Bio Engineer Archive
Thread: Our Pet Specials Question
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Agruel
Thu Jun 10, 2004 5:56 am
#1
Okay, this may have been covered before, but I am not having any luck finding much on it with the search. Strong poison, from everything I have gathered, is a fairly desirable special attack for a pet. Being a Creature Handler as well, I have Strong poison on one of the pets I made for myself.
Problem...to date I have not been able to get this special to fire. No notification in the combat window, no status notification in the HAM area, no graphic, no nothing. What, exactly, am I doing wrong?
Couple of points, to clear up any confusion. I have Taming 3, so this is of course, referencing Special attack 1. In addition, the pet is not full grown. probably about lvl 15 of 30 last night.
Any insight would be appreciated.
Akelan
Thu Jun 10, 2004 7:02 am
#2
Two things - One, train the specials with a full word command, not a letter. I have seen this fail more often than not. I'm not sure the command parser deals with the one-letter commands very well; I know /tellpet strips them most of the time.
Second, I think the specials have a re-use timer, similar to stims and other player commands, and they may not fire when commanded repeatedly. If poison is attempted, but fails to land, there might be a period before it can be attempted again. This is all theory, but it seems to explain the results I get, as I tend to use strong poison specials a lot in my own pets.
LLan
Agruel
Thu Jun 10, 2004 7:25 am
#3
Well that is good to know Akelan, it gives me hope that Strong Poison might still be triggerable, just hard to use. Over on the Creature Handler forum, I am being told that Strong Poison is not triggerable at all, and if this turns out to be true, that kind of lowers the value of the special in my mind.
Akelan
Thu Jun 10, 2004 7:33 am
#4
I would say that just as a quick guess I get poison to land about 1/4 of the time I command it. I know the pet will use it at random if I do not command it, and it is hard to tell the difference if I have given the command 4 or 5 times and it shows up as to whether it was my command or a random attack. I have, however, noticed it showing up almost immediately after issuing the command as my first attack command (target and issue my "spit" command to engage the pet, rather than the usual attack command) and it has shown up on command enough to pretty much eliminate sheer coincidence as the reason, so I continue to have all my toxic pets trained to use the command and working with it in hunting.
LLan
Agruel
Thu Jun 10, 2004 7:44 am
#5
Hmmm, you said something that might help narrow this issue down a bit more than I had previously thought...when you mentioned your "Spit" command, I assume that you mean you engage with a ranged poison attack. Hopefully I just misunderstood. Both of the pets I am currently testing this with have Strong Posion as a special, but no ranged. I wonder if that might be why I am having issues? Ah well, I will try it again tonight and report back.
NancyJ
Thu Jun 10, 2004 7:46 am
#6
If you're still having problems - you might try popping into the CH forum to ask - they'll probably know better than us. Would you ask a weaponsmith how to do Legshot unless he was also a carbineer? 
From my experience with my little non-ch poison pet, he does the poison attack if I dont issue the attack command but instead issue the special attack command
From my experience with my little non-ch poison pet, he does the poison attack if I dont issue the attack command but instead issue the special attack command
Message Edited by NancyJ on 06-10-2004 07:49 AM
Talthazar
Thu Jun 10, 2004 7:52 am
#7
According to the CH correspondent, Knockdown, poison and disease specials do not work on command.
Akelan
Thu Jun 10, 2004 1:49 pm
#8
My pet that I was thinking of does not have a ranged attack, so his "spit" command for poison sends him to the target to engage. Whether or not this works where commanding it in the battle itself does not is hard to tell, but I ahve noticed the pet poisoning on engaging quite often when I use this approach, which also lets me hold the second pet in reserve for a moment until the main one has gotten securely in the mob's sights, then send it in with the common attack command. (I often tame and mature a non-CH level creature in my datapad, and use it when it is still young enough to be called with my other pets to see how it does and just for the enjoyment of working with the team again.)
It seems too often to just be chance, I will have to try watching it more carefully and see if I can tell the difference.
I have CH 0/3/1/4, so I can field a total of CL 33, and 2 active pets, so with a CL 22 cu pa that is my favorite mount and a 9900 health, light armor, 60% kinetic beast (a pretty good CL 22 for my efforts) I can also use a CL 10 to full growth, or sometimes tame and grow an exceptional CL 12 or so to give to a newbie CH. Some of my CL 10 misses have been quite good CL 12's, and are generally well appreciated as gifts by novice CH's, and I often give a CL 10 that is full grown to a player that is close to making the skill to start CH, so they have a good pet to get exp with from the beginning, and can get a little experience handling them, while keeping a pet slot free for the tame & train critters that provide a lot of early experience once they make CH.
Llan
Talthazar
Thu Jun 10, 2004 2:01 pm
#9
It probably is worth some extra testing. The problem with these three specials is that there is no text message over the pets head associated with the attack like there is on every other special. With the others you know it goes off when comanded because you see the message when you give the command, whether it actually sticks or not. I've been working my second account more lately, but maybe I'll have to get out this weekend and try these out some more.
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