UO Second Age

My taming character is 6/7 GM with taming at 88ish.

Template is:
Animal Lore - 100
Animal Taming - 88ish
Magery - 100
Meditation - 100
Resisting Spells - 100
Veterinary - 100
Wrestling - 100

I am considering dropping Wrestling for hiding.

Granted I haven't really hunted a ton using pets so I am basing this on my assumptions. I feel like I would gain the ability easily hide while my pets tank animals, hide from PK's , or run and hide in order to get spell-casts off.

I am not really aware of what I am losing? In the time it has taken me to get to 88 taming, I have gotten a few greater heals off that probably would have been interupted without wrestling but hiding would probably be just as effective. Same goes for the few times I have gotten stuck and needed a quick teleport away from monsters (teleport may have been interupted but I could have hidden to escape anyways?).

Anyones thoughts, experiences, views etc etc??

Wrestling and Hiding are both so easy to macro to 100, I figure I may just test this out to see for myself.

Thank you for your time, consideration and for any input.

keep wrestling and an lor xen when you need it imo.

It depends on your style, if you're close to the action, keep wrestling. Hiding won't help unless you're 9 steps away from your aggressor (that's almost a full screen). From the situations you describe, I agree with Bag.

Now, if you had hiding + stealth....well, that's another matter.

Don't drop wrestling! Especially if your character is a public character, whose skills are available to see in the myUOSA site.

I used to specifically target tamers without wrestling - they're sitting ducks. On my dexer, I could easily kill a tamer who had 2 dragons or wyrms guarding them but had no wrestling.

Hiding doesn't work if someone is attacking you within 8 tiles or less. It's not useful against multiple tank mage PKs, and not that useful against dexers either. It really only helps you defend against a solo tank PK, in which case you can just mini-heal yourself and "all guard me" until you decide to gate out.

If you're insistent on adding Hiding, I'd suggest dropping Resist. It sucks that you spent the gold and time to GM it, but it's 1/10th the usefulness of wrestling.

But personally, I used to use your template just as you had it, and I found it to be perfectly fine.

Wrestle = amazing

Vet = not needed.
Just get a couple of dragons, and when one gets low, stable it and get out a new one.

as an aside, how are you macroing wrestling to 100 easily? I find wrestling to be torturous to macro. using an order guard or npc mage or something?

I just would grab a polar bear, have him guard me then all stop after I attacked. I could literally use one band-aid to heal it every 2 minutes or so.. went from 30-100 in an afternoon.

I used the same method getting up tactics, swords, wrestling and other melee talents on another toon (taking much longer than wrestling) and encountered a minor problem. I believe once the polar bear decides he is "better off on his own" he will attack back and, with bear only one being healed, kill you.

Still this allows you to macro for 4-5 hours? Eventually leading to one death which is insignificant (can keep bandages in a bag) using ~30 bandaids a hour. (So relatively easy compared to med/magery/resist/taming)

Also thanks for your input. I think I underestimated wrestling's value / overestimated hiding's. I won't be making any template changes for a while.

Actually, this relates to nightshark's accuracy post. This shouldn't work; if you're pounding away at your pet, it should fight you back the whole time. Even if "all stop" did work here, like in post-UO:R, you would still need to say it after every time you connected a hit on your bear.