Bio Engineer Archive

Ok, so I've been reading all the helpful reports and delights of mutant rancor sampling fun, and I finally was compelled to do it myself last night by a good customer who wants a CL 65-70 critter, and was referred by a very nice BE (so how could I let these folks down right?). So I went to Dath northern outpost, and headed straight west like many helpful people here have suggested.

About 500m west of the outpost I started hitting wall to wall rancors. Rancor youths, rancors, enraged rancors, and the occasional bull rancors. I assume all these are mission spawns. I had little trouble sampling the bull rancors. No more difficult then sample bark mite burrower queensor some of the uber voritors on Dant as near as I could tell. But no mutants at all. I travelled further, and further and further, nothing. In fact, about 2k away from the outpost there were no spawns at all. None. I figured I was out of the "mission spawn area", but I guess no random spawns were left So I started making circles around the outpost. A 500m circle, a 1k circle, and so forth. Found lots of various rancors, but no mutants. So after a couple hours, I gave up and headed home. As most of you know, around this time, the server crashed. So, remember what others had said about spawns, and how it's best to get them early after a server reset, I logged back on when the sever came back up, and headed straight out there again. Sure enough, THIS time going about 2km west of the outpost, there were rancors. Lots of em, including the mutant variety! yay!

So now my fun began. I tried mask scent and zooming in with the speeder. My usual tactic when sampling. No dice, no chance. 4 of them herded together in a tight pack, no chance that I can mask from all 4. So I got off the speeder, maybe 50m from them and masked scent. I started walking towards them, mask scent broke. I froze. Stood complete still. They didn't aggro. I waited until my mask scent timer reset, re-masked, and waked forward very slowly. broke again. froze again, re-maksed, and now was only about 25m from the nearest one.I closed that last10m quickly and slammed down the /sampledna button. Bingo! a sample. WOHOOOO! first try. After that there were a lot of sample attempts, some successes, some failures, some aggros, and some mutant rancor deaths (final score: Arthur 2, mutant rancors 1, muahahaha). When they did aggro, I was generally able to outrun them without too much trouble. I seemed to be considerably faster than them, and also zig-zaggin between fallen trees seemed to frustrate them into giving up persuit pretty quickly. I had one death, but that was just out of pure laziness. I didn't wait until my burst-run had re-generated before attempting to re-sample, and wanted a free trip back to town anyhow, lol.

So I ended up with3 mutant samples and a few bull samples.My first combo I wanted to be a little conservative as far as CL,and wanted to get some basline as far as what sort of stats will yield what in that CL range since I have no experience with that at all, so I used mutant-bull-slinking voritor-slinking voritor-bull. Result was CL 63 with only 1 special and around 450 damage.....ewwww, not what I wanted at all! *holds head in shame*. Part of the problem was that I had like 3-4 failures during experimentation (none of them critical) which held the stats lower than they should have been.

Fortunately, I took notes, so hoped to be able to tweak this higher on my next attempt. So I tried again. This time I think it was (don't have my notes) mutant-bull-grassland voritor-grassland voritor-mutant. And when I experimented I made sure the stats were higher, particularly in the damage department. This time all experiments were a success. The result? CL 71 with again only one special.... SONOFA.... I sampled this creature, got one dna sample off it, and it poofed. Crud! *sigh* time to head back to Dath again. Still not sure what I'm going to be able to put in the psych slot so that I will get a nice "special 1" in this combine. I was trying some voritors in hopes of getting strong poison, but they never seemed to show up in the final. I may have to try a strong voritor in aggress and experiment it up like hell, dunno. Any advice would help

ArthurDent - former Bio Engineer, Tailor, and Droid Engineer
Account cancelled 7/8/05 due to game breaking bugs in these professions that have been neglected for FAR too long. Last day July 27 2005
custom tailoring and droid orders welcome. "making Evil products since July 2003"
Achiever: 80%, Explorer: 60%, Socializer: 46%, Killa 13%

Ictus - Bria

ArthurDent - former Bio Engineer, Tailor, and Droid Engineer
Account cancelled 7/8/05 due to game breaking bugs in these professions that have been neglected for FAR too long. Last day July 27 2005
custom tailoring and droid orders welcome. "making Evil products since July 2003"
Achiever: 80%, Explorer: 60%, Socializer: 46%, Killa 13%

Here is a trick to help with mutant sampling, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Use your maskscent as usual, approach the mutant rancors, try to approach a mutant that is a little bit seperated from the rest. More then likely maskscent will drop, thats ok. The mutant will agro you and chase you. (If your lucky he won't trigger his ae attack and agro the other mutants) There seems to be some relation between how much agro you get and if the ae triggers or not, but who knows, thats just speculation on my part.

Anyways, lead the single mutant away from the rest, he won't travel to far, after a few times leading him away you'll be able to gage how far they will chase.

Once agro drops, hop off your vehicle, mask scent and approach the single loan mutant. Typically he will be slowly slowly slowly trudging his way back to the nest. You can usually get in 1-3 sample attempts during this time.

It takes a little practice, but I've employed this technique for great results.

- Pahbi

here's my recipe for sure-fire lvl 65-70 pets:

mutant + mutant +mutant + rancor youth + arachne queen

couple points in physique, 1 in prowess, 1 in mind, the rest in agression and psych (you would be amazed what people think of a 600pt damage pet).

best pet in this range so far: lvl 70, 13800 H, 12500 A, 12100 M, 550-560 dam, 1.98 speed, .61 to hit, ranged attack, strong poison, knockdown. 48% to kinetic, no vulns.