Kitty knows some new tricks

Maybe I should take back my rant on pet skill training and how hunters have to go tame other beasts in order to teach new skills to their other pets. Yesterday was training day for my kitty, and he had four new skill levels I needed to teach him, which meant four beasts I had to tame and then fight alongside to learn the new skill levels. Lucky for me I was in Dustwallow Marsh, which has lots of crocs, and each different kind had one of the skills I needed to learn so I stabled my cat and went out hunting for some crocs.

If you've ever played a hunter, you remember that first pet you tamed, you know, when you set out to find a really cool pet for yourself, picking and choosing from the various options you had available to you, depending on what area you were in, and it had to be something your level, so that narrowed down your options too. Maybe you have a pet in mind already, but maybe it's above your level so you just grab something else to hold you over, or maybe you have the perfect pet picked out and it's already attainable. Either way you have no traps, nothing to distract them with, just a skill called Tame Beast that will hopefully make this particulary beast your loyal companion. I decided to grab a fairly rare pet, at least for somebody playing Alliance. I ran over to the Blood Elf starting zone to grab a low level Springpaw Lynx. This is the only place to find this particular cat, as it does have older cousins that live in Outland, but they have a different coloring, and I think the highest level for them is 7 or 8, so you either get one at a low level or don't bother because it would take too long to level up. I made the trek through the Plaguelands, dying a bunch of times on the way due to my ridiculously large aggro radius, but I finally made it and hunted one down. It was pretty funny watching all the little Hordies avoid me, even though I was only level 12 and they probably could have taken me out with a little help if they wanted to. I had finally found my target and went about taming him, letting him beat on me while I channeled the spell, and then he was mine. Now many hunters make this trip to get a Dragonhawk at a low level, since you can't get another until Outland, but while I decided on a pretty common pet, a cat, I wanted one that would stand out.

Now that I have more skills at my disposal, when I want to tame something I can just throw down a freezing trap and draw them over to it, usually they don't even get one attack at me before I win them over, so it's pretty different from those first few times where you had to make sure you weren't going to die before taming them. Either way, I made some comments about learning new pet skills in the past, and I'm not sure if they changed it or I just got lucky, but for each one of those crocs that I tamed I learned the skill I needed on the first mob I sent them to fight, sometimes on the first use of the skill. I think it might also have to do with the skill giving me the most trouble in the past being prowl, which isn't a combat skill so I just spammed it when I was trying to learn it, and it has a cooldown. Needless to say, I was able to get all the skills I needed fairly easily and then I made my way down to Tanaris, running since I hadn't gotten the flight path yet. Served up some justice to those Wastewander hooligans, then ran through Thousand Needles all the way to Feralas to grab the flight paths there. On the way west through Feralas I stumbled upon a Grimtotem camp with some caged little blue dragons. Luckily there were a couple Night Elves on the ledge overlooking the camp that wanted me to save those little blue dragons, so I cleared out some of those Tauren bastards and freed the little guys. Then I get a follow up to kill more Taurens. Well, I had already cleared the whole camp, but alright I guess, so I waited for more to magically appear and then killed them too. After laying waste to the camp and being rewarded for it I made my way the rest of the way to the beach and swam over to the island to pick up the flight path before calling it quits.

I'm not really sure how much of a difference those new pet skill ranks made, but I think I did notice my enemies going down a lot faster than they used to. I guess it's worth it to make sure your skills are up to speed or you will be doing more work when you don't need to. Oh and my hunter is level 46 now, the levels just seem to come and go so much faster now, although I might be comparing to my characters that are in Outland so of course it will be faster.