Shattered Kingdoms

So I started to play my master(4) scout a little to see if anything changed for him and I have some questions.

The two listed changes had to do with finding herbs earlier and skinning earlier.

With herbs, prior to the changes I was able to find all the herbs except for the ones that are GM-only from what I've read. I'm still not finding any haste, fly or sanctuary herbs so I can't notice anything different here.

With skinning, I had not tried skinning mithril animals since I didn't think I could skin them and I wasn't able to solo any of them to try it out. I still haven't tried skinning mithril, but I just failed my last two skinning attempts on much lower level alligators with scale hide, even though I'm level 44 and have skinning mastered.

I thought the fail chance was only for things above the scout's level -- Is this working as intended?

There was always a skin failure chance. It just got upped. Not having skin mastered makes the check higher. I don't know about the higher level herbs yet only because my scout isn't there yet and I don't know when you get what herbs.

Has there been anything said about this issue elsewhere? The skill failure rates are really frustrating now. A GM scout with Mastered Skin skill failed on flying serpents at an almost 23% rate (from 0% previously). I mean really - that is about ridiculous. Not to mention dragons... 70% failure rate.

Other skills seem to be impacted as well, though perhaps it is my imagination. Previously I almost never failed camo (mastered) - perhaps 5% of the time. Lately I can fail 5-10 times in a row. Did skill failure rates get increased across the board?

Some of the changes were great, but these skill failure rate increases have not increased my enjoyment of the game - quite the opposite.

I don't know what to say, but you have some horrrrrid luck. I just recently had to refit my scout and I used the flying serpents and I only failed to skin them once during that time.

My scout friend has scout mastered and is GM, we killed a dragon six times to fail everytime on skinning.

That's rediculous. Scouts just get weaker and worse as the years wear on. When I played Gorom scouts were very powerful. Even an elf scout was quite dangerous. Same with Dwallstrom it was the same - staves.

Scouts now are so pathetic compared to the scouts I got to play with when I first started that it's just a big turn off for me. I mean with the old haste your pet aged a year, but you got double attacks on boulder bears and trinos, they hurt. Staves were available. So you could always fly and do much more. When I had Gorom you could skin and tailor supernatural hides. It was awsome. Scouts were awsome.

Now scouts can hardly do anything. Bleh.

There were no changes to camo failure chance.

Quit ruining it for us Dulrik. One of the greatest gameplay perspectives the game has is speculating about the code mechanics and changes.

I had an idea about alternatives to the current high failure chance for skin, but I don't know if you'll like it.

If you would fail now, instead of failing, you would get a skin that is not perfect and has a lesser protective value than a perfect skin. The more you failed by, the worse it would be. There would probably also be a descriptor so that everyone that sees the skin would know it is less than perfect. There would also still be some chance of outright failure.

Example: a slightly mangled mithril skin

I don't think skinning failure rate needed to be upped that far, either. It just adds further need for grinding in SK, which I believe should generally be avoided.

A 10-20% fail chance should always exist, but to force scouts to grind say, 40 dragons to get a set of armor just makes SK remind me of lineage 2.

The herb change was great, though.