Ranger Archive

As a Ranger first, then a pistoleer,

I tend to play close and friendly with the critters I kill. First thing I do on the mobs is throw traps. The sonic pulse does wonders immediately followed by a glow wire, and as the other posts mention, then hit them with suppression fire.

Then health shot 1, health shot 2, and add warning/ threaten combo to keep them at bay and i noticed on some creatures, they get crippled. Seething Bols on dant are my favorite targets. After the cripple, I stay a good distnace and keep the other one away from me. Stopping shot is a beautiful thing. I have yet to get fan shot and i cant wait.

I usually hunt with a master combat medic, and she is amazing. Her ranged poisons and heals for me keep me up and running around. We have hunted for a long time so our tactics are solid enough to solo almost anything (the other day we took out a rancor and a rancor youth) I threw about 10 adhesive meshes, and 10 phen darts and 10 glow wires and got the message i maxed my trapping xp woohoo.

Although i enjoy the solo hunt but being with a good buddy will maximize your returns and your fun.

Thanks for the post JBMat, your posts are always a good read and I usually learn something new from them.

Lots of great tactics here, but here's my two credits:

* As mentioned, have one of each type of gun (laser, heat, acid). Get them of good quality and get them sliced. I carry a scout, a FWG5 and a DX2, the first was sliced for speed and the other two for damage. I was way lucky there.

* I also wear a Ubese jacket made with a decent kinetic resistance and, again luckily, sliced for HAM reduction. It slows the whittling of the health bar, which is usually the first to go in my case.

* When Isolo, I use the adhesive mesh and phenancine dart traps. One each of those, followed by a bleed shot and a health shot 2. By then, I've got it down to about 70% and can finish with a pistol whip 1 and health shot 2.

* Usually I hunt with my best friend, who's a TKA/Master Smuggler. She loves to tank, so I'll lob wire mesh traps to drop the melee defense of the beastie and assist with a couple of health shots. If things get really dicey, my friend will use Last Ditch or Low Blow.

I'm Ranger and Pistoleer (one box left till master).

Here's what I usually do when soloing high-level creatures.

1. Find a spot 64m away from the creature with no trees or rocks between you and it.
2. Fire Bleedshot1+Bleedshot2.
3. Fire Suppression shot
4. Suppression shot should give you sufficient time to fire either 2-3 fan shots (make sure there is not a single other creature within 64m from you)/body shot2 or 1 stopping shot.
5. Throw in a trap to slow creature down.
6. Move out to about 50-60m away from the creature and fire as many bodyshots2 as you can until it starts moving faster again
7. If it still not dead, let it come to you and knock it down with melee defense 1.
8. Fire two bodyshots2 while it down and at the same time put some distance between you and the creature.
9. If it's still not dead (you picked on one tough creature) repeat steps 3-8 again.

Most of the time I have to problem soloing creature up to lvl 65. After that it gets tough. But even some lower level creature could be very hard to kill. For example this is not going to work on gurrecks at all. They are lightning fast and will get to you before you'll be able touse suppression fire after bleeds. So for gurrecks you might want to get a tank (and a good one too, they hit for about 500-600 damage every time).

If you need to pull social creature from the herd (assuming that it's agro creature) run to about 20m away from it, and it will start attacking you. Then run back and as soon as you are about 30-40m away from the closest creature that will assist it either use suppression fire or throw in a trap to slow it down.

If you need to pull non agro creature. Try running closer to it until it will have \\!// on top of it's head. After that turn around and run back. Most of the time creature will follow you for a short while.

Hunt Master/ Rifleman here. Tactics depend on the creature level I find.

For low levels (like if good wooly spawns on corellia and all you've got is durnis and paralopes) hit with the hardest shot you've got. Last I checked MOBs still don't BAF if you can take them down in one shot.

For even-cons or a little higher speed is a consideration. If they're slower (not many now - soon to be none) then just bleed and run, stop briefly for each headshot, run again (rough terrain helps here). If they're faster than me (cats for example) open with bleeds from the kneeling and hit a suppression fire. If it sticks start throwing phenacine, glow-wire, adhesive and usually a noisemaker. Then alternate phenacine and adhesive with headshots and pray. If the traps fail I've got an armour macro (kinetic ubese) and I switch to a scout or a D18 pistol and start spamming my warning shot/peace macro (/warningshot, pause 2, peace - prevents the speed of the pistol from dragging the mob back with a shot after warning shot works). If I'm not dead then I try again -or retreat to heal.

Pets become necessary beyond this inmy opinion. I've never gotten a trap to stick on a high level mob ever. I can solo with conceal shot, but it's slow and if I miss it's all over - that and the mobs will often disappear if they are random spawns.

A word on the pet nerf - if you have some CH all that will happen is the same thing that happens when the pet is grouped with you now. Occasionally the mob will aggro you rather than the pet. The pet can regain aggro if you just lay off the damage for a bit and run around. That and I'm pretty sure that there are tricks like attacking the lair that will cause the pet to be #1 on the mob hit list.

One final word on carrying multiple damage type weapons. Do so definately - but don't necessarily rely on vulnerabilities to tell you what to use. For example - gurks are Light armour and 5% resist to energy but vulnerable to stun. Since my rifles are AR 2 or 3 I actually do more damage with energy (as the armour piercing effect comes into play) than I would with stun (as the damage to a vulnerability is not modified after the hit).

Some of my thoughts - hope something helps someone

Forgot one - the bleed and get-out-of-Dodge approach.

If the Mob is a mission/ lair/ POI spawn (i.e. not a random spawn that just pops up in the world) you can bleed it, suppression fire (or whatever it takes to get it to slow down) and run like the wind. At about 140m it will usually lose interest and peace will stick. Type /waypoint while it's still targetted and then sit and wait for about 2 min. The mob will disappear but is still in the world bleeding (/areatrack if you don't believe me). After a couple of minutes the bleed will be done and you can approach again and stick another bleed. Approach too soon and the next bleed tick will cause the mob to re-aggro and chase you some more.

The only downside to this (apart from kill-steals) is that if you don't pay attention to the strength of the bleed you can kill the mob while out of range - defeating the purpose. With the new bleed rule on Test that won't be a concern any more.

This is the only way I can solo FS NPC's on Dantooine - they eat both me and my pet for lunch otherwise.

Hmmm...Ranger/Pistoleer seems to be pretty common and most of the tactics here are the same I use, so I only have one thing to add.

Put a good tangle pistol in your aresenal as well. It comes in very handy on occassion.

I have all my pistols hot-keyed

Scout shift+f9
DX2 shift+f10
Tangle shift+f11
FWG5 shift+f12

And I keep the power-ups on them all the time.

I'm a ranger/commando so here's generally what i do for most creature mobs.

1. Mask scent

2. flame cone

3. switch to scout blaster

4. spam warning shot until target succumbs to fire DOT

5. And do all of this while running around as if I'm the one who's on fire.

Note: This tactic really only works against 1 or 2 of the stronger creatures at a time, as warning shot is not 100% effective and it is difficult to switch targets quickly and keep the warning shot effective. Sigh...I wish warning shot was a cone attack...

I would also very much like it if I didn't have to stop moving in order to toss a trap...

I'm gonna throw out a few things here.

For Baf groups with a lair choose a route to the lair that is flat and level, if there is so much as a vine or pebble in the way creatures will warp on your melon.

Now if everything is close together and can be 2-3 shot killed with strafe2 then everything is cool. I use my Jawa Ion pea shooter as my primary weapon.

Now why a jawa, Stun damage and DAMAGE DOESN'T hurt Lair. So you can spam away warning/suppression/Strafe2/flushing2 etc with out ever once have to worry about getting fresh spawns from a damage lair.

If something warps on me, I can either except the fact that I'm gonna die in 300ms or I attempt to equip my pistol and warning, kip, hs2.

Best I've done so far is hunting blurrg's on endor and 1 time a blurrg raptor. The other night thought I would attempt a Stonecrusher Hanndok (something like that cl135 ar3 100%-80% res) Popped a muon, took cover concealed shot, suprise shot missed , warpped one shotted, Dead. I was laughing.

any ways just a few thoughts good hunting

Here is a great tactic:

Stand in the middle of the outpost or city or wherever you are and type...

/shout Master Ranger/Rifleman going out to hunt sweet Endor Wooly Hide, looking for partner(s). Looking for some tank support from a melee class. Have buyer paying 30CPU for this hide. /tell <NAME>

With the loss of L15 non-CH pets (a great change in my opinion), and improvements in the melee classes that actually help make us effective player tanks, this will be a much more common situation, so start now.

After that, do everything else already stated in this thread...great ideas...and if your new partner is not a ranger, help him out with traps that work good when you melee against a mob. Sonic pulses are great (did I really say that?). Stunning and dizzying with area affect? Do you know how long it takes to get to TKA to get stun and dizzy against one attacker? A long time. Glow wire, wire mesh, they are actually useful when you don't have a ranged weapon in your hand.

Talk ahead, establish a leader (even in a 2 man group), and make sure that the leader leads, so everyone is on the same page.

Talk to your partner about specials...are you a pistoleer doing Health damage with specials? as a TKA, I have unarmed body hit 1...we can both target the same HAM and do the job quicker.

Talk to your partner about healing responsibility...tanks tend to be a little busier during actual combat, and they take more damage, so heal them if you are a novice medic...cause once they go down, you are next.

And most importantly, talk to your parnter about safe sex (woops, wrong forum)

2/2/2/2 Rifleman, 0/0/2/0 Ranger reporting in.

I'm assuming this is "tactics for stuff that you can't kill in one shot." I'd tell you my tactics for killing durnis, but it mainly just involves using a DLT20a rifle on autofire to save wear and tear on my T21.

Solo critters

Conceal Shot. This special attack is a total cheesefest, and I will be greatly (and pleasantly) surprised if they don't nerf the hell out of it after the upcoming social aggro changes. I was hunting on Endor last night. Found a Mantigrue Reaper lair that only spawned one Mantigrue at a time, and only had 5 total. Take Cover + Conceal Shot for a while = Dead Critter.

If you don't have Conceal Shot, then drop Mindshot 2 + Mindshot 1 on 'em, then get up and start running. You'll be 80m away by the time they start charging you, and you'll have plenty of time to whip out the Stick That Sprays(tm) or a pistol or something and squeeze off some Warning Shots to make the critter think things over.


Social Critters, pre-patch

This will only be true for a few more days, at most. Most high-level missions only spawn two or maybe three critters for a lair when you find it, and another two or three more when you shoot it, and then another two or three more after that. I've been running Level 20 mission on Endor, and everything seems to come in twos. My technique here is to target one from out-of-range, hit auto-attack, hit Peace immediately, then snag whatever's charging at me with an Adhesive Mesh trap. After that, a couple of bleeds and then just wait and hope the root doesn't wear off two soon. (If it does, there's always Mister Warning Shot.)


Social Critters after upcoming social aggro changes

Unless they do something to Conceal Shot to reduce its effectiveness, Conceal Shot will be the way to kill just about anything in the game with minimal risk. I hope they don't, because despite its minimal risk, it's also slow as Christmas. And I think that trading speed for safety is a perfectly viable solution.

But assuming Conceal Shot works like it does now, and assuming that social critters won't aggro on you unless the critter you're shooting aggros on you (which doesn't happen with Conceal Shot unless you miss twice or someone else shoots your critter, or unless you stop paying attention and go into autofire mode due to running out of queued up Conceal Shots or running out of Mind Pool), then Conceal Shot will let you eventually whittle down any group of any type Critter.

Most of my favorite tactics have already appeared here, but I can add one success story.

My Ranger/Rifleman still retains Pistols III so that I can do Warning Shots with a scout blaster, since scouts have great point-blank and no 2.5x melee damage. The biggest hazard with Warning Shot is that right after it succeeds you'll re-aggro the creature with another shot before /peace takes effect.

Pet stats seem to indicate that all creatures have a 2.0 attack speed. So theoreticaly a fire rate of 2.0 would let a creature respond to a successful Warning Shot (ie. turn and run) in time for you to /peace against your next attack.

Since most well made scout blasters have been optimized for speed and damage, I had one custom crafted with a 2.2 speed and low HAM cost. The 2.2 is to counter my +20 Pistol Speed and bring the fire rate roughly to 2.0 (I'm not sure how to calculate the exact effect of Pistol Speed skill so this was a guesstimate.)

The results have been fantastic. Since getting that Warning Shot-optimized pistol, I haven't once re-aggroed a fleeing creature with a stray shot. On Kettemoor you can contact Tybacca the weaponsmith, he did a factory run of them.

Wow.....by the looks of it I must be the only Carbineer/Ranger!

I also have some CH which helps me with tanking the bigger creatures and all its friends. I usually hunt in a group with a commando and a smuggler, so i try to act more as a ranger than a carbineer.

First off, Carbineer is so broken, nothing seems to work, and I am out of place, since my commando buddy will run in a put a burn on the creature, while my smuggler buddy puts healthshots on it.

Since I have the pet, I will always intiate combat. I set myself up at about 50m out and send in the tank. I then follow up with a wire mesh and a pdart to help slow it down. I then spam burstshot (I think) so i can damage multiple ham bars at once. (Dont have cripple shot yet).

This probably doesnt sound like much of a plan, but it works pretty well, and we can run around Dantooine without too much worry.

One question! Is there anyone out there that was a Carbineer and switched to pistol or rifle, and what did you think?

Wow.....by the looks of it I must be the only Carbineer/Ranger!

I also have some CH which helps me with tanking the bigger creatures and all its friends. I usually hunt in a group with a commando and a smuggler, so i try to act more as a ranger than a carbineer.

First off, Carbineer is so broken, nothing seems to work, and I am out of place, since my commando buddy will run in a put a burn on the creature, while my smuggler buddy puts healthshots on it.

Since I have the pet, I will always intiate combat. I set myself up at about 50m out and send in the tank. I then follow up with a wire mesh and a pdart to help slow it down. I then spam burstshot (I think) so i can damage multiple ham bars at once. (Dont have cripple shot yet).

This probably doesnt sound like much of a plan, but it works pretty well, and we can run around Dantooine without too much worry.

One question! Is there anyone out there that was a Carbineer and switched to pistol or rifle, and what did you think?