I had a few questions about pet bonding. 1) Is there a specific reason why this is limited to 1 bonded pet per character? For the sake of variety, it's always fun to train up a pack of wolves or hellcats or some other animal, and run around with them. I'd love to see the pet bonding system allow unlimited bonded pets (like OSI back in the day when this system was in place). I think there's a natural constraint against hoarding bonded pets due to the control slot limits. 2) Are there limits on pets that can be stabled by a character? My recollection of UOR was that there were not limits in this era, but just curious. 3) Do stablemasters, from a practical perspective, ever run out of room in their stables? Again, I didn't think that happened by the time UOR came around, but just figured I'd check. 4) Is the stable duration 7 real-life days? I'd love to see this set to 14 instead, like houses. Not for any gameplay purposes, but simply for practical out-of-game purposes. I certainly hope to have some fun "unplugged" vacations in the future that last more than 7 days, without losing my pets. The only way around that as I see it would be either bringing my computer on vacation just so I can refresh my pets (utterly lame), or giving someone my account username and password so they can log in and do it, which of course seems like a bad idea.
1) Bonding unlimited pets was deemed too Tramelish. 2) Yes there are limits, I think its around 10-12 pets. 3) I have never seen or heard of that happening on THIS server, potentially due to the pet limit. 4) At the moment pet decay is disabled. Hope these answers help you.
Fantastic, huge help, thanks. Just read up on some of the prior threads about bonding. In reading over the past threads, I don't understand why bonding exists (which it didn't in the UOR era, correct?), but is then limited to one pet. As far as I can tell, the one-pet limitation just seems like something that caters to nightmare-riders. People who hunt with dragons would obviously prefer 2 or 3 bonded pet slots, people who roleplay and hunt with 8 little guys would obviously prefer 8... so it seems that pet riding purposes are the only reason for which a limit of 1 would serve any practical purpose. I don't particularly see an issue with having no limit on pet bonding. If you can only hunt with 2 dragons at a time, that's a rather practical limit to the usefulness of bonding anyways. And certainly a stable limit of 10 or 12 puts a true upper cap on this. Anyways just something I wanted to figure out if it was set in stone or not... my own personal taming practices are to generally have in stable a pack of 8 trained wolves or hellcats, two dragons, and a random animal or two like a highly-trained chicken. Would obviously love to be able to bond with each of these, for variety's sake... would hate to see things are geared towards helping everyone ride nightmares, and drawing the line right at that point and no further.
Additional pet bonding slots are currently under review for addition, we are just carefully reviewing ways to do it in a fair manner. We are also reviewing the amount of stat loss a bonded pet endures when being resurrected. As for stable slots each player by default gets 6 slots. You earn 1 additional stable slot for every 50 points of skill in Animal Taming, Animal Lore and Veterinary. And Xevec is correct we currently do not have stable decay enabled so your pets will not decay. Eventually there will be a small fee deducted from your bank every 7-14 days based on the control slots of the pet. Once we enable this we plan to expand the stable limits in a substantial degree.
You guys are really impressing the heck out of me. Sounds fantastic. As far as the stat loss thing goes... that's a really tricky thing to figure out. I assume the pets aren't losing actual stats/attributes (STR, DEX, INT). However, even if they're just losing Skills, it gets tricky because if they die enough times (or even perhaps just once if untrained), casting pets could easily have their Magery skill fall below the level at which they could legally cast some of the spells that they are supposed to cast. To avoid that, my suggestion would be that pets should lose a percentage (50% maybe? although that's pretty harsh on highly-trained pets) of the difference between their current skill and the minimum spawning skill. For example, if a dragon spawns between 40.0 and 60.0 Magery, and you have one bonded at 50.0, its penalty should be [(50.0 - 40.0) * .50] = 5.0 magery. If you've trained it up to GM Magery, it would lose [(100.0 - 40.0) * .20] = 30.0 magery. Maybe that's a little too steep, I dunno. But my suggestion would be to base it off of the minimum spawning values, since if bonded pets are regularly being resurrected at or below that value, it removes the value of bonding in the first place.
Having pets drop THAT much in a stat res would be super harsh. The speed in which pets train currently is already painful enough. i farm a few hours almost every day and my mare still hasnt recovered full from its last death which was almost a month ago. I understand the setup for skill gain on pets currently and in theory that would be fine but no one farms/macros pet skills in the same way as a player can with thier own. Also anyone who has had pets for an extended period of time if they lose one of thier good trained pets it literally takes weeks to get one back to the same point which vastly slows down thier ability to farm. theres a huge diff in dps ona dragon with 5x gm skills to a fresh tame one.
Just trying to be objective The percentage can be tweaked; the important thing, IMO, is to ensure it never goes below the minimum spawning value, IMO.
Pets gain skills in much the same way players do. As a player, if you only exercise your skills while out farming, of course it's going to take a long time to GM. If you want well trained pets, get used to macroing them.
