CONT: IV. TRAINING & SKILLS

CONT: IV. TRAINING & SKILLS
Date: 05/18/2007

3. How do I teach a skill to my pet?

Ok, you’ve learned a skill from either the trainer or another creature and you now want your favorite pet to have that skill. It is actually pretty easy to teach the skill to your pet if you follow these steps:
1. open your spell book.

2. click on the “general” tab.

3. find the icon that looks like a slingshot (it will say “train pet” or something like that)

4. click the icon and a new window will open

5. in the new window all the skills you know will be listed. The ones your pet already knows will be in grey at the bottom. The ones you know that are available to teach to a pet are in green at the top.

6. Find the skill or rank of skill you want to teach to your current pet and click it.

7. Note the cost in TP for the skill and look towards the bottom of the window and ensure you have enough TP to cover the cost.

8. Note the pet level required for the skill at the bottom where it describes the skill.

9. If you have the TP available and your pet is of the appropriate level, click the button “train” and presto, your pet will now know the new skill or rank of skill.

10. Follow these steps for everything you want to teach your pet.

There are a few caveats to the above:
A. If the skill does not show a TP cost to the side, it is a skill your current pet cannot learn. The only exception to this is Growl which has no TP cost at all.
B. If your pet is not high enough level to learn a skill you will have to level him up.
C. If you do not have enough TP to teach the pet the desired skill you can go to the pet trainer and ask him/her to “untrain” your pet. This will refund all your TP and then you can follow the above steps to teach your pet anything you wish that it can learn.

The cost to untrain your pet is 10 silver initially and it will reset to 10s in 24 hours. If you try to retrain again within 24 hours of an initial training the cost progressively increases to 50s, 1g, 5g, 10g. However, again, it will reset to 10s if you go 24 hours without retraining.

4. Pet Skills and Training F.A.Q.S.

A couple of commonly raised questions and issues dealing with pet training need to be addressed as well at this point.

A. I trained my pet with a higher skill rank and the TP didn’t subtract properly: Actually it probably did. When you tame a pet with a higher rank of a known skill the TP cost noted by the skill in your spell book is the cumulative cost of that skill and all lower ranks. If you know a lower rank already, then the actual TP cost of the new rank will be the difference between the old rank’s cost and the new rank’s cost. For example, If rank 1 has a cost of 10 TP and rank 2 has a cost of 25 TP, if you tame rank 2 alone it will cost 25 TP. However, if your pet already knows rank 1 and you just tame it in the new rank 2 the actual cost to you will be 15 TP since you have already spent 10 learning rank 1.

B. Can I skip training a rank? Absolutely. You do not have to progress in order through rank 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. You can jump straight to what ever rank you want. For example, I neglected to tame pets and learn Bite ranks 4 and 5 as I leveled up. I know ranks 1-3 and 6-9 and can teach any one of those ranks I want to my pets, but I can’t teach ranks 4 or 5. If I tame a pet in rank 1 and then decide I want it to know rank 9, I can open my spell book and just click on Bite, Rank 9 and train it (assuming I have enough TP and my pet is the right level to learn it).

C. Do I have to train a new creature for each rank of a skill? Yes. Just because you know rank 1 of a skill doesn’t mean you’ll automatically learn rank 2 upon gaining the right level. You’ll still have to go find a creature with rank 2 and train it and use it to learn the new rank.

D. Help! My pet’s action bar doesn’t show that I taught him a skill. Ok, first, only “active” skills like bite, claw, dive, screech, etc. are shown on the action bar. Passive skills like fire resistance, Natural Armor, etc. do not show on the action bar. Secondly, on occasion a pet skill you have trained your pet to know will fail to automatically appear on the action bar. This is easy to fix. Open your spell book. At the bottom is a tab that says “pet” click that tab and it will list the things your pet is trained in. Find the icon for the skill that is missing from the action bar and drag and drop onto the bar.

E. How do I turn off autocast for a pet skill? When a pet skill is on the action bar, by default it will autocast. This can be an issue, particularly with growl and prowl. To turn off the autocasting of a pet skill, right click its icon on the action bar. A small yellow triangle will appear in each corner of the icon to indicate autocast is off. Until you right click it again to turn autocast back on, you’ll have to left click the icon to activate the skill manually.

F. What is this focus dump stuff? Pets have “focus” that works sort of like mana. As a pet uses an active skill he expends focus points. Some skills, like claw and gore, are limited in trigger time only by the 1 sec. global cooldown. However, they use a lot of focus and your pet will eventually run out of focus if the skill triggers enough in a fight. The talents “Go for the Throat” in the Marksman tree and “Bestial Discipline” in the Beast Mastery tree can help ensure that a pet with a focus eating (or “dumping”) skill has enough focus to continually use the skill.