Smuggler Archive

I'm not going to repost, I assume everyone can read earlier posts...

I'm not object to other skillset characters being able to limit the smugglers ability to FD (especially younger smugglers). If we drew the FD skill to be the same as the percentage chance of success, then we would look at something like this:

Dirty Fighting
1 40
2 40
3 20
4 20
Master 50

Investigation
1 0
2 0
3 30
4 10
Master 40

The idea being, the 'roll' to see if you successfully feing is feign-antifeign=%chance of success.

So, a level 3 BH hunting a Jedi with DF 1 would run a 10% risk of the Jedi successfully feigning. A Master BH would reduce a Jedi with DF 2's chance of success to about 5% (the minimum allowed). A Master smuggler would have a 90% chance or better of successfully feigning against anyone (they are just that good at evasion). This kind of a layout allows similar points to be dropped into the Jedi tree somewhere so they can detect feigning BH's. It makes 'dabbling' in BH less effective against the feign, and it makes dabbling in dirty fighting pretty useless against a Master BH. And it removes corpse-camping if FD is fixed, because once the feign works, the fight is ended. Being a Master Smuggler pretty much rules out being any good as a Jedi. Making the investigation bonus favour the Master BH limits the Investigation 3 PvP-only character class. Spreading the first 80 points of FD across DF 1 and 2 means you need to invest 15 skill points to just get 80. Since you can't hunt a player before Inv 3, this means 15 skill points in dirty fighting buys you a 50-50 chance of feigning at best against a BH. And currently, failing the feign is brutal to your pool points and creates a huge delay before your next action (which is good). Those players who take all of DF just for feign still have less than a 50-50 chance against a Master BH. the numbers can be played with, but I've frontloaded a lot of Feign into DF1 because most smugglers find it handy for getting all that pistol exp. I also frontloaded Inv 3 and almost ignored Inv 4 to ensure that dabblers in feign are dealt with by anyone that can hunt them, but to make sure only serious Bounty-Hunters are extremely effective against the skill.
For PvE, certain high end critter could have a small amount of the detect skill that prevents feign, but at master, we should be looking at 100% in PvE.

All of this assumes that Feign gets fixed as well.

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GrimRebuke wrote:
by the way, I suggested that if smugglers got on the terms, failed BH missions landed the BH on the terms. This met with 0 approval from the BH community. It appears, after doing some hunting for other players, none of them want to be in that boat .

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Yeah, that's been suggested and punted out several times. The reason it's met with such opposition isn'tbecause BH's don't want to risk being hunted themselves. Sure, there are some BHs that just like theidea of BH as a means to be a virtual "punk", butthat's nothow the devs or the "true" BH community sees us. The mainreason BHs oppose this idea is that BHs have a high rate of failure vs. Jedi...especiallyranged MBHs. What MBH would support being hunted for a failed mission when that MBH is at a disadvantage against ALL Jedimarks? Most low level Jedi have melee skills to suppliment their Jedi: advantage Jedi. Mid to high level Jedi have saber block: advantage Jedi. Not to mention that a Jedi doesn't have to fight. Also, if 5 BHs all take missions on the same mark and 1 succeeds the other 4 fail...is that really cause to be hunted? Plus, with all the bugs & other exploits there are too many gaps for that system to be effective. If all those issues could be addressed then I think the majority of BHs would accept the idea (hey, more bounties more business, right? :smileyhappy The one question remaining after all that is, does it make sense for a BH to be hunted? I hate using the movies as a reference, but let's try that...Empire Strikes Back. Vader gives several BHs a mission...one suceeds. Would Vader put up Bounties on all the other BHs that failed? Now, Attack of the Clones. BH fails to complete the mission after several attempts; BH #2 (Jango) eliminates failed BH. This is the scenario that BHs may accept. If you fail a mission multiple times (depending on what constitutes a "failed" mission), then you should have the potential for a BH mission on your head. Once the BH community sees how smuggler bounties would work, they would be much more accepting to BH missions on BHs. Using a similar visibility system, each failed mission raises the BHs visibility X amount. A succeeded mission clears the BHs visibility or decreases the BHs visibility by X amount...or the BH could hire a Smuggler to remove them from the terminals.

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GrimRebuke wrote:

Dirty Fighting
1 40
2 40
3 20
4 20
Master 50

Investigation
1 0
2 0
3 30
4 10
Master 40

The idea being, the 'roll' to see if you successfully feing is feign-antifeign=%chance of success.

...Making the investigation bonus favour the Master BH limits the Investigation 3 PvP-only character class.

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We're pretty much saying the same thing I think, but through different methods. And I think I don'ta 90% chance of successof FD is appropriate for Smuggler Bounty missions. Only 1/10 ofBHs would complete their missions...significantly reducing the profit/mission.In orderforBHs to be encouraged to makea living through their profession, they would need a much higher chance of success. Also, what you're discussing is putting the BH roll chances into a passive skill set. What I'm thinking is putting it into droids. My reasoning for wanting to put it intothe droids is two fold 1) the chance of FD success is more determined by the Smuggler's abilities (where as the BH is flat) and 2) it helps bring in another profession Droid Engineers. There's so little content in this game for other professions, the more we can involve them, the better I say. This also puts the cards in the hand of the Smuggler. My original idea gave the Invest 3 BH no chance of detecting FD and gave it all to the MBHs. But, let's change that a bit and say there are two levels of detection droids...It might look something like this:

Edit #1: Clarification, the Droid 1 & Droid 2 detection abilities don't stack. A MBH could use either droid, but would obviously want to go with the Droid 2. If the Droid 2 fails, the BH may not try again with Droid 1.

Edit #2: Added comparisons

Message Edited by Rockhurst on 10-14-2004 07:51 AM

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Sharenna wrote:

I've not really seen much of this debate as I don't frequent the boards that often, but I heard about this and tbh I'm not very happy with it. If you haven't already, read all of GreenMarine's thoughts on the Smuggler revamp. Don't look at just one specific portion or another, but the system as a whole. Anyway if this does get implimented can we make it that a BH cannot use sliced items from a smuggler. Tell me would any smuggler be willing to slice for a BH if by doing so he knew he would then get hunted...Not all smugglers will enter this PvP system. There will be options so a smuggler can stay out of PvP but can still smuggle. Those smugglers may be the ones that would slice for BHs. GM did talk about larger risks for having sliced weapons and it won't be nearly as common as it is today...make it more illegal. Since BHs are also in an illegal business, they would be one of the prime customers of a slicing smuggler.

If a BH is sucessful on killing a smuggler then he get a TEF for 5 days against all smugglers, as a last act the smuggler contacted his smuggling guild and informed there was a BH out to kill them all.

I know that most BH's will throw these ideas striaght out of the window as they want it to be as easy as possible for them without any great risk to themselves, but there must be some downside for them if they are allowed to hunt smugglers. First, 5 days would be a very long time...especially without the luxury of a second character that Jedi enjoy. A solution I think would work better would be that the BH looses "reputation" for each failed mission. After the BH's reputation falls below a certain point, he/she will appear on the terminals and can be hunted by other BHs.

When I think about the Smuggler revamp and the interaction with BH's, I focus on the whole picture of what it could be like...not the particulars. My recommendation here is just a possible solution to one of the particulars that we would need to address to get to the end result.

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Jabourn wrote:

I like the ways I've worked it out the best... (yeah, guess I'm a bit biased )

Make Dirty Fighting I grant a +1 FD mod;

DF II +2

DF III +3

DF IV +4

MasterSmuggler +60

Currently at DF IV it's +70, and that's the lastSmugglers get.

Move the odds up at Master Smuggler.

Or... Place the mods all over the tree like CH's have for taming. Have every box in Smuggler grant +4 to FD.

Then put +6 at Master Smuggler.

That was the fix for CH's getting people dabbling in their profession... same can apply for Smugglers as well.

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How would you counter the +70 FD skill?

Problem with the FD Droid Detection is, let's say a Smuggler is winning the fight, MBH has 0/0/4/0 Smuggler (which a lot do) and the MBH pulls the ol' FD. Then what? The Smuggler then has to deal with the frustration of his own skill. One solution is to put FD only at Master Smuggler level. That would also fix the problem of Jedi having FD also.

Or... Why not just have FD on a timer? And by timer I mean you can only have it enabled for so long, maybe five minutes maximum. Then you have to wait 10 minutes to use it again.

Or just remove it completely in pvp situations (was it really intended for pvp anyway?)... what did Han Solo say? "I prefer a straight fight instead of all this sneaking around."

Han Solo was a messed up smuggler I do not think nerfing FD for smugglers (removing it from pvp) will be good at all. I mean, it's pretty much a smugglers only defense.

At first, that a master smuggler would only have a 50/50 chance of feigning against a master BH put me off--maybe because I'm used to never failing, maybe because I take a lot of pride in our profession, etc. But in a fair smuggler bounty system, that sounds just about right--neither side's going to get too frustrated when they can't make their mark/escape the long arm of the quasi-legal law. This may be the best system I've seen so far, even down to the numbers range, and it has my support.

As for BHs using FD against us, maybe smugglers should get the ability to see feign, too. After all, you can't [EDIT] a [EDIT]er.

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Rockhurst wrote:

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Jabourn wrote:

I like the ways I've worked it out the best... (yeah, guess I'm a bit biased )

Make Dirty Fighting I grant a +1 FD mod;

DF II +2

DF III +3

DF IV +4

MasterSmuggler +60

Currently at DF IV it's +70, and that's the lastSmugglers get.

Move the odds up at Master Smuggler.

Or... Place the mods all over the tree like CH's have for taming. Have every box in Smuggler grant +4 to FD.

Then put +6 at Master Smuggler.

That was the fix for CH's getting people dabbling in their profession... same can apply for Smugglers as well.

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How would you counter the +70 FD skill?

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FD works 100% of the time?

Forgive me if I seem a little daft with the whole skill mod numbers discussion...

Are there any states that a BH can use (aside from a KD state, I know FD won't work when KD'd) that can stop a smuggler from FD?

I guess I'm more worried about dabblers than the whole BH vs. Smuggler bounty missions, since we're pretty much at a disadvantage (we being smugglers) already.

I don't particularly think any change needs to be made, or mods for the BH to "detect" if a Smuggler is FD since I thought (and fully admit I may be wrong) that FD only had a 70% chance of working at Dirty Fighting IV anyway. That's 30% of the time that a BH is going to wipe us out any way.

Sorry, I know I obviously don't have much to add to this discussion, since I don't fully understand the jargon that you guys are using here, although I think that's part of the bigger problem... i.e. most players aren't up to speed on all the mechanics of the modifiers in this game, and just how the combat engine runs in general.

Hard to have an intelligent discussion about this when most of us are pretty un educated about it all