The Tamer Who Matters

S1 · Loyal, not suicidal

The game contains a behavior where a badly injured, unhandled pet should break off and run to its owner. It has never fired once, for two independent reasons: the skill value that feeds the check can only ever be negative, so the gate never opens, and if it did open, the math clamps the flee chance to zero, the exact opposite of the intent. The rebalance made this worse in an interesting way: the check is fed by Obedience, a skill players now buy ranks in, which means players are paying experience into a dead switch. Fix both inversions, with conservative thresholds: only below roughly 15 percent health, and only when the handler has given no recent orders. Obedience then earns its name, trained ranks lower the panic threshold, so a well-trained pet holds the line longer before instinct takes over. A watched pet fights to the last; an ignored one saves its own life.

Seen in: UO loyalty disobedience, WoW Classic unhappy pets.

S2 · Truth in the trainer

The taming trainer currently sells fiction. Animal Handling is listed with a real description, "Increases chance to tame a creature," and does not exist: no skill data behind the entry, nothing to learn, nothing it could ever do. Veterinarian is listed and equally hollow. Frenzy and Refresh were retired in August, with refunds, and are still in the trainer's catalog. And the purchase path itself never checks whether a listed skill is actually implemented, which is how all four ghosts survive. Clean it up: the trainer lists what exists, the purchase path refuses what does not, and while we are in the skills window, the displayed taming bonuses stop rounding to whole numbers while the underlying math truncates, a small honesty bug players have already filed. The two ghost names do not disappear from the game's future, Veterinarian in particular is card S13, but a trainer is a shop, not a wishlist.

Seen in: every game whose trainers survived an expansion; UO's trainer lists track published skills.

S3 · Stow and carry on

Since August, pets remember their wounds: stow a bear at half health and it comes back at half health, even across a zone line. That is the right foundation and the wrong resting place, and the tester who verified it said so in the same breath: a pet put away to rest should rest. Proposed, with the genre's guardrails: a stowed pet recovers health slowly, on the order of ten minutes from empty to full, out of combat only, so stowing is convalescence and never a mid-fight reset button. A dead pet does not rest in the bag; it waits for a resurrection, you cannot stow your way out of a vet bill. Second half, same principle: buff timers stop burning while stowed. Today a two-hour pet food buff keeps counting down inside the necklace, so swapping pets taxes the buff you paid for. Freeze buff durations on stow, resume them on summon, never refresh them. Together the two halves answer the real cost the quick-swap thread named: swapping pets stops meaning re-buying and re-buffing your way back to where you were.

Seen in: the genre keeps the hospital at the stable (WoW's stable is pure stasis; BDO and ArcheAge heal at the stable keeper, for a fee), and the one game that healed companions in the pocket, Pokemon, walked it back the moment the pocket became reachable anywhere. Slow rest with the fast path elsewhere is the configuration that survives.

S4 · No taming from the grave

Die at the wrong moment of a tame, while your current pet is dying alongside you, and the game wedges: the freshly tamed creature is stranded in the necklace behind a resurrection timer that reads negative, the old pet is gone, and nothing can be summoned until a zone change clears the jam. Players reproduced this years ago and it has survived every fix wave since, including this month's. The tame and the death each clean up correctly alone; it is the overlap that corrupts the state. Untangle the ordering so a tame that completes as you fall either lands cleanly or fails cleanly, and a negative death timer can never be written at all.

Seen in: nothing, this one is ours. Filed from player reproduction on the tracker.

S5 · A cap that grows with you

The one July bug still standing, and the page's obligatory unpopular card. Summoning grants a pet level cap that does not cap: the cap is applied to the creature's level first, and then Combat Training's bonus and the collar's +5 are added on top. At skill 100 a cap of 90 produces level 120 pets; at skill 200 a cap of about 125 can produce pets around 180. Every downstream stat scales off the escaped number. The July card proposing the fix went four votes up, ten down, the worst score on the page, and its top comment argued for a different cap entirely. This rewrite adopts that comment. The minimum ship is unchanged, apply the cap last, level = min(template + bonuses, cap). The design on top is the critic's: the cap also tracks the handler, something like the tamer's own adventurer level plus a margin, so a fresh account cannot pilot an endgame pet through low-level content while the veteran who earned both halves of the pair feels nothing. That was the actual complaint under the votes, not "leave my pet alone" but "the wrong people have the strong pets."

S6 · Mastery deepens, not multiplies

The rebalance rebuilt the tree and left the species templates alone, so this card survives with its numbers intact: a top bear's strength is 25 + (level x 1.5) + (mastery x 80) and its health 50 + (level x 0.25) + (mastery x 200), with mastery at 1.25 at skill 100 and 2.5 at 200. The second hundred skill points simply double the mastery term. Bend those lines to a square-root form: a grandmaster feels roughly minus 15 percent on the mastery term, the skill-200 runaway takes minus 40, and everyone below grandmaster barely moves. Waits on its S22 dial like every take.

Seen in: WoW (pet stats as a fixed fraction of owner stats), UO 2017 (power priced, not multiplied).

S7 · The armor budget, paid once

Two July cards, one budget, so they merge. Every tamed pet carries a hidden all-pets package: health per level, rising damage resistance, and a flat 45 damage absorption that is a large part of why a watched pet simply does not die. Family packages then repeat several of the same stats on top, so the tankiest families are tanky twice; only nine of the fourteen families even have a family package, which is its own oddity, and card S10's opportunity. Meanwhile the rebalance quietly raised the passive total: Hide Toughness's resistance now actually reaches the pet (it did not always), and as of this month so does the resistance on tamer gear. Each of those is correct alone; together they mean the passive layer has grown while the plan of record says it should shrink. Trim the flat absorption and halve family bonuses where they repeat the base layer, and move the trimmed armor into the Guard stance (S12), where it becomes something a handler turns on when the pet is actually tanking. One correction from July, on the record: the first edition flagged a resistance line applied through two stats at once as a possible double-count. It is not one; the skill grants physical and magical resistance by design, and the card's math no longer claims otherwise.

Seen in: WoW Tenacity (survivability as a spec choice, not a default).

S8 · Rare and named tames

Seventeen votes up, zero down, the most wanted card on the July page, and the rebalance quietly built its rails: the seven-tier reband gives every creature a place, and the new taming collection tracks 177 pets across fourteen families with per-species counters. What is missing is the reason to check the far end of the map: the midnight wolf that only prowls the northern woods at night, the scarred old bear with a name and a story. Two layers, both proven elsewhere. Rare hue rolls on ordinary spawns turn all 178 creatures into lottery tickets and make the whole existing world re-huntable overnight. Named beasts, one per family, walk a pool of spawn points across two or three scenes on long windows, a patrol circuit to learn, never a single spot to camp, some gated on world state worth discovering: night, weather, the moons. Strictly cosmetic or sidegrade, a rare is a trophy, never a stat stick, because the moment rares are stronger the hunt becomes homework. Taming a named counts as the kill for every ledger that cares, so the hunter camping it to slay and the tamer waiting to calm it are never at war. The collection page gets a shadowed silhouette row for the named you have heard of and not yet found.

Seen in: WoW's silver-dragon rares and spirit beasts (Loque'nahak's eight spawn points and the hunt culture around them), UO's rare-hued nightmares, frenzied ostards and white wyrms and the bank-front pet trade they fed, Outlands named beasts, GW2's unique juvenile skins.

S9 · Send and guard

Sixteen up, zero down in July, and untouched by the rebalance, so the ask stands: two commands the kit is missing. Send, point at the ground, the pet goes there and holds. Guard ally, assign the pet to a party member, and it defends them the way it defends you. Pulling a patrol with your bear parked on the far door, or assigning the wolf to the healer, is the difference between owning a pet and playing one. The rebalance strengthened the case: the command plumbing demonstrably works (three runes ship on it today), and the new tether means a sent pet has an honest maximum range, which July's version of this card had to hand-wave.

Seen in: EQ's command vocabulary, City of Heroes goto and bodyguard, UO "all guard".

S10 · Nine innates, fourteen jobs

Fourteen families, nine family stat packages, and for most players one question: which is strongest. A family identity pass gives every group a job: bears hold the line, wolves bleed fleeing targets, spiders slow, boars knock down, crocodiles crush armor, drakes strafe. The first pass ships four or five archetype groups (tank, striker, controller, skirmisher, breath) rather than fourteen bespoke kits, fills in the five families that today have no package at all, and becomes the chassis the family kits (S11) mount onto. The seven-tier reband makes the audit tractable in a way it was not in July: every family's spread across the tiers is now a table you can read.

Seen in: WoW family abilities, ARK species roles, UO Outlands family niches.

S11 · Family kits on the bar

July's flagship asked for a pet ability bar: family abilities on your hotbar, costing your focus, yours to time. The rebalance built the bar. Three owner-cast pet commands ship today on a two-slot channel with real costs, real windows, and charge rules that extend duration without power. What did not ship is the content: the same three commands serve a bear, a spider, and a drake identically. This card is the second half: each archetype from S10 earns one signature rune on the same channel, the bear's Maul, the wolf's Fear Howl, the spider's Web, the drake's Wing Buffet, built exactly the way the shipped three are built. July priced this Large when it included inventing the machinery; the machinery exists, so the honest price is Medium, and the pattern to copy is in the data.

Seen in: FFXI Beastmaster Ready moves (the precedent the shipped runes vindicate), WoW Kill Command, GW2 F2 beast skills.

S12 · Real stances

The shipped commands are moments you cast. Stances are postures you set, and today's postures are still free: aggressive is simply the strongest setting, at no cost, forever. Replace them with stances that trade. Guard: more taunt and resistance, less damage, and the armor S7 trims from the passive layer lands here. Frenzy: more damage, fewer resistances, the pet visibly enraged (the never-used Enrage stat finally earns its keep). Harry: low damage, slows and interrupts. The card draws a clean line against the rune channel: runes are seconds-long calls with cooldowns, stances are standing orders with permanent tradeoffs, and both layers read the same archetype data so they compose instead of competing.

Seen in: WoW Ferocity/Tenacity/Cunning, EQ stances, City of Heroes Mastermind modes.

S13 · The Veterinarian, for real this time

July's version said "we already own the skill slot." That is no longer true, and the card is stronger for the loss. The rebalanced tree has no Veterinarian row and no Animal Handling row; what survives is a rank stat the game still computes, an icon, and the trainer's ghost listing (S2). So this card now asks for what it always meant: a real skill line, built new, on the branch that keeps pets alive. And the rebalance handed it the strongest argument a care line has ever had here: pets no longer heal themselves, at all. Every point of pet health is now the owner's work, and the school offers exactly one heal and one resurrect to do it with. The Veterinarian is the job description: field bandages that heal out of combat, cheaper and faster resurrection, and, adopting the best comment on the July page, rez-window insurance, a trained veterinarian's pet cannot be lost outright to the death timer while its handler is fighting to reach it. The same comment asked to heal injured wild animals found in the world, with the Love virtue answering; that ships in this card's second stage, because it is exactly the kind of thing this game does that no other game bothers to.

Seen in: UO Veterinary (bandage heals and vet resurrection, the exact precedent), WoW Mend Pet, ArcheAge's stable-hand recovery.

S14 · Taming is a fight

Capturing a great beast becomes a contest instead of a ten-second cast bar: weaken it into a band, begin the calming channel, ride out its attempts to break your concentration, and commit the collar at the right moment. Everyday tames stay quick, the contest scales with the creature's power, so the drama is reserved for the beasts worth bragging about. New in this edition, promoted from the July thread to the card body as a design option: the purist rule, a tame only succeeds if the fight was yours, any outside help, damage, healing, or crowd control from another player voids the attempt on the great beasts. It reads harsh and it is exactly how the people who most want this card want it.

Seen in: WoW's Molten Front and Mists taming challenges (Deth'tilac, kited below his own strength before the tame is even allowed; Ban'thalos, tagged out of the sky), ARK's weaken-then-commit, FFXI charm risk.

S15 · Sidegrade pet gear

July's version leaned on two "empty gear tiers already sitting in the data." Checked again for this edition: those folders are empty because the idea was abandoned, the handful of assets that exist are marked obsolete, and no shipping item uses them. So the card drops the archaeology and targets what is real: the pet sheet's three live gear slots, whose owner-side stats, as of this month, finally transfer to the pet. Fill the slot pool with choices instead of levels: a collar that removes the Strength command's drawback but lengthens its cooldown; a relic that turns the bear's Maul into a cleave; a charm that widens the tether but thins the pet's threat at range. Mutually exclusive, ability-modifying, never raw levels, and one anti-goal named out loud: the +5 pet levels on collar gear is exactly the shape this card exists to replace, and the S22 dial on collar-gear bypass will say how urgent that is.

Seen in: WoW glyphs, ArcheAge battle-pet gear done as sidegrades.

S16 · The focus commitment

Fielding a top pet reserves part of the owner's focus, the opportunity cost that justifies fighting beside a second combatant, and Concentration's curve still cuts that reservation by 62.6 percent at skill 170. The July thread's one comment on this card deserves a direct answer, because it read the proposal backwards, and if a card can be read backwards it was written badly. Plainly: this card makes the commitment bigger, not smaller. Concentration would reduce the reservation by at most about 30 percent at grandmaster, instead of the 60-plus it reduces today, so the net focus a top tamer sets aside goes up. The commenter's own numbers, a 497-focus reservation from a 1040 pool, verified the current curve exactly; under this card that reservation grows modestly rather than shrinking. The pet is a build choice again, not a free ally. Tuned jointly with S5, which lowers the reservation on its own by capping the level, and gated on its S22 dial like every take.

Seen in: UO control slots, City of Heroes Mastermind endurance economy.

S17 · One law for every summon

Summons are pets without a tamer, they share the machinery, and the rebalance did not touch them, so their books never got audited. They do not balance. Upkeep runs three ways: elementals, the daemon, and the phoenix reserve twice their level in max focus; the wisp falls through to a flat token ten; skeletons and liches reserve nothing at all. The level formulas run three ways too: elementals scale with their school's specialization, most other summons scale with the caster's level instead, and the daemon uses the same formula at half rate, so identical investment buys visibly different pets depending on school. One law: every summon pays the same shaped upkeep, every summon levels by the same shaped formula, tuned per school by data rather than by accident. The give riding along comes straight off the wishlist: each school's summon in two casts, the single strong companion and the cheaper swarm variant, sharing one food and gear pool, which is the most-asked summon feature on the tracker this month.

Seen in: EQ magician pet lines (one law, many elements), the wishlist's own summon-variant thread.

S18 · Pets with personality

An Excitement stat has sat unused in the data with a design note about pets celebrating, and it survived the rebalance untouched. Use it: pets that are actively handled emote more, the bear rears after a commanded Maul, the wolf circles you after a win, the drake preens when fed a treat. One hundred percent cosmetic, zero power, and the cheapest warmth this program can buy.

Seen in: FFXIV minion behaviors, WoW pet interactions.

S19 · The handler's vanity line

The community's monetize-taming thread asked for exactly this and it costs the balance budget nothing: size tonics (the Growth and Reduction stats already exist in the data, unused), pet dyes, skin variants, trick and emote packs, and the thread's own best idea, a crown-shop pet resurrection service for the tamer stranded far from a healer. Strictly vanity and convenience, the day a store item carries a pet stat, every other card on this page loses its credibility. This is the card that helps pay for the rest.

Seen in: ESO and WoW pet cosmetics, ARK dyes; requested in our own wishlist thread.

S20 · Bond

The card the rest of the page builds toward, renamed for a good reason: July called this "Bond & Obedience," and Obedience is now the name of a shipped skill players buy, so the meter is Bond, one word, and the shipped Obedience skill becomes one of its inputs rather than a naming collision. Each pet carries a long-term Bond grown by real handling: commands cast, heals landed, fights survived together, veterinary care given. Bond is worth the top slice, about 15 percent, of the pet's performance, fades only slowly with neglect, and never drops below a floor. Under it, a short-term attention layer drains only when the pet fights with literally no input from its handler and refills instantly on any order. A handled pet is the strongest a pet has ever been at your side. A pet parked to play the game for you sinks to the floor and stays there. Every signal Bond reads is one the server can verify on its own, commands, casts, and kills it already sees, which is both the anti-cheat posture and the reason this card sequences after the command surface (S9, S11, S12): Bond needs verbs worth watching.

Seen in: UO loyalty and bonding, WoW Classic happiness, ARK imprinting.

S21 · Fight alongside your pet

Our published balance target says the pet should be at most 60 percent of a tamer's damage, the tamer must matter. This card makes that personal: full kill experience when the handler took part in the fight, where taking part is generous by design, meaningful damage or any support action at all, a heal on the pet, a command, a buff. A handler who did none of those earns a reduced share, never less than 30 percent. And to answer the question asked directly on the July thread, in the card body where it belongs this time: yes, a bard-tamer playing songs and steering the pet is taking part, every song counts as support, full credit. This is not experience by distance, which was reviewed and declined; participation is about what you did, not where you stood.

Seen in: EQ and WoW group participation rules, GW2 event credit.

S22 · Watch the dials

The rebalance opened three questions its own change log says should be answered by numbers, not opinions, and this card is the public commitment to answer them before any take on this page tunes anything. One: is the three-second resummon at Summoning 150 short enough that pet death stops mattering again? Two: with two command slots and three commands, does Taunt plus a damage command become the only pair anyone runs, making the choice a false one, especially once family kits (S11) widen the menu? Three: does pricing the training skills at four times experience push players to skip Combat Training and buy pet level from collar gear instead? Each question gets a dial, usage and outcome numbers from the shard, published in the balance change log the way the census and the band measurements already are. The takes (S5, S6, S7, S16) wait for readings. Votes on this card mean: yes, hold them to that.

Seen in: our own balance program's band measurements, applied to the school that needs them most.