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Razor User's Guide to GM Taming Easily

Mara

Knight
Razor User's Guide to GM Taming Easily

Preliminary Discussion: Mainly for new players, but veterans may find something useful here too.

This guide is to aid the new tamer to GM taming very easily with the assistance of a couple of razor macros and a small amount of information about how taming animals works. It can be used alone or in conjunction with another great guide that is available which will be linked to at the end.

Generally the best new tamer character for a player is one that has an easy time of taming new creatures and then successfully using them for PVM. Thus, the following suggested templates are geared toward that. Later on, if you wish to use a tamer for PVP there are other skills and considerations to worry about.

Suggested template:

GM Taming
GM Lore
GM Vet
GM Magery
GM Music
GM Peace
GM Meditation/Resisting Spells/Hiding – any of these three will be fine, the choice is up to you. You can even split up Magery and 2 of these skills to accomplish what you wish with an 8x template. Try to shoot for having the other skills GM though.

What template you want to end up with determines what you should choose as your starting skills. You get 100 skill points to spread out between 3 skills at character creation, and the choices also determine what newbie (essentially blessed for blue characters) items you will receive. Some people like to take at least 1 point in musicianship so that they receive a newbie instrument. This isn’t really all that useful to me since even newbie instruments wear out, but some people might like this for getting started.

Your main consideration is that you want to GM all difficult or costly skills while you have the least total skill points invested. For Hybrid the skill cap is 700, and the skills get more difficult to train the closer you get to the cap. The difference in difficulty and/or cost can be fairly dramatic for skills like taming, inscription, magery, and resisting spells, sometimes taking 3x as long or costing 3x as much. On Hybrid, you can get gains as long as there is a chance to succeed and a chance to fail at the task you are trying to perform, regardless of whether you fail. On top of the skill gain rates being accelerated, this makes skill gain much faster on this shard. This is in contrast to some shards where you only gain skill on success. Being able to gain on failure is something that we will use in our favor, to be explained more shortly.

I recommend taking 10 Str 10 Dex 40 Intel for the Mana so that you will be able to Gate Travel and Mark Runes with some success through the use of scrolls without having to train up any of the Intelligence related skills. Initially your strength will seem very low, but as you tame animals this stat should raise easily enough to allow you to carry more gold around and other items.

I would also recommend taking 50 Magery 49 Resisting Spell 1 Musicianship if you are going to have a character with GM Resisting spells (as opposed to Meditation or Hiding). If you do not plan on taking Resisting Spells in your final template, then Animal Taming, Hiding, Music, or Veterinary can be taken at this point to a starting level of 49 or 50, should you desire. You can use 300 of the 1000 gold that you will get at character creation to train Animal Taming at a stables to about 30 or so.

Lock all of the skills except for the ones that you are planning on training so that you do not inadvertently train skills that you don’t want to. Remember, you want to keep your total skill points invested as low as possible while you train the most difficult skills first. At this point, lock everything but Animal Taming, and leave that pointing up. You will notice there is a difference in displayed skill with the show real button on/off. When enabled, the show real button shows your actual skill points invested in each of the different skills. When it is off, it shows your ‘displayed skill’ which incorporates a bonus to many skills based upon your stats (str, dex, intel). As you approach GM in a skill the bonus to your skills that your stats provided is gradually phased out completely. Your displayed skill (show-real off) is what determines your success or failure at any of the skill related tasks.

I recommend starting in Minoc, and then after familiarizing yourself with the town, visit the bank (Coordinates: 2504, 562). You can use Razor’s built in positioning system to find your way around, if you are not using another program like UO Automap, UO Cartographer, or the Client’s Overview Map. On the General tab of razor, to the lower left, click on ‘Open UO Positioning System’. You will notice that your coordinates are displayed in the top left of the map window that opens up. I like to double-click on the map to remove it’s border and make it’s footprint a little smaller.

Deposit your gold and take notice of the voting stone to the left of the doors. If you double-click on it, two browsers will open up where you can enter a Captcha caption to vote for Hybrid on two different gaming sites if you want to. In return for taking this time to consider voting for the shard you are playing, and helping to bring more players to the shard, you will get a reward that can either be a piece of blessed clothing or a check for 10k. You can vote once per day, and this money is very useful for new players just getting started.

Deposit whatever else you need to into your bank box and head north to the stables (Coordinates:2527, 383). Click on animal trainer and see how much it will cost to train animal taming (if you did not take it as a starting skill), and drop the amount specified onto the animal trainer to complete the training. Take a moment to check and see if the other animal trainer can train you a little bit farther using the same process. At this point you may want to buy a horse, and a couple apples at the town provisioner (Coordinates: 2461, 434).

Normal prices for a horse and an apple are 602gp, and 3gp, respectively. If you find that the prices are much higher than this in Minoc it is because the faction that has control over the town has raised the town’s taxes, thus making the NPC vendor’s prices higher. You can find out what towns are controlled by factions as well as their current tax status by visiting My UOGamers and clicking on the factions tab. Regardless, there are towns that are not able to be controlled by factions that you will always get normal prices in. The largest ones are Delucia, Papua, and Serpent’s Hold and you can get to them by taking a short trip after using a public moongate. The closest moongate to Minoc is nearby (Coordinates: 2701, 694). If you are going to travel to the moongate, you are going to be crossing through territory that is out of guardzone, so pack light in the event another player or monster tries to kill you.

If you did buy a horse, you may as well start the bonding process which will eventually enable you to resurrect your pet if it dies. The typical process is to feed a freshly tamed animal the food that he likes (horse = fruit or vegetables, beetles = meat, etc.) and then put him in the stables for 1 real week, and then feed him again when he/she gets out. You really only need to feed the pet initially, keep them happy for a week, and then feed them again, but stabling them is usually the safest and easiest way of doing this. A bonded pet is able to be resurrected using bandages if it dies if you have the veterinary and animal lore skills both at 80 or above. Do not worry about this too much for the time being though, as you are likely to get killed and lose your mount anyway at this point. It’s a rough world out there.

When you are ready to, take the Minoc Moongate and travel to Yew. Head southwest from the moongate through dangerous terrain until you reach the bank Empath Abbey. Bankers and an Inn are available inside the building. Along the way, you may have noticed that there are many player vendors in this area, and many of them are accessible while you are standing within guardzone(designated with the green lines on Razor’s UO positioning system). There is also a voting stone available outside the doors of Empath Abbey. You should be able to buy an unfilled player crafted runebook for about 1000gp or less. Unfortunately, Yew does not have a mage shop where you can buy empty runes and Mark/Gate scrolls so you will have to try elsewhere if you are going to mark runes at this point. Some of the vendor’s directly adjacent to Empath Abbey usually have runebooks that are already filled and marked at a reasonable price, about 10k-15k. If you have the funds available, a town runebook can be a worthwhile investment at this point. There is currently no way to be sure that you are getting a filled runebook at this point, so buyers beware when buying from player vendors. Many of the larger operations do not allow scammers at their sites, so generally you are ok if buying from places directly adjacent to the bank.

Yew is where you are going to be able to train your Animal Taming skills all the way to about 80 before we move on to better places to finish things up. Some people like to train in other locations, namely Delucia and that works well too, but it is a pretty crazy place at times. In yew, you will find all the creatures that you need during this part of your training. The following page from Stratics will show you the kind of animals that you should be training depending upon your displayed skill level.

UO Stratics - Animal Taming

Essentially, you can follow along a general progression of goats/pigs/sheep(if needed), hinds, boars, llamas/black bears, brown bears, great harts/grizzly bears. Remember that on Hybrid, you can get gains even if you fail, so as long as you are above the minimum skill listed on stratics you can get gains, and by choosing monsters of higher difficulty(with at least a small chance of success) you won’t have to keep switching from animal to animal as frequently, and you will train taming more efficiently with your time. Remember that information from sites like Stratics is not always applicable to UOG Hybrid, so when in doubt ask in the Question and Answers section of the forums to see what other players believe about your question. Keep in mind that players are not always right either, and you may have to do some investigating of your own.

Once you have successfully trained an animal, it’s difficulty rating is set to 0.0 for your character so you are not able to get gains from that animal again. You are going to have to move on to another. It can be helpful to have a warrior friend or alternate character that can clear out the animals you have previously trained so that the game generates new ones to train on.

When you successfully tame an animal, be sure to rename it. Simply backspace out most of the current name until ‘a’ remains for now so that another tamer coming along will know that you have already tamed it at least once. You may have noticed on the site that there are multiple skill levels required for taming an animal depending upon how many times the animal has been tamed before. An animal can be tamed up to a maximum of five times by different animal tamers with increasing difficulty each time. A pet can have an unlimited amount of owners though, as you are able to transfer pets to other players as long as they have the ability to control it.

The fact that it gets more difficult to tame an animal the 2nd, 3rd, etc., time around means that if you are working with another tamer or are creating two different tamers with an alternate account, you can use lesser monsters to get very high gains in the animal taming skill. You may have noticed from the Stratics page that with each successful taming, the base difficulty level for a pet will go up by 6 points, resulting in a decrease in success chance by 12%. This can be used to great effect to finish up your skills as opposed to running around searching for the higher level creatures. By renaming the pet ‘a’ for now, both you and other tamers will know that you have already tamed it once(so you know you won’t gain by taming it again), and another tamer coming along will know that it has been tamed once(so they know the pet will be at a higher difficulty level than normal). Sometimes you will encounter an animal that appears to have never been tamed before, but for whatever reason you can’t succeed in taming it no matter how many attempts. What has happened is the animal has been tamed before, maybe even several times before, and now the skill level required is higher than your current skill level. The game will still let you try to tame it in these instances, even though you have no chance at succeeding. Just move on. One of your fellow tamers was not so friendly and did not rename it.

Once you have reached about 80 in skill level, you should try going to one of two places. You can either go to Delucia (Coordinates: 5315, 3972 – accessible via moongate to the Lost Lands and then a short walk west to the town gate) and fight over bulls with other tamers while staying inside of guardzone, or you can adventure to tame Giant Toads (Coordinates: 6055, 3530 and 5965,3405) in the swamps East of Papua. One way to get to Papua in the Lost Lands is to visit the town of Moonglow and go to the northernmost building known as Encyclopedia Magicka. You can get close to the abbatoir at the north of the building and say ‘recdu’ to be teleported to a mage shop in the town of Papua. To teleport back (Papua->Moonglow) say ‘recsu’ on the pentagram in the Papua Mage Shop. Another way to find Papua (Coordinates: 5730, 3207 – Mage Shop) is to try to get there from Delucia but it is a very far distance and you are likely to die in the process if you are new to the game. If you die, just continue on as a ghost until you get there and then resurrect in town. Leave all your valuables in your bank box before attempting the journey if you want to try that way. You can also ask a friendly mage to gate you there, but beware of being gated to your doom. There are a lot of tricksters out there looking for newbies. Make sure you bring a couple runes, a runebook, and some mark scrolls so that you can mark a few runes and put them into your runebook once you make it to the Giant Toads. About 30 or so spawn, and once cleared they tend to spawn back fairly quickly. You can harvest them for a little gold and some spined leather if you like, but finishing taming is the main goal.

Taming bulls and or giant toads can take you all the way to GM. Once you get to the 90’s having them be pretamed once can help get more attempts per animal (due to the increased chance of failure), but don’t let that stop you from just clearing out pets that you have released and allowing the game to regenerate them. You can train anything else from the list that you think will give you gains as well if you decide to go about it your own way. There isn’t a wrong way to GM taming, but this guide is designed to get you there as quickly as possible.

Once you are GM in taming, it is time to think about finishing up your other skills. Remember the hardest and most costly skills should be finished first. Perhaps Magery and Resisting Spells should be next, or maybe Magery and Hiding if that is the template that you decided on. Buying up the skills you want from an NPC at first if you have the money is a good way to save some time training. You can GM Magery and Resisting Spells by simply progressing through Mana Drain, Reveal (for a short while), and then Mana Vampire, casting all on yourself with a macro that has an appropriate delay in between attempts and incorporates time for mana regeneration. You will want to train Meditation and allow it to approach GM for training Magery and Resisting Spells. If your final template design does not include Meditation, you can always trade it out for another skill once you hit the skill cap of 700 by placing its skill arrow down and the skill you want to train in its place up. This link will help you determine the success chance for spells at different Magery levels, so you can try to cast for a success rate in the range of 40-80% for the best gains: UO Stratics - Magic: Magery. You can GM Veterinary and Lore simply by running a macro that tries to resurrect a dead but bonded pet, assigning an appropriate pause in between bandage attempts, about 5 seconds or so). Make sure that you are not trying to resurrect the dead pet of a factioneer (typical use warhorses as mounts) since the game does not allow you to help them unless you are in factions as well. You can finish peacemaking by creating a macro that tries to use the skill and then targets yourself to attempt to perform an area peacemake attempt. There is a ten second delay in between attempts for the skills of Hiding and Peacemaking.

A tamer with a dragon and nightmare, even with poor stats and untrained, can expect to make 50k-100k per hour once they get the hang of things. There are many great pets to choose from, all with unique benefits: frenzied ostards, kirin(rideable by males), unicorns(rideable by females and have poison immunity), white wyrms, nightmares, and dragons top the list. It may even be best to purchase a pet from someone else when you are just starting out. Delucia is a great place to find experienced tamers with pets for sale. Just make sure the pets are bonded before you go anywhere outside of guardzone. Tessa’s Cove (Coordinates: 2703, 396 – Northeast of the East Minoc bridge) has a rune library with just about any place that you would wish to travel to already marked. There are also many other rune libraries scattered around the land to help you get wherever you would want to go. Many times player vendors build rune libraries near their main vendor locations to bring more traffic to their stores. Just be careful out there, danger abounds.

Another great guide that has helped tamers for years in the Guide Section of the forums is this: http://www.uogamers.com/forum/skills-templates/61856-how-make-tamer-2-days.html.
 

Mara

Knight
Re: Razor User's Guide to GM Taming Easily

Main Discussion: Useful for everyone, the information here will make GMing the taming skill much more efficient. Initially this was to be the main post, but I thought some additional information on the subject would be useful to new players.

In order to facilitate the easy taming and release of pets, the following has been used in various forms on Hybrid for a while by many players. I did not invent the process, but maybe I streamlined it a little. Hopefully this will enable the new players to finish up their training quickly so they can move on to making money and bigger things.

Razor Hotkeys that should be set up (found on the hotkeys tab):

Set Last Target: This gives you a target cursor so that you can assign anything you target as your lasttarget, if you need an additional way to do so. Depending on what targeting systems you currently use (I use a mix of both the client’s targeting systems and razor’s), this will always ensure that both the client and razor have the same animal identified as your last target. If you normally use SelectNext Mobile or SelectNearest Mobile to cycle through targets – both client targeting systems, hitting Razor’s Set Last Target hotkey and then hitting the client’s Last Target will ensure that the client’s Last Target is the Same as Razor’s, etc. If this is confusing to you, do not worry, this is just an additional way of selecting the animal that you are going to try to tame. The following razor hotkey will work fine as well.

Target Closest Grey and/or Target Random Grey: This is part of razor’s targeting system that will target the nearest grey or cycle through them, respectively. It is used to target the animal that you want to try to tame. When used, whatever animal that is selected becomes razor’s last target which is what we want for the macros coming up.

Animal Taming Macro: This is what we will set up shortly. For now, click on the razor tab and just hit New, and create a new macro named Animal Taming or whatever else you like. Then go back to the hotkeys tab and assign a hotkey to the macro.

Release Pet Macro: Same as above. Just create a new macro named Release Pet and leave the macro empty for now. Assign a hotkey to the macro.

Stop Current Macro: Again on the razor hotkeys tab. Self-explanatory.

The two macros that follow will allow you to easily tame and release new pets. At this point, you can build them yourself by selecting the macros and recording yourself taming and releasing an animal and executing the required hotkeys as necessary. Make sure that you have only one instance of razor open so that your macros can be saved by razor upon exit. Alternatively, you can exit out of all instances of razor/the client, open Windows Explorer, go to C:\Programs\Razor\Macros\ and open the two macros with Notepad. Then you can cut and paste the actual code(to be given), save the macros, and then get back into razor to edit them as necessary or use them as is.

Animal Taming Macro:

Use Skill Animal Taming
Pause .00sec: - This is a minimum pause that will only take up the amount of time that a line item needs to process by razor. It takes up the same time as any other line item, but I like to use these types of manual pauses for reliability in some macros, as opposed to the ‘wait for target’ command. This can be adjusted if you find that with your ping you need a little more time for the target cursor to come up before the macro skips ahead in the macro. Adjust as necessary.
Exec: Last Target
If SysMessage: you start to tame the creature.
Pause 12.76sec (12755ms) – This is based on the time that it can take to try taming a pet (10-13sec), and also has some consideration for line item processing delay. Adjust this as desired if you wish.
EndIf
Pause: .00sec – This is again a minimum delay to initiate a small delay in between taming attempts to limit the amount of processing that your computer will be doing to run the macro before you start to tame the creature. You can adjust as desired to make the delay between initial attempts longer.

Loop – Enable the Loop Button to the bottom right. The benefit of this macro is that you will continue to attempt taming a pet again and again at approximately 13 second intervals, so if you fail you don’t have to start hitting hotkeys again, you can sit back and observe. Later on, when you start to try to tame high level monsters that can get angry at you for trying to tame them, the macro will keep trying to tame the pets again and again until you succeed in initial trying to tame them. This will save you a lot of annoying hotkey work. Remember that with the aggressive monsters, after you start trying to tame them, tab in and out of combat so that you don’t punch them on accident. The creatures don’t appreciate that.

Here is the actual code should you desire to cut and paste it into the macro through Windows Explorer and Notepad as described earlier.

!Loop
Assistant.Macros.UseSkillAction|35
Assistant.Macros.PauseAction|00:00:00
Assistant.Macros.LastTargetAction
Assistant.Macros.IfAction|4|0|you start to tame the creature.
Assistant.Macros.PauseAction|00:00:12.7550000
Assistant.Macros.EndIfAction
Assistant.Macros.PauseAction|00:00:00

Release Pet Macro:

Say: aaaa release – I will explain why aaaa shortly
Wait For Gump (Any) – Edit the timeout to 1
GumpResponse (Button 2) – This is the selection of releasing the pet instead of hitting cancel.

What this does is release any pet that you have renamed a, aa, aaa, or aaaa, without you having to click on the pet and go through it’s menu. This is useful because you will want to keep track of how many times a pet has been tamed for both your benefit and the benefit of other tamers. Tamed once(by you), rename the pet ‘a’ – without the parenthesis and that will tell you and other tamers that the pet has been tamed once, and is more difficult to tame (6 skill points higher required per time it has been tamed, for a 12% success decrease in success chance with each pretaming). See prior information and Stratics link in the preliminary section, if desired.

As you get higher and higher in taming skill, pets that have been pretamed already and released will be the ones that you can gain the most skill from since on Hybrid you can gain on failed attempts as long as there was a chance to succeed. Note: If you come across another tamer that is using a different renaming method, don’t be a jerk and override his name just so you can release it easily. Just add another ‘a’ to the end of what he/she has named the pet and then release it manually through the pet’s command options or saying - ‘pet’s name’ release. Even though this will take a little more time, both you and the original tamer will know that you have both already tamed that pet and that you cannot get any further gains from that animal. When you are done taming a bunch of pets, and you want the game to generate more, you are going to have to either kill the released pets(some master you turned out to be) and let the game respawn them, wait a day for them to disappear and respawn on their own, or just look elsewhere. You can also lead the pets into danger and get them killed that way.

Here is the actual code for the Release Pet macro should you decide to cut and paste it as described before.

Assistant.Macros.SpeechAction|0|52|3|ENU|2|17|109|aaaa release
Assistant.Macros.WaitForGumpAction|2426193729|False|1
Assistant.Macros.GumpResponseAction|2|0|0

Now that we have our macros set up, this is the ideal sequence of actions to efficiently tame and release a pet.

1) Target the pet using either Set Last Target, Target Closest Grey, or Target Random Grey
2) Hit the Animal Taming macro
3) Hold down ‘alt’ + single left click the creature you are trying to tame (pause slightly and single left click again if necessary) until you see ‘Now following.’ above the pet, then lift your hands from your keyboard. You should now automatically follow the pet around trying to tame it without having to do anything more. This is very useful for animals that seem to want to move around a lot and it takes a lot of the chore out of training taming. You can hit ‘alt’ + single click yourself or just move in any direction to stop following at any time if you like.
4) If you are unsuccessful, just allow the macro to keep trying to tame the creature.
5) If you are successful, hit your Stop Macro hotkey.
6) Click on your newly tamed pet and pull to drag the stickybar for the pet out. Now that it has been tamed, this new stickybar will allow you to rename the animal. Click on the name section, and then backspace out all the extra characters, leaving just ‘a’ – without the parenthesis, or ‘aa’ etc. if it was pretamed by someone else.
7) Hit ‘Enter’ to accomplish the name change, and then right-click on the stickybar to close it out.
8) Hit the Release Pet Macro hotkey and this will release the pet automatically.

Using this method, you should be able to train and release pets with a lot less aggravation and time than is normally required. Even if you are training animal taming at the skill cap, you should be able to complete it within a couple days, as I have done just this week. If you train it as your first skill, it shouldn’t take you long at all. I hope this guide helps to get new players up and running and making money in the shortest amount of time possible.
 
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