good job
@Tyrath i know a fella OCD'r when i see one.
enjoyed your training stuff, saved me a lot of time and experimenting.
I had a lot of fun training the various pets up and taking them out on dungeon trips to see which were the most effective. For me the top 3 pets are Bushi/Parry Hiryus, Necro Tsuki Wolves and Blue Beetles. CUs just don't impress me unless they are scrolled out in everything. The Drakes are impressive in certain certain areas with their 100% damage types but don't see them being used much outside of places where 100% elemental damages are highly valuable. Serpantine dragons are kind of cool but come up very short in the training process. Shadow Wyrms with their over cap STR hit like a hammer but ultimately fail as a 5 slot pet IMO due to generally junky resist,pretty much the same feeling with the dragon wolf........ But alteast you get one training round to buff its resist a bit. Nightmares are a good all around hunting ride again and Firesteeds can be made into quite impressive pets, one of the better pets I trained up was the firesteed I put 120 SW. The Firesteed I put disco on not so impressive. The Najasaurus is impressive and quite a brutal little snakey thing, they are the crankiest pet I trained by far, at 120 tame and lore they still like to give you the finger on a regular basis. The wind runner from the store was a complete waste of 1000 sovs and after that I was not going to waste the SOVs on a lasher. Still have not got a Frost Dragon to pop on a L7 Map. After my general testing of a lot of critters I settled more in to seeing what builds in the 3-4 that best suited my general PvM needs. The Blue Beetle replaced GDs for my T hunter, in most cases he strolls through LvL 6 Maps but does need backup on most L7 maps. The Tsuki Wolf was built for taking out large numbers of spawn and is very effective either bushi or necro route I just like the necro and his wither better as his life leech and SS more than make up for the lack of High Parry. The Hiryu wins for me in the all around mount and hunting pet. I put my top Hiryu up against my top CU in a best 3 out of 5 match. Despite the CUs healing the Hiryu chewed right through him 4 out of 5 matches, the strings of high damage Armor ignores just overwhelm the Cus defense and healing ability. Basically the CU runs out of mana and the Hiryu doesn't. I would however recommend CUs as a general purpose pet as they can stay in the fight for a long time and their elemental damage is good. What I have seen is the more aggressive player/ play style like the Hiryus better and the more defensive player/play style opts for the CU. Rune Beetles are another impressive high damage pet but IMO limited to Gargs as a general purpose hunting pet. At this point Ethys really need to not take up a control slot so the non Garg tamers can have the same mounted speed the smelly, big feet, flappy winged gargs have, with 5 slot pets.
Other fun pets have been Sabre Tooth, Wild Tigers, and the Ossein Ram but again not rideable thus limiting their usefulness with not smelly garg tamers. Also given the environment in which the Ram must be tamed, I really expected more bang for the effort you end up when training is done with a good pet but very far from a great pet. The pheonix is also impressive but is too small LOL I tend to lose health bars and finding the little bird can be a challenge under a MOB pile.
Something I did not think would be impressive were many of the general animals. I have been training a Bull up for the Siege Bull Fight Tournament that is coming up. They go 1-4 slot and once you buff their resist, give them some HP/STR/Stam and add 20 HPR and add Piercing to them the simple common bull is rather impressive in the damage dealing department. Took him at 3 slot to Miasma last night and he dominates the Scorpion. If I did not have such a limited supply of scrolls on Siege I would probably give him 120 wrestle/tact/anat/ and resist in the last round of training. As it is he will get Stam and Mana Regen more HP and Str and a bit more mana.
Scrolled VS Unscrolled pets. I have done a lot of side by side testing of them. A CU or Hiryu with a long list of 120s is impressive. The real question was are they 250,000,000 gold worth of scrolls (or More) impressive. The short answer is NO not IMO. For PvM a base pet with no scrolls is still very effective, Let us not forget a month ago most of these pet types never left the stables and colored Hiryus and CUs were for bank sitting. To take them up to a 5 slot has made everything useful again whether you put 1/4 of a plat worth of scrolls into them or not. It could even be argues that the points not spent on scrolls and used to buff up areas that get shorted by adding scrolls makes the unscrolled pet better. A CU benefits most by adding a 120 Healing and 120 Anatomy, A hiryu with adding 120 bushi and Parry. A tiger or Sabre tooth 120 Wrestle and Tactics a Tsuki 120 Necro and SS or 120 Bushi and Parry. I largely ignore resisting spells on pets for the average tamer PvM it is just a expensive add on that does not give that much bang for the buck. If you are doing a lot of high end caster type stuff then it is probably worth the investment, as are all the other scrolls . But it is mythology that in order to have a effective pet that you have to invest hundreds of millions worth of scrolls into them. Also several critters can be tamed with higher wrestling and tactics than GM and some like the Najasaurus come with crazy high resisting spells.
As Donavon post regularly the behind the scenes changes and tweaking of pets has been on going and I kind of expect them to continue tweaking them for the next 3-4 weeks. PersonallyI think this pub should have stayed on Origin and the other pre full release shards for a solid month if not two. A lot of crying could have been avoided by doing the the tweaks and Nerfs in that closed environment. But then there would be the we want it worldwide right now crying, so we can complain that it was released before it was well tested and fine tuned. So like with the mana issue, which was very unbalanced they really had no choice but to hit it with a hot fix NERF hammer and then go back and start tweaking and balancing it better. Which they obviously have been doing. This was a big pub that changed the entire system and dynamics of a large portion of the game. A very impressive feat given the Dev team size and resources. Some imbalance, glitches and bugs are to be expected. Even if the Dev team were 10X bigger with endless resources there would have been things missed and tweaks/nerfs required. Yet they built the pub and released it with relatively few bugs, glitches or imbalances. Ya really gotta work at finding something to complain about for the most part with pub 97.
