GMing Veterinary

Vet is an extremely useful skill for using your animals against Huge numbers of monsters, or monsters that are much tougher than your pets are.

There are different degrees of effectiveness to it as well, if you are a GM vet, you can heal a massive amount of hit points and cure poison consistently and reliably. At 61.0 Vet and 61.0 Lore you have a chance of curing poison.

Vet is one of those rare skills in that even at low skill levels it's going to be helpful. A skill of 40 can heal hundreds of hitpoints of damage on your pet during long fights.

High levels of Veterinary skill can heal huge chunks of your pets health bar, in addition to more hit points being restored, you will have less "you apply the bandages but they barely help" messages too.

Another fringe benefit of carrying the vet skill is that it allows you more stable spaces. Your total Vet, lore and taming skill is what determines how many stable slots you have, the maximum amount of pets you can stable is 5, but in order to stable 5, you need a minimum combined skill total of 240 in those three skills.

Some tamers don't carry veterinary at all, and rely on the greater heal spell, and cure/arch cure spells to keep their pets alive in combat. For the most parts its pretty effective, however sometimes (especially when fighting shadow wyrms, ancient wyrms, or multiple targets, like Ogre lords, blood elementals, magery just isn't going to keep up the constant stream of hit point restoration that bandages will, in fact a lot of higher level monsters (like Balerons) require a dragon and the nightmare to be attacking it, while the tamer is mana dumping G-heals on the dragon, and working the bandages non stop. (Side note, Trained dragon and nightmare teams can take a Balaron, but if the dragon is new, the tamer can count on loosing both).

How much vet you want to have pretty much dictates how your going to go about raising the skill. Having 30-40 points of vet will give you a significant amount of healing power, having more than 61 vet (and more than 61 lore) will give you great healing power and the possibility of curing poison. GM Vet will give you amazing healing power.

One last thing to consider, is multiple animals. Many tamers that don't use a lot of Vet will hunt big monsters with 2 Trained Dragons, and their nightmare. It does not add to your healing power, but it will kill whatever the "big target" item is your going after a lot faster, giving the creature your hunting less time to kill whichever one of your beasts they are going after.

If your only going to go for 30-40 vet, you can by it from one of the NPCs at the stables, (or at the Britain animal hospital 1 building south of the in town stables).

Vet will raise nicely on its own (providing you take your pets out hunting regularly) until the mid 60s, just heal the damage your pets get while hunting with bandages instead of magic. After 65 of so it then it will start getting difficult, if its not an absolute must for you, you can probably just let it raise naturally when you heal your tames in combat.

Vet in the 90s is just about imposable to GM from normal healing, you can have gains less than .3 during busy nights with lots of hunting and healing involved, for many players letting vet ceiling around the 90s is fine, and that will give you a lot of healing power with your pets.

However if you want to GM vet, your probably going to need to do it with 8x8

You can do this both land and ship based, I massively prefer ship based, its much faster, you don't have to deal with "movement", there isn't a big interference factor with ship based 8x8 as their is land based. (Monsters attacking your training animals, people attacking your training animals, server boundaries, bards peacemaking...)

See The chapter for GMing animal lore for more details of 8x8.

This works almost exactly the same as animal lore 8x8 lock your animal lore skill, make sure your Vet skill is turned up, get a huge stack of bandages, and a couple of animals (polar bears are ideal) fighting, and heal away on the high seas.

Remember to

Stock your boat with Food, bandages, reagents (for casting gate, greater heal, recall and whatever else might come up)

Always sail north or south (upper right hand corner or lower left hand corner) when searching for 8x8 gains.

Have in game macros set up for: slow forward, forward one, back one

Unless your in a guild you need to do this in felucca.

After about an hour:

This does not need to be done during power hour, and can be GMed in a marathon 4-7 hour session, or over a few days if you park your boat on one end of a string of Vet hot spots.