UOAlive Reporter Y
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Welcome to another Odd Builds. This is by no means a fully formed build or the best of the best but is here to help me remember what I'm doing and hopefully inspire you all to make your own weird builds or improve on mine. It will also be a cheap build so good for new players to start building gold before moving onto anything more expensive or tough to play.
Melee Tamer
Melee Tamer
This is perhaps a bit more meta than most of my builds, being a tamer, but I was inspired to try it after someone asked a few weeks ago why all the guides seem to be for magic or bard tamers. I used to play a melee tamer back in 2003 so after this question I decided to switch from archer to melee. Along the way I got some odd roleplay ideas and another odd build was born. For a simpler build just follow the first part of the guide, or keep reading to see a truly bizarre version!
Main Skills
The core skills to this build are of course Animal Taming, Animal Lore and a weapon skill. Your Taming and Lore can be anything you like but if you want to use a fully trained, 5 slot pet you will need at least 115/110 (either can be the 115, it doesn't matter. 115 Lore is usually cheaper to obtain but 115 Taming will help you actually tame your pets more easily). You can check your control chance here:
You will also likely want tactics to go with your weapon skill. Weapon skill is a personal preference but I ended up choosing swords, partially based on the weapons and their special moves and partly on the mastery (more on that in the mastery section). You usually want your weapon skill at 120 if you plan to fight bosses which can be an expensive investment but for lower level creatures 100 will be fine. You will also want 100 tactics to help with your base damage.
You've only used up 445 points so far, leaving 275 to make this build your own. Now you need to decide what is important to you.
Optional Skills
First, your pet will need some form of healing, especially as they're likely to be your tank. For me, I like Veterinary as it's the only skill that can res a pet and since I'll be stood next to my pet this is my preferred option. You can also go with Magery (a popular choice for pet healing, plus allows you to heal yourself and travel around), Chivalry (again you can heal yourself and your pet, plus it has remove curse and options to increase your melee damage) or Spellweaving (if you cast Gift of Life on your pet before it dies, it will resurrect it).
You may also wish to take a healing option for yourself, although most of the time your pet should be the one taking the damage, not you. I decided to go for Healing, which also requires Anatomy. Taking Magery or Chivalry may be an easier, less skill-point intensive option (though if you wish to also do damage with your magery you will require Evaluate Intelligence as well), particularly as they can also heal your pet. Anatomy can help with your damage as well so it is a good choice for a sixth skill even if you take Magery, Chivalry or Spellweaving over Healing.
115 Lore
110 Taming
120 Weapon
100 Tactics
100 Veterinary
100 Magery or Healing or Chivalry or Spellweaving
100 Eval Int or Anatomy
You should look something like the above by now but you may notice this is actually 25 points over the skill cap of 720. This is a build that can benefit from +skill jewellery or you can get away with lower skills in Vet/Magery/Healing/Chiv/Eval Int/Anatomy if +skill items are not to your taste. If you're not bothered with Veterinary you will have 75 points spare to up the other skills or add something else in. Or you can really push the boat out like me and really cram +skills in to make an odd, shapeshifting build!
My build is:
120 Taming (94 + 26 skill jewels)
110 Lore (84 + 26 skill jewels)
90 Veterinary
120 Swords
100 Healing (70 + 30 skill jewels)
91 Anatomy (65 + 26 skill jewels)
115 Ninjitsu (85 + 30 skill jewels)
110 Tactics (I may drop 10 points from this to go onto Vet)
The above is very +skill intensive and not all the bonuses can fit on one set of jewels so I have two sets. Both have Taming, Lore and Anatomy on. I can then switch between the healing or the ninjitsu versions as I please. For most fights, healing is the one I use. Ninjitsu is in this build more for roleplay purposes as many of its moves require stealth. This build can make use of Focus Attack (for a bonus to any 'on hit' properties on your weapon but you can't use a shield with this) and Animal Form. This was my reasoning for roleplay behind it, but also a little utility. At a minimum skill of 70 you can cast Ostard or Llama form. These will provide you with mounted movement rates, ideal if you have a 5 slot pet that you can't ride. The downside is you can't use special moves in this form. I wanted the skill jewels to make it easier to get into the form when I want to use it and also to provide access at 99 skill to Unicorn form, which also gives you mounted speed and an immunity to lesser poison, poison and greater poison. You can also use wolf or bake kitsune form at 85 for mounted speed, a hit chance bonus and +20 hit points.
Stats
You'll want high dex to increase swing speed to 1.25s and, if you have taken healing, your heal speed. I have 125 naturally. Higher strength will increase your weapon damage too so I've taken this as high as I can; for me that's 120 natural with the +5 from the swords mastery passive for 125 total. My int is not important and sits at 10 natural with +20 from gear.
Mastery
I was coming from a build using chiv, tactics and archery so I wanted to find something to increase damage nicely, if not to the same extent as Enemy of One and Consecrate Weapon, and the swords mastery appealed to me. At level 3 it gives a passive bonus of +5 hit chance increase, +5 defense chance increase, +5 strength and +5% damage increase. I am also intending to use Onslaught, an active ability that lowers one of your enemies resists based on real sword and tactics skill and also the damage type of your weapon. Onslaught works on real skill and has different buffs depending on the total of your real swords and tactics skills. A total of 220 will give you the second highest damage increase (-16% debuff to the mobs resist) so I chose to go with 120 swords and at least 100 tactics. 120/120 will give you a -20% debuff. The other active ability is called Focused Eye which is a sustained ability and gives a hit chance increase buff; I'm not built around mana regen or sustaining abilities so I haven't tried this out.
You can of course also run the Taming mastery as any other tamers do. I switch to this when training new pets to get the bonus from using Whispering and Combat Training may be better for certain fights to help your pet stay alive or deal more damage.
Gear
Gear will differ for everyone depending on the pets you are using, how you've built them and what you are hunting as well as your build.
Jewellery - The main thing for this build, if you try to cram skills in like me, will be +skills jewellery. I can't fit anything else on my ring and bracelet. If you go for the simpler version you'll be able to add some extra stats of your choice on these.
Armour - I use studded leather for the suit so I can reach the 55% Lower Mana Cost with imbuing. The five pieces also have Stamina Increase (to ensure I hit the 1.25 swing speed), Mana Increase (to ensure I can use special abilities and animal form) and HP Increase (a safety barrier in case I get targeted). HP Increase could probably be swapped for anything else you prefer. If you take Magery you would want Lower Reagent Cost instead. My headpiece is just a random dropped artifact that fills in some resists for me to hit all 70s and also has Dex, HP Increase, Stamina Increase, Mana Increase and Stamina Regen on it. Although I don't have parrying I do use a shield for some Defence Chance Increase and Faster Casting. You could remove the shield to make use of Focus Attack and use potions as well. I'm also using the Holy Grail tabard for the Faster Casting and Faster Cast Recovery plus the Int bonus.
Weapon - I like using katanas for Double Strike and Armour Ignore plus they're quite fast so I need less dexterity to reach max swing speed. They also allow me to use a shield. This will be a preference again and of course also based on which weapon skill you've chosen. I also have a whip for AoE with Whirlwind. Stats-wise I will be creating a set of 7 with the main slayers on, 100% elemental damage depending on the slayer, mana leech and damage increase, which will leave a slot free for whatever you prefer. On the whip this will likely be an area hit; on the katanas I may stick with life leech.
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