Scout Archive

I'm working on Marksman + Scout. My marksman line is progressing rather nicely, and I'm getting experience in scout at a slower rate. But, in reading posts about class difficulty and the need for balancing, Marksman got a .5 rating and Scout got a 1.4 rating. . . making Marksman twice as easy as it should be and scout 40% too difficult. Anyway. . .

It appears at this point that trapping is more of a solo exp item. My question is (not having trapped a mouse) related to how to, when it's appropriate, and pointers on which traps give best exp. Please expound as much as you can on this.

Side note. I play a bard in DAoC and it has a mezz ability that was key in early groups for crowd control. It seems that if you have a kill mission and attack a nest, you should be able to use the trap feature to benefit the group, instead of having a marksman run around in circles with 8 angry mobs chasing him. Trap/Mezz the creatures? I may be totally offbase on that, but having not trapped any, I am speaking out of total ignorance.

Trapping is more like a monster debuffing skill. Each trap has some sort of debuff affect on your target. One of those affects is a stun, but as far as I can tell, the stun lasts only for a second or two. Traps are effective in lowering your target's melee defense, ranged defense, attack ability, and blinding them. I think there's a high-end trap that slows the target down (Adhesive Mesh,) which is sort of Mez-like, but more like the EQ Ranger's snare ability.

I'm also from DAOC (Scout). In concur with the previous poster. The traps here are mostly debuffs. There are some snare like effects, but I haven't tried them yet. One of the traps seems to simply make other traps more effective (like a resist debuff).

Feedback from some group mates (also ex-DAOC), are that they LOVE the ranged defense Debuff, that we get fairly early on.

SInce we get exp for throwing traps (trapping), and for making them (general crafting exp), and they have a nifty affect, there a nice win-win situation. The only negative is that they seem to take a combat round, if you want to think of it like that.

One disappointment is that despite the AOE graphic for traps, they don't have an AOE effect. For example the Stun trap, though it does make a big dent in Mind bars for some critters, but only for the one you have targetted. This doesn't make much sense with some of the traps (like the ones that throw spikes, stink bombs, for stun effects). I'd think those would be AOE and affect all critters in melee with me.

From what I gather, Rangers get area-effect traps. They can't give all the good stuff to the starting professions.

Thanks for the responses.

There are many tweeks to be made, but it is nice to know I can do things in combat to increase my scouting exp and not continue to have marksman far outpace my scouting skills. On targeting the mobs, is there an effective "face" command so that the camera automatically tracks to the selected target? It is nice that you don't have to face a target to attackit, but it makes it difficult because in tight areas, I have found myself aggroing mobs that were not in the way and adding much disaster to our group.

Your head tends to look in the direction of what you have targetted.

I have not found a /face like command though to spin the camera around.

I'd also like a "last attacker" or something. Tab goes through everything in yoru visual cone, even if it's far away and not attacking you which has gotten me into trouble before.