Game Guides Archive

Introduction
I had assumed that most folks knew what I'm about to spew, but occationally I am surprised by the hapless hunter out there missing out on possible harvest due to impatience and a possible lack of knowledge about how these spawns behave.

Maybe it works different in EQ and folks have assumed it didn't. I dunno. I thought I would impart my experience here on this forum and see if I can improve things and help "yall" out a tad

Part I: Lair Science
There are 3 types of lairs, and 2 types of behavior... but first I need to define the "wave".

In the 2 types of behavior there is a maximum number that the lair spawns, this set of critters is called a "wave". I will define the "wave amount" as this maximum number. Usually, if nothing has killed off a critter or 2 or they wandered off a far distance, the number of critters you see when you first encounter the lair is this "wave amount". This set of critters is the initial wave.

The 2 types of behavior is Active and Passive. Most are aquanted with Active behavior. If you hit a Mission lair, critters will pop out. The will react to continual hitting of the lair by trying to heal it. They are the lairs defenders. If you hit the lair (and they see you do it), they will heal once then come after you. In the beginning some folks could hit the lair hard enough to kill it before more defenders could spawn and would have to only deal with a few critters. This is why the devs beefed up the HP of the lairs, get more defenders out as you pounded on it to pound on you.

The Passive behavior is seen in the "invisible" lair. Shoot and kill a critter, another critter will pop up to replace it about one minute later. The initial wave, plus 3 more waves will show up unless the server triggers a spawn replacement. Now for the lairs...

Lair types are Mission, Invisible and Natural lairs. Mission lairs can be determined by the name of the lair containing the name of the defender. For example, "a Tattared Torton lair" or "a Wrix Pack lair". These type can be "generated" by the mission terminals. The other 2 can be found just roaming the wilderness. The visible ones will be named things like "a Nest" or "a Warren" or "a pile of rocks".

The Mission lair exibits only Active behavior. All lairs have the initial wave but in a mission lair you can stand all day and not get another critter to show after you kill the initial wave. Hit the lair, however, and you get another wave. When the lair crosses just under half of its hit points in damage another wave comes out. Invisible lairs exibit only passive behavior, there is no lair to defend. You have to wait for the respawn on those. Natural lairs are the fusion of both behaviors. Kill the initial wave and another pops up. Hit the lair and the initial wave will come after you AND spawn defenders to heal the lair... and come after you. It is possible to be fighting 2 full waves at once in a visible, natural lair. This is not a bug or a server "hiccup", this is working as intended.

If after this "server hiccup" you find the lair fully healed you know that someone in your party hit the lair that should not have. .

Part II: Hunting Techniques
I had to insert this postumously, as it was the end of the day at work hense the edited/reposted state.

We will go over the 3 kinds of lairs, worked by 2 kinds of hunters: Solo hunters and hunter parties. First we knock off the invisible lairs. Nothing new here other then the skills you learn hunting a particular spieces. Techniques for hunting particular spieces is beyond the scope of this post and there are guides out there for who is BAF and who is not and also require knowledge of the professions, toughness of the creature, etc. What is in the scope of this treatise is the relationship to the wave and the lair and order of battle.

Therefore (with all that out of the way) invisible lairs, those exibiting only Passive behavior, you simply kill the initial wave and lay in ambush for the rest of the spawn (EQ/UO called this "camping", but there the spawn system facilitated this far more readily and had a different flavor).

An aside: Corpse Rot
It has been often bemoaned that the bodies from a kill vanish too fast. This is not quite true. You have to develop a technique for this in groups. Solo hunters will not have this problem unless you manually loot, then harvest, such that you allow a problem. How it works is while a dead critter is on the ground, untouched, the body is available for about 3 to 5 munites (I never really timed this). However, if a body has been looted and/or harvested, by ANYONE, you have 30 seconds before *poof*.

When hunting in a group, what you should probably do is assign your leader as the most knowledged about the wave amounts for a creature an let him signal when the wave has been killed. Then AND ONLY THEN should anyone harvest the critters. This way 30 seconds is just about enough time for all to get a share and ultimately maximized your total production. My euphimizm for this is "Ninja Harvest" .

In the aformentioned invisible lair you can probably get away with kill the wave, harvest, then kill and harvest the rest as they respawn. If the server spawns them in a group it would be best to wait for the whole wave to show but I have not seen regular behavior here, so you can play that one by ear.
With mission lairs it's a pretty easy sequence:

1. kill initial wave


2. harvest


3. TAP the lair and wait for full wave to show then kill it (or ambush kill, but don't harvest yet till the wave is dead)


4. harvest


5. shoot the lair until JUST BEFORE you have damaged it to half of the lairs hitpoints. Whatever you do STOP SHOOTING IF YOU SEE A CRITTER COME OUT


6. wait for full wave (as in step 3)


7. harvest


8. Crazy go nuts. The lair is empty at that point, but some have "bosses" at the end of the lairs HP so be mindfull of that.

Definition: Tap the lair; shoot or otherwise hit the lair ONCE then peace.

Now we come to the part that is more art then science: visible, natural lairs. Remember: both behaviors are in play. You probably can do the Mission lair sequence, and then pop off the Passive waves as you go. However, if you are not an experienced group or the critter is particurly powerful I'd go for first applying the Invisiable lair technique (kill the Passive waves first) then finish the lair with the rest of the Mission lair technique. If you are solo hunting low level you can tap the lair and use AoE specials (Area of Effect) to get the passive and active waves going at once and save you time. I use this technique to get all 30 bunnies from a Crazed Durni lair in a matter of 10 minutes.

Part III: Summary
If you do it right, you should see the following yields:
Mission Lair: Initial wave + 2 Active waves = 3 x wave amount.
Invisible Lair: Initial wave + 3 Passive waves = 4 x wave amount.
Natural Lair: Initial wave + 2 Active waves + 3 passive = 6 x wave amount.

Wave amounts I can verify:

6: Have seen them but cannot verify

5: Durni, Crazed Durni, Paralope, Murra, Tabbage, Krahbu, Violent Krahbu, Slice Hounds, Dire Cats (yes, I have hunted on Corellia a LOT)

4: There are some, but none I can say for certain. I think regular Rancors... but those might also come in wave amounts of 5.

3: Tortons and Ravinous Tortons. Maaaaaaybe Mutant Rancors... or was that another type?
Waves amounts of 2 and 1 exist, I cannot be certain which, however.

Conclusion on wave amounts: they seem to be a function of difficulty level.

Safe hunting out there and remember n00bs: DON'T HIT THE LAIR IF CRITTERS ARE OUT

Message Edited by Fred_Skinner on 02-12-2004 02:07 PM

Excellent thread, Ranger Fred!

Before the last patch, things were more predictable. All your lairs were pretty much 4-2-2 or 2-2-2. Meaning when you got to the lair, you saw 4 or 2 MOBs and each successive wave would be in multiples of two. Now things are much more complex and I have seen 1-1-1's, 3-3-3's, 4-4-4's, and so on. It is usually MOB type dependent, so if you get to know the MOBs you will know what to expect. For you CH'ers... you can definitely force a spawn of certain babies by using this lair knowledge. "Wild" lairs, those that are not generated by a mission.. usually have lots more creatures in them. I pulled 27 crazed gurrecks out of a single lair once. This is great for us Rangers as we can track for these types of lairs and everyone else must find them by accident.

As far as lair mechanics goes.. this is what I have observed, at least POST-patch...

If you "tap" a lair once... doing any damage at all. It will spawn the second wave. The third wave will not come out until you get the lair down to half of its hit points. If you attack a lair while there is a nearby MOB, some of them will try to heal the lair back to full health as you mentioned. Unfortunately this does not reset the "waves" or you could "milk" a lair indefinitely.

Any that don't try to heal the lair will come after you. This is both good and bad. Its not something I want to have happen when I am fighting Rancors, but with tusk cats or banthas or similar it provides an advantage.. just get out to 64m and use an AOE shot right on the lair... all the animals will either rush to the lair or come straight at you.. but they will ALL now be in your line of fire and all die very quickly, even the new spawns. You can clean out a whole lair of medium level creatures in like 30seconds (provided you don't blow the lair up before they can spawn).

Hey, nice work. I guess it was needed for one of us to do something like this. I get asked once in a while about how to hunt and do missions. And recently I had some RL friends join the game, and saw how they were doing destroy missions. So I had to sit them down, in my impressive HTFB, and give them the lessons of an experience ranger.

Good job.

Make this required reading for all noobs who keep trying to shoot freaking lairs whilst I am taking out wave 1,

JB

LOL.. JB, thats it I simply have to make a char on your server and hunt with you.


I usually just let the noobs get incapped. That usually stops them from shooting the lair.
I remember this one guy.. he was like "That's my mission... those creatures are guarding it" which immediately followed with him charging into the middle of a group of bols and shooting the lair. Must have been his first day. LOL.

I was like "WAIT!" but it was too late. I killed the ones I could that were chasing him, but eventually he was incapped. I just sighed and hit him with a stim after finishing the lair off.

Very cool guide. This should be added to EULA. lol

Dont u just hate when noobs keep shooting the lair?? Or for example one is the only guy with a decent pet, and is

unlucky enough to hunt with 5 spoiled grinders. They usually dont have a clue what is goint on. So, u attack a lair of

Slinking Voritors or quenker relic reapers and your pet gets a decent licking, but none else gets any damage except

specials. So I am standing there, healing the live insurance, and suddenly u hear this: ALL RDY? 1 second later, rdy

and off it goes. I may be in good health, but my pet has about 100 HAM left. I have to say, I hate it when my pet looses vitality.

I really love my pets. It is always such a hassle to tame them. But worth it.

So, when u have the honour of 2 grinder or kiddie commandos this usually happens. Both get theis Zippos out and try to be as

selfish as possible by using flame cone 2 or something like that on the lair. This results in not 1 but 2 waves comming at them.

Then they die and ask me y I didnt kill my bet (which has about 100 HAM left as mentioned) by saving their anti-social %$&!§%$=?")=?.

Btw, I normally tell everyone beforehand to wait for my pet to get healed. So I normally just watch them get killed, heal my pet and do the killing over their dead bodies, as I dont have a choice.

That drives me nuts.

WHEN WILL THE PEOPLE LEARN THAT THERE R ACTUALLY GUYS WHO KNOW WHAT THEY R DOING??

I even made a macro for teamspeak which tells peeps what to do. I gave up valuable quick.access space for that. That is how fed up I am.

I think in the next patch they should include a PUNISH feature which the teamleades can use. For stupid team-members.... Hehe, that

would actually be a nice thing to have...

Well, so long,

good hunting

El-Clembo

Ranger on Gorath

One addition: When it's about lairs with quite low ham (like durni-lairs, that's where I noticed it): You might kill the lair too fast if you are not careful as it might get destroyed before all creatures have spawned (this was a difference between two durnis from random lairs when killing the lair quick and > 10 - I did no exact bodycount - when hitting the lair once and just let it 'burn down' without further shooting on it.

Excellent post!

This will assist not only new Rangers, but also those reading this forum in search of some hunting basics.

Good read.

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darmokVtS wrote:
One addition: When it's about lairs with quite low ham (like durni-lairs, that's where I noticed it): You might kill the lair too fast if you are not careful as it might get destroyed before all creatures have spawned (this was a difference between two durnis from random lairs when killing the lair quick and > 10 - I did no exact bodycount - when hitting the lair once and just let it 'burn down' without further shooting on it.

---

Yep

It should also be mentioned here that you can damage a lair too fast and totally nuke your harvest. On the starter planets you should use an off weapon especially picked for "lair popping", a CDEF throw-away, or even your survival knife that everyone is certed for. One hp is all you need for the first tap and you do not want to damage the lair to near nothing in one hit. Remember, tap for the first one, that is hit once and peace. The second one stop justbefore half hp. If they don't come out tap and wait a tick or two.

I'd have to ask if a "forumauthority type" would get with me as to if there is a more appropriate board, or another board that would alsoqualify.

If you watch your radar.. you will see a creature spawn with a dot before they are actually visible and fully aware of what is going on. For this reason, I usually watch the radar when lair tapping and not the lair itself. When the dot comes up, call "peace".


Also, the bosses I have seen don't appear to be very "bossy". They will come out fighting for sure, but I haven't seen any that are really harder than the regular mobs.
Although while hunting fynocks on Talus I repeatedly saw like 5 bosses come out at once. They weren't really any harder than the regular mobs, but 5 aggro'd at once was quite a start.