Pet boosting must take into account existing pets and tamers. Some are going to want a greater WW, my first thought is what about the WWs I have? I don't want them neglected, but I don't want them to turn into a white GD that I'll hate and never use either. I just want to see modest improvements to pets that aren't used that much. I just want them to fit into our modern game a bit better, not mow bosses down like mongbats. I hope the devs manage to find a level that's more balanced.
If I hear "I want what sampires have" one more time I might just scream lmao. Make a sampire if you want a sampire! Sampires are overpowered and for some reason have been protected from the nerf stick for far too long. But it makes more sense to bring one class down a peg than raise all the others, given that taming is not the only class that's behind sampires. It's a shame that some tamers now want to equal or better sampires. Can't we be better than that, just once? Do we really want to go back to all kill, no skill? Is it so bad that we have a challenge to kill stuff and someone is doing more damage than us? Pet changes must be done very carefully and I hope EA resist the temptation to go wild and make really powerful pets. Taming has already become much easier over the years, at the rate it's going my RL pets will be able to play their own tamer
Pet slots need to be done carefully too, even just 1 more slot is going to be a huge power increase. But they could double the points each pet takes and allow "in between" levels. So 1-5 slots becomes 2-10. Then some pets can be shifted slightly without changing overall power of some pets. That would open up different pet combinations without screwing the balance up.
The only kind of pet slots I'm particularly interested in are the stable ones, still strikes me as funny that every other class can have more weapon choices in their backpack at any time than I can hold in several tamers worth of stables lol.
I quite like the idea of growing a pet up to be stronger, but I would want to see this done in a way that we didn't just park pets to train on a shadow ele to level them up. Tamers are far too good at pet parking and working around the mechanics to get things trained quickly. If pet training had to be done actively by tamers and pets could only raise in power at a certain speed, that would be better. I'd like to see that actually replace the system we have for pet training now, because really it is just park at spawn x, then spawn y if you don't want to bother with more involved methods. A lot of tamers get the perks without really being involved training either their character or pets. I'd like to see better rewards for those players who take chances keeping pets alive in a spawn during training. Or who train taming on aggressive creatures, and train rather than add skill items. We have become very instant gratification in UO and I don't want to make everything take ages and be terribly boring. I just want players who take time to learn taming, to train through normal game play to have fun and better rewards. I want taming to be more about fun than pet park + skill boost items. I want to see tamers working their skills and their pets, not just meet them at high end spawns with a GD
What I'd love to see are quests that non tamers can do too, where you are told to go acquire specific pets and use them to kill a number of a particular monster. You can use bonded pets, but you'd get more points if you use fresh tames. Also more reward for not having any pets die during the hunt. Pets like boura could be used for players who don't have taming, along with mechanical pets like a golem. Vollum too - almost forgot about those lol. Miners could get quests for ore that involved their pack critters beating up a specific foe hehe. But you could get some fun quests if you based them round a fun challenge like that. And it would test a player if they had to keep several fresh pets alive and kill something. You'd probably have to allow for others joining in to heal the pets, perhaps deduct points if others heal or you could do a party version where tamers group together and fight something with teeny creatures. Just something fun, no uber powerful rewards but a cool test of how well you controlled and cared for animals/mechanical pets.
Pet colours...I'd almost favour things like marking like say dragons with different coloured bellies or *nice* tone changes. RL reptiles have some really cool looking markings that IMO are much better than a solid purple or blue type hue. I'd also like to see cu sidhe look more like the mythical ones, spotting on their coat and more wild dog like. Though they do look very like my happy retriever which is cool, I just fancy a more feral looking doggy!
Champ spawns - need to die with fire, IMHO. Spawning rounds of tougher monsters in excessive numbers for a bit of paper got boring for me after maybe 5 spawns, PvP around spawns is even less interesting. Restrict the Fel ones to one smaller area and re-do them from scratch. Make something engaging and intelligent, not simply bash monsters then beat the snot out of each other. PvM is more interesting to me now lol.
Wenchy
