Droid Engineer Archive

When hunting rancors, I cant seem to keep my droid at my side, far less make it go into the battle zone to harvest, because rancors do AoE attacks. Is there a way around this?

Please advice, because I love my harvesting droid now (I was a bit sceptical at first). Its a shame that its so whimpy at rancors.

Get your local DE to make one with a combat module. Then they'll become the fearless comat droids we all know and love.

Don't have your droid made with a combat module installed and don't group with the droid. Either of these 2 things will cause the droid to be targeted in combat.

No DaiLai's problem does not have to do with being grouped with his harvester. Rancors drop an AoE bleed that effects droids, even though it is not supposed to (known bug). A combat module would solve the running, but it would also cause the droid to draw aggro from a rancor, and lead to the much less desirable end of being crushed by the beast. Using a harvester droid under such circumstances is tricky, but I came up with a method through trial and error. This is what I came up with for my Swordswoman/BE, who was tanking her mobs in a tight cluster and soloing the lairs. With a good harvester, veghash and long buffs, she hauled in over 65k in hide in one session.

1. Use /tellpet macros. Change your droid commands to a /tellpet if they are not already. Feel free to add a line of speech apart from the command, so you know when its issued. The range of a /tellpet is about 100m which is the distance a droid will run. It is also much farther than a /shout. You will be able to call the droid back without chasing it down. (FYI- if it has the bleed mentioned above, it will try to run on every tick of the bleed until it fades)

2. Park the Droid I learned quickly to station my droid about 30m from where I was fighting. It short circuited him getting hit since he was not in the melee.

3 Shift the mob Basically, I ended up shuttling the mob back and forth between two points. Rancor goes down, I command the harvest, then move myself and the mob away. when the droid is working, I would shift to my next target. Lather, rinse, repeat.

This may seem tedious and make the droid not worth using, but to be honest, I used this method during the early stage of each wave, then when I felt the lair wasnt popping, I simply resorted to my normal MO and spun the rest of the pack to death. The harvest I gained from making sure to get almost every rancor outweighed the slight slowdown in killtime. Without the droid, I would have been still killing when the first corpses began to poof, so I think it's worth the effort.