Gonna try my hands at raising a couple of beasts, one for combat one for hunting. These will be the first beast that I have ever raised. I am a pureblade sentinel with aeonics with transcendant beastmastery, any suggestions on what abilities I should invest in.

Poison spit, gust wings, chameleon, the various cures, with health cure having priority.

For hunting and influencing, I think all you really need is bodyguard. Oh, and I guess the cures and the heals would be nice.

For hunting/influencing, you may want to go with Bodyguard, Influence Charity, Influence Empower as your core (250 trains so far). Then, you decide if you want Battle+Aggressive (140) if you want to add that teeny little bit more damage, or you can go Regen Ego+Heal Health and/or Heal Ego (140-240). Total trains add up to 600, so you can fill in the rest with other skills like the other influence buffs if you use them, Riding(10)+Scaling/Flying/Trotting/Galloping (80/100/30/30) for getting around, or Chameleon (70) if you don't like seeing your beast all the time. Just don't get Battle together with Heal Health, as they both require beast balance and which means that one of the skill is kinda wasted when you bash.

Bodyguard is amazing for hunting, and having riding/trotting on a beast can really help you move a lot faster before getting hasty messages. Flying/gust might be a good one to get as well, and also spit poison. The beast battle ability does barely any damage, if you were considering that on your hunting beast. I don't know if I'd recommend that. Don't bother getting all of the influencing ones, as you'll hardly ever use most of them. Empower/Influence are the two big ones.

Psh who needs beasts when you have long legs. I have debated about getting a wyvern though. But even then who needs a beast that can fly either >_>

I don't know about combat beasts, but my hunting/influencing bird is pretty decked out.

Mount, Trot - For added mobility. These two, plus Ooshphet mean I never get a hasty message no matter how fast I try to run.

Heal Ego, Heal Health, Regenerate Ego - Heal Ego is not so useful for me anymore, but as a lowbie lobo, I couldn't influence without it. And since I was using it a lot, Regenerate Ego was a necessity. And since I like use long chains of kata forms when I bash, I can only use Heal Health between forms, as a kind of emergency maneuver. It was much more usable as an Aeromancer, when I could fire off Heal Health between every attack as necessary.

Influence Begging, Influence Empower, Influence Weaken - For the Hallifax epic quest, Tosha, guards, and Illithoid Prison. I wouldn't do without any of them.

Bodyguard - Awesome. End of story. This has saved my tail tons of times.

Hijacking this topic, I am wondering what is a good starter beast? I'm considering getting one for bashing support, influencing support would be nice if that can be fit into it as well. Also what maintenance costs am I looking at? And how long can a beast survive unattended? I do like to go on a break when I feel like it

Also, does training beastmastery higher have an effect on the beast's stats, or should I just train it to the highest ability I want to invest?

Well, the main differences between beasts (besides their appearance) are what innate abilities they have, and thus how much they cost. Maintenance costs, you can pay up to 36 in-game months worth of stable fees in advance (I believe this comes out to about 5600 gold if you use your city's stable, double that for the stable on Mt. Avencha if I'm not mistaken). Beasts also consume one feed from their feedbag per in-game day if they are out of the stables, but feed is relatively inexpensive. Reagents can be pricy, but they're a one-time thing. Your beast will be able to survive in the stable for as long as you've paid for. After that, it will lose a level once per in-game day until it dies permanently. If you forget to put it back in the stable after you log out, it'll stand around until its feedbag hits empty, then die and reset to the stable, losing one level. If it's level 1 when this happens, it's dead for good. A pony is a pretty cheap one, and has begging influence innately.

Your skill in Beastmastery only determines what you can teach your beast; its stats are effected by its level and how many of a certain reagent it has been given (bodoru/health, mindoru/mana, suporu/ego). If you've trained it everything you want to and it has room for more trains left over, you have the option of just pumping it full of the reagent for whichever stat you want it to have more of. As long as you're sure you don't want to teach it anything else of course.

A nice starter bashing/influencing support beast would be the pony, as it is cheap and has inherent Influence Charity.

Also, if your stable fees run out, you'll get a message that your beast has lost a level. If you have the Chrome/Firefox extension which you check semi-regularly, that'll work as a notification for you to do a quick pop in to pay the stable fees again.

Beasts use their owner's crit rates. Even without a huge amount of damage, it's an additional source of critical hits, and when you take that relatively small amount and start magnifying it crit-wise... it becomes useful. Of course it's -immensely- more useful at high circle, or when you have crit runes.

Actually, I stopped using my beast for bashing because the critical hit rate remains the same, but his damage is far lower than my own, so it ends up being less damage overall. In other words, he was stealing my critical hits and not putting them to good use.

Umm, there is no such thing as stealing criticals. That's bad math, man. Every hit is a % chance. Your beast using your crit ratio has -no- bearing on your own crit ratio. If you roll 4 sixes in a roll on a 1d6, you've still got a 1 in 6 chance of rolling another one right after. You don't 'use up' probabilities like that. Neither does a beast.

Blaise Pascal is crying in his grave right now.

(Note: This may not apply if the coders are sociopaths and actually went out of their way to artificially ration critical hits, then bias them toward your beast for the sole purpose of making the skill a trap to diminish the effectiveness of players who bother to learn beastmastery, just to screw with our heads. I only mention it because I'm a conspiracy theorist at heart and seem to always bear the brunt of the ill will of the Random Nefarious Gods .)

Right, I still get the same chance for critical hits with EACH hit, but I'm spreading it out across three attacks instead of just two, and one of those attacks sucks. And, the RNG is uniform enough to ensure that over time, you get a relatively fixed percentage of critical hits.

I think it is pretty easy to see how this work, get a crit counter script, calculate your personal crit rate over a large number of hits, then take out your beast, adapt script, then go kill stuff again and see how it turns out.

Those are fixed percentages for each and every hit. With two hits, each hit is still getting the same percentage of critical hits. The thing is, you're adding a -third- attack which gets the same ratio of criticals. Rather than just 2 critting 50%ish of the time, you've got 3 critting 50%ish of the time each. It's extra damage man. It's also basic probability. I'm serious here. There is no such thing as 'conservation of probability' (unless artificially enforced of course).

actually, you just count your own personal crit rate both times and compare over a very large sample group. Unless the coders are screwing with us, mathematically it will be identical. Any crits your beast receives are purely bonus damage on top of what you'd otherwise do.

This was something that I've been wanting to test ever since I thought I noticed my beast doing more crits than I do.There is a possibility that I may just be noticing the beast crits more often than my own crits, but I also highlight all of my crits in bright orange which makes it hard for me to ignore any crit.

You're getting three attacks instead of two - how is this a bad thing? A weak third attack is better than no third attack.

^ This

No.