Ranger Archive

For a rifleman who has to remain concealed - could be useful. But what is stopping you from dropping critter A, moving in masked, harvesting, and moving back to your shooting position? Never understood that - unless the others are gonna aggro on you.

For the rest of us, sorta a waste of creds. I can draw one creature, take it our, harvest, and be ready to take on his pals quick enough.

Not a harvestor fan, I got a droid out, he better be able to fight or tank.

JB

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JBMat wrote:

But what is stopping you from dropping critter A, moving in masked, harvesting, and moving back to your shooting position?

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Riflewoman here. I havent found the need for a droid. I just do what JB has said. Take down critter, run in and harvest. Take down more critters repeat. Been working great< but I also solo mostly so the need to get in and harvest fast is not really an issue

Ebe

When I was a rifleman, I timed my kills so that the creature died within harvesting range. It took a lot of practice but I rarely had to move more than 5m to harvest and I usually was standing to begin with. The only time I bothered to lie down was if I was going to be /concealshotting a creature to death. I usually only did that on mobs over CL 100 that had a chance of dropping nice loot (krayts, giant dune kimos, etc). /concealshot was just too slow and mind heavyto bother with.

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Calculus_Entropy wrote:

Having started up the Rifleman tree, I thought that using my droid harvester would be good when I had a tank around (i.e. Master Doc in Comp Armor). We were Endor, so the kills took a while, and I was able to concentrate a little more on using the little guy. It was fine for that particular situation, but once the speed at which I kill things increases, it will be less useful, as I can harvest much more efficiently by myself.

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yep - I just started up the rifleman tree myself (from pistoleer), and the droid seems to be much more useful to me as a rifleman than as a pistoleer. Pistoleer was a lot more mobile, so the droid's bonuses were nice, but since I was running around anyway, it was annoying to have to wait for it to reach the creature and harvest. But rifleman is much more static -- I'm not at the skill level yet where I want to move around and risk getting in close, so I just go prone and take out all of the mobs with headshot and send the droid in to harvest. My droid is a level 113, so with veghash I was averaging about 10 more units than I would get normally (this was off rogue bagarasets (sp?)).

The droid's use declines, though, when the lag increases. /tellpet doesn't seem to work with it, so I have to say 'h' everytime I want it to harvest, and there were times this weekend when there was a 3 second pause between my saying 'h' and it appearing in spatial. What would generally happen is that I would say 'h,' and then tab over to another creature, but there was such a delay in spatial that the droid would think I was telling it to harvest my new combat target (and getting the 'you can't access that creature). So, I would have to go back and retarget the corpse, etc...

One other thing I noticed is that the droid sometimes will sometimes harvest, but not harvest. What I mean here is that the droid will drive itself out to the corpse and come back, but not give you the 'your droid has sucessfully harvested' spam and the resources will not appear in your inventory. But if you try to harvest with the droid again, it will say 'you have already harvested this creature.' This happened in two situations: first, when the annoying '1 or more resources were left on the corpse' bug happened - in this case, looting the corpse recovered the resources; and second just at random (I suspect due to lag) - in this case even looting the corpse would not recover the resources. In the case of the second problem, storing and re-calling the droid seemed to fix the problem.

Iseult
Master Ranger / MediocrePistoleer
Bloodfin

For /tellpet, I'm pretty sure the command has to be longer than one letter. So "/tellpet h" won't work but "/tellpet ha" should.

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Nemo0 wrote:
For /tellpet, I'm pretty sure the command has to be longer than one letter. So "/tellpet h" won't work but "/tellpet ha" should.

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cool - I'm going to try this tonight. Thanks

Iseult
Master Ranger / Mediocre Pistoleer
Bloodfin

I'm glad I came over here looking to find some answers on Droid Harvesters. One of my alts. in a Swords/Ranger 0040/TKA 4003. He's my harvester. I got him a droid w/ a harvest rating of 103, and we went out into the woods of Dath and Yavin this weekend in order to get the good avian meat on Valcyn. Here are some of my observations w/ the attached stipulations:

Stipulations:

1. I was always buffed, 2450ish range, 3hr durration. Not mind buffed.


2. Always used my Scyth to kill the various avian meat droppers.


3. Always full of Brandy, Aghiz (sp?), and Veghash (for the harvest bonus, the stuff I had was +34%)


4. I did this grouped w/ droid, ungrouped, and w/o droid to get me some numbers on the % bonus of using a droid.


5. I didn't know, in the beginning, that you actually made the droid do the harvesting for you. I actually was harvesting myself, thinking I would get the "bonus" automatically, but eventually figured out how to get the droid working.


6. As stated, the droid's harvest rating was 103. Dunno what that means, but I don't think it is the fully "Tricked out" droid. I think they can go as high as 110, but don't know for sure.

Observations:

I'll use the whisper male bird, medium size,from Yavin for the first observation:

• No Pet: I'd harvest 40 units.


• Ungrouped w/ Pet: I'd get 43 units.


• Grouped w/ Pet: I'd get 43 units.

Now an observation w/ the Dath. Ancient Replilian Flyers, fat and healthy:

• No Pet: 85 units


• Ungrouped w/ Pet: 90 units


• Grouped w/ Pet: 90 units

What it worked out to, for me and this droid, was an average bonus of 6%. Hmm. Lets look at some other considerations:

Other Considerations:

1. On the adventure planets, w/ the droid out and grouped, the poor little guy tended to get agro'd very easy. Poor, little guy was getting chased all over the place by those ancient fliers. Funny at first, irritating as all hell when I had to go chasing after him just to kill the bird. Especially when he would run right through a patch of NS's.


2. It takes a while for the droid to do the harvesting. Point at corpse. Say "H". Wait for the harvest. Point at another corpse. Say "H". etc. This gets pretty darn irritating. I could, and finally DID, just run my own loot macro to harvest, took way less time. There might be a way to do an automatic harvest command for the droid, but I was getting to irritated to figure it out. I'll look into this a bit as well.


3. Time. If I stored the pet, and moved to another lair, I'd have to wait 15-25 sec to pull him out again. Irritating and time consuming. If I got an order for 10k Avian, I don't really have time to wait for my little friend to mossy on over and finally harvest from the corpses.


4. The "I'm not listening" to you from the droid. Sometimes, the little guy just plain ignored me for a little while. Whether it was lag, or he was being dense, I don't know. I even went over and /bonk him a couple times. Either way, I sometimes had to repeat my harvest command 5-10 times before he decided to move,

By the end of 2 days of trial and error with him, I finally just stored him and harvested myself. I love the little guy, but It was taking WAY to long to put him to an efficient use. I made up the 6% difference pretty fast going solo myself. These are some of the things I noticed so far, I hope they have helped.