Droid Engineer Archive

The discussions I've tried to follow a bit on DE-only Combat Droids made me come up with an idea one how to integrate crafters in general more into combat as apparently at least some DEs want to play a bigger and more direct role in the conflicts going on in this Star Wars universe.

As a non-DE I am, of course, against DEs having DE-only Droids, because I would also want one and I can't discover a logic behind certifying droids with AI to a DE ... but as a crafter myself I would like to have a more valuable and "unique" roll in combat, either helping my group or making myself stronger in a way related to my professions.

I would like to see a skill integrated in all professions that craft something used in combat ... this skill would let an engineer temporarily boost the power of profession specific items while in use ... this would be an add-on to slicing and power-ups. A weaponsmith should be able to target friends and tweakthe weapon used (if in close proximity, costing a special slicing tool - maybe crafted by novices - and some mind points), an armorsmith should be able to do this with armor, and a droid engineer should be able to boost the HAM and dmd stats of a Droid (or healing stats etc).

This to me seems to be a realistic feature that would give crafter a better and much more valuable role in combat, in groups as well as solo. I would tie this skill to a modifier that increases while going up a skill tree, so that dabbler can decide to get a small bonus, if they chose to spend skillpoints on that extra, but so masters still get a huge advantage (kind of like with experimentation points ... only it should work )

I realise that this proposal isn't limited to DEs, but the coming reorganization of this profession could be used to maybe integrate a system like this, which is why I am posting this here. And if not feasible to do this to all professions (you would probably have to integrate a complicated new system to ensure you're only tweaking an item from your profession), I think at least the DEs should be able to somehow power up their droids in combat, maybe by integrating some kind of stim-buff that only works on droids (integrating a tweaked droid batterie in RP sense).

Would something like this be some compensation for DEs wanting exclusive combat items ?