Combat and Healing

#1

Combat

Sooner or later, you're probably going to want to use your pet in combat. You can either order your pet to attack a target (by selecting the target and speaking whatever vocal command you bound to 'Attack'), or you can order the pet to Guard you (assuming you have earned the Guard command and given it to the pet) and then attack the target yourself. Pets who have been ordered to guard a player will automatically defend him if something adopts an aggressive posture toward him, so just causing a creature to attack you at this point will be enough for your pet to charge into the fray. Please note that pets do NOT automatically Guard their masters, so you will have to explicitly order them to do so (or they'll just stand there and watch you take a beating).

Just like players, pets are incapacitated when one of their Health, Action, or Mind bars reaches zero. At this point, an enemy can execute a "coup de grace" (a.k.a. "deathblow") to kill the pet. This is a Bad Thing, and should be avoided. All creature pets have a statistic called "Vitality" that starts at 100/100 and decreases each time they receive a deathblow. When your pet reaches 75, 50, and 25 vitality, it will receive a corresponding decrease in its statistics (i.e. Health/Action/Mind). While you can restore some of the lost vitality with a Bio-Engineer's "vitality pack," doing so will decrease the maximum vitality. Thus, if a pet is killed enough it will eventually reach a point at which its stat loss cannot be recovered.

Healing

If you have at least the Novice Medic skill, you can heal your pet's damage with stimpacks, just as you would another player. Even if you have no medical skills, you can use Pet Stimpacks (which are made by Bio-Engineers) to keep your pet healthy in battle. This is extraordinarily helpful in most combat situations, and can often make the difference between an incapped/dead pet and a victorious pet. Always keep a few stimpacks or pet stimpacks on hand while traveling.

Pets can be wounded like players, as well. If your pet takes a Health or Action wound, you can heal it by feeding the pet after battle. Your pet will think "(Fido) Hungry!" out loud when it has such a wound (if its name is 'Fido'). Pets will eat anything players can eat, so travel biscuits are just as good as melons for this (beverages cannot be used... only food). If the item of food has multiple charges, the pet will only consume one charge per feeding. Though it's not a prerequisite skill, I like to have at least Wilderness Survival I from the Scout tree, to gain access to the Forage ability. This gives you a pretty good chance of finding food for your pet in almost any outdoor area, which is great for healing pet wounds on the run. Even more useful is purchasing a factory crate of food from a Chef, who can experiment more charges into each treat. This way the crate itself will only take up one slot in your inventory, and you can pull a single multi-charge piece of food out at a time.

If your pet takes a Mind Wound or battle fatigue, you'll need to Play with you pet. Your pet will think "Fido Play!" out loud when it has a Mind wound (if it's name is 'Fido'). In order to play with your pet, you'll need to have taught it one of the two pet Tricks (which you get by advancing to Creature Empathy I and Creature Empathy II). Simply say the phrase that you bound to the trick, and the pet will do it (and heal his Mind wounds). The second trick heals more wounds per use than the first, but it may take several uses of either trick to fully heal your pet (depending on how many Mind wounds it has).