Hi there I am new to this forum and Rimworld in general, now playing for some weeks.
I love this mod and am thankfull for the work you have been (and still are) putting in.
Now I'd like to ask: is it possible to buff the Ranger class or better said their "Bond animal" skill? It occurs to me as a quite inferior spell. Once you have used it, you are reluctant to use it again for not loosing your pet. Once tamed a thrumbo, you'll never touch that switch again and your Ranger is left with low stamina and just one regular spell causing slow leveling.
I thought of a way to make the spell reusable and came up with 2 methods:
1) make it like Necromancers "Raise undead" and simply add new pets instead of limiting it to one. This can be balanced with fairly long cooldowns, but being honest undead pawns are more OP than the same amount of (non-legendary) animals, since they can fight, haul, craft... Maybe the bigger ones (thrumbo, gallatross etc.) need more stamina to sustain, and running out of stam gives the risk of your bonded animals to wander into wildness (disappear) or worse going manhunt. Of course you would need a method to quickly refill Stamina, maybe a "Fighter skill: meditate" and/or make recreational drugs (beer, mead, smokeleaf) adding Stamina to fighter classes.
2) Give a chance to "after tame" the bonded animal so one day you can release the bond without sending the animal off. This way you use the skill to overcome high wildness and manhunter chances in taming and can use all trainable animal skills at once + the bonds buff. Then your pawns regularly train the animal in tameness, obedience etc. and once they fulfilled a training, the forced checkmark from the skill turns into a regular trained green checkmark. So after you reached tameness on your Thrumbo, you can release Animal bond, keep your pet and use the skill on the next hard to tame target.
A hybrid of both methods and maybe easier to implement(?) might be a timer on the bonded animal that automatically sets the "tamed" status after a specific time. Maybe use the illness function for a processing headiff, and on 100% the animal is "feeling at home" in your colony and won't leave you even after releasing the bond.
On another note, I also like the bladedancer and love "Phasestrike" for both fighting and raising my economy, similar to "blink". Sometimes, my pawns tend to forget what they were doing while phasing/blinking. One time Pawn tried to refill (Dub's Bad Hygiene) the bathtub and always phased while hauling the water, loosing the water while doing so. Then they ran back to the well, Phased again to the tub and on and on and on... funny.
As the Bladedancer needs a melee weapon to use their skills, I loaded some weapon mod providing a "gunblade" which should serve as both range and melee, but unfortunately it doesn't work. Still need to equip the gladius to use the skills. (Simple sidearms and Dual Wield) Any method for me to add Gunblade to allowed weapons for fighter Skills?
Thank you.