Creature Handler Archive

With mounts coming up soon does anyone have any ideas for those... I kinda left mounts alone but this is a good time to have a 'wish list' for mounts. I'm going to recomplie this summation soon.

Here is a thread I had been working on for a while with a lot of my own ideas, which are also reflected in this list. It got buried under the tidal wave that is the CH forum, so hopefully it isn't too dated.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=creature_handler&message.id=52811

Hope that helps, fill free to cut and paste my ideas into the list if you like.

- Crazy-J -

Sorry, forgot to add. The above thread also has a lot of my own ideas about mounts (caravans, domesticating, armor, saddles) so give it a scan.

Actually Calid I probably summed up that wrong. I probably should read:

Allow the taming of any adult creature, under CL 60, but the chance would have to be very small.

1) Instead of having a /retreat command I would like it built into our creatures AI. If a CH has been DB and or Incapped I would like the creature to run away. Or perhaps have the creatures run away

1. Have creature AI cause pets to retreat either when they reach a certain level of HAM or if the Handler has been incapped and or DBed.


2. Creature Rescue - Creatures will drag their Handlers incapped bodies out of combat. Only for high level CHs


3. Handler Controlled Creature Attack Moves - Handlers can cause the creature to use one of their special abilities - target a certain HAM pool - STOMP (I would love for my pets to be able to step on people and make them go squish


4. Spread out the Max Level of Pets points across the CH Tree. So instead of needing 3:2:0:0 to call a Graul Mauler you would need 3:2:1:1 or even 3:2:2:2.


5. Make Pets bankable. Storing pet structures is probably a long way off. If we could bank pets then it wouldnt be an exploit and we could finally KEEP every pet we tame. Personally I want one of everything.


6. Calling a pet over a certain CL will cause Elite weapon certifications, abilities and mods go inactive. Most of the nerfing to this profession has happened because of people who can do massive amounts of damage getting just enough CH so they have a meat shield. If they couldnt do those massive amounts of damage then perhaps we won't get as nerfed into obivion. Then get some of the cool things like Kimogillas back. Geez that would be soooo coool.


7. Pet Yards - Create a CH unlockable menu option for houses that is a pet storage center. When a pet is dropped inside he will appear outside and treat the house as his nest. Maybe even protect his master if they are attacked.

Here's a pet command I've often wished for: fetch.

My Ranger is a hunter and frequently wipes out entire lairs for the inhabitants' meat, hide or bones. Since I do this with ranged weapons, I have to periodically run among all the corpses to harvest them before they disappear. Would that I could target the corpse, say "fetch", and have my pet go bring it to me, assuming a reasonable size ratio.

Changing CH to require the complete Scout tree would probably be impossible to implement, and abruptly turn a lot of CHs into non-CHs over their limit for unused XP. It would be easier to just add CH bonuses to Ranger and the other Scout trees. Or, if the devs don't want to add more, move some existing CH bonuses into those trees. Many CHs wouldn't like suddenly losing their skills, but they would only have to train in Scout/Ranger to get them back.

This won't make me very popular here, but I also think pet targets should aggro on the pet's handler. That would make the "our pets are our weapons, just like a blaster" argument hold up better. Mobs never attack a weapon, they attack the player wielding it. CH would get more respect if we assumed the same risks as other combat classes.

The originator of the thread ask me to copy a post here that I made in SWG Discussion.
--------------------------------------------------------

First of all, combat droids should be introduced that are better than CL 15 creature pets so that non-ch will be seeking out the neglected droid engineers for combat pets. We can keep the current system in place that allows a non-CH to have 2 creature pets and 2 droid pets.

Next, give Creature Handlers the ability to train profession-specific creatures for Non CHs. Instead of a level cap for non-CH, limit the different types of creatures they can have to certain classes of creatures. The Non CH pet would be limited to the group, follow, tricks, guard, patrol, and class-specific commands. There would be no need for an attack command, that is what the droid is for. Here are the classes of pets I propose:

Hunting/Tracking

Target Audience: Scouts/Rangers/Combat professions

Animals that can be trained: Huurton, Kusak, Slice Hound, Choku, Kahmurra, Murra, Gurrcat, Wrix, Minor Sludge Panther (Notice that most can be made by bio-engineers)

Abilities:

Retrieve - can retrieve a corpse for looting or harvesting

Pull - commands the animal to attempt to seperate a mob from the herd with a chance of failure.

Track - enhances /AreaTrack for rangers by telling the animal to run to a creature selected in the list (can only be used if the owner has tracking IV so as to not undermine the achievement of higher level skills). This would be useful if a ranger is tracking for a group as everyone could follow the pet to the creature. Have it stop outside of aggro range.

Taunt - lets the creature pull aggro for 5 seconds, giving you time to heal or run away.

Restrain - Since scout and ranger traps do not work on NPCs, you could use the animal to "root" an NPC for 5 seconds with a 30 second timer between uses. Simulates the animal dragging someone to the ground or pinning them place with an aggressive and threatening posture.



Rescue Animal

Target Audience: Medic/Combat Medic/Doctor

Animals that can be trained: Same as Hunting/Tracking

Abilites:

Rescue: Sends the animal to retrieve a deathblowed or incapped player and bring him to the healer to rez/heal

Defend: Sends the animal to guard an incapped player against deathblow, allowing the healer time to get to the player.

Taunt: same as Hunting/tracking

Get Help: Finds the closest player character and gives a text message in a chat bubble. ( Your group is outnumbered and dying, you could give a waypoint asking for help.) This simulates the creature running with a message attached to it.



Pack Animal

Target Audience: Crafters

Animals that can be trained: Bantha, Eopie, Brackaset (and similar modeled creatures) - I'm trying to stay away from ground pounders here.

Abilities: Item Storage, limited usage as a vendor (traveling salesman?)



Entertainment

Target audience: Entertainers

Animals that can be trained: All the Hunting/Tracking creatures with the addition of durnis, gnorts, and squalls.

Abilities: More tricks that enhance healing/mind buffing abilities

Mounts

Already implemented! Woohoo!



In a nutshell, non creature handlers get small pets that enhance their profession instead of getting uber tank pets, which is the role combat droids will fill (hopefully with a well thought out cert system). In fact, you could do this easily by adding enhancements craftable into probots that increase HAM, Armor, Damage, change damage type, ect. Only high level creature handlers can obtain an animal equal to or better than a combat droid.

How does this make the game more "Star Wars" like? The majority of people will fight with droids and the majority of animal pets will be cats, dogs, and bunnies trained to do specific things (which is reasonable). The only Master Creature Handlers will be those who really want to play the class. There will be no need to dabble in CH just for a tank because droids will be available for that. And no one gets nerfed.

Some of these idea are ok.

Eagle Flight is simply undoable I would think unless they add Jetpacks ext. This is Star Wars not He-Man or Middle Earth.

Pets being able to track Nerfs the only worth while ability of Rangers who are totally worthless otherwise.

I am a Master CH and will very soon be a Master Ranger. I am one of the builds that prove its not the CH part alone that makes them so powerful, its the additional skills which decide if its an Uber build or not. Anything / Ranger is less uber than it could be.

Getting pets doesn't need to be easier. There simply actually needs to be spawns of babies to work with. In some cases there just isn't.

CHs and their pet searchs are the only true rewarding questing experience in the game. They did of course take care of that by removing pet storage. I knew it was going to happen when some big mouth let it slip to the Devs we were having fun.

Please think through your suggestions. We have seen the hard way that if we don't work out the details and the negatives that no one will. We still might not get a choice anyway but we have to try.

imo the 2 things that would make most people happy and stop complaining:

- No CH skills means no pets > add a couple of combat droids with equal stats to strongest non-CH pets.

- Disalow the use of weaponswhen using pets (some sort of control device) and increase the DPS of pets.

Terrific post. It is great to see more ideas coming out of this profession. I personally love being a CH and it is ideas like this that will help this profession become all it can be.

My favorite ideas were: 1.The creature arena, this sounds like a very Star Wars thing to do.Players coming to bet on creature battles could become annual events like every saturday, it would be the football game of SWG.

2. I really like the idea of player cities having stables,

3. The BE ideas are great, taking pets to a BE to give a wrix poison attack sounds so cool.

4. Finally, the little additions like fetch would be fun.

Hmm what if a player city stable had some sort of added effect that was benefical to the creature? EG, leaving them there would recuperate them and they would heal over time whilest you get some wound healin.

I have left the game... someone please highjack this thread and take it over!