How to Train Your Dragons/Mares So you have some freshly tamed dragons/mares but now you need to train them. This guide will give an overview of the various methods used in order to successfully train your new pets. First a brief rundown on WHY you should train your pets. 1. Trained pets do significantly more damage. 2. Trained pets take significantly less damage. A pet's skills are difficulty based and it will become progressively more difficult as your pet nears 100 in any particular skill. As far as I know, there are 4 different methods commonly used to train pets. DISCLAIMER: DO NOT TRAIN UNBONDED PETS DISCLAIMER: DO NOT TRAIN UNBONDED PETS DISCLAIMER: DO NOT TRAIN UNBONDED PETS 1. Au Natural This method of training is the most basic. It entails taking your dragons/mare out to a farming location and using them to farm. Whilst they fight and kill monsters, as long as you keep them alive, they will undoubtedly gain in skills. Make sure you are fighting monsters with magic if you want your pets to gain magic resist as well as their melee skills. The plus side of this method of training is that you will be making gold as you train your pets. The downside is that there is a lot of risk of pets dieing and losing 2.5% of their skills, whether that is to spawn or player killers. 2. Pet on Pet This method of training is also fairly basic. It entails taking 2 pets of the same type and having them spar each other. Since dragons and mares are magic casters, this will train them in all their skills. This method REQUIRES 2 veterinarians if you are going to let this run AFK!!! 1 gm vet/animal lore character and a 50/50 vet/animal lore alt is sufficient, as the 50/50 character will gm vet in no time. You will want a huge stack of bandaids set next to you and will use a macro that alternates healing 1 dragon then the other at the fastest interval that your dexterity will allow. The secondary healer can alternate at a slightly slower rate, as he is mainly used to protect against long strings of failures that could result in one of your dragons dieing. The plus side of this training method is that it trains ALL the skills at once. The downside is that should you lose connection, one of your dragons will die. It also burns through a lot of bandaids and requires 2 accounts to macro safely. Lastly, after only a few minutes of sparring with each other, the dragons or mares will have burned through all their mana. This results in them being unable to cast higher level spells, thus limiting their magery gains to around mid to high 60's. *note this picture was taken with haste, always macro in the center of your house, at least 8 tiles away from the walls to avoid passerby's EQing your pets to death. 3. Shadow-Iron Elementals This method is the the crème de la crème of pet training. Shadow-Iron Elementals are immune to both your pet's magic damage as well as your pet's physical damage. This makes them excellent punching bags for your training pets, which will nearly if not completely make your training session resource free. To get a shadow iron elemental you will need a miner and a gargoyles pickaxe. Gargoyle pickaxes bump the color of an ore vein up one level and also have a chance to mine up an ore elemental (Not to be confused with ore golems). That means to get a shadow-iron elemental you need to use the gargoyle's pickaxe on a dull copper vein until you are able to draw one up from the vein. Then walk it back to your house and trap it on a single tile by locking down movement blocking items around it. Once you have the elemental locked down inside your house you have 2 ways in which you can use it, melee or magery. To train your pets melee skills on the shadow-iron elemental you will want to gate your dragons onto an adjacent tile and command them to kill the elemental. Then pull the bars of all your pets and wait a moment to observe which of your pets has the shadow elementals aggro. You will want to then loop a macro that says "all guard me" and applies one bandaid every 30 seconds to whichever pet has the elementals aggro. This will be the only pet taking damage and one bandaid per 30 seconds is overkill for keeping your pet alive, but better safe then sorry. The "all guard me" in the macro is used as a substitute for feeding your pet. This is because every successful command increases a pets loyalty rating and the "all guard me" command is very easily obeyed by your pets. The plus side of this method is that it requires only 1 bandaid every 30 seconds. The downside of this method is that after only a few minutes of sparring with each other, the dragons or mares will have burned through all their mana. This results in them being unable to cast higher level spells, thus limiting their magery gains to around mid to high 60's To train your pet's magery higher then that you will need to let them regenerate mana so they can cast higher level spells. To accomplish this, trap your pets a few tiles away from the elemental and alternate at roughly 3 minute intervals attacking and not attacking the elemental. This can be done in 2 ways. The traditional way is to have the house owner drop a stone oven in between the elemental and your pets, blocking line of sight. The house owner will just have a simple macro that places the oven, pauses for 3 minutes, then axes the oven, pauses for 3 minutes. Lore your pets while they dump their mana and regenerate their mana and adjust the pauses so they don't waste much with full mana or out of mana. Make sure to include a handful of "all guard me" commands so your pets do not go wild. The second method of allowing your pets to regenerate their mana is by taking advantage of the "all guard me" command. The command effectively will stop your pets from attacking unless something attacks you, in which case they will attack back. The trick to using this command to let your pets regenerate mana is that YOU need to attack the elemental, not letting the elemental attack you. This is fairly easy to accomplish. After you gate your pets onto the single tile, order them to kill the elemental. Then recall to outside your house and walk inside. As soon as you get in you need to be in war mode attacking the elemental. Then park your character on a tile that is closer to the elemental then your pets are. If you successfully aggro'd the elemental before it aggro'd you, when you give the "all guard me" command, your pets should stop attacking. If they are still attacking, that means the elemental was quicker then you on getting the aggro. Simply hide yourself and sit there for a few moments, then come out of invisibility and QUICKLY attack the elemental and try the "all guard me" command again to see if it successfully stops them from attacking. If they do stop, you are in business. Loop a macro that says "all guard me" about 10 times, pauses 3 minutes, then says "all kill", pauses 3 minutes. Again, adjust these as needed to ensure efficient mana dumping and regenerating. The plus side of these methods is that both will allow you to macro your pet's magery to GM using NO resources. The elemental will remain in your house for 24 hours. The downside is that melee skills are not improved on while training magery, nor is magic resist. I will usually macro my pets on shadow-iron elementals in melee range for about 4-8 hours, until they are 5x gm. Then I will move them back and macro magery to the high 90's/GM. 4. Human on Pet This method is EXACTLY like freesist sessions, in which a few casters will cast meteor swarm on a tile of your pets. They will only take 1 dmg per cast and regenerate hit points at a high enough rate that you could run 5-6 casters and never have to heal your pets. Pets gain magic resist at a much higher rate then humans and in under 24 hours your pets will be GM resist. For information on setting this up please refer to this guide. There are only a few differences which I will detail here. The tamers participating in the resist session NEED to loop a macro that gives the "all guard me" command so that no pets go wild. Due to this risk of wild pets if someone loses connection and stays unconnected for a considerable amount of time, these sessions are best not run publicly, instead they should be run alone, with a few friends, or with your guild. The casters need to be on a different floor then the pets so they do not get attacked by the dragons. If a caster also has pets getting trained, they need to include a few "All guard me" commands in their casting macro. Also despite the temptation, casters should not attempt to run upstairs and animal lore their pets to check their progress. There are a lot of angry dragons waiting to get revenge on the casters and it will almost assuredly result in instant death. One special note, dragons do not "actively" meditation, but only passively through the meditation skill. That means you can do this resist method on the pets in conjunction with having them macro magery on a shadow-iron elemental.
I have a question about training pets. On hybrid(not sure if im really allowed to name another shard on here or not) you and your pets skill gains slowed down when you were closer to your 700 skill cap. When we trained our pets, we would res kill the pet until it would read 0 for each skill. Then obviously do the harder skills first (magery & resist) then do melee skills. Is this a good way to do it here or does skill cap not apply to skill gains?
So I am using Guideon's set up, but when I tell my pets to guard, they ignore me and continue attacking. I do get the message that they are guarding me though.
Yes for a few reasons. First, all guard me is an easier command, as in, the dragon will follow the command more frequently. This is why people spam all guard me to get pet loyalty up. Second, all stop would have your pets begin to wander about, which depending on your setup may not be such a bad thing but ultimately I would want to give the easiest to follow command possible when AFK training. Ultimately they do the exact same thing. 1 all guard me and the pets stop attacking if you make sure you attacked first.
Mares have a low mana pool so they gm magery slower. Gunna prolly take like 2-3 days to get it to GM. One way you can SIGNIFICANTLY speed this up however is to discord your pets. Then to "gm" you only have to get them to like 82 magery. This cuts the time down to a probably 1/4 of how long it takes without discord.
