Pet Training

Info

Training your pet well is important for a number of reasons:

Even a highly scored pet that has just been tamed is relatively weak and can die a lot without training. Your Veterinary skill will go up while you are training your pets which in turn raises your Animal Lore skill. This effects (among other things) how much control you have over you pets and which pets you can control - That is to say, raise your Animal Lore through Vetting your pet while training and you will quickly be able to control other higher level pets! Notes:

You should always use jewelry for hunting and to control your pets, get a ring and bracelet that give you as high Animal Taming and Animal Lore as possible (max 15) in order to control higher level pets earlier. The Taming skill is the more important of the two. Fighting higher level monsters causes more damage to your pets and thus raises your Vet skill (and thus Animal Lore) faster; besides this they also provide better loot drops, money and you will develop better hunting skills. However, your targets combat skills must be relatively close to your pets - too strong (or weak) and your pet won't gain. You will find it very difficult to tame your first hunting pets so get a guild mate or friend to tame one for you.

See the Pets section for more detailed information on your pets and how to control them

See Best Pets Guide for a comparison of high level hunting pets

Initial Selection

Pet training begins by getting a pet worth training. If you're going to invest time in making your creatures more powerful, it stands to reason that you should first spend some time making sure the initial specimen is as powerful as possible. There are a few aspects of your minions that you need to take heed of. First off, choose a species that has potential. There's not much point in spending days, weeks or even months maxing out an Imp only to find that it's still rubbish. Set yourself up a macro to activate the Animal Lore skill (as a tamer you should already have a fair bit of this, but if not, remember that humans get an inferred minimum of 20 points in every skill). Using this on your pets will grant you a detailed window which goes through their strengths and weaknesses. However, to lore a non-tame creature requires very high levels of skill - 100 for animals, 110 for monsters. Once a creature has been tamed it will lose at least 10% from all its attributes. Some values will in fact halve. Tame a random sample first so you've some idea as to what the losses will be. Note that taming a creature under the effects of the Paralyze spell results in even greater penalties. A good way to find out how powerful a pet is likely to be once it is fully trained is to tame it and enter the post tamed values into the UOCraft Pet Power Calculator. You can also work out your chance of controlling a given species here. If you do not have enough skill to control a given creature, it will ignore you in battle and you will be unable to bond with it.

Skills

Any skill a creature has can be trained to either 90% of what it was before taming, or 100.0 points (which ever is higher). For example, a creature tamed with 144 Wrestling will have a training cap of 129.6 (144 - 14.4), while a creature tamed with 50 Tactics can only be trained to GM level. Like Pet Stats, these skill levels are subject to no overall cap - Some creatures, such as the Rune Beetle, can be trained to have over 800 points amongst all their skills.

Wrestling, Tactics & Anatomy A pet's ability to Wrestle improves its chance to hit a target, while Tactics improves the amount of damage it can actually deal. To improve in these two skills your pet must fight something within about 25 points of its own skill ranges. Anatomy on the other hand can be trained by fighting against a target of any skill level. It tends to raise at a much slower rate, however. It improves your pet's chance of dealing critical hits.

Magery, Evaluating Intelligence & Meditation Characters mostly rely on their Magery skill to determine their chance to cast a spell, however a magic capable pet is only limited by the amount of mana it has in reserve. A wild Nightmare, for example, will quite happily open up with Flamestrikes despite only spawning with a maximum of about 50 Magery. Nevertheless, Magery does serve to improve the effects of some spells. For example, a pet with more skill is more likely to succeed when casting Cure or Arch Cure, and will be able to repair more damage with Heal or Greater Heal. Evaluating Intelligence serves to boost the effects of most combat-orientated spells, improving damage dealt along with the duration of buffs or debuffs. The Meditation skill serves to improve mana regeneration, hence helping your pets to remain effective for prolonged periods of time. It doesn't really matter what you fight for the purpose of improving these skills, as pets cast spells automatically in combat and do so whenever they find themselves with a shred of mana to spare. However a pet which has used up all it's mana will mostly cast lower level spells, hence reducing their chances of gaining Magery when they hit the higher skill levels. One solution to this is to fight creatures that spawn solo, hence allowing for some recuperation between kills.

Resisting Spells A pet's ability to resist spells essentially makes it harder to inflict a debuff upon it. For example, at 100 skill, you will require over 110 points in Magery to inflict a Curse on your pet - and even if you manage it, it won't last anywhere near as long or lower it's abilities by anywhere near as much as if it lacked spell resist altogether. This skill was traditionally very hard to raise until the destruction of the original Haven introduced Spectral Spellbinders. These are unique in that they only cast the types of spells which trigger spell resist checks (debuffs), and of those they only cast the spells that deal no damage. In terms of physical combat they are also extremely weak. To train in this manner, simply wander the streets of Old Haven ordering your pets to "kill" the Spellbinders you see. As soon as you can, tell them to "follow" you again and the undead spirit will follow your pet blasting it with spells. If you cannot find any Spellbinders, simply kill all the undead spawn in the area and a fresh wave will appear in short order. If you have a particularly weak pet you'll need to keep a close eye on it's health bar, a full Lower Reagent Cost suit helps maintain a lengthy session of Greater Heal spells (but be careful to conserve your mana as much as possible). Once you've got as many Spellbinders as possible simply sit back and let them cast away. While their spells do no damage at all, the eight closest to your pet will be able to deal melee attacks, so you might like to take advantage and practise your Veterinary skill while you wait. Depending on the amount of monsters you attracted you should be done within an hour, perhaps a little longer should you wish to cap your pet's Stats while you're at it.

Poisoning Guess Poisoning is a lot like Anatomy, target any type of enemy you wish and just keep belting them.

Healing The only pet with the Healing skill is the Cu Sidhe. It will not only use the skill to aid itself but its master as well, assuming you're in range. It'll automatically use the skill whenever its health level is below a certain amount (90%?), and continue until fully repaired. However, in order to train past 90.0 points, it must cure deadly poison. An otherwise well trained Cu is quite capable of killing single Rotting Corpses indefinitely without intervention from its master. Be warned that because the process of getting poisoned and then curing itself is very slow, it can potentially take months to reach Grand Master level. Many players choose not to bother, more still now that the Greater Dragon is a far more effective pet then the Cu Sidhe in terms of both giving as well as taking damage.

Stats

Use Animal Lore to check out your pet's stats. Your character's stats can each be trained to a maximum of 125, and this is also true for your pets. However, unlike characters, pets have no "overall" stat cap and so Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence can all potentially reach their maximums. Pets gain stats by exercising their skills, but gain them far faster if using skills that are already capped out. A good way to get stats up quickly (particulary Dexterity, which can be very slow to train) is to raise Resisting Spells first, and continue to have spells inflicted on your pet after that has reached it's maximum. Each time a creature gains in a stat, it will also gain in a related statistic - For example, improving Strength will also improve Hit Points. Therefore you want to tame a pet with the highest hit point total possible (so as to have the best starting point to train from), and the lowest strength value possible (so as to have the greatest number of potential gains to the hit point total). An exception to this rule is when a creature's initial strength value can start at 125 or higher. As you won't be able to improve it any further, you therefore wish to tame a creature with both the highest strength and hit point totals possible. Similar rules apply to Dexterity (which improves Stamina) and Intelligence (which improves Mana).

Strength Every time a creature gains a point of Strength it's maximum Hit Points will also increase by one. This also determines your pet's base damage output.

Dexterity Every time a creature gains a point of Dexterity it's maximum Stamina level will also increase by one. The more stamina a pet has the faster it can strike and the faster it can travel.

Intelligence Every time a creature gains a point of Intelligence it's maximum Mana level will also increase by one, which also improves it's regeneration speed.

Resistances

Use Animal Lore to check out your pet's resistances. Unlike your character (which starts with no resistances and gains them by donning armor), pets come with their own "base" resistances which vary between specimens. Your character can improve his or her resists by training Resisting Spells (albeit by a very small amount) - While your pets can also train in this skill, they will not receive a resistance bonus from it. Hence they cannot improve their initial resistance levels at all - make sure the pet you choose to train starts out with the highest levels possible for that particular creature type (especially in terms of physical resistance).

Training Methods

Punching Bags When training very weak one-slot pets, it can be quite difficult to get gains without getting them killed. An easy way to get around this is to simply have them attack targets that won't fight back. This is very easily arranged in the Felucca facet (where pets can target yourself and your other pets). The most obvious practise dummy is your own character. Armor yourself as you see fit, but steer clear of items that make you hard to strike - Shields or things with the Defense Chance Increase property. Hit Point Regeneration and Self Repair, on the other hand, are most useful. A full suit of Virtue Armor plus a few jewels for HPR works well. Simply travel to an out-of-the-way location and have your pet attack yourself. Toggle out of combat mode to prevent damage to your "pupil", and allow it to batter away at you. If you have the skill to control a stronger pet, bring one along and have the trainee attack that. A Cu Sidhe is ideal, as it can heal itself. Do careful not to give any "kill", "guard" or "stop" orders to your punching bag - it'll retaliate and make short work of it's aggressor (even if you don't choose a target for the "kill" command). This method will typically only take your pet up to about 45 Wrestling/Tactics. After this point, it will need to fight creatures with skill levels within about 20 points of it's own scores in order to gain further.

Quickly Cap Statistics Pets can be trained to 125 in any and all of the three statistics - Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence. Doing so increases the amount of damage they can give/take, how fast they can move/attack, and how often/long they can cast spells for. Whenever a pet uses a skill it has a chance to gain in associated stats, however, this chance is significantly improved if the skill in concern is already at it's maximum. Therefore you'll usually only start to see good stat gains after a significant amount of regular combat training. The way around this is lays with Resisting Spells. This skill can be raised very quickly by attracting a large group of Spectral Spellbinders. These will still cast when the skill itself maxes out, and the statistic gains will come very quickly if you continue to allow them to do so. This technique is particularly useful for raising Dexterity, which can otherwise be very slow to cap. Note that while Spellbinders are weak they can deal a bit of damage in numbers... Weak one slot pets will require heavy healing (good for Veterinary gains), while stronger creatures (such as the Cu Sidhe) can more or less ignore their attacks indefinitely.

Shadow Iron Elementals Some Elementals are strangely immune to spells and pets. This can make them aggravating when encountered in the wild by a tamer, but very, very useful for the purpose of training - an unkillable target with reasonable combat skills means you can train your pets into the higher skill levels with no interruptions. Shadow Iron Elementals are the best examples for this technique. They're roughly on par with the average freshly tamed "high level" pet, without any nasty tricks (such as the Valorite Elemental's area attack). While they can be found in the wild, it is typically far less trouble to have one spawned for you by a Miner. If you intend to fill that role yourself, you'll need 70 points of skill (with or without item bonuses), a Gargoyle's Pickaxe, and a Prospector's Tool. Find a cliff face near where you wish to train, and travel around using the Tool on the mountain. Remember an ore vein comprises of an 8x8 area, only use the Tool in each vein once. This upgrades the ore type by one. Keep going until you're informed that the vein was changed to Dull Copper. Once you get this message, grab the Pickaxe and start swinging at that spot. If you're lucky, an elemental will spawn right next to you; don't worry, although it's hostile it moves very slowly and has no ranged attacks. Lead it away to where you wish to train, set your pet(s) on it, and provide heals as required. An average elemental will have about 60 Wrestling/Tactics. Your pets need to be within about 20 skill points of these levels in order to get gains. As the battle progresses the elemental will improve as well, so a single target can potentially take your pets all the way to GM. Although unkillable, elementals will de-spawn after a few hours - be aware that the next elemental you summon might be too weak to train them further, but if you can rig the timing to your advantage elementals can still be used to achieve GM skill levels. This technique can be used to train multiple pets at once. Since only one of your charges will be attacked by the elemental, it becomes possible to easily train weak pets. Simply make sure your strongest is set to Active prior to giving the "all kill" order.