Ranger Archive

As usual, nice post NRaas, and thanks for taking the time for your research in our "discussions" here. I like how you are taking this, and am glad you are our cooresponant right now, in this time of "identity crisis".

So Outdoorsman it is then huh? OK I can work with that, since pretty much everything I have been saying falls in place for that.

My idea of the great outdoormas, is very much along same main principles you stated.

Outdoorsman/Rangers have the ability to:

1. Camaflauge themselves and go undected. (thats it. no "only animals" blah blah blah)

2. Track things, and avoid being tracked.

3. Set up ambushes, surprise attacks, traps, using tactics, what ever you want to call it. Again, this is any outdoors environment, whether it be for animal or humanoid.

4. Path finding/traversment. This means they are excellant at getting cross country with great speed and ease. Able to go through thick brush, over hills, through water, anything terrain, with great speed and ease.

5. Survival in the outdoors, and fending for themselves. This is finding food, and resources, shelter, giving first aid to ones self, and staying out of the way of predetors.

6. Hunting. All outdoorsman are great hunters, particularly of animals. Why? Because they are in the outdoors all the time, and so are animals. (but because of this they are adept at hunting humanoids in the outdoors also.) A hunter knows the strengths and weaknesses of animals. He has studied them in their natural habbitat. Know when and where to strike for most effectivness. Knows which ones going to fight as a pack and which ones will be free for all.

Now many of these aspects are already integrated into our Ranger. Some of them in pretty good game usability, and some not, or not there at all. So if we want to put this Rangers, and aim it a little more to the creature side then the humanoid side, do this.

1. Camo, pretty much leave it as is, maybe making it a little more effective then it is, and for sure against all mobs.

2. we have areatrack, and it's OK. It needs to be extended to 1000m, and it needs to work a little better. We need that /track skill that will spawn something, and it needs to able to, at some point, choose what kind of animal you want to track. for that planet of course.

3. This is represented in our trapping line. Very Very lightly. We all know and have said 1 million times, our trapping line needs some big time improvments. We need traps that actually have a noticable, and helpful effect on higher level creatures. If I use the right traps, in the right way, being smart about it, I should be able to take down a yellow solo, with out mastering a combat profession. I can do this on a few creatures now and before, using traps. Scout traps. We need at least one humanoid trap, for keeping the humanoids out of our hunting grounds if nothing else. We need things like hunting blinds, to let us ambush something and get a good surprise attack in that cause more damage or puts some serious states on. We should have at least one trap that actually deals damage. Look a swinging wood spiked wall would cause damage. A log swinging from above slamming into you would cause damage. Falling into a deep pit, especially with wood spikes, would cause damage. (see note in number 6 of second section)

4. Again the Terrain Negotiation does a good job of representing this. But the ranger should not be equal to the scout in RUNNING cross country. I have said many times but here it is again. Leave the point spread for TN as is. But, it should add to running speed up to like 70, then the last 30 points go to crawling AND swimming. This means that a ranger gets 30 points of running faster then a master scout, then tops out for running. It has been said that something should be changed about travelling and rangers, with mounts and speeders. Well I think if we get to go faster then a master scout, say at +70 TN maybe close or as fast a mount, it would be a great improvment.

5. The camping line is all that really applies here. The foraging is worthless ATM. Camps are nice, but need something more, and need to be repelling, which isa bug anyway. No animal in the wild goes near a camp of noise people and a fire. The larger say FB camps should allow entertainers to heal BF. And they need to allow the ranger themselves to enter combat and travel to some degree away from the camp with out it disbanding. The outdoorsman should be the one making camp for others to rest, then going out and finding dinner, or herbs to heal. Some of the other ideas like the log cabin, or stash/hide and hunting blind would be some great addtions. The harvesting is also here in this line, finding the resources needed to survive. A ranger should be able to pull 2 and 3 resources off a creature. It would not happen that a master outdoorsman would waist so much of the creature. If he is surviving in the outdoors, with out going into town, he will get all he can from anything he kills.

6. Well here again, they gave a minor to hit bonus to animals, and some defence bonuses. This tells us one thing, they can code things to be mob specific. So why not damage bonuses to animals, why not critical hits, why not specail weapons, poisons, etc. We should know what will hurt them the most. We already know what their damage output is, and to hit accuracy and specail attacks. With this info we should be able to defend ourselves against animals better, with that information. We can see what their vulnerabilities and weaknesses are. With this information we should know how to hurt them the most. We need to know whether or not they are a social animal or not. This would be known by an outdoorsman. (from my note in the trapping section, we need a trap, or something, that will allow us to pull a single creature from a social group) Does not have to be a for sure thing, just a good chance to, like most of our skills. Just give us a chance to pull a single creature away from the pack so we, and a group, can attack them with out risk of agroing the pack.

So, NRaas is this something you are looking for here?

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Things that would make Ranger more superior in PvE (or "outdoorsman" whatever) could be done within the context of currrent skills:

• maskscent won't break, period,not in battle, not ever,once youhave +125 skillmod.
  
• creatures will take noticeablibly more damage from rangers, not just a "tohit" modifier
  
• rangerscan harvest bone, hide, and meat from the same creature
  
• rangers can /track animals and lairs, not just /areatrack
  
• rangers spawn missions without going to a terminal in the city
  
• ranger camps are semi-permenant,and don't "poof" away unless you log out.
  
• rangers can camouflage themselves against NPCs (trust me, real humans can NOT see snipers who are well camouflaged).
  
• rangers can run faster (not just crawl faster) than master scouts
  
• ranger traps can root, snare, & debuff creatures to provide real "crowd control" for groups
  
• there will bea ranger trap for every debuff or state effect that you can possibly think of

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Wow. For the record I will be posting my own thoughts on this, but this is a very large step in the right direction. Great stuff, and I agree on all points. Most of this is stuff we have been discussing for some time but this is a very well laid out quick summary.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=ranger&message.id=28798&view=by_date_ascending&page=1

(a good thread somewhat like this already going on if you want to read more)

There are so many good ideas being thrown around, its hard to grasp one and try to run with it. Personally I think the dev's should be approached with the intention that while we don't HATE ranger, it certainly isn't very useful. (compared to other 'elite' professions) And we've been over the problems a million times, its not time for criticism of the current state of the ranger profession, rather how we would like and hope to see it progress.

However most importantly, what exactly are we? Outdoorsmen, Ultimate Creature Hunters, travel guides? So far two clear ranger-like parallels have been drawn from star wars. The first is the Antarian Rangers. However a less known (and taken from the thread I linked above, thanks dyraak_sinh) exists:

"a pretty good example (actually more than one) exists in the book "The Approaching Storm" which takes place right before Episode II. In this book, Anakin, Obi-Wan, Luminara, and Bariss receive the aid of two native guides named Kyakhtya and Bulgan (I hope I spelled those right). These two are master trackers, they know everything about the terrain and geography, the weather, the wildlife and flora, they are experts at riding their mounts"

So here we have two 'molds' on which to guide or profession. I will describe how I envision them below.

The Antarian Ranger / Support Ranger / Padawan Protector:
This is somewhat more like we already have. This type of ranger should have skills to .. well .. support. Traps that actually work, and I can't emphasize this enough. No one uses traps .. except for maybe the phecnacine dart in small groups. If we had good traps, such as the lure or snare traps .. or new traps like we have all been submitting there would be much more incentive to stay master. This sort of ranger should also have a better form of rescue .. you all have read how tough it is to be an initiate out on your own and given the current race to unlock your FSCS this would give some people who aren't power gamers a way to be part of the new jedi experience. Ideas such as camps that take away TEFs, smoke screens, TEF /rescue (puts tef on ranger instead of jedi), or the ability to conceal yourself and others off of radar have all been proposed. I also really liked the ideas someone had above on different types of camps, as it stands .. no one really uses the current "high level" camps. This ranger would have to actually be useful in the GCW and to hunting groups, or else the only rangers that will be left are the 0/0/4/0 dabblers.

The Ultimate PVE ranger:

The name describes it all. Required skills would have to be better creature killing modifiers, traps, guns, specials... SOMETHING! There would have to be either unbreakable maskscent or much, much better camo. The camp ideas that have been proposed so far would be neat, but I think we would all be happy with them (as long as HTFB actually prevents aggro's 100%) as they are currently in this ranger build. Some new sort of harvesting would have to be implemented, its not bad right now, but multiple harvests (up to 2 or all with a percent less of each total), special harvests (trophies, skulls, etc) would be nice.

In either build, master ranger NEEDS to be worthwhile .. besides RP'ers is there anyone here who can honestly say they feel their 140 skill points are well worth the title of master ranger?

Thats my rant for now, I love this game and do not promote dev hate as a lot of people seem to like to do. Sure we pay $15 dollars a month to play this game, and overall thats a lot of money from all the subscriptions .. but at the end of the day .. we're sitting in the comfort of our homes arguing with text on who got nerfed the worst in the latest patch. Think about all the people who wished they had $15 to their name, money isn't the do-all end-all of life. If they made this game and did nothing to it, wouldn't you be a little bit more pissed? We get updates quite often, and community input is ASKED FOR. So maybe you don't get exactly what you want in every patch .. think how many conflicting opinions there are .. they have to try and make everyone happy. (mini-rant status: SUCCESS!)

I would prefer that the rangers not only be great outdoors men, but also masters of espionage, infiltration, scouting (doh),and concealment. Bounty hunters might worry that aranger willstep out from a tree and grab them, because we are so good at concealment they didnt see us.

As is, Ranger is a nice add-on to a weapons profession, as it allows resource collection. It is by no means an "ELITE" profession as it is advertised to be, and what it costs in terms of skill points to be. I agree with the sentiment that some serious changes/enhancements to the ranger profession are necessary. As is, I'm interested in sticking with the profession largely from a role playing perspective, not because it offers anything spectacularly awesome. And for a game like SWG, dagnamit, it should be spectacularly awesome. If its not awesome, eventually I'll die of boredome and play the next game.

II think the problem is that SWG has too many professions, with too few skills scattered among them. The ranger suffers from this. Some skills that might be suitable for a ranger profession are found in creature handling. Some are found in squad leader. But you know some professions do borrow from other professions. I just saw that a Combat Medic, for example, has terrain negotiation, borrowing from us!

So one line of thinking here might be 'what skills already exist in game that might be added to the ranger line'. Perhaps not maxed out or as good as what other skill classes have, but maybe some of the entry level skills. For example, how about giving those who make it to master ranger, the following skills: Terrain negotiation for a group (entry level squad leader skill), ability to tame certain small creatures (maybe personal non-tradeable mounts),but not the best creatures like handlers can). Or how about this, similar to the smuggler, how about giving us some weapons specials in our line so that rangers dont also have to have a major combat profession to just get by in the wild. Borrowing lower level skills from other professions and offering them to the ranger at master level should easy for the dev team.

Beyond this, my comments would be a restatement of what has come before, which is repeated in these forums over and over by SWGs ranger customers:

1. Ranger camps need to have something more special than their size. Make bases permanent until the ranger makes another one or logs out. Improve varieties of Camps: How about camps with a ranger exploration or hunting terminal to give us our next assignment? Even if it was just a master skill, that would make our profession very desirable. At master level, it would be nice if a ranger could build their own 'hunting lodge' for themselves, a small hovel to keep in a place in a favorite hunting spot and decorate, a structure just like a low level architect could do but one tailored to hunting.

2. Make traps more serious debuffs that actually work noticable, else can the whole thing. I'm also a ranger that once I max traps probably will utilize them very little, probably two of them at most once in awhile.

* I would suggest that all traps either be put in the scout line or all in the ranger line but not both. In either case, the traps should work noticably, with effects that are easier to see and judge when they end. Doing this would create a new tree for the scout or ranger. The ranger should also have stationary traps.

3. Add a concealment skill line to the ranger, assuming that trapping is moved out to scouts. Make the concealment something a lot more powerful. Definitely against NPCs, maybe against PCs for short time periods. Check out DAOC and how scouts could 'grey out' and nearly go invisible to others, but not quite be invisible. Something like that would seem appropriate for concealment. Mask scent is pretty weak as 'ceoncealment' IMHO, even if it does work.

4.Crafting/Savenging - how about being able to make something that other classes can actually use? Not that we need to be a tailor, but could there be small things we could make for outdoors use? No great ideas, but there must be something. Torces to mark special trails that stay in the game world for a day (to help guide others on events)? What happened to finding water, which we could then sell?

5. If rangers are such great hunters and guides, should not those we are guiding benefit from our presence? Could rangers have some buffing effect to other members in the party to help them? (or is that also given to squad leaders)

These are all great replies, I particularlly liked CavemanGamer's suggestions above.

What kinda bothers me about all this though is that we've been in this spot before. You know....when the game was first released? When we all put forward suggestions on ways to finish up the profession? When Greenmarine came up with all these great ideas that not only included /camo and /areatrack, but /track, new traps, new camps and other goodies that we were promised and now seem to be forgotten? Yup, we're right back at that spot again.

I certainly hope that whatever eventually comes from all this will actually be followed through this time and not dropped due to other priorities again.

Oh, and to try to add something constuctive to this thread and not just sound like I'm complaining, here's a suggestion:

Let rangers fillet more fish. As it is now, I believe a master ranger fillets exactly the same pitiful amount of fish as a novice scout (correct me if I'm wrong). Since we're supposed to be better harvestors, it would only make sense. Plus it might encourage more rangers to fish, as the amount of fish we can fillet compared to the amount of time it takes to get it just doesn't make it seem worth it most of the time.

I can't stand it when I catch some nice big faa or laa and only wind up filleting a couple of units from it.

My view of a ranger.

A rangers role in the game of SWG should be the greatest PvE class heard of. They are the ones who can take groups out for the BEST hunting available kilometers from the nearest town and sustain the hunting for massive amounts of time. They should also be great PvE soloists aswell as a group asset. They should be able to know every inch of every creature and pick the ideal weak point for their weapon of choice whatever that may be. They should be able to use the environment to their every advantage, always picking the terrain of their choice for a kill. They should be able to find the rarest of creatures and trap even the most forbidable foe with their awe inspiring custom trap design. The should be the ones who come back from a days hunting to astonish his allies with his harvests and trophies. We should be great.

To do this is not as hard as it sounds....still a challenge....but worth every ounce of effort.

1. Permenant camps which can be customised and remain while you hunt.....what sort of a hunter isnt an individual who doesnt cusomise his or her equipment to suit them.

2. Allowing sustained hunting wouldnt be hard for a skilled ranger....make advanced camps which perhaps run on power and have perhaps clone centers, small turrets....all of course on a small level but enough to allow people to travel miles without the worry of cloning and running back. And camps should heal Bf with an entertainer.

3. A ranger knows his prey...perhaps if you were camo'd up and were stationary a devastatingly powerful PvE opening attack could be performed for both ranger an melee professions, this would put an excellent use to camo kits. This works on the fact that rangers are masters of disguise, being able to sit unnoticed until the ideal shot / attack to cause a cripling and powerful suprise attack. (this could possibly be master ranger and should be the most powerful attack, but be limited to PvE and only to be used as an opening attack to stop people spamming it )

4. Customisable traps with experimentation for duration etc....customisable could simply be combining known effects like a snaring poison trap....perfectly logical and deadly....rangers have a talent for being inventive and creating the most genius and effective designs. Why not add an element of crafting to our profession with camps and traps?

5. A ranger relies on nothing but the environment....we should be able to pick more interesting things out of the environment like poison berries with different stats depending on the planet....like a berry which causes a mind bleed on dathomir and could be used in traps....or a hallucinagenic (spl?) berry which dizzies and confusing a target making it do random attacks / moves on random people or mobs with the dizzy affect?.....a devestating trap which could be made using rare items....found on dangerous planets

These addtions are rushed and im tired atm so my imagination is limited but i especially like my last one with custom traps.

Traps should be our weapons.....not causeing damage (except for poison) but have the best crippling and disorientating affects in the game. Adding an imensly powerful opener in master usable with every weapon would make master ranger a great choice for the avid PvE player.....as choosing ranger as a master almost removes any advantage you have in PvP.

Thats my vision of a great PvE character.....please take it in mind and good hunting

"I had was to make conceal work only OUTSIDE city limits (PC and otherwise) boundaries."

Yes I can go with that concession, it sounds veryreasonable.

"I think the 'creature' focus is not so much about helping us kill the creatures, but helping us and our groups go through the process of killing creatures. "

Yes, that is a very good take on the focus, work with that.

The idea would not be to change our profession into a weapon profession persay...

• But rather enhance whatever other profession we have chosen with skills and abilities.

Hence the word "support" can also be used in the skill set sense...

• Ranger supports the other skills that the character has.

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Now, I don't know how far we should push regarding "support" in the sense of the group dynamic...

• I can see possible group bonuses to harvesting and concealment to reduce unwanted attention.

But pushing beyond that might encroach too far in Squad Leader territory...

• And they have bigger guns than us.

I believe a ranger should be able to control more powerfull creatures then the regular folk.. as long as we're on this Creature hunter idea. Nothing ridiculous.. but something like lv 30 or so..

"Well, here are my thoughts on this. I apologize for the length, I tend to get a little long-winded at times"

Thank you Klif_Hangar, that is the type of response I am interested in.

"I sure hope the squad leaders don't stumble upon the highlighted camp"

And you have hit a primary issue...

• Our vision can not impede too far into any of the other professions, lest we risk losing any possibility of having it realized.

The following profession derive from Scout:

• Ranger


• Bounty Hunter


• Squad Leader


• Creature Handler

Because of this relationship, we are forced to concede certain aspects of the game system to other professions.

• Combat related encampments should fall into the Squad Leader profession.


• Bounty Hunter should be provided their due with regards to humanoid combat advantages (and yes, some form of traps)

Our profession directs us downa far more creature-centric path and that is what will keep us from crashing headlong into another profession's arena.

"The Antarian Rangers"

Ah yes... As Keito_Temreh so eloquently misquoted:

• "but please show us all NRAAS in what book and the page, chapter, etc... where it is stated rangers were merchants"

What Iof course was refering to was the fact that the Antarian Rangers is a far larger society than simply Rangers. They included Merchants who provided goods and services to wayward Jedi, andSoldierswho fought beside the Force Sensitive, and Diplomats and Politicians who opened their cities to them.

Now we have the rather nasty problem of our name being similiar to a great and noble foundation. No one profession can fully encompass what the Antarian Rangers stood for, so how do we reconcile this issue?

As Zkull recently pointed out, the developers have not yet reconciled the concept of Jedi aid themselves...

• So given our own issues, should we alsolump in a possible Jedi connection as well?


• Further muddying the waters?

That is a question the supporters of the AR should consider...

• Bring me a proposal of how to fit the concept of the AR into the vision we are attempting to mold, and we will debate further.