Creature Handler Archive

Ok folks, here's the draft of the new Top 5 issues list, compiled from the info-gathering thread and other things I've seen posted since Publish 21 went Live. I apologize for the length of time it took to compile this, but I wanted to see what people thought after they adjusted to the new system so I waited a bit, then I got caught up with getting ready to move.

Creature Handler Top 5 Issues (September 2005)

1. Pet Call/Store Timers

Since the Combat Upgrade, weapon switching delays have been removed. With Publish 22, vehicle call timers have been removed. However, it still takes 15 seconds to call a pet. Thus, Creature Handler's weapons are still unable to be "equipped" for 15 seconds, and it is much more difficult to travel with our weapon out constantly, especially compounded with poor pet speed (see issue #3, below).

If a Master Creature Handler wishes to use 3 pets, it takes at least 45 seconds to call them if you're not in a city. As one relevant "for example" as to why this is a problem, try hunting a player bounty as a Master Bounty Hunter/Master Creature Handler. By the time your pets are called and grouped, your target has run far, far away.

It's also a big issue in group settings, because in addition to the fact that our pets take up a spot in a group (see issue #4, below) so are normally unwelcome to begin with, it takes us minimally 15 seconds to be ready for an engagement while everyone else has had 15 seconds to get started. Creature handler, as a profession, is "left behind" in group activity.

The original reason given as to why the call delay timer was introduced back when it was first put in the game was to avoid people swapping out pets mid-combat and essentially exploiting their entire datapad to solo content. If the store timer following combat is not removed (but still reduced please), this will prevent any exploiting of that nature while still allowing creatures to be called instantly.

Solution: Remove the delay timer on calling pets and reduce the storage timer to 30 seconds following combat. This will enhance Creature Handler gameplay tremendously while not allowing exploits of pet rotation during combat situations.

2. New Pet Specials Missing/Broken/Ineffective

A great number of the new pet specials do not seem to be working correctly. Either they do not seem to work at all, or various versions of the specials (L1 vs. L2 vs. L3) do not have noticable differences, or in one case (Pinning Attack) the attack can't even be verified to exist outside of the /petPinningAttack command that implies it should exist.

NOTE: I need to compile a full list of what is working, and what is not, and what should be working better. I'll be collecting that data over the next week or so.

Solution: Re-evaluate the function of the new specials. The difference between L1 and L2, and L2 and L3 versions of specials should be noticable and worth the investment of both time and pet ability/training points because of the difficulty in obtaining the higher-level skills and time required to level the pet to accept the ability. Also, several of the skills are generally ineffective and need fixed. Finally, please locate the problem causing the absence of Pinning Attack and put it in the game, to be truly 'jack of all trades' it would be nice to have access to our full skillset.

3. Pet Movement Speed

Pet movement speed has been dramatically reduced since the Combat Upgrade went Live. Most pets can't even keep up reliably with a player at normal run/walk speeds, let alone mounted or on a vehicle. It's ridiculous that often a mount is capable of faster movement speeds while carrying a rider than while charging into combat, but this is sadly the case post-CU.

The pet special ability Fleet Footed does not appear to work correctly (see issue #2) and actually give pet movement speed increase, but we should not have to rely on training a pet with a special simply to give it a reasonable movement rate. Fleet Footed should be *bonus* speed to make a pet an exceptional member of its species, not a *necessity* to make creatures playable. Many Creature Handlers are of the opinion that overall creature speed was nerfed to make way for the inclusion of Fleet Footed as a special, and it is a very unpopular decision if that is the case.

Creature Handlers also miss the diversity given when different pet body types had different speeds, as it was a nice touch of distinction between various species to help combat the feeling that pets are simply "skins with stats" which they have slowly morphed in to. It would enhance the new system to not only be tracking down a pet with a particular special or a particular level, but a particular movement speed.

Solution: Revert creature speeds to Pre-CU state, where creature body type had impact on the speed of the creature and base creature speed was much more reasonable and realistic. Make Fleet Footed (if it works) enhance that base speed, allowing for pets that have exceptional speed for their body type. Also, allow Fleet Footed to enhance the speed of mounts for riding, which it does not.

4. Pets & Grouping

With the group limit nerf that occured with the Combat Upgrade, there was a drastic side-effect to the Creature Handler profession. Currently, a single MCH with 3 pets is 4/8 spots in a group. Even a single pet MCH is 2/8 spots.

There's no other profession that takes up more than one available spot in a group, and this is making grouping with a Creature Handler highly undesirable post-CU. Our pets *have* to be grouped to have a chance of surviving high-level content. Most of the time we can't use our pets when doing high-end PvE since even with the new system, a CL 80 player will be in virtually every case superior to a CL 70 (or less) pet, so most groups will not want to accomodate the CH's pet.

This results in an inability for the CH to monitor their pet's health easily, and of course the pet does not benefit from the group level bonus, thus dying quicker and being rendered more useless. This is especially the case if the Creature Handler is using multiple pets, such as CL 35 x2 or CL 23 x3. Such pets perish very rapidly ungrouped.

It's akin to asking each combat profession to use an extra group spot for their weapon. The Creature Handler is drawing combat ability from their pets, after all.

Solution: Make pets not count toward the group limit (or give pets their own sub-group) as to allow Creature Handlers to be able to use their weapons and skills without causing inconvienience to their group. Or, increase overall group limit size to compensate, as back when groups allowed 20 members this was rarely an issue.

5: Pet Storage

With the new system and the need to collect different pets for different special abilities, there has never been a more relevant time to ask for additional pet storage. Currently, a Master Creature Handler is limited to 22 pets in their datapad, with no way to remove a pet from their datapad and store it somewhere without actually deleting the pet. While 22 is a large number compared to some other MMORPG pet handler classes, no other MMORPG has quite as robust a pet system as Star Wars: Galaxies since the revamp and most Creature Handlers find it highly desirable to ask for more storage.

Creature Handlers highly desire a method of storing a pet outside their datapad so they can take with them a tailored selection of pets yet not have to destroy other, prized pets. As has been mentioned numerous times in numerous other places, many Creature Handlers have sentimental attachment to their pets and destroying them in favor of new pets is not an option they ever wish to use.

This situation was brought to the forefront when it became obvious that following Publish 21 newly-tamed wild pets were slightly superior to their converted counterparts, as they had a chance of an innate special while the converted ones did not. This forced many long-time Handlers to face the difficult choice of keeping a pet that is inferior stat-wise but holds sentimental value, or destroying it in favor of a superior combat pet.

Solution: Allow Creature Handlers to "re-deed" datapad pets (creating an item similar to BE pet deeds) and place them in buildings (with appropriate no-drop/no-trade restrictions if necessary), or create a new, architect-craftable structure (stable or corral) that has additional pet storage where a Handler can place a pet from their datapad in the building. Or, increase Creature Handler datapad storage at master level to include even more pets, but the focus here is on being able to store pets outside the datapad if possible.

Other issues:

- Max pet level increase to 80 (coming with ToOW!)

- XP requirements to level creatures is quite high. (probably not worth asking to change since the "group XP nerf" was reverted with an apology, so XP is still quite easy to gain in a group)

- AI issues, including pets continuing to attack lairs until they are destroyed even when commanded otherwise.

- Taming is exceedingly time-consuming at top level (CL 60+). (are people still having major problems even with BE taming clothing and chef food at master level?)

- Alphabetically sort the abilities on the /train list (I'll see if I can get this looked at, seems to be a very small change)

- "You can't tame that" bug still pops up (we were told this would be fixed in a forthcoming publish, and it was "band-aided" in the meantime with a 60 second timeout)

- Vitality loss removal (I'm all for this, since we can't get ADKs for pets and the time investment to level a top-end pet is pretty high)

Message Edited by Ko-aIri on 10-13-2005 10:50 AM

Looks comprehensive to me.

WOW! What a list ... very very good and complete.

/bow Ko-aIri;

I like the list, especially how all the pet specials got grouped. If we had to list them as 1-5 it will take years for CH to get fixed.

perfect top 5

and thank you for also noting the pet vitality issue

i think in light of having to do so much to get the pet lvled up that the vitality loss needs to be removed

Outstanding list!!!!

I agree every issue listed needs to be fixed. Thanks for taking the time to put it together.

Love the list. Hope that these get the attention that we hope for. Then maybe we can get the others that also need to get fixed. Mine are:

Secial attacks such as Poison/Disease be put back into the animals that had them before. These don't need to be "learnable" abilities, but really add to the danger of hunting them in the wild. And also complements the "learnable" abilities we can teach our pets.

Thanks Ko-aIri for all the hard work you put in.

I support this post 100%!

I would also like to see a complete SPECIAL's list with correct ability enhancements so we can correctly upgrade our companions. We shouldn't have to be SOE's lab rats.

We also should be able to see all pet stats on wild tames.

Fix pet food!

A few more I would like added.

- Since all pets espically the Non-CH variety require a great deal of time to grow/train it is very inconvenient for Creature Handlers to sell Non-CH pets/mounts. This is espically compounded by the pets having to take up a slot in the CHs datapad untill sold which could be used to hold another pet with a needed special ability, combat pet, or rare tame.

Solution - Allow Creature Handlers to "re-deed" a fully grownpet so it can be placed on a vendor.One possible way to do this would be to allow BEs to make a pet container or "Stasis Tank" that would allow a fully grown pet to be dropped in a house or placed on a vendor. Since pets seem to be fairly data intensive it is recomended that this be a once per pet deal IE: After a pet is removed from the stasis tank it can never be placed in another one. This prevents people from abusing the system to gain more pet storage, gives BEs another item to sell, gives CHs a way to "retire" prized pets,and solves the problem of selling Non-CH pets/mounts.

- Pet DPS is to low compaired to other combat professions. MCH requires a 106 SP investment which drastically reduces the ammount of speed, defense, and accuracy modifiers avaliable to the player. The reason for this is supposedly because CH allows a player to effectively wield 2 the offensive capabilites of 2 professions at once, however the DPS gained by including CH in your template is far to low to make up for the modifiers lost.

CH is described as a "jack of all trades" professionin the combat upgrade documentation that is supposed to be able to fufill the role of nuking, crowd control, and tanking depending on the pet the CH is using. With the new ability system pets arestillonly able to fufill the roles of tanking and crowd control because even with stacking all the damage enhancing abilities on a pet its DPS is still no where near half that of another combat profession.

Solution - modify existing abilities to either give a greater boost to pet damage or modify them to give actual damage multipliers to pet attacks. One possible way would be to modify the ability Frenzied Assault to give a triggered damage multiplier to the pets attacks like specials in other combat professions. This would be a one attack per trigger boost with an increased action cost for each level.

Message Edited by Joker9125 on 09-04-2005 02:14 PM

Very good list, but there is still one more point I would like addressed.

I really wish we had the ability to sell our wares (pets) on a vendor. Everyone knows we sell pets, especially now with abilities, so why are we the only profession banned from selling our "crafted " goods on a vendor. A lot of work goes into a good combat pet, so we would definately have a market.

This vendor issue would also solve all of our pet storage problems. I could offer pets to my Merchant alts vendor and thus store hundreds of pets.

Mirth