Creature Handler Archive

Raph,

I hope I can be clear in this, although I expect it to be long. Our profession is screwed right now. It is no longer very fun to play. We play games for fun. Raph, I was one of the people beating the drum to have creature handlers reduced in power some because I was able to run out and destroy creatures like Rancor that I should have never been able to approach alone, even as a master. No single character should. By this same token, creature handlers running through the streets with 3 rancors was just plain stupid and should have never been permitted.

Players entered this game with the expecation that creature handlers would be creature handlers... those capable of wielding fearsome beasts (not pets) to do their bidding. We wanted to go out and find a loyal companion to raise, care for, grow attached to and fight with. We did not want a creature that would be disposable, start off at its maximum potential and then decay. We wanted creatures that would start young and need training to become more and more powerful, not weaker and weaker through fighting. You gave us creature handlers that could call 3 rancors immediately. That was taken away (thank you) and replaced by creatures that decay and are disposable razors... shave three times with them then throw them away. You replaced 3 rancors with EVERYONE now being equivalent or better than novice creature handlers. I know train pets to sell to people that have far more commands than I had as a novice creature handler and all they have to do is pay me a few credits for these or have a friend give them away. There is no longer anything UNIQUE about my profession other than my creatures can be more powerful than other people's creatures that could care less about pets and see them as a useful meatshield.

As a novice, I went out and trained a grand wrix baby. This was my steadfast companion. I was planning on keeping him forever and he was a roleplaying friend. I sold him yesterday after an outing on Endor destroyed his statistics because he would not store, could not clone, warps around, stops following ,etc. You made my pet be disposable. Your entire model is flawed. You started the problem by starting people with the best creatures (3 rancors, etc) for no work. You now continue the flawed model by making creatures start at maximum potential (I'm ignoring the baby part because it is so brief and we do nothing but wait for them to grow) and then decay. What sort of fun or reward is that? They are tampons that get bloody and then we throw them away now. Like other players, I am currently growing a new baby grand wrix to replace my old friend I sold.

Sitting around for 10 hours waiting for a creature to heal is not fun. Begging bio engineers to sell pet stims that they have to fish for hours and stuff to make and are pissed off about having to make is not fun. Hunting for a store command and wondering if it is going to work is not fun. Seeing the entire world running around with fighting creature is not fun. Three rancors running through the streets is not in the spirit of Star Wars. Me taking the hits because it is cheaper for me rather than my creatures is not fun. Me running 250 meters to get my stopped pet yet again is not fun. Seeing players run around with 9,000 HAM wickedly powerful stormtrooper "pets" and AT-STs blasting the hell out of me is not fun. One shot kills are not fun.

Many of us strongly resent being likened to pokemon. Screw this pikachu, I choose you crap. Give us a solid companion we raise, improve, amplify and grow attached to. Revoke EVERYONE having creatures in the lame excuse of saying that everyone can ride a horse... so they should all ride horses type of argument. We're not talking about cats and dogs. We're talking about deadly mythical creatures. I can't even tell who is a creature handler anymore because EVERYONE is running around with creatures. That is the great vision of creature handlers? We're not distinct at all. More numbers do not make something distinct. We want more than that.

If you have to, make an elite-elite profession of Beast Master or something that allows us to amplify our creature's abilities beyond lame tricks. Let us control when they attempt a knockdown move, ranged attack or when to actually flee from combat. Let us throw away our weapon and focus on maximizing our creature as our weapon of choice.

You are truly cheapening us and it's not about us wanting to be power gamers. It's about us wanting to be able to enjoy the game, be interesting characters and professions, having a unique identity and having fun. Step by step this game is becoming a chore as a creature handler. I went from being an adventurer focused on caring for my beast to a peddler of small creatures to the highest bidder... a creature handler that came to view combat as too expensive to be worthwhile, irritated with all the bio engineers who will not make stimpacks out of rightful protest (they don't want to be pet medics).

Increasingly people are talkingi about quitting this game everywhere I go because it simply is losing the fun. As a creature handler I'm now running around with my creature stored because the ONLY possible outcome from combat is that my creature will eventually degrade. Think about how stupid that is.

Fact - Not everyone should be a creature handler and the current "pet" system makes everyone a novice one

Fact - Our creatures can only go downhill

Fact - Our creatures are disposable

Fact - Our creatures are buggy

Fact - Having mounts in a game does not require everyone having creatures as pets

Fact - You are upsetting many people

Fact - We're not all a bunch of power hungry immature idiots

Fact - We are cancelling our subscriptions and writing negative reviews

Fact - This can all be fixed

Holo,

I doubt you will be responding to this thread again but hopefully you will still be reading it. I am a Master Creature Handler have been for a month or so. I've sat through all the changes and just reworked my strategies to work with the nerfs. I've even defended some of the changes in game, argued with people that didn't like the changes, and hoped that things would be getting better instead of worse. However now I just see things getting even worse, since it seems that you don't know much about our professions (and we never hear from our actual Dev) let me explain a few of the problems with Creature Handlers and pets and hopefully provide some viable solutions to them.

1. CL 70 level at master, ok that basically means that at master I can have one CL50 pet and one CL 20 pet. So I searched (for days) to find the best CL 20 pet that I could get to go into battle with my favorite Gurreck, I think I found it, however as soon as I use him in a serious combat situation he gets incapped almost instantly. Why you may ask? Well it seems that every AI choosees to attack the lower level pet (there seems to be some acceptions to this rule but not often). Yes this makes sense on alot of levels, but what this does is simply make it so a Master only uses one pet. All the additions to pets would mean nothing, as the only viable pets for higher encounters are CL 50. My solution seems simple enough to impliment, just make the Cl 50 pets able to hold aggro over any other pet you have out. This would make having that CL 20 pet actually viable and not totally disposable (not including incredibly expensive to maintain).

2. There just aren't enough pets, don't get me wrong I love the variety out there but at higher levels there just wasn't another option other then a Gurreck. Yes maybe a Webmaster which is now what every master will be using (if they already had one since they don't seem to be spawning anymore). Frenzied Grauls run and I mean run from every creature it attacks, that's right not just from a Jedi from a Nuna, I tested this last night, with me not spamming the follow command every 10 seconds My HUGE Frenzied Graul (arguably one of the biggest and toughest creatures in the game) ran away from it's attacker for over 300m! I'm not making this up, somehow I was lucky enough that it didn't aggro everything else on the way and it eventually won the fight. But this is crazy! Rancors and Grauls running from everything in the game? Not to mention that they attack everything in a 5-10m radius so instead of that one mob you pulled there's now 5 creatures on your one Graul. THIS is a HUGE problem for anyone playing the class at Master level. It makes theses creatures totally useless in Battle. If they are mostly for looks then fine, but give us something viable for combat that we can actually obtain. Fix the broken BE pets, make babies spawn that are over CL 50 (decrease thier armor I don't care) make them extremely rare that's fine with me. But make them be Viable in PvE, let them not attack people in PvP I don't really care (if that's the big problem here PvP, then why not just make them useless in PvP?).

3. BE stimpacks are WAY too hard to make and extremely expensive to buy, please make them easier to make, and make them have more uses per creation then normal medical stimpacks. Make a reason for people to use them. As it is everyone is a medic to heal thier pets anyway. Make there be a viable solution for people that chose not to be a medic but have pets of thier own.

4. There is a huge number of Creature Handlers in this game, probably quite a few more then any other profession. The reason for this is simple, pets are the only tanks in the game, and who doesn't want a tank? Every MMORPG i've played the players are the best tanks out there, this one seems to be quite different. Players can never increase thier HAM permanantly, so they just aren't viable as tanks. The only way for a player to be a good tank would be Doctor enhancements (which cost an extreme amount of money and time to create. which is fine but having to pay the doctor for every buff when he's in your group gets pretty expensive) Spices, which create downtime, and food which costs alot and your only able to use so much. So that's 3 expenses for a player to become a viable tank in PvE (not even sure about effective). So who in thier right mind when wanting to be Uber especially as say a Carbineer or Rifleman would not want a tank to take the damage for them so they can spam that ever so effective shot that takes from thier limited HAM bars? The answer is that anyone that isn't totally dedicated to not having pets NEEDS pets in this game. Sure knockdown is nice (and entirely too effective if you ask me) and there are other ways to solo or kill in groups (kiting etc.) but for your EQ fans that are used to having tanks (be them pets or Warriors/Paladins) they want to have the same type of combat experience and will take the rather fast and inexpensive route to Creature Handler. I don't neccasarily have a fix for this that isn't changing the entire game, but I thought I would put that out there as one of the main problems with combat in this game in my opinion.

These are just a few, but I feel this is growing too long to continue. We have many bugs with pets that i'm sure you have read about or can find with ease being complained about here on the forums. I'm sorry it's so long, but I just could not stay quiet anymore. There is so much that could be done with this game the potential is incredible. However your balancing act is becoming quite ridiculous and I see us going the same direction as the EQ Necro which really dissapoints me. If you don't want us to be a mainly combat class, then make some other options for us, Zoo's or Ranches, being able to put CH pets in a Vendor somehow (not sure how that would work but it would be nice. Maybe you buy the pet on the Vendor but still need a CH to tame and train it? just a thought). Mounts will be a huge boon to this, but I have no idea how long that will take to impliment since we have no official word on the subject at all. Are we to become purely eye candy until that time? I hope not, i'm not sure I can stick through all this for that wait just to have something to do.

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Holocron wrote:

I'd say that it is half a combat class and half for those who enjoy taking care of things, sort of a Tamagotchi thing. So in a sense it has the same demographic as say, Monster Rancher or Pokemon.

I would not expect a straight creature handler to be as powerful in combat as a straight combat guy in any of the advanced combat professions. Creature handlers get tradeoffs--they get their own attack, for example, which if they choose to train up in combat skills, can be fairly significant. They can have multiple creatures. The creatures can do more than just fight, too, though I admit that some of the other things they do may not be of interest to non-roleplayers.

Most specifically, the vision of creature handlers I have is not that of someone who conjures up pets named A, B, and C, and doesn't care if they live or die, or who treats them like weapons. In a more fantasy-based game, I might well have made it so that if your pet dies, the creature handler takes a significant penalty.

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Holo,

you have probably stopped reading this post and I can understand there are other problems that also have to be dealt with but I will answer your 2 posts, in hopes that you or someone involved with the CH profession's development might read this. This will be a long post but, I think it needs to be said.

You have said that CH is half combat class and half likes to take care of things. I personally disagree, like a fellow poster, I see the CH as a more Beastmaster type of character, who's creatures are his trusted allies and are trained to help him in combat to best his foes. IMHO a creature handler IS a combat class who LIKES to take care of things (his pets). In group situations most people like to have a Medic because of the fact that healing a group is just as important as fighting in the group. This also applies to a CH, sure you could useyour pets as disposable fodder if you wish, but a CH who takes care of his pets and manages them effectively instead of wasting them, benefits far more. Also your statements about this are contradicted by the games mechanics right now. First non CH's are allowed to buy pets and use them as Cannon Fodder (read "meatshields") as they see fit. Some people do just want a pet to have and that is fine with me. The majority of the tells I get about training pets though, all ask about a good combat pet to help them fight their battles. Specifically they want high HAM to absorb damage for them. If you're going to say "the vision of creature handlers I have is not that of someone who conjures up pets named A, B, and C, and doesn't care if they live or die, or who treats them like weapons", why would you allow this? This is a total opposite of what is occuring in the game, a CH is supposed to care about the raising of his pets, but the only viable source of revenue for the profession is to sell off his beloved pets to someone, who is going to use them as a meat shield.

Another problem I have with your comment is; if you feel this way, why is there nothing else in the game for CH's to do. How else do we gain CH XP. There are only 2 ways to do this right now. One is through combat. Using your pet in combat, gives you CH XP, but only if you keep him alive (not incapped) for the duration of the combat. I agree with this, this forces the CH to take more care with his pet and prevent him from using the pet carelessly. IMHO good idea, but on the flip side the non-ch has no motivation to keep his pet alive other than it will cause less fire to be directed at him. So this still promotes the pets as cannon fodder concept. The second way to increase your CH is by taming and training creatures. As any CH with some time in the profession will tell you this is the slowest way of gaining CH XP so, just through game mechanics, you are pushing CH's to use their pets in combat. Also as a Novice if you decided to roleplay as a non combatant, this still is inconsistent with your stated vision of the CH profession. By XPing solely through taming and training. You are forced to tame, train and release (or sell the pet to another, which I have covered.) This causes a high turnover in creatures, which is also inconsitent with the idea of someone who cares for and nurtures his pets. It would becomparable tobuying a puppy, potty training it, teaching it to sit and then getting rid of it, to go buy another one. Although I assume you were joking, you reference to Monster Rancher and Pokemon in essence says it all. You are raising creature to fight battles for you, therefore you are a COMBAT CLASS.

Now I agree with the addition of mounts (and possibly other avenues too) there WILL BE other things for CH's to do. Unfortunately these things aren't available RIGHT NOW, so there are 2 options for the CH. Sit and wait until mounts are available, or play within the system. I choose to play within the system, if I am paying a monthly fee, I expect to play the character I am paying for, not to sit and wait until the other options are implemented, before I do anything. I think this is the most frustrating thing for us CH's as a whole, you have limited some of the capabilities of the profession, with a view of what you want the CH to be, but have not implemented alternatives to get the profession there. I, myself, and the CH community as a whole IMO, feel that the class has been put on the chopping block with no positive changes made in any way. Frankly you have closed many doors for the CH but not opened any others, evectively narrowing the possibilities for what could be an enjoyable and diverse profession.

You also ask "what do you think should be the benefit of being a Master CH? What is it that is failing to give you a sense of reward there?" I would reply that with the game and specifically the options for the CH profession as they are right now, I would expect to see more use out of the Master CH than is right now. It is possible to only go up certain trees and still effectively use a creature in combat just as effecively as a Master could. You can even trade pets now, and have a Master CH (or SUCKER, as they should be called right now) train all the commands you haven't learned and call a LVL50 pet without touching the creature management tree. This pet is just as good as a Masters Pet of the same level could be.

I honestly hope someone with the ability to make changes reads this but, at the fourth or fifth page it will probably go unnoticed. I know after page 1 I usually post my reply and move on.

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Sindorry, I honestly don't know enough about CH's to give an answer to that. I don't have a high-level CH.

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Then I honestly don't think you should be making changes to the CH profession without getting advice from the players first.

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Holocron wrote:

OK, sorry, I had a meeting there for a bit.

So I hear ya. My takeaways form the thread here are:

• We screwed up the gurreck change by not compensating for the armor reduction at the same time as we made the reduction


• We are overestimating the value of the armor (we may have to agree to disagree on this one--but if we can compensate for the armor in other ways, will that be sufficient?)


• You aren't competitive in combat compared to combat classes--and the issue isn't so much being an even match, but but in the ballpark. We're overstimating the value of the pets, basically.


• There's a lot of bugs with pathfinding, pets getting autostored, etc, that we need to address.

I that a fair summation?

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That's a big negative.

That only addresses the problem with gurrecks. You're totally glancing over all the -other- problems your 'balancing' has caused.

As far as point #3 .. pets extending the ability of the player .. how is that different then taking any other combination of skills? .. CH doesn't get any combat defensive bonuses (vs. posture change, vs. knockdown, vs. dizzy, vs. bleed, etc), CH can't heal themselves like a doctor or combat medic, they can't poison or diesease like a combat medic, we can't eyeshot like a bounty hunter .. etc etc. Just because we can hold a gun in our hand doesn't mean we should be disallowed pets. Should we make it so doctors can't use stimpacks if they're holding a gun in their hand? .. No right? .. Because that'd be insane. Why limit CH's in the same way?

"ilya no one said master ch should be the ONLY profession with perks..All proffessions should be balanced and have their own perks, I saw a master surgeon heal me for 48-100 health wounds at a time and he worked for the ability to do that so I applaud him"

haha...that's a woundpack b...i think around 450 ish was the biggest i've seen (on me...ouch, watch out for those screeching mantrigues on endor...they have disease )

btw i want a screeching mantigrue (armor 3, this doesn't pose a problem, does it? )

I have to violently disagree with the "Tamogotchee" remark from Holo. You can tame a pet in less than a minute. It then requires another minute to train it all of the commands. As far as I can see that's it for developing your pet. Pets are meant for combat.

All of the other CH's that have posted in this forum have a couple of the same basic complaints:

Weakening a class to the point that it is no longer worth pursuing.

Not fixing bugs that gimp the class even further.

A total lack of communication from the devs stating their overall goal for the CH class.

A near total lack of presence on these boards to respond to the myriad of questions/complaints.

I've stopped playing because I'm too frustrated by all of this no expend any more time and energy on it. All of the time and effort I have put into my CH has now been wasted. The fun I was having is gone. I have not cancelled my subscription yet because I still have hope that some of this will be fixed. However, I have no solid evidence to base that hope on. We all need a little TLC and some attention to our issues. And fix the **** bugs!

I'm just once voice, but I'm gonna speak on this.

cl 70 limit . Thats up to the Master CH, I can't reach MCH, So I'm not gonna act or speak as if know what a mch needs or wants.

Each CH has the ability to play there character as they wish, Meat grinder fine, Care giver Fine Thats your own free will and to each there own.

What bothers me is that a Non CH can store more pets then me, and can get them fully trained and fully grown with ZERO investment in Skill points .

Mounts Fine (Non Combative), little pets cl 5 and under fine. but a full grown peko peko with 2.2k ham thats pushing it.

I picked up CH to suppliment my boredom while working on Ranger and to Assist me In Combat. 2 weeks later I actually thought about giving up some of my rifleman skills to advance in CH, I ending up doing that because I was Forced to. (0-0-2-2) now 1-2-2-2

With Non-CH's using pets it looks likeI might as well surrender skills and get those pets instead and free up those skill points

Gunnar
Master Ranger
Rifleman
Creature Handler

Thanks Q.

And Holo don't let all us whiners get you down we are all just really, really, really, pissed off. I'm sure you're not in too good a mood with all us jumping on your back.

How bout this fix, Creature Handler profession can not be taken along with any Elite combat professions. I'm sayingELITE here, I want to keep my warningshot it is a life saver. That will fix your concern about the bounty hunter D33D$. I was going Novice Pistoleer and I hate giving it up for other things, but really I need so many other things for this profession now like medic skills and my ranger skills there just arent enough skill points. Now I'm thinking of going Bio-Engineer too so there will go my other marksman skills.

I hope you will take this under concideration. I am one of the people who really does not like (major understatement)the pet level caps for the Master Creature Handler. I love it for the novice and smaller levels but I am serious about this profession. I love my animals and they are my life line in combat. Not being able to use my full arsenal is quite devilitating.

Thanks for reading

As someone stated earlier in this thread CH is what we the players make of it. As Devs and such you may have had a vision of how you wanted things to go. But we are the true shapers and molders.

I think one of the things we need returned to the Master CH is 3 pets with no caps. I say this now because we do have a partial cert system now. No more novice CH with 3 huge beasts. You also have some control over what we can call as well. You have tamed the gurrek made the high end babies very very rare to find. Given pets a slow degrade with deaths. So give Master back 3 solid pets with whats left is giveing us back some of our former glory but as intended we are still reduced quite a bit.

Although i get annoyed with the nerfing i understand what you are trying to do. I think however you are going about it in a bad manner. It doesnt matter now how i think things may have been done better , they are already done. Now we have to salvage this profession some and rebuild your preceived customer relations.

Word of advice though, fix some bugs (i know you are working on these but get some into the game) and toss us something we are asking for before makeing any mroe reductions in power. It will go along way to improve your image.

Well I agree that they are paying undue amount of attention to CH. But CH are also getting undue amount of attention in forum. Sure I agree that lot of them are from idiots likem e calling for nurf for nurf sake, but why CH? Why isn't Ranger or TKA target of these people? Ya'll can say thats because people are ignorant, especially about CH at higher level but I don't buy it. I doubt all smart people play CH and rest of the profession are play by people who can't possible understand what they are talking about when they talk about CH.

I see lot of CH saying that CH are ONLY tank for high end game, as if that is the way it SHOULD be. No it simply is the way it is right now, or was. I agree that nurfing CH without putting in way for other profession, like TKA or some other melee type ability tank the high end mob BEFORE taking away CH's ability to tank was stupid, but I would have expected that it would eventually have been.

CH may have been a Combat class in beta, but then why are you asking what the SOE's vision for CH if you are gonna stick to what you know what CH used to be in beta? If SoE say CH is combat class, then that is what it will be if it isn't already. If they are they vision it to be half combat half support, then that is what it will be regardless of what it was in Beta.

I think that most of you hit it right on the head that this change is for PvP, especially to satisfy those who were upset that pet isn't affected by 75% damage reduction. I think this is the silliest way to do it, since this affect PvE so much more than PvP, but I re-read most of your reply to why pet shouldn't be effected by 75% reduction and somehow I don't know if you'd get much sympathy from rest of non-CH.

And as for Master CH, I do understand you want perks over non Master CH, and that is only reasonable. But most of the suggestion I read isn't asking for perks, it is asking to be able to pull out 3 rancor (why is it always rancor? every Master CH hate rancor!). I'd understand if you want ability to improve your pet's HAM for 33% for brief period of time (like 5-10 min), ability to tame Master Only pet that no one else can use, or some other "perk", but thats not what I see most of you asking.

And I am not sure if some of you are talking to me when you say I have no CH, but umm... how do you know if I have CH or not? I would think you have enough sense to put any "opinion" you read in forums into a context of whoever if speaking and make up your own mind as to say it "matters" to you or not. Being everything written here is an "opinion", to think yours have any more validity than other people simply because you play CH and you THINK that other person doesn't is ... I guess it is as ignorant as assuming that other person is not high level CH.

Well said Papa

Pathing problems still.

Pets still stop and dont follow

Pets still disappear from datapad

Pets still warp back to wherever you called them.

Pets still jump back into datapad during combat.

CL70 limit is...quite frankly pitiful..sounds good... actually is completebollocks

Mobs now getting armour nerfs yet no reduction in CL.

Spawning of babies is strangely nerfed

Current regen rate of pets has got to be a mistake surely?

BE made stim packs, hand made, ridiculous components.

I'm sure there are more problems.

Frankly, i dont see how you have the cheek to say there have been improvements in the class.

You're attempting to *cough* balance a class against a boatload of broken classes..of which you yourself recently stated that 1-2% of players have reached end-game.

How the hell you can balance a class when 98-99% of the players havent maxed out their combat skills yet is beyond me. Lets face it, every single nerf is aimed towards PvP, and you cant possibly sort that out at this stage.