Droid Engineer Archive
Thread: Survey Droid requires Novice Artisan -- why?
psikobunny wrote:
you need to be able to survey to get droid help suveying, you need to be a scout to get droid help scouting, you need to be... ehh you get the point
Yes, but I don't believe the comparison is apt. A harvester droid that non-scouts could use would give them an essential scout ability that grants both xp and material wealth (resources). Thus, making novice Scout a requirement for using that droid is appropriate. While the /survey command is indeed an Artisan ability, the droid's usefulness is far more narrow than the harvester droid, being to essentially answer "is it time to move my harvesters on Dantooine?" without you taking a trip there. In fact, the droid doesn't even duplicate the /survey command (which returns percentage concentrations nearby), but duplicates the act of opening the survey tool to see the resource list. The list itself isn't even useful if you're not already in the process of collecting resources or familiar with existing resource names.
Let me (a master bio-engineer) use these, and I will still be hiring Artisans to go find the good concentrations for me, when the droid tells me the resources have shifted.
Zip_Moonblast wrote:
So DEs are ok with the fact that although bio-engineers and crafting doctors have the same resource gathering needs as other crafting professions, they will never get BEs and docs as customers for these things? I don't expect DEs to start campaigning for BEs and docs to get fair treatment for our own sakes, but I'm a little surprised that you're not even interested in having the additional customers. It seems like a potential win-win to me as, like I said, we'll still need an artisan to find concentrations anyway. This would just let us contact and hire an artisan sooner. But if less convenience for us and less sales & jobs for you makes sense somehow, I'll have to take your word for it. Thanks for answering, anyway.
I can see where you are coming from, as I have a character without Artisan who would benefit from the use of these droids. I would also welcome more custom from having a broader potential client group. The problem is even though these survey droids have a very limited use you would still in essence be getting a skill that comes with Artisan and then that brings up the whole abilities for no skill points debate over again.
The way I see it is that, you would need Novice Artisan just to get a list while on a particular planet. Therefore you should still need Novice Artisan to use these droids, and no matter how nice it would be for my alt to be able to check on spawns without having to log in my main, I would rather have this than there being skills that are borrowed from other professions at no skill point cost.
IDIOT ALERT!
Sorry I reread the main thread... sorry for the last post.