Ranger Archive

The level of creature you can trap is determined entirely by your trapping skill. This means that a high level player will have extreme difficulty in levelling lower level trapping tiers (i.e. a single combat mastery at CL 54 will be unable to obtain more than 1 xp per kill at Novice Scout). A skill change will help but it is not an optimal solution. Also note that Trapping xp is treated like any other weapon/medical xp right now (i.e. you only get trapping xp when you kill the target).

Things that might help you:
Dweezel, a trapping food (or anything that you can find that will increase your trapping skill).
A Trapping Droid (it is said that these increase your chance to hit with traps although I'm not sure if the xp will work correctly in the CU).
Force Sensitive Survival (you can get a bonus to trapping in this branch).
Dropping some combat skills (this is far from a good solution but it is an option if you really want the xp).
I have not tried this but state defense decreases might help. If you have some way of trying this, please let me know if it helps.

Things that will not help:
Grouping (if your CL goes up, things will actually be worse).
Getting Master Ranger made traps (traps don't change depending on the level of the maker).
Raising your combat level.

This is a serious problem and hopefully the Devs will have some type of fix soon.

Great work Lyth, up she goes.

Wow, this really is a problem. I tried going back and working on scout trapping skills with another character that was CL 16. All but impossible to actually gain goodtrapping xp.On average I was getting 20 - 50 pts per creature kill, and was having to use at least 4 different traps on CLs 12-15.I even tried giving up some marksman skills to bring down my CL....It took me dropping more skills to go down in CL then it did to go up in CL and it made very little difference... When you need like several thousands of points to level, you can see where this would be a downer getting 30 pts at a time..Now a starting scout working on trapping ( CL 1-5 ) can get the same 20-50 pts per kill using a single trap on CLs 2-5... Hope they at least take a look at this....

Maleki > GHOST

Master Ranger > Radiant

Here's some results of trapping tests that I did on TC yesterday.

I had to sacrifice my ranger -- dropping him to 4044 scout. But I wanted to test this out on a mid combat level toon. I have some rifleman skill, so this test is based off a CL 39 rifleman with +5 trapping skill (4044, no boxes in the trapping line, with the +5 only from the novice box)

Big thanks to Jamethiel of TC for making some +7, +9 and +10 Dweezel! (trapping mod food)

These results aren't scientific or even very complete.. I spent at least 4 hours, but what little info I got might still be useful. It definitely shows how progression in the trapping tree can become gated.

Dweezel can be helpful, providing your CL doesn't greatly exceed your ability to trap. Possibly not a problem for new characters - but definitely a problem for anyone wanting to switch to scout/ranger and starting from scratch.

As nemoO said, dropping your combat skills to lower your CL isn't a good solution -- It's an option, but no other profession is required to do a "workaround" in order to gain skill in another area. Also, dweezel helps -- but again, no other profession is required to use a buff or mod to properly gain XP.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to test with a trapping droid.


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Character combat level: 39
Trapping mod: +5

Without Dweezel

level 2 (gray con) Capper Spineflap
traps stuck on first or second throw
(1xp)

level 8 (gray con) Fanned Rawl
50/50 chance of sticking on the first throw.
(1xp)

level 15 (gray con) Capper Spineflap
roughly 10% chance of sticking a lecephine dart
(1xp)

level 25 (gray con) dune lizard
max 40 traps thrown, none stuck

level 38 (blue con) dappled gualama
max 40 traps thrown.. none stuck


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Character combat level: 39
Trapping mod: +5 (+15 total using dweezel)

With +10 Dweezel

level 15 (gray con) Capper Spineflap
(with +10 dweezel.. total of 15 trapping skill)
originally 10% chance of sticking a trap without +10 dweezel bonus, with dweezel I was able to land every trap.
(1xp)

level 25 (gray con) dune lizard
(with +10 dweezel.. total of 15 trapping skill)
trap stuck on first throw
(1xp)

level 38 (blue con) dune bantha
(with +10 dweezel.. total +15 trapping skill)
over 30 traps thrown, none stuck

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Yeah, its obvious something is borked. I recently had to drop all but 4040 Scout so I could do some FS quests and now I cant get back to Master Scout. Would be nice if they would fix this. I wonder if anyone has actually made it to the top of the Ranger trapping line.

Guess I'm stuck where I'm at for now.

Wait, what is this Dweezel?

Who forgot to tell me we had a trapping food?

/search chef schematics

dweezel has been in the game for a long time. It's a food that gives a bonus to trapping.

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frightwig wrote:
dweezel has been in the game for a long time. It's a food that gives a bonus to trapping.

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I've been playing for 4 months. I only know what foods I see for sale. Guess it hasn't been selling, so this is news to me.

I guess I am stil a noob in some areas of this game.

I don't know. If someone can get 444x Ranger in 7 missions with friends, maybe having the trapping "broken" kind of balances it out.

Or they can just balance our XP all over.

Well, as a level 60 Master Rifleman/3001 Pistoleer and Scout 4244 I hardly ever get a trap to land. I think my trapping mod just cant keep up with my CL since I have it high due to two ranged professions.

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Feefers wrote:
Starting with a new character I have not found this problem as long as (as stated elsewhere) you hunt things around your level, I've actually been using traps against 2 level higher creatures and been getting modest XP.

I may just be mis-reading but I fail to see how this xp "problem" differs from any other xp "problem" of the new CU enviroment.

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The problem mainly happens when you do not level in a more balanced fashion. For example, if you have Master Rifleman but no Scout and decide you want to add Ranger to your template, you will have a very difficult time landing any traps on anything close to your level. If you make a new character, make some traps, find some CL 54 targets, and try throwing the traps then you are very unlikely to get any of them to hit what would be a white con for the other player. But the CL 54 player would have the exact same chance of hitting that target as you would. If you know you want the trapping skills when you start out then it shouldn't be a problem but the longer you wait before adding trapping to your template, the less likely you are to be able to trap anything that will give you more than 1 xp.

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Nemo0 wrote:

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Feefers wrote:
Starting with a new character I have not found this problem as long as (as stated elsewhere) you hunt things around your level, I've actually been using traps against 2 level higher creatures and been getting modest XP.

I may just be mis-reading but I fail to see how this xp "problem" differs from any other xp "problem" of the new CU enviroment.

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The problem mainly happens when you do not level in a more balanced fashion. For example, if you have Master Rifleman but no Scout and decide you want to add Ranger to your template, you will have a very difficult time landing any traps on anything close to your level. If you make a new character, make some traps, find some CL 54 targets, and try throwing the traps then you are very unlikely to get any of them to hit what would be a white con for the other player. But the CL 54 player would have the exact same chance of hitting that target as you would. If you know you want the trapping skills when you start out then it shouldn't be a problem but the longer you wait before adding trapping to your template, the less likely you are to be able to trap anything that will give you more than 1 xp.

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Another way of looking at it as being 'different' from some other post CU XP issues is that, if you are CL 54 and can't get wild spawns at your level, you just go get some mission spawns or group up and join somebody hunting 80's. You get the XP, eck, you even get extra XP. Unfortunately trapping mods don't 'scale' with your CL so you can't get round the XP problem by grouping.

It does look a bit like the problem we identified in beta when a player would have reached mastery of a ranged profession (non-elite) and then couldnt get melee XP as a novice brawler without first weakening the creature with ranged attacks then switching to brawler to finish it off. Except of course you can't 'weaken' the creature to increase your trapping level, as it were.

As Nemo says, if you're starting from scratch and are aware of the issues and you level in a balanced way, no problem. But if you are looking to add Ranger, or even simly scout, to an existing template, ouchies.

Nice numbers Kimi, btw. (You do know you didn't need to kill your ranger to get back to scout 4040? Levelling up a novice scout on one of your spare TC slots would have worked too )

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Almagill wrote:

Nice numbers Kimi, btw. (You do know you didn't need to kill your ranger to get back to scout 4040? Levelling up a novice scout on one of your spare TC slots would have worked too )

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Yeah, I was thinking of that, but I don't have any combat skills on the other toons, so they're all CL1. I wanted to test it with a decent amount of CL and combat skills though.

If I'd started completely from scratch, I probably wouldn't have even needed the dweezel since my trapping mod would've matched up pretty well with my CL.

Of course, now I'm stuck unless I drop rifles.. But I still have my Wanderhome ranger.