Hunters call needs a new method of leveling badly. Plus there's plenty of crab lore in paintings, lets get to it.
Let start with basics I think it needs:
- Lore - Why Merrick has interest.
- New enemy type - Crabs, multiple types (will explain)
- New loot - Baby Crabs (animal loot, with 3 uses!), Crab Eyes (3 colors)
- New Inventory/Ship Items - Crab Legs & Corrosive Ammo Box.
- PvP/Reapers involvement.
Thats the bare bones, now for the long winded details.
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Here's how Merrick I think would spin it."Its spawning season for the crabs in SoT, which are veracious man-killers when guarding their nest. As they get older the crab become toxic and inedible, the young ones havnt developed their poisons yet and are a rare delicacy in the Sea of Thieves that only the rich or daring get to savor! Even those who prefer a healthy diet of bananas seek out these nest because the crabs tend to drag in riches with them that sunk long ago. Either that they just got a deathwish always wanted to cross swords with a giant crab haha!!"
This gives reason why Merrick wants them dead; food, danger to pirates, thrill of battle. All three things Merrick loves most. -
The crabs I think should be larger then pirate but not so huge that a sword would be a poor choice flat out. They should have several types to avoid a 1 trick easy win and a boss or Broodmother, 1 giant boss crab that protects the final loot. Here's some enemy variety ideas.
Warrior Crab - White Eyes, primarily a frontline attacker using mostly claws which can be blocked with swords. You need to target their legs and eyes to deal full damage as all crabs have a tough outer shell.
Caustic Crab - Purple Eyes. Uses Claws as well as spitting Venom from Blunderbuss range.
Armored Loot Crab - Yellow eyes. Attached garbage and broke loot to itself for extra armor making non-legs eye hits almost completely ineffective. Will toss these items from its shell long range as an attack.
Broodmother - The last guardian of the nest. A combination of all three and much larger. Killing her causes her to drop/spit up the loot.
The crabs general behavior should make them a threat to fight via cannon/ship. All crabs do have a corrosive ship attack which they can use on ships which will pop holes, can swim, and BOARD your ship. As you attack their home so shall they attack yours.
You do not want to lure crabs to the coastline without someone on shore as live bait. They will attack your ship from afar while trying to board and continue to attack you on respawns and your ship! This may seem a little overwhelming to some but it prevents the boring gameplay of just anchoring and respawning till you win or just firing non-stop from the ship with 0 threats. Sloop may actually still be able to use tight turns and low speed to help them. If you light them on fire they will scatter and run for water if available.
- Now the loot. Baby crabs will start to crawl away from where the broodmother dies. These crabs can be picked up by hand, but will periodically pinch you taking away a small amount of hp. To prevent this you can use ANY animal crate to pick them up instead. While on your ship they will crawl all around trying to find the ladder to escape if they are not caged. They have much higher hp then the new one-shot animals. To prevent killing them easily. If they do die they drop raw crab legs which when cooked offer same heals as kraken/meg meat or sold. The crab legs and uncaged Baby Crabs can be sold to only the hunters call live baby crabs having more value, but the Merchant Alliance will also take them caged for higher value for their animal exports. So these crabs can be food, hunters call exp or merchant exp.
Note if an uncaged Baby Crab reaches the water it will start to immediately SLOWLY sink! So keep em below deck away from ladders. caged crabs will float as well as crab legs on the floor like chicken meat will.
The eyes appear randomly as fight, each crab has a low chance of their eyes becoming loot, which the Gold Hoarders & OoS both have interest in. Merrick will also take them cause he has bet with a filthy mermaid that pirates will kill more crabs then mermaids this season. White low, Purple medium, Yellow high value.
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So I already explained my idea on the crab legs, one thing to add they can be eaten or sold raw too with much diminished effects but raw crab is still a 30%ish heal that can be eaten twice. Now there is also a "Corrosive Ammo Box" with 100 shots that cant be refilled. This Ammo box gives your guns ammo a poison effect for 5 shots. Keep it for your own uses or sell it to Merrick! Merrick needs to arm his hunters and is now buying all Ammo Boxes for a low price, and Corrosive Ammo Boxes for value based on shots remaining. The idea is a crab ate an Ammo Box and its internal poisons are coated all over the ammo.
-Note using Corrosive Ammo Box with regular ammo in your guns replaces all non-Corrosive bullets with Corrisive. You can tell what ammo you have by looking at the ammo on your gun. Corrosive Ammo with have a Purple Dot instead of a White/Gray Dot. -
PvP this is what makes this risky and rewarding for other players obviously. The main thing here is this a farm-able "fun"way to level hunters call, because fishing is nice but not what I want to do to level it up only and megs and krakens are unreliable. However Corrosive Ammo could be a huge advantage for anything else your trying to do that day. For PvP its obviously a huge power boost being able to prevent full heals by the enemy until poison wears off. Reapers Bones will take everything even Crab Legs "rare delicacies make a great tribute"
In Summary
This will allow people who want to level hunters call to actually actively do so rather then just being a statue for hours on end. We all learned fromt he ruby splashtail events people hate sitting at dock for days with fractions of exp and wandering is not viable. The loot has multiple uses and just like how OoS gave phantom balls we could seriously use new ammo types for our guns. I would probably try and get 1 ammo box for myself as a solo slooper to help speed up PvE like the meg or Skeleton fights which solo can be tedious. Plus I'm not a great shot but I am decent the poison advantage would really help me in PvP and other in PvP I feel. You can sniper poison the driver of a ship trying to flee or cannoneers when you got no cannon angle yourself.
I'd really enjoy this and I'd like your thoughts/additions/opinions/tweaks too.
