A plea for Bio-Engineered Pets

[ansgaming]

hello,
I was browsing pets on the market and noticed there weren't many and the stats appeared strange. So I was thinking of leveling up a BE and came to the forums to read about them. Found this thread.
Have any changes been implemented?
Thanks,
morrow

[Anishor]

Changes are on test awaiting our BE's to test them.

[ansgaming]

How exciting!
Thanks for the update.
Ill spread the word. (Tell the one I know)

Thanks,
Morrow

[ansgaming]

Any progress to report from testing?

[Halyn]

Doreen's done some testing. We're doing some final adjustments, and BE pet changes will be in the next patch.

[crnel]

Coming in very late to the discussion. Not sure what specific patch changes were made last year, or if they were felt to resolve the OP's concerns, but BE'd pets are still way below their wild counterparts in terms of viability because stats still require heavy experimentation to achieve wild pet levels - let alone BE improvement levels. I would suggest following Hayln's earlier suggestion to combine Physique, Prowess and Metal experimentation lines to conserve experimentation points, as long as the Ranged Attack would still translate into the template the way that it does currently when placed into the Mental slot.

Even if this isn't possible, there's another glaring problem that I think could be resolved fairly easily.

As I discuss here - http://empireinflames.com/forum/viewtop ... 4784#p4784 - any DNA sample with fortitude >1000 shoots all resists down to 0, with no possibility to recover them during experimentation. Also, Special Resists, which maintain their values throughout assembly and experimentation, have been largely replaced by Effective Resists only, which must be regained through experimentation (unless, again, fortitude is >1000, in which case they're stuck at 0). This makes high CL-level DNA fairly worthless, since any pet made with them will have no resists. (*None of the DNA samples in SquirrelGirl's examples feature fortitude >1000, so I suspect that the excess fortitude problem may be an unintended consequence of last year's patch.)

Current case example from a NS Bull Rancor.

Live/Bas:

Special Protection
Energy: 60.0%
Heat: 100.0%
Cold: 100.0%
Electricity: 100.0%

Effectiveness
Kinetic: 15.0%
Blast: 15.0%
Stun: 15.0%
Acid: 15.0%

EiF:

Effectiveness
Kinetic: 60%
Energy: 60%
Electricity: 70%
Stun: 50%
Blast: 70%
Heat: 60%
Cold: 60%
Avid: 50%
Lightsaber: 60%

Even though EiF's rancor has higher values, they won't keep their values at assembly because they're effectives, and they'll be stuck at 0 no matter how much experimenting is done on Physique because fortitude is over 1000. As a result, there's no reason on this server to gather DNA from this or other similarly high-CL pets with high fortitude and effectives only: the defenses resulting from their DNA will be worthless.

Several options I would recommend:

1. Replace all Effective Resists with Special Resists. This seems to have been done on SRII (though I would confer with Takh to verify). I came across a pet GSP on Coronet that had all Special Resists in the 40s-60s, which are numerically higher than live/Bas (http://swgcreatures.info/detail.asp?creatureID=23) and infinitely more valuable for DNA sampling than effectives.
2. Cap all Fortitude values for every creature at 1000.

Doing this plus combining the first 3 experimentation lines would give BE's a better shot at making high-quality pets, as well as give them a reason to sample DNA from bull rancors and higher powerful creatures again.