First off, all animals hit boxes need to be revamped because elephant tusks in particular are a HUGE pain. I actively kill wild elephants who get me stuck on their tusks. Crocodiles also can't be hit from the front with a tiger/lion/wolf, this is very annoying.
Sheep - Should give hide and fiber (maybe left clicking scissors gives hide, right clicking gives fiber)
Lions - get rid of the god awful noise they make when running. The sound is fine when you're not riding a Lion (ex: one runs at you in the wild). But a rider constantly hearing the WISH WISH WISH WISH sound is really annoying.
Tigers and Elephants are EXCELLENT swimmers, this should reflect in game with a swim speed buff or oxygen buff.
Suggestion for new creatures: Hippos, excellent underwater animals that can help you salvage.
I'd like to start a petition for Manta Rays to be nice/passive creatures and Sting Rays to be the hostile creatures.
A minor nitpick - an animal being completely incapacitated while it does the level up animation is really annoying. Lions have an especially long one that is obnoxious.
Tone down the blood animation of Tiger bleeds, I feel like I'm in a horror movie every time I get a minor scratch from a Tiger.
Big animals like Rhino, Elephants and Giraffes should have high carry weights and medium health. It doesn't make sense to go through the hassle of taming these things only to have them be less useful than a bear. Buff their gathering rates, make them slower and stam out faster. They should be useful for gathering but not unstoppable killing machines at the same time (You should have to choose, gathering vs war). That's what lions, tigers and wolves are for as well. It would make sense to need a lion, wolf or tiger escort on a large gathering creature.
Symbiotic relationships between animals! Let a monkey sitting on an elephant and they get a buff to their melee %. A parrot on a Rhino might give a buff to their stamina. A seagull perched on a giraffe gives a similar buff (maybe weight?). That would make the smaller creatures more useful and would also create a risk/reward situation (smaller animals could be killed by wild animals or players but it's worth the risk because of the buff they provide to your gathering creatures). If you pair up a tiger and an elephant then they should provide a small buff to each other, maybe this pairing is permanent. The Elephant can't pair with another tiger and vice versa. This would create incentive to going out and taming multiple kinds of creatures while also creating another risk/reward situation. It would make animals less expendable. That being said, if animals are less expendable then they shouldn't get wrecked by wild creatures as often as they do. Toning down alpha spawns should do the trick nicely. There should always be risk when going out but not to the point that it's at currently.
Armor on animals. Say you don't want a gathering elephant, you want a war elephant. That should be feasible. If you want to pump those precious level skill points into stam and melee to make them viable then having some armor should be possible as well. The armor would weigh a significant amount so that you can't have a war elephant who is also carrying a treasure trove of explosives to the front lines. Having a barbed rope going from one tusk to another to create a little scoop of death. Things like that.
Wolves feel inferior to tigers and lions currently. Maybe they could have an ability called Howl (30 second cooldown maybe) that causes a non-stackable Fear debuff on wild animals and players. Said Fear debuff would be minor but maybe it makes wild animals run away and for players it makes their screen shake or darken for a second or two (like you're struck with fear, eh?). A player cannot be Feared more than once per 30 seconds or once per minute to avoid abuse by having multiple wolves.
Horses could have an ability called Charge. Maybe they rear up and all friendly players and friendly animals get a small stam/health regen buff for 20 seconds. Non-stackable and a player cannot benefit from Charge more than once per minute.
Tigers could have Call of the Wild. This could increase movement speed for 5 or 10 seconds for friendly players and animals nearby. Same rules as the other buffs.
Bulls could have Seeing Red. Increases melee damage but reduces coordination for 10 seconds, same rules as other buffs.
Cows are not war creatures so I could see them having some sort of calming passive ability. If you have a cow nearby then maybe your vitamins go down a little slower (I know, that doesn't make sense but the immersion is already broken so just bear with me). This would be similar to Penguins.
I feel like having each individual creature type contribute something would make them way more valuable and would encourage people to go find and tame them and work harder to keep them alive. It would also make people think more strategically about making space to bring them on a ship to go raiding.
These are just some thoughts that I've had! Enjoy
