Creature Handling Context 2

Creature Handler Guide

Quote: By: Freebi Eaway, Posted at: Fri, May 7th 6:17 AM 2004, Last Edited: Wed, Oct 4th 6:06 AM 2006 Rated 4.20 by 5 people

The Intermediate Creature Handler's Strategy Guide v1.00 By Freebi Eaway Antares, Naboo, Intrepid (2004.04.22) Contents 1. Foreword 2. What do you want to do with your pet today? 3. The "Best" Pets 4. Special Protection vs. Total Effective HAM 5. What's the Damage? 6. Speed and Range 7. Missions (or no missions) 8. Pet Combinations 9. Training, Purpose, Performance 10. More Information

1. Foreword There are a lot of CH guides for beginners and for getting XP, but where are all the strategy guides for established CH's? How do you maximize your "CH experience" by using the best pets available for a specific situation? Hopefully this guide will address most of these issues.

2. What do you want to do with your pet today? Pets are the primary weapon of the creature handler. But what are you fighting? If you're fighting other animals, you'll want a pet with a high effective HAM (effective health/action/mind points) versus kinetic, since every animal has a kinetic attack and most groups of humanoid non-player characters (NPCs, also known as "mobs" have kinetic attackers. But as with all things balanced, is your pet getting more eff ham vs kin than needed at the risk of sacrificing other defenses, specifically vs energy and maybe others? What are you fighting and what are its attacks and special abilities? It can get more complicated than the number of attributes and abilities a pet has.

Let's focus on "effectiveness versus". This phrase means that if a pet has 10000 HAM, and a 50% Special Protection versus kinetic attacks, a kinetic attacker will have half its damage blocked and need to damage your pet twice as much to incapacitate it. So your pet's HAM becomes, effectively, 20000. And so it goes for other types of Special Protection. The six types are acid, blast, cold, electricity, energy, heat, kinetic, restraint, and stun.

The formula for calculating effective HAM based on the Special Protection attribute is (not including the "Effectiveness" attribute, which is usually lower anyway):

Eff Ham = HAM / (100% - eff%)

3. The "Best" Pets Typically, general consensus on a "best" pet should really refer to "best overall" or "general purpose". For more specific uses, there are usually better pets. As a rule of thumb, pets can be compared to other pets of a similar/same Challenge Level (CL). But it is possible to get a better pet for a more specific use. Let's use a rancor as a base for which comparisons can be made.

A rancor at a CL50 has 11300 base HAM and 32286 eff HAM vs energy attacks. A craggy bolma, however, at CL47 has 38000 eff HAM. A bolma can take 18% more damage in a fight vs energy. In fact, it ranks #4 of all tameable creatures vs energy in the game.

A delirious merek avenger has 38909 eff HAM and can take 20.5% more damage than a rancor vs kinetic attacks. It ranks #3 of all tameable creatures vs kinetic in the game.

Neither craggy bolmas nor delirious merek avengers are considered rare.

Unfortunately, the situation is rare where anyone, pet or person, has to deal only with a single type of attack, or special attack, but information like this is difficult to ignore.

4. Special Protection vs. Total Effective HAM While a pet's total effective HAM is often the most important consideration, sometimes the basic Special Protection attribute is enough.

For example, if you are doing missions you can usually finish with your pet nowhere near becoming incapacitated, why not choose a pet with a higher effectiveness versus a particular attack type? You might choose a delirious merek avenger (eff 45%)for a mission against primarily kinetic opponents, but its eff vs kinetic is lower than that of a graul or merek assassin (eff 50%). That's an 11% savings in the total amount of damage your pet will sustain, although it's a greater percentage of damage for lower level pets. It will however save you credits in stimpaks and food to heal them.

5. What's the Damage? A pet has several attributes which determine the amount of damage it can do. They are maximum damage (max), minimum damage (min), to-hit, and attack speed. Creatures in the wild all have an attack speed of 2.0 (one attack every two seconds), so while that of bio-engineered pets varies, we'll focus only on wild-tamed pets. The following formula determines a creature's damage during a two-second round of combat

damage = (max + min) / 2 x "to-hit"

While a pet's maximum damage may be an intriguing factor when choosing an attack pet, their real damage may in fact be lower than another. For example, using this formula we calculate that a ravenous torton does more damage than a graul mauler. Here are the calculations:

ravenous torton (CL34) damage = ( 350 + 360 ) / 2 x 0.40 = 142.00 graul mauler (CL35) damage = ( 310 + 340 ) / 2 x 0.41 = 133.25

Of course, there are other factors to consider, Special Protection and Special Attacks not the least among them. But for straight damage, the torton wins.

6. Speed and Range An often overlooked pet attribute (statistics aren't listed anywhere) is a pet's movement speed (not its attack speed, all wild-tamed pets attack at 2.0). Almost any pet used in combat can keep up with you on your mounted pet. The faster pets like cats can keep up with a landspeeder, and the fastest pets like lantern birds are faster than Speederbike Swoops. With this in mind, a fast pet can get in a hit or two during the time it would take a slower pet to reach its target. Faster still of course are pets with ranged attacks. Time is money, even in the game, and everything that helps speed up the completion of a mission means greater rewards per unit time for you.

Another bonus of fast pets is that they can simply follow you on your mount from mission to mission, saving you the time and/or cost of repeatedly calling and storing pets, along with the cost of camp kits. Also, your pet can also guard you while you travel, should any unexpected attacks occur.

7. Missions (or No Missions) Tanks A standard tactic for attacking an objective is through the use of a tank, that is, a player or pet who is a main attacker and bears the brunt of most (if not all) enemy defense attacks. Typically, a tank strikes an enemy base or lair first, and all defenses attack it. This frees up the remaining members of a group to focus on and bring down enemies one by one minimizing any counterattacks to the rest of the group. Having a good tanking pet means a better chance at completing a mission.

Faction Missions Faction missions and bases are typically defended with the use of both energy and kinetic counter-attacks, and usually there are two or three times more energy defenses than kinetic. A good tank will be able to withstand both types of attack and have at least as much energy HAM as kinetic HAM.

Creature Missions Creature missions on the other hand typically lean toward kinetic counterattacks, sometimes with ranged counterattacks, such as acid. A good kinetic tank will have at least as much kinetic HAM as energy HAM.

No Missions (Looting) A reasonable income can be made by killing all those NPC humanoids hanging around most cities, not to mention great loot (locked containers, skill tapes, armor attachments, clothes, disks, and even force crystals) and you don't even have to get off your bike!.

What you will need: speederbike swoop gleaming lantern bird(s) (CL34) (or similarly fast pet(s) such as cats) macros

Strategy: You will need 3 macros ready, one for /loot, one commanding your pet to attack, and another to call them to follow you. Putting them in a toolbar is probably a good idea.

Find a city with a lot of NPCs around it. Coronet and Kaadara probably have the most, but they are also among the busiest with a few other players camping spawn locations. Narmle has plenty of NPCs but they are a bit tougher and take longer to kill. Another location to try is Tatooine. Traveling from city to city you will come across at least a few spice fiends, water bugs, jawas etc. where you can use this strategy.

Call out your pets, get them to guard you, then hop on your bike. When you find a group of thugs to attack, target them with your [Tab] key, hit the pet attack button, fly into the fighting. Assuming you can withstand the NPC attacks, stay close to the enemy until he dies. The corpse will still be targeted so at this point, hit your /loot button. Hit [Tab] again to target the next enemy, then the pet attack button, and so on. Target, attack, loot, target, attack, loot.

Note: as soon as you loot a corpse, if it has nothing to loot, no new enemies spawn, if you loot anything at all, another spawn appears immediately, so be prepared.

Payoff The combination of bike and pet speed (and the fact that you never even have to get off your bike) means you will be circling the city and attacking and looting far more than anyone just standing at an NPC spawn point and waiting. You can easily make 10k per hour looting credits alone. Add the price of the loot you can sell and your pay per hour goes up substantially. Make sure to leave room in your inventory, or you will find that before long you won't be able to pick up anything else.

Currently, prices for locked containers is anywhere from 4-6000 credits, clothes are a few 100, junk dealers have just been revamped, so after an hour of looting that will be another few hundred credits. After finding around 20 disks, you might have a full set or two to hand in to a recruiter for 600-1200 credits. And possibly the 'gem' of all standard loot, Crystals sell for 100-150k credits (don't get your hopes up too high though, it took me a couple of weeks of 1-2hrs minimum per day of looting before I found my last crystal).

8. Pet Combinations With the acquisition of the Creature Management III skill, a CH can call and use two pets simultaneously, and with it, the possibility of using different combinations of pets. Here, the rule of thumb is that a higher level pet will perform better than two lower leveled pets totaling the same Pet Levels. But let's look at two examples (for the Master CH).

A rancor CL50 and a mountain dewback CL20 will do a combined 242.5 + 62.4 = 304.5 average damage per round. A delirious merek avenger CL40 and a graul CL30 will do 163.9 + 115.1 = 280 average damage. It's close but the rancor/dewback wins in that area. Looking at eff HAM vs energy, the merek/graul combination loses again 38397 to 22325. However, in eff HAM vs kinetic, the merek/graul combo is the clear winner with a whopping 57509 to the ranc/dewb's 39161. The merek alone goes down only after taking as much damage as both the rancor and dewback combined.

If you need tanks simply to survive while you and your party get all the XP, this is a good combo.

Another point to consider is that an NPC will spend the bulk of its time attacking the stronger pet, the second pet will hit with fewer or even no penalties, since it will suffer far fewer enemy hits and special attacks. The second pet can even be chosen based on damage alone with no concern for Special Protection or Armor since it will be hit far less often. With creature balance what it is, this means that you can probably find a pet that hits for a bit more damage since its defences may be lower than another creature.

An often overlooked pet trait is special attacks. This may be a significant factor when choosing your pets. For example if you often use a knockdown attack, it may be worthwhile to choose a pet with a dizzy attack, as the combined effect on an NPC is that it will fall down and not be able to attack while it remains dizzy. Conversely, why bother acquiring a pet with a disease attack if an NPC that it's fighting won't be alive long enough to be adversely affected by the wounds it receives from it? A poison attack on the other hand will affect HAM pools and bring down an enemy more quickly.

9. Training, Purpose, Performance The complete list of commands is as follows (not all commands are usable with all pets): . attack (current target) . befriend (current target) . clear patrol point . column formation . embolden pet (player requires ability) . enrage pet (player requires ability) . follow (current target) . follow target . get patrol point . group (group leader must be in range) . guard (current target) . patrol . special attack 1 (current target) . special attack 2 (current target) . stay . store . tame (current target) . train as mount . transfer (ownership to current target) . trick 1 (uses commanding player's HAM) . trick 2 (uses commanding player's HAM) . wedge formation

With most commands, you must manually train your pet. Some commands will be listed in your Command Browser under the combat tab.

There are various strategies for creating pet commands. While you can make all pets respond to the same commands, it would be useful to make different sets of commands, particularly when you call call 2 or 3 pets. A tank pet that is slow to reach a target could mean an faster attack support pet arrives and hits first, thus taking more damage than is wanted.

Commands may be based on pet type or by pet use. Many people simply make one- to three-letter abbreviations for their pets, e.g. a-attack, f-follow, sa2-special attack 2.

To create commands based on pet type you might have commands like cata, catf, catgr for a particular type of cat to attack, follow or group. That way, if you have two cats out they will peform the same actions together.

If different pets' primary function is to be a tank, you may want all your pet tanks to respond to the same command regardless of what kind of pet it is. Whether graul or rancor, if they are the tank, their commands might be tanka, tankf, and tankgr.

The default one- to three-letter commands might be reserved for mounts if they are out more often than other types of pets.

10. More Information There are quite a few creature databases with varying search functions and abilities, some of which were used in the creation of this guide. Most of them incorporate searching features which allow you to find a pet based on certain attributes. Here are some (in alphabetical order):

. swg.allakhazam.com . swg.stratics.com . swg.warcry.com . www.swgcenter.com . www.swgcreatures.com

I hope you have found this guide helpful.

Note: This document is not related to, and does not specifically endorse the use of any SWG website or creature database. For the purposes of this document, use of websites, or creature databases may be required and/or useful.

Special thanks to Ticoa for her input in the creation of this guide.