I played a Dexxer w/ Hiding & 79.9 DH / 20.1 Tracking during the UO:R era. I remember this working very effectively -vs- Hiders in the field because of the short re-use on DH when targeting the ground and not a specific container. At 79.9 DH you might fail a couple times on skillcheck -vs- a GM Hider, but the re-use was so short that it was still an effective counter. This post is not about the effectiveness of Detect Hidden -vs- Hiding, it is about the re-use timer on Detect Hidden. Something on Detect: (bleh, the link won't go directly to the page, it's under "PROFESSIONS" > "THE DETECTIVE") Which seems to support what I remembered: Targeting the ground (area) was a shorter re-use timer than targeting a specific container. *No clue what buying it up to 20 has to do with anything other than just speeding up training in general. (duh)
The article you quote seems to indicate that there's no delay when used on objects and a 10 second delay when used on areas. http://web.archive.org/web/200102050158 ... tive.shtml
High School was a long time ago, maybe my reading comprehension isn't what it used to be. I took it to mean the exact opposite of what you're saying, Upgrayedd.
This area detect feature was added in patch 39. However I was unaware of the targeted vs area skill delay. I will look into working this change into a future patch.