Ranger Archive
Thread: Camo kits, too costly to make with too small a benefit
The camo kits really do need something changed. On the whole what you have here is a defensive skill that at the moment is very costly to use and very difficult to make the item needed to use it. The fact that the conceal can be broken like the normal maskscent pretty much makes the camo kits the single most expensive consumable in the entire game. Ideally these things needs to be made more worthwhile cause at the moment the benefit simply does not justify the effort needed to make them. There are really several solutions.
Less specific resoruces
The camoflage kits need to require less specific resources to make. Having to find a specific meat, hide, bone and finally get an artisan to help you get the flora takes a very long time and ultimately what you end up with is an item which has around 3-4 charges but can be broken like the normal maskscent meaning that it's wasted. I've spent something like 2 hours gathering looking for and gathering the resoruces to make 3 camoflage kits and ended up with them only lasting around 30 minutes because the conceal could be broken. It would be much better if it just asked for any type of high, meat, bone and flora rather than needing very specific types.
More charges to each kit
The other solution is to double or triple the number of charges that each kit gives you, these are after all requiring very specialized resoruces for something that is easily used up in the field. Thus it would be alot easier if the kits had around a standard 5-8 charges each allowing for them to be used more and justify the difficulty in making them and being rapidly used up.
Conceal shouldn't break
The final solution is to stop conceal from 'breaking' in the normal sense. Yes, you can be detected however this is supposed to be like a camo kit that you wear thus it wouldn't really stop functioning once you were detected. You would however find that something aggro's to you and that allows you to run away while still wearing the camo kit however it's effectiveness is severely reduced because you have an enemy following you and thus drawing attention to you. The conceal would last a timed duration as normal and then you need to reapply it.
Good post, Tal-N. I agree, concur, etc, wholeheartedly.
As a Master Ranger I find myself using standard newbie avoidance techniques because I can't rely on Camo or Mask Scent to work. Call me crazy, but there's just something not right with that.
- Stravaig
I have a few issues with it...
I dont mind that the kits need to be made from planet specific resources... that is fine. The flora thing can be difficult since we rangers are supposedly self sufficent and yet many of us do not have survey skills. Any meat or something a ranger CAN obtain should be substituted or the camo kit should really be more powerfull.
I tried a few out with some purchased berries, etc... Yeah for exploring they will work great on NPCs but really a waste. If you shoot at an NPC it doesnt prevent everyone from aggro-ingand you dont seem to get the few shots before being discovered thing... I may be wrong... Maybe it was just in my test. Anyone else? I figured this would be a true ranger skill where you can be under cover and snipe or hunt with some time before being discovered.
Why on earth would you want to have Bothof them up at the same time?! That isTWO times the chance to aggro everything you see!
Too funny and yet true.
Has anyone figured out if a non-master ranger can use the top of the line camo kits?
PS So not nice that camping xp is a piece of cake now. I think all ranger wannabes should experience the joy of camp sitting, afk, day after day, week after week....
I dont mind that the kits need to be made from planet specific resources... that is fine. The flora thing can be difficult since we rangers are supposedly self sufficent and yet many of us do not have survey skills. Any meat or something a ranger CAN obtain should be substituted or the camo kit should really be more powerfull.
Yeah i agree that they need to be planet specific however the fact is that they also need to certain types of materials as well. if the naboo kit needed just naboo hide, meat, bone and flora then that I 'd say is reasonable comsidering what the camo kits is and how many uses you get from it. However in the case of the naboo kit you have a serious problem creating it. The first is that herbivore meat for naboo only comes from two animals. Gnort and Bolle Bol. Now gnort are easy to find but they give such small quantities of meat, the bolle bol are CL24 animals and are hardly something you can solo without some serious combat skillsplus they are somewhat rare as well.
Then there's the naboo scaly hide, again this only comes from two animals. Spineflaps and krevol. Both of which are swarming mobs who overpower you when you start a fight with just one of them plus the weak ones bearly give any materials.
What they need is simply for the kits to need any kind of meat, hide and bone from that planet, then it would justify the fact you only get two or three uses from each kit. Either that or as i said they drastically increase the charges per kit to make the effort of searching and gathering these materials worthwhile. As for maskscent, it's working fine for me. It's breaking a few times which is fair and it also works flawlessly on CL55 creatures as long as you're walking or crawling. Only thing it's failed on everytime is with Kimogila of all sorts 
But they're CL90 and above so who cares. I only hope that the Lok camaoflage kits are powerful enough to work against animals like that or else camo kits aren't worth the hassle when you can just avoid them from miles away with /areatrack
When you have -5000 Naboo faction standing you find it very handy while walking into town past the RSF But yeah on the whole the starting planets don't generally have any need for camoflage kits except for applying them to other people.
I made TWO successfull Conceal checks against a couple of Juvenile Canyon Krayts (Something I could Never do with Maskscent) and thankfully it worked just fine! 260 Scouting Expeiance Each is Insane!
Now if I could just sneak past the kreetle nests and evil hermit huts that crop up right outside town I'd be happy...
I do not have a problem with the camo kits being planet specific that makes sense. They could have made them even more specific which also would have made sense, such as one correllia camo for swamps and another for plains and grassland and a third for forest/mountainous regions, which they did not do at this point. The problem with the camo kits is that you need some very specific plant items. We can not do this on our own. You might get lucky and through foraging just happen to once in a great while get say "domestic" oats or wheat or whatever, but then it is one unit not lots. You have no way of "find" or surveying for specific items without wasting skill points in artisan to gain surveying abilities.
I have been heading toward scout/ranger with CH when I was in beta and eversince the game went live with my main character. I am just shy of Mastering in both CH and Ranger. This will totally prevent me from doing that if I want to have the ability to stay out in the wild and make my own kits. Otherwise it means buying them at high prices from vendors or from the bazaar. The first day they were out, I tried to find the specific, I believe it is domestic oats for Corellia. I looked galaxy wide through the bazaar and discoverd that none of the specific plant items for any of the planets is in the bazaar except one that was for Tatooine, which didn't help me on Corellia. So I linked up with one of my friends who has artisan skills and we went out to see if we could find what I needed. We found a 80% spot. Tried to harvest it but it said there wasn't enough of it. What???? 80% through and artisan and there isn't enough! What gives? If we have to find even higher concentrations of it we will be in real trouble.
Now think about this, this is going to really force us to be in cities constantly looking for someone who can sell us some. Now the problem doesn't stop there. The problem is worse when you think of any of the five planets that are not starting planets. You can not build on these planets which is fine usually, but how is an artisan going to get enough for all the rangers to make camo kits for these specific planets when they can not put down a factory or extractor to do it? This means individually harvesting on these planets while we try and keep every aggro creature on these very dangerous planets off of them so they can do the job. And this has to be done without the camo kits helping you because you haven't gotten the materials yet to make them. If we already had a couple kits well then we could use them on ourselves and on them (were suppose to be able to apply the camo kits to others who are not rangers). So you can use maskscent but unless the artisan is a skilled scout as well (which severally starts eating into his skill point pool) he is going to be detected by everything out there. So you will need a combat medic to keep you both alive while you are trying to harvest the desired amount of plant specific item you need for say Lok.
I just don't see this happening. This makes it so complicated that it just will not make the kits worth it, so we will be back to relying solely on maskscent once again.
I think the camo kits are a great idea, but someone needs to make some changes so we can resource the materials as rangers and not have to waste precious skill points on artisan unless for some other reason one wants it.
Just my thoughts on the subject.
Jolandir