Greagoir Pendragon's How I GMed Tame Creature

First of all I want to thank all of the GM tamers with their great advice and resources. Today (10/16/2016) I am joining their group as a GrandMaster in Tame Creature.

Excellent threads/sites on taming I wanted to share:
Gnick Gnack's taming web site - http://sotataming.enjin.com/
Jaath Windsong's thread about his taming success spreadsheet - https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/taming-and-summoning-chart.60911/
Umuri's thread on focus drain - https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...e-your-data-points-analysis-experience.59024/
Here is thread about how to tame solo - https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/pet-taming-solo.67590/

My goal is hoping this helps someone think about taming as a career path in SotA. I really like having a pet battle along side of me while I am adventuring.

The path was not easy and I learned a lot about how to tame and I wanted to share this with you. I am still learning and made decisions that I can live with (regarding pooled adventurer experience) to be able to GM tame creature.

Here is my current skills. I adjusted some already gained skill levels as I learned through other GM Tamer's advice and my own testing through adventuring and trying different things out.



Having a large pool of adventurer experience points is the key to quick taming level advances after level 80. I went from 99 to 100 faster than going from 98 to 99 because I had a larger adventurer experience pool. I am not one who mows down opponents fast with Area of Effect spells or high level blades skills. I am a Druid who uses a few simple nature type of spells (Fire Arrow, Ice Arrow, Obsidian Arrow, Root) and Searing Ray. I made the choice to focus more on taming as I have loved taming creatures since early Ultima Online.

To get my large adventurer experience pool I took some of my abilities I had in (Root at 77, Refresh at 88, Heal Creature at 93, Obedience at 77, Train Intelligence 70, and Bulwark of Earth 54) and took the Books of Obsidian Unlearning and reduced them to the minimums. This added to my 160,000 pooled experience gave me a total of 1.2 million experience points. I did the dumb thing and did this in two parts (ended up with 700,133 xp and when gains were slow again (taming level 98) I did the other part and ended up with 732,949 xp. Doing it all at once would of made all gains level faster. These abilities I lowered was from 2.5 releases of adventuring. Many great guides are already out here on the forums to explain managing experience pools. But seeing is believing.

Only gain in the taming skill to raise it up fast:
Once I had my experience points in check I turned every other skill all to the negative sign (-) so these abilities would not gain. So I would only be gaining in Tame Creature . This made it easier to go from 87 - 98, and 99-100). Levels 98-99 was with I had 257,781 pooled xp left and the gains were very slow. The rest has that 700K experience pool.

Collar Recovery is very important to save your silver ingots:
Before taming make sure your Collar Recovery is at a high level so you don't burn through taming collars. I recommend level 95 when taming Bear Patriarchs as I did not loose one collar. Keep Collar Recovery a few levels above your Tame Creature level and if you loose a collar while taming, increase the Collar Recovery another level until you don't loose anymore taming collars before taming again.

This is what I tamed and when for Tame Creature gains:
0 - 20 = I took the path of love so I started out with 20 skill points. Rabbits and chickens are good to tame at this level
20 - 40 = Large Corpions
40 - 60 = Large Arctic Wolves *if you start successful taming a lot and using up collars, then start taming Large Polar Bears.
60 - 80 = Large Polar Bears *if you start successful taming a lot and using up collars, then start taming Bear Patriarchs.
80 - 100 = Bear Patriarchs

To get the innate skills up I mainly gained in Summoning, Resurrect Creature, and Heal Creature and had all of the taming innate skills set up to gain too (Obedience, Collar Recovery, Combat Training, Concentrating, Refresh). They gained rapidly until level 80. When I was taming I was only gaining in Tame Creature on purpose.

The levels break down in the 90's like so you can plan better how much you xp need for this level gain:
91 - 46K xp needed to gain level
92 - 50K xp needed to gain level
93 - 58K xp needed to gain level
94 - 62K xp needed to gain level
95 - 69K xp needed to gain level
96 - 75.5K xp needed to gain level
97 - 82K xp needed to gain level
98 - 91K xp needed to gain level
99 - 99K xp needed to gain level
100 - 111K xp needed to gain level

The taming skills I found useful and not useful like this:

Tame Creature - Needed to tame any creature. See above on how I gained this skill.

Heal Creature - Great to heal the pet. At level 40 you heal 11 - 15 health. At level 92 it was more like 21 - 25 health (+10). I think I will raise this again and stop at level 80 which should be fine.

Resurrect Creature - Needed to resurrect your creature in case he dies. I like that you can select yourself and then hit resurrect to do it, instead of having to get to your pet's body. As soon as he is alive again, right click on him and select teleport him to you so he is not targeted and killed again.

Obedience - I think level 40 is good for this as this will determine at what level you pet will flee if his health gets too low. At level it is 30%, at level 60 it is 45%, and 80 it is 60%. I did not see a big difference. Just keep healing your pet and he won't flee.

Collar Recovery - A modifier in helping you not loose any taming collars while taming.

Concentrating - This will help reduce the focus use while the pet is active. Get this as high as you can while getting your focus as high as you can. Then you will be able to use magic spells or combat moves and fight along side your pet.

Refresh - This is how long you can summon a creature again. At level 1 it takes 15 minutes between summonings and at level 88 it was 4 minutes between summonings. Level 88 was too high for me. Find a balance like maybe level 40 for 8 minutes between summonings. I have the time savings three postings below under level 88, so you can see where it fits for you.

Summoning and Combat Training:
These work together to determine the health and power of your pet while summoned with the summoning skill. My bears are at a good level of health and power with my summoning at 86 and combat training at 91.

Pair Summoning and Combat Training with Concentrating and you have a pet you can battle along with and not feel like both of you are going to perish quickly.

Root to keep the animal you are taming in place:
Originally thought the root spell was the only spell to use to pacify aggressive animals I wanted to tame. On 10/17/2016 I learned the Animal Charm spell may work. Maybe not. I rooted a wolf, them charmed him. When I click on the Tame Creature glyph it tells me "you must select a target" when the wolf was selected. Even though I re-selected him it would not tame until he was out of Animal Charm. I will continue on with Root and use Animal Charm as a "save me before I die" type of spell.

I hope this guide helps you in your quest to be a GrandMaster Tamer.

Please let me know if you have any questions.


From SotA Museum: http://www.sotamuseum.com/?post_id=62&title=greagoir-pendragons-how-i-gmed-tame-creature

EDIT - picture was lost, needed to put it back.

 

I mainly use bears due to the WHAP they give which results in a knockdown of whomever they are fighting. My focus as of now is 401. I spent skill points in the first focus increase skill.

At my current skill level My pets have these stats Summoning 90, Combat Training 94, Concentrating 90:

(11/07/2016) - The HP have not changed so your increasing the Summoning and Combat Training did not help. But increasing the Concentrating did help lower the focus cost by a little bit.

Large Polar Bear - 331 hp - focus drain 158.6

Bear Patriarch - 370 hp - focus drain 182.2

Obsidian Bear - 445 hp - focus drain 225.7

Ferocious Red Spider - 412 hp - focus drain 274.3 (this one has web and poison attack)


At my current skill level My pets have these stats Summoning 87, Combat Training 91, Concentrating 85:

Large Polar Bear - 331 hp - focus drain 161

Bear Patriarch - 370 hp - focus drain 186

Obsidian Bear - 445 hp - focus drain 230.4

Ferocious Red Spider - 407 hp - focus drain 274.8 (this one has web and poison attack)



I searched back in a few threads and wanted to post my pet's stats with this older skill set Summoning 71, Combat Training 87, Concentrating 75.

Large Polar Bear - HP: 285 - Focus Drain: 202.9

Bear Patriarch - Did not have this pet yet.

Obsidian Bear - HP: 392 - Focus Drain: 296.1

Ferocious Red Spider - HP: 312 - Focus Drain: 296.1

See what a difference it makes.

Edit - added more points of data

 

@Duke Gréagóir

Congrats on the journey all the up to GM.

It's gotten progressively harder after R32, glad you made it all the way

Now you get to play with all the cool pets!

 

Gaining Refresh -
0 = 15 minutes between summons
20 = 12.5 minutes between summons
30 = 11.15 minutes between summons
40 = 10 minutes between summons
50 = 8 minutes 40 seconds between summons
60 = 7 minutes 30 seconds between summons
70 = 6 minutes 3 seconds between summons
80 = 5 minutes 2 seconds between summons
88 = 4 minutes between summons

EDIT - added more refresh information