Shattered Kingdoms

I think if something like this was implemented, it would do two things. One, incite more people to actually use ranged attacks in PvP. Two, it would make mercs a little less useful as PvP tanks, but a lot of them might start to spec with bows and crossbows again. This seemed to be a thing of the past.

That's not entirely true. There are tames of many different classes out there. Barbarian tames, however, tend to be the toughest in head-to-head combat, and therefore tend to be the pets that are chosen by most scouts. I'm open to reviewing some of the alternative pets that I've put in over the years, but I don't (and never have) see scouts ever intentionally choosing a pet with fewer/weaker attacks for the purpose of getting other/alternative benefits. I don't really expect to see that change unless we see a renaissance of new scouts trying alternative play-styles from the "common knowledge" scripts passed down from the most experienced players about how one is "supposed to" play their character.



That's pretty much exactly why the bronataur exists as it does. There are a number of other potential pets that I built into the Lost Jungle, but I designed those in at a time when most players spent a LOT more time at mentor/ master/ champion level before reaching GM. There was a time that a lot more of the animals in the Jungle COULD have been used by scouts (but still weren't, due to distance to travel) as they leveled up. It's been on my back-burner to go back to the Jungle and re-balance the animals so that this area can better serve the scout population in-game. Feel free to post a different thread or IM me with any ideas or feedback that you might have in regard to this.



These ideas lean more heavily on code-change requirements.



Yeah, he used to be pretty awesome. He was slightly debuffed due to code changes, but mostly debuffed by the arrival of other, better pets in the game who made him somewhat obsolete. While I was working in Vaerlain, he wasn't really a priority to re-buff, but I may have given him something along the way, as a token to his former greatness.



This would require code-work to design as you've presented here.



I agree. Some of these may have already been reworked since the last scout PC has spent any time with them. I don't know how much you've traveled around to test the various animals out there, but if you do some first-hand work finding and testing them, I'm happy to hear suggestions and consider recommendations.



I'm pretty sure these exist already. This would, however, eliminate the wild-fighting barbarian bonus, and the pet level may not be able to be high enough for a skilled e-parry. Therefore, I suspect the existing merc pets out there have already long since been dismissed in favor of the barbarians.



Agreed.

While I am putting up my wish list.

One of the things that have always bothered me about playing a scout is there are no herbs in valleys, mountains, deserts, snow, snow mountains, beach, or water.

These are all parts of nature that have some form of plant/fungal life that exist. Some new herbs, maybe some more powerful variations for the harsher terrains would be nice to see.

Marksmanship would be a scout only skill master level. Scouts should be the ultimate in raged combat, not mercs.

I can't stress enough this is for scouts, scouts only, nobody else.

Not true. Both NPCs and PCs have the enhanced damage skill and the reduction applies to both.

If I were to do it, I would agree.

Tested this out tonight and it does not appear to work. Once the rally affect has been applied from merc 1, merc 2 cannot rally. Merc 2 gets the same message you get normally when you tried to rally yourself while already under the affects of rally.

Nice catch. I forgot that you can't rally when rallied. I can change that.

It looks like sprites have taken a double hit to their damage, I am not sure if this was intentional or not, but not only was my ranged cut in half and my rate of deflected arrows gone up, it seem our melee damage has been cut and our deflected blows has increased significantly. We only have two melee sprites to really test it though, so if you could run some tests on the test server?

Deflected is usually just the damage message you receive when you take zero damage. So it's not a double hit, it's just that you were not doing much damage to begin with and now it is zero. I already replied earlier that I will make another update to tweak the damage bonuses for ranged combat, but at best you can maybe expect some of the 0 damage hits to be upgraded to 2-3 damage.

By the way, there were no "ninja nerfs" in this update. I stated exactly which couple of nerfs happened in the update notes. So if you see things that you think don't add up, feel free to keep questioning. It will either be explainable or a possible bug.