Shaman Pets and Weapons

[Barm McLir]

I remember on live that shaman pets would dual wield if you gave them weapons. For example, you could hand Jobaber a rusty dagger and scimitar and you'd see combat messages where he was piercing and slashing. I used to fill a bag with Forging Hammers (1sp from a vendor) to boost his dps.

Naturally, the question is *when* did this work. I had a favorite vendor in Plane of Knowledge but that was during Luclin.

A great resource would have been the original Shaman's Crucible but it crashed and, sadly, there is very little of it recoverable from the Wayback Machine;

https://web.archive.org/web/20010601000000*/http://forums.interealms.com/shaman/


Here's an Allakhazam post from 2003 where a shaman mentions trying to use a halas quest to replace carrying pet weapons (http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/quest.html?quest=749#m104755400555019):

Was bored tonight so I took the 2 minutes to do this quest, thinking it would be a good way to get cheap pet weapons. They're not lore, so I summoned two of them and went out to the tundra to find a mammoth. Summoned pet, gave him both hammers, sent pet in and he's just biting and double attacking as normal, not bashing and duel wielding like he would with two fine steel hammers for example.

So for anyone thinking they could run this real quick just so they wouldn't have to carry around a bunch of fine steel or polished steel ulaks or something to get the pet to quad, I'll save you the time. Although they are NO DROP, you can still give them to the pet, he just won't use them.

To be fair, there's an earlier comment from 2000 claiming shaman pets have never been able to equip weapons.

Anyone else remember this?

[NegaStoat]

I clearly remember that Shaman & Beastlord animal pets could both dual wield if they were of the appropriate monster level (same as the lvl 24 mage pet summon lowest level) and they were given a pair of 1h weapons. This was either at the start of Luclin or very, very soon after release. I'm 100% positive of this. I am not certain if Shaman pets had this ability anytime during Velious, or if it was available sometime near the game's launch and then patched to give the "(pet name) bites" mechanic / message instead.

I have a gut feeling though that if Shaman pets could dual wield when given weapons earlier into the game before Luclin, it would have generated posts and guides telling shaman to do it because when Magician pets were finally given the ability to hold weapons at the same time the pet attack speed mechanic was normalized, it showed up in posts very frequently.

[loramin]

This discussion has been done many times here over the years, so I'd really recommend Googling it (as an aside, Google is much better for finding forum history, especially beyond the last few years, than the actual forum search itself).

The long and the short of it is that I, like you, have very vivid memories of giving my Shaman pet weapons to make him dual wield. I even remember doing this in non-Luclin zones, so when I came to P99 I was irritated that I couldn't do it here.

But memories are tricky things, and none of us marked a big dividing line in our brains between Velious and Luclin (or any other expansions for that matter), so it's easy for stuff to bleed together. Thus, you can't go by memory, you have to go by classic research.

And (again), if you look at the previous threads you'll see some people trying very hard to find evidence of Shaman pets dual wielding pre-Luclin, because they very much wanted it to happen here ... and yet no one was ever able to produce any evidence whatsoever to indicate it was possible pre-Luclin.

But again, if you don't believe me, ask your friend Google ;)

[Barm McLir]

Oh I'm not arguing with anyone, just curious when it changed.

[loramin]

Oh I'm not arguing with anyone, just curious when it changed.

One of those older threads I mentioned should say for certain, but IIRC it was somewhere not too far into Luclin (as best anyone can tell; I'm not sure Verant ever made a patch note for it or anything).

[Jimjam]

Yea, I remember shaman pets being able to wield weapons.

Everyone had this idea that if a model couldn't display weapons the npc wouldn't attack with them. Of course this is wrong, as we can tell from their attack text.

I think the fact at some point shaman pets couldn't actually use weapons reinforced this view.

It's going to be difficult to find evidence for when the changes were made.