Perilous Taming & Pets
Pets here grow, level, and gear up. How the tier system works, how your pet earns its own progression, and what the exotic mounts bring to a fight.
Overview
Taming on Perilous Legends is a long-game investment. A pet is not just a leash on a strong creature - it earns levels of its own, grows into its full strength, can wear a set of custom armor, and can be pushed past its natural skill caps with powerscrolls. A well-raised pet is a project, and it shows.
Pets fight the classic way: magic resist and armor do the mitigating. This page covers the framework over all of it: how a pet's power tier is measured, how you raise your own skills alongside it, how pets grow, and what the shard's standout combat mounts do.
Pet Tiers & Slots
Every pet has a control slot cost - the number of follower slots it eats out of your five. That cost is also how the shard measures a pet's tier: the more slots a creature demands, the higher its tier, and the higher its tier, the more equipment it can wear and the higher it can level.
| Tier | Control slots | Equipment slots | Affinity level cap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 | 5 slots | 4 pieces | 100 |
| Tier 2 | 4 slots | 3 pieces | 80 |
| Tier 3 | 3 slots | 2 pieces | 60 |
| Tier 4 | 2 slots | 1 piece | 60 |
| Tier 5 | 1 slot | None | 60 |
So a five-slot beast is a Tier 1 pet that can wear a full four-piece set and level the furthest, while a one-slot critter is Tier 5 and cannot be geared at all. See Pet Equipment for the gear itself.
Training Through Your Pet
You do not macro Animal Taming in a corner. Both Animal Taming and Animal Lore train from kills - when a monster dies with your pet in the fight, you have a chance to gain. Three conditions keep it honest:
- The pet has to be worth your skill level. A pet that tames at more than 10 points below your current Animal Taming teaches you nothing - a grandmaster tamer gets no gains from a pack of cats.
- The kill has to be in your pet's league. The victim's fame must be near your pet's own weight class; a dragon slaughtering rats earns you nothing.
- You have to be near the kill - within about 18 tiles, same map, with the pet alive and under your control.
Gains come in at roughly half the pace of weapon-skill training, so it is steady rather than instant. The way to raise a tamer is simply to go hunting with a well-matched pet.
Affinity & Leveling
Pets are not frozen at their tamed stats, and they no longer grind skills up in combat the old way. Instead every pet earns Affinity - its own leveling track, fed by kills. Open it by using Animal Lore on your own pet: the pet's book replaces the standard lore window, with tabs for stats and skills and an XP bar.
- Each Affinity level grants 10 points to spend. One point is +1 to a stat (Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Armor) or +1 to a skill.
- The stats carry the old-school weight: +1 Strength is +1 max HP, +1 Dexterity is +1 stamina and faster swings, +1 Intelligence is +1 mana and more spell damage.
- The level cap scales with size - a five-slot pet caps at Affinity level 100, a four-slot pet at 80, and smaller pets at 60.
- Skills climb to 100 through Affinity, and can be carried to 120 with powerscrolls.
- Spent points are fully refundable - the book has a reset button if you want to respec a pet's build.
Pets bond the moment they reach their first Affinity level rather than after a set number of days, so an actively-hunted pet bonds fast.
Evolution Pets
A few of the shard's signature creatures are evolution pets raised from eggs. They level 1 to 10 as they fight - gaining flat HP, damage, and armor each level - and at level 10 they evolve into the full-grown version of themselves, with the stats and the look to match.
- A Stygian Drake Hatchling matures into a full Stygian Dragon. The egg is a rare drop from the Stygian Dragon boss, hatches only for a tamer with 110 Animal Taming and 110 Animal Lore, comes pre-bonded, and rolls one of a range of cosmetic hues. Stygian dragons carry the Angry Fire bloodline power and a dragon-breath attack.
- A Dragon Turtle hatchling grows into a full Dragon Turtle on the same 1-to-10 curve.
Both are five-slot pets at every stage of their life, so they are Tier 1 from the day they hatch.
Combat Mounts & Steeds
The shard's exotic mounts are not all cosmetic. The four elemental steeds - Tide, Flame, Earth, and Storm - are full combat pets you also ride. Each is a five-slot, Tier 1 creature that demands 110 Animal Taming, carries a chassis around 85% of a mature Stygian dragon, and brings its own elemental attack kit:
| Steed | Element | Notable powers |
|---|---|---|
| Tide Steed | Ice / water | Ice-bolt breath, cold area spells, a chance to freeze on hit |
| Flame Steed | Fire | Fire breath, a fire-storm cast, burning melee hits |
| Earth Steed | Earth / poison | Crushing blows, grasping claw, poison breath |
| Storm Steed | Energy | Energy-bolt breath, an energy aura, armor-ignore strikes |
There is also an undead steed with life-drain, disease, and a fear effect that can freeze an enemy. Not every fancy horse is a war-beast, though - the Clydesdale is a rare skin on an ordinary horse, so it is a looker, not a fighter. The rule of thumb: if a mount asks for a heap of control slots and high taming, it is built to fight; if it asks for one slot, it is a ride. The full stable, including the sea and sky mounts, lives on Mounts & Flight.
Pet Powerscrolls
Pets can be pushed past their natural skill caps with pet powerscrolls, dropped in the rare-and-up loot tiers. Each one raises one skill's cap by +1 on one pet, and like player scrolls they are color-banded: green scrolls raise caps 101-105, blue 106-110, red 111-115, and blaze 116-120, so you work through the colors to carry a skill all the way to 120. They cover eight pet skills: Magery, Evaluating Intelligence, Meditation, Resisting Spells, Wrestling, Tactics, Anatomy, and Poisoning.
Pet powerscrolls stack into the same Powerscroll Tome as your own, so a hoard of them stays organized.
Pets in PvP
Pets are a PvE powerhouse, and the rules rein them in when players are involved. While you are flagged for PvP, your pets fight at a handicap:
- They slow to a walk - no running, mounted, or flying pace until your flag clears.
- They deal 50% less damage to players. Damage against monsters is unchanged, and so is everything outside of PvP.
Stabling & Recall
The shard is forgiving about losing pets to real life. If you disconnect with pets out in the world, they auto-stable for free after about two minutes and come back to you on your next login if you have the follower slots free - no pet is lost to a dropped connection. Bonded pets that are already out when you log in recall to your side automatically. Biologists can also brew a Growth Serum that doubles a pet's XP for an hour to speed a young pet along.
Tips
- Train by hunting with a pet matched to your skill. If a pet tames more than 10 points under your level, it has stopped teaching you.
- Match a growing pet to prey in its league - farming trash mobs stalls both your gains and its Affinity XP.
- Count your control slots before you tame. A five-slot war-beast fills your whole roster but levels the highest and earns every gear slot in return.
- Spend Affinity points freely - they are refundable, so you can respec a pet's build with the book's reset.
- Do not commit your best pet to a fight while you are PvP-flagged; it will be slow and hit players softly.
Exact pet stats, XP curves, and taming requirements are set in-game and get rebalanced over time. This page describes how the systems behave; confirm the current numbers with Animal Lore in-world.