From QA testing - what other mastery did you pick with your TAMING mastery?

It really does seem like taming is getting the shaft, again. @Chris will you please give us some sort of explanation for the drop in creature strength? Also, paint us a picture for how taming will be effective? A loose road map? Hell, I'll take a cobble path map at this point. I understand keeping certain things secret for various reasons but for the people that have dedicated so much to something that has given so little, it would be nice for us to have a deeper understanding of how this will all proceed.

 

Yea im really disapointed... im trying to hold the rage until I can test it monday.

The top pets were outta my range because of focus, if the mid range ones become weaker then im back outta taming again..

 

@Chris you said the goal was for a pet to be able to solo a mob 3 levels higher and still have 3/4 of it's hp left. That's already impossible for pets. My fero red spider got his arse kicked by a wild fero red spider. And that should be an even 1 to 1 fight. Now you say you're going to lower them, whats the goal now?

 

Now that pets are valid again...what about the summons?

 

A tamed creature of the same variety should do slightly better than the non-tamed creature, in my opinion. That's just not the case. I've wondered for a long time why it's that way.

 

@Chris I'm ok with the double exp cost for specializations, but to have a useful pet it needs to be well above 100, 116 seemed good for my pet. This will now cost 110 million exp. It gives me a long term goal, but at this exp rate...for the sake of taming please don't make taming even weaker unless you're giving us other tools for taming like taming buffs on gear, or artifacts that help taming. 110 mil for a useable pet and thats after spending 45 mil on the tree itself is getting super costly.

 

Pets will be valid again with roughly 140-150 million invested. If the summons are going to compete, they should cost about the same. And drain the same amount of focus as a tamed pet.

 

Since all summon spells are afaik max tire (except the skeletons ofc) that would be valid.

 

Taming doesn't come with anything other than a pet, fire, earth etc are all complete trees. But yeah I'm fine with summons being = to a tamed pet if the summon itself (not the tree) costs the same as a tamed pet. So summon = to my pet would cost 150 mil.

 

For the sake of keeping balance between summoned & tamed pets - let the summoned pets have a finite duration. Death pets already have this limitation btw so it makes sense for the other magical pets to be subject to this as well. This way the focus cost of maintaining your fire or water elemental doesn't have to be raised too high.

I'd also like to see a mechanic wherein a skill/talent in the magical tree allows you to pour more focus into your elemental with a corresponding increase in the magical pet's power.

 

I'd like to see this go the opposite direction in regard to focus cost and summon time limits.

Lower the focus loss of having a tamed creature present and raise the focus cost of having a summon present. Also, summoned pets are far too weak but I'm pretty sure our precious devs know that already

Death pets have HP loss over time which can be negated by heals (which I think is strange) why would death summons get any benefit from life spells? I'd be ok with them benefiting from soothing rain or even heal creature from the taming tree but sun and life heals should hurt the death summons, not heal them. Also, there is a death staff (craftable artifact) that affects their HP loss over time. I don't think any other summons will have this feature based on the current design.

 

And then I recall UO, most end up making a tamer to keep up with the bar, Corpse explode repeat.

 

Agree that the focus cost of tamed pets are too high. I'll be experimenting with the new taming tree masteries in R51, hopefully my leather armor focus will be enough to keep it alive & powered comfortably.

Yup, death creatures should be damaged by sun & life spells which are the classic cleric spells used against undead.

 

Test your favorite tree fire mastery at 116 vs taming at 116...fire melts everything! I took fire mastery to 100 and everything died crazy fast vs taming which was doable but took forever to kill stuff. Taming is NOT like it was in UO lol.

Chris said fire is king of dps and he wasn't wrong! Fire Death duo was so OP it's boring. The only people that will take taming are people that love taming, power gamer's won't touch it. For me, taming is fun but it's still one of the weakest skills one can rely on in SotA, at least for now. Taming in UO was one of the strongest skills a player could have...no comparison to taming in SotA.

If you doubt what I'm saying meet me on test, you will be able to kill a group of mobs 10 x faster that I can, that's not hyperbole. Fire melts stuff with mastery!

 

The balance aspect is what I was implying, to logically truly make taming work they would have to gimp the player char into a newbie and it would all be about the pet. If you give here you have to take from there, so to speak.

 

You're right, I dumped all skills (53 gm's gone) other than taming and healing, the pet needs healing to be able to solo at all and I need healing while the pet slowly kills stuff. It's not powerful but for me, it's fun! Once I have healing and taming finished, I plan to take some earth skills to 80 as it's fits with a Bear shaman type char. For group stuff the pet won't be very useful, he's just too weak but I'll have healing for group stuff so I can still go hang out with people. Oh and tamed pets can dance now so I'm planing on making money from in game dance competitions. Snuggles the bear is an awesome dancer!