Ranger Archive

2. disagree that this is not useful. crawling makes maskscent work better plus those who use ranged weapons(the majority of players) get better to hit bonus in the prone position. i also think that the new conceal ability will probably work better if you are in the prone position.

5. no one should be able to have battle fatigue healed in the field. the devs definitely will not go for this. down time is necessary for everyone and you cannot get down time if you stay in the bush all day long.


i suppose the others are ok, but definitely keep the crawl speed in there. it is immensely useful to those who try to play their characters as true rangers. stealth is of the essence and greater stealth comes with being prone. just because we are rangers does not mean that we are no longer scouts and i have to say that maskscent is the most useful skill i have and the devs have already stated that being prone and crawling gives bonuses to maskscent's effectiveness. DO NOT CHANGE THIS!!!!!!!

nrass: Yes, but with the up and coming /conceal command, what Ranger would bother using /maskscent?

The abilities granted by Terrain Negotiation should be re-evaluated based on the addition of /conceal


i think because /conceal will work similarly to maskscent just being more effective it will also work better if you are prone and crawling as opposed to upright and running. IT IS STILL HIGHLY EFFECTIVE. it should be left the way it is.

Yup, those are some of our issues. Overall PvP performance/role for rangers didn't make it into your list. I feel this is very important to a large percentage of the ranger community.

- traps to work in PvP both on creatures and players; rangers get 0 PvP combat skills, none, zero. I understand the devs probably are not willing to add any crowd control to PvP combat, fine. Make those traps do something else, stun, dizzy, damage etc.

- conceal to to provide a way to camouflage yourself and hide from other players for as long as you don't engage in combat or until another ranger discovers you. Rangers live behind enemy lines, gather information and engage in hit-and-run attacks, I think many of us would like things to head that way. I think it would be wise to award this skill to master rangers only.

Ranger is an expensive profession to master, the prerequisite is full mastery of 'scout' and the ranger profession offers no skills useable in the galactic war! Not until we can harvest things off dead PCs, but I doubt any of us want that skill, or do we? I sure would love to gather some BH DNA and have someone clone one for me as a pet.

Concur on all fronts. Keep up the good work Mineras.

Sorry to burst the guys bubble about PVP and the terrian negotiation. There is more to this game then PVP and since I took the profession of Ranger it helps to run a little faster especially when we are out in the wilderness exploring and not sitting in a city waiting for the opposing faction to come into the cantina. I am also a Rifleman and being a ranged fighter is all what it is crapped up to be. If I dont kill something while it is 50 to 60 m away which is unlikely I am screwed because my weapons take a heck of a hit at point blank which it should be. I have said this time and time again we should also be able to swim faster. There has been places that I had to cross huge bodies of water to get to the other side of land.

Mineras,

I am not sure how long it has been since we voted on our new top 5 issues but I think we need to revisit it.

1.The biggest current issue. Creature to hit bonus currently only affects ranged weapons

I don’t see how this could possibly be our biggest issue. Our creature to hit bonus is pretty insignificant compared to bonuses that non-ranger classes get to accuracy and speed. If someone is playing a primary combat ranger and his main concern is to hit bonuses then he will have a combat profession as well, which will render his ranger to hit bonuses immaterial. There are so many issues that are far more important then that. Camp auto-disbanding is a much bigger issue and it is not even listed on the top five. I have never heard any rangers complain in game about our to hit bonus. Every ranger/scout I know thinks that it is completely ludicrous that our camps disband after 50 minutes no matter what. Can we please have a new vote on the top five issues? I propose:

1. Camps auto-disbanding: Camps should never auto-disband except maybe on logout. As long as scouts/rangers are only allowed to have one deployed at a time there will not be a problem with abandoned camps littering the world. (A) The most important one is that they should not disband due to us simply wandering out of them. We should be able to set up a camp and venture out from it and return to it. If there needs to be some time limit it should be 5-10 minutes or so on the basic camp and an hour or more on the HTFB kit. (B) I strongly believe that camps should not disband due to combat. Whatever small ability the higher camps have to repel creatures should not apply to creatures that are agro so rangers cannot fight from complete safety within a camp. (C) Then there is the issue of camps auto-disbanding even if rangers are following all the rules and not attacking or leaving the camp. This may not be as big a deal but I still believe it is important. I know some rangers use camping macros and while they may not come out and admit it, they will not openly support permanent camps because it will stop macro camping. I would like to see all camps permanent unless disbanded, but once you get the HTFB kit you no longer need wilderness survival XP so I don’t think we would be stepping on the macro campers if we allowed at least that camp to be permanent until disbanded by the ranger or if he logs out. This would satisfy all the requests for ranger homes bases and so forth.

2. Wayfaring run speeds and burst run efficiency: Would be nice if they divided the bonuses to run speed and crawl across all 100 points of terrain negotiation instead of only the first 50. And burst run efficiency should increase duration of burst run and/or decrease down time between burst runs.

3. Examining creatures doesn't tell us what we really want/need to know: Examining a creature should tell you if it is a pack hunter (assistive) or a herding creature (non-assistive). Special attack 1 and 2 always show none. We know that a higher ferocity number means something over a lower ferocity number, but the details of what ferocity level is telling us are very unclear.

4. BF healing in camps: Yes it should be slow and maybe only possible in the larger/largest camp and if entertainers want it to only be possible for master entertainers that is fine too. But at some point there should be some

5. Maskscent: The first four things I believe most people are in agreement with. This one is probably not going to be as popular but I am going to throw it out there. I think maskscent is far too powerful. As a master ranger I can put on maskscent and walk into the middle of a pack of level 25 or even higher creatures and walk around and even walk through them and sit down next to them and they don’t notice me. That is just wrong. It is supposed to be masking my scent not making me invisible. And what is even worse they are going to give that ability to master scouts and increase the base power of the skill by 40%. If they keep the maskscent bonuses the way they are now (all in the explore tree) then someone will be able to get around +80 to maskscent which when you add in the 40% bonus to base they are talking about will give someone with Exploration IV (29 skill points) better camo then a master ranger currently is. In a good hunting group you can get Exploration IV in a day. So what currently takes two master professions (scout/ranger) to attain will be attainable in a day. Everyone will become a scout just so they can pick up exploration and get the run bonus and invisibility. Maybe a master ranger with a very highly experimented camo kit built using the best resources and with maskscent on as well should be able to crawl around near (within 5-10m or so) a creature without being noticed. But no one should ever be able to stand face-to-face inches from a plains hunter without getting attacked. Let alone someone that has invested all of 29 skill points and a few hours into scouting. Mask scent should only work if you are more thena certain minimum distance from an animal. At some point they would be using other senses to detect you (possibly their vision or hearing, just a thought)

Thanks

David,

The creature to-hit bonus is a big deal to our melee Rangers. Those who have ranged shots don't care - but those who are a melee class are finding that it takes three times as long to Master Ranger because they can't kite the larger creatures that those of us who are primarily ranged Rangers can (I'm a hybrid swordsman/rifleman).

So when a good portion of your membership can't use a skill because it's been overlooked, this is a problem. Mineras was right to put this on the list. Whether or not its #1 is arguable, but it should be here.

Camp auto-disbanding is an issue, but it is one of lesser concern. First, part of the job of camping is to consume resources. If we don't have camps that auto-disband, you're drastically cutting down on the amount of resources being used and that will make it even harder to sell hides/bones/meat and will cut down on the market for metal and polymer. You can argue the impact that this will make on the economy in the short term, but it will make a difference long term. You also have the problem of what happens if you get killed in the wilderness and can't disband your camp - you have to trek all the way back out there and risk getting killed again to shut it down so you can camp somewhere else (this will become even more important when the auto-insurance is turned off). I also believe that it was the Devs intent to make camps more powerful when it comes to blocking out creatures from entering them. Having a camp not disband during combat would result in us using camps to kite creatures towards them, hide out in the camp where the critter can't go, and kill them in relative safety. This is unacceptable.

While I agree that the higher end camps should last longer, auto-disband is an important feature that needs to remain in the game.

I agree with the burst run/terrain navigation idea.

I agree with the examining of creatures issue as well. I asked the Scout dev about this yesterday, but he said that they weren't working on this issue at this time because of other, more important issues.

BF Healing in camps is a touchy subject that's being debated. I am torn on the issue - part of me wants it, the other part doesn't.

Maskscent, as anyone who visits the Scout forums will know, is currently bugged. It should not be behaving the way that it does right now. In any event, this is no longer a Ranger issue, as Maskscent will be a scout issue only. Rangers are getting the new /conceal function. So let me and the Scouts deal with the problems with maskscent.

Overall, not a bad list.

B

I believe the most important thing on that list was making sure we know whether or not an animal pack hunts or not. That is one feature that would have really helped me along the way.

Healing BF in camp is another feature I think is very important, but I think it should have to be an entertainer at a certain level, to be determined by people that know more than me, to make sure that it is a serious entertainer. That could be a skill entertainers receive at one point " able to heal in Ranger tents" or something. That way any ole person couldn't just pick up the entertainer and use it

Davidjp1234,

I concur, just have to add auto-BF-regen (very slow, high-levlel rangers only, maybe only master), and BF heal in rosie's tent with the help of entertainers (remember M*A*S*H) along with remembering that I have too many skillmods to count right now so why not use a couple of them when figuring how much BF gets healed and we'd be a lot happier than we are now.

Campsauto-disbanding when the next one is deployed is a great idea, though it might make macro-campers have to rethink some of their macros (may make them easier or harder to gain xp depening on the player's macro skillmod:smileywink and I agree that I think there would be NO noticeable affect on the hide/bone market no matter what you do with resource requirements for camps.. I never would have bought the hides/bone needed for scout camps since the whole idea was to gather your own and get scoutXP at the same time... so there's a bit less for sale on the market cause I had to kill one extra squall for the basic camp, big whoop, now I have more scoutxp, thanks.

David,

I believe that Mineras was trying to do something aid our melee Rangers and that it why the to-hit bonus was on the list. You're arguments are logical, but I still feel that it belongs there. They need some acknowledgement and aid, as they are the red-headed stepchild of our profession.

On camp auto-disbanding, you said "First, the job of camping is not to consume resources! The job of camping is to provide a place for scouts/rangers and their friends/hunting parties to rest and recover." While you are correct - the primary reason for camping is to provide a place for resting and recoring - a secondary, internal use for camps is to remove hide, bone, metal and polymer from the economy. Don't think of this from a player's perspective, think of it from the Devs perspective. We've already seen two increases in the cost of hide and bone for camps (one was obvious - the new update jacks up the rates. The other was a subtle - a decrease in the caps, meaning you need to craft more camps to make the same XP). So while you may not consider it to be important, it is in the eyes of the Devs and it WILL be an argument used against changing this.

Your other points are solid. I personally feel that the Field Base and HTFB SHOULD have longer up times prior to auto-disbanding, but that they shouldn't be made "permanent". That's overkill - and you'll piss of the architects too. How many times have you heard that your FB or HTFB is better than a house? I know I've heard it a few dozen times.

And you can disagree with me on the Maskscent issue, but you're missing the point - maskscent is no longer a Ranger skill. Period. It's strictly a scouting one. Read the Scout developer answers. Rangers can still use it, but we get the /conceal skill to enhance it. And as I stated before, the way that maskscent is working now is NOT the proper way - it's bugged and it's being fixed. The fix is on TC right now, if I'm not mistaken.

We agree on more things than we disagree on, so I'm happy with that for now.

B

Question for you Brisc, when you are able to get in TC:

Do conceal and maskscent stack? If so, can you explain pretty much how they work together? thanks

I agree with all of you and you all make a valid point. I really have only 1 concern that i dont think has been touched on( or maybe it has). I think traps should stack in inventory, i have so much stuff in my inventory that having traps just cludders it all up, if they were stackible i would only have 6 inventory slots taken by these traps. thank you that is all from me

Tharrano - Ranger Ahazi

Jal,

I was on there this morning. But being a noob, I can't really do much yet.

I'm waiting for the terminals to come up so I can level my character quickly. I'll let you know when it does get there.

Raffel,

You don't have to read the dev tracker. Just read the "ranger response" and the "scout response" that are stickied in their respective forums.

Many of the issues that you've brought up are being dealt with.

You can read my arguments about camp auto-disbanding. If camps worked properly, them not being able to be disbanded could quickly turn into an exploit. BF in camps is fine as a higher end Ranger skill, but I still prefer going to the Cantina. It's a needed way to make them useful, and to help promote in-game socializing.

If you are annoyed with what you get as a Ranger, why did you invest all of the time doing it? Patience my friend - the game has only been out for two months. These issues will get fixed and you'll have stories to tell the grand-scouts...."Back when I was Rangering, we had to make our camps outta sticks and berries! Didn't have no newfangled crafting kit..."

B