direct control of the droids one by one to do the tasks as if you were there yourself. When that's done, you send them the WP to another harvester in the area(or of town if there are no more in the area) and have them go.

All this would be designed to minimize the work of the player and have the droids be doing the work for him. With this extra time he could be out hunting, crafting, socializing, healing, whatever's his thing. Although for this to work droid aggro would need to be minimized or removed or they would never make thier targets...

Great idea. Wont happen though. I have come to the realization that they dont plan on making DE any better than what it is. But I am one that will continue up that long hill to Master DE. But great idea though.

Rashnu Botmaker - Master Artisan/Droid Engineer - Lowca

Great Idea, but how is a binary load-lifter gonna walk up them big hills? Nevermind, it would just go around it maybe.

Droids need a smooth path to get to a waypoint is my uhhh . . point. (no pun intended)

Actually, I thought that was a great idea. (about sending the load lifter out to retrieve the goods). But then again, they don't want any automatic gameplay to take place either. So most likely it would be balanced out in such a way that it would have a risk involved too. Most likely that it can be taken down by an aggro mob if it does not avoid it well enough. But this also brings in something else I thought of. they would have to eliminate the "red robot" function where if you leave it unattended long or get far away from it, it becomes attackable.

Wokka-Wokka

I've had a simular idea about this, but to make the idea fly, there must be some kind of risk. So Invented the 'jawa' risk. In essence, everytime you pull out your droid to do something like this, you run the risk of lossing your droid. In other words, some one can steal your droid - that some one would be either a bh type or some kind of slicer on the player side or just npc's if that's too hard to do. Once your droid is captured, you have a random chance to 'rescue' it. In other words, you are given some kind of 'quest' to get back your property. To migate all this you can have your droids insured =)

works out nicely.

=)