Creature Handler Archive

I would like to be able to see all the pets Values in the examine window in the data pad .

Includeing benifits bestowed by special abilities,how much defense gained from combat agility ?To hit values for precision strike etc..

Would also be nice if we had some sort of way tosee the speed of a pet in the examine window

example

Cupa 35 mph,30 while mounted

and if fleetfooted L1,L2 or L3 was added would also show us the value of the increase so we would know it is recorded and working.

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Galacium wrote:

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the agro problems...

#1. Stop having every social creature make a b-line for the CH when their pet attacks a friend. Initial agro should idialy go to the attacking pet unless the creature handler is closer to the socail animals or has made an attack of some kind. This behavior makes life very difficult for CH players without other professions.

As has been posted before, pet calls and stores AND calling a pet while aggroed.

Pets are a CH's weapons, it makes little sense that essentially a CH cannot travel while SF because a major part of their offense is stored and if they're aggroed upon loading, they cannot use those weapons.

My big issues are

1. The untamable babies bug. Though there is a fix for being unable to tame anything, there is a bug which causes a baby to become permanently untamable. I've only notice this with babies that do not have an associated lair nearby (100m radius).

2. Issue two is partily associated with ranger, is that if you track a baby using ranger track which is more than 100m away, virtually always by the time you get to it, it would have become an adult. Thus it makes it pointless to use ranger to find babies, you would have better luck just driving around or bleeding a lair

3. Some old pets do not exist anymore even as adults or do not have wild spawns. Namely the Queen Merek Harvester and King Merek Harvester (this one does have a static spawn).

4. Single wild spawns such as the great plains stalker and the grual marauder, if you kill the first spawn it doesn't respawn and gets replaced by another creature type or lair, making these pets increasingly difficult to find. Not sure if this is intended.

Message Edited by KwongWah on 08-16-2005 06:29 PM

1. Cannot store pets while you or the pet isin combat, and there isa store timer of 30s after combat is concluded.


2. Calling a pet takes 5s. You are allowed to call pets during combat (although maybe on a longer timer).


3. Incapped pets still count towards your "max level of pets", so an MCH could pull one CL 23 pet, when it incaps, call a second one, and so on. I'm not really sure how effective this tactic would be compared to just having all three out in the first place, but it might have a bit of a "surprise" factor in PvP.


4. If you have sufficient "additional pets" skill you can call multiple pets (up to your max) simultaneously. So an MCH can call all three pets within 5s.

I think #2 and #4 by themselves would make CH much less of a time sink when in groups, and being able to call pets while in combat would make a CH less vulnerable to ambushes.

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sciguyCO wrote:

1. Lair attacking is just weird. Calling a pet off of a lair should keep it off of the lair. If I pull it off with a "/tellpet follow" then tell it to attack a creature that popped from the lair, there's about a 50-75% chance it'll go back to the lair. I've gotten into the habit of spamming my attack macro twice to let it know "yes, really, I want you to attack this thing". Also, it's annoying when the pet is pulled off the lair to a mob, and then goes back to the lair once the mob is dead.

2. This may have already been hashed out here, but I thought I'd bring it up. Should CH xp contribute towards combat xp earned? It obviously doesn't right now (almost certainly due to CH not requiring combat xp for any of its boxes), but if you consider our pets our "weapons", then why should it be any different than other combat profs?

3. I've run into the same "no xp" problem as others have reported, but it's also affecting CH xp, not just training xp. I'd kill a mob and get a reduced amount of unarmed xp (due to the contribution of the pet to killing the mob), but no CH xp and no training xp. I suspect this may have to do with bringing a called pet across a server boundary. Storing then recalling the pet fixes the issue.

4. Call / store timers need some re-evaluation. We do want to make sure that a CH doesn't get an unfair advantage by calling successive waves of fresh pets into combat, but there must be some way to make this less painful. A possible implementation:

1. Cannot store pets while you or the pet isin combat, and there isa store timer of 30s after combat is concluded.


2. Calling a pet takes 5s. You are allowed to call pets during combat (although maybe on a longer timer).


3. Incapped pets still count towards your "max level of pets", so an MCH could pull one CL 23 pet, when it incaps, call a second one, and so on. I'm not really sure how effective this tactic would be compared to just having all three out in the first place, but it might have a bit of a "surprise" factor in PvP.


4. If you have sufficient "additional pets" skill you can call multiple pets (up to your max) simultaneously. So an MCH can call all three pets within 5s.

I think #2 and #4 by themselves would make CH much less of a time sink when in groups, and being able to call pets while in combat would make a CH less vulnerable to ambushes.

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I'm just going to steal from Sciguy and pretend I posted all of the above. And then steal from Drashk and add

Hey, necessity may be the mother of invention but laziness is a close cousin.

How about setting up a system to allow creature handlers to trade their own xp for points that could be applied to the pet xp grind.

1) Ability slots -- Pets tamed before Publish 21 seem to have one less slot (and no 'freebie' abilities) than those tamed after. BE pets seem to get one less ability. Old BE pets may get two less. Essentially this makes old pets, some of which are irreplacable such as the Veractyl, and BE pets sub-standard as they potentially have 2-3 less abilities.

2) Ranged pet AI -- Wild pets with a ranged attack have become almost impossible to command to 'follow' once in combat. They start to move then immediately turn back to spit at the target. Prior to Pub 21 to they would spit until out of range but would come. BE pets with a ranged attack will not use it at all.

3) Vitality -- With the work required to raise a pet to its full grown state, vitality should be reconsidered, especially if the pet xp requirements do not see a signficant change. Something that takes so much effort to raise should not be stripped away or turned ineffectual. Vitality needs to be removed.

4) Call timers -- These need to be eliminated, or if that unknown 'exploit' still exists, reduced to just a few seconds. Reducing the after combat timer for storing would be nice, but is less annoying to me. It would also be nice to be able to call a pet in combat to defend myself (other's can pull out a gun, sword, or what-have-you), but I don't expect this. Restricting the storing of pets during combat should be sufficient to prevent horrible abuse.

5) Aggro -- My pet should get the excess aggro, not me. As said above, if I am closer to a mob than my pet then I can see this occuring. Creatures should always focus on the closest threat and NPCs should only have a chance of focusing on me, as there is still a pile of fur and fangs chewing on their friend that is a more obvious threat.

6 [bonus]) Grind -- I like having to go tame babies to get a new ability. The time to learn it feels rather excessive. I haven't even started looking for my "real" pets as I am still working on level 1 specials. (Because the list is not sorted and hard enough to scroll through, I do not want to start on L2 before L1, or L3 before L2.) Maybe this would not be as much of an issue were I not a master for two years, but as I only have my own experiences to base this on I want to include it.

Message Edited by Seiryuu on 08-16-2005 01:41 PM

1) Give ranger some CH bonuses such as the level of pet you are able to handle. This would greatly benifit Ranger/CHs who are both supposed to be a combat profession, yet one will find it difficult to take on a level 75 npc. Allowing CH/Rangers to tame higher level CHs would counteract this problem. Even if it is just level 80s.

1) Grouping(!!!)
This is extremely important. We went from group sizes of 20 to 8 with the CU. It was hard pre-cu to find groups that were cool with your pets being grouped. Post-CU its impossible. Pets are faaar to weak to take up a player slot in our new micro 8-man groups. We desperately need an option to sub-group our pets to us. perhaps a seperate on screen box that lists the stats of any pets (creature or factional) that you have out, so that at least you can monitor them. Perhaps this would show all 'pets' that all members of the group have in play atm, and it could be toggled on or off in options. This way creature handlers and doctor types could monitor these 'pets' without them having to take one of the groups extremely valuable player slots.

2) Storing/Calling pets
Why do we still have these silly timers? they were put in when CH were one of the toughest profs in the game and now that we have been extremely reduced in effectiveness (to say the least) we still have to deal with them. All other profs can switch weapons at will even while fighting. I understand why we cant call/store at will but we need a medium ground to be fair to us. IMHO there should be no delay for calling pets, even if you are in combat. Storing pets does need a delay, although about half the length it is now. Try getting a group to wait for you to call/store 2-3 pets that they dont even want in the group anyways, it aint happening.

3) Pet storage space
We need the ability to redeed our pets so we can store them just like every other profession can store their trades 'tools' in houses, banks, droids, etc. We desperately need more storage, especially with the new CH system.

4) Mounts!
Mounts simply must be re-tooled, the way they are at present is not acceptable. They have no use beyond roleplay. Pre-CU mounts were barely useful because you could do basic attacks while on them even tho the mount slowed when in combat to avoid kiting issues (fair enough). Post-CU we can no longer attack at all while on a mount even tho we still get the penalty to movement (which is not necesary if we cant fight!). Let us use a basic range, melee (and saber for jeedei) attacks while mounted. If that sadly isnt going to happen then get rid of the pointless mount-slowdown when aggroed nonsense. While they are at it they need to give CH (especially MCH) some perks to using mounts, anything would be appreciated. There was dev talk (and sketches i believe) of different saddles and wearables for mounts way back when, and talk of mounts usable as traveling vendors, storage, etc. What happened to all this great stuff?!? This would make mounts feel more star wars for sure.

5) Pet Speeds
There needs to be a speed increase across the board for all tamed creatures. The CU smited their ground speed and we were told it was a bug that they were aware of. Now there seems to be no plans to fix it. The fleet foot ability is the only option and it doesnt even work (see below). Pet speeds in general are weak, especially when following their master. Mounts really need a speed increase as well.

*** yeah i know its supposed to be just 5***

6) Pet ability effectiveness
There are many abilities that arent working or are so weak that they are bordline useless. These need to be fixed and/or tuned-up to be worthwhile. Considering we have to track down, tame, fight with to learn, then level a pet so that they can learn an ability (that cannot ever be removed or replaced) it would be nice if the abilities actually worked properly and were useful. Normal professions are handed there specials/abilities with each box, we are not, this means extra care must go into making sure that our abilities work, and work well. Fleet footed is just one ability that does zilch, or its bonus is so completely marginal that its not noticable.

7) Pet Wearables
Pets should be able to wear tailor made clothing, leashes, collars, barding, padding, etc. In addition Image designers should be able to do ID work on pets to further personalize them. scars, different colorizations, size tweaks, etc. The wearables could be tied into the increased usefulness of pets as vendors, mounts, supply/loot mules, etc.

1. Call timers, get rid of them except for while in combat. Lower the after combat store timer.

2. Grouping, some kind of sub group, or have pets NOT count towards the max.

3. Some new specials do not appear to work and (given the work to get them) higher lvl specials give little benefit above lower ones.

4. Pet levels, Player lvl cap is 80. Give us lvl 80 pet max lvl. This would help with higher lvl mobs especially when pets are not grouped.

5. Aggro, while 80m away sometimes I have 2nd, 3rd and more creatures passing my engaged pet and attacking me. Sometimes without me attacking.

Extra credit

6. Data Pad space, now that we will have to lvl mounts and other non-ch pets it would be nice to have more space. I think that the corral idea would work as a storage option, display for sales, and more CH driven content that other professions would enjow as well.

My top five would be..........

1- Special Abilities that don't work (Frenzied Blitz, Beastly Constitution, ect)

2- L2 and L1 Hamstring, KD,ect seem to be exactly the same, there is no benifit to having an L2 over a L1.

1. Calling Pet and Storing Pet Delay--it shouldnt take almost a minute to store a pet. CU was supposed to mean Grouping and my group always leaves while I wait to store my pet -- because of #2. And I dont like leaving it behind.

2. Pets need to be able to keep up with Swoops and Barcs. This is essential when in a group and going from lair to lair.

3. They need to follow better. If a Master CH says "follow" well the pet should respond. If a Novice CH says follow, well maybe not.

4. Specials on BE pets need to be fixed or adjusted. If I paid 1 mill for an Uber BE pet I should have ability to change the Pet Special then.

5. Master CH should have earned some bonus to speed up theability training, as they deserve special treatment because of their horrid grind!

6. Raise the Pet Level to 80.

7. Gurrecks need to be reduced in size like before CU.

8. Fix the 'this is not your pet' when I try and use a Pet Stim on it.

9. Master CH should not take almost a half hour to tame a high level pet with BE clothes, Jawa Beer, Aroma Screens and Almond Chewie Food. I could see if you were not wearing clothes or eating special food etc. But if I take the time and effort to do so, it shouldnt be so hard.

10. Allow CH XP to convert into Combat XP at the Village.