| Bounty hunter complete guide : FAQ Q. What kinds of droids do I need and when do I need them to complete BH missions? A. You will only need to use droids once you train Investigation 1 you will need to begin using Arakyd Probe Droids and Seeker droids (note: not the Arakyd Fugitive Tracker droid). After getting your mission from the BH terminal speak to a BH 2 BH 3 Informant to gain the mark's bio signature. Then travel outside the city limits and call down one arakyd probe droid. Once it lands upload the Bio sig and wait until the probe sends back a message telling you where your mark is. Once you travel there use a seeker to track down where the Mark has moved to. A typical mission will use up 1 Arakyd Probe droid and 4 Seekers early on in a BH's career. Q. My seeker keeps saying my mark is at the waypoint but there's no one there, even after mulitple attempts with a seeker droid. What do I do? A. This is an existing issue. Sometimes if you're too close to the waypoint the seekers will stop updating to the mark's actual location. Use an Arakyd Probe Droid and the waypoint will reset to the mark's new location. Q. Is there is place where the BH level 2 and 3 Informants are in the same city as a BH terminal? A. Kaadara, Naboo has both BH level 2 and level 3 informants. The BH 2 informant is directly behind the Star Port. The BH 3 informant is next to the Cloning Facility. Q: How do I track a Investigation I-IV Mark? A: First, you need a supply of Arkayd Probe Droids (the stackable type, not the pet type), and Seeker Droids. Get those from a Droid Engineer or Bazaar. Next, take a mission from a BH Terminal and then speak with an Informant that is appropriate for your level. Now, leave the city. After getting the "you have left Whatever City message" try to launch an Arkayd Probot. You might get a message indicating that "You must move to a different area to call down a probe droid from orbit." If that's the case, move farther out of town. Upon launching the droid, you will get a countdown until the droid lands. Watch for and listen for the explosion of the landing probot! That is where the probot will emerge, reading as an "Imperial Probot Base". Sometimes, the droid will land outside of your radar, but generally no more than 100 meters from you. Also, due to a bug, sometimes the droid may not spawn for up to 20 seconds. Be patient and stand still. Highlight the probot, and select "Transmit Biological Signature". The Probot will then launch and commence a search pattern for your mark. A few minutes later, the droid will report which planet the mark is on. Head there, but realize that some of the elite planets do cost a lot of credits to get to! Balance the cost of hunting your mark against the reward! Once on the same planet as your mark, you'll see the waypoint of his last monitored location - what the probot detected. Based upon your own skill and intuition, your use of seekers will determine where you can find and intercept the mark. Launch a seeker to gain information on your mark's whereabouts. Most of the time, the mark heads toward a known city, presumably to head to a starport and get away from you! A few methods exist in predicting your mark's location: Some people will mark the Orange Mission Waypoint with a blue waypoint, as well (using the /waypoint) command, and after a few seekers, will see the general direction that the mark is heading! Some hunters will go to the city that the mark is heading towards, and wait for it there, or head toward the mark once it gets within a couple of kilometers. Some will just use seekers to track the mark down like the dog he/she/it is! Refine your own methods! Q. What's the best way to get the 40K combat xp? A. Answers vary, many like to hunt on Lok or Talus for langlatches or tortors. 40K combat xp is 400K weapons xp (assuming you use 0 traps). Try to get 200K Carbine xp and 200K pistol xp Q. FireKnockdown doesn't set someone on fire. Is this normal? A. Yes, FireKD only knocks people down. There is no secondary fire damage applied to the target. Q. Which Bounty Hunter special has a fire damage over time? A. The Bounter Hunter Pistol skill, Torso Shot, has a fire damage over time. Q. Does Bleeding Shot and Health Shot 1 stack? A. Yes, Bleeding Shot and Health shot stack but Bleeding Shot has a damage over time to mind while Health Shot attacks health. Q. When I fire the specials for my LLC I keep getting the message "Target out of range". What am I doing wrong? A. You must be near the mark in order to use that special. The maximum range is ~17 meters. Q: My LLC Mods aren't stacking! When I check my Skills screen, it shows that I have LLC Accuracy +50 and LLC Accuracy +20! Is this a bug! A: At the least, it is a visual bug. At the worst, we aren't getting the +70 accuracy bonus. This is a well known issue, and hopefully it will get addressed. Q: Why can't I use my LLC specials while prone? Why does it say that I strike a base, when I shoot it with my LLC? A. LLC's are currently reading off the melee damage table. NPCs will close into melee range with you, instead of using their ranged weaponry, because they think you're wielding a melee weapon. Also, because the game thinks you're wielding such a weapon, you can't do specials while prone. You may also get the melee bonuses when fighting ranged weapon users, the most notable of which is a 2.5x bonus against rifle users. This is NOT working as intended, and hopefully will be addressed soon in an upcoming patch. Q: What should I do with my 33 leftover points, assuming I'm intending to master BH? A: Again, this is a matter of opinion. Many BH's take the medic skill to use stimpacks and heal themselves and their non-CH pets. Some take pistoleer skills to improve their accuracy and speed, and to get stopping shot. Some take ranger to add in their tracking skills. Some take Creature Handling to have more powerful pets. It's up to you which approach most appeals to you! Q: I just lost or gained faction when I killed a mark! Why? A: Some bounties do indeed give you gains or losses in faction. (Wasn't there a post by someone stating that there IS a rhyme and reason to which marks give you which faction, based on whoever is giving you the job on the mission terminals? Something to consider...) Q. How can I tell what the NPC faction effects of killing my mark will be before I kill him? A. You can't. It's totally random. The mission blurb and mission title have absolutely no effect on the NPC faction effects you will suffer after killing your mark and the negative faction effects can be quite steep. Q: How do I "slice" a weapon or armor? And what does it do? A: Slicing of weapons and armor is done by Smugglers. You give them the item(s) you want sliced and they do the work. They will return the item(s), hopefully, improved. With weapons they can increase the speed or the damage. With armor they can reduce the encumberance or the effectiveness. The better the smuggler, the better the slice. Q: What are kryat scales/tissue? Where do I get them? And what are they used for? A: Kryat scales/tissue are loot drops off of Kryat Dragons. Kryat Dragons live only on Tatooine. They are used, in the production of weapons/armor, to make higher quality items. Kryat Dragons are not the only MOB that drops scales/tissue. It is wise to /loot you before /harvest until you get a feel for the MOB that drop other items. Q. Ok I just got Novice BH and I'm ready to start hunting marks what do I do? A. Grab a scatter pistol and an LLC. After gaining your 40K combat you should have enough carbine and pistol xp to train BH pistol I and BH carbine I. It isn't necessary to train in LLC1 immediately and that can be done later. To hunt a mark go to the Bounty Hunter mission terminal with no weapon equipped. Remember the level of missions depends on the weapon you have equipped. With no weapon you will get low level missions that usually pay between 3-4K and are a little easier. The marks usually do energy damage and use AP0 weapons against you. Once you get a mission you have to find an informant. Level 0 missions don't planet hop and are on the same planet as you so you don't need droids (as mentioned by the author of this thread). Talk to an informant to get your marks location and then go out to kill them. Q. Can I use power-ups on my LLC? A. No, the LLC is a heavy weapon and would use heavy weapon power-ups if they existed. Q. What are all the Bounty Hunter titles and what tree are they for? A. Avenger - LLC tree Q. How much investigation XP do I get per mission. A. Investigation XP is 1% of mission payout. Higher paying missions will give more Investigation XP. Q. Can I group with people to kill my marks? A. Normally, you cannot group with other players in order to kill marks. There are however some exceptions, although it is not known if these are bugs with the TEF system or as designed by the developers. If you are of a given faction and you group with someone of the same faction, the mark becomes killable by everyone else in the group after the mark fires at the Bounty Hunter who has the mission. Note: Q: Sometimes my marks end up in a city stuck in buildings and are attackable yet can be seen, is this mission stopper? A: Most of the time it's not, and here's how you can try to get around it: *note - this will require a pet or a droid* Give your attack command to your pet/droid and 9 times out of 10 the pet/droid and mark will go at it, even through walls. Next, give your follow command and head for open area away from the building, 9 times out of 10 that mark will come running right out, guns blazing! Engage the mark as normal. Not only have I used this repeatedly to 'free' marks from invalid locs but I've used this on other attackable NPC's stuck in static structures just to verify that it works. For example, had a mummer stuck in railing outside a guildhall in Kadaara. While most of him was showing, his legs were in the scenery and he was not attackable. Droid attacks, mummer comes running after it + me waiting patiently with LLC = really really dead mummer. Q. Is there a way to earn Investigation XP other than missions from a Bounty Hunter Terminal? A. Yes. At Investigation II you are able to be part of a team which can take over a Faction base. There are various, static NPC bases throughout the galaxy. Taking over the base requires a Bio Engineer, Bounty Hunter, Commando, and Smuggler. Successfully taking over a faction base will reward the Bounty Hunter with 1000 Investigation XP. Q: Do marks move around randomly or is there some pattern to their behavior? A: The novice level marks, being on the same planet aren't covered in this, but here are my findings using a simple calculator. The mark, given that the seekers are properly updating his position - meaning you are not needing to launch a second Arakyd probe on-planet, seems to travel at about 176m/min. Besides the occasional mark that seems to always be one step ahead of me, meaning changing direction (not sure if they are really doing this or not) and being 3-4km away from me always, this number should allow you to plan how long you have for healing and/or missions until the mark is within a reasonable distance. For instance, my first mark this morning was at a distance of ~10km from Restuss on Rori. Using the mark travel speed, I was able to get some chores done and come back in time to launch another seeker and locate the mark right in town at exactly the time I had predicted. Q. What do I do with my 33 skill credits that I have left after making Master Bounty Hunter? A. You can train some Medic skills so you can heal while fighting marks, you can get some pisoleer or carbineer skills to augment your combat ability or train Creature Handler to get a tougher pet to tank for you. There are a number of different options available to you. Your decision will be determined by your play style and preferences. TERMINALS AND TRAINERS Bounty Hunter Trainers: Mission Terminals: Novice Bounty Hunter Informants: Master Investigation Informant: Master Bounty Hunter Informants: Bounty Hunter Droid Terminals: The quickest and easiest terminal/informant setup I have found is in Coronet, Corellia: -220, -4470 in the center of town around the fountains. You hit the terminal and turn around to the fountian behind you and there is the informant (an information broker, Cornett, Corellia: -212, -4465 ). This is a good starting point, also as if you can take missions that drop you in Tyrena you can hit the terminal/informant there as well. Corellia is a great planet for getting a feel for the hunt. Try to have at least BH carbine 1 or BH pistol 1 to be able to take the red marks. TO make things easier your first hunt hit the terminal with no weapon equiped you should get a diffculty 5 mission or so. If you have your carbine or blaster equipped you get about 13 to 18, and with a LLC you get 17 to 26 or so. Make sure you have some stim packs at least A, and B if you can get those, and a few camping kits because you will be doing a bit of healing out in the wild and find that your first marks will teach you to hit and fade or get really effective with your offensive strategies. Try it out and get your approach to hunting the mark honed and then you can branch out to higher diffculty missions. WEAPON GUIDE Preliminaries Before we go further, a recap of some basics: Base Damage: The damage that appears in your "Battlespam" (i.e. the text which shows up in your Combat window). The minimum amount of Base Damage you can do with autofire will be the minimum damage rating of your weapon multiplied by 1.5. The maximum amount of Base Damage you can do with autofire will be the maximum damage rating of your weapon multiplied by 1.5. So if you have a weapon with a damage rating of 100-200, your base damage will range from (100 * 1.5) to (200 * 1.5), or 150-300. Floaty Damage: The damage that appears over the heads of critters, NPCs, and PCs when you shoot them. This is the damage that is actually removed from the HAM bars of your target. 80% of the damage is applied to one HAM bar, and 10% is applied to each of the other two. So a 100-point shot to the Head would take off 80 points of Mind, 10 points of Health, and 10 points of Action. Floaty damage is obtained by multiplying the Base Damage by a Resistance and Armor Factor (RAF). Resistance and Armor Factor (RAF): The effect of Armor Piercing (or lack thereof) and Damage Resistance. The RAF consists of an Armor Piercing Bonus (or Penalty), and a Resistance modifier. Armor Piercing Bonus: [(1.25)^(AP-AR)] This is applied whenever the AP of the weapon is larger than the AR of the target. Armor Piercing Penalty: [(0.50)^(AR-AP)] This is applied whenever the AR of the target is larger than the AP of the weapon. ---------------------------------------------- One of the convenient things about the SWG combat engine is that the damage distribution seems to be even. If you have a weapon with the following stats: 100-200 Damage; 3.5 Speed; 15/20/25 HAM; AP: Heavy, then you will have Base Damage values of 150-300 for autofire, and the chances of you hitting for any particular damage value from 150-300 will be the same for all values. Your chance of hitting for 188 points of Base Damage is the same as your chance for hitting for 234 points of Base Damage, which is the same as your chance of hitting for 150 points, which is the same as your chance of hitting for 300 points, etc. This is convenient because, with an even distribution, you can easily find out your Average Base Damage Per Shot. Specifically: So for our hypothetical weapon with damage 100-200, the Average Base Damage Per Shot is: Next we need to factor in Armor Piercing. This will give us the Average AP Damage Per Shot To factor in the Armor Piercing rating of the weapon, simply take the Average Base Damage Per Shot of the weapon and multiply it by [(1.25)^N], where N takes on a numerical rating based on the following: 0 = No AP This represents the "base case" where you're firing against a critter with no armor. Returning to our hypothetical weapon, the Average AP Damage Per Shot is: With the Average AP Damage Per Shot in hand, one of the more obvious ways to compare weapons is via AP Damage Per Second. And here's where it gets a little tricky. Each weapon has a Base Weapon Speed. Our hypothetical 100-200 damage weapon has a Base Weapon Speed of 3.5. That means that, in autofire mode, and assuming reasonable latency conditions, the weapon will fire once every 3.5 seconds. But. Each specific weapon track has a corresponding "Speed" skill. If you train Novice Rifleman, you receive +5 Rifle Speed, +5 Pistol Speed, and +5 Carbine Speed. As you go up each track, your weapon specific Speed skill increases. By the time you reach the Novice level of one of the three specialized weapon professions (Novice Rifleman, Novice Pistoleer, or Novice Carbineer), your Speed skill for your specific weapon will be +30. (And if you're a Master Marksman as well, it'll be +35.) This is important because your Actual Firing Rate is affected by your Weapon Speed skill thusly: This means (among other things) that you can't calculate an AP Damage Per Second rating simply by dividing Average AP Damage Per Shot by the Base Weapon Speed. Fortunately, however, the purpose of this exercise is NOT to calculate Damage Per Second. Remember: We're just looking for a number we can use to compare weapon effectiveness. And, as it turns out, dividing Average AP Damage Per Shot by the Base Weapon Speed will -- with one particularly crucial caveat which I will detail below -- give us a very useful number for weapon comparison. I call this number the Effectiveness Rating. The complete formula for the Effectiveness Rating is: Effectiveness Rating ={[(Min + Max)/2] * (1.5) * (1.25)^N}/Base Weapon Speed Crucial Caveat(tm): There is a 1.0 second speed cap on all weapons. This means that for many weapons, there will come a point where you are shooting that weapon as fast as you will ever shoot it, and no amount of Speed skill increase will allow you to fire any faster. At that point, other weapons which have a lower Effectiveness Rating will slowly become more effective, relative to the weapon at the 1.0 speed cap, and may even surpass the original weapon's effectiveness with increased Weapon Speed Skill. To illustrate this point, compare two hypothetical weapons: a 150-250 damage, 1.3 speed weapon with no armor piercing, and a 150-400 damage, 5.0 speed weapon, also with no armor piercing. The Effectiveness Rating for the first weapon is: The Effectiveness Rating for the second weapon is: According to this, the first weapon is clearly superior. It will throw out more damage in less time than the second weapon. However, the first weapon will hit the 1.0 second speed cap when the user's Weapon Speed Skill hits 23.1. Which effectively means that the user will hit the cap when he trains his 4th box in the Marksman Weapon Track (i.e. Rifle Specialist, Pistol Specialist, Carbineer Specialist), since that would put his Weapon Speed Skill at +25. So once he's trained that 4th box, he's firing that weapon as fast as he's ever going to fire it. The adjusted Effectiveness Rating for the first weapon once it hits the 1.0 speed cap is: By contrast, the user of the 2nd weapon won't hit the 1.0 speed cap until she reaches a Weapon Speed Skill of +80. But at that point the adjusted Effectiveness Rating for the 2nd weapon will be: Note that at this point, the 2nd weapon is actually outperforming the 1st. If you're curious, the performance of the 2nd weapon equalled the performance of the 1st weapon when the Weapon Speed Skill of the user of the 2nd weapon hit +72.5. If you're REALLY curious, if you have two weapons, and the 1st weapon (A) has a higher Effectiveness Rating than the 2nd; and (B) is already at the 1.0 second speed cap, you can calculate the Weapon Speed Skill needed to make the performance of the 2nd weapon equal the performance of the first via the following formula: where Min1 is the minimum listed damage for the 1st weapon, Min2 is the minimum listed damage for the 2nd weapon, etc., and where Base Weapon Speed is the speed of the 2nd weapon. Anyhow, the upshot of all this fascinating math is this: A weapon with a higher Effectiveness Rating will outperform a weapon with a lower Effectiveness Rating, provided: 1) The Armor Rating of the target critter is equal to or lower than the Armor Piercing Rating for both weapons. The weapon with the higher Effectiveness Rating MAY continue to outperform the weapon with the lower Effectiveness Rating even if one or more of these conditions aren't met. But if all four conditions are met, then the weapon with the higher Effectiveness Rating will always be the superior weapon. This being the case, I will provide the Weapon Speed Skill at which the weapon hits the speed cap when I finally get around to actually comparing various weapons (which, at the rate that I'm going, will probably happen sometime in June 2011). Finally, if we want to see how weapons compare with respect to firing special attacks (Eye Shot, Torso Shot, Underhand Shot, etc), we can divide the Effectiveness Rating by the HAM costs to get what I call the Volsted Rating. (I call it that because "HAM Effectivness Rating" and "Effectiveness HAM Rating" both sound dorky to me, and because I suck at coming up with names.) Harking back to our initial hypothetical weapon, the one with the 100-200 damage and the 15/20/25 HAM costs, the Volsted Rating would be: Effectiveness Rating: {[(100+200)/2] * 1.5 * (1.25)^3}/3.5 = 125.6 If you just got here by skipping over all the foregoing algebra, allow me to be among the first to welcome you to the rest of this post. Here's the payoff, where all of those calculations will come into play. For each listed ranged weapon which has an autofire mode, I will provide the Effectiveness Rating, the Volsted Rating, and the Weapon Speed Skill required to hit the 1.0 second speed cap. Pistols Scout Blaster; 60-122 Damage; 1.7 Speed; 11-22-11 HAM; AP: None Advanced Scout Blaster; 74-145 Damage; 2.0 Speed; 11-22-11 HAM; AP: None Advanced Power5 Pistol; 59-182 Damage; 2.8 Speed; 16-39-15 HAM; AP: None Advanced FWG5 Pistol; 50-193 Damage; 2.2 Speed; 11-36-18 HAM; AP: None Advanced Tangle Pistol; 44-101 Damage; 3.4 Speed; 14-29-23 HAM; AP: None DX2 Pistol; 82-129 Damage; 2.4 Speed; 22-40-14 HAM; AP: Light Advanced Launcher Pistol; 65-235 Damage; 2.5 Speed; 17-51-17 HAM; AP: None Advanced Scatter Pistol; 114-182 Damage; 2.1 Speed; 17-51-18 HAM; AP: Light Carbines DH-17 Short Carbine; 60-150 Damage; 2.8 Speed; 25-27-14 HAM; AP: None E11 Carbine; 60-127 Damage; 2.6 Speed; 29-36-17 HAM; AP: Light Advanced Laser Carbine; 38-264 Damage; 3.7 Speed; 28-45-22 HAM; AP: Medium Advanced EE3 Carbine; 80-186 Damage; 2.9 Speed; 38-32-17 HAM; AP: None DXR6 Carbine; 97-149 Damage; 3.9 Speed; 27-48-20 HAM; AP: Light Advanced Elite Carbine; 104-182 Damage; 3.5 Speed; 28-45-22 HAM; AP: Light Rifles Laser Rifle; 29-376 Damage; 5.7 Speed; 14-22-59 HAM; AP: Medium SG-82 Rifle; 104-166 Damage; 5.6 Speed; 25-22-42 HAM; AP: None Advanced E11 Rifle; 91-174 Damage; 4.7 Speed; 13-23-36 HAM; AP: Medium Jawa Ion Rifle; 100-181 Damage; 6.2 Speed; 14-29-46 HAM; AP: Light T21 Rifle; 118-333 Damage; 7.2 Speed; 40-33-75 HAM; AP: Heavy Heavy Weapons Flamethrower; 422-810 Damage; 4.7 Speed; 75-17-17 HAM; AP: None |