Bouras and Healers

TXEggplant

I have an old character who I always planned on making a healer.

Her template is (real/mods)

Anatomy 100/100

Healing 100/100

Swords 100/100

Tactics 100/100

Spirit Speak 95/100 (Bloodwood Spirit)

Animal Lore 95/108 (jewelry)

Vet 100/110 (jewelry)

Taming 35/63 (jewelry)

Pre-bouras, I had a swamp dragon to help me take hits when I played with a party. That gave me enough time to get invisible, get situated and get into position to be able to heal both players and animals.

Now, I have a High Plains Boura that I'm training up. I was able to tame it and get it to bond with me via jewelry. I have a Lowland Boura as well, because I wanted to see the difference. And, while they are training, I can have them both as the HPB takes 3 slots and the LLB takes two.

I have no desire to be a full on tamer. I literally just want to play this char as part of group, as a support char. She keeps her fighting skills because it's better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war, right? She has the taming to be able to tame these lower level but high hit point beasties and train them so they don't just die in one hit and take her with them.

So, the boura. the HPB has a tail swipe as a special skill and has acquired parry once it GM'd wrestling and anatomy. Supposedly, it can be trained on other skills but ... what? And what would be the best skills for it to have to help me help the party? The HPB has no pack instinct but the LLB does. I don't know if that makes a difference. I also don't know if I'm only going to be able to go up to a certain level of training because of the character's low training?

Like I said, I'm not a tamer. I really just want to utilize high hit point animals to aid my character in healing. I also really enjoy training them (but not enough to tame my way out of healing skills). I want all my animals to have some fighting skills, to give me enough time to save myself so I can save them and the other players in my party.

Any advice would be appreciated!

WornOutYourTool

For assisting pets I either make them tanky with things like feint or have abilities to help everyone do more damage like discord, rune corruption, conductive blast, inferno etc.