Ranger Archive

Now I know I had rated harvesting droids a bit low before and somewhat helpful to only our scout friends, but I have come to a new understanding of late...

It took me a long time to come up with the "magic sequence", usually everything I have ever tried with the little guy was always slower then me. I pretty much religated him to "training wheels" and considered him obsolete for my level. However, I was presented with a new achievement from Eclipes DE community: an R3 with 119% harvesting mod.

I was contacted by one of them, offering them off of his vendor to try them out. While yes, indeed, I got some increase I was plagued with the same dilema as before: my harvesting sequence was faster then the droids, and the increase was not enough to cover this fact. Indeed, the little guy was slow enough (considering the extra time it took to pull him out too) to even have to worry about the primary 5 minute corpse rot.

Now I'm an engineer in real life. We have to know all of what a Physicist, Chemist and Mathmatician knows and solve the unsolvable, make things that all 3 would not have thought applied. I began to realize my hunting-harvesting sequence optimized on my strengths: shoot fast - gather later. I rethought the entire method I do hunting:

• Droid can harvest while you hunt (don't group with it and it won't get aggro'd)


• Droid can move for you, if you are a ranged. You can switch targets while he is working.

So what I do now is pull the droid out first. This eliminates 15 seconds off the top. You might think at first that power drain will be more with him out while you hunt, but I have found this not to be the case from what I was doing (pulling him out after all critters are dead). Then I start shooting. When the the MOB changes to CORPSE command the droid to harvest. Then moment he starts to move, switch to the next MOB and make that one a corpse. Check to see if the droid has harvested the last one, wait for him to if he is still enroute, then command him to harvest the next (/tellpet or /shout if needed). Then, as before, switch to the next target when the droid moves again to harvest.

You can keep him going out there amongst your targets and kill the lair with very nearly the same speed as before. Last night I was doing Picket Planswalker lairs in under 4 minutes. My stack on Monday for Herbi was around 29k and it's now 100k and 8k

Couple of points:

• You have to pay attention a bit more while hunting. It's a little harder to make fun of misstells on RIN... and you tend to make a few yourself


• Keep the corpse in range of 64m now, so the droid does not get "confused"


• Might want to macro the harvest command and map it to a key (F-key or cntl-alt-something)


• This can even work on slow-n-laggy planets, just be patent a little. In fact, this was about the only way I could get this to work on Lagtooine.

/ponder...



How can I say this without being mean: You were shooting and THEN pulling out the droid??? FRED!! My faith... faltering...

Hehe. Ok, joking aside, another thing I've found that helps is get a brightly colored droid. Its silly I know, but it makes it easier to track where it is. The droids won't usually get aggro'd if they are not grouped, but they WILL get hit with area attacks, which makes them run. With a brightly colored droid you can realize... hey... he's gone... a little faster and call him back. Mine is bright red.

EDIT: oh, another thing - my macro is now:

/tellpet get;
/loot all;

That way I can use it for the droid, AND for those oh so rich storm troopers. Note: the droid will not loot, you have to run up to the NPC corpse.

Message Edited by Vorpaks on 07-30-2004 11:13 AM

I don't have him out too much if I can help it: batteries are overhead. It seemed to make sense to only pull him out when needed.

I would not recommend using one on many MOBs at all tho, ones with loot on themare still best done by hand. I don't use him on MOBs with AoE specials (at least not this way).

Pickets, however, are perfect .

Message Edited by Fred_Skinner on 07-30-2004 10:37 AM

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Vorpaks wrote:
...snip...

/tellpet get;
/loot all;

...snip...

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Fred_Skinner wrote:

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Vorpaks wrote:
...snip...

/tellpet get;
/loot all;

...snip...

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Not gonna work for me, never close enough

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Ya, the /loot all is actually not for harvesting loot off animals, it's for when I kill and loot NPCs. Its a way to save toolbar space (nosrtomo gamepad space actually). For example, I'll run up to a storm-trooper I just killed and hit my harvest macro. I'll get a message that I cannot harvest this target - invalid or something, I forget the exact wording - and then I'll get the message "You have looted xxx credits off of ____." It's just me being lazy. Half the macro is for my droid and half the macro is for me.

Any animals that have really great loot like Giant Dune Kimos or albatrosses I would definitely loot/harvest by hand. When I kill those guys Im not really going for the meat/hide anyways. The other loot faamba segments? Klicknik glands?) I haven't really found a use/market for.

Message Edited by KaiRaene on 07-30-2004 06:16 PM

I have found the droid will not harvest anything beyond 60m from you. Also, sometimes it stays by the corpse beyond 50m and i have to litterally yell at him to get him moving again. I found out if you get hima formation command (guard, wedge, colum) he will come back to you.

I wish my harvesting bonus stacked with the droids bonus, and the food bonus