Dex Tamer Ideas

I'm toying with the idea of training a dex tamer. I'd very much appreciate any ideas or suggestions on how to put together a workable template. Thanks in advance to the brilliant minds of UOR that help me put this together.

What method of transportation are you considering? If you are ok using public moongates or an "alt" to get you around then I think many options are open when you drop magery and med. To save on resources I'd probably go with standard taming but get music and peace.

Yeah, sorry. I should have been more specific. I was thinking along the lines of no mage or bard skills. Some sort of mix of fencing, tactics, anatomy, healing, resist, taming, lore and vet. It's a lot to fit in, I know. Bunch of skills at 80 or 90 will do it. Just hoping to get someone's personal experience or perhaps a unique angle I hadn't thought of myself.

to me the answer depends on if you plan to pvp or pvm?

Really, I think it's rather douchey to plan on bringing tames into PvP but I would like for the odd PK I run into to be really sorry he found me. Hence my desire to have some amount of resist as well as my choice of fencing for the para blows. Who knows, though, maybe it'd make a good character to defend sigils with or something. . .

Mutombo did it for PvP. Would be cool for a PvMer though, I think anyway. I'd probably drop Vet for Magery though and just rock mobs that can be easily GHealed.
I dunno.

Taming
Fencing
Tactics
80 Vet
80 Lore
80 Anat
80 Healing
80 Magery

That's the only thing that makes sense to me. It still feels like a weak template imo...but it would probably be an efficient farming template. Use your 80 magery to gate pets. Probably want to have stats like 100 str 45 int 80 dex. Might help to keep gate scrolls. Also worth noting that you wouldn't be able gate if feebleminded unless you ran more int (like 51).

One of the things that will be really annoying about playing this is trying to get close enough to a mob to hit it at the same time as your pets. They will probably often get in your way and also when in melee range the mobs are often going to switch to hit you which will be annoying too.

No need for Healing; your pets should be taking the pain.

I guess I'd say:

Magery
Swords
Tactics
Animal Taming
Animal Lore
Vet

...and then either Anatomy or Lumberjacking, whichever adds more damage. I think Lumberjacking would.

Alternatively, you could go with Eval Int for the final skill. If you're unmounted, you're not going to get close enough to para blow anyways. And if you are mounted, you're being sort of inefficient in your PvMing.

I tried to find a way to not have healing too, but the only thing that made sense to me other than 80 healing was an equal amount of meditation. I don't think any template on any character should be without magery. Then after that every template that does combat needs a healing method...and as a rule of thumb I say magery+meditation is a sufficient way to heal OR healing by bandage is sufficient if you have magery/no med to support it.

I agree you don't want to be taking damage - but you will be taking damage. Mobs will turn and flamestrike you. Mobs or players will hit you before you can get your pets in the way. Maybe you'll be at an event or amib or champ spawn and things will do area effect damage to you and your pets at the same time.

It's worth mentioning that I'm assuming this template will mainly be used for pvm stuff.

That's a safe assumption, Mes, but now you guys got me dreaming of feeding players to my nightmare. Really, I just want some extra stable slots so I can keep a pack of dire wolves and a pack of hell hounds. The template would mostly be about style. I may just train this character the naturalist way and see where it goes.

Now that I think about it... why not Archery?

Great skill to complement your tames - that way you don't have to be up against the monster but rather can be a safe tile back, healing your pets and out of harms way.

Plus, I haven't looked into this much, but I think I read that Archery has a weird custom to-hit formula here, such that if you're (a) standing still, and (b) close to your target, you have a high chance to hit. There's also the plain old high chance to hit customization that players have here too, so I don't know how these might interact, but safe to assume you won't be missing much.

I like the idea of archery too. Especially if you could find a slayer bow for whatever you were killing.

Hmmm. . . I do like the archery idea. And with the accuracy bonus on magical bows I might be able to go with sub-GM archery skill. . .

Just want to clarify that the accuracy you see on a magic weapon does not mean you gain chance to hit. It's a pretty common misconception. That rating is just a damage increase (remember that all it does is add +tactics skill which only adds damage, not chance to hit).

However there is a special mechanic on the server to gain a chance to hit with bows the closer you get to the target, until melee range, where you will be on a level playing field again.

Also, I'm pretty sure that a few months ago combat skills received a significant increase in chance to hit across the board against all non-player characters. I think at GM archery you would have atleast a 75% chance to hit an npc with a GM defensive ability.

That's from the patch note when this came out. It's not clear if this applies to GM skill levels only or all skill levels. If it worked for all skill levels then I think having less than GM archery would probably be just fine.

Traditionally you get a bonus to archery instead of tactics. Did we change that at some point with out my notice?

Godric, you are correct.

And, I believe the archery bonus here for accuracies is a straight 5% per modifier (not 4.3% or whatever weirdness it was in-era).

Do powders of fortification work on bows? If so, should be easy to find a nice +25 bow to make this work.

Telamon provided the formula in the board somewhere for chance to hit via archery; should be easy to plug in 2 tiles for distance and 0 movement and figure out your chance to hit at GM and otherwise.

Well as far as I can tell there's two different things happening - +chance to hit that vs mobs that all combat skills received, and a +chance to hit for archery that has to do with your distance from target.

edit - oh neat. I guess I vaguely remember the + archery from magic weapons, but had forgotten it. It's embarrassing to say that I think I've never equipped a bow before on the server until just now. It seems to me that it's gotta be pretty complicated to figure out your chance to hit with a bow against an npc considering all those factors.

I guess you'd need to know if they were multiplicative or if they just added onto each other.

Yeah, I just checked. The archery bonus is in multiples of 5. As far as how those bonuses stack up, who knows. . .

Yes

From: Patch 31

Code:

   
if (DateTime.Now < (attacker.LastMoveTime + TimeSpan.FromSeconds(.75)))
{rangemod = 24;} 
else
{rangemod = 12;} 

defValue = (distance * rangemod ) + (defWeapon.GetDefendSkillValue(attacker, defender) * .33);

Correct, archery weapons get a bonus to archery skill instead of tactics from any magical accuracy bonus the weapon has

The hit-chance bonus for pvm is across all skill levels, up to a maximum of 75% chance to hit at 100.0 skill.

Of course! That's who knows. Thanks, EZ.