Ranger Archive

Even improving traps have been mentioned on this thread before, I really think that this issue hasn't been stressed enough! There have been very cool ideas for traps, but as far as it goes I see that on the State of the Profession wishlist only considered a few have been considered. I totally back up the ones already taken into account, like for example the one about NPC traps, trapping player pets for PvP purposes, etc. But there have been other great ideas too on previous posts that I do think need to be considered:

-LURING: I think that one of the coolest, greatest and most useful ideas for Traps for Rangers is the ability to LURE creatures away from their packs, so we should be able to kill it on a place where none of the creature's "friends" can attack us. Rangers are expert HUNTERS for crying out loud! HUNTERS do this kind of stuff! Hunters know how to trick animals into a place where it will be easier to kill. This will be specially useful if the Social Assistiveness info on the creature will be in fact displayed on the examine window of high level Rangers. Also, the conceal and mask scent must be fixed too in order to be able to sneak near the pack of animals. Would a bait be necesarry to lure the creature away of its pack? OK! So be it. In order to lure the crit the ranger must craft a bait made of meat for carnivore animals or of flora for herbivore animals. To avoid exploits, there can always be a chance that the luring will not be effective and it will instead anger the whole pack intantaneously. Of course, the chance to effectively lure the animal will increase as the trapping mod increases, so for a Master Ranger it will ALMOST always work. Very high levels creatures like Rancors can be lured only by Master Rangers and so on.

-RESCUE: Have you ever asked yourself how many rangers ACTUALLY USE or LIKE the RESCUE command?. Personally, the times when I have used it ( and that had REALLY worked, which means that it has been very few times cause it almost never works, even though I am a wookie who has innate rescue MOD's and has Ranger Trapping 4 Skill) what has happened is that it get's ME killed instead of the person I am supposed to be rescueing. Does anyone else see a problem here?. Yes I know that for any rescueing profession ( firefighters, lifesavers, etc) there is the chance that they may get killed when trying to save the other person. But that doesn't mean that it will ALWAYS get him killed. This can be translated into the SWG Ranger Profession as following: when rescuing a player, there shouls be a chance that the creature will stop attacking the rescued player AND NOT attack the rescuer. Of course this would vary depending on the creature’s level and the player's rescuing skill MOD. For a Master Ranger, it will ALMOST always work on a Rancors for example. Anyway, I am posting this rescue fix for those guys who actually use rescue (if there are any at all ...), because personally I think rescue it's kinda useless and should be eliminated or changed for another trap like for example the LURING trap i brought up above. Actually, it may be better to substitute rescue with lure, which means that when the creature is attacking another player, the ranger would try to lure him away and hence rescuing the attacked player. All the restrictions explained above will apply when luring the animal away from the attacked player. Anyway, if you do want to leave the Rescue command on the ranger tree, you might as well fix it by givin the chance that it wont ALWAYS result on angering the mob on the rescuer. I don't see why should a Ranger ALWAYS risk his life in taking the chance on rescuing other player when the best chance for the attacked player to be saved is to burst run away himself from the crit an save his own arse. They way rescuing is working ( or should i say when it works) now its pointless, the devs might rather eliminate it from the ranger tree or if they want to leave it, then they should fix it. And if they won’t actually fix it, then at least every ranger who actually uses it should be awarded Altruism points and/or a Altruism badge ... or don't you guys think that attempting to rescue a player from a Rancor knowing that the result is that the rancor would invariably kill the rescuer instead is one of the most ALTRUISTIC things a Ranger can do in the game? .... even kind of worthwhile a requiste to open the FS slot, didn't Qui Gonn Jinn indentify Anakin's altruism as a Jedi Trait???? (Just kidding about the FS part ... I just had to give it a try =) )

-TRAPPING 4 & ORIGINALITY: I think it's just wrong the fact that after getting 70000 trapping xp points you dont get any new trap. Actually, the fact that a Ranger only gets two working types of traps more than a regular scout ( which arent that great neither, Sonic Pulse and the Blinding Bomb are not better than scout traps like Phenacine or Adhesive Mesh). In fact, if you think of it, the Ranger traps don't make the ranger unique from other professions like BH or Carbineers that are also able to Dizzy, Blind or Stun creatures. Its silly that the only traps that have unique effects are the Scout traps, cause no other proffessions can snare, root to the ground or lower the melee and ranged defenses of creatures like a scout is able to, while various other professions can blind, stun and dizzy creatures like the ranger traps do. I’m not saying that scouts should be nerfed and give their traps to Rangers, I think scout traps are just fine the way the are. But Ranger must have effect unique traps, like the NPC traps you are proposing, like LURING explained above, even rescue can make a ranger unique if it gets fixed. But there are many other possible traps that can make the ranger trapping skill much more unique AND THAT WOULD FIT VERY NICELY IN THAT EMPTY NEW GRANTED SKILLS AND COMMANDS BOX of Adv Trapping 4. The only use of taking the time to get 70000 trap xp points is to Master Ranger, otherwise its just a waste of skill points. Please make it worthwhile to pass through all the pain of those 70000 xp points, please put there a REALLY cool trap. Please make Trapping 4 attractive to those who don’t want to become Master Rangers. As I said, NPC traps are GREAT, LURE I think it's a MUST, but there are also many other good ideas previously posted. For example, there is no trap that lowers alll three HAM stat pools, there is no trap that lower secondary stat pools like (strenght, stamina, etc).

- RANGER and CH COOPERATION TRAP: Both Rangers and CH are wilderness men. They both deal with animals. One is specialized in hunting them and the other is specialized in taming and training them. Both professions are related. Why shouldn't they be related too in SWG?. There is much talk about that CH rule the game, that they are too powerful and consequently should get nerfed, that the game should be called CH Wars instead of Star Wars due to the large amount of CH that exist in the game, etc. I personally think that that kind of talk is pointless and useless, that instead of whining and calling for nerfs for other professions is better to make all professions powerful and equally appealing. This can be done by making profession much more interdependent. All profession must be self sufficient in some aspects and dependent on others. They game is already designed to be as such and as far as I have read in the dev's post, they intend to make it even more interdependent. So I think that it may be possible to make a trap that will make it easier for a CH to do its job, but that trap can only be crafted and deployed by a Ranger. This can be a RESTRAIN trap, a trap that will temporarily restrain the baby creature's aggresiveness towards the tamer in order to make it easier for the CH to tame it. The success to such procedure would of course depend on the CH taming MOD and the trap's quality and/or the ranger’s trapping MOD. The failure would result in angrying the creature and making the whole pack to attacks perhaps. It can be a trap that when used, it will temporarily raise the CH Taming MOD by 10 or 20 points depending on the quality of the trap and the rangers trapping ability. This will encourage Rangers and CH working together, going into the wild together, as it should be. The Ranger will benefit on the CH's Pets and the CH will benefit on the Ranger's traps and camps. This will also be even better if the healing modifier of camps would also apply on pets. Some may say that making traps to enahnace CH skills will mean that Rangers would just make the CH even more powerful than they already are. But I think that by helping other profession being more powerful the Rangers itself become more powerful, cause it will mean that the Ranger’s services will be needed even more than they already are as a outdoor companion. To avoid a CH/Ranger exploit, this trap should be a high level trap (Master perhaps? Trapping 4 perhaps?) and only medium level CH could be benefitted from it. Other way of implementing this trap can be a CH USE ONLY trap, BUT THAT CAN ONLY BE CRAFTED BY RANGERS.
These ideas are not new. They have been previously posted on other threads, I’m just elaborating them again here cause I really think that trapping is not sufficciently stressed in the issue list. Traps do need to be fixed and they are as important as the other issues. I totally back up the other suggestions on camping (Please implement the Modular Camps! please make the gameboards in the High Tech camps actually playable!), mask scent/conceal issues, harvesting etc. These are very important issues that MUST be addressed. But traps ALSO MUST be addressed too. I think they deserve a place in the Top 5 Issue list.

As for now that's it. Nraas, Thanks you very much for your help to us all Rangers. Keep up the Good Work!