Droid Engineer Archive

Ill be doing it this week. I had to push it off until some of internal discussions were finished. The timetable was changed because the Droid Engineers were very clear in telling me they wanted Droid Engineering and Droid Handling as two seperate professions.

Their argument makes a lot of sense too. A good balance is akin to Bio-Engineers and Creature Handlers; BE's make em and CH's use them. Its really two different playstyles. One is crafting and one is combat/exploration. Adding a class of combat droids to the game has to be similar. Combat droids themselves have to stay level 10 or under for the general population otherwise everyone would rush out and get the better pets. That leaves a wide range of powerful combat droids that needs to be in the game, but to get those droids, players have to spend the time and energy to earn them.

So what we'll have is a Droid Engineer profession and a Droid Handling profession. All players will have access to combat droids up to level 10 and DH's will get a wide range of heavy combat droids to handle.

This is in the round table discussion thread ending 1-25-04.

Get to posting. It's not easy being ignored so thoroughly, of course.

What the.....?

I think the main concern on these boards was the ability to make droids everyone could use, with the exception of only a few (one?) DE-only droids. A droid handler profession? From what I could see, most DE's are strongly opposed to that. Or am I on too much flu medication?

Bleh. This might be the final straw....

Well, although not what I wanted (wanted certs in existing classes)... I will take this because it is the best thing we are gona get for a while now.

However... if we only get to make these new combat droids and dont get any new kinds of modules for everyone to use (such as slicing modules, and other goodies that will benefit other kinds of professions, not just a DH profession) I would be very upset.

Yes droids would be great for combat, and a DH profession would at least eliminate any balance issues or min-maxers while making it possible to make really good combat droids and not just slightly better probots. But Star Wars is also about utility droids that are useful to many if not ALL the professions in the game. THAT is what I wish for, not just these new combat droids.

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Let's see...

Master Droid Engineer, Master Artisan, Master Droid Handler... assuming that DH is an elite class based on either Engineering (like Droid Engineer) or based in some wayon Droid Engineer itself, that leaves 47 skill points for other things.

Hmm... that'll get a big chunk of Merchant which would then leave me with no weapon skills at all. Or I could take Marksman/Rifleman and be without the ability to sell effectively. Or I could drop Master Artisan and pay someone to make me schematics for the MA parts I need... that's probably the most effective route.

Considering that the end result will be an exceptionally well-rounded combat/merchant/crafter character, this doesn't seem like such a bad thing after all. What's the crisis again?

The crisis is that the devs seem to want to force people to take a complete profession to use droids whereas almost everyone else wants droids to remain usable by all.

The simplest way round this is to include a +x droid level for each Master basic profession , master elite profession and possibly for novice elite profession.A little balancing to prevent people taking a ridiculous amount of novice elite professions, job done, very nice.

It appears however that the Devs don't want to do anything so crass as working out a solution to the problem, but just want to add a single flag to the CH code to differentiate between creature and droid, and slap it onto a droid handler class

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Arcid wrote:

The crisis is that the devs seem to want to force people to take a complete profession to use droids whereas almost everyone else wants droids to remain usable by all.

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"Everyone" also wants Droidekas, and it would be horribly unbalancing to allow everyone to use a Droideka. What we're seeing from the Devs is the best possible compromise that they can come up with - give the players who want them their ultra-powerful combat droids, but don't overbalance the existing Droid Engineer class while doing it.

The choice was probably something like this: add an array of new combat droids usable onlyby a new Droid Handler profession, or don't add any new combat droids at all.

Not sure which of those I would have chosen onmy own.

My initial impression when I first saw this was:

*censored*

That was followed by5 minutes of staring at my screen in shocked disbelief...

Really...this is what that clueless dude has been telling the devs we want all this time? This is what has been taking so long? This is an example of how "great" a job he has been doing "listening" to us and passing info along to the devs?

What the hell?

Kollos, I concur. And after last night's meeting of the Inter-Server DEA, I thought it was pretty clear that most DE's did not want a new DH profession, but would work with a new Droid Certification system.

I'm sure Drashk is having quite a migraine headache about now.

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Kollos wrote:

The choice was probably something like this: add an array of new combat droids usable onlyby a new Droid Handler profession, or don't add any new combat droids at all.

Kollos:

As you are so fond of pointing out, the issue is hardly so black-and-white as you paint it here. Please don't ask us not to paint it these terms in one place but then use that very same black-and-white example in other areas (to make your points).

I happen to believe thata properly designed and implemented "cert" system for combat-capable droids is a VERY good solution and totally doable. This is, of course, the logical solution...but may not be the one that the Devs like since it involves **gasp** WORK.

Making a new DH profession, in my opinion, was simply a very easy way out of a very sticky problem. That's not fixing a profession...more like an 'artful dodge' of our plight.

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