What to pair with taming?

I plan on making a tamer but am having trouble coming up with a template for what I would like to do.

This would be a pure farm character, and used for nothing but PvM.

So the base template I have is:
Magery
Meditation
Animal Taming
Animal Lore
Veterinary

I was going to try Odin's build: http://www.uorenaissance.com/player/7399, but it seems many people are picking up discord/peacemaking as well.

From a pure PvM standpoint, what are your opinions on each build?

Provocation is better for special holiday events sometimes. But for everyday farming, I think Discordance is the best.

I have music, provo and discord instead of med and it is a lot of fun. makes provo onto boss monsters easier too. I don't even notice the slower regeneration.

I'm having trouble understanding the purpose of Disc. From what I read, it weakens mobs?

Does it cause them to not attack as well, or simply reduce stats/skills on mobs?

Also, does anyone have a chart reflecting the stat/skill reduction?

Actually, it looks like YOU posted some very relevant information already. Thanks Dalavar

http://uorforum.com/threads/guide-to-the-bardic-arts.2912/

These are the three tamer templates I've seen the most:

(1)
+Music
+Provocation

This probably has my vote for 'best of the bunch', it's just extremely well-rounded. Crowd control can greatly reduce the amount of damage your tames take while simultaneously helping you kill stuff faster. Well suited to just about anything, but is extra vulnerable to PKs and you have no personal defense when monsters aggro on you.


(2)
+Wrestling
+Magic Resist

This template gives you the most survivability. Well suited to surviving or fending off PKs and greatly minimizes embarrassing deaths in PvM. Also good at champion spawns as you can just bring in a more specialized character for the "bard-only" stages. You can swap out one of these for Eval Int too, if you want some nuking power instead.


(3)
+Music
+Provocation
+Discordance
-Meditation

This is probably my favorite to play - there's just always something to be doing with it. Discordance is powerful. The tougher the enemy you're facing, the better it is. But you will really miss Meditation. GHeal spam has saved my dragons many times, and this template has a hard time keeping up when things go south. If you do go this route, you absolutely need 40 dex for faster bandages. If you're into champion spawns, you will miss Meditation even more (rezzes, e-bolts, gates).





Tamer/dexer hybrids are a lot of fun too. Ridiculous damage output, but you have to sacrifice a lot for it. You may end up needing a second character to taxi you around.

My beef with Provo for a farmer is you will likely choose spots that don't have swarms of enemies. Although if you plan to do champ spawns a lot, I think Provo makes sense.

Also, I should mention I began here with basoosh's Survival template. Ended up dropping magic resist in favor of Inscription. 15 spell circles is usually more than enough to survive a pk or some accidental monster targeting. Why use resist to take half damage when you can use inscribe to take none!

You can also drop wrestling for eval int. You get 50 defensive wrestling from it (25% misses from a gm enemy)... And the easiest way to kill a pk is to reflect an explosion AND ebolt, while your pets drop their reflect and you cast your own level 6 spell to hit with 100 eval.

If I had to build a tamer today my template would be:

Taming
Lore
Vet
Weapon Skill (I wouldn't do archery. You're going to be near your pets to Vet them so I think archery is kinda silly here)
Tactics
Anat
Healing

We are allowed 3 accounts here. I don't think it's a big deal to have a 2nd account taxi you around. I did it for over a year here with my peace dexxers never having magery. Just keep another account, or 2, in town and ready to cast a gate on macro to your location.

This template is 100% damage output. You don't need to rely on more than 1 mob (provo) or using peace over and over. Equip a slayer and a few pets and go to town. If I had a tamer with this template I would never leave the balron room.

My 2nd choice would be a Disco Tamer.

Forgetting a tamer spec, The merchant ranger. tracking and ID. I hunt mares, also keep and eye for pks, can track rares zookeeper spawns, and can move all items into the loot container already present, and id . loot what needs looting. All Kill...

Dalavar's got a good point about inscription and having eval on a tamer probably warrants it's own entry. A lot of people run eval + resist. As far as the dex tamer goes, I tried out Cynic's template. If you have another qualified PvM character it can seem burdonsome and get forgotten really quick. I'm also getting ready to retrain my tracking tamer(I've done this twice). . . Love the idea, it's just that nothing seems to come of it.

Also, I don't know if anyone runs it but a LP+Carto tamer makes sense in it's own way. . . Under powered in comparison to others but I'm thinking about trying this on my main just for the 'busy work' of training two time consuming skills and completing the achievements.

I used to make an easy 100k an hour cycling back and forth between bloods and elder gazers with a tame/discord build.

Mage
Med
Tame
Lore
Music
Discord
Vet

My pets would smash through bloods in seconds with discord applied and I raked in mad cash. You can use slayer instruments and easily kill ancient wyrms/barons.

On a side note, I would love to see the results of using a Provo/discord tamer in the shadow wyrm pit in destard 2. Those thugs spawn quick and drop nice loot.

Slayer instruments increase Disc damage?

It appears to only affect success chance.

Yes, it only increases your chance of successfully discording. Against mobs like bloods/elders you can use a regular gm instrument and succeed 99% of the time, but against more difficult mobs you'll want to use slayer instruments.

I have 2 tamers, one a provo/music and the other wrestle/resist. Provo/music with med is my go-to champ spawn build. I understand that some people would rather sub in a second character when you do bard-only stages, but I like to do everything on one character. Wrestle/Resist is just kind of meh; I'm prolly going to tweak that one...maybe drop resist for inscription which sounds interesting.

I would probably be focusing on farming mobs like dragons/blood eles/balrons. In this scenario, do you guys feel Music/Disc would be a good option?

I think Discordance is best for those. Definitely for balrons and bloods. For dragons, there's enough of them in Destard that you could make a case for provocation, but disco is just as good and is more versatile IMO.

Do bear in mind... you'll have about 50% success barding dragons with a GM instrument, and maybe 90-95% with a slayer. With a GM instrument, 10% success at barding balrons, and about 50% with a slayer. You can get by with GM against dragons, but against balrons you're almost wasting 200 skill points unless you use a slayer instrument.

My main character is geared up for the same type of hunts.

His build is:
Taming
Lore
Vet
Music
Disco
Provo
Magery

Meditation isn't really needed in this build since you aren't using Magery for offense, just recall/gating around and a bit of defense/healing.

I noticed while GMing music that none of my instruments took durability hits(even though I bought 10). Is this the case when using disc on a mob with a slayer weapon, or do they actually take durability hits?

I thought about leaving off med in the same build, but since this is only my second mage, I think I'll stick with it for now

Do you plan on dropping med for provo or something else Captain?