I propose that it be possible to earn Animal Taming skill gains via doing combat with your tamed pets. Reason: There is currently little reason to use Animal Taming for combat purposes until 100 skill, rendering the Tamer arguably "unplayable" until the 1-99 grind has been completed. Consider every other combat skill, even Magery. Sure, you can go the boring grind-y route to raise these skills, but you can also choose to raise them via adventuring. If you are a melee, ranged, or magical fighter, then you are able to go adventuring and fight creatures appropriate to your skill level and not be wasting your time as far as skill gains are concerned. A young swordsman can enter the Brit graveyard with dreams of one day fighting ogre lords and such, and when he leaves, he will be closer to those dreams. Dragons are, however, just as out of reach to a young tamer after he leaves the graveyard as they were when he entered. I do *not* want Animal Taming to be easier. I simply want 1) A reason to fight alongside creatures that aren't dragons as I gain skill, 2) An alternative to grinding taming alligators/scorpions over and over and over, and 3) Access to what I feel is a large segment of content that is being missed out on, such as the canine and feline pack mentalities. P.S. I realize that folks can play the game any way they want, and that if I really wanted to, I have every capability of fighting any tier of creatures with timber wolves, grizzly bears, etc. However, for someone such as myself who does not have an unlimited time to spend in-game, it is important to me that I can move towards my goals as I play my character. Fighting alongside wolves and bears may be fun, but as things currently stand, I just have to accept that no matter how much I do it, I won't move any closer towards my goals.
Very well written, and I would tend to agree with this concept. This would especially be useful for those players who have chosen to play as naturalist. As things are now, it's not really possible to play a naturalist tamer as it would take actual years to build your taming skill that way, this would certainly be a fix to that problem. Besides, our coders are so good at what they do that I'm sure they could find all of the potential problems and work arounds for those problems long before they patched this into the game
"play as a naturalist" -- this phrase completely embodies the point I was trying to make. I feel like my entire post could be summed as this. "... so that naturalist tamers are possible." Thanks for your thoughts!
tl;dr No. Just macro it. This is one of those ideas that I often use as an example of a bad design decision. Tamers are way overpowered in the UO PvM scene, even here on Renaissance. The reason is simple: you get a tank and DPS machine that is ten times what a player can achieve on their own, and you can use more than one Taming is supposed to be hard to raise. It's the price you have to pay for the power you eventually wield. You have some interesting points in your post. You imply that your goal is to be a GM tamer, or at least to reap the rewards of such. You state that you do not wish to engage in less-than-GM taming content because it does not get you closer to "your goal", which I assume is GM taming. You complain that this content is not experienced currently because of this. It sounds to me like your goal is the destination, not the journey. And that's quite alright, not everyone has to savor the journey. Even those that do will choose not to do so in some situations. So if your goal is to be a GM tamer, MACRO IT. You skip the journey and reach the goal. If you want to savor the journey of the Beastmaster, do what so many others have done and take that journey. Your complaint is that this journey is a slow one, and I completely agree with you. I played a tamer on OSI for three years and was barely taming Drakes, but it was fun as hell. So here's a rough outline of a naturalist tamer: Start with 50 taming and disco. Use Peace and Discord to keep your pets from taking too much damage. Tame armies, not pets! Tame your target creatures over and over until you find ones with very high stats. This engages you in taming and nets skill gain. Start with Brown Bears, then Grizzlies at 59.1. Grizzly Bears can easily take down Earth Elementals in number. At 77.1 move up to Lava Lizards. At 84.3 move up to Drakes. Four well-trained drakes can drop a disco'd and peace'd dragon like a bad date. At 93.7 move up to Dragons (obviously). And at 96.3 start trying your hand with White Wyrms.
Great points! I especially like what you said here: "It sounds to me like your goal is the destination, not the journey. And that's quite alright, not everyone has to savor the journey. Even those that do will choose not to do so in some situations. So if your goal is to be a GM tamer, MACRO IT. You skip the journey and reach the goal." Also, I like your outline for the naturalist tamer. Definitely something to think about.
One of the biggest issues with this idea is that by opening up skill gain to using your tames, what you mostly will have accomplished is simply making the skills much easier to raise via macroing afk.
Exactly. Perhaps if the gains were based on mob kills, not just active control of tames, it may work but it sounds very risky. What's to stop anyone from putting up a house with a table wall and having a bear slay mongbats in the Fens of the Dead? I like the thought but it sounds very very risky.
This does seem like something that would be very hard to implement without making it easy to take advantage of. If you ask me the thing that needs to be fixed about taming is the number of control slots. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Compared to OSI, alchemy, inscription, and lumberjacking have all gotten a nerf for balance, yet tamers have been given extra control slots here. Was that because tamers were ever under-powered? That's the worst thing about this shard to me. It's preposterous. Add to that the amount of new content that's easily accessible only to tamers. . . *depressed sigh* *goes to train a tamer so he has some chance of being competitive at the next event or new piece of game content*
Perhaps what would be more helpful for what the OP is looking for is a retool of certain tameables in the 50-90 region to be more useable. Like frenzied ostards/grizzly bears/polar bears/imps that are in some way more useable. Something under the power of a nightmare, but better than where those things currently are that someone in the 70~'s or 80~'s skill levels could make some use but not be capable of camping balrons.
It's not hard to get to the point where you can train drakes. Now, drakes require 2 control slots (as do nightmares) while dragons and wyrms require 3. I won't say that drakes are quite half as good as a dragon but they're rather formidable none-the-less. As of this moment you will almost never see a tamer with drakes. At the higher levels of skill the reason is obvious: Why would one use three drakes instead of the much more powerful pair of dragons or wyrms? It's my opinion that at lower skill levels the drake should be very appreciated by young tamers as it was traditionally meant to be. For purposes of comparison, I've trained taming into the 90's as quickly as I've trained provocation. This means you can be out hunting with drakes as soon as you can be hunting with a bard. I'm sure some will find this hard to believe but it's based on my own personal experience. Right there is why I believe there isn't a true and legitimate problem illustrated in the OP (no offense, pdodd.) However, we could improve on this still. If we lowered control slots to 5, as is era accurate, instead of 8 (which I can only assume is to help lure tamers from other freeshards) then the imbalance of PvM power between ~96+ tamers and those of ~86+ skill would be greatly reduced. Newer tamers would then have the opportunity to control two drakes while riding a horse or ostard. With the use of veterinary healing this would place such a tamer much closer in power to the GM tamers utilizing a nightmare/single dragon combo than they are currently. Elsewhere, I've also presented ideas that I think would improve taming such as new tameables as well as improvements to the pack instinct bonuses. You can review a previous discussion here: Control Slots for Tamed Monsters and Animals Obviously, I'm pretty confident in my own opinion and I mean no offense to anyone. I would like to point out that I have not personally tested the effectiveness of two drakes versus one dragon. Nor have I actually committed to playing a tamer, though I have acquired my fair share of experience in training the skill. Every time I see a post like this I feel the need to share my feelings on the state of taming as I have a strong belief that tamers are shown quite a bit of favor here on UOR. (Such as the boss system, whereby bards are essentially forced to leave a spawn at some point as only a tamer could be expected to take on such a beast.) This particular post, however, has inspired me. I think when I have the time I'll create an experimental tamer to test the time required and effectiveness of using "mid-level" pets versus the other popular high-level PvM techniques.
This has all been said before. Tamers OP. Mare/Drag/WW ftw. Anything else is purposely crippling yourself. Bards can sit in a corner and suck their thumbs when they see boss-type monsters. Dunno if reiterating it really makes sense. As with most things in UO, you can try to beat them, join them, or quit. I love Renaissance and I couldn't beat the tamers, so for the first time in roughly fifteen years of playing this game I GMed taming. It's fun. Hop on board, Godric. I agree with the OP's idea. We might indeed see more use of weaker creatures on the path to GM taming. I don't think the argument that this system would create any more AFK macroing of the skill holds water. There are enough ways to macro it AFK already and I don't believe for a second that our taming community hasn't been using them to the fullest. At worst it could provide a different way of doing the same thing that's already done. At best it would please some people who would like to see actual playing of the skill at some point between 0.0 and 100.0. Maybe that's not enough of a reason to justify a change but I don't think it would hurt either.
I stopped macroing taming at around 97.5 and have only gained a few .01 since by taming a few dragons/wyrms. I've had no real issues with it not being GM and have farmed a small fortune since getting my pets. Would I have to feed them less at 100? I believe so, but this has never hindered me. I have fully stocked bards and warriors...even a crafter or two, but my tamer is still my favorite toon. Not even because I used him to farm that small fortune..but more-so because at the drop of a hat I can log him on and come to the aid of a guildie/friend, or someone in IRC needing help. I'd hate to see ANYTHING ever change that. Now, passive gains are always awesome in my book but I'd expect there'd have to be some major tweaking for that idea to work. I suspect the only reason we don't have 80 tamers on at once is because some people just don't have the patience to macro it up. With all this being said I think there is only one real important question left.... Who wants to give me a bunch of pre-tames so I can finally GM this sh*t?!?!
I'll help ya out there, Mobolin. I've gotta train taming up so people will take me seriously in these discussions. *hops on board*
I'd use drakes when bored.. easy tames as your cleaning up destard. Also took out the arctic ogre mage with 6 drakes. The main problem with them is they cannot cure themselves. 98 taming is also perfectly fine, I saw no real benefit from hitting GM 4 months later. Im not sure about the OP on what steps could.be made to make it easier to gain on the field, maybe up to a cap like fighting with a pick axe to raise lumberjacking?
