I was just wondering if there was a good mage/tamer template. I was thinking about creating one and not sure what skills would be good for it. And if that would be a decent choice to go. I don't really care about PvP that much but if UO is more PvP intensive than it used to be i'd want to make sure I could survive in a fight. I was thinking the normal skills,
Taming, Resist Magic, Magery, Vet, Animal Lore but not sure where else to go. I want to make sure I can tame high end creatures, gate, make runes, and cast enough spells to make this build viable. Any help would be appreciated.

My template is lore, taming, vet, magery, eval, meditation. All scrolled out as high as I can get them lol. Some people give up eval for peace, if you only use magery to gate and such.

I forget what usefulness does meditate and eval have? Meditate doesnt that like help you regen mp faster? but dont remember what eval does. I'd almost like to have Resist on there but if I could do well without it than great.

Without eval, your spells don't have much affect. Like if you cast mind blast on something, you won't do hardly any damage. Same for healing, it won't heal hardly anything without eval.

Meditation helps mana come back quicker when you use it. You have to wear leather armor, or mage armor tho.

I don't use resist on my tamer cause I let my beasts take the damage while I heal them and throw off spells.

Ahh. Ok nice. I havent played UO in years and just getting back into it, and I figure going the tamer route may be almost like doing hunter in WoW. And get to customize a little by being a mage / tamer. So yah I'll probably use that temp and give it a whirl. Of course I know it'll be a pain to level up my skills ugh.

Actually Mind Blast is the only direct damage spell that will work without eval. I think it uses your INT to calculate the amount of damage it does.

Also heal spells have nothing to do with eval, they work based on how high your magery skill is. But in principle you're correct, spells are generally less potent without eval - direct damage spells do next to nothing, and buff/debuff spells don't last long and have lesser effect. Summons work fine, however.

I have a tamer mage, I am working on. Here is his template.

115 Magery
115 Med
115 Eval
120 Taming
120 Lore
120 Vet

I picked 115 in all the mage skills in case taming fails me, I don't want to get jacked by every monster so I feel eval is VERY important.

Very true, you want to be able to be a stand-alone mage if need be. Say you are going to be doing something where EV's are needed, and not pets. Boom, now you have a mage that can deal good damage.

Thanks for all the advice folks. One other thing I was wondering more or less for the Tamer part of this. when taming pets, do pets have different skills that you need to train or is it just simply tame a pet than do an 'pet attack' type deal?

Pets do have different skills that can be trained based upon their inate abilities. You may find these abilities on many sites to do with taming, or simply lore your pet. While many spend time directly training each skill available to a pet, I find it more fun to simply play. The pets skill will rise as it gets experience.

I'll have to check out the skills page. I'm an ex WoW player and was a Hunter on that and for all your pets you had to tame them, learn the skill, if you wanted a new pet you had to make sure the new pet could use the pet skill you just learned, etc etc. So a little unfamiliar with the pet skills on UO. Back in the day when I used to play I just gained up Taming to tame and ride new mounts and never really did anything else.

In a nutshell, each pet has its own skills which work just like a player's skills do. As in the pet gains in skills by using those skills. You don't have to choose anything, the pet has certain skills that it will get better at through combat.

Like, most pets have wrestling, tactics, anatomy and resisting spells. Magic using pets have also magery, eval and meditation. Some pets also have poisoning, and the cu sidhe has healing.

Each pet you tame has its own skills and they don't affect other pets in any way like apparently in WoW, so no worries about having to tame certain pets to use their skills.