Gm Tamer, I believe one of Two. Here are some ideas :-)

I think it would be cool to have taming specialisations so that you can be good at taming and doing tricks with one type of animal per passive skill. Just domestic animals (easy to level up) or (harder) just bears or just wolves or just spiders.

 

I love you Riya And im not trying to discourage your profession.
But I just don't want this game to turn into a Pokémon Spinoff
Where everyone has a pet and its just a game where u save enough money to get the best pet.
Ive seen so many mmos get watered down with pets and summons that it become less about your character and more about what pet you have.

I hate pets fyi. I think they are just a non skilled way to add dmg/negate dmg.
Im all for non combat pets, but I really dislike the idea that u can add a % of dmg to an enemy just by telling it to attack.
Wheres the skill/honor in that? I understand that some just love pets, but they break games all day.

 

YES.

They need to add skill levels to pet cmds and a skill check to summoning the pets. Other wise everyone is just a master of pets as soon as they get the best one.

 

Even still we are doomed to have pets forever now

There once was a PVP zone
Two evenly matched players engage each other>
Player A has a pet>
Player B does not>
Player A will win 90-100% of the time due to added targets/dmg
Player A won due to a gameplay element that requires Zero skill or thinking.

 

A pet locks slot in your equipment so you can get not the benefits other can gain there and it eats up much Focus, so you can't really fight like you do without a pet. I always run out of focus so fast. The same is, that this weapon has permadeath, so once killed you have rezz it with the poor focus you have or let it die. So it quite balanced, you can't use many focus special attacks with a pet out. And when the pet never reaches you, you have no advantage at all. Some are a bit over powered but altogether they are good balanced and big disadvantaged to summoned elements.

 

Myb at lower levels...
Using pets and going all out in PvP, Ive never run out of focus.

Also the slot that's being locked in a necklace, so most I could ever imagine seeing is like what +5str? And that's if you don't have a crit whistle with +3 str. Not really a trade off if you have something like Hugs or Atos

 

That's frankie, not Atos. =p

 

hehe yea I didn't know if riya had seen the name change though

 

What taming should be?!

This is the way taming should be on shroud nothing els.

 

Thank you for posting this, I really liked how the horse did not have to be beaten almost to death to be tamed. I never liked beating animals in UO in order to make them weaker in order to be successful in taming, but this has been discussed in another thread. This representation in taming also adds a lot of value to the role playing aspect, I hope it is considered for our game.

 

Did we not learn from UO? The upper level pets need some sort of requirement to control, period. End of story, giving maxed out pets to newbies and letting them go kill 3 zones above their skill set is a mistake.

Remember new players hunting with 5 dragons?

I do think two tiers make sense

1. Everyday pets
2. Maxed out pets requiring skills to control.

 

An alternative idea would be to make the skills and abilities of the pets scale with the level of taming skill.

A spiders stats controlled by 0 skill would be X.
A spiders stats controlled by a gm tamer might be 3X, and they have web, fast heal, poison, etc.

Also, higher skills should result in finer commands and control. Right now, leading a pet is a nightmare.

 

Umm... Wouldn't the summoning skill make more sense as a requirement for... Summoning?

 

The best pet MMO, ever, was in my opinion Rappelz.

Short summary of how pets are handled in that game:
* killing an animal has a chance to drop a taming card, several tiers of rarity cards
* that taming card gives you a chance to tame a similar animal
* upon succes you tame said pet, but it is level 1
* pets can level up to your max level, so if you are level 10 your pet cannot get past level 10 untill you do
* pets have skills and item slots for weapons/armor
* pets can evolve 3 times, and with each evolution they gain more passive and active skills
* each pet has an unique role, tank/damage dealing/healing pet etc.
* pets can be combined to gain better stats or unique looks

I think several of these ideas could be implemented in SOTA to make being a tamer or pet handler a richer experience.

Flaws with the current system:
* too easy to buy a powerful pet, which allows low level players to skip to high end zones in a heart beat
* no feeling of connection with your pet - no levelling up, no evolution
* pet pathing/fighting still needs a ton of work and is indeed in pre alpha stage
* if you know how to work the system, pets never get lost - so 1 tamer can flood the whole server with pets to buy because there is not enough demand
* some pets are too big and get stuck non-stop especially in the dungeons
* only the highest tier of pet will be in demand

 

I'll admit I like that I can buy a pet from someone else. Though that's mostly because I am not into crafting and you basically have to be a crafter or spend a fortune buying the collars and whistles to level it up on your own.

I would Compromise and say that a certain summoning skill level could/should be required to use higher pets. That would allow for trading to still happen but require more of a commitment of exp from the person who wishes to use that pet.

It would kind of separate the crafting and adventuring aspects of it a bit.