USEFUL pets one can control without taming skill

[Nero]

I am posting this in the "Tamer" section as I always wanted to know what kind of pets I can control without taming.

So this is a list (in progress) of USEFUL special pets one can control without any taming skill at all.

I excluded vanity pets, low damage pets as well as (ridable) pets that just serve to reach mount speed. I also excluded ethereal mounts. Although also taking up follower slots, I did not regard talisman summons and magical summons etc. here.

To be precise, it is basically a list of USEFUL pets which you can STABLE and control without any taming skill.

- Kotl Automaton (good for light combat e.g. crafter, requires tinkering)
- Gadgetry Table Golem (requires tinkering to max stats, cannot be bonded but can be stabled)
- Golem (cannot be bonded)
- Clockwork Leather Wolf (cannot be bonded)
- Clockwork Scorpion (cannot be bonded)
- (mechanical pet) Vollem (cannot be bonded)
- Vollem (good attacking pet, can be partially trained to below 30.0 taming requirements)
- Swamp Dragon (damage reduction)
- Paroxysmus' Swamp Dragon (damage reduction)
- Giant Beetle (ridable transporter)
- Pack Llama (transporter)
- Pack Horse (transporter)
- Fire Beetle (portable forge)
- Iron Beetle (miner)
- Slime (portable trash can)*
- Goat (portable trash can for shoes on fisher) [edit: not sure if goats or mountain goats or even both work]
- Bake Kitsune (good attacking pet, requires necromancy to summon shadow wisp to control)
- Lesser Hiryu (good attacking ridable pet, requires bushido to control)
- Lowland Boura (good meatshield for light combat e.g. crafter)
- Ruddy Boura (good meatshield for light combat e.g. crafter)
- War Horse (good for light combat, requires VvV membership)
- Imprisoned Dog (not tested yet but seems to randomly copy resists of nearby creatures)

* Special thanks to @gwen for letting me know about slimes.

Please add any pets that I may have forgotten.

 

[gwen]

Ferret and Squirrels (incl Albino squirrel) : very low initial taming needed. Can train 2 to really powerful pet (resists, FWW, Armor Pierce, grasping claw, HP regen , HP, wrestling scroll , 150 Stam )which will still require 0 taming.
Ferret eats fish

 

[Petra Fyde]

My 2 slot squirrel requires 27 taming, achieved with jewels.

 

[Nero]

@Petra Fyde: You can probably control it with 0 animal taming and no jewels, as long as the taming requirement in the lore page remains below 30.0.

 

[Nero]

After reading the comments above, I built the following squirrel on test center:



Taming requirements after spending all training points were below 30.0. At that level, I spammed "all follow me" and it remained "wonderfully happy" at 0 animal taming and animal lore. So it is safe to say that as long as you stay below 30.0 taming requirement, anybody can control it:

 

[gwen]

@Nero Now you believe me, right?

 

[Nero]

Yeah, all good. My squirrel can now take out dragons, lol.

 

[dvv]

Thanks for this thread !
Can’t see any reason to not have a powerful squirrel for each of my characters now

 

[PlayerSkillFTW]

Low taming requirement pets (crystal Vollems and Squirrels/Ferrets) that can be given 120 Disco+AP are useful for their powerful debuffs against foes. You just need to know how to properly utilize them and keep them from being targeted. Tell them to attack the foe, then if they don't get a successful Discord off within 3 seconds, tell them to follow you, then attack again. Keep repeating until they get the Disco off, then have them attack and apply AP as you sit directly on top of the enemy (same tile) to keep it occupied with attacking you instead of the pet. For enemies with AoE attacks, once the pet successfully gets Discord off, you can simply have it stay put as you hold the enemy away from the pet, but still on screen with the pet so it keeps Discord up.

Against foes with less than 160.0 Barding Difficulty, 120 Discord will apply -28 to all Resists and -28% to all skills, while also debuffing DI, SSI, and DCI (-51 DI/-25 SSI/-25 DCI with 114.5 Discord). Against foes with 160.0 Barding Difficulty, those debuffs are halved. As you can see, Discord is incredibly powerful for weakening both the victim's offense and defense.
Armor Pierce applies a +10% Damage Taken debuff for 3 secs to the victim (which even buffs direct damage like AI or WoD).

 

[Nero]

I am mostly using a vollem from a boat on my fisher, on my provo bard, or on a parked boat when hunting something overland to minimize damage. The vollems are better for this as they got better ranged attack moves like disco (squirrel can't get it), magery and fire breath.

I am thinking of using squirrels for light meleee combat by adding poisoning on one squirrel and bleed on the other and put the rest into hp and defensive skills in case they do get targeted. I am not sure if that is a good idea as the poison and bleed ticks might get them aggroed faster.

 

[gwen]

I am mostly using my vollem from a boat on my fisher or a parked boat when hunting something overland to minimize damage. The vollems are better for this as they can got better ranged attack moves like disco (squirrel can't get it), magery and fire breath.

I am thinking of using squirrels for light meleee combat by adding poisoning on one squirrel and bleed on the other and put the rest into hp and defensive skills in case they do get targeted. I am not sure if that is a good idea as the poison and bleed ticks might get them aggroed faster.

Try grasping claw ( if your toon uses phys weapon ) and Aura of nausea (if you go poison)
rest skill points in survival : HP and regen

 

[gwen]

Also I haven't yet tried small birds from Tokuno with initial hiding skill. Not sure if tram/fel birds have hiding, Tokuno ones definitely have it.
One more challenge for @Nero

 

[PlayerSkillFTW]

Also I haven't yet tried small birds from Tokuno with initial hiding skill. Not sure if tram/fel birds have hiding, Tokuno ones definitely have it.
One more challenge for @Nero

There are some birds that have 0-0 Base Damage. I have EJ chars with 5 of these birds trained up to 125 DEX/GM Wrest, and use them to train Parry on chars or weaker pets. Even with 125 STR/GM Tact/GM Anat, these birds will still deliver 0 damage on hit, yet trigger Parry checks for skill gain.

 

[gwen]

Reporting one more pet : Ridgeback.
When tamed requires 0 taming skill (horse needs 30). This mean Ridgeback can be trained 1 level with 3 selections and become quite tough ride.
Example : FWW , Phys resist , rest in HP.

 

[Nero]

Ok tried it out. The ridgeback I tamed started with 0 requirement. However, once I made 1 modification (physical resist in that case) it not only expectedly jumped a slot but unfortunately went from 0 to 84 requirements.

It seems some pets like the vollem increase by 20ish points and others like this one by 80ish points after the slot jump. And then again, the squirrel did not (or only a bit) increase in requirement after the slot jump.

Given all these inconsistencies, I guess we will find out by trial and error which of the low requirement pets stay clearly below 30 after the slot jump. In case anybody wants to keep on testing: here are two lists showing the minimum taming requirements of pets:
Animal Taming Chart | uo-cah.com
UO Tameable Creatures - Ultima Online | Taming Archive
These lists are not always complete but the best I have found so far.

For now, I settle with two trained 2-slot squirrels or one trained 4-slot (post-patch) vollem on my non-tamer characters.

 

[gwen]

Thanks, @Nero I haven't tested it : had no time. Found low tame requirements yesterday transferring Ridgeback from my warrior , releasing slots for more ferrets (I like them more then squirrel) . Only had time to check it is different from Horse requirements.
Interesting how it jumps to initial wild Ridgeback tame requirements with first training round. Really pity mechanic .

 

[Basara]

Just for reference: The "crystal" vollems are actually just reskinned Nightmares. So, anything that you'd do with a Nightmare (or do with 2 untrained Nightmares as a team, pre-training), you can do with Vollems.

 

[gwen]

Hi all.
Reporting one more pet : Gorilla
need -18 taming and can be trained to 3 slots (ferrets to 2 slot only).
I am in the process of bonding but hope to make powerful helper per of it for a warrior or Archer .
Since recently I finally bought and moved to my shard mark of travesty (+10 taming/+10 lore) now I can raise any character taming and lore to 45 (2*15 imbued jewels+ 10 mark +5 library talisman) and command pet to guard me.