Once you’ve left the training area and entered the Real World, it’s a whole other ball game. No longer are you simply running around a small, relatively safe area simply attempting to kill things and level up a few times–now you’ve got literally a whole world to explore and virtually limitless options at your fingertips. More importantly, death now means something. If you die and haven’t scanned in (saved) your character recently, you’ll lose experience, something you’ll want to avoid as much as you can. In this section, we’ve put together some tips and strategies that we’ve gathered in our time playing the game.

How to Use Your Pets

Shame on Funcom for not including any information whatsoever in the manual pertaining to pets–the creatures that meta-physicists, bureaucrats, and engineers can create to do their bidding for them. They mean the difference between life and death for these three professions. However, unless you know how to use them, they’ll stand around doing nothing.

Control
The most basic command you can give is “/pet attack,” which will cause your pet to attack the currently selected target. If you’d like your pet to go after enemies that are engaging you or your team, input “/pet guard,” and your pet gladly obey. For some personalization, type in “/pet rename newname,” replacing “newname” with whatever you would like your pet to be called. To let the pet roam and attack on its own, use “/pet hunt.” You can free or kill your pets with the “/pet free” and “/pet terminate” commands.

Combat Tips
Use your pets! One of the simplest commands that you can give a pet is “/pet attack.” Often you will end up on a team with newbies who either never issue a command to their pets or, for one reason or another, just tell it to guard them and then ignore it. People who fight like this–and make no mistake, they are doing a lot of the fighting even though they shouldn’t be–would be better off as enforcers.

To make the most effective use of your pet, get in range of the enemy. Once you are able to select it, order your pet to attack it and then back off. After you do this, the enemy should begin to attack your aggro pet instead of you. If you like, you can let the two of them duke it out; however, it is better if you assist your pet. Simply shoot the enemy from a distance or fire off offensive nano programs, depending upon what you have, and you will find yourself able to take down enemies with ease.