Pet Training

This is a bit of a work in practise, not so much an "informational" page as it is a guide page. I reckon we should make a category for "guides" where users can "ramble" in "their own words".

Anyway! Pet training begins by getting a pet worth training. If you're going to invest time in making your creatures more powerful, it stands to reason that you should first spend some time making sure the initial specimen is as powerful as possible.

There are a few aspects of your minions that you need to take heed of. First off, set yourself up a macro to activate the Animal Lore skill (as a tamer you should already have a fair bit of this, but if not, remember that humans get an inferred minimum of 20 points in every skill). Using this on your pets will grant you a detailed window which goes through their strengths and weaknesses.

Stats

Use Animal Lore to check out your pet's stats. Your character's stats can each be trained to a maximum of 125, and this is also true for your pets. However, unlike characters, pets have no "overall" stat cap, and so Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence can all potentially reach their maximums.

For every stat point your pet gains it will also gain a point in Hit Points, Stamina or Mana respectively. Hence when selecting the perfect pet to train, you want to make sure these three figures are as high as possible (to make for the best starting point) while making sure the actual stats are as low as possible (to ensure the highest possible amount of gains).

There is an exception to this rule - Many pets will have stats that start out higher then the 125 maximum. Since you obviously can't train them any higher, you'll want to make sure those particular figures are as high as possible from the beginning.

Resistances

Use Animal Lore to check out your pet's resistances. Unlike your character (which starts with no resistances and gains them by donning armor), pets come with their own "base" resistances which vary between specimens.

Now, your character can improve his or her resists by training Resisting Spells (albeit by a very small amount) - While your pets can also train in this skill, they will not receive a resistance bonus from it. Hence they cannot improve their initial resistance levels at all - make sure the pet you choose to train starts out with the highest levels possible for that particular creature type (especially in terms of physical resistance).

Skills

Any skill a creature has can be trained by use, in the same way as your character's. They cap out at 100 but are subject to no "overall" limit, so if a pet has a skill it can max it out (regardless of how many points other skills might be using).