Complete List of ALL Tames and Description/Suggestions for Dev Team

[Squawk!]

*insanely long, fully comprehensive post regarding every tame in the game*

Ruffles made a comment replying to the 'nerf' of panther tames (and guys let's be realistic, nerfing panthers was a great thing for all the people tired of dying to a wild panther. Nerfing the tamed version was just a byproduct of that). But his comment mentioned how the game wasn't designed to just use one primary tame, and that every tame should have some kind of use. While we all know there are a few vanity tames (things you tame just for the heck of it), I agree each tame should have some kind of purpose. So I thought I'd outline my experience with every tame in the game and where they 'fit'.


Current tameable animals (and I'm sure I"m forgetting plenty)

Farming tames:

• Flarehorn - People will burn me in effigy for this, but the flarehorn is far too strong. At this point, it is the single best farming tame in the game, and it can do far too much. I had a flarehorn with 623% attack, but anything over 300% gives you a huge bonus to wood, stone, ore, twine, and it's pretty darn good for grass as well. It is better than every other tame here for all of those items. Also, if you farm stone, you'll end up dumping sulfur constantly. But if you farm ore, you'll get all the ore you need AND all the stone you need. It's just too good compared to the other options. And for only 70 regular feed (and about 90 minutes tame time or so) it's incredibly easy to get, even at early levels.
  
• Kebo - the poor man's bahamut, the kebo still takes a good bit of feed to tame. However, it's worse in every way. Some people thought it might be better for ore and/or rock, but that's just not true. Right now, the kebo is almost entirely useless considering you're never too far from a flarehorn. And these guys are always fighting elementals and gryphons, making them a pain to even tame!
  
• Longhorn - I love these guys. They are greatly overshadowed by flarehorns, but if you need something that gets you a wooden base quickly, a max-level longhorn tames in only 25 herb feed and gets wood, straw, and twine very quickly. I'll ride around on him and keep transferring items to my inventory to make foundations, troughs, anything wooden. In my opinion they are a great starter tame. However, incredibly low HP and low damage make them a sitting duck. If you have a 160 longhorn with a good saddle and a lvl 60 panther comes towards you, you pretty much have a coin toss situation. They need better health to be realistic, or some guard dogs.
  
• Elephant - these guys are an insanely long tame even with herb feed. They need an adjustment. While they are the undisputed king of grass and straw, that's a pretty niche need. They do a fine job of wood and twine as well, but why wouldn't you just get a flarehorn. They are more plentiful, MUCH faster to tame, and versatile. The elephant is only used in very specific circumstances and the tame time is a little ridiculous for what it does.
  
• Boar - one of my favorite tames for new players. One of the few animals whose wildness doesn't go to zero if you use non-kibble. Taming it with apples will usually retain 50% wildness or so. A good boar can help you out greatly with early-game wood twine and straw. Late game, we use them to farm rare mushrooms in a few spots on the map. They're fun to tame, cheap, and are useful at almost all stages (though mid-game you're not using them for wood/twine anymore).
  
• Colossal Flathorn - These guys are awful. Several patches ago, they made it so the flathorn has reduced weight for wood (wood only counts as 20% weight). That was an interesting idea, but if it can only carry 300 lbs or so, you need to be basically naked while youre' on it. A 120 flathorn, tamed with herbivore feed and a legendary saddle was still pretty useless for wood, despite the patch saying "has a chance to harvest a large amount of wood".
  
• Yeti - these idiots, as cool as they are, taking a VERY long time to tame, a ton of feed to tame, and do very little once they're tamed. Their right click does maybe 90 damage to manor (you're never getting through a manor structure that way). They gather a sad amount of wood/grass, and basically exist for no reason. This is disappointing because when fighting them in the wild they seem like a real menace. I put this under farming tames, but they're probably better off just used as base defense fodder.
  sheep - we all know what this does. Use them if there are no panthers or gryphons nearby to skin for fur.

"other" tames:

• waterbug - i raided two different bases who both had waterbugs actually named "useless". Why even bother making a saddle for them?
  
• centaur - these had a ridiculously long tame. It's strange that they tame off of meat or herb (though i suppose accurate since humanoids are omniverous?) Some people use them for base defense, but the ridiculous tame time and lack of a mount make them kind of a useless extra tame. There is no real NEED for a centaur tame in this game right now.
  
• goblin - a great idea, and everyone loves the idea that they can knock people out. but their insanely low HP means a single greatsword can kill 10 of them at a time (i recently raided someone who had 10-15 goblins bunched up. Took two swings)
  
• scythe goblin - same as above.
  
• turkey - I'm conflicted about this. Look, we LOVED when turkeys came out. It felt insane that they would crank out 2000 meat in a single sitting with almost no effort. That stat alone makes these things sound way too overpowered. But if you take turkeys away, people are going to quit this game because the requirements to feed your tames meat are already ridiculous, and i remember the days of having to cook and cure meat for consumption were incredibly annoying. So I'm thankful for turkeys, though their output is pretty crazy right now. I would actually recommend you not be able to soul stone these. I thinik you should be forced to find them in the wild. Finding a turkey should take a little work, for such a big payoff.

Ground attack/defense tames:

• horse - the first thing we tell any new player to do in game is get a horse. I know they used to be insanely overpowered. You could do an entire event with a single horse, especially if he were higher level. I understand that needed to change. It is still one of the best ways to gain experience and level quickly. Horses are in a pretty good place right now. I wish higher level ones got better, though. Right now, a low level horse is really fragile. But i think once you get to level 100 or so, they should start to get MUCH stronger. Currently they do not. Even a 100 horse may have difficulty riding aross the world if you have to fight a few bears and deathstalkers on the way. Something to think about.
  
• bargesh - these guys used to be great tames but right now they are useless. Back during launch, you could tame these with rotten meat (a nice touch), and you could ride around spamming right click to shred an enemy to pieces and get some meat/hide/bones from it. I thought it was very balanced. I know the right click spam seemed crazy, but it was just a hunting dog, it was not designed to ride long distances. I liked the old bargesh. The new ones are just trash animals to kill in the starting area. They are not serious tames at all.
  
• wolf - one of the few tames you can ride without a saddle, which is cool. Too bad they really don't do anything useful.
  
• deathstalker - people go nuts for these tames. They are pretty good. Especially if you know the frame-rate limiter trick so you can attack as fast as a wild panther, this is a solid way of getting around town and safer areas, and you can win almost any 1v1 fight with another monster. The problem is that their HP won't even help you last as long as a horse. You are better off with a horse and spear (which costs 200gold or so and some iron) than a 160 panther with a legendary saddle. Think about that for a sec from a balance standpoint. Panthers look cool, but they take an INSANELY long time to tame even with kibble, they lose a ton of wildness with kibble (this is a bug you guys should fix. Kibble should not drop wildness on an old tame this much). They are super fast which is cool. But a horse and spear which you can get cheap and fast is infinitely better. Do you know what I use my deathstalker for? I loadit up with vendor items and just go to town and back. Nothing else. Deathstalkers have a place in the game, but the cost to acquire them is too high.
  
• Bear - these guys are just base defense fodder for me. I'll put a few in a beast pen just to attack someone trying to raid me. But they're not great tames. They're not fast enough to matter, or high HP or anything special. They're mediocre AND take a very long time to tame.
  
• Arachnae - we tamed one and laughed for a while but these things can't kill ANYTHING, so if they get attacked by so much as a wolf or boar they're in big trouble.
  
• Cyclops - i'm talking about the regular, non-savage version. These guys have fairly low health. Their range is ok when throwing boulders, but otherwise they are not worth the time and materials to tame them. And god forbid you try to meat-tame and use arrows for constitution. You'll spend more than 12 hours.
  
• molten tiger - Do you like panthers, but wish they were slower and less useful, but slightly cooler looking? If so, you're the only person who would ever enjoy this mount. They're another base defense fodder i use. Basically, any tame that turned out to be disappointing just sits in the base as one more aggressive creature you have to cut through if you're raiding me. This is one of two mounts I honestly think should give you cooked meat when you kill something. That would be a really cool addition and it would make sense. The damn tiger is made of lava. It should cook the meat it harvests!
  
• unicorn - these guys are great for healing non-mythical tames. They take a really long time to tame, and they're not nearly as unique/rare as you would expect. One weird thing to note is that they have to be leveled properly to be effective. A level 40 unicorn might tame with 150 mana. A level 120 might tame with 400 mana. Those are just starting stats. If you leveled both of them, you would see the mana gained from a high level unicorn is MUCH more per level. So a brand new 120 unicorn isn't very useful at all, even after taming. But even a level 40, once you've added 20-30 levels on him, should reach 1000 mana. This is a weird choice, I don't know if it was intentional, but it is a little confusing that even a max level unicorn tamed with kibble is going to be bad before you start leveling it. Also, without using any 'tricks', unicorns are very hard to level up. They don't exactly hunt.
  
• Frost wolf - just a collectors mount. nothing more. no real purpose.

[Squawk!]

Oh yes, there's a "part two"

Flyers:

• Berunda - The most annoying, loudest tame in the game, but also beloved. They tame quickly from rotten meat and don't lose too much wildness, and their saddles are cheap to make. Everyone probably remembers their first berunda (or vrock) fondly. They're slow and can't fly for too long, but that's a perfect balance for how easy they are to tame.
  
• Gryphon - Everyone's first "real" flyer, the gryphon is fun and challenging to tame (dodging their flying/attack patterns, etc). They take a long time to tame. They have decent carry weight and health, and can even kill a few things when needed. Besides their absolutely absurd turning radius (devs have you ever tried to land one of these and park it in the beast pen? Really, this should have been fixed ages ago), they are excellent mid-game tames. There's one absolutely catastrophic failure with the gryphon: The saddle. These things cost a fortune to make, you can only make them at high levels, and most people just get them from event drops. This means even if you have everything you need skill and gear-wise to tame one, you have to sit in general chat begging for someone to sell or trade you a saddle. I don't think it should be an end-game riding skill saddle because it's a mid-game tame. This should be adjusted.
  
• Wyvern - This used to be my favorite mount. There is nothing more satisfying than cruising around the world on these fast, agile creatures. And in pvp they had a specific use: They were faster than all the other mounts, but fragile. So if you were very skilled and picked your fights carefully, you could even pick a rider off a windrider or peregriff (without getting hit) and drop him to his death, making it a viable pvp mount. As I mentioned in another post, the HP increase from building structures makes it impossible to kill a player from fall damage now. The wyverns can't attack something in their talons, so once you pick someone off their mount, you're more vulnerable than they are at this point. That's a shame. For moving around the map and exploring, though, they are one of the best tames in the game. I love my wyverns.
  
• Nidhog - the current pvp mount of choice. People abuse their spin by getting 3000+ stamina on them and just spamming CTRL to fly across the map. That part needs a cooldown or something. The spin on a nidhog is cool, but it should only be used tactically to provide a short burst of speed occasionally or do some damage. People are using it to easily move into position to pick people off of mythic tames and that's probably too strong. They are challenging and fun to tame, they take a long time even with kibble (but lose too much wildness in my opinion). You also have some flexibility over stats, and it's perfectly viable to level attack, stamina, health, weight, etc. I think most people spend half their game hoping they can someday have a good nidhog in their stables. An awesome mount if you would just address the non-stop spinning which I feel is abusive.
  
• infernus dragon - putting aside their obvious... issue at the moment... the infernus dragon ended up disappointing many people. They're huge and require a lot of space to keep. They are about as slow as a berunda which, in my opinion, is inexcusable, and they don't really do much in the way of damage. I know a long time ago their breath was ridiculous, but nowadays the only reason I see anyone use an infernus is for, well let's just say it: cheating. I do not know what use they have besides vanity, and if you're on a pvp server you are a sitting duck asking to be picked. When you make a fantasy game and decide dragons aren't mythical creatures, you give up a lot of their majesty. The REAL dragons in this game are windriders. Oh, this is also a mount I think should give cooked meat once you kill an animal with it. Another very cool use.
  
• frost dragon - everybody i know hates these mounts from a utility perspective. They don't really do anything useful for you. They look pretty, they almost never spawn on most servers (i've seen so many posts about this). They are just a collectors mount.

Mythicals:

• Peregriff - People mis-use these all the time. A peregriff is one of the best tames in the game if you use it for the right purpose. Right now, they are great for a few things: AOE damage to wooden (and sometimes stone) structures, and running the event. Since a peregriff is slow and uses lots of stamina, they are not the best mount to actually fly on. Instead, having them follow you and attack creatures at your command is the best use of them. A couple of peregriffs can do an entire event and only lose a little health. They are tanky attack birds that, while slow, dish out damage and have tons of natural armor.
  
• Windrider - the single best mount in the game, anyone would agree. A windrider is fast enough compared to a peregriff, so you can actually use it as your primary way of getting around the world. They kill creatures easily which means you can level yourself quickly (if you aren't already 60) and actually gain levels on your windrider pretty fast. But mostly, it's their utility that sets them apart. The second you have a windrider, taming everything gets so much easier. Want a flarehorn? Go pick one up with your windrider and drop it at your base to tame. Transporting other tames around the world is a piece of cake with this mount. One small note: Their wing damage is very unreliable. If you are flying around trying to damage things with your wings, the peregriff tends to hit much more than the windrider. So windriders are not nearly as good at attacking structures or players with wing damage alone. I use the windrider as my tanky fighter jet, and let my peregriffs do the dirty work behind me.
  
• Colossus - this once-epic creature has been completely left in the dust. Not only do they take up an insane amount of space (which at one time was a worthy tradeoff), but they don't even fit through giant manor gates (a HUGE oversight by the dev team. This should have been fixed early on). Strangely, a kebo eats herbivore food but a colossus requires meat when he gets hungry. The worst part about a colossus is their damage output. While perfectly fine against straw and wood, a colossus takes a very long time to eat through a reasonable amount of stone. And they are virtually useless against iron and manor. I think mine does 13 or 19 damage to manor, making it worse than the other known creatures that damage manor (water elemental, light elemental, yeti right click, and pegasus to name a few). The colossus really got left behind and nobody thought to come back and adjust it based on the new tames and new structure HPs. Most people I know dont' even want their colossus anymore because there are much better ways of raiding people that don't require a 12x14 iron base to keep safe.
  
• Pegasus - i discussed this with Ruffles already. The pegasus has been acknowledged by the dev team as being the weakest mythical. It has the normal "mythical" HP (50k or so), but otherwise just acts like a standard unicorn. It heals roughly the same amount and has almost no special tricks. It has a stomp attack which is occasionally useful for killing animals, a wildly inaccurate lightning bolt that does almost no damage, and a mounted right-click that actually hits manor for 190 damage or so (but occasionally needs to cool down). They need work right now. My suggestion was to make them a battle healer, something more of an active/burst heal. The thinking is that you should be able to take a pegasus out with you in a pvp scenario and use him as a way of providing defense (shield or healing) to allies in a large radius. That's what would make this thing truly mythical.

A quick note on the mythicals: I really think these need to be revisited and you need to ask yourself if they should damage iron and manor. It seems very strange to me that the top tames in the game, those that require a very special, extremely expensive feed to make, tons of iron hook arrows, and constant evolving of elites to find the right level, still can't even damage an iron structure. A peregriff and windrider do absolutely nothing to iron or manor, and pegasus/colossus don't do enough to even get you through a single small door in a reasonable amount of time. These mythical beasts are great if you're taking down a wooden house, but anything higher and you're probably tossing them in the stable and grabbing a hammer.

New "hybrid" tames

(These are something in between regular tames and mythicals. Delicate feed, higher quality, etc which were added after launch).

• Vicious Hyena - one of my favorite tames in the game. A 120 only takes 26 delicate feed which is a reasonable amount of time spent. A level 4 vicious can kill a lvl 80 panther with no problems. I'm sorry they terrorize the elven starter area sometimes, but from a taming perspective they're awesome. What do I use them for? Guard dogs. I usually have 2 of them guarding my flarehorn in case it gets attacked, and they're in every room of my base to attack potential intruders. A level 200 vicious with a saddle is going to take some actual strategy to defeat. They're pretty fast and deal high damage with crazy health. Any time someone tells me they want a panther to help them hunt, I tell them to pick one of these up instead with a gryphon and go tame it. Bonus: a low level one can be tamed with regular cured meat and no saddle, and it's STILL an excellent addition to your stable as a guard dog.
  
• Savage Cyclops - these things are crazy. VERY difficult to tame if you dont have a windrider that can pick them up and bring them to a safe place. They take an insane amount of arrows to drop, they deal crazy AOE damage, they farm a ridiculous amount of meat and hide. These are amazing tames. On top of it all, you can ride them. The boulders are a little outdated (ridiculous cost just to attack some iron). They look fantastic as well. My one complaint here is that they actually end up overshadowing some of the mythical tames. I mean, again, they can deal 3000-6000 damage to iron structures, yet NONE of the mythicals can come even close to that kind of output. I love these as 'guard dogs' as well, but for much more important scenarios (my best flarehorn in a hostile territory, inside my manor guarding my best chests, etc). These are fantastic tames, but they should make you want to buff the mythicals.
  
• Albino Deer - Probably the second best tame in the game after the flarehorn. If you have even a small patch of grass near you, you'll have magic shards for life. They also have great HP and attack damage. They used to damage iron and manor, but that was clearly a bug (by the way, dev team you never addressed this bug. you stealth patched it and you should have owned up to the community and at least mentioned the reason for the change. With no input from you, we never know what's intended and what's not). They are incredible tames. I wish you could pick them up with a regular gryphon, but they require a nidhog or better to pick up.

I'm sure I forgot a tame here or there, but my goal is to show you where these tames fit in my playing experience with 4000 hours in game. My views here reflect many of the other alpha guilds I've seen on my and other servers as well, and might give you an idea of how these tames are perceived and some potential ideas for making them more diversified and/or useful in the future.

[joker™]

Nice info man but the infernus dragons are the best flyers for farming meat and also I think it's the quickest way to get meat is by a infernu dragon

[Squawk!]

That's interesting to hear! For me, killing a bundle of longhorns and panthers together with my windrider, then dismounting and chopping them with a greatsword for 1000+ meat is the best way. Are infernus getting more meat than that? A greatsword and a fast way to travel are pretty incredible for raw meat.

It's also so slow, i don't know if you could farm enough animals in the time it would take me to run around hitting things with a greatsword.

[joker™]

Yeah that's a good way to but just going in the middle of the map with a infernu dragon kinnda faster cuz u have to kill then dismount then chop kinnda look alittle bit worky and I got 35-45 raw meat for every longhorn just get there and press ctr and I think the wind is the same speed of the infernu

[sycoman2]

Great list!

I love my panthers, ive got 2 at lvl 200ish both have slighty over 2k carry weight. My flarehorn has 2500 carry weight with 370%ish attack.
I use them as my mining team, i can complety clear out the 2 mining areas around the elf city in 1 trip each with them.

Was really dissapointed at the stats of the lava tiger when i tamed one, i just don't see the point.
As you said they are slower, bigger, and seem to have less carry weight and less attack, while taking at least 2x as much feed. Also their animations look clumsy and less refined then the regular tigers.

[Sadie]

Heya,

you need to revisit the use of a panther after the nerf; you stated "you can win almost any 1v1 fight with another monster." Not anymore xD I don't even use mine as a vendor run mount anymore. It's easier and faster to use a nidhog or wyvern to just go to vendors and sell.