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Player Written Guides Pet Building - The Basics

A common question in Discord is how to build your pet. This guide is designed to be a quick reference and complement Insano's excellent guide on the forums (https://uoalive.com/forum/threads/uoalive-animal-taming-guide.614/). These tips are relevant for ALL pets. The vast majority of pets will end up roughly the same by the time you build them up to 5 slot; the main differences being any that are overcapped (greater than 700 Str or Int, or higher than 150 Dex, over 80 in a resist or over 120 in a skill) but even so the differences will not be huge. The other differences are some pets have healing; this won't let you sit back and just watch them kill everything but it can give a little buffer if you need heal yourself or them, and they can even heal you. Finally, some pets have poison immunity. Poison immunity means they cannot be poisoned and have health degen from it, but they can still take poison damage from a weapon or ability.

One excellent resource for pets is https://www.uo-cah.com/ Bookmark this, you will use it a lot.

They have a pet planner that is far superior to the in-game one plus a bestiary that will show you the magics and abilities your pet can learn. This obviously doesn't include the custom tameables on UOAlive but the majority of these are based on either a naja or a cu with slight tweaks so you can use these as your base to plan a rough build. Basics for all pets The order in which you raise things is personal, but for me I like to increase survivability as soon as possible to make the rest of the training go more smoothly. I will usually leave abilities and magics until I've raised stats, resists and regens. Scrolling is individual as well; the vast majority of my pets have no scrolls on them at all. Some have space left for them but they still work well for my needs. If you want to solo end-game bosses you will probably want to save points for scrolls (there's a calculator for this on uo-cah as well)

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First you need to decide what this pet will be used for. Is it a single target boss killer (and if so is it an all round boss killer or designed for a specific one) or is it for spawn clearing with AoE damage? With the above in mind you will want to set their stats as below: Str - this generally wants to be set to the max, 700, for every pet. Even if you're building a magic user they will be doing melee and so high str will increase this damage Dex - this wants to be 150 so that the pet can follow you at max speed if you're mounted Int - if you have maxed Str and Dex you can raise this to 371. It will increase mana regen rates for pets Stam - this also wants to be 150; it works the same as for players and increases the pet's swing speed HP and mana are usually left for 'end of level' points that can't be used elsewhere before you continue training and tend to have different significance for different tamers. HP is more expensive but mana only costs 0.5 points so it can be very useful for finishing a round of training. HP - For me, I'm happy if a pet has at least 500 hp; nothing will one hit it and it can survive a few hits if I need to run out to keep myself alive before jumping back into the fray. Mana - I tend to leave mana wherever it starts and as long as it's above 125 I'm fine with that. Pet AI can be iffy and will mana dump so regen is more important; even with a high mana pool your pet may well empty it within the first minute of a boss fight. Some prefer a higher pool to ensure it can dump more abilities before relying on regen


Resists This is where you need to know what you want to use your pet for. If it's a generic, all round pet there are two common spreads of resists. The max you can have over all resists is 365. The first is 80/75/70/70/70. This is because physical and fire are the most common damage types so those are higher, then the others are the same as you'd aim for on your own suit of armour. The second is 80/80/60/65/80. I use this quite a lot. Energy is the third most common damage type, so my pets have higher resists in the top three but the pay off is they're weaker to poison and cold damage. I tend to put poison at 65 as it's slightly more common than cold, but either can have that extra 5, it doesn't really matter. These can differ. Some pets come with higher resists, for example cus usually have higher than 80 cold so you may have to leave another resist lower than you normally would to compensate for it. It may also be worth training a pet that has 80 in cold if you plan to fight a boss that does cold damage. Regens These are quite easy. HP and Mana will always want to be max. HP to help keep it alive and Mana to help keep the pet doing damage. Many people will only push stamina to 5 or 10, if they put it on at all. This is to help if the pet loses a little from a big hit so they don't slow down in their attacking speed. Base Damage Always raise this to max! You can leave it until the last round but don't forget to do it! The cap increases with each slot.


Magics and Abilities The first thing to know is ALWAYS ADD THESE FROM THE BOTTOM UP. Start with AoE, then Special Moves, then Special Abilities and then finish with Magic. Sometimes if you choose a magic first it can lock you out of choosing any of the other abilities. The exception to this rule is Poisoning; if your pet doesn't come with poisoning already, you will need to choose it if you want to put poison breath or another poison-reliant ability on your pet. If a pet already comes with an ability, such as dragon breath, you can't remove it and it will take up one of your ability choices. If they already come with a magic you can switch it for another magic. If you want to add necromancy your tamer will need to have negative karma. To add chivalry you need positive karma. Once trained, your karma doesn't matter. The two meta builds for pets are chivalry/armour ignore for a single target pet, and poison breath/frenzied whirlwind for a spawn clearing AoE pet. These are not the only viable builds. Uo-cah has pages that describe the spells available for each magic and they can all be very useful. Disco is a fantastic magic to put on your pet if you're not running a bard yourself, especially if you play in a group, as it will make the enemies take more damage and deal less to your group. As a general rule, the less abilities you put on a pet the better. The AI is not overly smart so if you have lots of different options for it, it will try to use them all. This is why many stick to chivalry with armour ignore for single target; so the pet will mainly be buffing itself and doing high damage hits with armour ignore. I have taken pets with all the different magic abilities to group champ spawns and they have all performed well; I have also soloed all the mini-champs in The Abyss with all the different magics so choose one that you like, or that suits your pet. Again, uo-cah has a great section detailing what each ability and AoE does.

ScrollsYou can scroll your pets up to 120 in any skills they have. This can be costly and requires you to have the power scroll in your pack for that skill. If you don't intend to hunt end-game bosses with your pet, scrolls are not necessary. If you plan to hunt end-game bosses in a group, scrolls are not necessary. Only if you intend to solo end-game bosses will they be needed and even then it's more to speed up your fight. Disco is the one that should be scrolled to 120 even if you're in a group; less than 120 against a boss and it will never be discorded. If you have the spare points you can save them until you have the scrolls and they will certainly improve your pet, but I wouldn't sacrifice anything for the sake of adding in scrolls to my pets. If you're a newer player you will still be effective with a non-scrolled pet. If you have lots of scrolls (or gold) lying around then scrolling up can be worth it.


Feel free to share your pet builds, the weirder the better! These pair are a 2 slot rat and 3 slot horse that have taken on Destard together (sadly you can no longer train a horse to have those resists). That horse used to be my taming companion, to help subjugate things like beetles, hence his strength was left at 125 so he wouldn't do too much damage to them and kill them by accident.

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This is my unicorn, I wouldn't ever take stamina regen up this high again as it's quite costly. I also wouldn't take Int to 700 rather than Str.
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An exquisite black bear I built (first spawn, black bears spawn slightly differently now I think)


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This is my 1 slot [Rare] nightmare. He's only at 4 slots now and I still have the points available to scroll him to 120 in everything once I get the scrolls and still have him at 4 slot, allowing me to ride another mount while he attacks. If I took him to 5 slot I would only be able to increase his hp and mana and would be left with a lot of points that are unspendable


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What a great guide! One thing that caught me off-guard is AOE. According to uo-cah, a beetle can learn aura of nausea if you have it learn poison. When I did, the only AOE available was poison breath. I did not choose it and the AOE option disappeared after my other choice. Does AOE have levels? It's not a huge deal because leveling pets is fun so live and learn.