Who's There?

The skill "hunt" and its progeny recently gained a great deal of accuracy by allowing a second keyword.  This change brought much needed accuracy to single-target searching, and it's really a fantastic upgrade.

I think it's time for many of the area-wide scouting abilities to also include one or two keywords.  Currently, the majority of area-wide scouting abilities are subclass abilities, subclasses which are never chosen for a main character, because of their highly situational utility.  The problem is that these scouting abilities are limited to player characters.

Why would a warlock give up the strong defense of battle learning or the all-around utility and power of reduced lag/prevention times for only the ability to sense the players in an area?  Especially given that warlocks already have a silent, instant spy and sixth sense, there's a very narrow margin of usefulness for a scouting subclass spell, especially one with a significant prevention time.

What if NPC's were searchable with scouting abilities?  The use of a scouting ability with no modifier would return players as it does now, but adding a modifier should return any NPC matches with a short description of the rooms:

a tangle tree -- In the Mudhole
a tangle tree -- In the Mudhole
a tangle tree -- The Wetlands

This additional functionality would greatly increase the utility of scouting abilities.  For example, a hunter of the right subclass could much more easily find a lost pet or a single NPC within an area.  She could enter an area, scout for its room name, and turn on hunt when she arrived in the general location.

My understanding is that the following classes have scouting abilities in one or more subclasses:  hunter, warlock, druid.  Obviously, the strength of each ability could be adjusted according to the class.  The casters might have room exits returned next to the room titles because they are actually "seeing" their targets, whereas a hunter's ability might only return the room titles.  Perhaps druids would only have the strength to scout for NPC's from their havens, with remote owls retaining the current limitation.

If an NPC ability would be too cumbersome from a design perspective to tack onto the current abilities, perhaps these could be new skills; they could be used for expansion upon current classes/subclasses.