Droid Engineer Archive

Hearing the rumors about an Elite-Elite DE frightens me a bit, since I'm a casual player, and I'd really like to play a viable Droid Engineer. I bought the game a couple of weeks after release, and I still haven't achieved the first skill increase beyond Novice Droid Engineer. I hadn't even made Novice until a couple of weeks ago. Elite-Elite would mean not only having to sacrifice other professions I enjoy (some Scout, some Entertainer, some Marksman), but it would also mean a seriously long investment of time before I reached such a level.

Then I started to think about this from a different perspective, and I realized that maybe DE itself shouldn't be an elite profession, but a starting one.

As it stands, the products a droid engineer produces aren't unbalancing to the game. The most powerful droid we can produce can be overtaken by a herd of crazed durni.

When I started the game, I had in mind a preconceived character that wasn't an armorsmith or a tailor or a merchant, but just a guy that tinkered with electronics and droids. I couldn't start the game as a droid engineer, however. Instead I had to make weapons, and armor, and clothing, and fireworks, and all sorts of other things that had absolutely nothing to do with the character I had envisioned in the first place.

If DE were a starting profession, it would ensure that there'd be room for an elite DE. It would then be viable to play this character and still have character points to dabble in other things. If someone wanted to be completely self sufficient and take on the Artisan tree, they could spend their points on that. Or, ifthey didn't mind being dependent on other people,they couldspendtheir points on other things.

I was asking about this in another thread, and the upshot is that there is no reason to believe that the Devs are actually planning an elite-elite DE profession. Some DEs came up with the idea, and some DEs are so in love with the idea that they don't seem to be able to bring themselves to believe it might not happen (which is a little weird, I think), but there's nothing official at all.

In short, if you can stomach the rest of the issues with the class, then you certainly shouldn't let fears of an impending elite-elite profession hold you back.

i dont think it woudl be out of the question either..

Remember that a dev posted here asking what kinda droids would you like to see in game..

Yes, which could just as easily mean more droids in the existing DE tree, or specialty schematics available outside of the normal tree. The devs have said "more droids," so I take that as evidence that there will be more droids. I'm can't infer anything about how they will actually be delivered.

Yes, it is in fact possible that there will be a second DE profession. More to the point, it's not impossible, and I never said it was. All I'm saying is that all these possibilities have approximately the same amount of evidence pointing to them:

• There will be an elite-elite DE profession in the future.
• The devs will entirely remove the existing DE profession in the future.
• The devs will make "droid" available as a player character "race."
• There will be an elite "circus clown" profession in the future, branching off "entertainer" and the new elite artisan class, "balloon animal engineer."

ROFL Balloon animal engineer. Finally I know what I want to do in life!

I sincerely hope there is not an elite DE. If new, actually useful droids go in the game as a new profession, I'm selling back my DE skills. The DE profession would lose any purpose other than to be a punishing grind to get to the point where you can actually make something good.

One of the points of my post was that Artisan is already a "punishing grind" for those of us that just want to be Droid Engineers.

My question, ultimately, is would Elite DE be so bad if DE was of the same level as Artisan and Entertainer and Marksman? I fully realize that what I'm talking about will never ever happen, but I think it's the only way that I could stomach an Elite DE profession in the game.