I have a roleplay/dungeon crawling build which is essentially a summoner. The skills involved here are magery, necromancy, spellweaving, meditation, spirit speak and resisting spells.

He rarely (almost never) casts offensive spells. He just summons.

Naturally I'm plagued by the max number of followers stat.

The question: Are there any means by which this stat can be increased? Are there any items, quests, etc that add to the max number of followers?

If not - there should be!

I'm your typical original UO fan recently returned to find a very different world with a whole lot of items and stats I hadn't seen before.

Regards,
Sirus

No there's no way to increase it and believe me, not many wants there is...
Or tamers would just rule the spawns again with the insane pets you can have, I remember those 3 WW+Nightmare tamers...
And too many summons would be as bad, you'd have tons of AFK mages spamming summons like in the Treasures of Tokuno event. And farming minor artifacts and the like.

Well that's of course true if you could increase the number by a large amount. Right now the cap is 5. If there was a rare item in the game which could increase the amount to 6 it would be very helpful and I don't see how that could be overpowered. Most of the strong pets in the game require 4 points, so you would have to have at least 8 to have two of them (such as 2 demons for example) and you still wouldn't get to ride a mount of any kind.

There are advantages and disadvantages to chosing any one item over another as well. Anyone using an item to add to this stat would of course be sacrificing what they could be getting from using other items.

Regards,
Sirus

A mage would be able to have 3 Air/earth elementals, Blade spirits or Energy Vortexes.
A tamer could have three Bake Kitsunes, or the like.
A spellweaver would have an extra Natures Fury (like 5 wasn't already enough). Or 2 Dryad's Allure "tames" (Two titans or Orc Brutes?).

Am I the only one who doesn't see a problem with this? It seems that most experienced players can defeat those things easily.

Given what someone has to sacrifice in order to be able to have those kind of followers it doesn't seem particularly unfair to me.

I often see people tearing through demons, titans, etc. using melee skills and decent gear. With that in mind, how would what you say be all that bad?

Regards,
Sirus

The problem wouldn't be PvP - it's more that, if you're trying to kill a certain type of monster, say a White Wyrm in the Ice Dungeon, an the is a tamer with even more pets than now, you'd never had a chance to get the kill. Even worse with mages being able to have 3 EV. They nerfed this only 2 years ago, because mages with 4 EV were way to powerful.

But don't get me wrong, I can totally understand you - sometime I'd love a extra slot too, especially with the new 5 slot dragons coming up. But for the sake of a balanced game, I think i should stay like it is. But hey, you never know what the devs will come up with.

I've seen tamers talking about 8 control slots. What's up with that?

Even in PVP, I'd like to see even the vast majority of well experienced players handle three trained baked kitsunes, or two run beetles. Oh, and I know the "just kill the tamer" argument. However, I can see protection tamers simply invising while their pets do the dirty work, and they walk away unscathed. Summons may not be a problem, but "multiple" well trained pets would be. FWIW.

I thought of a pair of rune beetles, just after I made my last post.

Increasing from 5 to 6 follower slots would be a pretty bad idea...
I've thought the matter through some more, and I only see more reasons for it to stay at 5...
5 is a good number, in part because it's prime. It limits the possible combinations, while still allowing flexibility.