Creature Handler Archive
Thread: The New system is promising but the amounts of time involved are ludicrous
Moakie wrote:
All SOE cares about is making money. People playing longer = more money. So it makes sense they'd like a game where you spend more time grinding.
much like the 30:1 village conversion, it's all sort of equivalent to hitting a panic button.
Indene wrote:They are just as useful as they were in pub 20. They are NOT as strong or useful as they were when their specials worked etc. Keep track of the full history.
-Indene-
Well, lets see... Blind, stun, dizzy, and intimidate worked on demand with the old system. Now you can put those on one pet instead of just 2 at a time (if you had enough money and time to wait for a BE to make the combination you wanted), one just needs to find and learn the abilities, or collaborate with another CH. KD, Poison and Disease never worked on demand. Now, KD works on demand, we have a bleed attack that works better than the old poison (oh, and it is on demand too), and *ding ding ding* we have a winner, they actually did nerf/remove disease specials. Damn, guess we can't cause 1 wound per hour anymore.
My "full history" timeline:
Publish 21 as compared to the day before publish 21: We lost nothing, and gained the new system, which you can completely ignore if you really want to.
Publish 21 as compared to the day they nerfed female nargs/elite tames: We lost the quick and easy path. It has been said that the female nargs specifically were a bug, never intended to be elite. I'll be interested in comparing a level 22 trio trained with vigorous health, defense, and marring storm to the standard of those nargs. I know it will come up short, but I think it will be quite viable, and much more variety is possible.
Publish 21 as compared to pre-CU: We lost pet speed. I think the default speed should be higher, possibly equivalent to pre-CU, and the fleet foot specials should boost from there. We lost tanking ability and extreme armor capabilities -- so did everybody else. The new hate system and new armor system make for, in my opinion, a much more balanced and fun game. That being said, tanks need viable hate-management tools. From what I hear, aggression on pets works pretty well. TKM's and other player tanks need a much better taunt skill. We also lost the special ability 1 / special ability 2 system, which I discussed above; and believe that the new system *far* surpasses.
Publish 21 as compared to the 2nd "great nerf": The 2nd major nerf of CH, as I recall, moved max CL bonuses all around the tree instead of having it all be in 4000. We "lost" a huge amount of dabblers with 2 grauls following them around. May or may not have lost medium armor in that one, too.
Publish 21 as compared to the original "great nerf": I wasn't a CH at this time, but I did have friends in the profession. Lots of friends, because as you recall, it was the FotM at the time. CH lost its status as /BMOC, but, uhhhhhh.... Could we really have expected any different?
To the original poster, I agree that the time requirements are pretty high, especially if you have notions of learning all abilities up to level 3. But I've been running around taming low level (under CL20) creatures mostly, addressing the Pet Specials sticky if I am going for a specific one, and I've already accumulated a pretty long list of learned abilities including several level 2's and one level 3. I forsee a great potential for swapping training with other CH's. In any case, getting a basic stock of abilities doesn't take an extreme amount of time, and I find that even the level 1 versions of skills are quite effective. Even very low level (under CL10) creatures that I use have been quite successful at getting the level 1 state attack specials to stick on level 80-82 mission targets. Usually doesn't take more than 2 attempts to land a blind, KD, or stun.
People seem to be misunderstanding what a lot of us veterans are upset about. It's not the new system. It's a good system, and I've said before andsay again, wish we had it 2 years ago - when I wasa novice CH with an empty datapad. I think the misunderstanding is, in part anyway, a matter of perspective.
After playing the game for over 2 years, after travelling all over the universe, spending countless hours trekking across planets, spending countless hoursfinding and taming pets, doing countless missions, doing theme parks (twice)and quests and more countless missions, allthe while I'm levelingup my character, I get to do it all over again to level up my pets? It was fun the first time. No doubt some will think it's fun to do it a second time. Personally, I don't.
Oh, well, you fight with your pets anyway, so what's the big deal? *boggles and boggles again*
Because there is a lot more to this than "just" fighting with my pets. I first have to find/tame a whole freakin bunch of pets - and not pets I want, but a whole freakin bunch of "throw-away" pets. Because you firstneed L1 abilities in order to train L2 & L3, you first have to tame low level pets sincethose are the ones with L1 abilities. And what Master Creature Handler doesn't want a level 5 pet? So, you spend a good deal of time travelling all over the universe trying to find babies you can tame. Not every creature you tame will have innate abilities, though,so you might have to tame a good number to find ones with an innate ability.
Assuming that you want tohavemore than one L1 ability, you're going to end up having to tameawhole **** load oflow level pets.All those pets, by the way, you're going to end up throwing away. After that, assuming that you want to know L2 abilities, you have to go out once againto find/tame a whole freakin bunch more pets. Most of which you're not really going to want, so you're going to throw them away, too. Then there's L3...
Finding/taming pets is only part of it, though, and not an easy part at that. You also have to fight with all those pets. Which is simple, of course, because that's what you do with pets anyway. Yep. Nothing I love more as a Master Creature Handler thanusing my level 5 pisspot nothing of a pet to killyard trash and throwingthat pet on the trash heap when I'm donewith it.Not finished yet, though. If I want those L2 abilities, I now get to fight with a whole new crappy bunch of mid-level pets against mobs that, because I'm CL 80, I could probably kill bare handed. Woohoo, having fun now. And the best part? I again get to throw all those pets away. Have to make room for other pets with different abilities after all.
Finally, after countless hours offinding/taming pets I don't really want andfighting with pets I don't really want against mobs I don't really care about fighting, finally I get to fight with my real pets.And spend more countless hours leveling them up.
Obviously, I don't have to do things in the exact, sequential order that I just listed, but I do still have to do them. Well, ok, I don't "have" to learn the new abilities. I can just leave my pets gimped and not teach them any new specials. Realistically, that's not a viable option if I want viable pets.
The new special's system is a good system. But as a Master Creature Handler - if I want viable pets - I am starting all over. I'm leftwondering why I have to go back and grind out several million xp points to level up my pets - some which I've had for close to 2 years. And as a casual player, it might take me another 2 years
DaBudo:
Out of all the posts I've seen post-pub21, yours has said it best. 
Blunt, to the point, and if people can't understand why we're ticked after that detailed explanation, then they need far more help than the explanation could give them.
/applaud
Message Edited by Jedi-Nyte on 08-07-2005 11:57 AM
Although I'm on the other side of the fence on this one, I hear and completely understand your argument, and I applaud you for explaining it in an excellent way. I personally have been having fun for the past two days, running around taming garden trash that I have no intention of actually keeping long-term, and spending a brief bit of time using them to learn their specials. But, not everyone will enjoy doing so as much as I have. However, I think that there is a solution within the fact that pets can be traded and trained by other creature handlers. I've already done so with some CH friends, and I can see some potential for non-CH pets trained with specials as well.
I'm willing to train pets for free, and I believe that high-end CH's trading training on the high-end specials will hopefully become the norm. Maybe we'll start to see posts in galaxy trade forums advertising special ability training...
So, it may be entirely possible to gain specials that you want without having to do all the grind work yourself; especially if you provide an incentive like credits or training a rare special ability that you know in return. You've still got to level whichever pet you want to put the specials on, but if you aren't using your pets at least some, then CH isn't doing you any good anyhow.
This, to me, seems like a clear win over the past systems. You could, pre-CU, get a Bio-Engineer to make a high level pet to your specifications, with a specific combo of 2 specials. In my experience, actually getting this done was a very expensive nightmare. BE's are and were hard to find. A BE with enough practice and dedication to be able to fulfill your request was even more rare, and they usually charged a fortune for their creations (justifiably so). Now, the vendor has changed... BE's can still make customized pets with a customized focus, but for the special ability portion of their development, we can rely on other creature handlers. I feel that this will likely result in making it easier to get the abilities you want, not harder. Not to mention that the new list of abilities and the much larger amount of ability slots to train into will allow for some extremely exciting, diverse, and useful combinations.
Maybe I've got my hopes set too high, and there will be no new level of interaction and cooperation amongst CH's. Even if it does happen, there are dangers with jerks training your pets with unwanted skills or just plain running off with them, but the same thing can be said for slicing and many other game mechanics that work pretty well now. Who knows, maybe this will turn out pretty sweet both for those that go nuts and learn every special themselves, and for more casual players as well.
Yep that is the point we have tried in many was to express. If none of the ways teaches then the student is willfully avoiding learning. There can't be any other sane reason.
-Indene-