Those of you that know me, know that I like to keep people updated on what's going on, so here are your Ranger Dev 2016 updates for right now:

Currently in Proposal:
*MoN changes to help address the following issues:
1. Doesn't work in areas with an urban enviro more urban than neutral.
2. Doesn't last long enoughh.
3. Can't cast it unless in intensely wild areas.
4. Not a valid way to deal with the city as a lower-mid circle Ranger.

*Ranger SIGNAL expansion
- This will include a project to gather suggestions for new SIGNALs.

I can give more details once the projects become approved. Yes, there are other projects I'm looking at, but these are the ones I'll have out first.

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NaOH+HI

There has been thought on a lot of projects. I'll provide information on which ones I start on as I go. :)

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NaOH+HI

Looking forward to the new Ranger stuff! I had a ton of ideas myself but cant wait to see what others have for the guild!

>Excited yet?

Yes! Thanks, Naohhi. Expansion of signals will be a nice fluff addition, and very much looking forward to MON changes. I like the addition of cast on others.

Jalika

Thanks NaOH+HI,

Much appreciated for you getting this done. One question though MON is higher level spell. Is there anything in the works for lower circle rangers to help them improve their ranger bonus? I've noticed that at lower levels I had to worry about my bonus than I do now.

Thanks again for all your work

Bluefalcon

Hi DR-NAOHHI!

I know you have a lot on your plate and I haven't properly researched the forums, but any chance you could add horse instructing learning to Ranger Dev 2016?

More specifically, instructing a horse a lesson used to teach a significant amount of Animal Lore skill. I just finished 2 horse lessons that had an approximate combined time of an hour and a half and only moved Outdoorsmanship and Scholarship from 0/34 to 2/34. I do recall reading that getting skills to 34/34 status should reasonably take 20-30 minutes.

Any chance you could boost the learning obtained from Horse Instruction?

Thanks in advance and any insight to this situation would be most appreciated!

Thanks you for the update NaOH+HI.

Personally, I'm looking forward to the MoN changes.

>>Scout Area. Give biome, terrain, foragables.

Hate being that guy but can at least the foragable thing not be guild-restricted? I feel it's along the same lines as prospect and watch forest and I'd love to know what room has what plants.

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Uzmam! The Chairman will NOT be pleased to know you're trying to build outside of approved zones. I'd hate for you to be charged the taxes needed to have this place re-zoned. Head for the manor if you're feeling creative.

>Project 4: Ways to train Scouting

I can't speak for all rangers, but training scouting was never the problem, it was having it serve a useful purpose. Scout Area showing biome and foragables would be awesome and a good step towards scouting existing for something other than tdps and circle requirements.

The shelves in the Crossing Guild have some weird mechanics, too. It'd be nice if they were just normal donation shelves that were only restricted by virtue of being in a Ranger-only part of the guild?

GENT

Yeah I'm not sure why my experience with scouting is so divergent from others. My scouting is my second highest survival by almost 60 ranks and is closing in on 500. When faced with the option of having a somewhat challenging skill to train that does something interesting or an easy to train skill that does nothing I'm interested in the former, I don't need another performance.

The others are correct that you generally won't get above 4-6/34, but it does gain ground in the fact that it's a skill you can keep rolling while hunting and while working on town/non combat skills is I think why it got so far ahead for me. In combat I just use hunt every minute and half (the cooldown on exp is 75 seconds if E-pedia is in the right). I rarely get more then 2 or three mindstates from this but exp pulses are on a two minute timer you can always keep this pool pulsing.

Outside of combat, find a nice convenient short trail and learn to love it. The length and difficulty of the trail doesn't really seem to matter for teaching in my experience. I'm still using the trail from just outside the northeast gate up to the north road docks and back down, 4 mind states for a round trip. I interweave it when training skills around town and make sure to hit the trail again anytime I'm at 1/2 mind states.

It's worth your time to find a trail near your hunting grounds if you're going to be away from your home base for awhile, most hunting grounds have a convenient round trip trail somewhere near by, even on Aesry you can keep scouting moving while training outside of combat.

The only time I really went out of my way to work scouting was a period when I was in the 150's. I imagined personal trail markers would be the best thing since ever so I really wanted that 175. Those end of the evening time periods when I just wanted to zone out I'd just run a trail back and forth for 30-60 minutes before bed while I watched the scouting scroll and something on Netflix. It was normally enough to hit mindlock before I'd have to log lest unconsciousness win. A mind lock soaking overnight will keep the skill at the top of your survivals.

Added benefit of this practice is your perception will be bonkers, all of your scouting training will train perception as well, throw outdoorsmanship on top of that and it's rare that you'll go to sleep with less then a mind lock in perception. Soon you too can be watching the endless thievery in the pine needle path.

And just to clarify, I'm totally fine with adding more ways to train it, and I'm ecstatic to see Rangers getting some love. I just also really want to feel that scouting practice is making me better at something, and having some more useful abilities come out of it like finding foragables in an area is awesome!

At the risk of sounding ungrateful I'm going to be brutally honest and say I am not excited about any of the proposed changes. I'm not sure how they will benefit me. Maybe I'm just not understanding though.

>>At the risk of sounding ungrateful I'm going to be brutally honest and say I am not excited about any of the proposed changes. I'm not sure how they will benefit me. Maybe I'm just not understanding though.

That's fine. Not every piece of dev will be interesting to everyone.

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NaOH+HI

Speaking as one of the few Rangers in Plat any improvement to scouting is a huge win. Hunting works well for training in prime because there are other hunters in the area, thus creating a way for the skill to train in combat. In Plat this is not the case and the only way to train is by running trails for long periods of time over and over. While it isn't more of a chore than really any other skill to train it takes away from the overall experience for me because you can literally have no interaction with anything/anyone while running trails. Anything that allows me to spend more time on interacting and less time grinding skills is a win for me.

Gross. That's gross. You're gross.

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NaOH+HI

Yeah, Scouting is EASY to train, but only for a range of ranks, and only if you are willing to make your character do something that no sane individual would ever in their right minds do, for hours on end.

Scouting is a long outdated, broken concept and making it less of a PITA to train is good for everyone until such a time that the Guild/skill gets a serious overhaul.

Naohhi is definitely taking us on the right track, so thanks for that! :)

GENT

I train scouting three ways:
1. While hunting I use HUNT every 75 seconds. When I get ready to leave the hunting area I HUNT, HUNT # a few times.
2. While traveling, every time I pass through an area that has a crafting society, magic feat trainer or forest warden I HUNT, HUNT # to them.
3. I climb in an area that is near creatures at my skill level. I run through a bunch of climbs, HUNT, HUNT # to one of the creatures, run the other way through the climbs, collect four piles of rocks and repeat.

When hunting I usually get to about 12/34 for a 20 minute hunt.
When climbing I usually get to 16/34 by the time I lock athletics.
Every time I pass through an area and HUNT, HUNT # I usually gain 2-3 mindstates

I don't lock scouting all that often, only if I happen to climb and hunt back to back. Cycling through all of those and having a little more trickle in while traveling usually keeps enough on my mind that I am learning it the entire time I am logged in.


It was about three years ago Sithix changed trails so they teach both scouting and perception really well, supposedly up to 1500 ranks.
Before that change, every trail taught the same amount no matter how difficult, and by the time you got to 500-600 ranks you'd barely get 1 mindstate per trail run.
Now trails are supposed to scale from ~35 to ~1500 ranks, so if the trail you are using isn't teaching well you should move on to another. When I was trying out different trails after that change, the trail between Shard and Hib ended up working the best for me at ~850 ranks. You can also do magical research or appraisal focus while on a trail to add to the things you can learn.

Now, I didn't list running trails as one of the 3 ways I train scouting.. mostly because I carry a burden and pet bleeders. Trails can be an effective way to train, but only if you don't handicap yourself.


I personally think scouting is easy to train, but I might be blinded by how insanely difficult it was to train just a few years ago instead of comparing it to training other skills now.
First there was just trails that didn't train well at all after 500 or so ranks, then they added HUNT which also didn't train all that well at the time but did give you another place to train scouting.
Then they tweaked trails so they trained well, and shortly after that they tweaked HUNT so it almost doubled how much it taught per action.

(Not in any way saying I'm against new ways to train. More ways to train is great, and more uses for scouting is even better!)


That reminded me of another way to train scouting.. when HUNT was first released (and didn't train all that great) and trails still sucked, I started looking at trails that started/ended near a hunting area with a creature near my level. I'd go down a trail, HUNT, HUNT #, go down the return trail, repeat.
That might be a little tougher now since not all trails teach the same.. you would have to find a trail that teaches well AND has a challenging creature nearby.


Side Note: I am assuming the time it takes to travel along a trail first checks your skill against the trail difficulty to determine the base time, then adds burden, wounds, etc as a penalty. Each trail has a minimum amount of time and once you reach a certain skill in scouting, so if you reach X ranks and are able to run the trail at the minimum amount of time, any ranks above that won't factor in at all. If that is the case, could the ranks above X be used to reduce the penalty caused by burden and wounds?

>>Scouting is a long outdated, broken concept and making it less of a PITA to train is good for everyone until such a time that the Guild/skill gets a serious overhaul.
Making it less of a pain NOW is much easier than tackling the overhaul, which is in discussion but not something I have time to deal with without a lot of hands helping. It's not something I'm ready to discuss, though, because it's involved, it might not happen for a long time, and I don't want anyone jumping to conclusions.


>>Maybe PROSPECT and WATCH FOREST should teach a bit of Scouting.
Makes sense, I can request to work on it in my proposal.


>>SCOUT AREA for everyone
I don't have a huge problem with this, but if I go this route, you can expect me to make it much better for Rangers, because it suits them. If better means they get more accurate or more info, then I think that's fair. For example: Ranger using SCOUT AREA may see "Boreal Forest" or "Deciduous Forest." Non-Ranger would see "forest." I'm likely going to base the amount of foraging information on a skills. For the skills, I'm looking at Outdoorsmanship, Scouting, and Alchemy, with alchemy being the last factor and Scouting being a stack onto Outfitting for Rangers to give them a bump over others. Let me stress, this is all just conjecture though, nothing is approved.

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NaOH+HI

Outfitting? Do you mean outdoorsmanship?

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Re: Life mana Spell preps

You raise your hands in the air. You wave them like you just don't care. Somebody says, "Hey!" Somebody says, "Ho!" Somebody screams.