Lateania: Animal Taming has a ~35-hour dead zone where every reward is worse than a 1,200g shop pet

Animal Taming is a 1..100 trade whose entire reward is a better companion, but for the first 49 levels every beast it can give you is worse than or equal to the Emberdrake you can simply buy from a capital Stable for 1,200 gold.

Companion power comes from base_attack, scaled by pet level (Pet::attack = base + base*(level-1)/4, and PET_MAX_LEVEL is 10, so a fully-fed pet is base x3.25). The five pet auto-skills in taming::PET_SKILLS also scale off that same attack value, so base_attack drives the whole contribution.

Comparing pets::PET_SPECIES against taming::TAMEABLE, at pet level 10:

Emberdrake (buyable, 1,200g, tame_level -) base 20 -> 65 attack Shadow Panther (Taming 20) base 17 -> 55 attack WORSE than the shop pet Jungle Constrictor (Taming 30) base 18 -> 58 attack WORSE Greenmantle Dire-Bear (Taming 40) base 22 -> 71 attack +9% Green Wyrm/World-Oak (Taming 50) base 38 -> 123 attack +89%

So the curve is flat-to-negative for 49 levels and then steps hard at exactly 50.

The cost of crossing that dead zone is the problem. skills::xp_for_skill_level puts Taming 50 at 712,030 xp, and the only source of taming xp is a successful tame worth tame_xp = 30 + tame_level^2 / 2. Climbing by always taming the best beast you qualify for takes roughly 1,136 successful tames. With tame_chance at 40% at the required level and a 30s TAME_COOLDOWN on each failure, that is on the order of 35 hours of play to reach the first beast that beats a purchase any level-10 character can make.

For scale, the same 35 hours spent on the Obsidian Throne extension wing (~20 xp/sec) is over 2.5 million character xp, and a single Sundered Reaches tier-21 drop table upgrades all eight equipment slots at once. Taming is dominated on every axis until the very last step.

Suggested fix: either lift the early/mid TAMEABLE base_attack values so the ladder overtakes the Emberdrake somewhere around Taming 15-25, or lower the Stable pets so a 1,200g purchase is not the correct answer for the first ~35 hours of a trade. A test asserting that the best tameable at each 10-level band beats the best buyable would pin whichever choice is intended.