Ranger Archive

I just recently finished a tour on Dathomir, collection some insect meat for a contract. While I was there, I realized that I hardly ever used /conceal. I made a couple kits, Dath animal bones and leather hide where 900OQ and 700OQ respectively. So, I was able to experiment real nice and made about 10 15 use kits. Then I saw that it took about 1000 resources, that's a lot IMHO. I fully realized just how much more useful /maskscent is. I wasn't wearing armor, just some pants and a jacket with +15 maskscent/conceal. In general, I could walk in the middle of a normal Rancor lair and not be noticed. It seemed to me, that cammo was really functionless. If maskscent protected me from regular Rancors, and conceal didn't protect me from higher level CLs, obviously it's silly to waste resources that could be better used on HTFBs(I love those things). With that said, here is my idea.

Camouflage and the Conceal command as a "buff." We'd apply it as normal, but instead of "hiding our scent from creatures" it would become a buff and would last anywhere from 30-120min (based on experimentation?) and act as a creature damage mitigation. One of the things that always troubled me, was how if Mr. Ancient Bull Rancor all by his lonesome 100m away broke my Cammo when I got to close, those pea-brained giant spiders I was killing suddenly noticed too, as if The Rancor dialed 911 and broadcasted my ware bouts to the entire planet. My logic for turning it into a creature damage mitigation, is to simulate a "hiding" effect where the creatures can't really tell where and what you are, thus reducing their combat. Ideally, it really should be a hiding state effect like it is now, but I think it's impossible to do in order to give it an edge over maskscent without making it unfair (I understand how unfair it would be if we could hide from Ancient Kryats).

Even on group hunts, my goupmates find it fairly useless. It breaks, beacuse normally on a group hunt we are hunting high CL NPCs or Creatures. It might be nice to get from here to there, but even then it breaks it's fair share, and when one person is noticed the whole group slows down, thus the Cammo benefit of speeding travel by keeping us hidden is lost.

Finally, if it worked as a buff as I said, it could finally be used with both maskscent and conceal. Now, I love ranger and to call my self a Master Scout on steroids, but I have to admit we are not very 'different' in our abilities. I love reading all the fun and interesting changes we could/like to see, but I doubt they will ever come to fruition. Especially the more complicated changes. I subscribe to the theory that small changes are the best to go.

In closing, sorry if this has been brought up before, I didn't see anything about it when I searched. Selfishly, I kind of like having us mostly 'Br0ked' or not very useful because I like being different and having people ask, wow, what's a Ranger...is it fun...why do you want to play one, but wouldn't mind having some extra functionality! Lots of little changes like this would eventually be one great big change benefiting all of the Ranger Kind.

Frederick Skinner
Antarian Ranger, Ranger(0030), Master Rifleman, CH(4214)
Ranger is not a profession. It's a lifestyle.