Does Pet Control vary with Pet Skill/Stat levels?

[Luke Carjacker]

I have a tamer template where I have just 110/110 taming and lore. I was trying to control my bane dragon last night, and it refused so many times in a row that loyalty dropped down to just 'rather happy'. This particular bane is fully trained and about 4.0 on the pet rater, so he's a strong animal.

Now, what I noticed is that his barding difficulty has gone from about 105 just after taming to now well over 118. My question is, has he gotten harder to control now that his skills/stats are higher? And a related question, are pets with naturally higher skills/stats harder to control and/or tame?

I never noticed this challenge before because my main tamer has been 120/120 for quite some time. However, this new template allows for just 110/110; thinking this might be a problem when I set up this character a few weeks ago, I tested with some banes that were freshly tamed and didn't notice too much trouble with control. Was the string of refusals just bad luck, or did they actually get more difficult to control? Or is control difficult related to just pet type, and not the particular pet (unlike barding difficulty).

 

[Wenchkin]

I think you've just been lucky controlling the bane with your tamer *grins*

Minimum taming for a bane is 107.1, which means at 110/110 you have control of just 87.4%.

So it's not the barding difficulty, your tamer just needs a skill boost

Wenchy

 

[Llewen]

With a control chance like that unless you keep feeding your pet it's inevitable that that pet will eventually go wild on you. But to answer you question, no, pets don't get harder to control as they are trained. Control chance is based only on the pet species and has nothing to do with skills and stats. Although there may be some variation from pet to pet. I do have pets that seem to fail commands more often than others, even though the control chance for all my pets should be 99%.

 

[Luke Carjacker]

Thanks for the info. Yeah, I was aware that I wouldn't have optimal control at 110/110, but was still wondering about the failures I had the other night, like maybe 18 of 20 commands were refused. That's a statistical near-impossibility, but the sort of thing that happens with the good ole UO RNG.

I'd love to throw 5 more points into taming, but my template just doesn't allow for it. I'm set up for pvp with 120 magery, eval, mysticism, focus, 110 taming & lore and 60 bushido. Add in that I need +20 magery over the cap and I'm at 780 skill points right now. I've got my equipment set up exactly as I want it, and I'd lose out on capability if I stole points from anywhere else.

Other option would be to go with a Cu Sidhe, but I've really enjoyed using the Banes I've gotten (several really nice ones). Also, if I'm using a bane I can throw up an EV to help move a rat spawn or something; which you can't do on a Cu.

Just to note, I decided to experiment today and was able to give 19 consecutive commands before a refusal. That's better luck and certainly more in line with an 87% success chance than the failures I got the other night. I don't mind feeding - tasty treats aren't too expensive or tough to get - I just want to make sure I don't have a pet go wild during a fight.

 

[Jonathan Baron]

This has been discussed elsewhere but it bears repeating here.

These energy bars with the insipid name are merely booster shots. They do not eliminate that annoying message that your Bane is "peckish" and not performing at full potential. The quest given at the Ter Mir alchemy shop to acquire these odd sticks of whatever they are has been eliminated.

These juvenile sounding snacks have been relegated to T-Chest loot and their prices have gone as high as 90k on the more populated shards. Should they go even higher one can anticipate players justifying to their Guild Mates that enduring waves of fierce spawning monsters is worth it due to a potential mother load of dragon snacks. Heaven knows there's little of real value in T-Chests now.

What works - really works - is something worse: a bowl of stew o' rocks, available at your local friendly robot sales tool for between 400k and a million gold. I performed an unscientific but interesting test two night ago to see what would happen if I actually FED MY DRAGON.

For this experiment I employed that field across from the Gargoyle refugee camp outside Ter Mir. Here is where those growth hormone eating musk oxen hang out and spend their days huffing in disgust. I've tamed a couple and they do make marvelous pets, formidable and much quicker when used as combat allies.

No, I did not take a veteran award black dye tub to serve as a placebo. Wouldn't have worked anyway. My swampy in black rags and buffed stats did okay on the first one. Took awhile but roared, it killed, it did the Karate Kid crane thing at the end.

Then I fed it that black crap and chance favored my foolishness. Two High Plains Bouras jumped my Bane in close succession. This fight was over faster than the one on one. And, as fate ordained it, another two appeared and my Bane dispatched them with equal ease.

Yes, animals were harmed in the making of this production but no bandages were were needed to sustain the victor, unlike the pre-stew battle.

Despite my wordiness there is a simple message here: they are splendid combat animals if you could only FEED THEM. The "none" in the lore sheet under Preferred Foods is rubbish.

Banes no longer frequent the fashion runways and vanity parking lots of Luna bank. I'd wager that most are stabled. They've gone from the cure to the obscure so quickly that one veteran player handed me a Barding Deed for mine as an act of spontaneous generosity, thinking it was an odd colored Swampy. It worked out. It adorns my warrior's swampy dragon now and it does look great - shadow armor. Nice touch.

Food oddities are hardly new. That splendid over-sized wolf with the Celtic sounding name is a vegetarian. Frenzied Ostards get even more frenzied if you try to feed them cooked meat. Horses - yes, horses - eat raw ribs with zeal if they're the fighting sort. White Wyrms will eat gold if you feed it to them and Lava Lizards love their metal ingots.

Fine. That's cool. But no animal, save the Bane Dragon, requires an investment of MILLIONS to bring out its A game every time.

It's okay without food. It's another beast entirely when fed. It's then it truly becomes what it was meant to be: a viable replacement for the inexplicable withdrawal of the Dread Mare from the game.

Fussy and fickle the Dread may be, but I figure taming is a 1000 raw ribs per skill point campaign. Haven't seen a robo sales droid selling those.

Jonathan
Ansel and Luscombe on Chessy
Eaglerock and Malcolm on Lake Austin

 

[weins201]

Curious what are you TRUE stats you are getting 60 points from somewere?

Perhaps those 60 point could be tweaked just a little to get to 115 taming and lore perhaps only 110 eval???

And I am assuming your magery is 140 that what you mean by 20 over so you can use a mage weapon????

are the 10 points in eval really that much different?

And not to burts your bubble but i can forsee a future when they fix the mage weapon issue. it is a long time coming

Looks like you arnt reall a Tamer Mage you are more MAGE tamer perhaps a different pet OR Pets could help. Looks like you do spawns and have the bane there as a nice back-up. If thats true then maybe a simple nightmare and a pet ball for a beetle or a Bake???

 

[Luke Carjacker]

Yeah, you're exactly right that I'm more mage than tamer. I do have a tamer that I use for certain things, but at spawns and if PvP arises I guess my inclination is to fight as a mage. If I'm able I'll set up kills that include my pets. For the most part, I don't like to go on foot in a pvp situation, so I'll fight as a mage; and have a bane, dread or cu underneath me is good protection if dismounted and/or ganked.

I prefer not to go with 110 eval; I've thought it over a lot and I agree that would really be the only place to steal some points from. I guess I'll just have to really sit down and think about which spells I use most; it's just more of a knee-jerk reaction that I need 120 eval for PvP. In pure mage fights, 120 eval makes all the difference in the world, but since I'm doing a lot of damage via mysticism & pets, maybe it's a reasonable compromise. I know I don't want to steal points from the 60 bushido I have. You need 62.5 to cast confidence 100% of the time, so there's a chance of failure as is. And again, being able to heal on the run with confidence, healing stone & potions is nice protection when outnumbered.

I've considered other pets. I have some really nice Cus and I really like their survivability in PvP situations. A big drawback, though, is that you can't cast EVs to help move the spawn if you ride a Cu. Other big drawback is that Cus don't cast spells, so it's kind of easy for people to get away from them in. I did tinker with the Bake idea even before you mentioned it (in conjunction with a Bane), but I don't like PvPing in spawn areas with non-mount pets. It's just too much trouble trying to get them to keep up, especially if there's a bunch of targets on the screen at once.

Regarding your comment about mage weapons, I haven't heard anything about that. I do know that if that happens, A LOT of people will have to be making changes. In fact, I'd like 90% of the regular PvP mages I see are carrying a mage weapon wand, twinkling scimitar, planesword or something of that ilk.

Also, I haven't had the same bad luck controlling my bane as I had the other night. Refusal in pvp are still a pain, but since that post I've fought in extended fights and not had any concerns about losing so much loyalty that it might go wild. One thing I do do regularly is after a fight, go to a nice safe place and give it commands to raise the loyalty back to wonderfully. Overall, I'm enjoying the template.

 

[Wenchkin]

I would say you'll need something like either 112/112 or the 115 on taming to get the bane under control fully. TBH if it was me I wouldn't entertain PvPing at less than 99% control - Sod's Law of Disobedient Pets kicks in - your pets will always disobey the most vital commands.

Normally I'd say just feed the pet if it disobeys to get loyalty back up, but with banes that could get quite irritating. The thing is once you refuse commands the loyalty drops a little, so every subsequent failed command lowers things a bit more. And of course once the loyalty is in the drop, the chances are your next command will get refused too. Which is probably what happened when you had a run of command failures. So you would usually try and feed a pet to stop that downward spiral.

Pets like banes need more skill than some other PvP critters, so the tricky thing with your template is fitting in your mage ideals alongside the pet. If you've got a free slot for a talisman that's probably where you'd want to pop a taming boost. Brain has gone on a blip this morning but I'm meaning the tali artie with +5/+5 on it.

Hope that makes some kinda sense, I normally try not to post before the coffee kicks in lol.

Wenchy

 

[Jonathan Baron]

As I said, I've seen those treats behave like pre-crash real estate in the two shards I play on. I've not been much for T-Chest adventures until this happened and the quest to make them was removed. Now folks think I'm daft when I tell them I've got dibs on the Tasty Treats and I don't care about the rest

Fortunately this happens with the non-tamer guild I belong to on one shard and not the tamer DOMINATED guild I belong to on another. The latter is more into those battles against various peerless monsters and are aware that the phrase, worth its weight in gold, doesn't begin to cover it when it comes to the treats. These are not Bane-only booster shots after all.

I can only assume that these Bane snacks are no big deal whatsoever to get if your guild LOVES doing T-Chests several times a night.

I'm neither a good tamer nor a good mage yet. Only been back a few months after ten years away. Obsessive devotion to acquiring skill points and putting them in the proper places was a fundamental mistake I made. It's a mistake just about everyone makes. Templates are effective for diminishing anxiety and boosting confidence. They have little to do with separating the average player from the gifted one.

The most effective players I see succeed due to keen situational awareness, extraordinary patience, and very high frustration tolerance. A template is simply a measure of what your character is theoretically capable of doing, not what you, as a player, are competent to do.

In short, despite game dictated minimum thresholds, points are an unlikely source of problems apart from fundamental competitiveness issues like adding Bushido to a steel on steel guy for instance. Rather, my lack of experience and competence is always, always the source of my woes in UO.

I have yet to have a pet flat out refuse a command unless I messed up. Or it's due my failure to manage the pet properly. For example, I continue to forget to issue the All Follow Me command just prior to climbing aboard a pet. This can prove a huge mistake, especially in the Succubus room at Fan Dancer Dojo. As the saying goes, the one element common to everything that's gone wrong in our life is that we were present.

I am not convinced that any number of skill points above the number required for the pet to accept you has any effect whatsoever on its obedience. In fact I'm certain it plays no role at all.

Plus each pet has its oddities. My Cu, for example, attacks strictly based on line of sight unless I tell it to guard me. Then it will hunt down monsters based on sound and select their target based on what they see. Dreads behave in similar fashion. The only dragons I've found intelligent enough to manage this well is the incomparable Hiryu: among the most intelligent, if not THE most intelligent combat pet in the game. Nothing else has the Hiryu's near genius for threat assessment whereas most others attack the first enemy they see without regard for relative strength of foes. But, in the end, that's our responsibility, not theirs. The Hiryu simply allows me to succeed in spite of my numerous mistakes.

Short version: points are indeed Sine Qua Non but are rendered minuscule in a game this complex. I realize the tolerances are tighter in PvP but I'm still trying to get my mind around the fact that, now, they are separate activities entirely. No matter. It's not what you have, it's what you do.

Jonathan