Post by Crossbreed on Sept 18, 2018 17:23:16 GMT -8
Hi!
I'll start off any taming discussions and/or ideas and we can all compile them here. I'm going to break my first post down into sections so that everything has its own place and can be referenced based on info needed.
Section 1. Background Info
I played UO back on OSI servers during predominantly the ML era. I played a tamer, a pure necro mage, and an archer. I was young when I played and used to play with my parents! I loved taming because of the idea of being able to find, pick, and choose my pets. It's fun trying to find strong or rare colored pets to collect, fight with, and use. And heck, sometimes we're lucky enough to get a rare color and a strong pet at the same time!
I've been on this server for a little while now, a bit over a month. I got a little ahead of myself and tried to race into the harder quests because I wanted a challenge. I've gone through areas like Atlantis and Doom's gauntlet, explored pretty much every single Tartarus dungeon I could (while mapping out most of Tartarus with runes!), and completed a good deal of quests like the grape stealing quest, white witch quest, and more. There are still some I need to try and complete, but I don't want to rush through everything too quickly!
Right now I am playing primarily as a Necro Mage Tamer and it has been pretty fun. What I have noticed, though, is that my pets don't come into the equation all that often in the hardest content I've experienced so far. This will be explained in section 3.
Section 2. My Pets!
Currently my go-to combo is a Charger of the Fallen with 2-3 Majestic Ostards. The goal is to DPS enemies down before they can kill my pets through use of pets and my spells. It works well on enemies like Vile Basilisks, minor bosses, and general enemies. Other than this combo, I've used a sphinx for a while as well as a greater dragon, EVO unicorn, and am still training a Drow Dragon. Unfortunately, the tankier pets have seen less and less use as I've grown to try and do as much damage as possible before my pets go down. It's just easier to have the Charger temporarily tank and do tons of damage rather than a giant tanky pet that does mediocre damage. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, but it does make tanky pets less appealing since I've seen time and time again that no matter what pet it is, it still can't even survive some of the hardest content the server has to offer. My tankiest pets still die in similar times to Chargers, even despite having more than double the health.
Aside from the pets I use, I have tamed a ton of different things. Reafans, Night Terrors, Uber Polar Bears, White Wyrms, Shadow Wyrms, Dragon/Drakes, Ice Steeds, Fire Steeds, Nightmares, Cu Sidhes, Abominations, Dire Bears, War Horses, Reptalons, Lesser Reptalons, Unicorns, Bake Kitsunes, and probably some more I've forgotten at this time. I'm still looking around constantly for new things to tame.
Section 3. Pet Problems
The biggest problem with pets are their inability to participate meaningfully in a good deal of harder content. As an example, the real challenging part of the grape stealing quest requires you to go through 3 different mini-bosses in order to get 3 different ingredients to turn into the NPC. For these bosses, you have to go through a cave with enemies that all have around 2-2.5k hp each and you have to kill one special named version to unlock the areas to these mini bosses. Pets are relatively usable here in the cave, but not as usable when soloing the quest. Too many high hp enemies swarm you, since they are all in close proximity, and it comes down to throwing your pet on the named enemy and trying to use your damage to kill it fast enough to open the portal to the mini-boss. I think this is fine since it requires some outside the box thinking, but the last area of the cave with the wisps takes this to an extreme, since each wisp hits very hard with crushing blows. My pet didn't last more than 3 seconds before it got killed by the wisp swarm, and to get around it I had to die numerous times until I was able to separate the named wisp from the rest, kill it, and then run to the boss.
The mini-bosses themselves did 650 damage a hit to my pet and 150 damage to me. Needless to say, any pet I threw in front of the mini-bosses did not last long. What these fights came down to was me spamming paralyze field to keep the mobs stuck while I slowly dps'd the boss down with lightning bolts and energy bolts. If it touched me at all, I would die, and I had to repeat this 3 times since there were 3 bosses like this, 2 of which had 10k hp and the last having much less but having access to spells. I was able to get through the quest and unfortunately did not get anything good as a reward, but I was glad I beat it. However, I didn't feel like a tamer in this quest. I killed pretty much everything on my own and my pets sat nearby, dead, unable to do anything. I think that's okay if this quest alone was meant to be this way, but it's been a reoccurring theme in other quests or areas as well.
The white witch quest isn't nearly as rough, but the bosses do have some mechanics that forced me to let my pets suicide over and over until they eventually killed each mini boss. This quest at least let me use my pets though, so that's a plus. I don't mind having to let my pets do this as long as they can contribute in some way to the fight, since I did invest points into taming and wanted it to help be a part of my ability to complete quests. But I also think that throwing pets in for 15 seconds, having them die, then leaving, rezzing, and repeating, isn't the most interactive way to fight a boss. I had no choice but to do this because the boss had a mechanic where it would drain all my mana and stamina if I was on screen with it, so I couldn't help my pets do anything anyways. But the pets did help me clear parts of it, albeit fairly slowly.
This problem also sorta happens in Atlantis, since the "Dark Father Titans" do a ton of damage to pets as well. When I go there, I only use my pets to fight the Yamadons and trash mobs, then put them away when I fight the Titans themselves. At first, I thought the blood oaths were the only problems here for pets, since they also cause me problems (I can't use anything other than lightning bolt because the delay on flamestrike, for example, is too long and a blood oath cast while it's going off will oneshot me). However, even the fighter-style and mage-style titans seem to rip pets apart faster than normal. It's not like pets are unusable here, though. They just can't fight for very long on the titans themselves and are mainly just temporary distractions so you don't get blood oathed yourself. I myself don't use my pets on the titans because it feels like it's more trouble than it's worth to let my pet die for how small of an amount of time it stays alive, summoning things on the off-chance they don't get immediately dispelled to tank blood oaths seems to be better, unfortunately.
Overall, I think what feels discouraging for tamers are any mechanics where pets take even more damage than normal. This makes it feel like a tamer is invalid in these situations, because they can't use pets to do even a small amount of damage or distracting. High end mobs already hit very hard, so I don't think it's necessary for there to be enemies that do bonus damage on top of the likely 100+ damage it'd be doing regardless to the pet. I do think it's okay if a specific boss has this mechanic to enforce variety in builds, but multiple areas where this happens becomes discouraging. Any individual tamer that tries to outheal an enemy that does over 100 a hit to a pet is going to lose with how much hp the bosses have as well, since tanky pets also do not do as much damage (typically/ideally) as damage-oriented pets (pack instinct pets, chargers). I don't want tamers to be in that OSI mode of spam healing their pets and letting them do all the work, but I also want it to be viable for a tamer to fight alongside their pet, since our skillcap allows for it and it's way more interactive. Tanks do, however, encourage group play, which could be a positive, and tanks can also be group healed if more than one tamer is there, making them last longer for fighters/archers/DPS players/DPS pets to do their thing. It seems fair if a tank can tank for a group, but can't tank for a single player. But tanks pets can't even do that if they take bonus damage, whereas taking "normal" damage from these bosses (+100~) it'd seem like that'd be possible with multiple players.
Section 4. Ideas
I'll try to list these in order of what I think is the easiest to implement and what may help the most as of right now. I don't think all of them should be included together or expect them to, just a bunch of ideas for small issues. Also, there's a lot so be warned
1. Bonus damage to pets reduced/removed. I think there's a difference between making pets less effective at face tanking everything for one player and making pets useless, and too much bonus damage does the later rather than being an effective way of encouraging alternative ways to handle enemies. This server's stronger bosses already would force groups or players to adapt to new boss mechanics, and I think if pets were allowed to survive for at least a small amount of time rather than none at all, it'd be much less discouraging for tamers.
2. More exalted pets! Some fun pets don't have exalted versions yet, so they can't be stored and freeze our pet slots.
EX: majestic ostard, hell hounds, abominations, etc.
3. Certain exalted pets having the ability to reach Tartarus pet levels, ones that tamers would prefer Tartarus pets over exalted pets (Higher level cap most likely. Also probably not for greater dragons, they can already get high hp). Otherwise, tamers will just go into Tartarus and tame non-exalted pets that spawn with better stats. Without the stable system, this feels like an unnecessary drawback, since tamers thrive on access to a variety of pets and can't do that easily without exalted pets. THAT SAID - I think it's very fun being able to hunt for special, stronger pets outside of the exalt system. It's nice to get what you see yourself taming. But slot freezing feels bad, it'd have to be something very special for me to keep it at this point.
4. Veterinary feels weak, I only used it for rezzing and now that my alchemist makes pet rez potions I have almost no use for it. This is because on this server, most high end bosses have either AOE, Poison, or ranged pulls that make it very dangerous for ranged tamers to be that close. Not sure how to make it better, though.
5. Lots of pets feel weak or useless when compared to the mainstream ones. Fire steeds need pack instinct to be usable (maybe ice steeds, not sure. I won't use them until they have exalted versions since my ostards are taking too much room.) As of right now, fire steeds are useless without it, they're almost like a night terror. For their taming requirements, they should be more worth the effort. Also, many pets have decently high requirements in slots or taming levels that are very weak. The uber polar bear is a 6 slot pet that is weak, Reafan is a 4 slot that feels like a night terror in strength level, just slightly tankier. Exalted shadow wyrms feel weak for 6 slots as well, except for the Tartarus versions you can find in the wild, but they are not shrinkable.
6. I'm afraid of leveling my drow dragon just to find out it's weaker than my greater dragon. Wish I could know how strong it'd be, but maybe that's not a realistic thing that can be done.
---------------- Fun Unrealistic Ideas - Probably not Implementable or Too Crazy but Ideas Nonetheless -------------------
6. Supportive pets that are primarily meant to do other things, like heal, cast spells, barding/barding spells, etc. (They probably don't walk into the enemy to fight in melee range and can't be too good at their job, but would be supportive and helpful when tamers can't use a fighting pet)
7. A pet like the Hiryu that lowers armor/resistances. Might be redundant since players use armor ignore a lot, but it'd be nice for those that don't/in groups so players didn't have to spam it as much or rely on mana leech.
8. A tanky pet that does little damage and is meant to tank. Maybe it can taunt enemies. But that might be too crazy. :^)
9. I don't know why but I always thought it'd be cute if the serpentine dragon was tamable, knew chivalry, and would cast divine light a lot. On that note, there are a lot of nice models that could make for cool/cute pets. Always wished there were stronger Bake Kitsunes too..
Final Thoughts
These are all suggestions and not at all expected. I think a lot of minor things contribute to the class of taming feeling a bit underwhelming, so if we get rid of those minor things it could feel a whole heck of a lot better. I don't want to sit back and have my pet be healed and that's all I do, I always fight with my pet and I think if we get that opportunity to utilize our pets more often then taming would be in a fine spot. The ostards, I think, were a pretty big discovery in terms of pet damage potential and may be needed to be toned down if we get exalted versions and I can test them in a group with other players. As of right now though, they're unable to fight without a tank which makes sense and I'm glad is the case. I also like the way that they need such high taming to be used reliably and I think that could be expanded upon a bit with other potential pets.
If anyone else has ideas, please do tell everyone. I've tested my tamer's limits a lot, so I do believe I've seen the root issues with why taming may feel underwhelming and many ditch it. I do not think it's horribly under-powered, but I do think it's fairly weak in comparison to other character builds when it gets to end-game content and bosses. I also understand the hesitation towards making pets too strong and I agree completely, that's why I think it's nice to highlight strengths in pets so that one is not, by itself, too powerful. The Charger of the Fallen and Ostards are pretty good examples of damage oriented pets that aren't too tanky, and I'd like there to be room for other pets that can compete with them in both similar and other ways.
I'll start off any taming discussions and/or ideas and we can all compile them here. I'm going to break my first post down into sections so that everything has its own place and can be referenced based on info needed.
Section 1. Background Info
I played UO back on OSI servers during predominantly the ML era. I played a tamer, a pure necro mage, and an archer. I was young when I played and used to play with my parents! I loved taming because of the idea of being able to find, pick, and choose my pets. It's fun trying to find strong or rare colored pets to collect, fight with, and use. And heck, sometimes we're lucky enough to get a rare color and a strong pet at the same time!
I've been on this server for a little while now, a bit over a month. I got a little ahead of myself and tried to race into the harder quests because I wanted a challenge. I've gone through areas like Atlantis and Doom's gauntlet, explored pretty much every single Tartarus dungeon I could (while mapping out most of Tartarus with runes!), and completed a good deal of quests like the grape stealing quest, white witch quest, and more. There are still some I need to try and complete, but I don't want to rush through everything too quickly!
Right now I am playing primarily as a Necro Mage Tamer and it has been pretty fun. What I have noticed, though, is that my pets don't come into the equation all that often in the hardest content I've experienced so far. This will be explained in section 3.
Section 2. My Pets!
Currently my go-to combo is a Charger of the Fallen with 2-3 Majestic Ostards. The goal is to DPS enemies down before they can kill my pets through use of pets and my spells. It works well on enemies like Vile Basilisks, minor bosses, and general enemies. Other than this combo, I've used a sphinx for a while as well as a greater dragon, EVO unicorn, and am still training a Drow Dragon. Unfortunately, the tankier pets have seen less and less use as I've grown to try and do as much damage as possible before my pets go down. It's just easier to have the Charger temporarily tank and do tons of damage rather than a giant tanky pet that does mediocre damage. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, but it does make tanky pets less appealing since I've seen time and time again that no matter what pet it is, it still can't even survive some of the hardest content the server has to offer. My tankiest pets still die in similar times to Chargers, even despite having more than double the health.
Aside from the pets I use, I have tamed a ton of different things. Reafans, Night Terrors, Uber Polar Bears, White Wyrms, Shadow Wyrms, Dragon/Drakes, Ice Steeds, Fire Steeds, Nightmares, Cu Sidhes, Abominations, Dire Bears, War Horses, Reptalons, Lesser Reptalons, Unicorns, Bake Kitsunes, and probably some more I've forgotten at this time. I'm still looking around constantly for new things to tame.
Section 3. Pet Problems
The biggest problem with pets are their inability to participate meaningfully in a good deal of harder content. As an example, the real challenging part of the grape stealing quest requires you to go through 3 different mini-bosses in order to get 3 different ingredients to turn into the NPC. For these bosses, you have to go through a cave with enemies that all have around 2-2.5k hp each and you have to kill one special named version to unlock the areas to these mini bosses. Pets are relatively usable here in the cave, but not as usable when soloing the quest. Too many high hp enemies swarm you, since they are all in close proximity, and it comes down to throwing your pet on the named enemy and trying to use your damage to kill it fast enough to open the portal to the mini-boss. I think this is fine since it requires some outside the box thinking, but the last area of the cave with the wisps takes this to an extreme, since each wisp hits very hard with crushing blows. My pet didn't last more than 3 seconds before it got killed by the wisp swarm, and to get around it I had to die numerous times until I was able to separate the named wisp from the rest, kill it, and then run to the boss.
The mini-bosses themselves did 650 damage a hit to my pet and 150 damage to me. Needless to say, any pet I threw in front of the mini-bosses did not last long. What these fights came down to was me spamming paralyze field to keep the mobs stuck while I slowly dps'd the boss down with lightning bolts and energy bolts. If it touched me at all, I would die, and I had to repeat this 3 times since there were 3 bosses like this, 2 of which had 10k hp and the last having much less but having access to spells. I was able to get through the quest and unfortunately did not get anything good as a reward, but I was glad I beat it. However, I didn't feel like a tamer in this quest. I killed pretty much everything on my own and my pets sat nearby, dead, unable to do anything. I think that's okay if this quest alone was meant to be this way, but it's been a reoccurring theme in other quests or areas as well.
The white witch quest isn't nearly as rough, but the bosses do have some mechanics that forced me to let my pets suicide over and over until they eventually killed each mini boss. This quest at least let me use my pets though, so that's a plus. I don't mind having to let my pets do this as long as they can contribute in some way to the fight, since I did invest points into taming and wanted it to help be a part of my ability to complete quests. But I also think that throwing pets in for 15 seconds, having them die, then leaving, rezzing, and repeating, isn't the most interactive way to fight a boss. I had no choice but to do this because the boss had a mechanic where it would drain all my mana and stamina if I was on screen with it, so I couldn't help my pets do anything anyways. But the pets did help me clear parts of it, albeit fairly slowly.
This problem also sorta happens in Atlantis, since the "Dark Father Titans" do a ton of damage to pets as well. When I go there, I only use my pets to fight the Yamadons and trash mobs, then put them away when I fight the Titans themselves. At first, I thought the blood oaths were the only problems here for pets, since they also cause me problems (I can't use anything other than lightning bolt because the delay on flamestrike, for example, is too long and a blood oath cast while it's going off will oneshot me). However, even the fighter-style and mage-style titans seem to rip pets apart faster than normal. It's not like pets are unusable here, though. They just can't fight for very long on the titans themselves and are mainly just temporary distractions so you don't get blood oathed yourself. I myself don't use my pets on the titans because it feels like it's more trouble than it's worth to let my pet die for how small of an amount of time it stays alive, summoning things on the off-chance they don't get immediately dispelled to tank blood oaths seems to be better, unfortunately.
Overall, I think what feels discouraging for tamers are any mechanics where pets take even more damage than normal. This makes it feel like a tamer is invalid in these situations, because they can't use pets to do even a small amount of damage or distracting. High end mobs already hit very hard, so I don't think it's necessary for there to be enemies that do bonus damage on top of the likely 100+ damage it'd be doing regardless to the pet. I do think it's okay if a specific boss has this mechanic to enforce variety in builds, but multiple areas where this happens becomes discouraging. Any individual tamer that tries to outheal an enemy that does over 100 a hit to a pet is going to lose with how much hp the bosses have as well, since tanky pets also do not do as much damage (typically/ideally) as damage-oriented pets (pack instinct pets, chargers). I don't want tamers to be in that OSI mode of spam healing their pets and letting them do all the work, but I also want it to be viable for a tamer to fight alongside their pet, since our skillcap allows for it and it's way more interactive. Tanks do, however, encourage group play, which could be a positive, and tanks can also be group healed if more than one tamer is there, making them last longer for fighters/archers/DPS players/DPS pets to do their thing. It seems fair if a tank can tank for a group, but can't tank for a single player. But tanks pets can't even do that if they take bonus damage, whereas taking "normal" damage from these bosses (+100~) it'd seem like that'd be possible with multiple players.
Section 4. Ideas
I'll try to list these in order of what I think is the easiest to implement and what may help the most as of right now. I don't think all of them should be included together or expect them to, just a bunch of ideas for small issues. Also, there's a lot so be warned
1. Bonus damage to pets reduced/removed. I think there's a difference between making pets less effective at face tanking everything for one player and making pets useless, and too much bonus damage does the later rather than being an effective way of encouraging alternative ways to handle enemies. This server's stronger bosses already would force groups or players to adapt to new boss mechanics, and I think if pets were allowed to survive for at least a small amount of time rather than none at all, it'd be much less discouraging for tamers.
2. More exalted pets! Some fun pets don't have exalted versions yet, so they can't be stored and freeze our pet slots.
EX: majestic ostard, hell hounds, abominations, etc.3. Certain exalted pets having the ability to reach Tartarus pet levels, ones that tamers would prefer Tartarus pets over exalted pets (Higher level cap most likely. Also probably not for greater dragons, they can already get high hp). Otherwise, tamers will just go into Tartarus and tame non-exalted pets that spawn with better stats. Without the stable system, this feels like an unnecessary drawback, since tamers thrive on access to a variety of pets and can't do that easily without exalted pets. THAT SAID - I think it's very fun being able to hunt for special, stronger pets outside of the exalt system. It's nice to get what you see yourself taming. But slot freezing feels bad, it'd have to be something very special for me to keep it at this point.
4. Veterinary feels weak, I only used it for rezzing and now that my alchemist makes pet rez potions I have almost no use for it. This is because on this server, most high end bosses have either AOE, Poison, or ranged pulls that make it very dangerous for ranged tamers to be that close. Not sure how to make it better, though.
5. Lots of pets feel weak or useless when compared to the mainstream ones. Fire steeds need pack instinct to be usable (maybe ice steeds, not sure. I won't use them until they have exalted versions since my ostards are taking too much room.) As of right now, fire steeds are useless without it, they're almost like a night terror. For their taming requirements, they should be more worth the effort. Also, many pets have decently high requirements in slots or taming levels that are very weak. The uber polar bear is a 6 slot pet that is weak, Reafan is a 4 slot that feels like a night terror in strength level, just slightly tankier. Exalted shadow wyrms feel weak for 6 slots as well, except for the Tartarus versions you can find in the wild, but they are not shrinkable.
6. I'm afraid of leveling my drow dragon just to find out it's weaker than my greater dragon. Wish I could know how strong it'd be, but maybe that's not a realistic thing that can be done.
---------------- Fun Unrealistic Ideas - Probably not Implementable or Too Crazy but Ideas Nonetheless -------------------
6. Supportive pets that are primarily meant to do other things, like heal, cast spells, barding/barding spells, etc. (They probably don't walk into the enemy to fight in melee range and can't be too good at their job, but would be supportive and helpful when tamers can't use a fighting pet)
7. A pet like the Hiryu that lowers armor/resistances. Might be redundant since players use armor ignore a lot, but it'd be nice for those that don't/in groups so players didn't have to spam it as much or rely on mana leech.
8. A tanky pet that does little damage and is meant to tank. Maybe it can taunt enemies. But that might be too crazy. :^)
9. I don't know why but I always thought it'd be cute if the serpentine dragon was tamable, knew chivalry, and would cast divine light a lot. On that note, there are a lot of nice models that could make for cool/cute pets. Always wished there were stronger Bake Kitsunes too..
Final Thoughts
These are all suggestions and not at all expected. I think a lot of minor things contribute to the class of taming feeling a bit underwhelming, so if we get rid of those minor things it could feel a whole heck of a lot better. I don't want to sit back and have my pet be healed and that's all I do, I always fight with my pet and I think if we get that opportunity to utilize our pets more often then taming would be in a fine spot. The ostards, I think, were a pretty big discovery in terms of pet damage potential and may be needed to be toned down if we get exalted versions and I can test them in a group with other players. As of right now though, they're unable to fight without a tank which makes sense and I'm glad is the case. I also like the way that they need such high taming to be used reliably and I think that could be expanded upon a bit with other potential pets.
If anyone else has ideas, please do tell everyone. I've tested my tamer's limits a lot, so I do believe I've seen the root issues with why taming may feel underwhelming and many ditch it. I do not think it's horribly under-powered, but I do think it's fairly weak in comparison to other character builds when it gets to end-game content and bosses. I also understand the hesitation towards making pets too strong and I agree completely, that's why I think it's nice to highlight strengths in pets so that one is not, by itself, too powerful. The Charger of the Fallen and Ostards are pretty good examples of damage oriented pets that aren't too tanky, and I'd like there to be room for other pets that can compete with them in both similar and other ways.
