Creature Handler Archive
Thread: A summation of great CH ideas (long) Version 1.0
-First of all I'd like to say there are so many great idea that come out of this forum. These ideas deserved to be thought upon and perhaps, if the idea is plausible and brilliant then a developer could think of implementing it. Some of these ideas might seem far fetched. Some of you will say that we need to acknowledge bugs. Still ideas on how our profession can eventually be improved are to be preserved so when the developers want to give us a new feature they have a place to see a condensed concise post. I looked through the first 20 pages of the CH boards and out of the 220 pages here that is hardly the tip of the iceberg. Please feel free to constructively criticise these ideas or add to them. I would like to thank all the people so far that sat down and wrote down their ideas on this forum. Please forgive me summing up most of these posts and leaving out detail. I tried to condense this as much as I could without losing the main point. Keep thinking!
CH physical items:
Opie76 had an idea on a arena/park:
-Have an arena like structure that master archs could make. Only one arena per player city as to be an incentive to live there. Here CH's could battle their creatures and players could even bet on them. This place would help the CH/BE relationship by engineering a pets to be unique (eg have a posion attack on a wrix) and this could help in the area. I think that CH's would have to stand in a special box and only be allowed to give commands.
jadegreif has suggested a Prod/whip:
-Basically allow an item that allows more maximum total CL of the pets out. This comes at a price though and you should not be able to yield a gun perhaps at all or at heavy penalty.
Eagle_flight had suggested ideas on creatures for everyone:
-The community seems to be split on everyone having a 1-3k HAM tank (creature). His possible solution was to only allow people to eventually have a mount or a pet that could participate in combat. Simply limit storage to 1 creature.
Rorenikibi had several good ideas:
-Have MCH's able to tame adults above CL 50. The chance would have to be slim though.
-Have food buffs work on pets (simple and helps chefs expand into another market)
-A creature corral (or pen/zoo) strutcture.
The BE/CH relationship:
Styphathal had a wonderful idea on the CH/BE relationship:
-He stated that most of us enjoy taming creatures and most of us do not like to buy a BE'ed creature. He suggested having a tamed creature be brought to the BE and have undergo a type of 'gene therapy' to enhance it. Similiar to a Weaponsmith/Slicer relationship. You still let the BE be able to 'cook up' creatures from scratch, this would just be a interesting alternative.
Opie76 had more ideas on the CH/BE relationship:
-Do not allow CH's ever to sell creatures on the bazaar/vendor. Only BE's should be allowed to do that.
-Allow BE's to modify color, armor, attacks and size of creatures to make them more varied and a BE pet worth considering.
Breeding:
-A lot of people have suggested creature breeding. (So I'm not quoting one person) This could hurt BE or help. It would have to take more time to breed a baby then for a BE to create one though. Still, there should be some benefit to breeding. Say you had a BE that made a simply amazing pet, you could breed it with another wild one to get a very nice middle of the road pet. This idea probably would require the creature pen/corral/zoo feature though. Gestation should take quite a while in game time (atleast a realtime week). You would also need to take care of the mother with a special diet perhaps. This would satisfiy Holo since his view of CH's is a half combat prof, half pokemon trainer.
Pet armor:
-This idea has been thrown around alot as well. This would help the armor making market and maybe BE's. Say BE's would have to modify the amor in some way for the creature. No I do not think that pet armor should add more AR rating for most beasts. This would just make things overpowered again. You could add special resistances or completely negate all natural pet armor and replace it with the player made armor instead. Just another option and graphical effect. We do see pets with mounts and armor in the movies.
-Make a type of pack that we could put on a mounted creature. This pack would be used for storage.
Babies!
-Currently the amount of babies you can and simply cannot find in some lairs is rediculous. If only a BE could make this creature then that would be fine. BE's need some sort of perk like that. I'm talking about the overwhelming majority of creatures below CL 60 that simply don't spawn a baby period. How do these creatures reproduce? Asexually? We know this needs revision. I purpose that all creatures below CL 60 would have a chance of spawning a baby. Even if this chance is less then 5% per lair there should be a chance. There should be exceptions to creatures like an ancient so-and-so. This creature is really old, a baby should be normal.
-Currently you can search any creature lair for eggs. This I think could become very interesting. Say a CH or BE could incubate and hatch the eggs into babies. Maybe make this lair harvesting harder.
Raising system:
-I think Holo would agree that we treat our creatures like meat sheilds. I purposed a baby raising system. When we tame a creature we usually just store it in the datapad till we can use it. We don't have to feed, play, use or do anything special to get it to grow. Why expect CH's to be empathic towards a specific creature when they had to invest no time into it's growth?
-Make rasing a special way through diet, playing, and taking care of a creature beneficial to the creature. If we neglect growing a pet then it should not be as optimal as it could be.
-This could continue into adulthood so once it's grown we don't abuse the creature. If you do not take care of the creature when it's grown then you could have statstical reductions (lack of exercise or feeding) or other penalty.
Commands:
dalcey Suggested a rest command:
Say our creatures are hurt badly and due to regeneration nerfs we could have our pet do this 'rest' command. This would improve his regen rate as long as he would be resting.
SeTSwiPe expanded on Holocron's idea of the /tellpet command:
On top of the /tellpet command he would like to see /emotes or social motions give commands. (I can totally relate to this, I already try to make my commands look like emotes, although they are said. They could just let /emotes and /socials bind to commands).
Tathos * wrote about a retire option:
1) Add an option to the radial menu called Retire
2) When retire is used, it brings up a confirmation dialog
3) Upon confirmation, you pet will be stored in your backpack, with its name still intact.
4) This pet can then be placed in a house, just like BE furniture.
5) The pet can be sampled by the owner only, but not retamed by anyone.
Azeiron had a brilliant idea on the pet cap issue:
We all know Holo would like us to be more empathic towards our creatures and use them less like meat shields. This idea would raise our CL and satisfiy Holo. He thought of introducing something called PCL (personal control level). By doing things such as feeding, playing using, not allowing DB's etc (empathic actions) then this PCL would gradually decrease over time to a point where you could see as much as a 30-50% reduction in overall CL the creature would represent. This would only apply to the CH that would work with the creature and it could go back up perhaps if the creature was abused or neglected. PCL could be a master perk or worked into the CH ladder.
3D4D had a toy idea:
-Have a simple ball for RP reasons. We could play fetch 
.
Cthulhu1890 Had a very simple idea of creature emotes:
-Whether is was like a creature emote you could type EG '/emotecreature sniffs around' would produce " sniffs around". Maybe even some more social animations or tricks that had no benefit. This would help our creatures be more alive and would help RP'ers out.
Zizox summed up several good commands:
1. Sit
2: Lay down (most creatures have a built in prone animation)
4. Call off (also being called retreat by others, pretty explanitory)
5. Forage: Let's let our pets' noses do some work, let them see if they find anything interesting. (perhaps this could tie into rangering?)
6. Track: We should be able to let our pets aid us in tracking, they have good noses. Perhaps this would only be able to be used if we were a ranger with X skill. I know rangers will have tracking of some kind.
-That's it for now. I'd like to maintain and update other great ideas that I find and have them all in one area. I realize also that I forgot a lot of other amazing ideas. If your idea was not here simply add it and later I will make another version. Hopefully this summation will help condense the large number of new topics we see (we have over 220 pages of new topics...) and yet we can have feedback on all these ideas. The developers do listen to well orginzed posts and it's hard for them to wade through 220 pages.
-Also you notice that I do not touch much on bugs or outstanding issues. Vexerton seems to do a good job doing that, as well as other posters who make compilation lists regularly. Keep up the good work.
first of all, this is a wonderful post
my favorites: BE "slices" of our pets, retreat commands, and a place to keep pets if we can't have any more in the datapad (which we should be able to have...)
what I don't think will happen: anything that lets us have stronger pets (or more pets) than we do now. devs have stated in the TKA forums that a TKM (and other elite combat proffessions) should have a 50/50 chance against a lvl 25creature when soloing...as a CHM now you can use 70 lvls of creatures...(i.e...much better than 50/50 odds vs a lvl 50 creature). if these are the devs' balancing goals...i'm scared for more nerfs
PS, how about letting image designers/BEs alter our pets coloration, etc. (i'm realizing that this might be hard/impossible to do...but i think some people would enjoy it...ditto with tailors being able to make collars...harnesses...i dunno, animal things)
In order to get to Creature Handler, we had to go through Scout. And what are scouts supposed to be able to do? ...scout.
Why not a way to allow us to "bind sight" on our creature and use him to scout for us? We control him and see through his eyes. (Like the Eye of Zomm in EQ, but without the limited duration.) Make it Sci-Fi by having us need a "transmitting collar" on the pet and "receiving glasses" on ourselves in order to work. Someone would have to construct those, naturally.
There would be "aggro issues," sure. But it might give us a reason for taming non-fighting creatures of unimpressive merit. I've not explored many worlds, so I don't know all the creatures that are out there, but I could see taming a nice, harmless "gibber", *NOT* renaming it, then running it through a town, encampment, battlefield to scope out the situation.
First thank you Wildjames . Alot of this isn't my work though, just remolding what others have said. But it did take me a good three hours to do .
Yes I agree that CH will be changing radically yet again. But in reguard to the 50/50 remark. I really think developers have messed up by letting CH's tame anything below CL 15 for anyone. Now a creature can go tank for a ranged person and that 2k HAM in that low CL pet helps a long way. They really just added 15 more CL's with creatures and faction pets and driods! I see all this changing soon but who knows. We all need to keep thinking on how to bring new things that will make our class unique yet challenging and a joy to play.
ExarDun, that's a very sticky issue! Here are my thoughts. Why not make CH in general have more preques. EG master scout and master ranger (both lines that sound like they would be related to CH). This idea is similiar to the idea that some have toyed around with the beastmaster class (sounds too EQ 
).
UnderDuress , hehe your third post... not too shabby! I think that's a very neat idea. You would have to have goggles or something to that effect. You could attach a camera on your wrix or small bird like animal. I guess what that would be usefull for is speed at which you could scout. Say you're on a raid with your PA and you want to go ahead of the group (while on auto follow) with your creature. Now most can run much faster then we can. Of course there is the issue of server lag, notice when you run around sometime you do not have time to dodge aggro mobs. Because of that issue, it might not work... keep thinking!
the elite-elite CH profession has been suggested as another way to get more powerful creatures while making it so you can't master a combat profession as well. Additional skills like the ability to command creatures to do specific attacksand creature healing skills could be placed in this tree.
Personally i like the whip/prod idea better.
Shadowtalker, would you be able to provide links to the threads in which these ideas were brought up, just so interested people (hopefully the devs) can go and read the detail.
for example the whip/prod idead was brought up here http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=creature_handler&message.id=47614
And then was brought up again here, this time specifically addressed to holo
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=creature_handler&message.id=50276
Shadow, I only gave that idea because 1. the devs will never make it so people cannot train in more than one elite combat class. 2. Most people complain that we were spending too few credits to have 3 strong pets out at the same time.
To make us master scout AND ranger would make us equal to BHs in terms of skill credit costs, and there is NO WAY the devs will allow us to have 3 gurrecks out at the same time again...so, no I do not agree with you there.
My idea was to give us an elite elite CH line (note I said line and not tree) to give us enough extra CL to have 2gurreck typepets out. By doing this we remove the devs concerns of dabblers having to much power. As is, the only elite combat classes that spend more points in their lines are BHs and commando's, we should be more powerful than the others because of that...and we are not.
So Exar, basically make the CH tree have 5 lines instead of four? I don't see that happening.
Let me ask you though, why have two gurreck type pets out? I know alot of players want CL to be raised to 100 some way or another. I don't see that happening unless that whip/prod idea is implemented. But why isn't having up to a CL 60 pet not enough? I only use one gurreck usually. I know some CH's like to use two or even three smaller pets in combination. I do agree with holo in some respect, why do we need more power?
Not 5 lines. Didnt you see how they are adding an elite/elite architect line for player cities and a mayor line also? My idea stated that only a master CH can get to this line so it actually will be a seperate line altogether. It will also allow them to implement other commands as noted in my post.
As for why more power? Because, not everyone wants to be forced to take another elite combat profession, there is not one other elite combat class that is being forced to do so. The only reason the power of the CH was dropped is because of the fact that our powered was based on those that took CH and another combat class. By adding another line the dabblers will be weeded out (higher skill credit cost) and it will allow the rest of us to continue with the type of characters we wanted to begin with.
Personally I cant stand the idea of having to take pistoleer and be another cookie cutter template when the devs promised that this game wouldnt be like that.