Droids and Leadership

I agree with nerfing combat and fixxing sneak and BH levels. But there are 2 concerns I do have.

1) Leadership combats now suck. Very few leaderships (if any, I haven’t found one I think would work yet) will get remotely close to 150 combat. NPC’s you can call are not nearly strong enough to make up for the loss of combat levels, and oddly enough some combat mains that have high leadership levels are actually stronger than leadership/combat combos.

2) Droids suck. It took me over an hour to raise a combat droid 1 level. Thats ridiculous considering how spastic combat droids are in the first place. It would be amazing if droids gained at a better rate so combatants could use them to carry extra stuff, assist in fights, etc. Its such a neat part of the code but its so jacked up.

And before someone comes back with “Leadership NPC’s aren’t meant to be able to kill combatants or really be used for PK” my response is “Why not?” A pilot you can level in a couple days can get in a cap ship (some races like Duros which are also spectacular engineers can even build their own damn ships) And wreck LOADS of people after minimal effort. So then why would it be unfair for leadership ground types to be able to have access to more powerful NPC’s? Make them expensive. Make them where you can keep 4 with you, that log out with you like droids do so you can equip them. Make them slightly weaker then baseline humans. Then you are still talking about having to level/equip them (which is expensive and time consuming) And keep them alive through that process so you don’t lose all your investment. It would be more work than just buying a ship or building a ship and shooting people down and it would be less damaging (you can kill multiple people in a ship on the ground people can run away so yea you might wreck 1 person but not 6)

Otherwise it just feels like its useless to play leadership/combat types and it does not flesh out what could be a very cool aspect of the ground war game.

For the ammount of effort you put into the roll you might as well just suicide, role up an Engi pilot science type , do your own developments, build your own ships and then dominate everything from space.

Leadership combats most definitely don’t suck just because they can’t flurry or can’t teach it. A fully trained leadership main, for instance, can charge a premium for combat training because they can teach every skill to 97%, saving people loads of time on researching and a fair amount of just mindlessly killing things to cap out your weapon skills. Leadership combats also get feats and bonuses that 99% of other race/class combinations don’t get, like fortify and the 10% damage bonus from grouping.

The NPCs that you can call are extremely helpful and have been the decider between the person I’m hunting getting away and me finishing the fight. I think that you should spend some more time figuring out how useful they are.

I’m not going to address what you said about droids because droids are a broken bad system and we’ve beaten that horse to death multiple times in the last few years. Leadership combats are still amazingly good, though.

Zeromus pretty much summed it up exactly. Leadership/combats already are a different ‘aspect of the ground war game’ in that they’re not designed to be Combat Hercules, Slayer of All – they’re designed for people to group around for buffs, or for teaching. ‘RP-wise’ you can consider them more as an Officer class than Wolverine.

If leadership combats all hit 150, what would then be the draw of playing an actual combatant when you learned slower, got the same chances to disarm as a leadership main, couldn’t teach anyone half as efficiently and couldn’t provide half the group buffs?

If you’re looking for a strong combat character, the simplest answer is to pick combat as a class.

So..i’ve wasted time and money gearing up a droid that will just suck really bad? 🙁

Droids are good for three things: Translation, making buildship go faster, and carrying all the crap you can’t carry anymore.

10% damage means nothing if you are hitting at damage cap.

Anyone who does any combat will tell you how seldom you actually hit the damage cap in a real fight. 10% helps a lot end of story.

More on point with the topic..

Droids suck right now, we all agree. They need an overhaul to be useful beyond building ships and translating.. or maybe that’s all we should have? Who knows! If you want a combat droid, write an app for a combat droid race maybe haha

I wouldn’t mind seeing more functionality for droids. Droids that can pilot a ship for you, spy droids, medical droids, combat droids that actually work. Same for called mobs. The only called mobs that really have any use are drones for messages and soldiers/reinforcements because they can’t be shoved.

As far as I’ve seen from my testing.. You’d don’t get the 10% bonus from leading a group as a leader combat as it says you should.  The bonus never works.

Edit: Also, most of the combat skills can be spammed and learned rather quickly making the teaching to 97% thing kinda useless.  It really only helps with cutting out research.. which we all know sucks, so while that’s good, it can’t be compared to teaching sciences or some smuggling skills.