Ultima Online Veterinary - the two second bandage, the heal formula, and the 80/80 resurrection

Two seconds, whatever your dexterity

uo.com: “The delay for healing a pet with the Veterinary skill is 2 seconds, regardless of a player’s dexterity.”

This is a meaningful difference from Healing, where dexterity does set bandage speed. A tamer’s healing throughput on a pet does not degrade on a low-dexterity build, which is exactly the build most tamers run.

Worth flagging, because it looks like a contradiction and is not: the official stat table lists Dex as Veterinary’s secondary stat, while the skill page says dexterity does not affect bandage speed. Both are official and both are correct — the stat table is about which stats rise when the skill gains, the skill page is about bandage timing. They describe different things.

The published heal formula

Published on both uo.com’s Veterinary page and its Animal Lore page:

Term	Formula
Minimum healed	( lore ÷ 5 ) + ( vet ÷ 5 ) + 3
Maximum healed	( lore ÷ 5 ) + ( vet ÷ 2 ) + 10
Amount healed	random( Min_Healed, Max_Healed ) + ( pet’s max HP ÷ 100 )

Read the asymmetry. Animal Lore contributes ÷ 5 to both bounds. Veterinary contributes ÷ 5 to the minimum but ÷ 2 to the maximum. Veterinary therefore widens the top end of the heal far more than Animal Lore does — and because the vet ÷ 2 term never stops, skill above 80 keeps raising the ceiling long after the gated abilities have been unlocked.

Note also the last term: the heal scales slightly with the pet’s maximum hit points, so the same bandage does more on a bigger creature.

Cure at 60, resurrect at 80 - both need Animal Lore to match

The two abilities that make the skill worth carrying are both gated, and both gates are doubled: the level is required in Veterinary and Animal Lore alike.

Threshold	What it unlocks	Distance
60.0 Vet and 60.0 Lore	A chance to cure a pet’s poison	Within two tiles [!]
80.0 Vet and 80.0 Lore	A chance to resurrect a bonded pet	Directly beside it [!]

Poison is always cured first, before damage is healed — uo.com states this, and it matters tactically. A badly hurt, poisoned pet spends the bandage on the cure, not the hit points. Plan the sequence around that rather than being surprised by it.

Resurrection costs the pet skill. Per uo.com, the pet loses 0.1 skill points per pet skill when a player resurrects it, and 0.2 when an NPC vet does. The NPC also charges gold that scales with taming level, up to 30,000gp [!]. Doing it yourself is half the skill loss and free.

[!] Neither ability has a published success chance. Both are described only as “a chance”, with no formula and no number, at any skill level.

In PvP

• It is what keeps the pet standing. A tamer in a fight is a healer whose patient is the thing doing the damage, and the whole of that job is this skill plus Animal Lore.
• The 2 second timer does not degrade. Unlike player Healing, throughput on a pet is unaffected by low dexterity — so an Int-heavy tamer heals a pet exactly as fast as a Dex build does.
• Resurrection at 80/80 is recovery, not prevention. It lets a tamer get a bonded pet back after it dies rather than losing it, at 0.1 skill per pet skill.
• [!] Whether Veterinary bandaging can be interrupted or disrupted by damage is not published, in the way player Healing can be. uo.com does not state it either way, which is an awkward gap for a skill used under fire.

In PvM

Core to every tamer template, without qualification. Pet survival in PvM is almost entirely a function of Veterinary plus Animal Lore: the heal formula draws on both, the cure needs both at 60, the resurrection needs both at 80.

That resurrection threshold deserves the emphasis. Losing an Animal-Trained endgame pet permanently is the worst outcome available to a tamer, and 80/80 is the number that prevents it. It is arguably the most important single threshold in the whole wilderness group.

Above 80 the skill keeps paying: the vet ÷ 2 term in the maximum heal continues to rise all the way to 120, so scrolled Veterinary is not a vanity purchase.

Veterinary also counts toward the combined-skill stable slot thresholds of 160.0 / 200.0 / 240.0, alongside Animal Taming and Animal Lore, with slots stepping at 100, 110 and 120 in each contributing skill.

What it needs alongside it

• Animal Lore — not optional. Half the heal formula, and the matching gate on both abilities.
• Animal Taming — Veterinary only matters if you have pets, and the three skills share the stable slot thresholds.
• Tailoring — bandage supply, via cloth.
• Healing and Anatomy — the player-side equivalents. uo.com draws the analogy directly: Animal Lore is to Veterinary what Anatomy is to Healing. The difference remains the bandage timer.
• Herding — uo.com’s Herding page notes Veterinary is useful if you are herding creatures to hunt alongside.

Caps, stats and training

Veterinary is on the Power Scroll list: 105 / 110 / 115 / 120 with a Wondrous, Exalted, Mythical or Legendary scroll, counting against the 720 total skill cap. Primary stat Int, secondary Dex. It has no Skill Mastery — uo.com’s masteries page does not list it.

An unpublished route [!] maps neatly onto the thresholds:

Skill	Method
0–30	Train at an NPC Stablemaster
30–60	Heal creatures
60–80	Cure poisoned creatures (requires 60 Animal Lore)
80–120	Resurrect dead pets (requires 80 Animal Lore)

Each bracket trains on the ability the previous bracket unlocked, which means Animal Lore has to be kept at or ahead of Veterinary the whole way up. NPC trainers are the Animal Trainer, Rancher, Vegetable Seller, Veterinarian and Gypsy Animal Herder [!]. The Guaranteed Gain System awards a mandatory 0.1 when nothing has been gained inside your bracket’s window, and a Scroll of Alacrity raises each check from 0.1 to 0.2–0.5 for 15 minutes.

What is not published

• [!] Whether Veterinary bandaging is interrupted or disrupted by damage, as player Healing is.
• [!] Any success-chance formula for the poison cure. It is “a chance” and nothing more.
• [!] Any success-chance formula for the resurrection, likewise.

Everything else on this page is published unless marked [!], with the heal formula itself coming straight from uo.com in the form given.

Where these come from

uo.com Veterinary · uo.com Animal Lore · uo.com Pets & Ownership · uo.com Herding · uo.com Skill Masteries · uo.com Skills, Stats & Attributes · uo.com Scrolls of Power · uo.com Skill Gain Systems. Everything here is from uo.com or the game itself; anything uo.com does not publish is marked [!] as unpublished where it appears.