Ranger Archive
Thread: State of the Profession (Sep 18)
Composite bow or compound bow?
A silenced bow weapon that didn't attract social critters would be really cool.
If you could just silently dispatch an animal and it never sees you, but each shot has a chance of engaging the animal to you or bringing in others, that would a big change from the regular BLAST BLAST BANG BOOM! of the game and give hunting a neat angle.
A silent poison / tranquilizerarrowdelivery system fromsay 64 meters would GREATLY benefit Rifle Rangers. The arrow hits the animal, animal doesn't know where you are, others don't react, animal is snared / dizzy, whatever, Ranger goes to prone, blasts a few times from 60 meters, gets up, darts animal again, repeat.
I have no idea how you guys do it without a pistol or carbine as is, but traps at 50 meters and ideal range of 60 for good rifles should be addressed.
-- YP
"Composite bow or compound bow?"
- Educate me on the difference if you wouldn't mind. 
"A silent poison / tranquilizerarrowdelivery system fromsay 64 meters"
- It has been suggested to incorporate the poison request into the Ranger Bow system, to reduce balancing issues.
Calculus_Entropy wrote:
I agree that personal creature harvesters are a bad idea. If I have a havester getting suplies for traps and camps, why do I need to make traps and camps? I will not need to heal or protect myself, because I will be sitting in mt guild hall getting fat. If I need help getting to the harvesters, I just get some buddies to abk me up. This could possibly cause another decrease in animal resources like we saw when the 60% rule went into effect. Ifa bunch of rangershave something collecting resources all the time, won't that flood the market with resources? I think the whole idea goes against the idea of being a ranger.
Depends on implimentation. Perhaps one/two trap(s) only (how thats done can be debated), one targetanimal in the area (requires you to actually scout around looking for the animal, must be a natural lair and NOT a mission lair), perhaps a class-level limit (high enough NOT to work on high level planets: traps for bunnies make sense but not for elephants), and only one resource on the animal (I guess that could be debated too).
Egad, did I really make that one sentance?
I think the /subscribetoGroupharvest thing was geared more towards grouping with non-haresters, i.e. pets droids, docotrs, what ever...
And Why arent our traps usefull against people, If i set a bear trap in the woods, and a person steps into wont he go OWWWW!?
"Compound = "composed of many parts". This would be equivalent to a modern bow with cams, pulleys, cables, etc. that confer mechanical advantage in addition to storing energy in the limbs."
- Thanks... I meant a Compound Bow, I will change the list item.
I think static traps would be best if it were a 1-per kind of thing and I think this is sort-of what they are working on, but maybe not exactly. You can drop onewithin say20m ofany lair, and when the lair is destroyed, there is an extra corpse to harvest. Or maybe trapping level vs creature level determines the number of corpses. You could maybe capture 10 chubas in a certain type of trap, but you aren't going to be able to trap a Bol no matter how big the trap, unless you dig a real big hole and cover it with leaves and branches thata creaturewouldfall into(that should work against PCs then too). A hole-trap should take a long time to "dig" and cause an increased chance of agro while digging it. A static "harvester" isn't quite what I would envision unless it were extremely limited in the amount it could hold before capping. As was suggested, CL should definately be a factor in whether it would work and how fast it would work.
The "hole" trap would have to have bone spurs in the bottom to actually damage or kill the creature, or it would just put the creature in a totally immobile position for a very long time (with some chance of climbing out) so you could sit back and pick it off (brawlers can geta CDEF if they want to stay back far enough, or use a pole-arm in relative safety).
Ranger-Specific weapons: How about harvesting poison as one of the resources that can be harvested from creatures that have it (not looted). This would be usable by Combat Medics to increase the effectiveness of their poisons (actally, decrease the current effectivenesswithout this). Doctors may be able to "modify" the poisons to make anti-venoms (possibly if applied before combat will protect you from it - great for PvP protection against combat medicsor PvE against poisoning type creatures). The poison would be able to be applied as an optional slot in the the trap schematics we have such as bone-spur and replace some of the other organic resources in the current poison-dart (how do I turn make wheat into poison?). The poison should be able to also be made into ranger-created power-ups that fit an extra "poison slot" in any mid-level or higher Weaponsmith created weapon, or given to the Weaponsmith to add as an optional component to current power-ups or a new power-up schematic for them, this would also be applicable to vibro-knucklers and such for brawlers, as-well as pistols, rifles, etc. The poison should be cumulative per shot (10 poison shots should do the same damage as 1 poison-shot 10 times as powerful). There would either be a very low amount of poison per shot, or a special attack granted somewhere in the ranger tree that is /poison and works with any weapon. Poison would also help with that fact that as rifleman, I can't really help my pet much, since all my other special attacks except overcharge damage mind, instead of heath. The dart traps we have now should be enough (with poison components) for a non-combat Ranger to kill mobs without other combat skills (and a lot of extra time and multiple re-traps). A ranger might be able to solo a Krayt over the course of an hour with enough traps and patience.
All traps must be macroable or at-least stackable for hotkey use- HIGH PRIORITY. I understand the traps not stacking because each could could come out differently, butwith 0% experimentation under any circumstances, shouldn't they all come out exactly the same if made with exactly the same resources and therefore be stackable? Also, if traps are made in a factory crate, shouldn't you be able to uncrate them and then stack them... is this possible already? I would still prefer to have expermintation points for charges and effectiveness, and stackable if they come out the same. Could you create a manufacturing schematic and then use that schematic to make all of your traps from as long as you have that resource, therefore making it stackable?
Having 11 experimentation points to use on a camo kit that has about 5 boxes always leaves me with 6 experimentation points left that go to waste.
*** MaskScent IS broken when a Short Bothan Master Ranger draws insta-warp super-mob agro from 70M with mask on and a doctor without being concealed doesn't (Happens tens of times per day... thedoc loves getting the chance to revive me many times per night). Mask needs to be checked at the same distances whether masked or not and if it "breaks" all that happens is the one creature who broke it sees you and has the same or only slightly higherchance of attacking you as the architect that is out fora friendly stroll and got within agro range. If a social creature attacks you, then if you return attack you should draw the friends, not draw immediately upon break (I don't know that it does this now, just anticipating)
*** Fixed Resources per creature and limited numbers of pulls per scout per creature (Scout gets one that doesn't take 100% of that pool, Novice Ranger gets 2 pulls that will get 100% of the pool, Master Ranger gets3 and all 3 pull 100% of that resource pool...2Master Rangers in a groupwill have toshare part of theharvests). BTW, yesterday the harvest bonus and percentages felt about right, if not a bit high,when grouped with a Wookie Master Scout.
*** Deedable camps where you can place your own "extras" such as personal crafting stations. ALL Camps MUST get tents where you can go inside. Every NPC and Pubam camp I have seen has tents you can go in, but I don't.
Experimentation oncamps to lower camp-use, increase longevity, or increase heal-rate.
"Having 11 experimentation points to use on a camo kit that has about 5 boxes always leaves me with 6 experimentation points left that go to waste"
The amount of experimentboxes depends on the OQ of the resources used. If using all 900+ resources and the initial assemble is an amazing success there are 10 boxes, filling these would give you a 100% experimental charges and 10 charges. Having 11 points allows for a couple of experiments to be less then amazing and still get decent charges.
Check out my ranger crafting guide:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=ranger&message.id=13126
If you're looking at continuity within the SW universe, you could take the fact that ewoks used primitive bows in RotJ. Is it unreasonable to assume that some societies within SW may have developed and used hunting bows in a similar cultural fashion to the way wookiees use bowcasters?
Heck, a whole line of schematics ranging from simple recurves up to multi-cam, counterbalanced compound bows could be added, perhaps even equipment could be crafted to allow for bowfishing. I definitely think scouts/rangers should have an expanded crafting repetoire, and bows (or other 'ranged melee' weapons like blowguns, slings, etc) would be an interesting addition.
--
As for creature resource harvesters, I'm not fond of the idea of long term 'set and forget' type items. How about something which expands on traps like the placeable animal lure that has already been slated?
Either make these craftable items, or a command that uses resources when invoked. Once used, the trap is placed on the ground. If an animal wanders within the traps area of effect, there's a chance (based on various factors such as trap level and quality and animal challenge level) that the animal is captured, or if it fails, the trap is destroyed. The ranger then comes back and harvests the resources from the captured critter (the resources could be 'moved' into the trap object which is the harvest target rather then have persistent animal corpses or whatever).
If the trap was succesful, perhaps it could then be reset once cleared and used again (with a reduced chance of success for each reset). While a trap could only hold one creature at a time, higher skill levels could grant the ability to set more traps at one time, so a master ranger could potentially have numerous snare, pit traps or jaw traps set around a busy lair.
So, much in the same way you can sample resources manually faster than you could with one harvester, you could still kill and harvest animals faster using weapon skills or cronies than you could using a couple of resource traps. But also like using mineral harvesters, using resource traps frees your time up for doing other things with the additional benefit of not requiring combat skills in order to perform a ranger profession task.
This is just one example. In essence I am trying to say that there are many ways to implement the basic idea of animal resource harvesters that are both realistic and not overpowered while adding depth and variety to the class. Do not dismiss an entire concept based on one possible method of implementation.
I dunno about compound bows not looking space age Muhalo, have you seen some of these babies today?
Laser range finders (yes on bows!) nerf-head looking silencers, balancing weights, and the cams and pulleys, magnesium or even freaking titanium grips, balance-beam (like carpeneters' luminescent balance beams for leveling glass tubes) to determine bows' attitude.
Also, a bow is a complete system. There is no rebound, now kickback with a bow. What does this mean to someone in very low g or zero g? This means you can fire a bow without throwing yourself back. On low g planet rifle would throw your body over and in zero g (we know about the gun-in-space effect) and in zero g environment an arrow that had left a bow with a slight spin (easy to implement throw various methods) would have a perfectly flat trajectory.
High-tech bows-and-arrows, orcrossbows,possibly with mono-tips or effects warheads, would be an ideal zero-g combat weapon or special combat weapon.
-- YP
Personally disagree with the animal harvester, unless it was a domesticated meat farm or nuna ranch or something, just don't see a way to harvest animals in a trap, unless it's like a giant space-age roach motel.Nunas check in, they don't check out. 
-- YP
"Personally disagree with the animal harvester"
- Yes, this idea is just as controversial as the Ranger Bow, and the Creature handling bonus.
- Ah well...