Ranger Archive

Combining the ability to harvest poison with only the Ranger-specific bow would lessen balance issues (if the bow was only usable against creatures).

Great List Nraas, Thank you!

"but in order to harvest, they must kill"

- Fighters rely on Smiths to make their weapons, but they could pick up the skill themselves and make their own weapons

- Crafters require raw materials. They can rely on Scouts to pull in the organics, or pick up the Scout skill and do it themselves.

- Rangers can rely on a Fighters to do the killing for them, or pick up a Combat profession and do it themselves.

- It is simply a way of looking at the system in general.

- You can attempt to be a Jack-of-all-Trades and have a degree of self-sufficiency, or rely on others to do what you can not.

"Combining the ability to harvest poison with only the Ranger-specific bow"

- Interesting suggestion. Anyone have an issue with this?

In all cases about dependecies, its always about buying something do practice your profession. A ranger cannot BUY dead creatures to harvest. This is the fundamental difference I was talking about. In my original post I did make mention of the fact that there are dependencies and that most are dealt with by buying something.

I feel you've misunderstood the essence of my post from the response you gave it. If I could buy corpses to harvest (at a profit) then I wouldbe like every other profession out there. Pay for something, use it to do what I'm good at which makes me money. Doesn't work for rangers without killing skills.

Osborne Maelstrom - call me Os

Master Ranger - Kauri

Being a master ranger, I did some experimentation with maskscent (and some with conceal, but not a whole lot) and basically, the effect I've seen on Dathomir, hunting Giant Baz, is:

• Without maskscent I, and my non-ranger friends, can generally get within 35-40m, perhaps even closer, before being noticed and attacked.
  
• With maskscant, it generally breaks on the first couple of enemies I run into at a range perhaps 50-100% farther away than the range they would normally detect me at (i.e 60-75m perhaps farther).
  
• As noted before many times, when detected they USUALLY go aggro and USUALLY teleport right up to me.
  
• If I stand still in a battle with 3-4 other people, not attacking, with maskscent, newly spawned creatures seems to break my maskscent and attack me about 50% of the time. To reiterate, this is when I am outside the core battle zone (i.e others are right there, closer to the spawned creature), not moving and not attacking any other creature.
  
• Even when testing against low level creatures, the break rate is very high and aggro often follows.
  

Conceal seems to have similar flaws, as noted below.

To sum it up I repeat what has been said before - maskscent and probably conceal are mostly good for retrieving XP (even though that is questionable as well considering the high aggro rate) It is possible that they might be good for sneaking up to enemies by crawling, possibly walking (which would be useful for creature handler reasons), but they are absolutely useless when just exploring / doing destroy missions on high level planets. As mentioned many times before maskscent and coneal are a liability to a group, and if I see others using it I will ask them to disable it.

By the way, keep in mind that I don't necessarily want the 100% (more or less) successrate I had before while running around among Grauls (although with conceal kit and master ranger, that wouldn't be unacceptable). I do however not want maskscent to be a major stepdown from NOT using it.

As for conceal, I have used it once. It broke within 10-20 seconds. I haven't used it since (and it's not a lack of resources - I have enough for quite a few Dathomir kits). They just don't work.

Experimentation and crafting:

As noted, we can't experiment (no points, or just one point or something like that). This was true even when I was a novice artisan with a reasonable amount of artisan experimentation points. What we need is our own experimentation skill modifier. Being able to make camps easier to use is a great idea. Making traps last longer, have higher success rate and also easier to use is a good idea too (that said, does traps require a specific skill level to be used? it's unclear to me).
Another important experimentation feature would be the ability to increase the number of uses.

Trapping:

Being able to make a macro to throw a specific trap is necessary for me to use them. Especially with the trap that gives me just two uses. An alternative solution which also would work ok is to allow better stacking of traps. This actually is important whether there's a macro or not. Currently having a good supply of traps uses up a lot of storage space. You can get stimpacks with 30 uses. Why are the traps fixed at 2-6 uses (depending on trap)?

The same goes for camo-kits of course, where we also only have 2 uses and because of this and the applying to group members feature would need a lot of space (this does of course assume that camo kits become useful).

i dont like the idea of the harvestors for hides and stuff, ruins the idea of being a hunter if you sit in your house and the stuff just comes in, that idea is pretty stupid.

"A ranger cannot BUY dead creatures to harvest. This is the fundamental difference I was talking about."

- You can in essence pay someone to group with (hired mercenary players for instance) to do your killing for you.

- You could purchase Faction NPCs to perform the killing, or buy a Creature Handler pet to be your muscle.

- But in general, if you aren't part of a guild, you will be out of luck to find a consistent fighting crew.

- That is the downside of being a support profession.

- Medics have a similiar issue, as they need damage to heal to improve in skill.

- Musicians / Dancers require patrons who have Battle Fatigue or Mind wounds to advance.

"ruins the idea of being a hunter if you sit in your house and the stuff just comes in"

- I would suspect the Hudson Bay trappers of yore would beg to differ.

- You still need to go out and retrieve the material... Reset the traps... Pay the maintenance, etc.

NRaas,

Fantastic list and awesome work compiling it.

I know I might get flamed and probably in the minority but why a Bow? Is this EQ or D&D we are in the future and while it may be cool I can think of some other things that I would rather be fixed/put in.

1. Better trap results I seem to miss alot.


2. Longer duration burst running, fasterterrain movement then scouts.


3. Better damage to creatures as I stated before we should be the masters of PvE combat.


4. Higher harvesting rates then scouts.


5. Conceal working right giving us a reason to use camo kits.


6. I would rather see a ghille suit on me then get a bow, that would be cool!

Just a couple of my thoughts but I am not sure why we want a bow.

I am seriously against the Bow idea as well, so you're not alone.

Not that a bow is not "futuristic" enough. Bows, by design is a great weapon in any era, any setting.

I just cannot stand to see another weapon added to the game that has selective ammunition. It's bad enough that my Sharp Bone Spurs and Adhesive Mesh traps only seem to work on animals, I don't want to see arrows that cannot peirce humanoid flesh... or explosive arrows that only explode on contact with non-humanoids...

Great Googly Moogly!!

/emote pats self on back for NOMINATING N'Raas for the Ranger Correspondent!!

That is an amazingly well compiled and well articulated list N'Raas. Thank you for being the front man for our profession. Agree on all points.

<still camping on Naboo but headed for Tatoinee>

ONLY 3 BOXES TO GO!!