Scout Archive

WEAPONS AND ARMOR – WHAT SHOULD I GET?

I’ve not had a lot of experience with Melee fighting, so I’m going to focus on ranged weapons here. In my opinion, the best weapon for a scout to use is his trusty blaster. As I said before, 95% of the animals you attack are going to be coming within spitting distance, and you get some pretty hefty negative modifiers with carbines and rifles in close. For close in fighting, stick with a pistol. Carbines and rifles are excellent when fighting blaster equipped foes, but when’s the last time a Kaadu whipped out his rifle and took a pot shot at you? As a scout, you’ll be mainly doing close in fighting, so stick with a close in weapon.

This brings us to the armor discussion. Ahhh, armor. The staple of role playing. Well, there’s a good argument to be made for not bothering with armor at all – it damages your stats, and isn’t always that effective. As a scout, you can fight fine without bothering with armor at all. But that’s no fun – we’ve got to help our armorsmith friends out, too.

So what armor to choose? Don’t bother with Bone. While it looks mean, you aren’t wearing armor for the looks. You’re wearing it to help you from getting hurt. Bone armor is effective against laser blasts, but again – as a scout – the only rifle wielding Kaadu you’re going to see are in your dreams. Mabari armorweave provides good protection against melee attacks, which is what you’ll be dealing with most of the time. I recommend getting a set when you get the dough. And I know – the pants look girly (I get questions about my "skirt" all the time) but I’d rather look like a girl than be Bantha poodu.

So go with Mabari until some of the higher end armors become readily available. You can find it in most of your big city bazaars and many armorsmiths are able to make it now too.

MONEY

Scouts need dough. They just do. Maybe not as much as some characters, but you’re going to want to buy a house someday (come and visit Brisc Rubal’s Love Nest outside of Theed – I’ve got some groovy furniture), and you’ll want to buy a new DL44 blaster, and you’ll want to be able to tip that cute Twilek at the Cantina. So what’s the best way to make cash quickly?

There are two – selling resources and missions.

The more hide and bones you can get, the more you can sell in the bazaar. And once you start hunting with a passion, you’ll get more hides and bones than you can ever use to build traps and tents. Share the wealth. Tip medics with them (they always need organics for their crafting) and sell them on the bazaar. You’ll make pretty good cash, especially the larger the lots you sell.

Second, running missions. Delivery missions are fine – for artisans and entertainers. But they don’t pay half as well as destroy missions, and you aren’t going to get Scouting XP by taking the kiddie their prize for the best picture in the "Draw Lord Vader in the Shower" contest. You will get it for going out there and killing animals.

On Naboo, I have fallen in love with the Gnort Lair missions. When I go grabbing missions, I exclusively take Gnort missions. These begin to be available as you get higher in the ranks. Each mission pays at minimum 2000 credits, and each Gnort gives you 30-40 points of weapon expertise and 29 harvesting XP. Fine – this isn’t a whole heck of a lot of XP, but there are TONS of gnorts in each lair – usually 15-20, and they are very easy to kill. Someone training for expert pistol or pistol specialist can usually one-hit kill a gnort with your special action (body shot 1 or 2 for pistol). This makes "gnorting" quick, easy and lucrative. You can run anywhere from 4-10 gnort missions an hour (if you get their near to each other) which will generate anywhere from 8000 to 40000 credits. Easy money.

TO GROUP OR NOT TO GROUP

This is a difficult question, because it goes more to the heart of the game than any of the above. If you’ve followed my tips, you’ve got a nearly self sufficient character who won’t need a group to advance. But is this fun? It can be. But that depends more on you and your playing style than on the limitations or structures of your profession.

I’ve found that when I was in a social mood, I enjoyed grouping with my friends to go hunting. But when I was in a mood to make money, or boost my XP fast, I played the loner.

Going solo offers you the advantage of being in control – you pick what to kill, when and how. You get all the XP from harvesting the creatures, and building the camps. And you don’t need to worry about courtesy, etiquette and all that jazz. But it can get awfully lonely out there all by yourself. And you’ll never get good camping XP (unless you are willing to wait 15 minutes each time) to get the full amount from your timer.

In the end, as a Scout, you don’t really have to group often to make it to Master Scout. But if you never group, you’ll be missing out on a lot of the fun the game has to offer.

CONCLUSIONS

If you’ve read this far, I owe you a beer in the Cantina. Come find me in Theed on Naboo to collect.

I hope that this little guide to making Master Scout has answered some of the questions you may have had that haven’t been answered by the other guides out there. And I hope that the time and effort that I put into reaching Master Scout will benefit some of you out there who have the same goals that I had.

If you’ve got any questions, or need training, feel free to send me a /tell in game.

Good luck, and good hunting!

Brisc Rubal,

Theed, Naboo

Bloodfin

Thanks for great posts. I've been doing some of the things you mention but it has been trial and error.

Uhm,

Theseare excellent posts for an aspiring Scout to read - thank you much for sharing your knowledge!

Excellent guide that all Scouts should read!

I'm close to becoming a master scout and I recently picked up the novice medic skill tree.I was wondering how far to advance in the skill tree to be able to effectively heal yourself.I don't worry to much about healing wounds since I usually just set up camp and craft my traps or stimpacks while my wounds heal.Thanks for any advice anyone may have.Nice guides as well.

Medic is good for /tendwound Action or /tendwound Health . . . those little black stubs that start to appear at the end of you HAM bars.

The /medicalforage skill is usefull as well.

Great posts Delta!

I just wanted to add as far as the grouping question is concerned. I found that the best way to keep everyone happy when grouped was to do the following. Keep in mind this just the model of what I did, this will not work in every situation based on the people involved.

Almost immediately into the game I found 2 great buddies that I group with almost every night, having companions you can trust is a must for this strategy to work. One was a marksman (but recently picked up scouting on the side), the other was a scout. The strategy we worked out was as follows. After consulting with them, they allowed me to harvest all corpses and setup all camps until I mastered the necessary branches of the scouting tree. Why would they do this you might ask? Simple, I am the designated scout trainer for us now. No matter what they do, they will NEVER have to pay for training in the scout tree (I also do this for marksman). Also they know that I'm always going to be available to help them master the tree. There has been more than one occasion where we simply ran around and sat in camps at 7-10 minutes at a time to get survival xp for them. Now that I'm done with the tree, one of them is the designated scout when we go hunting. I no longer harvest any corpses when with them or setup any camps, though they do provide me with bones and hides when needed. This tactic has worked extraordinarily well. Although at first glance it would seem that one person masters the profession and the others are left behind, this is NOT the case. Both of them are also only a few days away from mastering scout.

I guess the overall point I'm trying to make is that it is VERY easy to advance in scout if you just get some buddies together and work out a system. Follow Delta's advice and always remember to throw traps at everything, harvest everything (as long as your group is ok with this), and work out a camp rotation and the xp will just fly by.

Thanks for posting! It's always nice to read a well put together guide. I'd like to read the first 3 parts of your guide, do you have a link to the posts?

See you in the foothills!

Preacher,

A better formatted version is under the "Game Guides" forum. The other posts are farther down in this forum.

Sydhartha,

If I recall correctly, wookies are unable to wear armor, because you guys are just too darn big. To be competely honest - like I wrote in the guide - there's a good argument against bothering with armor of any kind. The protection is gives doesn't always equal out to the amount of hindrance you get with wearing it. So don't worry about getting clobbered - you've got a lot of fur to stop the blows.

Brisc

I agree with most of this but I wanted to add one thing about weapon selection.

The rifle is the bets weapon there is for a Scout. Yes, it sucks that it sucks when you are fighting in close but once you get Intermediate Rifle and Trapping I no blue creature will ever get in close again. A Sharp Bone Spur and 2 head shots will kill almost anything blue to you. The only thing that is getting in close enough to bite you is a white con or higher.

Now, I am not suggesting you choose Rifle exclusively. I still use a pistol for close fighting, especially when doing destroy missions and I get mobbed by 2 or 3 animals when I hit their lair. When that happens a good pistol and the pointblankare shot rules. But if you decide you must choose only a single weapon skill to focus on, go for Rifle.

Just last night I bought a Scout Blaster and a nice DLT20a Rifle. With Advanced Rifle skill the DLT20a is doing 400-500 damage per head shot! It was worth every one of the 2000 credits I spent on it. And I got a Scout Blaster for only 500 credits somehow, I guess I got lucky in the bazaar.

My next expenditure will be for Mabari armor. I wanted to buy Chitin but there was none available on Correlia (Ahazi server) so I will just keep selling Bone armor and use the cash to buy Mabari. (I am up to Engineering 4 from using bone and hide for crafting Bone armor, traps and camps and I get lots of Survival XP by laying down a camp and sampling for fiberplast or metals for a while)

I play a wookie scout on Eclipse. Any suggestions as to what, if any, armors a wookie can wear? I wear like wookie arm wraps, and a jerkin, and a tree weavers hood atm but these are just basic clothes.

Is there anything a wookie can wear to help at all out in the field?

I'd say it depends on your style of play. I often kill mobs at extreme range so I prefer the rifle myself. Although sometimes they do get to melee range, most often they don't.