Scout Archive

There's an SWG Discussion thread where people are speculating it's server specific. Last week, I could walk around Yavin 4 and only be noticed by anglers and the occasional choku. Now, I'm getting attacked by diseased vrelts and crazed durnis on Corellia. Compared to pre-patch, maskscent is failing miserably for me. Yes, I'm seeing XP off of it, all in the 20's to 30's range. I haven't left the Tyrena area on Kettemoor, as I'm also working on getting my house decorated at the moment.

Which, by the way, can be exploited. I was rearranging items in my house, with maskscent activated, and kept receiving Scouting XP for a mob of violent krabhus outside the house. Oddly, while the durnis and vrelts were breaking scent, the krabhu weren't. This may have been because I was indoors. Even so, I don't think Scouting XP should be granted while in the safety of one's own home. Too easy to take advantage.

I am a Master Ranger.

The Keren Mission terminals give me CE13 missions (if that helps in any way). I group with an assortment of pets so the con of the mobs changes drasticaly depending on what I have out.

Creatures will agro on you when they break Mask Scent from much farther away than they would if you did not have mask scent up.

No non-agro mobs have broken my mask scent since the patch
I often get xp when I enter the detection area and again when I leave.
When MS breaks it happens most comonly when I am leaving this area.

I did not keep track of the amount of xp (I have not needed scouting xp in a long time). I did notice that I was getting it on most everything, some low level mobs I did not get xp from, but I am not sure which ones or if I was even close enough to get xp.

Naboo
Hermit Spiders (CL?) - Broke on 4th one that I passed.
Rabid Shauputs (CL?) - Out of 10 camps I passed it broke twice.
Rogue Fambaas (CL30) - I passed a half dozen and it never broke. Xp was around 100.

Endor
Boar Wolf (CL30) - It broke on one of a group of three. I was 90m+ away from it and it ran past the other two on it's way to me.
Arachne Warriors (CL32) - Just about every nest that I get close to, MS will break and a Warrior will come running. This was so reliable before the patch that I would use mask scent to pull singles from the nest using MS as a lure (MS would NEVER break before the patch, but that did not stop the stalking mobs from attacking). None of the other spiders would do this, just the warriors.

Dathomir
Mutant Baznitch (CL30) - One in eight (about one every other nest/spawn). I would get xp when I closed in to pull it and after backing up a bit I would get xp again as the creature came running to me.


It is way too late (early) and that is all I can remember for now. I will take notes tomorow and try to post some more solid numbers.

Astlin

Maskscent seemed to be working fine for me.

As a Master Scout, I ran around both Lok and Dathomir (and Talus, and Corellia) just testing out Mask scent. It seems that running while having it on seriously impedes the effectiveness of the skill. At least half the time I was running, it was broken by critters even to me (by my weapon standards, which is novice rifleman).

Walking made me succeed most /ms checks by 90%. I haven't tried prone yet, because that's a liability when detected in the middle of a "red dot" field.

Plus, whether walking or running, critters that conned more or less on my weapon skill seemed to have decently equal chances of breaking it. I wish I had written down my studies, but I was concentrating on checking out the planets, too.

I noticed, however, that critters on Talus and Corellia (with both more/less con) barely ever broke my maskscent regardless of running/walking (I'd say 80%success rate). Perhaps the "overall" safety of theplanet contributes to the /ms check?

Hope that helps somewhat.

~Z.

I know for a fact that just the level of the planet doesnt seem to matte.. I spent all my time on Corellia the last two days and it gets broken by things that are CL 11 or so pretty regularly. As a benchmark.. with my pistol it requires approximately CL 23-24 for something to con White to me.

Yellow dot creatures are not messing up mask scent anymore but even 1 very low level red-dot can break it easily now where-as before I could run right up to any red-dot creature on all of corellia or naboo and they dont see me.

As per my signature I'm a master scout. Yes my mask scent is breaking about 75% more often then it did before, and as near as I can tell the level of mob doesn't appear to have any effect on when it breaks.

It has broken on:

Nunas
Narglatch Cubs
Crystal Snakes
Klikniks
Pucs
Bols (seething .. and others)
Huurtons
Voritor Lizards
Picket Longhorns
Arachnes - don't know which as they were all together
Mereks & Meriks
Svort - no seriously
Mountain Dewback

There were others, but these I recall for certain. It's not so much the type of mob that's an issue, so much as how often it gets broken. I used to be able to run to a mission and not have mask scent break .. and if it did it wasonly once. It can break 4 or 5 times on a 1500m run on places like dantooine now.

Having a shorter re-mask timer is great, but it's not worth the change imo. If this is the way it continues I can always drop master scout along with traping and survival and use those points elsewhere though =)

Hope that's the info you were looking for.

Guys,

Thanks for this info.

Next question:

How many reds are around when you are getting it broken most often? Is a single, lone creature often breaking your maskscent, or is it a crowd of them?

B

It has happened to me when I have tried to get past 3 mobs, 1 mob and a gazillion mobs. I am not running straight through them, I always try to keep a 64+ distance. It mostly happens when there are more than 1 mob tho.

Yesterday one mob detected me and attacked me even before it showed on my radar. So it was defenately further away than 64 metres.Something is bugged with distance too.

But when they break my mask, they do not always agro, or it is only one mob of the crowd that runs to attack me. Rarely more than one unless I am too close to a lair.

Also I have noticed that when wearing mask, yellow mobs get the ? and !sign above their heads, so they do see me.

I was not detected by any yellows today, and I did test. Only agro mobs detected me.

I've been having great luck with Mask Scent since the patch. I will commonly get between 3 and 5 hits of XP per lair, depending on the level of the creature and how close I get. Red variety capper spineflaps will give me 21 points a hit, while vine rawls and tusk cats will give me 66 points a hit. If lairs are close together, I can easily get 500 scout XP in about 4 minutes. It does seem to work better if I am unequipped and walking rather than running, but the fail rate when running is only marginally greater.

I know that I am a couple of days late in posting, but I've had no problems with it since the initial patch or in subsequent fixes.

~~Shabhaii of Tombra, Naboo
www.chatarea.com/CityofTombra
The REAL BT

I am a Master Scout, working on Creature Handler and Pistoleer. Beginning with the server restarts in the early afternoon (EST), here are my experiences with maskscent.

Yavin4 - Maskscent broken at between 50-70m, on every spawn of over 3 MOB's, every time. This was not altered by posture or movement speed. Roughly 25% chance of MOB warping directly in front or on top of me following the "a creature has detected..." popup. I tested this while attempting to tame babies, for about 3 hours.

Dathomir - Grouped with several other players, at least 4 of whom possessed the maskscent ability. I belive at least one of the other players was also a Master Scout. During roughly 2 hours of hunting, my maskscent was again broken every time I approached within 50-70m of any aggro MOB group or lair.

I noticed that at least two of my companions not only seemed to keep their maskscent icons up, but in fact never seemed to catch any aggro at all. Out of the 5 maskscent icons, two appeared to stay on permanently. Mine and one or two of the other players icons flickered on and off constantly, only staying on as we traveled through dead zones with no spawns.

As on Yavin4, I never saw any single aggro MOB's spawn.

Perhaps, as Holocron noted earlier in this thread, the skill is working as intended and the repeated failure was due to my proximity to multiple aggro MOB's. If this is the intended game dynamic, then so be it. If this is the case though, the outcome of this "balancing" is that Master Scouts are no different from any other playeronce on the higher level planets.Because the MOB's spawn in groups, andhave such a high chance to defeatmaskscent, there is no reason to use this skill on those worlds. Worse, it is one less benefit of being a scout.

Maskscent dosent break alltogether too often for me at Exp IV. It broke when I would flip it on in the Squill Caves on Tat, but theres like 50 reds in a 64m radius there, and sometimes I got xp for the whole batch, which adds up real quick. Id say about 3/4 of the time it just didnt break, and if it did, nothing would run at me.

In the Wild if it breaks around 60+m they dont run generally (but the battle music comes on, which never ceases to freak me out), but in closer im a dead man, however it varies, some faster moving creatures will chase me down from longer distances. Personally it makes no sence to me, as if I DIDNT have maskscent on I would just walk on by, but they detect me easier BECAUSE im trying to hide... kinda wierd, and highly inconsistent, I think that needs looking at, it would seem that maskscent detection generates some degree of aggro on the monster, which should be canned and have a check if your in the monsters actual aquire radius.

One thing I did notice was that when I got detected, I would lock into combat, and never be able to get out of it until the creature that I broke on died (this pheonimon was unique to thesquill caves however, they wouldnt run at me, but that was probably due to the cave)

Personally im just glad that we started getting XP for this ability, but it still needs some maintenance.

Well as of last night my mask scent seems to be back to the old way.. I walked form one outpost to the ewok villiage and down to the lake and then to the other outpost and it didnt break once.

Even when I ran smack into 3 lairs of spider things because they didnt spawn on my screen till I stepped on them. (bout fell over on that one lol)

I am, however, no longer getting exp messages for mask, this could be due to being at a scout exp cap but I dont know what the cap is so I cant be certain.

I thought my mask scent was working just fine, staying up, getting xp etc. Well after a few days, and some hunting and exploring on Tat with a group, I learned more.

I have travelled through deep desert on Tat a few times now with a group. Several in the group were novice scouts, with low level mask scent. Well several times now, when traveling near agro creatures, of various level. Some white cons, all the way up to red. Dune lizards, squills, feral bantha, and swarmming dewbacksto name a few. My mask scent, with bonus of 100, would break and I would get agroed by the creatures, yet the non of the novice scout's mask scent broke. As I said this happened several times.

Besides the above, things that would not have broken my mask scent before the latest update, are now doing so. Now I can kind of accept that, if they made it more appropriate that I can't walk past "everything". I think master scout should almost never have it break, especially on a lower level planet like Tat. Now Lok or Endor is a different story, but I haven't been there before.

The biggest problem I have seen, and I bug reported, is that novice scout mask scent is not breaking and my master scout one is, against the exact same creatures. The master scout, and actually novice ranger for me, should be the one that can walk around with the least worry of getting attacked in the group, not the most worry. This atually brought my group into danger seeing as they would of course help me out and have to fight off the things that agroed on me.

My experience is opposite of squids. A friend and I were hunting together on endor. He is master scout, I am 4/4/4/3. We were both using maskscent. He was getting tons of scout XP and never breaking. I was breaking everytime i used it on all mobs from gurrecks to arachne. Sometimes they would agro sometimes not. I have not received a drop of scout xp from maskscent since it started. Maskscent continues to break for me on naboo, lok, correlia and yavin 4, havent visited other planets. I have also been detected my non agro creatures. I am much better off if i don't use it since using it causes a creature to notice me and half the time agro.

Romeosix Four on Bloodfin