Ranger Archive
Thread: Should Rangers group?
I personally enjoy grouping, but Rangers work fine with or without groups. We do get a penalty in harvesting while in a group (like everyone else), but that's usually made up for by increased kills.
Also, any Scouts in your group with Hunting 4 will pull in a significant percentage of the harvest. And a couple of them in the group can outdo a Master Ranger on quantity harvested.
Back when the change was made to allow everyone in a group to harvest from a kill, they not only reduced the harvest percentage for each person (just for being grouped), but also the overall harvesting quantity. I recall a time when you could not find a bit of hide, bone, or meat on the galactic bazaar and various other professions were proclaiming that Scouts and Rangers were holding back (there were even posts on these forums accusing Scouts of holding out to increase CPU).
They undid the overall reduction in harvesting fairly quickly as that was causing a massive bottleneck in the flow of resources to crafters. But the group reduction (aka nerf) remained.
With the recent changes to Chef and Bio-Engineer, meat is going to be in high demand. It'd certainly be nice if Rangers were exempt from the group harvest reduction. It'd be even nicer to see our harvesting bonus bumped up a bit from where Scouts stand.
The answer is dependent and many different factors mainly the purpose of the group. As a group, the group will harvest more off one animal than anyone person can solo.
The Antarian Rangers of Eclipse and those who hunt with us hunt for a particular reason and that is to fill our orders and contracts. That is our main purpose so 3-4 or more of us will get that job done faster and better than 1 person can on his own.
The question then falls how much money do you want? We believe that organics do not need to be sold at outrageous prices. It hurts players. Because the end product price goes up and people can't buy the stuff they want (this also roles into the whole economy getting ruined by too many credits in and not enough going out). A solo hunter will more likely make more money than he would sharing profits with a group.
But we are not out to make as many credits as possible. We make good money and get by with what we have. Plus we enjoy hunting together. Our corridinator gathers all the harvests and pays the hunters a 1-2 cpu less than what he is selling it for. Suits us all fine.
Simply put are you hunting to help your order or are you hunting for profit? That is the question that answers group hunting.
Caiden Appentice
Antarian Ranger Master Ranger/ Master Swordsman
To talk to us get on the public chat channel RIN
The only person who can make fun of me better than I can myself is a fellow ranger.
I can accept the group harvesting reduction as its generally more fun to hunt in numbers and we normally mass harvest a specific resource for a struggling guild crafteron larger hunts. If i want to go for pure profit i can go solo for a bit and turn over a nice tidy sum.
What i find totally baffling is that the group harvest reduction applies if you are grouped with a pet.
Correct me if i am wrong but pets, do not in any way harvest thier kills. As a Ranger/CH it is entirely ridiculous to expect me to group/ungroup my pets every time i harvest. Where is the reasoning behind this? The game was designed so a player can dabble in different skill sets to compliment thier play style but when they do so the game punishes them.
If i had decided on Ranger/TKA i would be able to do similair damage, kill similair numbers of animals and not have to pay a price on harvesting. How is it that the one Skill tree most suited IMO to match up with a Rangers skills has this inbuilt penalty.
Before anyone tells me i should hunt without grouping my pets, have you ever tried keeping 2 or more pets healthy, whilst staying alive yourself and without the ability to see thier ham bars? In a combat situation grouping (Although Passive) is possibly the most important skill a CH has.
It depends on two things - Can you solo what you want to hunt, and how long do you want to take to do it.
I can solo torturs, no sweat. I get a decent harvest solo. It takes about 40 minutes (travel time counted) to do a 2 tortur missions solo. 2 missions, 12k creds, roughly 1k meat.
With 2 people, 4 missions, I get the same amount of creds, about 1.25k meat, and it takes about the same time, as we have two people shooting. I tend to get some med xp on group missions (I have trained pharm 1 many times for friends to get AXP).
With 3 people, 6 missions, I get more money, roughly 2k of meat, and it takes only 10 minutes more than my 2 missions solo.
When I want cash, I solo... but I tend to do smaller faster missions and am not worried about harvest amounts.
When I want to harvest and need cash, I solo. Just takes longer.
When I want to harvest, have some time, and want to help others get xp, I group. Not hard to find a group in my city for the most part. As to the xp, dunno how many levels I have trained for scout/pistol after tortur missions, but it has to be at least 100.
JB