Favorite Companions and Training Sites

[gosos]

is it the bard character that tames bugs? i have not played a bard nor have i played a necromancer. not sure if anything else gets much pets. have not bothered giving bones to dogs for pets either.

how well do pets follow you? this is a known (and intentional) hassle in nethack.

[grobblewobble]

I'd still love to see a quickling queen skeletal warrior slave in action some time.

I've had a quickling queen as pet once. That was an amazing companion. Poisons enemies while ignoring their PV, incredibly fast and regenerates at insane speed.. almost as strong as a killer bug, but able to keep up with you too. It was great, until she found a corruption trap, transformed herself into a purple J of doom in one round and killed me in the next round.

Gosos: yes bards are the ones that can tame animals. They follow you all right, but if your character is faster than the pet you will of course constantly have to wait for it. Pushing them ahead through hallways helps somewhat, also because the pet won't get angry if it triggers a trap itself.

[Blasphemous]

Actually, bard pets falling behind can be a good thing - when you step on a fireball trap, they don't get hostile. Waiting for them usually takes 5-10 turns so it's not a big problem.
Besides, when playing a bard usually I only keep pets until I can safely take on monsters myself. Bards aren't too good in combat or magic, especially at the beginning, but more so than other classes.
Additionally, I feel that if pets kill monsters, treasure hunter talent doesn't apply.

[SiTLar]

I had a balor companion once. I used a SoFS in the Dwarven Halls. I back than was a beginner, and didn't know how to exploit it the right way. At some point we got in tough situation and the balor summoned molochs. That was really cool.

[FnrrfYgmSchnish]

I've had Greater Earth/Fire Elementals from a scroll of familiar summoning in the Dwarven Halls a few times before.

Whenever I play bards I always try to tame an ant queen, though--maybe not the absolute strongest thing in the world I (not nearly as tough as the greater elementals and such, anyway...), but they seem to hold up pretty well and start doing pretty impressive damage to most things once they've leveled up. I'm pretty sure I've seen their damage range get into the triple-digits before (according to the monster memory screen "each his does X to Y damage, average Z" bit.) The only problem is they seem to have weird behavior (randomly turning hostile on you) if you find another ant nest later on.

Never tried taming the higher-level claw bugs, though. The regular claw bugs seem to be a bit squishy. I imagine killer bugs would work really well, but I'd be afraid to so much as go near killer bugs with a bard early on. Or even not-early-on. Actually I tend to avoid the bug place entirely unless I have tons of magic to blast them with before they can get close. XD

[Blasphemous]

With high strength and very high to-hit, you can melee both greater and killer bugs quite effectively.
Twin daggers are amazing against them because of the high chance to hit.
Back in 1.1.1, I used to run with lvl 1 bard straight for the bug temple to tame some of them.
Tame one, order it to kill a hostile one, then either tame the victor if it's hostile or continue to the next one.
Now apparently bugs are much harder to tame. Bards start with a guaranteed wand of light though, so you can level up in gremlin cave easily to level 6 and max out music.
A lvl 10 killer bug kills barnabas with ease and you can then proceed to loot his store.