Ranger Archive

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Special Ability Combos

In the new combat system, players are encouraged to mix and match professions to enjoy a variety of game play styles and techniques. Special abilities and weapons from different professionscan be mixed to create powerful combat combinations.

For instance, take a character and combine enough Commando skills to acquire the Flamethrower and then combine it with enough Pistoleer skills to acquire the special ability Stopping Shot.

The result will be a character that can fire a fearsome blast from their flamethrower which will cause an opponent to fall down for a short period of time while being engulfed in the flamethrower's fire damage.

What combat combinations have you been able to discover?

This insight along with some other changes means huge changes to the gaming system.

For good or ill, well no one can say for sure, but some of the most recent changesseem to undo their entire vision of what they stated they wanted to do and achieve with the CU, but that would take a lot to clarify and does not directly try to give some light to your question.

1st, contrary to some peoples ideas, we are not a combat profession as far as this CU is concerned. We may get this, and our coorspondant is certainlyworking hard to getthis for us. But, at this point anyway, we can't say we are there yet, and at the same time have this and still clearly be Rangers. There were some changes made that certainly will help us in combat such as granting equalCL as the combat professions are getting and full health equivalancy. Butthere are someimportant areas wherewe do not have what is takes to be a solid combat profession such as 1) no specials that are clearly combat oriented or even fighting oriented, 2) no signature or specific weapons that belong to Rangers that others do not get (this may be a mute point now, since probably 3/4 of the weapons are no longer certified to a profession in any way; all you need is the cl level to use them) 3) we do not get bonuses to things like accuracy and speed in using weapons.

But the above quote is a real problem for Rangers now. Why? because of the number of SP (Skill Points) needed to get into Ranger and then M Ranger. There isn't any other profession now that needs to master and entire basic profession to get into their Elite Profession. This is a lot of skill points! A good example how this can affect things is when you consider that you can now master BH and Commando and still have SP left over to say go up to level 4 in TKA meditation and a few still for something else. Under the old CU you could not Master both CH and Commando it wasn't possible, but that no longer is the case, and you can use with these two Elite Combat Professions just about 90% of the weapons in the game.

With the ability to combine a Commando weapons (which now has it's specials in the weapon itself) with the specials of another Elite Combat Profession (which we don't have) you get a very powerful attack combo that happens at the same time. But since Rangers are not a combat profession and they don't get specials like the Combat Professions do, you have to spend what little you have left in SP in comparison to the Combat Professions to try and get some good specials, but this will leave you without the ability to get such weapons as Commando weapons (since this one profession is the only one left where all their weapons are still certified) and still Master another Elite profession to get all your cl level, to get your max health and some specials at least for combat.

So this quote combined with all the we know to be currently true about the CU (because things can still continue to change and most likely will) makes it very difficult to say just what exactly the full impact of the new CU will have on Rangers.

It looks at the moment like it is going to make life very tough for us with the limitations we have at the moment. And there are probably more unseen surprises like this as yet to be discoveredor revealed.The above mentioned forseeable problems do weigh heavily on our ability to hunt and to do combat. I doubt seriously if there will many more dabblers in Ranger since to use that much SP just will not give you the things needed in combat. This will discourage that for good or for ill.

These important questions need to be addressed. Even if we are not ever considered a Combat Profession, what is the impact of this on just plain hunting? How will we stack up in going after creatures that are near our cl level as opposed to those who are fully Combat Professionals? It doesn't sound good at the moment (again I don't know this for sure), but since we will not get the specials and the bonuses to accuracy and speed with weapons this could prove to be a major problem for our profession who are suppose to bethe best and most powerful hunters in the galaxies.

Well just my thoughts on a few things we know so far, but obviously I do not know the full impact of even this at this point.

Jolandir