Asa master ranger, I obviously have to be pretty careful while hunting bigger mobs. I usually just used my probots to take the initial aggro from a mob until I could trapthe moband then called him back quickly to avoid taking to much damage.
After my probots armor was nerfed to high heck, I was weary of trying any of the new combat droids. I heard nothing but bad things about them from reading the boards, and the idea of a combat enabled R3 was pretty silly. Why they couldn't let the standard 'roger roger' battledroid chasis be the CL10 combat droid I'll never know.....remember how quickly they were destroyed in Episode 1? That seems like less than CL10 to me.
Anywho.......I decided to try one out as a novelty kinda thing. Using primarily the planetary maps and asking around, it took me a couple of days to even find a DE vendor that A) wasn't completely empty or B) had all old, outdated stock. I was starting to think my server didn't have any DEs left for a while.
After picking up an R3 unit and an LE Repair droid, I went to work. The fact that I can keep the R3 in ranged mode is pretty nice.....he can start drawing aggro while still keeping his distance. The little cattle prod and buzzsaw is funny....laughed a lot when I first saw that. And I can pretty much use the same hunting technique as I did before......hit mob with bleed, /peace, back off, send in R3 when he starts charging to draw aggro, snare mob, pull R3 off mob (if it's too close), fire away. If R3 is far enough away he can keep firing away. I have to be more careful about it taking too much damage as it doesn't last more than a few hits of course.
LE Repair droid isn't as useful even with more HAM. The lack of a ranged attack makes it much harder to draw aggro off me after initial bleed / peace. And it's so slooooow. It's combat animations are a riot though...watching it punch and kick mobs is entertainment in itself.
Again, these things can't be used as your main tank. These things can't be used as your main damage dealer. They can be used as distractions and as backup pretty well though if you're careful.
Now my question is if there is anyway to heal these guys aside from sitting around? I heard there are different droid repair kits, but they are only usable by DEs.....is this correct?
Thanks for the new toys, hope the devs get around to fixing all your issues.