Some questions from a tamer newbie

[hawkeye_pike]

Hello fellow tamers,

I've been playing since 1998 and built my first tamer just this year. Yesterday I reached skill level 83 and (with jewelry) can now control Greater Dragons. This morning, I tamed my first Greater Dragon all by myself. Took me 20 minutes, but it was not too difficult. It is now in the stables for bonding. My tamer has the skills:

Taming 83
Animal Lore 100
Veterinary 95
Magery 110
Spellweaving 110
Eval Int 110
Meditation 110
(718 total)

Before I take this incredible beast to combat, I would be happy to receive some hints about setting up useful macros (I have UOA). I recently tamed a Nightmare and used it to kill Dragons. I set up the following macros so far:

• Set up a macro to heal the pet with bandages 4 times in a row.
• Set up a macro to heal the pet with greater heal spell 4 times in a row.
• Set up a macro to heal the pet alternating 4 times with bandages and 4 times with greater heal (for tight situations).

What is the best way to control your pet or make it attack a creature? I used to pull the target, invisible myself and then let it attack the pet. I never let the pet guard myself, should I do that? Also, additional spawn can cause a lot of trouble.

How often should I feed a pet? Is once a day sufficient?

I may raise my taming skill to 90 or 100. To be able to do that, I have to lower another skill. What do you recommend? Would Veterinary at 90 be sufficient? Or should I lower Eval Int to 100?

Thanks for your advise!

 

[Farsight]

You are very near Farsight's template. I only have 100 meditation and
His current skills are:
110 lore
110 taming (real 90, +20 from jewels)
100 vet
110 magery
100 EI
100 weaving
100 meditation
And 20 focus (being an elf, running long distances without 20 focus is a pain)

I keep weaving at 100 to bridge between low skill and high skill spellweavers for higher level arcane focus. Besides, I never have enough mana to cast word of death anyway. Since you already have another weaver, you may consider doing the same.

Vet at 90 is sufficient (That's Dedigan's plan), but your animal lore really needs to be 110 (can animal lore wild animals to judge them before you tame them).

The best possible plan is to pick either spellweaving or eval int and raise all 6 skills as high as you can, using leftover skill points for something that's useful at lower skills, such as chivalry or hiding.

Now the tactics:
When hunting with your pet, you really need to use all possible pet commands.
All Kill - when you want your pet to focus on one thing
All stop - when you don't want your pet attacking anything or if it's attacking the wrong thing
All follow - there are two ways to use follow, "all follow me" gets the pet to follow you, which is great in places where your pet is in trouble and you're near a door or a staircase. "All follow" Then target whatever you're trying to kill is MANDATORY in big fights, where your opponent will likely break your pet's targetting, usually through invisibility. If your pet is set to follow you, then you bring an area effect mage to you, which is bad. So set your pet to follow whatever you're fighting (this is usually used against peerless or champs).
All come - Pathfinding is better for all come than all follow, but the movement is slower. There are times when this is useful. I tend to take the easy way out and learn where my pets will get hung up.
All stay - This one is very good in heavy spawn areas where you don't want your pet to go charging into the middle of everything. It's also good if you don't want things to charge your pet while you go leading spawn to the group. I use this one a LOT in Bedlam or against Melissande
All guard me - Combined with an area effect spell, this is probably my favorite pet command. Farsight uses earthquake, Dedigan uses wither. In both cases, what happens is the pets will attack the most recent thing that the tamer has attacked. The result is that the pets stay close and kill whatever it is that I'm trying to kill. The problem is that if nothing is close, the pets tend to attack things that are unreachable, like monsters on the other sides of the walls. They have very good eyesight.

On healing:
I actually don't have a macro to heal my pets. Rather, I just do the same that I do with my warrior and other people. I just set my bandages to last object whenever I get into a fight and use them. If I relied on macros for healing, I wouldn't be half as effective as I am without. But I also switch targets a lot. If you ever watch me in a big fight, you'll notice that I not only heal my own pets, but all the other pets in the area too. A pet with 90% health is only 90% effective, especially if the pet has a breath weapon.

Maybe we should have McBykar and Dedigan try a couple of hunts together, just to get you used to the commands. We could do something easy, like the Citadel.

 

[RichDC]

In terms of healing setting a macro like that is a bad idea, in my opinion, sometimes you need to break your cycles of heals and run/invis/kill something.

I think most tamers will tell you they rely mainly on last object(or item type if uoa) and then last target or manualy click, i tend to have every pets bars up so i can alternate my vet to one and mage to another for example.

The all guard/aoe spell is good (my personaly fave is essence of wind)

 

[hawkeye_pike]

Very useful hints, thank you!
I absolutely want to stick to 110 Spellweaving. It makes the spells more effective, and I wouldn't want to miss Word of Death. I guess I rather keep my Animal Lore at 100. I don't mind taming a creature before loring it. The taming business is fun, especially when it is so challenging. Besides, once all pets are bonded I doubt that I will tame new pets very often.

I'm looking forward to trying these pets out!

 

[RichDC]

Ive personally gone

120taming (eventually)
120lore
120vet
110Sw
110med
110mage

and atm 30hiding (occasionally i champ and wana hide )

0evals ok i do heal a little less with mage but thats about the only time im at a disadvantage, i rarely go anywhere without a pet suitable for the occasion so never cast offensive spells. The only spells i tend to cast are: cure,arch cure, invis, res, heal and thats about it. Everything else offensivly is donw by pets and SW.

Edit: on the feeding of pets, you only need to feed when your pet is unhappy normally below extremely happy. The time can be anything, sometimes ive gone months without feeding other times ive had to feed twice in one spawn. When your pet frequently disobeys your commands, its time to feed!

 

[Tina Small]

Like others who have posted, I don't really have a pet bandaging macro either. Just use the last target approach for flexibility in healing my own pet/pets and those of others.

I have these pet commands set up:

• [pet name 1] Kill / [pet name 1] Guard Me
• [pet name 2] Kill / [pet name 2] Guard Me
• All Kill / All Guard Me
• [pet name 1] Stay
• [pet name 2] Stay
• All Stop / All Follow Me
• All Guard Me

It's very helpful to have separate "kill" and "stay" macros for both pets (I rarely use more than two at a time) so that they can be doing different things or in case one goes running off and I need to call it back but don't want the other one to stop what it's doing. I just edit the pet names in the macros before I go hunting, if necessary. The generic All Kill / All Guard Me command is useful when you are killing stuff with a monster you just tamed and don't plan to keep it. Saves you from having to rename it so you can use your macros with it.

I don't usually have my pets guard unless they are in the process of killing the stuff I want them to be killing. One exception is if it's minor league spawn that they can easily handle and I want them to kill nonstop. Also, I've combined the Kill and Guard commands because tamers often seem to have trouble getting credit for things like arti drops and it's been hinted that having your pet "guard" you helps ensure you get credit for all its kills.

The Stop command is combined with the Follow command to help ensure your pet disengages when you want it to follow you.

Depending on where I'm hunting and the amount of monsters around, I'm usually pretty careful about pulling the one I want to kill away from the crowd. I do this either by standing slightly off screen of the monster and waiting until it targets my tamer or, hopefully, one of the pets and starts to follow us. Or, we'll quickly run in and I'll tell the pets to attack a specific monster and then immediately tell them to follow me and we run back the way we came. That usually makes the monster that was attacked follow us and sometimes also gets another one or two monsters to come along as well.

I sent you a fairly long PM late last week, Hawkeye, with some other suggestions. Not sure you saw it yet. Let me know if I can be of any other assistance.

Have fun!

 

[Turdnugget]

You can put vet at 90 and use enhanced bandages, gives you 100 vet.

You don't really need to feed your pets if you have a good chance at commanding your pet. I rarely feed my pets because loyalty refreshes every successful command. I don't know if feeding your pet has anything to do with if they fight well or not.

I use last object macro within UO to vet my pets.

100 SW is good as you can bridge the gap between those with 120 SW and those with 80. WoD takes a long time to cast, and unless you can get a decent amount of ppl for arcane circle it might not be worth it.

Rich, I thought only Mage had to deal with how much damage you heal and not EI? Thought EI was only for how effective your spells hit for damage wise.

 

[Pfloyd]

For vetting i use uoa and make a heal main pet macro...i change the target every time i use a different pet which isnt too often nowadays...it's usually my cu or greater dragon. If im with some friends who are also tamers and we're fighting something big i use my heal alternate macro and change the target when i need to. I use a Logitech G15 gaming keyboard so i have my left hand near the 18 G keys for every character.

All of my pet command commands are whispered so if i end up in Fel they can't see what im saying unless they are right next to me. This also cuts down on spam for other people on the screen.

Using 2 pets or more: The pet that you take out of the stables is usually the pet that gets targetted first when you do an all kill command so remember this. I like to pull the pet with the best chance of surviving the damage output of the monsters your fighting. For instance using a rune beetle against a blood elemental is better than a nightmare or dread warhorse because of the poison and energy resists on the beetle.

Always carry food for your pets or be able to cast create food. There are times when pets just don't want to move even though they are obeying your commands (you can tell by the sound the pet makes and if they lose happiness or not) and just feeding them will fix this.

Get a pet summoning ball linked to your favorite pets because there are times when you just can't find it and the bug of 0 control slots comes up. Also insure the psb.

Have pets unguard you before you stable them. There is a limit to how many can guard you and it includes them while they are stabled.

 

[TimberWolf]

I must be one of the few that use bandage macros. I have F1-3 set up as heal pet macros. I just have to reset the targets if I take out different pets or if I go out with friends.

It is nice when a guild mate drops if you can keep their pet healed while they get rezzed.

I also have a heal other macro. For this I just cast greater heal and have a target cursor come up.....Then I can drop a greater on any pet/player from a distance...

I find these invaluable....but they are all single macros. If I need to vet my pet 4 times I just hit the button 4 times!

 

[Turdnugget]

Can anyone confirm that the pet you take out of stables first is the one that is targetted first? I've never heard of this...

What about if you log off with your pets? I ride a mare and always have a beetle with me and just log out in my house...

 

[Aibal]

Can anyone confirm that the pet you take out of stables first is the one that is targetted first? I've never heard of this...

What about if you log off with your pets? I ride a mare and always have a beetle with me and just log out in my house...

Aye, whichever comes out of the stable first will be the one that takes the damage. The only time I've seen an exception to this is when one pet gets tied up for whatever reason (stam block, lay of the land, etc) and the other gets there first and starts doing damage well before the other arrives. Even then, the next mob you attack things return to their previous order. Can't help on the logging, I NEVER log with pet out unless I'm riding it, I always make it a point to stable extra pets.

 

[uoBuoY]

Aye, whichever comes out of the stable first will be the one that takes the damage. The only time I've seen an exception to this is when one pet gets tied up for whatever reason (stam block, lay of the land, etc) and the other gets there first and starts doing damage well before the other arrives. Even then, the next mob you attack things return to their previous order. Can't help on the logging, I NEVER log with pet out unless I'm riding it, I always make it a point to stable extra pets.

Confirmed.
And yes they will keep the original pecking order after a logout. I've been training two pets for about two weeks and the tank remains the same.
If tank dies however, living pet becomes tank. No idea what happens if bothe pets die at the same time?

 

[soulstoner]

Congrats on the new beast ... fun stuff !

A note of caution --- My buddy used to have a good amount of his lore & tame skills on jewels - there was an occasion or two that his pet went wild after he (the tamer char) was rezzed and before he got jewels back on to have sufficient skill.

Also, a few folks recently provided some good info regarding greater dragon potential to go wild in a different thread entitled GD Gone Wild with Snoop.