Hi. How long did it tage you to gm taming, and how did you do it? i dont know if it will take me months or i can afk it in a few days.
I spent the first forever taming polar bears, panthers and eventually wolves on Dagger Isle. This was all manual running around taming stuff. Would get a small pack together and kill whatever monsters were in the area with the pack, training a bit of vet along the way. Then near 80 I was able to start taming bulls in Jhelom, which was only then able to macro/afk to GM. The whole first part takes a long time. I think I was getting like 5.0-8.0 skill gain per night, playing for 1-2hours.
Since a taming character was one of my last builds and I had amassed the gold for the desert temp house, I followed this guide. http://uorforum.com/threads/the-mostly-afk-guide-to-training-animal-taming.38138/#post-378922 I have used it for 3 characters so far and found it to work like a champ. I did the first character in about a week. The second and third took longer but that was because I wasn't trying as hard on them and was working them between other characters.
It took me about 2-3 months of casual play to GM taming, training actively (not AFK or using looping macros) for about 5-10 hours per week. Early on, I decided that I didn't want to use a "tame and kill" approach. Looking at guides and screenshots of hordes of scorpions, leopards, etc, all bottlenecked at a coastline or a house... it just felt broken to me, and not in the spirit of the game. I ran through the Jhelom bull pens to get a feel for what to expect, and that, too, just felt exploitative and wrong. The whole vibe there is hatred and death. Think about it: your character is saying things like "I promise to take care of you." to the creature you're about to immediately feed to a deadly serpent! I knew that method of training wasn't for me. Instead, I went for a "tame and release" approach. 1. Tame-and-release is a more ethical and justifiable approach than tame-and-kill. When my character tames a creature, he is learning how to communicate with that creature. Even though he has no intention of keeping them under his wing, he learns a little more each time, and lets the creature go peacefully back into the wild. Unless you're playing a cruel, chaotic evil character, it's hard to justify killing a creature you just befriended. 2. Tame-and-release is beneficial to other tamers. When a pet is released, it becomes more difficult for another player to tame. This translates to faster gains. In role-playing terms, that creature is more hesitant to trust the next human it encounters, thus requiring more skillful persuasion. I started with 50 Animal Taming and 50 Veterinary, and went straight to Dagger Isle. There, I ran around taming frost bears, snow leopards, and white wolves (in that order). I continued on Dagger Isle until I was able to start taming bulls. I heard that Delucia was a hot spot for the tame-and-release method, but when I checked it out, I discovered that the spawn of bulls and great harts was much slower there and more spread out. After having seen how quickly bulls spawn in Jhelom, I decided to take my chances at the pens instead. I found it quite difficult to make progress at the Jhelom pens, but with some patience (waiting for other players to leave) and determination (coercing other players to either cooperate or leave), I trained here until reaching around 93 skill. It was around this point that I decided the pens were no longer working for me. At this point, I either needed to move on to hell hounds or to find some bull re-tames. I tried hell hounds in Hythloth next. There's a room where hell hounds spawn in a pack of about 6. At the time, the Easter event was still active, and there was an easter bunny and a Fluffy just outside this room, so I had to be especially careful to avoid these powerful creatures. Keeping all six hell hounds under control while managing their fire breath was pretty difficult. My character had Peacemaking, though, which helped tremendously. I would make peace with each hound, one by one, until they were all calm. Then, I would begin taming, and alternate between a taming attempt and another round of peacemaking. As you can imagine, this turned out to be slow and arduous, and broke down once I started getting some successful tames and more hounds would respawn. Also, upon successfully taming one hound, the others would turn on it. This makes complete sense from a role-playing perspective (the pack feels betrayed), but I realized I couldn't continue putting hounds in that position to choose between me or their pack, knowing it would mean their likely demise. So I moved to T2A for the rest of my training. Here, I ran around finding frenzied ostards, hell hounds, hell cats, and lava lizards to tame. I didn't gain much from this, but it was fun. I would occasionally find a Britannian bull farm (i.e: a herd of released bulls). After randomly coming across a couple of these bull farms and gaining 0.3-1.0 from each in a short amount of time, I realized that bull farms were the way to go. Way better gains than even Jhelom pens were able to provide, and renewable for the benefit of the next aspiring tamer who comes along. At around 97.0, I decided to venture back to Delucia. There, I tamed every bull and great hart I saw. I would collect 6 at a time, lure them to the Delucia stable, and release them. Over the course of just a few days, I noticed other tamers doing the same, and we would tame each other's released pets. Not long after this got started, I reached 100.0. Looking back, there are some optimizations I would definitely make to my training strategy (i.e: spend more time building and making use of retame farms, and not just for bulls). I feel a sense of achievement in attaining Grandmaster in taming through following a naturalist, ethical path, that benefits both the creatures I've tamed and other players.
Started character with 50 taming, placed a house in compassion desert and table walled the toon inside running a taming loop afk, if I was online I ran around and dragged scorpions to him, hit 71.1 or whatever it is to tame bulls after about 2 days then parked the toon running the taming loop at bulls and left him afk for a week, if I was near the computer I’d Rez him, I know from my auto capture death screenshots that I died 148 times over 7 days before I hit GM. I’d say that was 90% afk.
It’s just the rezzing that’s annoying. The longest I stayed alive and taming for was about 3 hours before I was killed by griefers or people accidentally trying to drag their own silver serpent round the back. East pen, east wall was the spot that I died the least at.
I have 3 tamers now and they all take about a week using that (Mostly) AFK guide - but I wasn't AFK for most of it. I did get my fair share of griefing because I was always the first to res and be back to my spot. This sometimes causes the people who are all AFK to suspect you of stealing their spot or killing them. Jehlom is the closest place to hell on this server. Turns even the nicest people into monsters. I think I got killed by more people who thought I killed them (Which I didn't!!!!) than the PKs.
Depending on how many times you get killed at the pits (and whether you use a herding character) you can GM in ~5 days.
Miami, you will finish if you feel pleasure doing it... Make like me... Put peace at your tammer, get a tamming difficult chart and get yourself into the wild... If you follow a good tamming routine you will raise until 94-95 as faster as you could imagine.. you will not die to the jhellom ripper and will find a gold mine of zoo pets in your way(i made half of my scroll before reach 95 of tamming). After 95, there are no way... ask to a friend to help you retaming dire wolfs for example... and enjoy... the last fast gains..
After 95 ... tame hell hounds. Especially if you have another tamer or a tamer friend, do the following: 1. Have them tame 7-8 hell hounds 2. Gate them to a house 3. Separate your tamer-in-training from the hounds via a wall of furniture. 4. Pull one hell hound away from the others (separate them via door. 5. Release the lone hell hound and fire away at your taming. 6. Release the retame and boot it from the house (or kill it). This works especially well when you get to 97.5 if you have 2 tamer friends .. one with 85.5+ and one with 91.5+ taming. Just follow the above method for tamers 2 and 3. Just make sure to heal yourself every now and then. I tend to save up regular ol' heal wands and just use them every 30 seconds.
I started from 30, one week ago.. 1-2 hours a day plus 1 night semi afk at jhelom.. i am almost reaching 90.
Agree with @Sapharious about the desert house, if you can come up with even enough for a small house there is still plenty of spots out there. Have one character dragging with one of the house setups from the afk or other threads and it really makes that early journey a lot easier. Even as high as 80 taming Scorpions and Snakes will still be in a nice range and should you do ok on gains if you want to stay in one spot. The good (bad?) news is that after your first one building subsequent tamers can be a bit easier with pre-tames.
