Droid Engineer Archive

This is the first time I've visited this board, so if this has been answered forgive me.

Ever since about the last patch my droid is going through batteries like crazy. Prior to this I used my droids for months and never used a battery. Heck, not being a DE and knowing next to nothing about them, I didn't even know about batteries. I heal wounds with my droid and I never had a problem.

Then after last patch, my droids stopped working. I had no clue why. I'd pull out my droid to heal wounds and it would say something like "you must be in a camp or a med center to heal wounds". Ugh, I thought to myself, the whole freaking purpose of a medical droid is to be able to heal people outside of camps or med centers.

Then someone said maybe it needed power. So I got some batteries and sure enough when I picked "recharge" the droid worked! YAY!!!

Ok so here is my problem. I tend to take out my droid for a maximum of about 3-5 minutes then put it away. I only have it out long enough to heal a few wounds on a party member. I never leave it out running around me. The reason i'm REALLY TICKED off is that I have to put a new battery in my droid after about 2 or 3 uses. We're talking about having to power up my droid after 5-10 minutes of total combined use!!

THAT IS UNACCEPTABLE!

Is this a bug that was introduced after the last patch and have the dev's said it will be fixed?

This isn't just happening to one of my droids (ie: it's not like one of my droids is bugged) because I have 2 droids and they both are like this. One is a Cp30 and the other a probot, both with Med rating's of 110.

I almost spend more time charging my droid than I do actually using the dang thing!

Can someone please explain to me what's going on?

Uh, droids need batteries. How is that hard to understand. Before whendroids didn't need batteries for rechargingit was abug.I keep a crate of batteries on my person, one battery out all the time, and a spare crate or 2 on my droid.

So again: Droids need batteries.

Let me clarify my post.

I realize that droids needs batteries. I realize that the fact that they didn't use to use batteries was probably a bug.

MY POINT is that having to put a new battery in my droid after 10 min total usage is overkill!

Is that truly "working as intended?" Because if it is, at least let me dump 10 batteries in it at once for a combined power storage, so I don't have to frig around and recharge my droid every second time I use it to heal 4 wounds.

At first it does seem like every 10 minutes that a battery is required. However once I started using my probot consistently is seemed more like every 30 minutes.

What we really need is a power guage. If we get only one thing in the next major patch for droids, I hope this would be it.

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Redfyree wrote:

THAT IS UNACCEPTABLE!

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I totally agree! I offer all my customers lifetime recharges and repairs for free. It so embarrasing to have to recharge my power droid before using it to recharge my customer's droid. Ugh!

The battery drain thing sucks.

Droids should need power. But having no feedback is really problematic. You have no idea when your droid will stop because of low power, or even if using more than one battery stacks the power.

Contrast with creature pets. They can be feed, but they don't need it. This makes droid companions pretty undesirable. Sure droids can provide services like crafting. But pets need no maintenance that I know of. Droids need batteries.

Maybe a fair thing to do for balance is to pay a maintenance fee on animals you have. You know, for cleaning up after them, grooming, etc. Make the fee be paid for having them in your datapad, and based on the physical size of the animal. Just a thought.

I agree, I sell batteries by the crate. It's a good profitable product. BUT!!

The usage rate of the batteries is terrible! I use probots in battle all the time and going through 4 - 6 batteries a (long) day is just too much. Does anyone remember Luke carrying a satchel of batteries around and recharge his two droid 5 times a day?

did they used to have an option where you could experiment with the duration of the battery charges? if i remember right, there were two things you could change with batteries and experimentation... 1) number of charges; and 2) duration of a charge. maybe they should look into that option. i find that the more commands i give my probot, the more it seems to need a battery.

you can only exp on quality for batteries and that is in the number of uses per battery.

I made as much money selling batteries as I did as a DE until i hit master, which was just the other day. And I'm still making money on them, but factory runs are now on crates of droid stuff cause I don't need the xp.

4-6 charges a day? I don't get where the big deal is here. You use a droid thereforeit needs juice. Makes sense to me. I charge my probot that follows me around every so often just to keep him from hanging up in the middle of a swarm of killer parakeets on Talus.

"4-6 charges a day? I don't get where the big deal is here."

I suspect droids are bugged. **IF** I could pull out my droid and use it all day and only go through 4-6 batteries I wouldn't be having such a problem.

But when I have to recharge my droid every 2nd or 3rd use when he's only out of my datapad for 5 minutes MAX each time I use him, that's too much.

I would bet by the sounds of this that droids consume power if they are out being used, or if they are sitting in your datapad.

I am a DE too, the battery usage thing is another blow against us. I too sell batteries by the crate, but it just makes us even worse when compared to a CH or BE. Not only are their pets better in combat, but when an animal gets hungry, most people have the basic forage skill to feed their animal when out in the world combating. Now the only thing that holds true is that not everyone can hold a high level CH or BE pet, and I have never pitted a probot against a rock beetle. Hmm that would be interesting

Hi,
Just to answer DarkPuppet ....
I had my Probot Droid out last night 10-11-03 and when it was low on power it told me so by beeping *low Power* in my chat screen. It was still working fine but I recharged it anyway and carried on.

I haven't been using it long so maybe this is a fix ?
Or has this been around for a while.

Sukram Nao (vF)
Master Artisan
DE 2-0-0-4
Novice Pistoleer

Corellia
Kor Vella

Ibelieve that droids' battery consumption has increased.

This issue is magnified due to a fix in the last patch that put a stop to droids being recharged when stored. (Storing/calling your droidused to recharge it completely, so if you only used it 3-5 minutes at a time, it probably never needed recharged before).

The "droids being recharged when stored" thing was a bug, in my opinion, but the ol' DEV pendulum seems to have swung a bit far (as always). Rather than justremoving them from being recharged in the datapad, now their usage rate is borked. (buy 1 fix, get 2 bugs FREE!!)

I do not know if this has been offically addressed by the DEVs or not. We have a huge list of problems that we're still waiting on answers for, and I believe this is onsaid listalready.. (haven't read Gorantoth's list for a while though, so don't quote me on that). I truly hope they fix this, but I'm not holding my breath. Our bug list has been"looked at" for months now, with little to no feedback.

For now.. finding a friendly DE to sell you a nice factory crate of batteries is the way to go. We're at the mercy ofSOE on this one.. all we can do is hope for the best!

Cheers,