Could animal empathy affect tracking beasts that Animal Empathy would work on? I noticed it wasn't listed in there.

I always just assumed it worked on animals/beast tracking(this was before the FAQ), because you know how the beasts act, so you can more easily identify what kind of creature would do this or that, to leave the sign of tracks you found. Or scratches you found.

Edit: Left something out of my original post. Would it be possible, if when you use the descriptor of tracks you're looking for, instead of hiding indistinguishable tracks, it displays them instead of hiding them? I know if I were looking for someone specific, and saw tracks I didn't recognize, I would at least want to know I saw them so I could look at them closer, as in try to track again.

First off, I'm not seeing a real connection between animal empathy and tracking. One is your ability to express your own emotion on an animal in an attempt to calm it down and listen to you. The other is looking on the ground for signs that something passed this way. Knowing how an animal moves would be more lore then animal empathy.

IMO We haven't even had enough time to test the current updates, let alone try to improve upon them. I think of it this way, If you add more skills into the tracking equation you lessen the effects of the other skills in order to maintain a balance. Then you require an expert tracker to have all of the skills listed, which doesn't make sense. A "Hunter" doesn't need to know how to calm an animal, he only needs to know how to find it and shoot it. If you want a bonus in tracking animals, you can focus in them using favored enemy [animal].

Secondly, if your hunting a specific person, and you use the modifiers. (Meaning your not looking at all the other odd tracks) Then you should only be able to find those tracks that match what your looking for. And if you didn't have enough of the track to I.D. it, then it stands to reason that it was most likely -not- what you looking for.

The modifier is just to reduce spam, it's not really an RP thing.

On the subject of your other points, you make some good points. I'm not saying NOW CHANGE IT NOW NOW NOW!

To me your average ranger should be better at tracking animals/beasts than he he is at tracking other species, simply by class descriptor. I don't think it's cause for re-balancing everything. It's not like there is ever a time where tracking an animal would be horribly overpowering. It just adds a little more flaire. AE is by far not 'required' for rangers.

Tracking's got enough modifiers already.

yeah i also don't see that its appropriate. Animal empathy is about forming an empathic bond with a creature - understanding the way it feels, and having it understand the way you feel. Its something you become adept at sure, but its not about knowing more about animals than anyone else just like UMD isn't about knowing much about magic.

Its a bit hard to bond with a creature's tracks.

Yeah, on second thought, adding AE to the modifiers for just animal tracking wasn't the beast idea I guess. But there was a second part to the original post!

I will admit that I thought that AE should also count towards tracking...then I realized that that was a silly thought.

AE is charisma based....thus how 'wonderful' the animal feels about you or how pleasing an aura you have in the animals mind.

Charisma doesn't help my character see better, hear better or remember (int based) what a creatures tracks look like.

.....that is unless they're so beatiful that their beauty actually can illuminate the room! XD

Lore in this case covers the knowledge of fauna, as Wilderness Lore would.

Observation: Before the changes to how tracking was calculated, rolls of 40 and 50 were common to me, allowing me to identify by far the majority of the creatures in the mines. With the changes, however, a roll of 40 is suddenly a high roll to me, and it seems the creatures' DCs have remained largely unmodified. As a result, identifying even favoured enemies by tracking requires a considerable amount of luck. This is not as such a suggestion to change anything as it might very well be intentional -- just an observation.

Summoned Rat Arcanist Observation: Before the changes to how tracking was calculated, rolls of 40 and 50 were common to me, allowing me to identify by far the majority of the creatures in the mines. With the changes, however, a roll of 40 is suddenly a high roll to me, and it seems the creatures' DCs have remained largely unmodified. As a result, identifying even favoured enemies by tracking requires a considerable amount of luck. This is not as such a suggestion to change anything as it might very well be intentional -- just an observation.

Maybe its due to the removal of listen as a modifier.

Yes, the DCs haven't changed, I just get lower rolls thereby making identifying harder (I did notice that flying creatures are even more difficult to track as well).