Game Guides Archive

From Novice to Master – How to Become a Master Scout

By Brisc Rubal

Imperial Master Scout and Apprentice Gunfighter

Bloodfin, Theed – Naboo

So you want to be a Master Scout, ay?

I’m sure you’ve read your manuals, and the guides you’ve been able to find online. I’m sure you’re thinking "how hard can it be? All I’ve got to do is wander around the woods killing everything that I see!"

Well, you’re half right.

I’ve read nearly every single guide on scouting that’s available out there, and many of them are good – but most haven’t been updated in a while, so I thought I would take the time to write out some ideas, tips and how-tos from the mouth of one who’s lived it.

Having just earned the title of Master Scout after 11 grueling days of hunting across the wilds of Naboo, I wanted to commemorate the event by aiding all of you Novice Scouts who go to sleep at night dreaming of earning the title of Master by providing some insights into things I’ve found that work. I hope that you all will benefit by learning some of the lessons that I had to learn the hard way. And I hope that by reading this you’ll skip some of the frustrations and annoyances that can take away from your enjoyment of the game.

I’ve broken down this guide into the topics that I wished I had some help on while I was out hunting. I hope this is easy to read, and I also hope that it will answer most of your questions about becoming a Master Scout and how to survive out there in the field.

THE BASICS (Skip this if you’re already a Scout)

So what’s the point? Why be a scout? Simple – you are one of the few nearly self-sufficient folks out in the galaxy. You can do nearly everything you want by yourself, and you are an indispensable part of any group (if you choose to join one).

Scouts have a number of skills that make them critical characters: We can create camps, allowing people to heal and rest up out in the field. We have the ability to harvest bones, meat and hides out in the field – which are always in high demand from artisans and other manufacturers. We have the ability to use traps to slow down creatures and help bring them down quickly. As we progress through higher levels, we can mask our scent to skirt around dangerous animals, get a bonus to our burst running, and increase our speed up and down steep mountains and cliffs. If you think running isn’t that important – group with a Wookie near Deeja Peak on Naboo.

WHAT EQUIPMENT SHOULD I BE SURE TO HAVE?

As a starting scout, you’ll need a couple of things. First and foremost, get yourself a weapon. After that, make sure you’ve got a general crafting tool. You can’t make traps and camps without one. If you are bugged and the game doesn’t provide them (be sure to get a safety deposit box and check for them there) you can always find players willing to give them away to a new player.

As a starting scout, you’ll be able to make the lowest level traps, and the basic camp. Once you get out in the field and start killing animals, you’ll get the materials you’ll need in order to build these traps and camps.

KEY POINT: Always have some traps and some camps available. You’ll never know when you might need them.

DOWNSIDES

The largest downside to scouting is simply that nearly everyone has the novice scout skill. So when you group, you’re going to be in line for that valuable harvesting XP, or wilderness survival XP. This can make grouping extremely frustrating for the motivated novice scout – which you can read about more below.

Not only does nearly everyone have it – everyone wants to move forward in at least some of the skills. Some of the most popular hybrid and elite professions, namely Bounty Hunter, Creature Handler and Ranger, all require significant scouting experience. So many who aren’t on a path to become Master Scout’s will be crowding you out for XP. Don’t worry – you can still make it. Using the tips I provide here, you can follow in my footsteps.

WHAT PLANETS SHOULD I HUNT ON?

I’m partial to my home planet of Naboo. The wildlife is plentiful, the views are spectacular, and the world is big enough to have a number of cities that can provide you with markets for your goods (hides and bones), places to rest up and heal, and ample opportunities for grouping, if you so desire.

Any of the other sparsely populated planets are good as you rise through the ranks to higher levels of scouting. But be careful – many of the planets out there, like Dathomir, Lok and Endor, are not places to go alone. Others, like Dantooine, are so sparsely populated that they make it difficult to train and advance without help. The starting worlds, like Tatooine, Corellia and Naboo, are excellent for beginning, seasoned and Master Scouts.

Personally, I never needed to step foot off Naboo to make Master Scout. Now that I know I can handle myself, I’ll be sampling the wildlife on other planets.

Keep that in mind while you read this guide – I’m going to speak in terms of Nabooian creatures and locations. These are easily transferable to other worlds, so if you aren’t on Naboo, don’t fret.

WHAT ELSE SHOULD I TRAIN IN?

While being a scout makes you nearly self sufficient, you really aren’t unless you compliment your scouting skills with other novice skills. You don’t need to do much advancing in them, but having them will make your climb through the ranks much easier.

First, you absolutely must have the novice Marksman skill. In fact, it’s almost best if you try and max out the Marksman skill set. Each weapon (pistol, carbine and rifle) have their own important and unique attributes, and you’ll need them to advance.

If I were forced to choose which weapon is the most conducive to good scouting, I would say pistol.

CONTINUED

I became a Pistol Specialist (Apprentice Gunfighter) far sooner than I became a Master Scout. 95% of the animals you attack are going to close to melee distances with you, so being able to hit them up close for serious damage is critical. If you plan on using your scouting skills to round out a solid PvP player, compliment your pistoling with rifle, carbine or both.

But being a Marksman isn’t enough. You’re going to get knocked around out there, whether its at the hand of a biggie – like a Rancor, Falumpset or the like – or a little guy – like a Gnort or a Chuba. Being able to heal yourself in the field without waiting for twenty minutes in a camp is important. Spend the 15 skill points and the 100 credits and get yourself trained in Novice Medic. The ability to craft stimpacks alone is worth the time, and when you are grouped, having the ability to heal is a bonus that will make you popular quickly. You probably won’t need to advance much farther than novice in the medic field if you don’t want to – but having it will make life much easier.

As a compliment to the medic field, here’s another skill that’s good to have: entertainer. I know what you’re thinking. "How can a badass Scout like myself dance around like a Cantina Girl?" The answer is simple: it increases the amount of time you can spend in the field. Being able to heal your mind wounds quickly, and being able to heal your groups mindwounds in a camp will not only increase your camping XP, but it will make your more self sufficient – only needing to go into town to get rid of Battle Fatigue (which, unfortunately, you can’t cure in the field). This also saves you from having to drag a poor, defenseless entertainer out into the field.

Finally, having novice artisan helps to round out your skillset. Being able to survey and sample for resources gives you the ability to make some of the higher end traps that require metal and other resources that you can’t get by foraging. Like being a medic or entertainer, you don’t really need to advance very far in this field to get the benefits.

So here’s the tip: Pick up a marksman skill, medic, entertainer and artisan to round out your scout. Remember, if you don’t want one of them, you can always ditch it later.

THE QUICKBAR AND MACROS

I’ve got my quickbar setup to minimize the amount of time it takes me to do the things I do most often – fighting, harvesting, crafting, trapping and camping. You should do the same. Make sure that every one of the things you normally do for Scouting XP (hunting, trapping and camping) has a spot on your quickbar.

Mine is setup so that my pistols skills are on the far left, along with crouching and burst running in case of emergencies. My harvesting macro is in the center of my top toolbar, next to my traps - with six or seven slots being devoted to them. This allows me to quickly ripple off a number of traps in a row in order to quickly gain trapping XP. On the far right are the autofollow commands.

On the bottom toolbar (utilized by pressing SHIFT and the function key) are my lesser used, but nonetheless important, functions. These include going prone, my secondary pistol shots, and mask scent. My center bar includes my crafting tool and my dance skill. The rest of the bar is devoted to camps, and finally my secondary harvesting option (whichever one I’m not aiming for at the time).

Macros – as a scout, you need to setup harvesting macros. Do this by going into your skills sheet, clicking on macros and typing in the command. I have three harvesting macros:

/harvest meat

/harvest hide

/harvest bone

Having these readily available will speed up the harvesting process, and help keep other scouts from stealing your kills if they are quicker than you in the group. Most of them won’t have a macro setup and you can beat them to the punch.

XP – HOW TO GET IT AND WHAT TO SPEND IT ON

There are three major types of XP that are important to scouts.

First, is "Scouting" XP. This is used to get you through the Exploration and Hunting skill trees.

SCOUTING XP

NOTE: Hunting and Exploring use the SAME types of XP. So when you train up Explore 1, you lose the XP you had towards Hunting 1. You’ll need to earn the same amount over to train up your Hunting Skill. I didn’t realize this until my first training session.

Scouting XP is the easiest XP to get. You can get it one of two ways. One way is to kill an animal and harvest the meat, bones or hide. Different size and different types of animals create different amounts of XP. The general rule of thumb is the tougher the victim, the greater the XP. The other way to get XP is by using /maskscent, a skill you gain after reaching Exploration 2. I’ll talk about /maskscent more in the "Maskscent Controversy" section.

Which is better to train? This is a debatable topic, but I favor Exploration. First, exploration gives you the ability to run faster up hills, and also gives you increases to your burst run ability. These are important, and very useful. You also get access to /maskscent, which provides you with another means of gaining Scout XP, which you don’t get by moving up the ranks in Hunting. Hunting helps you in harvesting animals, and in determining which are dangerous and which are docile, as well as which are likely to kill you when you attack them, and which are likely to "bring a friend" if you attack them. But the downside is that training up hunting never will give you a new means of gaining XP. It was the last skill tree that I mastered.

So what should you hunt? You need to be hunting medium sized animals, that con either blue or white and you can kill without being severely hurt. When I was grinding through the last few levels of the scouting tree, my three favorite Nabooian animal lairs to stumble across were Nightspiders (spiders), Hermit Spiders (more spiders), and Ikopi (deerlike creatures). All of them yield 100+ weapons points, 10 combat points, and a whopping 50 harvesting points. They are by far the best lairs to hit when you are soloing. In a group, hit whatever you can find that you can take down without getting severely hurt. Always be sure to moderate what you are killing with how long it takes to recharge after a fight. I was attacking Nunas last night (which con white to me), and was needing to rest up after EACH Nuna. The XP was good, but the one mission lasted nearly an hour – way too long to stay interesting.

Other planets should have similar creatures with similar attributes. Once you’ve spent a few days in the field, you’ll get a feel for what gives you the best all around XP for the time and the pain of killing them.

TRAPPING XP

As a scout, you get a number of schematics that let you build traps. These help to disable and slow down animals by affecting their HAM pools, or their ability to move. This is one of the easiest forms of XP to get. You simply craft the traps, and lob them at your target. If they hit and take effect, you get the XP. Additionally, you can lob more than one type of trap at any single victim – meaning that, for example, if you have the ability to craft 6 traps, you can gain 6 times the XP for every animal that you attack. A Nabooian Nightspider, for instance, provides 50 XP points everytime you hit one with a trap. Meaning that a single Nightspider can earn you 300 XP points for trapping if you use all your taps. 10-15 Nightspiders per lair means taking one Nightspider mission and killing all of the spiders in the lair can earn you a whopping 3000 XP! You’ll blow through trapping quickly.

In addition to the ability to get easy XP, you also get crafting points for crafting traps – I had made so many traps that when I first picked up novice artisan, I immediately qualified for the next skill – all from my trapping XP.

Traps also are useful in helping to take down creatures that you normally couldn’t take out. Scouts can solo white, yellow and (rarely) red creatures with the assistance of their traps. Make good use of them!

SURVIVAL XP

This was the hardest skill for me to master, because it takes the most time. You only get wilderness XP by making camps. Every camp you make has the ability to get you XP – with the levels varying based on the number of people who visit it, the amount of healing that takes place while its up, and how long its up for. Basic camps are limited to 620 points of XP, and Multiperson camps can get you 820. I’m not sure about Improved camps, as I’ve not used one yet – I’ll let you know once I do.

The quickest way to boost your wilderness XP is to group. This isn’t always possible though, because every group I’ve been in has had more than one scout, and they’ve ALL wanted the camp XP. The most common cause of contention between members of groups seems to be over who gets to setup the next camp (followed closely by looting/harvesting privileges).

There’s an easy way around this: bring an artisan friend camping. To get my last 5000 wilderness XP, I joined my friend, the Weaponsmith, on a crafting trip. Every time he stopped to sample, I healed him – sampling takes away action XP and can be healed by a medic – and then danced to heal the mind wounds my /tendwound skill gave. In no time, he was getting great samples, and I was getting great camping XP, without needing to wait 15 minutes to get the max XP.

In addition, if you are out in the field and have a camp setup, keep a look out for folks passing by. If they enter your camp – even for a few seconds – you’ll get a little bump up in your XP. I usually give a shout with my coordinates to let anyone who may be around know they can come stop by to visit my camp and heal – and give me that needed wilderness XP.

NO BUILD ZONES

Yeah, they suck. But until the devs make a change, you’re going to need to get at least 1000 meters away from the edge of a city to be able to set up a camp. The best thing to do is to take missions or hunt far enough away from the city to ensure that you can camp if you need to. There is nothing more frustrating than to run into a great lair of Nightspiders or Nunas and not be able to heal up with a camp after a few rounds of fights.

THE MASKSCENT CONTROVERSY

Yup, we got nerfed. There’s now a timer on how soon you can reuse maskscent after you’ve had it "broken" by a creature. I’m sure you are expecting a huge rant against the evil devs for making it even harder to become a Master Scout and ruining our fun.

Well, you won’t get it here.

I can count on two hands the number of times I’ve used /maskscent and it was very successful – meaning two or three XP gains before being broken. Maskscent is a useful skill to have, but you should never rely on it to get your scouting XP. I’ve read the stories about running around Lok and getting 10000 XP an hour. That’s a thing of the past now, and whining about it won’t change things.

You’ll just have to get your scouting XP the old fashioned way – you’ll have to earn it. Like I did. Shoot, harvest, rinse, repeat.

WEAPONS AND ARMOR – WHAT SHOULD I GET?

I’ve not had a lot of experience with Melee fighting, so I’m going to focus on ranged weapons here. In my opinion, the best weapon for a scout to use is his trusty blaster. As I said before, 95% of the animals you attack are going to be coming within spitting distance, and you get some pretty hefty negative modifiers with carbines and rifles in close. For close in fighting, stick with a pistol. Carbines and rifles are excellent when fighting blaster equipped foes, but when’s the last time a Kaadu whipped out his rifle and took a pot shot at you? As a scout, you’ll be mainly doing close in fighting, so stick with a close in weapon.

This brings us to the armor discussion. Ahhh, armor. The staple of role playing. Well, there’s a good argument to be made for not bothering with armor at all – it damages your stats, and isn’t always that effective. As a scout, you can fight fine without bothering with armor at all. But that’s no fun – we’ve got to help our armorsmith friends out, too.

So what armor to choose? Don’t bother with Bone. While it looks mean, you aren’t wearing armor for the looks. You’re wearing it to help you from getting hurt. Bone armor is effective against laser blasts, but again – as a scout – the only rifle wielding Kaadu you’re going to see are in your dreams. Mabari armorweave provides good protection against melee attacks, which is what you’ll be dealing with most of the time. I recommend getting a set when you get the dough. And I know – the pants look girly (I get questions about my "skirt" all the time) but I’d rather look like a girl than be Bantha poodu.

So go with Mabari until some of the higher end armors become readily available. You can find it in most of your big city bazaars and many armorsmiths are able to make it now too.

MONEY

Scouts need dough. They just do. Maybe not as much as some characters, but you’re going to want to buy a house someday (come and visit Brisc Rubal’s Love Nest outside of Theed – I’ve got some groovy furniture), and you’ll want to buy a new DL44 blaster, and you’ll want to be able to tip that cute Twilek at the Cantina. So what’s the best way to make cash quickly?

There are two – selling resources and missions.

The more hide and bones you can get, the more you can sell in the bazaar. And once you start hunting with a passion, you’ll get more hides and bones than you can ever use to build traps and tents. Share the wealth. Tip medics with them (they always need organics for their crafting) and sell them on the bazaar. You’ll make pretty good cash, especially the larger the lots you sell.

Second, running missions. Delivery missions are fine – for artisans and entertainers. But they don’t pay half as well as destroy missions, and you aren’t going to get Scouting XP by taking the kiddie their prize for the best picture in the "Draw Lord Vader in the Shower" contest. You will get it for going out there and killing animals.

On Naboo, I have fallen in love with the Gnort Lair missions. When I go grabbing missions, I exclusively take Gnort missions. These begin to be available as you get higher in the ranks. Each mission pays at minimum 2000 credits, and each Gnort gives you 30-40 points of weapon expertise and 29 harvesting XP. Fine – this isn’t a whole heck of a lot of XP, but there are TONS of gnorts in each lair – usually 15-20, and they are very easy to kill. Someone training for expert pistol or pistol specialist can usually one-hit kill a gnort with your special action (body shot 1 or 2 for pistol). This makes "gnorting" quick, easy and lucrative. You can run anywhere from 4-10 gnort missions an hour (if you get their near to each other) which will generate anywhere from 8000 to 40000 credits. Easy money.

TO GROUP OR NOT TO GROUP

This is a difficult question, because it goes more to the heart of the game than any of the above. If you’ve followed my tips, you’ve got a nearly self sufficient character who won’t need a group to advance. But is this fun? It can be. But that depends more on you and your playing style than on the limitations or structures of your profession.

I’ve found that when I was in a social mood, I enjoyed grouping with my friends to go hunting. But when I was in a mood to make money, or boost my XP fast, I played the loner.

Going solo offers you the advantage of being in control – you pick what to kill, when and how. You get all the XP from harvesting the creatures, and building the camps. And you don’t need to worry about courtesy, etiquette and all that jazz. But it can get awfully lonely out there all by yourself. And you’ll never get good camping XP (unless you are willing to wait 15 minutes each time) to get the full amount from your timer.

In the end, as a Scout, you don’t really have to group often to make it to Master Scout. But if you never group, you’ll be missing out on a lot of the fun the game has to offer.

CONCLUSIONS

If you’ve read this far, I owe you a beer in the Cantina. Come find me in Theed on Naboo to collect.

I hope that this little guide to making Master Scout has answered some of the questions you may have had that haven’t been answered by the other guides out there. And I hope that the time and effort that I put into reaching Master Scout will benefit some of you out there who have the same goals that I had.

If you’ve got any questions, or need training, feel free to send me a /tell in game.

Good luck, and good hunting!

Brisc Rubal - Theed, Naboo

Bloodfin

Nice work, Delta. Lots of good information here.

Being near Master Scoutness myself I had no need for a guide, but curiousity has always been a flaw of mine (maybe the reason why I chose the scout profession).

In any case, I read through the guide and it covers most, if not all aspects of becoming a scout. Very nice job!

Might want to add that getting a better blaster every time you level in Blaster skill is very useful, if not essential in taking down bigger things as you go along. But other than that, good job.

Great guide for scouts, however I do disagree with the new mask scent rules. Not that I used it to build scouting XP, what I used it for is navigating my way through dangerous territory and since there is a typical "Delay popup" of very violent and red creatures... Without mask scent, them popping up around you makes it a little too late! Also 60 seconds... even when a yellow can break it? This would have been okay if mask scent only works on red critters and it is unaffected by yellow. I really wish the gamers who try and exploit things would keep it to themselves and stop trying to act cool with what they "found".

Travelling around Lok and other fairly dangerous places in the wild to explore, the mask scent nerf really makes things hard on the honest gamer. But "way it goes"

Also, there should be some wilderness survival points awarded for Foraging!!! Surveyors get it when they survey... Why dont we get a few when we FORAGE?!?!?!?

Well the maskscent controversy isn't much of an issue for me.. what is however.. Before I mastered scout.. I was making 48xp+ per aggro mob I was around.. after I mastered scout.. I now get 17xp.. and that is on white con mobs as compared to the non mastered scout blue con mob that yielded 48xp..

Last night I was testing it out and found I recieved 9-17 xp per aggro mob ranging from a blue to a white con.. ALSO.. If you now attack a aggro mob (Red dot on the radar) even while prone the mob comes straight for you.. so apparently the shooting while prone w/o aggroing for 3 shots has been nerfed.. (Prone=3 shot before aggroing, Kneeling=2 shot, this is with a cdef.. with a dlt20a.. it's 2 shot prone and 1 shot kneeling).

I have one question - how do you know when you get the max xp from camps?

I know that solo its 15 min

but with groups? or with 'visitors'? how much does that detract from the time taken? or is it an xp bonus instead

thanks!

Sobriquet,

Depending on the number of people and the amount of healing, you can cut back on the time by as much as 5 to 8 minutes. I've gotten the full XP from a multiperson camp with five or six people in it after 6 minutes of healing and resting up.

A lot of factors go into determining whether or not you get the full XP from a camp, so a lot of this it is going to be trial and error. When you find your artisan buddy to go camping with, experiment with leaving the camp up for different periods of time while you heal them to better fine tune how much XP you can get.

And - at least it appears to me from practical use - the difference between a basic and multiplayer camps is twofold: one, they're bigger (which is only important for looks) and two, they have a higher cap. You can only get up to 640 XP points with a basic camp, but multiplayer's are maxed out at 820.I haven't had much experience with the Improved camps yet, but once I get a hard number, I'll put it here.

As for the continuing Maskscent controversy - I will agree that it is a pain having maskscent broken by yellow (non-aggressive) creatures. Perhaps the devs (HINT HINT) will help to take the pain of this nerf away by removing the ability for non-aggressive animals to break a Maskscent. That would solve this problem and - in my opinion - calm most of the legitimate complaints about the loss of the skill.

Those are the only legit complaints I see about the Maskscent nerf. Not being able to exploit it for quick levelling is good - it ensures that anyone who makes Master Scout has taken the time to learn everything they need to know about the skill. Us early Master Scouts are the pathfinders - if we do our jobs right, it shouldn't be as hard for those behind us to reach the skill. This isn't a bad thing, and it doesn't lessen our accomplishment. Having to earn your title through hunting, trapping and surivival is what being a Scout is all about. Anyone can run around Lok with a load in their pants - Scouts should earn their XP. But that's just my opinion.

Brisc

I'm a master scout in Chilastra on the planet Corellia and I prefer the carbine. The top end carbine shot immobilizes animals for a decent period of time and also causes them to start bleeding, which will eventually kill the animal.

When teamed with another person who has the same skill the two of us can keep a target at bay for a nearly indefinate amount of time as we pelt away at it.

- Pahbi

Im alittle more than halfway through to master scout on Bria (two3 level skills and two 2 level skills)and I never seemed to get any good scouting xp from mask scent even b4 they nerfed it! I mean I would get it broken by greenies!! I don't think it was meant to be for me....so I just get survival xp the old fashion way!

Regardless I really like your guide, I will most definately get good info out of it. Myself I only have marksman skills and no other...I may look into medic or artisan (and thats just for the traps that i will be able to build later) but thats it. Now going back to Marksman I only use pistols (dl44 to be exact), it seems to fit me better even though I have intermediate rifle, I may go into carbine after I get pistol specialist (only 60K left). It sucks though dealing with a group because everyone and there mother wants to harvest even though they are not full fledged scouts. If I group from now on I make sure I work with very little scouts if not none at all, me being the only one in that case. Great post man, I wish I was on your server to get that beer!

-Tylius Naal

Soon to be Master Scout/Pistol expert

Bria server