Pets, Taming, and Ranching.

instead of 1 hp of damage it takes 2 to kill that cat.

EDIT: I'm sure he was bonded with somebody ... raise that cat from the dead!!!

 

On the subject of dragons being too powerful to be tamed due to balance issues they can make tamed dragons much weaker, for example in UO they could no longer cast all their spells, and I'm pretty sure their damage/hp/armor were reduced after being tamed. If I remember right the only thing a dragon could do after being tamed is breath fire and regular attacks. Or did they still cast poison? hmm... now I can't remember. Things changed later on and now greater dragons are the best tameable, you used to not be able to tame them.

But I'd be for sub-species of dragons as acceptable alternatives, just not ideal.

 

I hope there are some pets to be house/yard tamed. A dog, a goat..maybe a donkey. That is it.

Dragons or other high end creatures as pets needs to go as a standard in RPGs. Why would a dragon which in most lore is deemed intelligent be owned or bossed around by a human??

Nope, humans are food. Hell, if you're a dragon everything but other dragons should be food.

Sure raise a baby dragon, get some rare materials from it. IF you don't take it out and release it before it is X years old, it eats you, goes to the bathroom in your house and leave anyway.

The only kind of taming I want to see is for farming animals or mounts. Top end should be moose or bison for mounts..maybe a grizzly bear for looks. No pet tigers or lions or anything more deadly than that. Unless... every time you make them fight there is a 20% percent chance they will attack you. End up like Roy Horn.

It will be highly disappointing for me if they don't go a different direction. They are innovative and taming high end mobs for pets and being some OP gold farmer is pretty old at this point.

 

this is a great creature, but should be untamable. If it can instantly turn people to stone, or has poison as strong as a silver serpent they are too powerful. Even more dangerous than a dragon.

 

There will be no mounts in episode one, there will be no pack animals, there will be combat pets per the kickstarter stretch goal. There will be monster taming per another goal. I would be really disappointed if they don't have it.

It doesn't have to be Overpowered, it can be equal to other options, especially if they put in ways of hurting you for having a monster companion, such as slugs in your deck, to the point where you really can't do anything but have your creature fight for you. you have your dog with 2 slugs, lions are 10 slugs, and bears 12, drakes are 20 slugs and dragons fill your deck with slugs with no other options. or possibly 1 or 2 other skills/spells you might see during combat. but they will be few and far between.


Riding a bison? Did someone else already post Guy on a Buffalo?

 

Yeah ... Redfish pointed that out .. ... But I would still love to tame something that looked like that ... take away all mythical power and give it a basic attack ... it still would be cool to have

 

So far the only argument I've heard is that it would not be ideal/or a good idea for a pet to be so strong that the tamer could essentially hide behind it during combat which in my eye is a valid argument ... hence the idea of pseudo dragon

 

Yeah it was Bowen who was saying that they would be too powerful because dev's said they shouldn't be a solo-encounter. I think Bowen is mistaken as this is supposed to be able to be played as a single player game. But in case he isn't then there is that option.

 

Remember Chaos Mages can summon a demon and control it. We don't know how powerful that demon is, but I'm guessing it's really strong! I wouldn't be upset if having a dragon as a pet is as powerful as the demon. I'm sure the demon will disappear after a time, but the dragon would be more of the companion.

I still think that dragon's should act as a gold sink and demand a portion of the treasure. They are intelligent and they are doing the dirty work. Tamers had too much treasure compared to most players something must be done to mitigate that. Even half of what tamers got would still be a lot of gold.

EDIT: but there should still be tameable dragons!

 

Well the idea as already been proposed that Dragons are summon-able creatures ... and there would be a fee for their service ... it would be interesting what that fee would be and how feasible would it be after say 5 summons ... would the 6th summon be an outrages sum of gold?

That could potentially keep a combat pet market going with out everyone walking down the street with a 30 foot dragon and not create balance issues due to their limited (high price of use) usability

I imagine that people would only choose to use a dragon if it was a high profile fight

 

Remember that you will be able to take companions with you in the single player offline.

Also I would be highly opposed to animals being nerfed upon being tamed. Talk about forced game mechanics. Signs of serious balance issues where they simple patch the problem rather than fix the issue.

 

The issue being dragons are too strong for a single person to have. The issue that players want to be able to tame a dragon, even a nerfed one. Which issue do you fix? Ignore player wants? You can try, but the more wants you ignore the more people will get bored/uninterested in the game. I can see striking a balance between player wants, every player wants a house but that wont happen for quite awhile. But this want has an easy fix. It's not like we are wanting to tame everything, there can be much worse encounters than dragons, and there can still be greater dragons.


Also, I thought there would be companions in online mode as well, no reason to force players in single player online to find other players, or people in open play online might prefer the companionship of NPCs especially in battle. Once they are in single player online there isn't much reason to strip them out of FPO or OPO.

 

Not everything a player wants is necessarily good for the game. Though I pretty much consider it a non-issue in light of stated intentions. Dragons are intended to be strong.. taming them as pets therefore is not a good thing. Every PvPer and their respective mothers would be running around the world with a dragon on a leash just to compete. Nerfed or not. Whatever the strongest combat pet there is.. that's what people will use in combat.

And just how big do people think dragons are going to be anyway? In UO you couldn't make them very big because of the fixed 2D view.. but this is 3D and they fly. That could cause a lot of problems with the UI.

Honestly though I don't know why I'm even bothering to make a case. I would be astounded (though not in a good way) if they made dragons tamable no matter how many people beg for it. I see far far to many issues you just don't get with other animals. They should focus on the ones they can get in without too much hassle. I'm about 99.8% certain we won't be seeing full sized standard dragons as tamable. Smaller sub-species may be worth talking about but your standard dragon.. there's just no way. Not with the info we have so far (limited though it may be).

 

"So what did you think about the packers lose this past weekend? Last time I listen to you! With all your wisdom you couldn't tell me that the packers would not cover the spread"

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/07/cats-facts-jerks_n_4520552.html


I think this might be appropriate.

"The study suggested that the reason for this is because cats were historically loners who essentially "domesticated themselves." "

They basically decided they could put up with us for our food and safety we provide... could apply to all manner of creatures.

I dunno Bowen, you might be surprised about dragons, we've got some dev's that put tamed dragons in another game... And as I outlined with slugs, there can be some really good reasons why you wouldn't bring an animal to pvp, not having skills or nearly as many skills available can be a huge negative.

 

One on one I don't think having a dragon is a good idea for the tamer. A skilled warrior or mage would target and kill the tamer that has to hang out near his dragon pet. Once the tamer is dead then you deal with simple computer AI controlling the dragon, and the usual (monster is slower than the person).

I don't really think every PvPer will be using dragons if they build it right. I didn't see every PvPer in UO with a tamed dragon and they actually had tamable dragons in that game.

In fact I saw the opposite. The only time I saw dragons in PvP is when there were like 50 people on the screen fighting. They were good in mass warfare sieges or whatnot. Because if you knew who the tamer was you could take out that duo quickly.

 

I'm just placing this here for reference

 

just because it says lions are hard it doesn't mean you can't tame dragons. Each creature has a difficulty rating and there were weaker creatures than dragons that could not be tamed.

I didn't have an actual tamer but I remember reading about it on Stratics. Bulls were one of the most difficult creatures to tame before dragons. I didn't see many tamers walking around with bulls though. So it may say lions can represent a tough creature to tame but that doesn't mean its the toughest creature you can have.

 

I didn't place this here as part of an argument ... just for reference for those like me that did not know about the collar

On the dragon matter my stance is that while I would love to train a dragon, if it does not fit the lore of a believable world then I'm fine forgoing that ... and would be most interested in getting dev feedback as to what sort of magical/battle oriented pets will be available in game (or at least a criteria for us to go by)

 

The issue of balance has been brought up before and, again, it should be done in the usual manner.

Balance combat with combat. I have some zero sum pool. Let's call it "concentration". This can be modeled a dozen ways, whether it's passive slots, points spent, or some weird thing with the cards. Controlling pets takes from this pool. More powerful or numerous pets take more. Possibly you could downgrade a pet to not fully use it so that it just stands there and doesn't do much. Other passives, including wearing armor come out of this same pool. In theory, you could overspend on passives, limiting your active skills or movement. e.g. I have to stand perfectly still to control my dragon, I'm wearing so much armor you can kite me in circles easily, etc. Also, other companions should fit into this same mechanic with perhaps some bonus for solo offline play.

Balance gathering with gathering. We don't really want some win button crafting or gathering skill but it's not all that bad if you can eventually train them all.

Balance utility with utility. Like in Ultima, I could open the gate with the mouse, with a spell, or with an open skill. Perhaps these skills aren't even needed, but if they are, there should be many paths to acquiring them.

I played a hunter during my last tour of WoW. Every party could have 8 possible buffs (e.g. crit boost) and some number of possible debuffs (e.g. weaken armor). You'd look at whatever your party didn't have and select you pet based on that. Otherwise they were all more or less the same for damage.