Droid Engineer Archive

Hello everyone,

Someone please explain the HAM to me. I been a DE for awhile now and It has been a long time since I even made a probot. It did seem to get smoked very quickly (had 810 HAM).

Well, I made another one after I was able to make armor 4. Crafted an Adv.Probot and had HAM of 821, armor - medium, and resists of 40%. (used 2 lvl 4 armor modules).

Went out fighting and encountered a greater mutant womp rat (red to me with probot out). I sent it in and after it zapped it a couple of times, I knelt down and started body shooting it. In the end I never got touched, and the probot was at 1/4 Health HAM. I scrolled through the combat tab and roughly adding up the damage it took, it was well over 5k.

Anyway, When probots were perma-death i quit making them and using them. I figured I would try after the patching and was kinda pleased to be honest. I made several more and all were what I would call very good "tanks", allowing me to skill up on combat and pistol XP with very little hassle. I have never owned a pet and am sure they are much better, but I have to say, the Probot did very well.

FYI, I am not a serious gamer, but play for the enjoyment of it. Using Probot as a tank against a red con who would eat my alive had I solo'ed or barely would of won by burst running and health shots, was enjoyable.

Back to my original question: what is 820 HAM? its definately not 820 health, action, mind points or my probot would of been KO'd in first 10 seconds.

Shroood

One word. yes.

Since Armor works now, the armor cut the damageso the HAM only took some of the damage.

Waren Xim

Novice Droid Engineer

Corellia, Radiant Galaxy

Your probot was able to take so much damage because of its armor. I am guessing, but the womp rat probably does not have any armor penetration. That means its 2 levels below the armor level of the probot, thus doing only 25% of its normal damage. If you also incorporate the 40% resists into the equation, the womp rat was only doing 15% of its normal damage. Thus if your womp rat did 5k damage to the probot, then the probot would only take 750 damage, but since it might get spread around the 3 bars(Health, Action and Mind), It might look like even less.

In short the probot is tough because it has good armor, not because of its ham (which is pitifully low compared to even the cheapest pets). The place where the probot really needs improvement is its damage (only 50, much lower than say a bearded jax (120)). You will probably note that during the fight, while the probot absorbed most of the incoming damage, you dished out a lot more than him. If it was fighting alone, the probot would probably have lost after a very very very long fight since both sides were doing so little damage to each other.

Adam Steele, Tatoonie, Lowca

are you sure you couldn't take on the womp rat alone?

I could take them both with my novice carbineer and my novice pistoleer with no pets very easily, and justwith good (not great) weapons.

Heres my take on Probots as a Master DE and Novice working towards master Commando. A good Probot, and i mean an Adv. Probot with Medium armor 40% resists is just marginally usefull.

As a Commando I take Huf Dun missions on Talus. Now these creatures are rough, and i could not stand up to one for more than 5 hits at best. Probot pet is able to stand up to 2 of them while my Commando kills them both, although its health is low to incapped at the end.

The problem is, as a Commando I can do massive amounts of damage to make up for pets weak output. But any other class who does not have good damage output can only rely on a probot to hold of an enemy while he escapes.

Amd against PCs in the game? Probot dies in seconds in a firefight, unable to contribute at all.

So my take, as a Commado pet, barely acceptable. As a pet to any other classs??? A joke. At best an escape mechanism. But the best attack droid in the game should be much more.

i use them for taking out bounty marks. very useful for that. our long shuttle wait times allow them to heal in between marks. other than that.... probably useless.

Judge for yourselves if Probots are really that bad.

My Probot:
824 HAM
40% Medium Armor

Huuron Huntress
Armor Rating: None
Special Protection
Heat: 40.0%
Cold:100.0%
Effectiveness
Kinetic: 15.0%
Energy: 15.0%
Blast:15.0%
Restraint: 15.0%
Vulnerability
Stun -
Acid -
Electricity-
Deathblows: Yes
Ferocity: 0
Dificulty Level: 28
Special Attack 1:Knockdown
Special Attack 2: Stunning Strike
Base To-Hit: 0.55
Damage:270-280

I screwed up and somehow got incapped on the first round of combat. (/tell Hell does that. Thank you Haji) The Huuron did not have any Bleeds on it. I had done maybe 1k of damage to it and my probot maybe 150 damage so far.

What the hell, let's see what happens. I'mnot farfrom the Cloning Center. I hit clone real quick and start running back to the combat area. I returned just in time to see my Probot get incapped. It took me 3 minutes and 21 seconds from the time I was incapped and the Probot being incapped.

Of course the Huuron didn't have much HAM missing, but I was simply amazed my Probot tanked a CL28 critter for 3 minutes and 21 seconds.

Judge for yourself.