Pet Follow Speed and Other Stuff

[Mens Rea]

A follow then A Kill should result in the pet chasing the target very quickly - quicker than the current "flying/run" speed. Some people call it "teleporting".

http://www.tamingarchive.com/faqs/pvp.php

Essential PvP Commands

All Follow is important! Learn it! Fire breathing pets are slower a lagging australian when it comes to giving chase. Luckily for you there is this wonderful command. Say All Follow and target the person you want to die, then use [pet name] Kill. (Note: I say All Follow here but using [pet name] Follow is the preferred way to do it.

All Follow will only make one pet follow and it's difficult to determine which pet that will be. Again this is true with All Guard.

In addition to this, if the pet you are using is a firebreather, it will drop out of follow mode after doing it's breath attack, therefore requiring the command to be reissued. This cost me a battle once and I felt like kicking my own ass for not remembering.

Tamed pets should not be able to get into wind without having high enough magery, it would seem!

I think this wouldn't be a very complete guide if I didn't take a paragraph to mention pet training. It's a little known fact that pets progress in skill just as players do. The easiest way to prove this is to get a fresh dragon from Destard. Chances are it can't get into Wind (72 magery req). Take the dragon somewhere safe and summon elementals for it to dispell. After about an hour of this take the dragon back to Wind and have him walk over the telepad. He should be able to enter now.

Saying A kill then A Stay results in the dragon standing there shooting at the target - as I've always maintained.

Have the dragon attack a target and then tell him to stay. He'll stay back but should continue to take pot shots and the target. Helpful for those lamers that like to hide in houses...

[MatronDeWinter]

Released aggressive pets should attack players!!!

[Reena Dae]

This is currently the biggest issue I see with taming right now. Pets should have absolutely no difficulty following a player on foot, even while running. You could just barely outrun pets on horseback at a sprint, but they would still keep following you if they went off screen (currently they stop).

Do released pets do anything? I had a dog, a rabbit, and a nightingale tamed. They were commanded to follow me, then I had them attack something wussy to test out how "all kill" works on this server. After they killed it, they just stood there (they should have gone back to following me). I released them, left for about 30 minutes, and when I came back they were still standing there in the exact same spot.

[nightshark]

This is currently the biggest issue I see with taming right now. Pets should have absolutely no difficulty following a player on foot, even while running. You could just barely outrun pets on horseback at a sprint, but they would still keep following you if they went off screen (currently they stop).

Do released pets do anything? I had a dog, a rabbit, and a nightingale tamed. They were commanded to follow me, then I had them attack something wussy to test out how "all kill" works on this server. After they killed it, they just stood there (they should have gone back to following me). I released them, left for about 30 minutes, and when I came back they were still standing there in the exact same spot.

Currently they seem to be bugged, if you run around ice island all the pretamed pets are completely frozen. If they move from their original spot to attack something, they will always go back to their original release spot and just stand there. They didn't used to do this here.

I think pet AI is going to need a major overhaul at some point because every fix that goes into place seems to break something else. The follow/kill method simply doesn't work here because when the pet goes into a state of attacking (war mode), it slows down so badly that it can hardly move. Telling it to follow it's target doesn't work because it's still in war mode, so to speak. And yeah I have noticed that pets are terribly bad at following.. very slow and completely give up if you exit the screen. Escorts act the same - instead of "warping" next to you, they just move at a run speed and give up when you get too far.

[Batlin]

This is currently the biggest issue I see with taming right now. Pets should have absolutely no difficulty following a player on foot, even while running. You could just barely outrun pets on horseback at a sprint, but they would still keep following you if they went off screen (currently they stop).

This behaviour can also be seen in the demo, but I'm pretty sure that they wouldn't follow you across server lines. We really need virtual server lines...

[Mikel123]

This is currently the biggest issue I see with taming right now. Pets should have absolutely no difficulty following a player on foot, even while running. You could just barely outrun pets on horseback at a sprint, but they would still keep following you if they went off screen (currently they stop).

This behaviour can also be seen in the demo, but I'm pretty sure that they wouldn't follow you across server lines. We really need virtual server lines...

Hmmm, I'm pretty sure they would, because one of the ways to "fix" a "buggy" pet was to take it across a server line, and I would say a good number of tamers didn't even have Gate back then. I feel like if you had a monster attacking you, and you crossed the server line, you were safe. It would just look at you. And actually, if your pet was on the other side, it's name would appear grey to you automatically (not that it was, it would just look like it). But if pets wouldn't cross server lines, are you saying the only way to get them in or out of a dungeon would be to Gate? I don't recall this at all.

As for the server lines themselves, I'm kind of meh on them in general. Besides in rare instances of a new player being able to outrun a troll or air elemental into the safety of another sub-server, I'm not sure they'd have any impact on the players of UOSA. Even if you couldn't have a pet follow you across them, every tamer here has GM Magery well before they start using their taming for hunting or fighting.

[Reena Dae]

Hmmm, I'm pretty sure they would, because one of the ways to "fix" a "buggy" pet was to take it across a server line, and I would say a good number of tamers didn't even have Gate back then. I feel like if you had a monster attacking you, and you crossed the server line, you were safe. It would just look at you. And actually, if your pet was on the other side, it's name would appear grey to you automatically (not that it was, it would just look like it). But if pets wouldn't cross server lines, are you saying the only way to get them in or out of a dungeon would be to Gate? I don't recall this at all.

You could walk pets out of dungeons no problem because it was more like a teleport from A to B. Going up and down certain dungeon levels was a problem. Walking across an above ground server boundary did get your pet stuck, the same as any other creature. I think there was a trick to getting your pets across, but I personally never cared enough to figure it out since I had gate.

I don't think server boundaries really add anything to the game in that regard. I do remember it being something people complained about in Buc's Den for PvP as well.

[Mikel123]

Wouldn't a level in a dungeon be the same type of teleport?

[Faust]

Wouldn't a level in a dungeon be the same type of teleport?

Yes

[Mikel123]

Reena: your tameables chart is great, but it looks like it only shows average values (or, just the values of a particular animal that was sampled). Do you have files with the ranges of stats for these animals anywhere?

Also, how did you find these stats? Are they the stats from ~2003 when you could use Animal Lore to see pet stats? While the taming requirements didn't change much, I feel like the stats on them did (mostly, on the monsters).

[Derrick]

This certainly needs work. For some reason or another it appears the pet follow has become somewhat bugged in a recent patch in that they seem to lack some conviction in following in some circumstances, even when nothing else is around.

AI needs a complete overhaul, I'll likely have the throw a couple more band-aids on it before I'm able to do a desprately needed rewrite.

[Reena Dae]

Reena: your tameables chart is great, but it looks like it only shows average values (or, just the values of a particular animal that was sampled). Do you have files with the ranges of stats for these animals anywhere?

Also, how did you find these stats? Are they the stats from ~2003 when you could use Animal Lore to see pet stats? While the taming requirements didn't change much, I feel like the stats on them did (mostly, on the monsters).

The stats that are on the current version of the site were copied from uo.com's bestiary from whenever they started posting numbers (this was after the Animal Lore change where you can see their stats). Those numbers are not accurate to the T2A period.

The old version of of the chart started from the work donated by the GM/Councilor (found on Stratics). At some point I was working on either Test Center or my home shard (or possibly a combination of both) before the Lore update using Anatomy to get some STR/DEX values. If the STR values were over 100, I nuked it down to 50% with magery, then used greater cure until it was full and added up how much it was. Very crude, but about as good as you could do for the time period. I don't remember having particularly large sample sizes for anything I actually checked. This is the oldest chart I have archived: http://www.tamingarchive.com/tamechart.html

I had a White Wyrm that was tamed in 1999 that is still sitting in the stables today. It had more HP than Wyrms tamed much later. There was another veteran tamer who mentioned something similar about their WW on the UTB forum, but theirs had even more HP than mine. Here's what little information I have on this Wyrm: http://www.tamingarchive.com/reena/pets/sasha.php

Very old versions of the chart will list Nightmares as having as much HP as a Dragon. Every tamer from late 1999 knew that information was wrong. Their HP was closer to what Drakes had. It's possible the information came from when Nightmares could fly. I knew they had been nerfed, but that was before my time.

[Mikel123]

Wow, thank you again so much.

Yeah, we had a big post session here a while back about nightmares and their HP. I found some references to 1000 HP, and some references to 50-pt firebreath, which would line up. And personally, I remember "pre-patch" nightmares as a term, though at the time I didn't know what they were. But I think this is well before our era.

Also, Derrick:

Frenzied Ostard dex: 192

I told you all!

Please implement as soon as you can!

[Derrick]

Fixing Wyrms.
Where did the frenzied dex come from?

[Mens Rea]

Fixing Wyrms.

How so, Dizzlerrick?