***Please note: This guide contains no information on bio pets. Not only do I not have enough experience with them to write a guide on them, they are radically different from normal pets.First things first: You need a pet to train to make use of this guide at all. Go out and tame one. You're given five "pet control slots" on WP - that number is shown in your Character Status bar on the lower right. It has a dog symbol in the box, it reads "Followers" if you hover over that box, and it shows numbers in this format: 1/5. The first number is the amount of pet slots you are currently using, and the second is your maximum allowable pet slots. Any individual pet may take up anywhere from 1 to a full 5 pet slots, meaning that you could control five 1-slot pets at once or a single 5-slot pet. You can increase your maximum number of pet slots by 1 with an item called the Circlet of Controlling or you can purchase extra follower slots several ways at the Donation Hall. Most players believe the number of pet control slots that a pet uses up is a very important factor in determining its usefulness.
When you tame a pet, the first thing you generally do is single-left click on it which gives you a drop-down menu of options. Scroll to the bottom of the list and choose "NPC Info". This brings up the following screen:
This is very important because it shows you the maximum possible level that your pet can achieve. A pet's level cap can be anywhere from 10 to 30. Since pets gain ability points and unlock additional features for improvement with every level they gain, it is in your best interest to obtain pets with high maximum levels. If you tame a pet that you don't feel is a suitable level for you, it's best to kill it off. If you release your tamed pet into the wild, it will not despawn like normal wild animals and after a while that permanent wildlife could have a negative impact on server performance. If you're in a guild, then your pet will highlight green to you and you can kill it just by attacking. If you aren't in a guild or if it's a situation where killing your pet would make you lose karma, you can simply send it up against a stronger monster that will kill it for you.
Once you have a pet or pets that you feel are suitable for training, head directly to the Training Area off the public moongates. Have your pets attack one of the Training Twiggys right away. This isn't for skill gain purposes, as your pets would eventually GM all their skills through normal combat anyway. The reason to hit the Training Area right away is to raise your pet's basic stats - Strength, Dexterity, and Intelligence. Whether you're training a dragon or a squirrel, you can raise all of your pet's basic stats to 125 at the Training Area. This is time-consuming drudgery but if you are really looking to get the most out of your pet this is an absolute must.
Pets which do not use magic will actually still gain Intelligence in the Training Area but they will not gain either Mana Points nor magery-related skills, so it is useless. All freshly-tamed pets which DO cast magic will start with the same amount of Mana points as they have Intelligence points, and as you train up their Intelligence their Mana will also go up on a point-for-point basis until they are both 125. Almost all pets start with an equal amount of Dexterity and Stamina points but there are a few exceptions like the Cu Sidhe. If your pet starts off with identical scores in both Dexterity and Stamina, then point gains in Dexterity will also equal a point gain in Stamina on a one-for-one basis. That's great because Stamina affects attack speed: the more Stamina your pet has, the faster it will attack (up to its max attack speed) and the more Stamina it can afford to lose in battle before its attack speed is affected. If your pet's Dex and Stamina do NOT start at equal values, then it will not gain a point of Stamina when it gains a point of Dexterity. As far as I can tell, there isn't any way to change this fact. Leveling your pet and then adding Stamina until the two values are equal doesn't work; your pet will still gain Dexterity points without gaining any Stamina. Most freshly tamed pets do not start off with equal values in Strength and Hit Points, although I have found a few exceptions such as Woodland Healing Fairies and Seahorses. The same rule for Dexterity and Stamina applies here as well: if your pet's Strength and Hit Points start off equal, it will gain a Hit Point every time it gains a point of Strength. If they don't start equal, your pet will not gain Hit Points as it gains Strength points. Of course, this is only important if you've decided to train up a relatively weak pet. Remember that you can only train up to 125 in any stat at the Training Center.
Once you've trained all of the important stats on your pet to 125, it's time to go earn some experience points! It is almost a universal rule that the stronger/more useful your pet is, the more experience points it will take for it to gain levels. I would venture to say that the usefulness of certain pets is no longer what it once was years ago, yet they still demand a lot of XP and pet control slots. You can determine or decide that for yourself though. If you've decided to train a pet that is weak to start off with, like a horse for example, you had better start off killing very weak animals. Horses start with 20% Physical Resist and around 38 Hit Points - most monsters would kill a fresh horse in one or two hits. This is important because occassionally when a pet dies, it permanently loses stats, resists, and damage output. Obviously that will seriously decrease the usefulness of your pet and is definitely not at all desirable during the training phase. As your pet gains levels, you get a message on your screen about it.
The message tells you what level the pet has advanced to and how many ability points it gained when it leveled up. You spend ability points by clicking the red jewel at the bottom of the NPC Info dialogue box.
You don't need to use the ability points right away; they will keep accumulating and store until you decide to spend them. From levels 2 through 9, the only things you can spend ability points on are Hit Points, Stamina, and Mana.
If your pet starts with very low Hit Points, you might want to spend some in that area to help keep it alive easier. Generally speaking, I would not recommend increasing Stamina or Mana until your pet's Resists and Min/Max Damage are capped and it has a very healthy amount of Hit Points, if not capped in them.
At level 9, the system message will tell you that your pet is now "ready to mate". However, the pet breeding system has been disabled here on WP so your pet cannot actually mate. There are multiple posts on the forum about this feature which can be found with a simple search if you want to read up on it.
At level 10, you unlock the ability to improve your pet's Resists.
Resists help reduce damage to a pet from a certain source, be it Cold, Fire, et cetera. It should go without saying that you will want to have all of these at their maximum possible value of 60. If it isn't extremely tedious to do so, I recommend saving up all of your ability points from the first 9 levels in order to max all your pet's Resists as quickly as possible. In my opinion, it's even more tedious to try and raise them piecemeal through the higher levels which require more XP to advance through. Your pet will have to do much more fighting and will therefore receive tons of damage that could have been avoided by maxing Resists earlier.
At level 20, you unlock the ability to improve your pet's Minimum and Maximum Damage values.
Minimum caps at 17 and Maximum caps at 25. This is base damage only and does not include damage calculations of your pet's Strength, Wrestling, Tactics, or anything else. Obviously more damage is better, and since these are cheap to max out you definitely want to cap these values as soon as possible.
At level 26, you unlock the ability to improve your pet's Special Attack values. These are on a second screen which is reached by clicking the little blue gems in the picture:
There are three Special Attacks listed - Roar Attack, Fire Breath, and Poison Attack. All of these abilities start at zero and have a maximum possible value of 100. This is a little in-depth and so I'll explain just the facts without any conjecture in order to keep it clear and simple. I maxed the Fire Breath value on an NPC human pet that naturally had no breath weapon. Over the course of many fights it never breathed any fire, so it was useless for that pet. I maxed the Fire Breath value on a drake which does naturally have a breath weapon (which happens to be fire) and used it in many fights side by side with a drake that had zero ability points in the Fire Breath catergory. There was no difference in the damage output or rate of using the breath weapon between the two drakes, so it proved to be useless for that pet as well. I did some Google searches for useful information about this feature and only came up with players on various servers asking if the feature worked at all or saying that it didn't seem to work.
That said, I have the following information on this from a higher authority: the Special Attacks are supposed to work when used on the right pet, meaning that only certain pets are able to make use of these attacks. If you apply Fire Breath to the wrong type of pet it will do nothing, that is certain. If you apply it to the right pet, however, apparently it will do something. I have no information about exactly what the attacks will do on the right pet and I don't have any information on what pets are right for any of these attacks. Since Fire Breath did nothing for a drake, I think it's safe to say that what the right pet will be for any given Special Attack is not necessarily intuitive. It would require a LOT of trial and error to discover what works.
Edit 5/23/2015: I discovered that these special abilities were built into the FS Animal Taming release on RunUO (http://www.runuo.com/community/threads/ ... en2.70573/) and were called "Pet Power Moves". As you can see, the creator of the script himself wrote: [Pet power moves. Now pets can learn moves based thier ability points. (System not fully tested)]. If anyone understands scripting better than I do, I'd encourage you to download the script package and read through it. I looked at it and to my uneducated eyes it looks like it should work in a fairly uncomplicated fashion but I have yet to find anyone who said they've seen it work at all.
At level 30, you unlock the ability to improve your pet's Armor Rating.
This has a minimum value of 0 and a maximum value of 70. Players have debated for many years about whether or not Armor Rating has any effect. I chose to test it and discover the answer once and for all. After all, you're either getting a great damage reduction or you're completely wasting 70 ability points so why wouldn't you want to know if it works or not?
The short answer is No. It does nothing.
The long answer is that I beat up on my level 30 horse when it had 0 Armor Rating and when it had 70 Armor Rating and got completely identical results. I beat on it with a plain skinning knife (100% Physical damage), a Blaze of Death (50% Physical/50% Fire damage + Fireball), and a Thunder Wyrm Soul Crossbow (100% Physical Damage + Lightning). Without getting into exhaustive and unnecessary details (although I'd be happy to provide them to anyone who really wants to know), in both cases all damage done to the horse was the same. Whether Physical, Fire, or Energy damage was being dealt, the minimum and maximum damages and the average damage dealt over time were all identical when the horse had 0 Armor Rating and when it had 70 Armor Rating.
You'll notice that even at level 30 there are still three stats in the menu that are not unlocked.
Those three hidden stats are Strength, Dexterity, and Intelligence. In the pet ability system, those unlock at level 40. However, since pet levels are capped at 30 here on WP, those cannot be unlocked for improvement by any means.
I'll offer a few tips to help you on your way to training up the best pet on the server. First - if your pet starts off with an outstanding score (higher than 60) in one of the Resist categories like Cu Sidhe and Lokai do, it only makes sense to train them against monsters that deal the type of damage they're super-resistant against. Less healing, more killing, easier leveling! Second - if you attack a single monster with two or more pets at the same time, they split the monster experience points amongst each other. However, if you attack a monster with only one pet, it only needs to deal some of the damage in order to qualify for all the experience points. That means that you can attack a lich with your horse and, after the horse deals damage, finish it off with Energy Vortexes or a Flamestrike and your horse will gain full experience for the kill. I personally find that training a single pet at a time is the most efficient way to level. Third and last - your pet can gain additional stat points beyond 125 during the process of leveling. Each time it levels up, your pet has a chance to gain in any or all of its main stats. Sometimes they will gain and sometimes they won't but this is an important reason to fully train to 125 at the Training Area before leveling. If you do it the other way around and level first, you will gain in stats that are still not at their 125 cap, and those gains will be wasted.
I hope that you pet enthusiasts out there find this guide to be helpful and useful. Feel free to post any or all questions that come up. Remember to thank Ghost and Falkor for creating such a great custom server for us to enjoy. And most of all, have fun!