UPDATE: Tracking Skill Improvements

[Mooncalf]

The tracking skill has been made more versatile, and is now useful for things other than searching for targets to fight.

Hidden Items
The tracking skill now reveals progressively more floor loot which would not ordinarily be noticed by those with a tracking of 1.

For the most part, these aren't rare items, so the change simply makes certain items more common to stumble across for those with a high tracking skill. However, there are now certain rare items which can be found more frequently by those with a high tracking skill. Trackers are twice as likely to stumble across random relics found on the floor, and are also the only ones who can find Isk faeshards. To give some more examples, they are much more likely to find wallets, slightly more likely to find gems, and a fair amount more likely to find custom weapons and random weapon parts laying around on the floor. Having even a tracking of 4 will start to reveal more of these hidden items, but having a maxed out tracking skill will of course reveal all hidden items. Please note: nothing has been taken away from regular players by this update, and no existing loot drops have been made less frequent than they already were for non-trackers.


Better Randomly Generated Weapons
Trackers now have more chance to find the good weapons laying around (NOT from fighting enemies or b&e). This is, from a roleplay perspective, a reflection of their ability to search areas for harder to find loot.

To be specific, every time a tracker picks up a weapon from the floor, a 50 sided dice is rolled. If that roll is less than the value of their tracking skill, one of the stats of the found weapon increases (compared to the normal weapon stats that you'd find without any tracking skill). But it doesn't stop there. The 50 sided dice is rolled again and again until a failure occurs, at which point the weapon's final stats are determined. For a tracker with a skill of 20 this means that there's a 1 in 2.5 chance of picking up a weapon with +1 better stats; a 1 in 6.25 of +2 better stats; a 1 in 15.6 chance of +3 better stats, and so on. Quality is not improved by this roll; only power or accuracy (randomly selected) are. There is also no cap on the weapon stats, though it's quite unlikely that anyone will ever find a weapon with a 17 power or accuracy from this. However, these weapons are useful when broken down, or if you happen to find an unbreakable one.


Better Randomly Generated Weapons Parts
This acts almost exactly the same as the randomly generated weapons, but for weapon parts, not whole weapons.

The only difference here is in the specific details. Each time a weapon part is picked up, an 80 sided dice is rolled. If the roll is less than or equal to the character's tracking skill, the weapon part's base stat is increased by 1. The dice is rolled again and again until failure occurs, as with random weapons. This means that if, ordinarily, you were about to pick up a quality 10 weapon part (1 in 24) and you had a tracking of 20, you'd have a 1 in 4 chance of that part becoming an 11; a 1 in 16 chance of that part becoming a 12; and a 1 in 64 chance of that part becoming a 13. It's quite a small boost compared to the other new tracking advantages, but over time it can start to be useful, especially when coupled with the extra weapon parts trackers will naturally stumble across anyway.