The waiting time and the charge for using the vet, as well as a couple of other changes mentioned below, were meant to be incentives to try to first get another player to rez your pets. When the addition of the NPC vets was in development for Publish 60, it was clear that the developers were walking a tightrope between trying to help out players who play at odd hours and/or on sparsely populated shards and have a lot of difficulty getting pets rezzed and people who didn't want to see the veterinary skill become pointless.
In the Skillguide on the official UO site, there are a few requirements for using the NPC veterinarians that didn't seem to make it into the Publish 60 notes. You might want to review these to make sure one of them isn't causing the vet NPC to refuse to rez your pet:
- The targeted pet must be the player's pet.
- It must be within 12 tiles of the NPC.
- It must be in line of sight of the player's character.
- The player's character must have sufficient gold in the bank to cover the veterinarian's fee. (Apparently the gold can't be in check form because the notes say that if you don't meet the gold requirement, you'll get this message: "Unfortunately, you do not have enough cash in your bank to cover the healing.")
There's nothing in the notes regarding how long you have to wait before you can use the NPC vet. I seem to recall 15 minutes being the time under consideration during the beta, but have never tested to see if that is how it turned out. It may just be 10 minutes.
The NPC vet's charge to rez the pet is based on the amount of taming skill required to own the pet. There is no charge for pets that require 0 taming skill to own. The maximum charge, for pets that require at least 110 taming skill, is 30,000 gold.
Publish 60 also added a timer on character-initiated rezzes using vet skill to help eliminate insta-deaths that some players experienced when they rezzed a pet in a sticky situation. I think that timer is 10 seconds long. It also added some code that automatically restores a small amount of the pet's health when a player character does the rez, based on the character's vet and lore skills and level in the Compassion virtue.
Something else that was included in Publish 60 but that seems to have flown under the radar for many was the addition of a new potion called Elixer of Rebirth. Alchemists with at least 65 alchemy skill make the elixer from Medusa blood and spider silk. There is no restriction on who can use the elixer and I believe there is also no restriction on
where it can be used either, although that was discussed at some length in the beta. However, the pet must have been dead for at least five minutes before the elixer can be used. As with character-initiated rezzes using vet skill, there is a small restoration of hit points when the rez is done, based on the the rezzer's vet and lore skill; however, I don't think there is any any extra restoration of the pet's hit points based on the rezzer's level in the Compassion virtue.
