Ranger Archive

in the update log it clearly stated that the conceal tactic was supposed to be effective against creatures,NPC's (thus better then mask scent (scout skill)that only works on ceatures) AND other players now that would have some application in PVP i mean come on if we can slip around with out being easily detected ( i dont expect to be able to shoot someone up while still being under camo...) but i mean if we were doing beine acts in combat such as healing or SCOUTING the enemies location there is no reason why it shouldn't work arcoss the board like they originally stated. Now it would be perfectly resonable if they checked this skill by haveing the covert faction scanners be able to sense us...



now about traps... why can we use traps on ppl? go watch empire strikes back and tell me those logs and ropes cant be considered traps... im not saying they should be uber but what if we had something like sticky mess that we can throw that would keep them in one place long enough for us to run away... (everyone knows u dont use the sticky mess on ranged critters(spitting etc))

tracking- ya it needs a range boost considering this... we can run faster then any other prof in the game thus 500m takes us about the same time it takes the skill to give us a read out... now updating tracking nah i dont think that would work i mean scouts have to follow trails by looking at clues along the way there is no "shortcuts" but i think that when u select what ever it is that u want in the little menu and u push OK we should get a way point to the spot that the object was at when we pushed okay. for critters this works very well cuz they dont move.. players it makes it more realist cuz then we are REALLY tracking them...

camping - i think the up in reso is not that bad considering that making tents does give us camping exp (good job devs) but i think that the last camp should be cheaper (no longer need for camping exp folks thus no reason for the con)

harvesting uhh well im sry but ya all nerfed it too much i think that for the scout skill it was good because there are a thousand scouts out there (bh has to be a master scout) ppl get it for explore 4 etc ch.... u know where this is going everyne and their mom is a ch) but as a ranger we spend most of our time solo and u know we need some dues for gettting to hunt master....give us something we can pawn off...

Conceal...loving it. Except for the resource costs.

Mask Scent still effective as well. Kudos

Only level 1 in camps, no noticeable difference.

Love Tracking.

Big issues- RESOURCES. Yes, the 60% thing would have been nice, because in a group of two, I could get 60% of the previous bone amount, and another scout could get 60% of the previous hide. 20% resource increase over previous amounts. Three people takes it to 80% increase in total resources.

However, at this point I seem to get 60% of 50%. which is 30%. Do the math. Takes three rangers at level 3 Hunting to get 90% of my previous harvests.

and those rangers need the resources more than ever, with the 4 item requirements, planet and type restrictive for camo kits, three of which are harvestables.

I used to make money harvesting Banthas for Tat Herbivore meat, for the medics. sold it at a reasonable cost, got a deal from my local docs on stims.

Now I need to harvest wooly hide from banthas for my camo packs. Since I'm getting 30% resources right now, and my resource cost for traps and camps has been doubled roughly, I now have to spend 6 hours harvesting for my personal needs to match what I could obtain in 1 hour previously.

This means that I no longer have the time to harvest for my local medic. Which means higher demand (as if Tat herbivore meat didnt already sell as soon as it hit the bazaar, for as much as 6 creds per regardless of quality! selling it on planet!) for Bantha meat, and since the docs arent gonna get it as easily, the cost of stims will go up.

Now...i'm poorer, resource and cash wise, and the main consumable I purchase, Stim packs, are now going to cost me more?

Oh, and I need to give up medic skills to get artisan back so I can survey for flora, or I need to pay for waypoints or pay 4-6 creds per unit for flora. On chilastra, the recent wild oats were high quality, and many docs were using them for med packs. So, they are going for a premium.

We need a fix that allows us to harvest the planet specific resources we need without the artisan chain. Their skills are built around resource gathering for product crafting for SELLABLE goods. We cannot Sell our goods to anyone but rangers of our own level or higher. And they are in the same boat. They can make it themselves, so why pay for it?

This is a major concern. Sorry our dev is on vacation, and what not, but this is a major blow to the profession.

Kryibacca, Chilastra, Tuskens Bane

My only heavy disagreence with the subject is on the mask scent and conceal issue.

i can understand the %'s and the need for some sort of ballencing, with the need for mask scent to break.

My issue is that if your going to penalize us with such a heavy cost to make kits,things need to be adressed for ballencing.

The time should be increased on the duration of the kit, granted this could be scalable depending on how far up the tree you go, but should at a base be 20 min, and mabe worked up to an hour. Having my fly unziped by some low red, is really tough to take. The conceal should not be broken all the way and erased. Now this may not be the best direction to go, but like i said, if your going to put such a robust cost on the making of the kit, you need to make the ability that more robust. If you are expecting me as a ranger to work up the line and earn these skills, you have to think about how they work. I used mask scent religously. I got stalked a few times, smacked a few times, but i was able to work in the system.

My question for the developers are: Are the developers trying to make a system that is "the next step" for people transitioning from scout to ranger, wanting to put a price on every conceal (ranger mask scent), but making it quite reliable, and having some medium of predictability for situations? Or did you want to build a system that is just ok in its aplication and usefulnes do to unreliability, making it cheep to smack the conceal buton every time it breaks?

The resources are hurting me badly. Granted I didn't worry too much before, and would frequently sell almost all my resources, comfortable with the knowledge that I would get more easily. When you look at HTFB (35 Bone), the nerf in addition to the combat nerfs which have made it harder to hunt in general, I'm struggling to save up a nice cache of resources for my OWN use, let alone selling.

Maskscent: Working nicely. Could stand some tweaking down in the aggro department.

Conceal: Works at the same level as Maskscent... including not working against NPCs at all. The resource requirements are outrageous, especially the floral component not being forageable. The duration is far too short (16 minutes for a Master Ranger? come on!) and it breaks Far too easily.

New Camp Requirements: Amounts are fine, but why remove the Polymer? It made sense to have polymer in the highend bases. I would be happier if we could get a semi-permenent base or a Planet Specific Hunting Cabin Deed for Master Rangers! I also hope we can get high quality single person tents, so I dont have to whip out a field base everytime I want good healing and a false sense of security .

Area Tracking: Works Great! Just needs to be cleaned up abit and maybe have the range increased. Something does need to be done about tracking in the vasts wastes where nothing has spawned yet.

The Resource "Nerf": This is destroying many players ability to play casually. If I need to spend 4 hours of my session filling skimpy resources orders, how does that leave me time to do anything else? It just made a fun activity into manual labor. If the harvest amounts cannot be raised acrossed the board at least make our Ranger Bonus worthwhile! As it stands, I harvest creatures marginally better than a Scout. Why did I invest so many points in Bio.. erm.. Tracking? Certainly not for the non-existant creature to-hit bonus.

DeltaXi65 - /agreeall

I need makesome comments about the harversting corpses. IMHO, the reduction of harversting not is a bug but it is intentional. The devs really fear that we ranger/scouts will flood the market with organic resources. And IMHO they can be rightabout this fear.

Look, yesterday here at Tempest we made a big group (+ 40 people, okay, we needed maketwo 20 people groups and another lesser group) and we go to hunt the Kryat Dragons. A lot of shooting, a lot of peopledragon-killed (one blow - one kill, that dragons are good at the job!)and clonning and returning to battle running, a lot of confusion to harversting the corpses (we were 3 diferent groups and only one group can harverst the corpse). With all the confusion and chaos I harversted 2 Kryat Dragons (and if the dragons don't killed me 3 timesI am sure thatIcan harverster more 3 or 4 corpses, but they killed me and I don't returned at time to haverster them). But I am sure that if the new rules weren't working I certainly wasn't get hides from these beasts because someone problably harversted the corpse before me, because a week before the same group killed a lot of giant pekos-pekos andI harvested no one. Yesterday I get a net total of 1K tatooine bristle hides (and some tatooine wooly hides too), then the new rules give me the chance to get 1 k hides when beforeI get the chance to get nothing!

I am sure that a lot of my big hunt fellows get the same or greater hidesquantities (or bone quantities or meat quantities, whatever). If we were 40 people and if we all get onlyhides, this will give a net total of 40 K hides geting to market one night.If the harverster was divided even between hide and bone and meat, we have 13 k meat, 13 k hide and 13 k bones going to market one night.

I hope that some docs and med and scouts and rangers use thatorganics to craft something, becauseI am selling my 1 k hides and I don't want that the hide price go down. But I fear that all the other guyswill start now tomake big hunt parties and will flood the market with organic resources and the prices will go down a lot.

Now is really good to a ranger/scout group. We can get the really big things and get something like 500 k hides fromone dead beast (if you are one of the luck survivors and don't needed be clonned and return running) when before you rarelly get something. But IMHO, with time we will flood the market with organics. I hope that the devs don't low the harversted organics again, but that they go up the tailors and armosmiths schematics needed resources.

I don't think its concern over resources, the devs have not feared resource overages in any other area. Yu ever notice one of those heavy harvesters? On an 80% vein of metal it pulls almost 10k units PER DAY. And they are all over the place. In the scheme of the economy its a much more substantial factor. People now literally have 500k stacks of minerals. But everyone is crying for hides and meat. And wanting higher quality stuff.

They need to revert our harvesting ability. Thats obvious I believe. Actually they should increase the amount harvested on higher level mobs that are hunted individually. Keep the group deal as is. I mean, the lone hunter bringing down a high level mob is much more deserving of a higher payoff then the kill in a group.

I do believe that they need to remove the group harvest as it is and develop a new scheme, whether that's percentage based on number of group members, number of scouts/rangers within group, or skill based percentages for groups. This 60% across the board was too easy a solution.

Resorurce harvests have been lowered. I dont think anyone disagrees with that.

For me, maskscent now breaks on about 1 of 15creatures ( I have Wayfaring 4), but it seems to also break against mobs that ALREADY are fooled by it. Creature level doesnt seem to matter at all - Crazed Durni's seem to have the same chance to break mask as Huurtons or Vornitor Lizards. This leads me to think that there is still a termite in the woodwork somewhere.

Example: I walk/run/crawl (doesn't seem to matter) up to a group of slicehounds. As they come into range, I see the xp tick off, no problem. Now, with all of them within 64 meters, I begin to move away from them. As they leave the 64m radius, one of them breaks the mask, even after it was already successful?

I /maskscent again, and approach the group. No xp this time (except for the one that broke it the first time, and is now fooled) but the mask is broken again...I retreat, remask, and broken again...and again! I have a screenshot with combat log that shows /maskscent breaking 3 consecutive times against exactly the same group of slicehounds. This is a new dynamic it appears. Different hounds broke the mask each time.

I made some kits and tried /conceal - no discernable improvement to /maskscent at all - /conceal, crazed durni breaks it. /yawn

The old scouting xp exploit is back as well. you can bounce between 2 spawns a short (250m, about) distance away and get xp each time. XP awards are high - of course I guess it's easy to say that when you don't really need it heh

Just for comparison, I am a Zabrak carbineer with Ranger skills 4221.

MaskScent

I am a novice ranger (1/1/1/2) on Kauri,PRIOR to this weekend /maskscent was a horrible and useless skill. It broke against womp rats and gubbers, i started playing about a month ago and have NEVER, until this weekend gotten any scouting exp. from using maskscent, this weekend i got 270 pts from sneaking up on a Kimogilla ( i did this multiple times ), i was unsuccessful every time i tried the giant kimogilla, the giant ALWAYS saw me, dangit :-(, also had success against giant baz nitches, all manner of vesps,and many othercreatures on lok, dathomir and tat, ( haven't tested endor yet ),yes it broke onoccasion butit was infrequent and was always a mid to high level aggressive creature, i had nonon aggressive creatures break it, ( maybe i just got lucky but i did test it out on several planets and for a long periodof time )

Concel

I tested the /conceal on Corellia and it didn't last long enough for me to comment on it's effectiveness. As for the resource cost and the flora needed, if not for the creature harvesting change, this makes the things really expensive and at least for me , will not be using them much if at all.

Harvesting

all i can say is

bash> p4 revert creature_harvesting_changes

Trapping

this is another area i have absolutely no gripe with, now that i have given up the artisian tree completely i will hate the non creature harvestable ingredients :-) but these traps have enabled me to solo snorbals, bantha matriarchs, dragonets, and all manner of other creatures, especially like what i call the p trap, start with that follow with a glow-wire, follow up with adhesive mesh,shoot, repeat till dead. I have successfully thrown traps at all manner of creatures all the way up to the kimo, gotta love 1888 pts for landing a flash bomb :-)

Tracking

i like this addition, it is buggy, or more to the point does not work the way i had envisioned. ok there are real bugs,like log out in the wild, then log back in later, don't move just log in and do an areatrack i found nothing three times. now move a few meters in any direction till something pops up on the radar, now it will work and things will be found. i am going to try and repeat this tonight and /bug it. anyway, the distance is ok but then im only at level 1 tracking, if the distance doesn't increase, which im reading it don't that is kinda a problem, but being able to 'see' the kimo before it sees you is pretty useful, now if i could just find some darn krayts.

I must say the variation of the reported behavior of this skill set across the servers is most curious.

A mostly happy ranger,

Hornath, Karuri

First off I must say I do like the changes.

MASKSCENT: I have had maskscent broke by Aggros CL30 to 55andI don't think they arelow level MOBs. When going prone I have snuck past both aggros and non-aggros. Running I will get broke. However, I feel that it is the nature of the game and does add soe excitement. There are way to many people playing and saying "what do I do now?". FranklyI think a number of the harder planets are a little to easy to be SOLOing on. i really enjoying teaming up with a group of other players for a hunt.

HARVESTING: needs work, but heck there are a lot of things that need work.

CAMO: Yeah, You HAVE to play with others, so what grab a floral harvester and get someone who has floral survey skills. They can plant their harvester and help you plant yours. In addition, you could sell off the excess.

I have dropped my harvester around where others have theirs. Might not have the concentration I need but, I get enough of what I need and switch to what sells. Pays for the power, planting, and reclaiming the deed, my stuff is then free and I can go hunting.

CAMPS: same as before heal the group and grab some hides from teammates wow it works.

What I see here is the major complaint that everyone has, I want to be SUPER SOLO. Now that we have improvements people aren't happy (Just like in the other professions)

But, we wanted to be able to offer more to a group. Guess what, WE GOT IT!!!!. NOW go group!!!

I had the same experience that JohaoCarl had in a Krayt hunt last night. If intentional, so far it seems that when the overall harvest reduction was made the thing in the mind of the devs was the large group increased harvest. However, large hunt groups are not an every day thing yet. From what I've read and seen a large portion of the current harvests are going into crafting needed scout/ranger items and survival xp grinding.

I know the change was made to incentive scout/rangers into grouping, but I believe we should work to find a middle ground that is viable for both groupers and soloers.