It's a choice. Drone stasis also is. So is generator idea. I support the generator idea since it involves the least coding.

This is a fix for old content thats been broken for years.

Change to drone gens/broken drones or make weapons blow up on death.

I didn't express myself clearly. By coding i mean coding+debugging. I can see that there would be crazy amounts of bugs for some ideas. Gens, however, dont take ANY coding, just editing the server XML to add them and some debugging.

While Stasis and Drone Repair/Husk requires larger amounts of debugging, which the admins will try to pass onto us...

I'm all for implementing the best solution, regardless of difficulty to code etc.

With that being said, I still feel as if Drone Generators (and fighter generators as well) are the best solution for various reasons:

All classes would have the same mechanic behind gearing a new character:
- Heavy initial investment without long-term "fees" associated with choosing a particular class, which in this case is a massive investment on the engineer's part which is totally dependent on SS's dynamic (and antiquated) market/trade system.

- Depending on the number of "newer" accounts, one can justify that a certain percentage of people will choose engineer. New engineers equates to more drones being purchased or required which results in potentially higher drone costs and less availability; the more engineers there are, the less potential there is for a static availability of drones due to the group of people that farm drone drops would not be proportionally consistent to a new influx of players...

- No other class suffers from a dynamic market as much as Engineers; one could argue that Zerkers have to pay for 5 weapons instead of 1 like most other classes. My argument for that is that there are a plethora of weapons for each damage type for Zerkers; that is not the case for engineers. There are various tiers available for Zerkers in terms of weapon choices to fit a particular scenario; if an Engineer wants to do bana, he has to use AID's as there is no alternative for heat at that tech level.

Like I suggested in several other threads, make drone/fighter generators a heavy initial investment and potentially annoying to build. Various tiers of built "generators"(the core construction module behind the generators; ruin generators [special stats; maybe mzungu gives the generated drones additional bank but lower regen], built zone-themed generators that maybe give perks or something) determine the amount of drones/fighters generated. Higher tiers would cause the resulting generator to be much more expensive to repair, but would allow for more drones to be generated.

There is a huge area of content to explore concerning generators, and I think it is the next big step towards balancing class cost.

I don't see why Engineer gets a comparison to zerker. Why should they get a plethora of damage type selections?! The last thing they need is new drones.

I used Surg, Mining, Energy, Laser, Physical, Rad, and Heat as a zerk. The drones that "can" use mining, surg, and rad are weak as fuck. Only Energy, Laser, and Heat are real viable pve damage types for engineers unless you're lemon with a quad gen DS+ for armadas.

My sniper, gunner, sd, and even seer have greater damage type variety than my engineer. And everything my old zerk could use, so can the shm.

Your engineer must be pretty bad then. Armada Ambushes are extremely powerful in the right hands, so that's surgical. Armada drones have their uses, though not for straight DPS - that's physical. And it's well known that there are no high-level mining or radiation drones.

The only class that I ever found usable to put out a huge amount of radiation DPS over any other DPS, was Fleet Commander. If you go by that fact, then Engineers have Bule Ada Drones. They are suited for capping, but in the same line as it is for most other classes: radiation damage won't come close to other damage types.

In addition to all the fuss we're making on THE FACT ENGINEERS PAY OVER TIME THAN ANY OTHER CLASS

Btw, it isn't necessary for one to replace another. Example:Gens could be implemented so, that they take an amount of the according drone or for some other reason cost more than a set of drones. But drones would still be usable to old way too.