Creature Handler Archive

I had suggested this a few months back but now with more information I can revise this proposal.

Facts:
Survival has become a useless skill tree
/forage has no real purpose
CH has been greatly weakened and is without a unique niche in the game

Proposal :Merge CH with scout and ranger

Why this makes sense:
Most hunters have a companion, a pet that flushes out prey or retrieves them.
Replaces a useless skill tree
Benefits BE’s who will now have a market for creatures again.
Would give Scouts and Rangers some combat ability.
Would require no extra skill points from current CH’s (master scout and 2 trees of ranger instead of 2 trees of scout and master CH)


Changes:
CH go bye bye.
Survival and Exploration trees get merged into 1 tree (scouting principles or something similar). These skills compliment each other. This way camps are not eliminated nor is /forage
Tame moved to novice scout and +4 stored pets moved to novice scout.
In Place of survival goes the CH tree.
Hunting and CH trees merged.
Essentially so that Hunting IV and CH IV would be the equivalent of a 2/2/2/2 CH

Novice ranger +1 pets +4 stored pets.
Again survival replaced by CH and explore and survival merged, hunting and CH merged
Eliminate +3 pets as it was stealth eliminated by raising the CL of most pets.
A Ranger with Hunt IV and CH IV would be the equivalent of a master CH.

This way all current Master CH’s could easily switch over to being a ranger equivalent, and there would be no extra skill points needed.

I would like to hear the opinions on this especially from the correspondents, I realize this is probably a waste of time and even if it is liked and worthy of consideration it would be months before it gets implemented, but it’s worth a try.

You've obviously put a lot of thought into this, and you make someinteresting points there. But the complete elimination of a profession seems extremely radical. I would imagine large portions of both the CH and Ranger communities would be resistant to losing their current identity like this (even if the two professions are related).

Forgettit... better make Ranger worthwhile tohave with Tracking and such.

No thanks.

No offense, but it sounds to me like you just want the benefits of both professions without the additional skillpoint investment. Im still deciding on my end template, but if your a master ranger/master combat profession, you can still afford 3 blocks of CH, thats a level 19 pet(which can be formidable if its BE). If you dont like Survival, then drop it and put the points into CH.

I might end up dropping Trapping and some Survival/Wayfairing to get more CH, but Ranger and CH, although related, are seperate professions, with seperate backgrounds, and combining them is daft, IMO.

I think combining them makes since but I'd do it differently. Make the profession one of the highly specialized professions. Rangers/CH need some personal combat skills as well as woodsman and animal knowledge. Make the new profession require master marksman and master scout to acheive. Then you can split the trees of the new class to provide the harvesting, tracking, and ground movement abilities of the ranger with the animal handling abilities of the CH. Also increase some of the skill points if necessary to make an additional specialization impossible.

This burns the skill points, gives the appropriate skills to the profession, and allows the ranger to survive whether they use animals or not.