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So I got a nice pet....

Lexx Merlin

Seasoned Veteran
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
So I've been spending a lot of time pet farming, to get high end ones to sell or keep. Today, I got this awesome cyan hiryu that rates 4.6 stars...
HP: 547 Stats:670/131/318 Resists:69/89/23/50/48 Skills: 107.7 wrestling, the rest will be trained to gm.

I just wanted to share that because it was the highest rated pet I have ever tamed!!!

Anyone else have any pets that are high end they would like to share? I'm interested in finding other people who have high end rated pets. I also have a 4.3 fully trained greater dragon, but I'm gonna end up selling it.
 
S

shredder2

Guest
i have a fully trained greater that rates 4.4 and i have a regular dragon that is a 4.7 they are my 2 highest
 

Lexx Merlin

Seasoned Veteran
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
I'm trying to find people who are interested in buying high end pets... That's all I tame anymore... besides rare colored pets.. Don't think I will sell that 4.6 hiryu but definitely my 4.3 dragon is up for sale.
 

Maleachi

Sage
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
I actually happened to tame a 4,7 star Rune Beetle last week.
Made me pretty happy. :)
 

kitiara-atlantic

Lore Master
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
You would think as the calculator author, I should be able to rig myself to get the best pets :p

My highest of any kind is a 4.1!!

I would looooove to have that 4.6 hiryu :) Congrats, you guys!!

Just so you know, anything over 4.5 is a SUPER high pet. 5.0 is perfection and is a mathematical near-impossibility. :scholar:

I am in awe of your mad taming skillz *bows*

I just heard in the UO Dev live chat recording that a new RNG is in testing... maybe that will help me!
 

Aibal

Slightly Crazed
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
Very nice hiryu. My best pets are a 4.9 nightmare, a 4.6 gdrag, a 4.5 unicorn, and my 4.3 rune beetle. My best hiryu is on my secondary tamer on GL and is a 4.1...common colored though, not that I care.
 

Llewen

Grand Inquisitor
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
Campaign Supporter
In my experience hiryu's and rune beetles are the two hardest pets to get really good quality ones of. With rune beetles there are so many variables and such a wide range and with hiryus they are just a bugger to farm because of the way they spawn. Greater dragons should be a lot harder to find good quality ones of than they are, but for some reason it is easier to find a good quality greater than it is to find either a good quality hiryu or rune.
 

Aibal

Slightly Crazed
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
In my experience hiryu's and rune beetles are the two hardest pets to get really good quality ones of. With rune beetles there are so many variables and such a wide range and with hiryus they are just a bugger to farm because of the way they spawn. Greater dragons should be a lot harder to find good quality ones of than they are, but for some reason it is easier to find a good quality greater than it is to find either a good quality hiryu or rune.
Agree.
 

Lexx Merlin

Seasoned Veteran
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
I just recently tamed a 4.0 rune beetle, and stumbled upon it with just luck... I wasn't actually farming them, just trying to upgrade all my pets. I am still farming greater dragons to get one above 4.3 as I want to sell my 4.3 (located on chessy if anyone is interested).
I've been farming hiryus lately because I was trying to get a blue gold one to keep (and I got 3 in 3 days). I think they are easy to farm, just hold a dragon slayer spell book and cast hail storm on them, I kill them in 4 - 5 hits. Also the fact that I got that 4.6 and he is a colored one is even better... will make him a good seller if i decide to sell him.
 
V

vciufo

Guest
I have a few nice pets as well:


Reg Color Cu: 4.8
Bake Kitsune: 4.7
Greater Dragons: 4.5, 4.4, 4.4
Bane Dragon: 4.2

I sell greaters, Cus, and Banes so come see me at the Luna stables.


Lord Achilles
 
J

Jonathan Baron

Guest
Nice pets, huh?

I used to call you folks stat monkeys until I built an archer tamer that could not distance heal, much less make use of what I call the EMT macro (pouring on Greater Heal and bandages, timed to sync with casting/cast recovery time and bandaging time). Up 'til then if a GD was "three in the 70s" it was just fine with me. Tamed to fight, not fight to tame, otherwise known by its charming euphemism, farming. Yeah, we slaughter us a whole mess o' critters down at the Demon Temple farm. Yuch!

But the archer is fun. Now my pet has to survive extended periods...on its own. Crap! It has to be tough. I have to find a good one. Damn!

This is when I had to make the unpleasant discovery that I wasn't much good at taming. Friends would take pity on me and help me out....too much as it turned out.

One buddy was helping me with Cu Sidhes (my archer is my only Elf....weak-ass damn characters, those Keeblers) 'cause they were killing me all the time. Said he was invising me at key moments. Got a nice Cu alright....50 over max HP. Or so said that breaker of all hearts, the UO Pet Power Calculator, that miserable, brilliant tool that compares your hard earned tame to a fantasy creature that never existed or ever will exist. Let's see...shall I plug my pet's numbers into it, or apply a cheese grater to my chin...hmmm....feels about the same.

Turned out he had also cursed the Cu as well as invised me. Didn't want to reveal his secret but wanted to help me. I respect the compromise. The Cu, however, Duncan, has never been quite right though. But, then again, the Cu has never been quite right or perhaps too right. It acts like you'd imagine a fierce beast would behave, plucked from liberty to a life of eternal servitude to a weakling Elf.

Never liked dogs.

Little did I know, though, that this would be the beginning of my too becoming a stat monkey - not for Cu Sidhes, may they all choke on doggie treats - but for Hiryus, far and away the smartest and easiest pets to work with in this venerable game of ours. And I'd come to....love....damn it, that rather meticulous tool of elation destruction....the aforementioned Pet Power Calculator. It can't manage to puzzle out what training does to make an animal better but it absolutely nails it when it comes to knowing what makes a pet more durable. Most important, it best reveals hit points for what they are: the Fool's Gold of taming.

UO should be renamed Rare Drop. It's the core of the game....the engine powering it all. And great pets are rare drops, just like Tangles or that the best named drop of them all: The Animated Legs of the Insane Tinker. Say what you will about how hard it is to get one rare drop or another but I put a singular challenge before me: rare color Hiryus that would also light up the stars of that dreaded tool. The Brilliant Colored Beast of the Insane Tamer.

In this I had a most formidable ally: Lexx Merlin. Lexx find great animals. Lexx finds four star or better Greater Dragons (they hadn't yet hired the guy who came up with the name for those legs when they named that pet....dull damned name for the game's most powerful pet - for shame!) every darned day.

And thus the carnage began. Hundreds of the marvelous beasts had to die, alas. Scores of rare colored ones too.

Lexx got his 4.6 wonder Hiryu. I got stables full of really good ones in every color, only Pinks being a true vanity ride, owing to him being neon pink and all, and Walter. Walter is a 4.2 and the color of glacial ice. Bestia D'Oro is not far behind and a deep gold. Sol is bright yellow and nearly as strong as Walter. Motoko, named after the heroine of Ghost in the Shell, is blue/gold and powerful. There are seven others, spread across four tamers on three shards.

They do well in combat because, although the elven Eldgin (my archer tamer) is not strong, he shoots well and compensates in offense what my mage tamers delivered in defense. The rest do well with the mages too. All are fully trained thanks to the twin miracles of Shadow Iron Elementals (Lexx summons them) and Spectral Spellbinders.

As for Greater Dragons, hell....I just buy 'em from Lexx. Hate those things. Hate taming them. Hate their stone stupidity and their honking, and their penchant for choosing to attack the mongbat before the Ancient Wyrmm just because the mongbat is closer. Hate their name. Hate walking.

Hey, come back here, Walter! Silly Hiryu ran up three flights of stairs at a public house to kill a hapless troll I never saw. Hiryus take the Guard Me command very seriously. And, no, there wasn't anything any more dangerous anywhere nearby. Walter would have taken it on first. Duncan would have just stood there and growled, angry still that he'd ever been tamed.

Gawd, I love UO pets.

Jonathan (and his taming corps: Ansel/Eldgin/Malcolm/Steven Maturin hailing from their virtual homes on Chesapeake, Great Lakes, and the mighty Atlantic Shard...sig file is out of date and I forgot how to edit it)
 

kitiara-atlantic

Lore Master
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
Love your posts, Jonathan! I might just have to spend some time with hiryus. I've never paid them the appreciation they deserve.
 
J

Jonathan Baron

Guest
<whistles in relief that his remarks about the Pet Power Calculator did not offender its clever creator>

Thanks, Kitiara :)
 
J

Jonathan Baron

Guest
Now, regarding the calculator, despite my remarks it is a most respected instrument but it leads to some humorous misunderstandings:

Hapless Tamer: "Damn! It says this greater is only a 3.2...but it has 978 hit points!!"

Me: "Yeah, but does it matter how many hit points, let's say, your warrior has if he's wearing a 40s suit."

HT: "I guess...but has anyone actually SEEN a 5.0 greater? Where do they FIND these pets?"

Me: "Uh...they don't exist."

HT: "WTF!"

Me: "Well...at least I don't think they do.....they probably just take the highest stat ever recorded in each category. I don't think it's based on a specific animal."

HT: "You mean I'll never...."

Me: "Nope....you'll ever get a perfect one. Probably not possible....but you know the old phrase, 'A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what is a heaven for?"

HT: "Huh?"

Me: "Sorry...."

As many of you know, a clever German fellow created a splendid UI mod for the contemporary client....the Lucius interface. And he created a mod for THAT that allows you to cursor over all our precious items, spelling out their intensities, what they have been or should be enhanced with and so forth. So, why not create one that delivers the Pet Calculator stars, right there when you lore that creature aiming to redress you in a gray robe if you don't decide what you plan to do RIGHT NOW? As it is, most of us have the calculator running in a browser window while we're also deep within Dungeon Destard, bouncing between the two....

"Let's see....uh....physical of....oh crap, I'd dead!"

Problem is you can't intercept the data that fills that lore dialog box, known oddly in UO as a gump ("Run Forrest, run!") and, regardless of our honed memory for things, there is still that moment of suspense upon hitting the submit button (and submission is what it feels like) to see how many stars will appear. There will be no such mod...not now at least.

As for Hiryus, much depends on which client you use. On the ancient one it looks like a bird, hence the phrase, "Put your bird on it." One recent convert to the contemporary client, however, was crestfallen. "My God," she said, "My Hiryu now looks like a demented T-Rex!"

I think they look like a nifty T-Rex....T-Rex's little brother :)

Jonathan
 

kitiara-atlantic

Lore Master
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
Yup, 5.0 is basically impossible as it's a perfect pet :)

Ya know, at one time, one of the EC skins had a lore gump improvement where you could edit the code to set thresholds in each category (each resist, hp, str, etc), and if the pet was above those thresholds, those numbers would be highlighted in the lore gump. It was AWESOME because I would plug in the 95% values for each pet in the script, and voila. Didn't need to run the calculator every tame.

But an update broke that mod, and from my understanding, it's no longer possible. Heartbreaking, because that was my favorite UO mod ever.

Such is life...

I've thought about adding a customization option to the calc where users could toggle their preferred algorithms, or add a user base where you could save your pet info for easy comparison of fresh tames to existing pets in the stables... but real life gets in the way. Doggone.

I sure wish that lore gump mod still worked, though.
 

Llewen

Grand Inquisitor
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
Campaign Supporter
Ya know, at one time, one of the EC skins had a lore gump improvement where you could edit the code to set thresholds in each category (each resist, hp, str, etc), and if the pet was above those thresholds, those numbers would be highlighted in the lore gump. It was AWESOME because I would plug in the 95% values for each pet in the script, and voila. Didn't need to run the calculator every tame.
That was for the KR client. It was coded by Sarphus. Unfortunately as has already been pointed out, there is no access to gumps with the EC. I'm hoping someday that will change so that we can again have a mod like that.
 

Wenchkin

Babbling Loonie
Alumni
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
I tend to carry a newbie book on my tamers with max stats as reference, then it's easy to look over and see how close the pet is. Not as a %, but I normally tame critters who pass muster on the "eyeball" round or hide while I run them through the calculator. And then finally decide how I'd rate the pet based on it's stats and what I'm looking for.

Wenchy
 
J

Jonathan Baron

Guest
Yep, indeed Wench, it's what you're looking for....gotta be reeeeeel scientific about that too...

<me and my buddy Lexx one night along the coastal side of Hiryu Forrest>

LM: Cyan

Me: Yeah....it's bad though...

<many dead Hiryus later>

Me: 'Nother dark blue...been gettin a lot of those.

LM: 1076...tame out near max....resists suck...almost max poison...

Me: I killed it.

LM: Woulda tamed out near max...oh crap, more of those ninjas...gonna lead them off.

<dead plain Hiryu>

<dead plain Hiryu>

Me: PINK!!!!!

LM: A pink one?

Me: PIIIIINK!!! Pink one popped!

LM: Getting my tamer

It was his turn for the pink, and you don't sully a neon pink Hiryu with judgments about its stats....would feel like asking a gorgeous gal her shoe size first. But its stats were fine - better than my pink which I GMed and fought with.

Yeah, I know the Cu folks have Yellow Dog, and Yellow Dog is at least 1000 if not 10000 times more rare in incidence than everything else. But you can always FIND a Yellow Dog, always SEE a Yellow Dog because there's at least one on every big shard that NEVER MOVES from that special spot just outside Luna bank. Thing is, having something rare doesn't make you rare, especially if you're showing it off all the time. The converse is true: having something rare to demonstrate that you're special makes you among the most mendacious of the mundane - that puppet whose strings are the easiest to spot...the ventriloquist whose lips move when the dummy speaks.

And let's face it. How special can we be if we're obsessed with a game where most of the players have pub fries for brains, punks curse at each other in all caps on the most public channel with both impunity and great frequency at all hours, and a guy can play this game with the character name Heinrich Himmler? UO is for regular folk, most of whom don't even know who Heinrich Himmler was. In a way, it's kinda good they don't....however wrong that is for me to say (sorry, Grandma).

Ah, but when a pink pops....call me superficial, call me immersed in the virtual and the irrelevant, but it feels damned special.

Jonathan
 

Llewen

Grand Inquisitor
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
Campaign Supporter
You Sir, are one of a kind... :)

And I'd love to have that perfect black puppy I searched so long and hard for, but I've tamed lots of black puppies, and I'd never trade my amazing ugly mutt for one of them.
 

Llewen

Grand Inquisitor
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
Campaign Supporter
Where can i get the calculator?
I always wondered how people got their ratings
The link to it is at the top of the Taming forum under the title, "Big changes to the Pet Power Calculator! (details)".
 
J

Jonathan Baron

Guest
Sorry, Lexx, but this surprises me not at all. You have the damnest way of finding great GDs :) Damned is not exactly the best word for it.
 
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