Creature Handler Archive
Thread: Top Five Issues with the Creature Handler Profession
Erishio wrote:
I remembered five:
Give me a /protect command for chrissakes! Sometimes I want my pet to act like a dog who is loving and cuddly until you move too quickly or attack their owner. This means; With /protect the creature would be passive until I or (at a higher lvl) a select friend was attacked. Then it would attack the perpetrator until dead or given a different attack command by me. Then back to passive mode. What this does, essentially, is save me the trouble of targeting whoever/whatever it is attacking me and issuing an attack command.
C'mon CH designer... get these things to act like highly-trained *animals*!!!
Um.. have you tried targeting yourself and issue the 'guard' command.... does pretty much of what you describe, except, if the pet should guard a friend, you need to target him and tell the pet to guard, can't guard both you and someone else.
My number one issue is not getting credit for pet kills as far as faction goes. Running faction is the main thing I do in the game, and my pets are completely useless for this. I had to sell back other skills and keep myself stuck at 1/1/1/3 in CH because I have to keep around pistol specialist in order to get decent faction and mission rewards.
Which brings me to my number two issue; called pet levels not counting towards mission difficulty. Due to this, I also have to keep around pistol skills in order to get a mission difficulty above 6.
These issues have been talked about a lot in the following thread:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=creature_handler&message.id=48803&view=by_date_ascending&page=1
2. lack of pet variety at higher levels.
3. lack of good 3-pet combos at master CH, partly due to the max pet levels cap. if the cap could be raised with some "ifs" in there, such as "max pet levels 90 so long as no pet exceeds level 30" or something like that, there might be a way to permit CHs to act for "crowd control" in a group while preventing them from having 2 lvl 45 uber pets out.
4. large pets should not be able to enter buildings in which they logically shouldn't fit.
5. teleporting mobs mean teleporting pets.
all in all, i think things are getting better and the really annoying issues have at least been recognized and have some chance of being repaired.
My 5 issues:
1) Pet vitality. Either make it possible to fully restore or eliminate it's effect on creature stats. It's making CH's afraid to use the hard earned pets they get attached to and it's limiting the class. Full healing vitality with an aging system would work better. Maybe allow BE's to do a genetic copy of a pet so CH's can get a sense of pet continuity. BE's still get their business, CH's still get their favorite pets.
2) Pet variety. Get more babies out there dangit.Baby taming is the #1 draw for the CH class and there's nothing out there anymore. The "no armor 2" thing seems really stupid too when you allow the armor 3 at-st's to continue to stomp around the galaxy. As a tka master I can still solo arachnes (they're actually pretty weak, especially against players with armor piercing weapons), so why did you have to take them out? There are a LOT of creatures out there that could be given baby versions for taming that have0 reason not to be tamable.
3) The usual pet bugs, get rid of them.
4) Let's see some hard to get pets. Do some research, find out what babies are extremely popular or would be if babies were allowed for them, and make them hard to get. Give us back those armor 2 pets (until you nerf down the at-st I'm going to continue to maintain that we should be allowed to have armor 2 pets), but make them hard as h311 to find and tame. An armor 2 pet isn't really overpowered if you're lucky to have just 1 of these things, and only a handful of people have them. Maybe make a baby spawning scale based on the CL of the creature, where the low level babies are everywhere, but the high level stuff very rarely spawns babies...all the way up to CL 70 creatures, who have say a 1 in 10,000 chance of spawning a baby or something. Something like this would make CH master very worthwhile to have and breath new life into a RAPIDLY dying class.
5) Stop the nerfing. When you nerf you just make people mad. If anything start a class out weak then build it up to par with what you intend. When you take power away from people you are undoing what they worked so hard to accomplish. So quit nerfing all the classes, see who is still weak, then build them up, don't dumb things down. If we're still too overpowered because our pets are too strong in pvp (not true, just an example), then beef the other classes UP. If we're all too powerful for pve, then make some of the creatures stronger, don't make us weaker. Make reds resistspecials more, give some creatures armor penetration attacks, improve their AI, make them immune to overpowered abilities, etc. Quit dumbing usdown and start building other stuff up. Nobody likes being made weaker and you're alienating a lot of players by doing this.
Liriel Baenre
Most of this hasbeen brought up before but read on anyway...
I need to be able to control my pet at all times. The animal is not wild, it is being "handled". Therefore, *the animal should listen to me even when being attacked*. If it does not suit my strategy to have it fighting at a given time, I can't have it reacting to attacks and a)killing things I want alive, b) ignoring the target I need it to attack. Usually the scond one can be rememdied with another "attack" command but sometimes not. I have been hurt and lost too many baby animals this way. Not good. Long story short give us a "passive" command to tell the creature not to respond to attacks.
Storing during combat - is it unfair to want to do this? My pets have gotten pummelled while I was miles away at clone center, trying to store it. It wouldn't be such an issue save for the regen rate. This also comes back to the /retreat issue and also what I brought up above: if I don't want my animal to be fightingI should be able to stop it. Sometimes a "come" command works, but like I said, they always react to attacks.
Another that's been raised before - paths. Someone has said this but nothing is more frustrating than issuing an attack command to find my animal 150m behind me. Making a camp and finding a place to store/call it is just icing on the cake of pain.
Masters - give them a cool barn option to store animalsin their homes. We need a specialincentive to become master. Something very advantageous. Keeping 10 extra animals at home would be really nice. Especially when mounts come out - we can have our ownmount depotsor something.
Don't have a fifth...
I remembered five:
Give me a /protect command for chrissakes! Sometimes I want my pet to act like a dog who is loving and cuddly until you move too quickly or attack their owner. This means; With /protect the creature would be passive until I or (at a higher lvl) a select friend was attacked. Then it would attack the perpetrator until dead or given a different attack command by me. Then back to passive mode. What this does, essentially, is save me the trouble of targeting whoever/whatever it is attacking me and issuing an attack command.
C'mon CH designer... get these things to act like highly-trained *animals*!!!
Sorry - another one.
Raise +stored pets sooner. I am BROKE and WAS looking forward to CH being a *profession*with which I make some money. In order to start making any real money I have to hump and hump to get to management 3 for more stored pets. This is justa little unfair given that finding an animal (just one becauseI need one to fight with) and finding someone who wants it/can use it is a huge ordeal for 5k.
The Main issue is the usefulness of Master CH - Namely -There is no reason to be a Master CH atm. Most of us are using a single CL 50 pet - which you dont need to be a Master to use. You can eliminate 1 entire tree and still be as effective asa Master CH -More so id say since you can take those points and put them into another profession that could actually help your combat skills.
This whole idea of "Master Pet ShopOwner" that the devs keep talking about is not acceptable "Lets just give them more trade options at Master.." 1st and foremost -This is a Combat profession - not a trade profession. Leave the selling of pets to the BE's (Once they get their own problems fixed up..) .Give us more Combat-related skills/features... Raise the Pet cap to 100'ish, Allow us to have up to CL 70 Pets,etc
The Nerfing of Pets is another matter. Basically -The number of viable pets above cl35 or so is beocming non-exsistant. I was sane enuff to go around and collect 1 of everything before the 1st "Big Patch" - so i still have all of the extinct animals. The fact the devs called all of them "Overpowering" is just wrong and another nerf to being a Master/High Level CH. Bring back the pets in their old form and start introducing more high level pets (CL 50-70 especially if they dont intend to raise the cap)...
This are my two big issues. Everything else is trivial by comparison....