Hi, I played UO long ago and for a brief period of time at that. I saw KR and Mondains legacy and got reinterested. I really liked the skill system, and i REALLY liked the taming potential. So here is my question as a tamer what is the best way to get started, I've been reading through the forums and find a general concensus that magery/tamer is the basic idea.

So I will go with that I guess. In that regard what is a decent build to get started with, keep in mind I am a new player and have no money, no armor, and this will probably be my first character. Unless I decide to make a crafter of some sort to bring in some money.

I suppose with magery spell components can be a hassle to deal with if i don't have money, is it that big of a deal?

On another note, how would spellweaving or necromancer work with a tamer build instead of magery ? Could I substitute Magery out for necromancy and still use evail int, med, taming, lore, vet?

I guess this would be my starting build

Taming
Animal Lore
Vet
Necromancer(or magery or spellweaving.)
Eval int (I read this one could be subed for peacemaking to make taming easier?)
meditation
I would be an elf since I Like elves.

at any rate, thats about what I have to start. Any suggestions on this?

Well, I know most taming builds I've ever encountered include Magery. This isn't to say you couldn't do one without Magery, but I could imagine it to be quite a hassle. You'd have to rely on recall/gate scrolls since you couldn't cast the spell itself.

Magery components aren't that difficult to obtain. They're cheap from NPC vendors, and once you start finding pieces of Lower Reagent Cost gear, it helps greatly. I don't know what shard you play on, but on my shard (Atlantic), I've seen full sets of LRC gear for around 100-150k. Sure, it may seem a lot starting out, but it doesn't take too long to get.

You could substitute in Necromancy, but it still uses reagents. Another downfall of using Necromancy, is that it relies on the Spirit Speak skill to calculate a lot of it's spell effects.

As far as Spellweaving, I'm not sure really, I've never really ventured into it.

As far as the build itself, obviously, the 3 required skills are:
Animal Taming
Animal Lore
Veterinary


This leaves you with 400 points (Pre-Powerscroll) to mess around with.

My personal choice is a mage tamer. My template is as follows (plus the three core skills):
Magery
Evaluating Intelligence
Meditation
Chivalry

As far as the bard-tamer you mentioned, you would need Peacemaking and Musicianship. A possible build for that could be:
Magery
Meditation
Musicianship
Peacemaking


Later on, you'll run into a little trouble once you start dealing with Powerscrolls, but there's a while to go until you get there. Hopefully what I said can be some help to you.

If you decide to go with magery/taming. I would recommend going to twisted wield and litter pick swoops. You can find a lot of information to help you HERE. Baldguy works real hard to keep that updated and informative

Vepl

I like the bard/tamer setup (with enough magery to cast 4th and 5th circle spells - mind blast for basic offense and recall for travel).

Peacemaking can save your behind in a pinch when a beast goes aggressive on you!

The downside is, you don't really have any measures of offense unless you have a strong pet with you. But, if you're a tamer, you probably have a pet with you most of the time, so it's almost a moot point.

Good luck!

So I have decided to go mage/tamer, this is so confusing *snicker* I am making my character now, the silly web site to buy the game uogamecodes.com is giving me bunk, any way I am just now making my character I think I will start with animal taming, animal lore, magery, veterinary...what skills raise automatically ? I know meditation does but what else is there that rises on its own? This way I can probably get the most effective start.

And, again, thanks for all of your help. I am sorry for all of the questions, but you have all been very helpful.

Some things to do when first creating a character. Be sure to lock all skills that you do not want to raise. Make sure all skills that you want to raise are set to go up.

Actually no skill goes up on it's own. Mediation can raise as long as your not at full mana. Magery and Eval will go up as you use spells. Depending on your level of magery what spells will raise magery. Eval can raise with any level of spell. While taming creatures the Taming and Animal Lore skills can go up. When healing a pet Veterinary and Animal Lore can go up.

Hope that helps.

Vepl

Thanks Vepl, that was something I was noticing today while taming a horse, it was kind of funny since my bats wanted to kill it, lol, any way I noticed lore was going up even on failed attempts but taming only went up on a success, oh and I better tame me some bats again so that I can make some cash I ran out of casting materials lol.

Overall I am really having a blast right now just playing around with things, I found out that by accident I made one of my pets mad at me and it kept beating on me, or at least trying to, I think I accidently punched it while trying to harvest meat from a dead dear.

Any way I will browse the forums here and see if I can't find more info to help me on my adventures. Thanks for all of the help guys. Oh, and is this a place where I might be able to find a guild to join? Even if it is just a simple training /newbie guild.

thanks again

Maybe I missed it Truwen, but what shard are you on? Members here represent most of the popular shards. If you are on GL, I would be happy to try and help you out some, and I'm sure members on other shards would do the same.

I am playing on lake austin. I met a guy, riding a dragon who gave me some gear and a full spell book so I'm working on leveling my magery skill up