Returning player in need of some help choosing a template

[OMEN123]

Hello everyone. I've decided to start playing UO again and I'd like to make a tamer, as taming and pets always were the most fun part of the game for me. The game has changed a lot since I last played though, so I could really use some advice picking a template.

First things first, I'm looking for a PVM template. If I ever decide to give pvp a try I can either modify the build or create another character, but for now at least this character will be used for PVM only. I'd prefer a template that is as good as possible for taming purposes. Preferably this character should also be able to solo well. Lastly I'm curious if warrior tamers are any good? I'm only curious because the only tamers I've ever made have always had barding skills and/or magery skills and I was thinking that if I don't have to worry about lrc then putting together a decent luck suit might be easier.

I browse through some other threads but I only found threads about specific builds that never seemed to discuss how good the specific build was for taming purposes, and that's the reason I started a new thread. Anyway, any help would be very much appreciated. Thank you for your time.

 

[OMEN123]

After giving it some more thought I came to the conclusion that I will definitely want magery for the tamer regardless of the fact that I've done it before. Now the real question is how useful barding skills are nowadays? I read somewhere that peacemaking has gotten much weaker (the duration is very short on harder mobs?), is this true? Here are some builds I've been considering:

120 Magery
120 Meditation
120 Evalutate Intelligence
110 Taming
110 Lore
120 SW
(and possibly some chivalry, at least until I can afford to raise my skills to the cap)
---------------

120 Magery
120 Music
120 Peace
120 Taming
120 Lore
100 Vet

Are these templates any good, and how could I improve them from a taming perspective? I would like to be able to eventually tame all pets (including GD's). Thanks in advance.

 

[Krinkle]

---------------
120 Magery
120 Music
120 Peace
120 Taming
120 Lore
100 Vet

Drop Peace for Discord. It will help you to tame and will allow you to kill things quicker with your pet.

There was a change a while back for pet control. You can fine tune how much lore vs. vet you would need to tame specific pets. I can't find the link but there is a calculator somewhere that show this when you add your numbers vs. the pet you are taming/controlling.

 

[OMEN123]

Drop Peace for Discord. It will help you to tame and will allow you to kill things quicker with your pet.

There was a change a while back for pet control. You can fine tune how much lore vs. vet you would need to tame specific pets. I can't find the link but there is a calculator somewhere that show this when you add your numbers vs. the pet you are taming/controlling.

Thanks for the reply. How about this:

120 Music
120 Disco
120 Taming
120 Lore
100 Magery
90 Vet
and the rest in Chivalry (60+ with jewels preferably)

Would this be any good? I was thinking this build could use another source of healing than magery since it lacks all other magery skills.

EDIT: Also, on a side not, how difficult is discordance to raise? I'm only curious because I chose 50 taming, 50 lore and 20 magery as my starting skills, would I have been better off taking 50 disco instead of lore for instance?

 

[5% Luck]

The the only reason I see for having chiv on that template is to remove curse. If you want to hunt misima or coil it is a must and they, as far as gold farming go, pay very well. Other wise the chiv is a waste of points since it is directed at warrior templates.

I know you already said not interested in the warrior tamer but I run my tamer as a warrior. Its not to common for that template except in pvp but I use it successfully in PVM as well.

I have:
115 tame
110 lore
120 swords
100 tactic
100 vet
100 necro
80 parry
65 chive

I do make use of skill plus items to get all that to fit but I would say for farming pets to tame it is bar none the best. I can take down a greater dragon in no time and lore the next even faster!

The basic premise is have the pet tank if not fall back on vamp form and parry. Most times even very high end mobs will be dead before me if I take arrgo. What this template does is add together the two highest DPS "classes"(tamer,paladin) and dish out damage. It is kind of a "glass cannon" in that I do not have any way to break argo. No invisi. No peace.

While I still maintain the paladin semblance, even without a pet I can tank most if not all mid-high end mobs. That include some of the best tamables around. This way when I am out farming for a new pet to keep or to sell I dont have a pet follower count to slow me down. Once I find a worthy tame, I simply beat it within an inch of its life and tame it.

 

[OMEN123]

...

Thank you for the reply. You bring up some excellent points that I had not thought about. I also like the fact that your template doesn't seem to require lots of 120 skills, so it should be cheaper in that regard at least. Then again, how expensive would this character be to equip? I'd imagine that it would be difficult for a new player to get a lot of luck on his gear, assuming that he probably needs pretty much perfect resists, 4/6 casting, +skill items among other things? Maybe you could give some pointers as to what kind of gear I should be looking at? And how realistic would it be for me to reach that amount of skills when my skill cap is 700?

As for the build I proposed, would the chivalry not be useful for healing as well? I mean magery with no eval doesn't sound very effective for healing, or am I missing something?

EDIT: Also, what kind of stats would you propose?

 

[pgib]

I think the cheapest tamer you can create is a tamer-healer

110+ vet
110+ animal lore
110+ taming
100+ magery
110+ meditation
110+ focus

It is also imho the most "powerful" (in that he can solo high end creatures).

lrc, 2fc/6frc, as much mana regeneration/intelligence/mana increase as you can get.

With that you can spawn greater-heal almost indefinitely. If you set a vet target/cast greater heal on target macro, your pet is virtually immortal against non area-damaging monsters of any size cause you heal up to 90-100 hit points per second.

With area-damaging monsters or spawn (like the fire demons) you stay away and cast greater-heal/cure, wich lowers the "regeneration rate" of your pet to 40-45 hp per second (20-30 with heal).

Of course you take a greater dragon out for serious fight (with good resists and high wrestling, the rest doesn't matter) but you can also get one of the fancy freaks (a cu or a reptalon) to have some fun with lower level mobs because you can heal so much hp that it is very hard to kill them.

The good thing is that it doesn't matter how many fire demons and lava elementals or lich lords and rotting corpes are targetting your pet, it will stay alive and kicking.

It can also be handy if you fight in groups, because you can give the ranged hp-regeneration bless to any close contact fighter.

The drawback it that it is slow. You need like 7 minutes to kill a swoop, 10-15 for a paragon cu, more than 40 minutes for navrey, up to 2 hours for rikktor or a dark father and so on. It can be very boring.

And if you die things goes bad for your pet because with that healing rate you rarely send him against easy stuff: then you will find that a more than legendary mage with 600 intelligence is not smart enough to cast at least one greater heal on itself.

 

[OMEN123]

...

Thank you for the suggestion. Would I not be better of replacing focus with eval though? I mean it might run out of mana sooner but it would also increase the kill speed and reduce the incoming damage that way, no? Maybe even throw in enough necromancy to be able to use wraith form for mana leech, or do I need SS for that to work?

 

[pgib]

Thank you for the suggestion. Would I not be better of replacing focus with eval though? I mean it might run out of mana sooner but it would also increase the kill speed and reduce the incoming damage that way, no? Maybe even throw in enough necromancy to be able to use wraith form for mana leech, or do I need SS for that to work?

You can throw eval int in to do more damage in the short run but you can use your spells to attack if the greater dragon is not taking too much damage and that pretty much happens when your spells makes no differences because the gd can bash things in half the time you need to do it.

Of course burning ratmen backs is fun and a few mass spells are useful for lower levels of champ spawns but in the end the tamer that looses his pet in combat is the one that tried to do more damage than healing.

I have to say that i'm talking about soloing the game here. If you travel with friends than the tamer-warrior is better because there are others that can backup you.

Necromancy needs spirit speak. You can run with 20 necromancy and 40 spirit speak, using the +20 artifact you get enough mana-life leech to be of some use but you also need a pretty good suite to be effective.

 

[OMEN123]

I see what you mean pgib, it's just that I remember playing one of those healing tamers before (different build but same concept), and I was hoping to try something a bit different. The thing is that I've had a bard tamer before but never one with disco, so that build still interests me a lot.

120 Magery
120 Music
120 Disco
120 Taming
120 Lore
100 Vet
(rest in meditation until I can afford the scrolls)

What's the downside of a build like this? I take it that it's poor at soloing because of the lack of meditation and therefor I can't long-range heal and self-heal for long periods of time? If that's the case, would there be any way to create a bard tamer that would be great at soloing harder mobs?

EDIT:

120 Music
120 Disco
120 Taming
120 Lore
120 Magery
100 Med

Would this build be more viable for soloing?

 

[pgib]

Discordance is great because it softens the mob and lowers his damage output. You will do fine against all the things, big or little, that don't re-target. Take Navrey for example.

Unfortunately in my experiece there is no possible balance between distance healing and damage output: you take the max mana regeneration possible, with meditation, focus, mana regeneration, intelligence and lower mana cost, and it will work, or there is no point at all and you can go with no meditation.

For example, if you do the mini-champ in abyss where there are fire demons your gd will be surrounded by fire demons. You can't even think to go close and use veterinary because when you enter the fire damage area all of them targets you and you get knocked out with e-bolts and flamestrikes almost instantly.

Now, sometimes you can lure one of the demon away and fight it alone and there you need no healing at all: the gd gnaws it by himself. It is good when it works but most of the time your pet will jump in the middle of the spawy by himself while you follow him screaming all come-all stop-all @#!!: no greater heal spam = dead pet.

I see many using the log-out log-in "trick" to get back the pet in such situations and that's a borderline behavior if you ask me. They do because they can't heal.

 

[OMEN123]

I think I will start off with 50 taming, 50 magery and 20 lore, and then decide which route I want to take as I play. It's pretty hard to decide because on one hand I really like the idea of being able to solo most encounters, but on the other hand I would really want to try other builds than just the healing route. I take it from your replies though that out of the two builds in my last post, you would suggest the one with vet and no meditation?

 

[pgib]

I'd try that for start.

 

[kRUXCg7]

For example, if you do the mini-champ in abyss where there are fire demons your gd will be surrounded by fire demons. You can't even think to go close and use veterinary...... It is good when it works but most of the time your pet will jump in the middle of the spawy by himself ...

Tried it myself today with my new skills set, including:
120 Discordance
120 Musicianship
120 Provocation
Rest in Magery, Veterinary, Taming, Lore (just enough to command a Greater Dragon or Bane Dragon).

I am running the Provocation mastery: one of the songs grants a low but steady healing which seem to be enough for the Greater Dragon to survive for a few minutes against a horde of pesky Fire Demons and those elementals and other monsters. Of course they are not all attacking my dragon all the time, because I am a provoker. My budget suit of mana regeneration is good enough to run one provocation song indefinitely and both at least for a few minutes (the other song grants a 49% damage increase and more). Sometimes I am missing peacemaking when I can't help it and end up being targetted by too many fire demons myself. I don't need discordance all the time down there, might be an idea to change from Discordance to Peacemaking for the Mini-Champs, but I can also use those Confusion Blast potions and try to cast Invisibility. After a horde of Fire Demons and other monsters are dead it might be wise to use veterinary on the Greater Dragon. But apparently the best 'healing' method is to prevent the dragon from being damaged by provoking the monsters on to each other. Could switch from Veterinary to Meditation, too, to have more mana so I can cast Greater Heals. But no Veterinary means fewer stable slots.

 

[pgib]

I tried in the past (very past) the tamer-bard path too. I think i abandoned it when i found that it wasn't of great help with the dark father, cause i couldn't provoke the spawn back on the df fast enough (many failures) to prevent damages. But provocation itself is a massively powerful skill.

Greater Confusion Blast potion is a life saver for me, much better than hiding. Unfortunately the targetting system is a bit screwed up because if you take damage from a spell cast before the confusion blast then the mob insta-aggro you again and then you hit the pvp crappy timer that prevents you to throw a second blast.

 

[5% Luck]

For the warrior tamer:

I get along just fine at 0/0 casting. As a vampire I hardly ever need to heal myself and the pet gets bandaids since I am usually within range as a melee fighter.

The suit I have made is actually very expensive although a simple 70s suit with max stm/mana increase should suffice. Note the -25 fire for being a vampire.

The weapon is the tough part. What I sugest is to head over to:

UO Stratics - Weapons

plug in your total stm(note where it says dex total stm is better) and work out a weapon type that you like and swings at cap(1.25). Next you will need it to be a slayer and have mana leech. Thats the important part! If you can get hit lower defense that is always a plus.

A short list of artis that can be helpful:

travesty mask (either for weapon skill or taming skill)
midnight bracers
Birds of Britannia talisman
rangers cloak of augmentation
insane tinkers legs
mace and shield glasses
conj trinket
primer of arms
breastplate of the berserker (gargoyle)
sign of order
wall of hungry mouths
pillar of strength(gargoyle)

The other mention is the jewelry slots. What I did was add skills, a lot of skills here. On the room I had left I added HCI. Now I have 2 pairs of jewelry. The other has DCI for when I am taming. The HCI set for farming.

I run this char just like a sampire. But instead of me tanking I have the pet. In an emergency situation when all else fails honor self will save me every time.