Creature Handler Archive

chs used to make money when everyone needed a creature to tank for them, now barely anybody uses pets and pets that used to go for 100k's credits now go for next to nothing. Besides why buy from a ch when a BE can make a pet 10 better...

Ohh well im just ranting cuz i have spent 3 FULL days (entire weekend) rying to get my last couple boxes till master and it has been very frustrating. Dealing with low XP rewards, auto-storing pets , and worst of all pets that run and dont stop running....." here boy, here boy"

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Tarnblade wrote:

It seems to be a commonly held misconception that MCH in general is a huge money maker.

Ive noticed one or two posts about this so thought Id add some facts to the mix.

Extra cash for CH

Yes if you group with your pets and pull mishions you can get more credits.

However If you were to become a Master Creature Handler without mastering another good combat class to compliment it, there is just no way you could expect to collect your reward.

Pistoleer andTKA are just a fewexamples of combat proffs that you could use with MCH.

In all honesty many of the combat proffs can tank better than CH and if they want a better cash reward itsjust a case ofgeting into a group.

missions are definatly faster with pets than without... if you aren't into BE pets goto endor and get a webmaster... if you have a good combat profession send the pet to attack the lair, spam AoE attacks and the mission ends alot sooner, usually leaving out the last creature spawn...

Thengrab some high paying mishions and then leave the group to go solo them.

Resource gathering

Other people also say "why not collect all the resources and sell them "

Again this isnt a bad idea, but what people seem to overlook is that its a Scout/Ranger skill.

It isnt specific to MCH.

Also CH get penalised for using creatures. When it comes to gathering meat from corpses.

Try grouping with your pets and harvesting meat.

Then try gathering meat whilst not groupd with your pets.

You will see a big difference in what you take in.

or just have you pets out and not group them at all, for the higher paying missions anyone with a republic blaster should outdamage the pets...

Mounts and Pets

No one buys mounts these days. It takes up to 10 days to fully grow a Non CH mount.

Thats 10 days in your storage pad.

Not a prob for some masters, but many of us have a good variety of pets and dont allways have the extra room to lug round potential mounts.

Add in the fact that they just dont compare to any vehickles and no ones going to pay you 20 k + for a mount, when they can spend the same money on a speeder bike.

no argument here

When it comes to pets, I still sell them. Though its usualy Creature handlers that I sell too.

Wild and BE pets can be sold providing you find somthing people need or want.

It takes a bit of patience and somtimes a bit of luck.

You could honestly make more money doing mishs though, if you compare the time it takes standing around shouting that a pets for sale.

Conclusion

CH are like any other proff these days that does mish's for credits.

We basically have no huge advantage over any other class, and people saying we can make 200k in a hour are obviously using another proff in conjunction with MCH in order to solo high paying mishs.

If we were to rely solely on MCH to make money we wouldnt get anywhere what so ever.

true, but if you don't have any other combat profession than MCH, and aren't a DE... where are the rest of your SP spent??? usually in a crafting prosession (doc i think of as a crafting pro) thats where the money comes from

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200k an hour, that would beten 20k missions... 6 mins a mission... i think i could do that, barely... travel time plus killing the lairs, haveing WP's update to over 1k in each direction, spending time at the mission terminal looking for the 20k missions... that would be close if the only income you get is from missions... but add in the cpu for a good meat/hide and that can easily be done...

very good post, well organized, and well thought out... but i need to play devils advocate here...

Wabit

Out of interest what combat prof are you using wabit?

Message Edited by Louis_Cypher on 02-23-2004 05:24 AM

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Louis_Cypher wrote:

Grouping with pets can possibly raise the levels of difficulty thus also a higher credit amount gain from completing those missions.

ungrouped i pull lvl 25 missions, with grouped pets to cl70, and my R2 driod i pull lvl 51 missions, if i'm overt and group the weak reb faction pet its lvl 61

But couldn't we also drop CH and climb up one line of the smuggler profession and then be able to slice the mission terminals for the same increased credits payout but then the missions would also be an easier dificulty ?

when i did smuggler on a different toon, the payout was higher for the same difficulty missions, only worked for that one group of 5 missions though, and only for myself... had to reslice every refresh, tedius at best

Not sure how that slicing works actually but doesn't smuggler get def bonuses atleast ? Plus a few ranged attacks ?

a couple of nice pistol specials, and feign death (but with MCH you really shouldn't need that)... the defencive bonuses really aren't much, but you can make spice, which always sells, and slice weapons and armor wich also makes a nice little bit of money... rememeber smuggler is only 2 branches of combat, one of crafting, and one of slicing....

Maybe if you were smuggler and could slice terminals and had mch, you could gain even more credits from missions terminals I'm guessing?

correct =D

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Tarnblade, each profession is sadly lacking somewhere. CH is lacking in damage. Luckily, CH does not take any Skill points to get compared to other professions. That enables you to use skill points for damage. I can solo a Blurrg Raptor, CL 135 with a CL 38 pet, and even being a BE, I still have enough pistol skill to outdamage my pet. I have about 6 pistols I use that do stun, acid, heat, kinetic... the pet only does kinetic.

There are some problems to clean up though. I have tried to help with no luck. I petitioned to get the pet to not count as another player... I recieved no support.

Pets. You may think that I want you guys to buy BE pets so I can make more money. Not true. Selling pets is a small part of my profits. If a CH does not buy BE pets, he spends his money instead on Pet Stims, so to me that make no difference profit wise. Some refuse to buy them cause they are pissed off. Would I do the same? No. In December and before, I refused to sell BE pets because I felt dishonest. Not a single pet I had compared to the tamed pets that were available. I was CL 44 and every pet I had but one was tamed. So I am not being a hipocrit.

Trust me, the dev's willshow no pitty toCH's that don't try to maximise their characters with the resources that were made available to you by them. That seems crazy to have to say that. What rifleman would use a rile that wasn't as good and was expensive to use just because he built it? What commando would compromise himself because his favorite gun didn't work well?

I really thing some of you have a legitimate gripe about BE's not being available. Unfortunately, there are many BE's that sit in a corner and spend an entire evening making a once in a lifetime CL10 pet and sell it for 40k. During this time, he could have supplied 4 pets to the market that actually needs them. They are really out of touch.

To keep true to my word, I have started a character on Starsider. It will take me a couple months to get him to MBE. I dont seem to be able to get money there.

Come on guys, lets get the profession going.

Message Edited by GreenStok on 02-23-2004 09:35 AM

Message Edited by GreenStok on 02-23-2004 09:38 AM

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Barb-Wire wrote:

but yeah CH can double your payouts by grouping high level pets.

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I get about 2k more if I group CL 70 worth of pets than if I hit a terminal with no pets out. I get this same result on Naboo, Corellia, Dath, Dant, Endor, etc. I'm still interested in learning the secret to getting these "double" payouts.

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Barb-Wire wrote:
i disagree somewhat.

extra cash:

i dont think i know anyone that picks JUST CH for a complete skillset.

only specific builds with special gear can tank better than a CH pet. and they spend all their time healing instead of fighting when it comes to really high end content.

I can tank better than CH as a Master Pistoleer with 70% Kinetic armor and buffs. You dont believe me, come to my server and /tell Resead to show you. I dont have to heal because the multiple creatures that are attacking me are dead. If you talking about high end content as in 300k mob bosses, pets are worthless. They die quick specially if the mob uses force powers. Either way, soloing those are impossible without defense stacking.

but yeah CH can double your payouts by grouping high level pets.

Grouping pets can make your 6k mission 12k. Thats it. No higher than that unless your using somekind of pet duping group trick. If you want CH for that you may as well as master a combat profession and group with 2 people and you get the same results without pets. Just disband once you get the missions.

Keep in mind, I say 6k if your not an elite combat profession (on dantooine). If you have a combat profession you may already get 10-12k missions which means CH will only give you 16k at best.....which is only 4k more....hardly worth the skillpoints.
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resource gathering:

totally not true. hunting 4 from scouting is required to become a CH so it is part of CH if you want to go farther then it is master scout and the ranger tree but the difference is not that great. when i go harvesting for meat i dont group my pets or other people. grouping is not a problem specific to CH. any CH worth her salt will use the /target (petname); macro to keep tabs on a pet's health while not grouped. yesterday just fooling around on dathomir i gathered 15k of carnivore meat that should sell for around 8-10CPU for a profit of between 120-150k. once i finish selling it.

I dont argue with you about selling meat as a good resource of money. However you can drop all creature handler and just keep novice scout if thats what you want to do, harvest resources.
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mounts and pets:

mounts sell but not as well as they used to. i still sell them for around 10k each but then i sell any easy to find pet for 10k to cover my time and costs of travel. rancors sell really fast but i dont make it a habit of selling pets. most people that can own nice pets generally go out and tame their own. there is a demand for non-CH pets and i plan on looking up a few decent non-ch pets.

pull your pets out while waiting for shuttles or just standing around in town. takes about 3-4 days to fully grow a pet if you take them out a few times a day. i have never had a pet take 10 days to fully grow.

but as for money over time about the only people that can make more than running missions are the few true master weaponsmiths. /agree
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as far as making 200k an hour doing missions... i dont think any skillset can solo that fast. just the travel time alone will prevent that but 100k+ is very doable. if your in a group your actually slowing down you credits per hour not increasing it in most cases. but for some people this is the only way to make lots of credits.

I do over 200k an hour. How, I'm Master Pistoleer/Smuggler with some 2 trees of CH left (however I dont even pull pets out anymore). What I do is slice the terminals, the 26k janta/mokk missions on dantooine become 40k missions. I can fan shot all of them at once in about 2 mins (only 4 mobs per lair). I finish each lair in about 5-6 mins on average. So with travel I do 80k per 15-20 mins atmost. On average I can do well over 200k an hour, its just do I want to spend my time doing that.

CH is one of the few professions that will allow you to solo high level content with relative ease. if i had a kinetic rifle of some sort i would have no problem taking out any of the nitesisters solo. yeah ive got rifle but its the CH part that keeps them off me long enough to USE that rifle. without CH.... my rifle would be useless for soloing big things in a timely manner.

This I would have agreed on if I hadn't just become a Master Pistoleer and found I can solo easly without pets now that the auto-store and running bug is worse than ever. I guess it all depends on what high level content your talking about also. I've seen my no vul,11k pet go down in 15 seconds to a nightsister using force powers, then made quick work of me. I think rifle is different because of the conceal shot, you can just hit them even if your pet goes down and they wont agro you (tell me if I'm wrong about this but my friends say they do that against mobs all day). I serious doubt your soloing the high level content, 20-300k ham nightsisters, with pets. That's just non sense.

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Message Edited by WookieOgre on 02-23-2004 09:10 AM

Good post overall Tarnblade, just want to make a couple of points mainly to try to shift thinking away from 'we can't make money" (which I don't think was your intent, but could be taken as such).

Extra cash - pets do make a big difference, especially for non-masters of elite weapon professions. A master pistoleer may not see a big jump, but an MCH/0040 pistoleer will. Doing, for example, seething bols on Dant at 16k per, using fan shot to take each pair down at the same time and you can rack up an impressive amount of cash in very short order. I am not saying its necessarily more than a non-ch could make, just that it is a prefectly respectable level of income for the skill point investment.

Resource gathering - have to agree with you that the lowered harvesting amount for grouping with pets is a pain. Would be nice if that were done away with (just for pets) but is easily worked around by not grouping. If you are going on money making missions you generally aren't going for things that will be a serious danger to your pet in the short term, so grouping to watch its health all the time is unnecessary.

Mounts and pet sales- agree completely. Mounts need to be made a viable alternative to vehicles instead of something used by a tiny fraction of the playerbase. With BE improvements I don't think pet sales will ever return to any great degree, and as a BE as well I have a hard time seeing that as a bad thing.

Conclusion - I agree, we don't have a huge advantage but we don't have a disadvantage either. While doing seething bols to finish mastering pistoleer (finally succumbed to the holocron, lol) I made about 1 million Cr in 2 days. Now, that is not 200k per hour but it is still more than enough. I kept healing costs down by cycling through my top 5 pets, storing each one at about 50%, which is something that a non-CH cannot do. So no, its not like we are some uber money making machine, but we can do fine with just MCH andvery nicely with MCH plus part of a weapon prof.

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WookieOgre wrote:

I'm going to comment on some of your answers.

i would quote your post but it would get ugly and hard to read.

i referenced high end content. such as krayts etc. lesser beasts i dont rally need a pet it just makes it faster. these can be handled by just about any profession. i would love to see you kill a krayt solo like that

as for double payouts what is meant is that you can get higher paying missions than without it. ie wihtout grouping pets you can only get 6k missions group a pet and they go to 12 or more. that is doubling the payout. it also depends on the location a master CH is hardly going to be running missions on corellia for cash... thats a no-brainer lets not mince words. we were also speaking in terms of CH for the most part.

for resource gathering he was claiming that CH cant harvest or werent good at it. i was clearing that up. you dont take up CH just to harvest meat there are better methods of doing it but CH dont suck at it.

i would go after the 300k ham sisters if i had a kinetic rifle... but i dont i cant hurt them. the things i can hurt i can solo. it just takes a little longer without friends. krayts, giant dune kimo, nitesisters that i can hurt. i just dont think it is possible for a pistoleer to kill a krayt solo. you will run out of mind long before it is near death even if it NEVER hits your mind directly. the bleed over from the normal hits that land will be enough to kill you within a short time. same for other higher level monsters. with the advent of chef foods it makes it possible for people to heal mind in a limited fashion prolonging the inevitable. without something or someone else distracting the monster you cannot solo one of these beasts. i could sit back and conceal shot it but sooner or later i am going to land the dread 1 point bleed or miss twice or it will invisibly wander close enough to smell me.

nitesisters and other 300k ham force users are especially dangerous. try fighting a ancient krayt sometime with its AOE dizzy/KD it doesnt have force powers but it might as well. the only way to take one of those on is with a team of 4 or more even then it would be a long ugly fight.

but the major point of why i replied to the original post was to confront the myths of CH being so bad off. its a myth a lot of folks on this board like to perpetuate for whatever reason. the truth is that CH are not bad enough we are not helpless and we can make money and we can take on high-end content and be successful at it.

Created Account July 2003 - Canceled account Nov 2005. The NGE made me do it.
Barb Wire
Former Dark Force Wielder
Ex-Imperial Navy