I know this one is a bit of a stretch, but i'm going to request it anyways. Since our weaker tamable pets are only half as strong as the strongest pets: Why not have 2 slots on a taming necklace with room for 2 weak pets or one strong pet? Like two weaker wolves which are easily less than half as strong as like the lupine destroyer wolf. There may be other ways to handle such a request, but 2 slots on the taming necklace is just the first thing to come to mind to me. I would love to use 2x 400 hp smaller wolves vs the bigger 1500 hp lupine i have. Just some food for thought that i thought would be neat. Ultima Online had 5 slots and i always had two pets in UO. I always had either my ki-rin and a dragon, or two drakes and a barded swamp dragon.
The list of summoning skill needed to summon (and command) tamed pets: https://sotawiki.net/sota/Taming_Necklace_Summoning_Levels Example: If a tamer has a summoning skill higher than the tamed creature he can use the remaining summoning skill to summon other tamed pets in his possession (every single one must be in his possession, so no summoning or conjuring out of thin air). Tamer with summoning skill 50 could summon a Grand Old Boar (skill needed 44) and a Small Wild Boar with the remaining skill of 6. To prevent endless numbers of level 0 pets and to prevent a power creep (summoning additional allies where you had only 1 before) every pet with combat stats should at least have summoning level 1 (e.g. Brown Bear from 0 to 1, Large Brown Bear from 0 to 2). If even that would be too many then rule that every additional pet uses up 1 skill point to add. Then a guy with summoning 50 could get the Grand Old Boar requiring 44 +1 point to add another one for the ramining 5
Interesting suggestions. I'd enjoy having the option of deploying multiple pets simultaneously simply for the greater diversity of play styles it could afford. I'm not sure it's practical to have multiple creatures added to a single necklace, firstly because you'd need a separate necklace for each combo rather than each individual pet, secondly because additional work would be needed around determining how each pet is added to/removed from a particular slot. Pets in UO exist in their own right but that's not the case in SotA so not a direct parallel. Equipping multiple necklaces isn't an option either with the current equipment slots. Changing the process to allow summoning direct from one's inventory would mean tamers no longer have the tradeoff of losing stats from more useful equipment in order to gain the advantage of using a pet, so would be an issue for balance. Commanding multiple pets - I don't think is really feasible beyond "all attack this target", "all stay", set disposition for all etc. Having your own mini army with designated tank/DPS/debuff is a nice dream but in practice I think they'd need to function more like one mind in multiple bodies. @ConjurerDragon I like the idea of summing individual pet difficulties to determine how many pets of what levels a player can handle. I think it would need a much harsher limit on the number of pets that can be summoned even if they're very weak - maybe an exponentially increasing penalty for each additional pet rather than a flat minimum cost, otherwise I can see someone dragging 150 brown bears around Ardoris just to prove a point. Summoning skill also increases the potential power of your pet according to the tooltip (it's not just a gate on what level creatures you can summon); maybe that should be scaled down if you have multiple pets out, since you can't give each of them your full attention.
150 Brown Bears would not be possible with what I suggested. My suggestion was to raise the summoning skill for brown bears from 0 to 1 and to use up 1 skill point for each additional pet summoned. With a maximum summoning skill of 200 at the high end a tamer would be able to summon 100 Brown Bears (using up 100X 1 for each bear and 100X1 as penalty for each additional pet). 100 dancing bears would be a wonderful wandering zoo, but even with 100 instead of 150 it might still be too high.
Could always just look directly at ultima online for inspiration. I was just looking at asking for 2x wolves. But with ultima online your pets would take up anywhere from 1 to 5 pet slots out of your total pool of 5 possible slots. So if you were looking at summoning skill (just throwing out random numbers off top of my head.) 0-30 could count as 1 slot, 31-60 could count as 2 slots, 61-100 could count as 3 slots, 101+ could count as 4 slots. This math would let you have anywhere from 1-5 pets.
