Veterinary
Title: Ranger
Trained By: Rangers
The skill of Veterinary is the primary offset to Animal Taming.
The Veterinary skill gives you a greater understanding of the creature you are trying to tame. While it does not improve your chances to actually tame the creature, it will decrease your chances of angering the creature. The last thing you want to do is anger a dragon you are trying to tame. Long is the list of tamers who have become a piece of toast because they angered a dragon while trying to tame it.
The higher your Veterinary is, the faster your healing on your pets takes effect. For every 15 points of Veterinary, you will reduce your healing time by 1 second. This means 60 Veterinary will reduce your time by 4 seconds and at 100 skill you reduce the healing time by 6 seconds.
The Veterinary skill also allows you to determine a pet's hunger and determine what a monster's elemental damage/resistance bonuses. You will require 30 veterinary to assess what the creature has for elemental bonuses. It can be a bit vague but values fall under these categories:
- 0% to 10%: slight
- 11% to 30%: low
- 31% to 60%: medium
- 61% to 80%: high
- 81% to 100%: master
There is a discrepancy with veterinary and healing: in some systems the actual healing skill is used and in some the vet skill is used.
Pet Bonding
Rangers and Tamers can develop a deep bond between them and their pets. Once you have acquired a pet, take them hunting with you to gain experience and virtue. Once they have gained enough, you can spend it to increase their stats and fighting skills.
Use the Veterinary skill on your tamed pet. If it is not your pet, you will get some animal information. If it is your pet, you will get a menu detailing how much virtue and experience they have and what you can spend it on. If there is no button available to purchase the upgrade, you have reached the cap.
Although everyone can bond with their pet, those with high veterinary skill get a reduction. For strength, dexterity and intelligence, those with over 100 veterinary skill will get a 50% cost reduction and those with over 110 will get a 60% cost reduction. For each upgrade, the cost increases a bit: to raise it a second time, you will require 2x the base amount while the third time requires 3x the base amount, etc. For skills, you start with 5000 experience required and the increase/reduction is based on how many upgrades you have bought and your veterinary skill. The final amount will be somewhere between 4500 to 7500.
For example, you have just acquired the cutest little dragon. You have 100 veterinary skill. The first upgrade is a bonus and will cost just 10 virtue to raise it 10 points. Every upgrade after that will cost 25 virtue. So you will have paid 10 virtue, 25 virtue, 50 virtue, 75 virtue and so forth.
There are caps to how much a pet can have their stats and skills raised. It is a sliding scale based on their base amount. Lower animals get approximately 300% bonus while higher level animals get 25% bonus.
- Raising strength enables your pet to have a higher amount of life and to gain additional damage for every 30 points of strength.
- Raising intelligence helps your pet resist magic spells.
- Raising dexterity increases your pet's evade chance from melee and ranged attacks.
- Raising armor enables your pet to reduce damage taken.
Pet bonding does not work on mountable pets. If you mount your pet that you bought stats and skills, it will revert back to the default when you dismount.
Note on Pets Gaining Virtue and Experience
Your pet must attack the monster to gain virtue and experience. You cannot just take your pet hunting and have them sit while you do the fighting.
You cannot stable your pet or they will lose all their virtue and experience. Taking a pet out of the stable will reset their stats and skills to the default.
