Skills

As mentioned above, the only two skills required are Animal Taming and
Animal Lore. Take some time to think what you want your character to be. Each
template has it’s advantages and disadvantages for different playstyles. You need to be able to
defend yourself (Magery/Evaluating Intelligence/Meditation/Resisting Spells or
weapon skill of your choice), keep yourself alive (Magery or Healing/Anatomy),
and heal and cure your pet (Magery/Meditation or Veterinary/Animal Lore). You
will be able to drop the skills you don’t need for your Tamer template once
your character has matured.

Some skills are harder to raise than others. Taming and Animal Lore don’t cost
you anything to train up, and until you hit the mid-70s they raise fairly easy.
How you start out depends on a number of decisions: Do you want to raise your
Taming from 0 to 50 by taming very low level critters for an hour or two, or
are you too lazy? Do you have other characters to support your Tamer with
equipment and gold? Unless you absolutely want to start with 50 Taming and
Animal Lore, you can always buy them up to 30-35 from an NPC Animal Trainer at
your local stable, unless you’re playing on Siege Perilous shard where npcs do not train skills.

Here are some suggestions on starting different Tamer types and which skills
to start out with in order to avoid a long training period in your secondary
skills:

• For the Mage/Tamer:50 Magery, 50 Meditation or other skill of choiceThis choice will allow you to train Magery much more effective than just buying
  what little you can from an NPC Mage.

• For the Bard/Tamer:50 Musicianship 50 Provocation, Discord or PeacemakingProvocation and discord are very hard to raise, while Musicianship goes up rather quickly.
  If you start with 50 Peacemaking you will actually have a chance of stopping an
  attack and get away with your life, even if you don’t have much else to show in
  the defensive department.

• For the Warrior/Tamer or Ranger:50 Healing 50 Weapon Skill of Choice or50 Healing 40 Bowcraft/Fletching 10 ArcheryA Warrior/Ranger template is mostly preferred by Roleplayers. Starting skills
  are recommended optimized for starting equipment and survival. A Bowyer with 40
  skill can already make arrows and bolts without failing.

The Mage Tamer

The advantage of having a mage tamer is the benefit of having dual heal on any pet. This can be especially useful when fighting peerless or other large monsters. While applying a bandaid you can still cast greater heal on your pet.

The Spellweaver Tamer

Casting gift of renewal on the pet helps with additional healing, though gift of life has minimal useability since the pet is restored in the combat area with no health.

The Warrior Tamer

This template is a good choice for anyone who wants to be ‘in on the action’ rather than acting as support for the pet, chivalry also enables the casting of ‘remove curse’ on the pet, especially useful against creatures that use mortal strike.

The Bard Tamer

This template comes in several ‘flavors’. The peace tamer who will peace the pet’s opponent to minimise damage to the pet, also very useful when acquiring pets for your stable or if you choose to tame for sale to other characters. In addition to peace most bards will have one other music skill. Provocation is useful for ‘crowd control’ and allows the tamer to function in areas that may have too heavy a spawn for other templates. Discord reduces the opponent’s skills, thereby also reducing it’s barding difficulty making it easier to successfullly peace. Battles with foes that are discorded and peaced tend to go very swiftly.

The Treasure Hunter Tamer

This template can be a little cramped, though skill jewellery helps with that aspect. Level 6 maps can be solo’d with due care and good tactics at the initial spawn stage.