Creature Handler Archive

Your pet is way under power to hang with you as a tank now. You need to fight things around your CL and consider your pet as a DOT. Rifleman/CH is going to be a very difficult combo now, unless they put in a Pet Taunt. If you outdamage your pet, youare going to pull the mob off your pet and onto you. Riflemen dish out the most damage in the game or close to it. This means the odds are you will always be outdamaging your pets and pulling the hate. This is why I cal the pet it this situation a DOT. You end up tanking and the pet just throws in his licks. For this reason, consider taking a pet for damage over HAM. Once you get your CH and pet CL up things may start to balance a bit better. However, that big cannon your holding just is going to make it very hard in the new system

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obydan wrote:

I have just started playing agin after a few months away & seem to have understood the CU except for creature levels. I have read endless posts to try and discover why I am only getting 1 CH XP but still don't undertand it please help!!

I am a master rifleman & so have a CL59, I only have a few boxes of CH and can only use a level 21 pet. When I use a lvl 20 pet to fight a lvl 17 creature I got 1 CH XP. From the Boards I think my problem is I need to fight creatures that are at my CL, but wouldlvl 59 creatures not just rip my lvl 20 pets instantly?? Any advice as to what CL creatures (that won't slay all my pets in an instant) I should be finding to actually get some XP would be most welcome Please!! I know getting to MCH was not a speedy process but doing it 1 pt at a time would be a little rediculous

Thank you!!

OB

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One more thing: I was getting very good CH xp from actually "training" pets. So get out there, find any babies you can, train em up, and release if you dont need em.

Yes training is a very good way to get CH XP. I was doing 400+ when training my 3 narglatches.

-Indene-

Message Edited by Indene on 05-24-2005 06:35 PM

For good training xp, if you have a few credits to spare .. find a BE who's working up their sampling and crafting ... commission them for junk pets and train away. It's 400xp per command, and you get a large supply of easy to find pets.

By FAR the best way to gain MASSIVE Creature Handler XP (or any type of XP for that matter) is to join a group and pull missions off a terminal. I've been tagging along with some XP-grinding guildmates on CL-80ish lair missions, and getting about 4800 Weapons XP and 1600 or so Creature-Handling XP for each kill. Plus if I harvest tissue from the corpses, that's another 6k in Scout XP, which caps at 300,000 now at Hunting-4. (woo-hoo!!)

The process has three keys:

1. We now get FULL xp for each kill we participate in, even if we get in one hit on the target before it dies, if it's part of a group effort. ALL players in the group who attack the target get full XP for the kill.


2. That one-hit principle also applies to our pets, although I believe the rules noware suchthat the pet has to be actively fighting the creature when it dies to get you the XP. So, Tab to your next target and shout out your "Attack" commands as fast as you can after the critter dies.


3. Generally, the "Hate" system will ensure your low-level pet's survival. It won't do enough damage to shift the attention of the target away from other higher-level groupmates. So attack away!

Within those parameters, you can take any one of three approaches: You can choose to just fight with a weapon, do a combination of shooting with your weapon and attacking with your pet, or just command your pet and stow your sidearm. If you just shoot a weapon, all the XP from the kill will go to weapons XP. If you just use a pet, all your XP will go to CH XP. And if you use a combination, the XP will be split between the two in proportion to the damage you and your dish out relative to one another. This explains my ratio of 4800 Weapons XP and 1600 CH XP. I consistently out-damage my pets, so the majority of the XP from my kills goes to Weapons. But the total is always similar.

As for the new Creature Level system, it gets a bit wierd, so I will elaborate:

1. For each level above or below you, your XP and damage totals (and the damage output of the creature you're fighting) gets a bonus/penalty of 10% up or down. Thus, if you're a level-70 combatant fighting a level-71 Nightsister Initiate, you will have your damage against her reduced by 10% per hit, while her damage output goes up 10 percent. The reward in this example is that the XP you receive for killing her also is boosted by ten percent. Conversely, if this same level-70 character takes on a level-65 Reptilian Flyer, his damage output gets a +50% bonus, while the flyer's damage is reduced 50 percent. And when the flyer dies (presumably very quickly...), the XP is also reduced by 50 percent. And so the progression goes, until you take on something ten levels or more below you, in which case the damage done to you is trivial and the XP reward is reduced to a single point.


2. Now for the wierd part: Mission terminals... Whenever you pull a mission, the creatures for that spawn will automatically be adjusted to the level of the mission -- whatever the creature indicated in the mission. And the level of the mission will always be somewhere in the vicinity of your level (or the level of the strongest group member). And the creatures can be anything. I do a lot of grinding on Naboo, so we wind up fighting a lot of level-82 kaadus!


3. When in a group, creatures die very quickly, so if you have a full group of 8 players, you will pile up XP hand over fist. Expect the 16 missions such a group can pull to ensure that you will reach any applicable XP cap within an hour.

(Edited to fix a glaring typo...)

Message Edited by Iakimo on 05-25-2005 01:58 AM

How are you pulling CL82 kaadu missions on Naboo. I have seen mission lairs around with CL 80 fambaas and such and even some CL82 gungan missions, but I have never been able to pull these off the terminals. I so wanted to hunt off of Naboo out of our player city, but even with a full group we were only getting CL 50 missions. Everyone has told me the missions on Tat, Corellia, and Naboo are capped at CL50, I have seen mission lairs higher, but I cannot pull them, so I was thinking they are bugged. Are you using a player city terminal or a static city mission terminal?

To the original poster the best way to get XP is get in a group and use nothing but your pet. I went out saturday with a full group and we hunted pikets mostly on Dant. I racked up 800k xp in about 2.5 hrs. One mission lair will spawn about 20+ creatures at CL80 and I am getting just over 5k xp per creature, so thats about 100k per lair. And you get the full mission payout. It goes quick too, there is usually a jedi or more elite combat fighters who take down the MOBs pretty quick and keeps the hate off your pets. Plus I have found that pet pulling MOBs out of the herd works amazingly well now, the whole assist system seems to have no effect when your pet attacks. Since it goes wuick I recommend just sticking with CH rather than using other weapons skills, simply because you wont lose and CH XP, it is easier to manage your pets, and things are getting killed so fast you have to be on your toes to make sure your pet actually gets in there to make a hit. If you learn to pull pets well, you will be amajor asset to your group, since it is hard for player tanks to manage multiple MOBs sometimes, you can bring them one at a time.

Thanks for all the help guys!! Things are much clearer to me now. Well I am off to make freinds & find babies!! Thanks again!

OB

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Iakimo wrote:

Hmmm... we're running 8-person groups out of a player city, and Itypically groupwith padawans doing the Jedi XP grind. But yes, the missions we pull up range from level-78 to 82, and the missions listed by the terminals include the usual Naboo menagerie: fambaas, kaadus, Gungans, capper spineflaps, gualamas, tusk cats, etc. (the guys tend to avoid cappers, as well as the NPCs for obvious reasons.)

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OK that is encouraging, I have been hoping to see more use out of the player cities on the main planets. I'll have to try this again, but getting a group together to "test" this again may be complicated since everyone is so anxious to get out there and kill. One more question though is the player city you are pulling missions out of an improved job market, or some other enhancement that might affect mission levels? Not even sure if these affect mission levels, but I was curious.

We've got double xp until Tuesday, so get out there and tame like a mofo.

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Redondo wrote:

One more question though is the player city you are pulling missions out of an improved job market, or some other enhancement that might affect mission levels? Not even sure if these affect mission levels, but I was curious.

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I think it is, but I'm not sure. The guys just told me, "We're here, come join us..." so that's where I went. Been mongo fun!