Artisan Archive

I'm looking through and noticing a few comparisons to Ranger, as such I thought I'd throw my two cents on this topic in from a Ranger point of view.

1) the idea to give a wayfaring line similar to Ranger: our terrain negotiation only gives a bonus to crawl speed. The scout bonus is what allows you to climb hills faster. Plus if you try and get an artisan/scout combo to have better maskscent abilities than a Master Ranger, you will have nerf cried on you so fast... Ranger camo right now is borked and mask scent often works better. As such if ANY proffession is gonna get a bonus to mask scent above what a master scout can get, it's gonna hafta be Ranger.

2) the comparison to /areatrack. I don't know if you have any idea of how it works, but basically, we only have a 500m radius, and we can only see creatures that have spawned. Thus, this system would be useless to artisans since resources don't "spawn" the way animals do.Plus, 2500m is a HUGE range, and utterly out of whack with any skill in the game. In addition, Ranger tracking is a severly lacking skill and any attempt to take/modify this skill for use in artisan would be blasphemy for Rangers.

3) "Tuning" resources: Many Rangers have had the same idea for the Ranger proffession, and each time it has been overlywhelmingly shot down. The simple reason is that it's an economy destroyer. I know that as I made my way up scout to Ranger, I sold my resources to get money and I made more from resources than from mission payoffs. However, consider if Rangers had the ability to "tune" avian meats. My stuff would be next to worthless as Rangers with Elite combat skills kill more already, and if their stuff was better, it's less money for newer players. With the current system, any scout can go kill a creature and get less material but the same quality stuff. Taking that away takes away from the newer proffessions without really giving a bonus to the elites. What would end up happening is only the best tuned resources would sell for the CPU that are now being offered. The lower stuff would be much less expensive, meaning that Elite profs would be making the same CPU, but low-level toons would be making a fraction of what they can now. This is not the way to a better proffession.

Simply put, the way the original poster has it would really make a difficult system. Having recently completed a 10-page document on the ideas of the Ranger, I can suggest a few things that I believe would be in line with a true Star Wars miner.

1 line of harvestor management- would provide a bonus to BER of any harvesor placed, reduce costs and increase harvestor lots.

1 line of manual harvesting- a true miner can dig deeper and faster than any other. With a specialized tool, they could extract more resources in faster time by hand.

1 line of planetary surveying- a combination of increasing the size of the scan to 1000m (similar to the 1000m radius Rangers are asking for) and providing a command to the planetary survery droids at higher levels to find high concentrations. As the skills go up, the planetary droid seeks out higher and higher concentrations.

1 line of transportation: the ability to get resources from remote harvestors via droid. At master you can collectalarge portion of the resources from agiven harvestor (each use consumes 1 droid battery)

I apologize for trolling, this is just my opinion on the subject. I don't mean to imply in any way that the ideas were BAD, in fact I've often wondered why they don't have a proffession dedicated to getting resources. However, the implementation of tuning and the comparison to Ranger skills piqued my interest, so I felt I had to chip in. Take my ideas for what they are: the opinions of a Ranger who has never used a survey droid (though I did master artisan once).

anyway, have a nice day and feel free to troll the Ranger board anytime.