Terrain Negotiation Context 2 (Source)

http://soe.lithium.com/swg/board/message?board.id=scout&message.id=10441&query.id=380677#M10441

Quote: SCOUT SKILLS AND SKILL MOD DISCUSSION

I want to give a quick talk about each of the skill mods and skills we receive here.

Forage

Forage is an underutilized skill that is granted to Scouts. Similar to the artisan "sample" skill, foraging allows you to scrounge the immediate area for food and drink. This food and drink provides different buffs, such as temporary strength increases, HAM penalty reducers and other effects that have multiple benefits. At this time you don't receive XP from successful forage and these remains a request of the Scouting community.You can also forage lairs, which provide you with interesting items such as bees and eggs. The eggs are useful in some kinds of crafting, and can be sold. Bees can be placed into a creature habitat craftable by artisans. While these don’t benefit you directly, they do provide some interesting visual affects and may make you a few bucks selling to loot collectors.

The Scouting community feels that Forage has not lived up to its original design premise, which was to create incentives for Scouts to explore the landscape. We are working hard with the Devs to turn forage into a useful feature that provides useable loot and food items in line with the player crafted consumables that have become a key factor in the game.

Milking

That’s right boys and girls! Not only are we Scouts, we’re also dairy farmers.

This sounds funny, but milk is one of the absolute most sought after harvestable materials. I’ve heard cases of 10k worth of milk going for a million credits on Bloodfin, and averages nearly 200 CPU pre-CU.

This is primarily because it’s time consuming to get. Almost as time consuming as fishing (I won’t go into fishing here – read Volsted’s Guide to Fishing on the Scout Forums)

First of all – you can only milk herbivorous creatures, so don’t start trying to make nice to a lady Rancor. Second – as one would expect – you can only milk female creatures. In order to milk a creature you need to be mask scented, as well. One good tip for milking is to get two destroy missions for the type of critter you’re trying to milk. Get them close to each other – then run back and forth milking every critter you can between the lairs.

Burst Run Efficiency –

As you increase in the Exploration tree, you gain this modifier. It does not increase your speed running or your recovery time, but it does decrease the action costs for using /burstrun, which makes it more useful.

Creature Harvesting – As you increase in this skill, you are able to harvest larger amounts from creatures.

Creature To-Hit Bonus – This is a bit controversial, as it only applies to ranged attacks. The modifier gives a small bonus to your ranged weapon accuracy when attacking a non-NPC target.

Trapping – Increases your likelihood of successfully trapping a creature.

Camping – We are not 100% sure exactly what this skill mod does. It is possible to use certain camps even if you do not have the skill to craft them.

Creature Knowledge – This increases the amount of information that you can learn about a creature using the /examine function. At Master, you can learn a large amount of information, including whether or not they’ll deathblow and what kinds of hide and meat you’ll receive from them when they’re harvested. *NOTE - THIS IS CURRENTLY BUGGED*

Terrain Negotiation – This increases your ability to run up slopes and across rugged terrain. It doesn’t affect your speed over flat land. TN only works on your running speed until you reach +50. After +50, your TN is applied to your crawl speed only.

Mask Scent After near constant attention from the Devs for a number of months, mask scent is finally working as it was originally designed. With each patch, mask scent seems to get a bit fluky, and then settles back to work more or less properly. Maskscent is based on your Mask Scent modifier. It originally was based on your camouflage modifier, but this was changed as of the addition of the Ranger skill /conceal (which now uses that modifier). The equation used to determine a successful /mask scent takes into account your MS modifier, your speed (whether walking, prone or running) and the relative creature level of the creature who is trying to detect you. So as your MS modifier increases (with each level of Exploration), your chances of successfully getting XP and staying safe with mask scent increase. But it is also important that you are around creatures of a similar level to you. A novice scout running around on Dathomir is going to complain loud and long that his mask scent is useless and doesn't work, while an almost-Master Scout will be running around Lok doing the bunny dance because he's almost leveled and not had to do anything for it.

If you are having difficulty with mask scent, try two things - first, use it against creatures closer to your level, basically meaning ones that you would have odds on actually defeating if they attack you when you’re unbuffed. Second, change your speed. Going prone and walking both modify your mask scent prospects by between 5%-35% over running. Slow down, creep slowly and you'll start seeing some XP spam on your window. Also keep in mind that the larger the group of reds, the more likely it will be (statistically speaking) that your mask scent gets broken. Each time you get within the striking range of a creature (based on their ferocity) you will be “checked” to see if the creature broke your mask scent. 10 creatures mean 10 checks, and with the bit of randomness that is added in to account for luck, you may just get sniffed out - even against low level creatures like Kreetles.

Previous changes to mask scent have increased it's usability. It no longer breaks on yellow "non-aggressive" creatures. It has been tiered so that Master Scouts don't need to wait the full 60 seconds to remask after a failure. It does not break upon entering combat anymore.

Trapping XP

As a scout, you get a number of schematics that let you build traps – we’ll talk about each trap in a moment. These help to disable and slow down animals by affecting their HAM pools, or their ability to move, or giving them a “state”. 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 at a minimum.

In addition to the ability to get easy XP, you also get Scout XP for crafting traps.

Traps also are useful in helping to take down creatures that you normally couldn’t take out. Make good use of them!

THE BIGGEST MISTAKE PEOPLE MAKE WHEN USING TRAPS....is to try and trap something that is totally above their trapping skill. Now that many people with master-level weapons skills are mastering Scout for whatever reasons, they've been having serious trouble with trapping. Here's a handing dandy trap leveling guide, courtesy of GrandPop from the Scout boards:

Novice scout - CL 5 Trapping 1 - CL 10 Trapping 2 - CL 20 Trapping 3 - CL 30 Trapping 4 - CL 40 Master scout - CL 50

Trap Types (This is from the in-game listing of the trap ... obviously its changed)

Adhesive Mesh - A trap containing some form of compressed mucilage based adhesive. This trap is thrown at a target creature. If the adhesive mesh successfully traps the creature, the target will become immobile for a short time and will suffer significant damage to its action pool.

Glow-Juice Trap – A small container of natural bioluminescent liquid. Splashing the target with this material has the effect of making the target more visible to ranged combatants, reducing the target’s defense against ranged attacks.

Phecnacine Dart - A small Phecnacine tranquilizer delivery system. This object is thrown at a target in combat. When it strikes something, it releases a thin mist of poison. The poison will cause the target's movement to slow significantly.

Stink Bomb - A small container filled with the natural musk of an animal. The musk has a repellent smell and can cause a target to become distracted. This has the effect of making the target more vulnerable to status effects like stun or intimidate.

Glow-Wire Trap - Similar to the wire mesh trap, but this trap has been enhanced. The wire mesh has been strengthened and treated with a bioluminescent goo. The target will become more vulnerable to both melee and ranged attacks.

Wire Mesh Trap - A small canister packed with a fine and somewhat sticky mesh. When it strikes the target, the mesh entangles them making movement more difficult. This has the effect of reducing the target's defense against melee attacks.

Lecepanine Dart - A small dart delivery system, ingeniously crafted from natural organics. The tip is coated with a light Lecepanine poison. This object is thrown at a target in combat. If it hits, the poison will cause the target to become drowsy and slightly confused. This has the effect of making the target dizzy as well as causing a slight decrease in the target's mind and action pools. This weapon cannot kill and only works on animals.

Noise Maker - A special device that emits annoying noises. When thrown at a creature by a sufficiently skilled scout, the trap will cause the target to become stunned. The raw shock of the noise will also cause a large amount of damage to the target's mind pool.

Sharp Bone Spur - A spur fashioned from natural organics. A knowledgeable scout can throw this at an enemy creature, placing it in a perfect spot to cause pain. This has the effect of damaging both the creature's health and mind. However, the effects are never fatal.

Harvest Droids

We have available to us droids that harvest creatures for us – saving us time, giving us a slight boost to our harvesting abilities, and allow us to harvest in combat (so if we take a while to kill something, our prey doesn’t “poof” before we can harvest it).

My thanks go to Razhlok Lightningskull from the Scout boards for providing me with the information for this section of the guide.

In choosing a harvesting droid, check that the quality of the module your DE is crafting1 will give you some bonus to harvesting (around 3% per module). You want 6 modules (the maximum) for your droid.

You will need to program your droid to harvest. First you pick what you want your droid to harvest - the four options are meat, hide, bone and random. Then you must program a harvest command. When you start to program the droid, a question mark will appear above your droid’s head. Type in a command - for example "harvest". An exclamation point will appear over your droid's head indicating it has accepted your command.

Next, create a macro entitled “HarvestCorpse”, and either place it on your toolbar or alias it to your keyboard.

An easy one could look like:

/loot; /tellpet harvest;

You can also choose to program your droid with other commands (attack, stay, follow, store, etc) using the same method. To name your droid you need to program your droid by saying his name prior to the command. For example – programming the “Stay” command would require you to say “Donkeylips Stay”. Do this for three commands and the droid "learns" its name. Once it knows it’s name, you can go back and change the command to simple “Stay”.

To use your droid in the field pull him out of your datapad. Engage your target normally. When it’s dead, active your harvest macro. At this point you may target your next kill, while your droid goes out and retrieves the goods.

After you droid harvests the corpse you will receive a message stating a droid has harvested X number of resources from the creature.

At some point your droid will run out of power and will need to be recharged. In this case you will need to have a droid battery. If you /examine your droid, you will see just how much power your droid has remaining. Droid batteries are pretty easy to come by on any DE vendor's site or even on the Bazaar. I recommend buying them in crates.