Taming your first real pet comes at the end of a level 10 quest that you get from your hometown hunter trainer. I won't repeat all the steps of this quest here as it is simple, easy, and straightforward. Just be absolutely sure to do both parts of the quest. The first half consists of using a special taming rod to tame three types of creatures. After the first half, you learn the skill Tame Pet and you may be tempted to run out and tame a pet immediately. But the second half -- a simple delivery quest to your capital city, usually -- teaches you how to feed and train your new pet. Many new hunters run right out to tame a pet before they finish the second half of the quest, and then they are very sad indeed when their new pet runs away because they don't know how to feed it.
Training your pet can be confusing, so I will cover the basic concepts in depth on this page. If you are looking for a list of all the pet abilities in the game, or details on where to find these abilities, check out our abilities guide.
Some pets know a skill or two already when you tame them, but most pets need to be trained. In order to teach your pet a skill, you must first know it yourself. There are two ways for you to learn a pet skill: some skills you can learn from a pet trainer in town, and some skills you learn from taming creatures that know the skill.
Learning pet skills from the pet trainer is easy -- you just need to be high enough level and to pay some amount of money. Remember that you learn pet skills from the pet trainer, not the hunter trainer. Yes, your pet has a special trainer all of their own! But the pet trainer is usually very near the hunter trainer.
Here's the skills that you can learn from a pet trainer:
Most pet skills, however, are learned by taming a creature who already knows that skill. To learn a pet skill from the wild you need to stable your regular pet, go out and tame a pet that knows the skill you want, and fight with it until you get a text message that you have learned the new skill. Sometimes this happens immediately, sometimes only after several battles. Many hunters believe you can learn a new skill faster if you melee in close proximity to the animal you are learning from. I also feed the pet until it is "green/happy" though it is unknown whether that also helps. Once you have learned the new skill, it is safe to abandon the creature (unless you want to keep it as a permanent pet).
Here's the skills that you can learn from taming wild creatures:
If you have trouble learning a new skill from a wild pet, here are some suggestions:
Once you have learned a pet skill, you can teach it it any pet that you own so long as the pet is capable of learning that skill. Pets must be high enough level to learn the skills, and some skills can only be learned by certain families of pets. In addition, your pet must have enough training points available to afford the skill.
Pets gain training points based on their loyalty and level. The actual formula is (level)*(loyalty-1). This means that a Loyalty 6 Level 60 pet will have 300 training points total, and a Loyalty 6 level 70 pet will have 350 training points total. Pets of the same loyalty and level will have the same training points regardless of whether they were tamed at a low or high level. Pets may even start with negative training points if they already know some skills when they are tamed, but this works itself out as they level up or level up their Loyalty.
Most pet skills come in several ranks that get more powerful as they go. Your pet does not need to learn ranks in order, and you can bypass ranks if you wish. Your pet is refunded training points for lower ranks when you upgrade the rank of a skill, so it costs the same whether you train every rank of a skill or just the highest one. Pets can also untrain skills for a fee at the pet trainer, just like you can untrain your talents at the hunter trainer. This is important because while each pet can learn as many passive skills (armor, stamina, or resists) as they can afford, they can only learn up to FOUR active skills at once.
Incidentally, Growl can be trained for free even if the pet has 0 or fewer training points - which is quite nice, since it means that your pet can start helping out in combat immediately.
So now you know everything there is to know about training your pet -- except how to actually train your pet! This part is often confusing for young hunters because the icon for Beast Training is actually on the General tab of your spellbook and not, as you might expect, under Beast Mastery. It's the icon that looks like a slingshot. The helpful picture below, on the left, is a nice visual guide! Using this skill will open up a menu (pictured below on the right) that shows you all the pet skills you know -- either because you bought them from the trainer or because you learned them from a pet that knew them. Skills in grey are skills that your current pet already knows; skills in green are skills he doesn't know, although this isn't any guarentee that he can learn that particular skill. When you select a skill in this menu, the details about it show up in the bottom pane. Here you can learn more about the skill and whether or not this pet can learn this skill. If he can, then pressing the Train button will spend the training points and teach your pet the selected skill.
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