Scout Archive

Scouting is a pre-req for Bounty hunter. blah blah.. But where is the tracking skill? Maybe in Ranger, don't know. It should be a skill set in the Scout Hunting line. You know hit F5 select your Quary and run with it.

Like hunting I you get tracking. It's got a short 300m range. And limited things to track, low power Mobs animal only. Hunting III you get a 600m range and more powerful creatures can be tracked.

At hunting IV you get a 2km range. Still only animals though. This would just be an all around useful skill.

For Bounty hunter, Tracking would then be passed into the informant line. You can track people finally. you can also use Traps on humanoids finally. AS you climb the informant or whatever line thracking skill goes up and up but in distance. Of course let's not rule out Prob droids and tracker droids as well. that;s another topic.

I have had the same thought and idea about a tracking skill for the scout hunting skill tree. My though is, it's a skill added in the Hunting skill tree. Along with your idea, at first level it only gets say green and blue animals. You would type in /track and the game would have a timer on this, say 2 min or what ever, and you run around looking for it. If it is successful, a HUD message pops up telling you it was successful in finding "animals name" and a waypoint type arrow shows up on your radar pointing you to it. If it never found anything, after the time limit, you get HUD message, "you failed to track anything" As you get a higher level of track it can find more powerful animals, 2nd level is blue and whites, and 3rd level is yellow and red. Also, as the skill improves in levels, the percentage chance it is successful goes up.

Now seeing as this game basically "spawns" creatures for you as you wonder around, this will have to be tied into the track stkill. When you use the track skill, the game will determine if you are successful, and if so, it will spawn an appropriate creature for you, within the range of your track skill.

This would not only be a very unique, useful, and fun skill for the Scout/Ranger, but would make them needed for other players who want to go hunt something. Because of the "spawning" system of SWG there is no sure fire way to find a specific animal in a specific place. Say a hunting party wants to go kill(or try to) Kayt dragon. Well good like actually running into one, while you have the safety of the party. Well a Scout with high level Track, you have a good chance of finding it.

An enhancment to this skill could be to implement a specific creatre list. This will tricky I know, because each planet has different animals. So this will have to be some programming on the back end. But the idea is, you type /track and a window pops up with a list of creatures that exist on that planet, that your level of tracking allows you to find. The programming wil have to know this. Basically like when you type /find in a city and list of buildings comes up, same thing. If not for the skill in general, maybe this could be added to the highest level of Track as an extra bonus feature of getting that good.

Any commments, idea, or changes? What do you all think?

I am Master Marksman and 2k survival experience from Master Scout, and for the life of me I can't figure out what the scout has to do with being a bounty hunter. You spend all your time as a scout killing animals, trapping, harvesting etc. My understanding of a BH is that you are going after people, no harvesting required and no trapping available. The only useful scout skill for a BH seems to be the exploration skill because of the ability to run up mountains.

Am I missing something? What sense does this make?

Just have tracking pull up a survey tool style window. You go through a list and select the animal you desire to track, hit the track button and it sets up a way point if succcessful.

As for bounty hunter... well scouting is virtually useless. Exploration is truthfully the only usefull skill out there for BH. Tracking and trapping would be an extremely usefull tool, especially for tracking player characters (if player bounties ever get implemented). Trapping and tracking especially would make for great skills augmented into the "information gathering" skill tree of Bounty hunter. BH's are supposed to be great at combat, but they gotta be able to find their mark first...

Mori,

I'll go out on a limb and try to peer into the minds of the devs here.

I think the idea behind requiring Master Scout for Bounty Hunters is that Bounty Hunters need to be able to surivive on their own in any environment. You aren't always going to find the person you are looking for by following a waypoint in a city, or asking their neighbors. Sometimes you're going to have to go out into the wilds to find them, and you need to know how to do that.

Its kind of like why Smuggler requires major, major amounts of Pistol XP. On the face, you wouldn't think a smuggler would ever have to use his blaster, if we was good enough. But you never know what kind of situation they could face.

As for the tracking XP, I don't know if this is a Scout issue, but I will add it to my list of topics to bring up with the Devs.

B

Onthe topic of smugglers, doesn't it defeat the purpose when people have "Smuggler" visible under their name? Then everyone know's you're a smuggler. The Empire would catch on rather quickly.....

LOL......

That would be really cool....

I'd love being able to group with a bunch of brawlers and be able to track down the high exp prey... beats the **edit** out of killing blue mobs all day....