Scout Archive

XP – HOW TO GET IT AND WHAT TO SPEND IT ON

There are three major types of XP that are important to scouts.

First, is "Scouting" XP. This is used to get you through the Exploration and Hunting skill trees.

SCOUTING XP

NOTE: Hunting and Exploring use the SAME types of XP. So when you train up Explore 1, you lose the XP you had towards Hunting 1. You’ll need to earn the same amount over to train up your Hunting Skill. I didn’t realize this until my first training session.

Scouting XP is the easiest XP to get. You can get it one of two ways. One way is to kill an animal and harvest the meat, bones or hide. Different size and different types of animals create different amounts of XP. The general rule of thumb is the tougher the victim, the greater the XP. The other way to get XP is by using /maskscent, a skill you gain after reaching Exploration 2. I’ll talk about /maskscent more in the "Maskscent Controversy" section.

Which is better to train? This is a debatable topic, but I favor Exploration. First, exploration gives you the ability to run faster up hills, and also gives you increases to your burst run ability. These are important, and very useful. You also get access to /maskscent, which provides you with another means of gaining Scout XP, which you don’t get by moving up the ranks in Hunting. Hunting helps you in harvesting animals, and in determining which are dangerous and which are docile, as well as which are likely to kill you when you attack them, and which are likely to "bring a friend" if you attack them. But the downside is that training up hunting never will give you a new means of gaining XP. It was the last skill tree that I mastered.

So what should you hunt? You need to be hunting medium sized animals, that con either blue or white and you can kill without being severely hurt. When I was grinding through the last few levels of the scouting tree, my three favorite Nabooian animal lairs to stumble across were Nightspiders (spiders), Hermit Spiders (more spiders), and Ikopi (deerlike creatures). All of them yield 100+ weapons points, 10 combat points, and a whopping 50 harvesting points. They are by far the best lairs to hit when you are soloing. In a group, hit whatever you can find that you can take down without getting severely hurt. Always be sure to moderate what you are killing with how long it takes to recharge after a fight. I was attacking Nunas last night (which con white to me), and was needing to rest up after EACH Nuna. The XP was good, but the one mission lasted nearly an hour – way too long to stay interesting.

Other planets should have similar creatures with similar attributes. Once you’ve spent a few days in the field, you’ll get a feel for what gives you the best all around XP for the time and the pain of killing them.

TRAPPING XP

As a scout, you get a number of schematics that let you build traps. These help to disable and slow down animals by affecting their HAM pools, or their ability to move. This is one of the easiest forms of XP to get. You simply craft the traps, and lob them at your target. If they hit and take effect, you get the XP. Additionally, you can lob more than one type of trap at any single victim – meaning that, for example, if you have the ability to craft 6 traps, you can gain 6 times the XP for every animal that you attack. A Nabooian Nightspider, for instance, provides 50 XP points everytime you hit one with a trap. Meaning that a single Nightspider can earn you 300 XP points for trapping if you use all your taps. 10-15 Nightspiders per lair means taking one Nightspider mission and killing all of the spiders in the lair can earn you a whopping 3000 XP! You’ll blow through trapping quickly.

In addition to the ability to get easy XP, you also get crafting points for crafting traps – I had made so many traps that when I first picked up novice artisan, I immediately qualified for the next skill – all from my trapping XP.

Traps also are useful in helping to take down creatures that you normally couldn’t take out. Scouts can solo white, yellow and (rarely) red creatures with the assistance of their traps. Make good use of them!

SURVIVAL XP

This was the hardest skill for me to master, because it takes the most time. You only get wilderness XP by making camps. Every camp you make has the ability to get you XP – with the levels varying based on the number of people who visit it, the amount of healing that takes place while its up, and how long its up for. Basic camps are limited to 620 points of XP, and Multiperson camps can get you 820. I’m not sure about Improved camps, as I’ve not used one yet – I’ll let you know once I do.

The quickest way to boost your wilderness XP is to group. This isn’t always possible though, because every group I’ve been in has had more than one scout, and they’ve ALL wanted the camp XP. The most common cause of contention between members of groups seems to be over who gets to setup the next camp (followed closely by looting/harvesting privileges).

There’s an easy way around this: bring an artisan friend camping. To get my last 5000 wilderness XP, I joined my friend, the Weaponsmith, on a crafting trip. Every time he stopped to sample, I healed him – sampling takes away action XP and can be healed by a medic – and then danced to heal the mind wounds my /tendwound skill gave. In no time, he was getting great samples, and I was getting great camping XP, without needing to wait 15 minutes to get the max XP.

In addition, if you are out in the field and have a camp setup, keep a look out for folks passing by. If they enter your camp – even for a few seconds – you’ll get a little bump up in your XP. I usually give a shout with my coordinates to let anyone who may be around know they can come stop by to visit my camp and heal – and give me that needed wilderness XP.

NO BUILD ZONES

Yeah, they suck. But until the devs make a change, you’re going to need to get at least 1000 meters away from the edge of a city to be able to set up a camp. The best thing to do is to take missions or hunt far enough away from the city to ensure that you can camp if you need to. There is nothing more frustrating than to run into a great lair of Nightspiders or Nunas and not be able to heal up with a camp after a few rounds of fights.

THE MASKSCENT CONTROVERSY

Yup, we got nerfed. There’s now a timer on how soon you can reuse maskscent after you’ve had it "broken" by a creature. I’m sure you are expecting a huge rant against the evil devs for making it even harder to become a Master Scout and ruining our fun.

Well, you won’t get it here.

I can count on two hands the number of times I’ve used /maskscent and it was very successful – meaning two or three XP gains before being broken. Maskscent is a useful skill to have, but you should never rely on it to get your scouting XP. I’ve read the stories about running around Lok and getting 10000 XP an hour. That’s a thing of the past now, and whining about it won’t change things.

You’ll just have to get your scouting XP the old fashioned way – you’ll have to earn it. Like I did. Shoot, harvest, rinse, repeat.