Mania’s Arcania

(You can read all of Kaet’s adventures, starting with why I’m doing things this way, by checking out the series Table of Contents at the end of this post. Alternatively, if you are here primarily for juicy pet-related news, feel free to skip these bits — they’re optional.)

And so, at level 10, the hunter trainer in the Dwarven District of Stormwind, the eloquent Thorfin Stoneshield, sent me off to Kharanos for my level 10 hunter quests. For some reason, you must do your level 10 quests in your race’s homeland, even if you have been leveling up elsewhere. But just to be polite the hunter trainers in other towns will often give you a minor quest to go home, worth some 85 experience.

I took the tram back to Ironforge — I’d picked up the flight point but I wanted to save the cash, since I seem to be permanently strapped on this character — and along the way I tamed my very first pets! Aren’t they adorable? After I tamed them, I sold them for kabobs. It’s a strange old world.

Anway, after arriving in Ironforge and rounding up my rats, I made the simple if slow run to Kharanos. I’m not fond of the dwarf newbie area, but I love the hunter taming quests here: all three of them can be done very near the trainer. Contrast that to Durotar, for instance, where you have to run way up along the coast hunting for crabs, or the Blood Elf quest, which actually sends you into the next zone over.

Anyway, the first creature I needed to tame was a Large Crag Boar. For these guys I merely headed across the street, past the warlock trainer, and over the hill into the valley behind the inn (aka the Thunderbrew Distillery). There are also Ice Claw Bears in this valley, which is handy since I happened to know that those are the third creature I would need to tame.

Large Crag Boars have what I call a fake pet skill — a skill that only shows up during the level 10 taming quest when you tame the boar with the special rod. Several creatures have these, although not all of them by any means. Large Crag Boars come with “Rushing Charge, Rank 1″. (So far as I know, no one has ever seen Rank 2+.) This is an instant skill with a 5 second cooldown that: “Increases the caster’s movement speed by 65% for 3 sec. and causes it to inflict an additional 25 damage on its first attack.” Sounds like an early version of Charge! Interestingly, the boars that you tame in Durotar for the Orc/Troll level 10 quest have a similar but different Charge-like ability. It really makes you wonder what the designers were thinking …

(Aside: I always spend a few minutes pounding on the buttons for these fake skills in the forlorn hope that one day something will slip and I’ll somehow learn one. Wouldn’t that be neat, being the only person in the whole game who knows Rushing Charge?)

The second creature I needed to tame for my level 10 dwarven hunter quest was a snow leopard. These can be found just south of the area where I tamed the Large Crag Boar, around a frozen lake. The lake is a bit hidden, but if you start from the graveyard and head south-southeast you’ll run into the lake in perhaps 10 seconds of running. The snow leopard has no fake skills. But this cat is one of my favorite models and it’s always at this point that I almost decide to throw my plans aside and just tame one of these instead. But I will resist!

Next up was an Ice Claw Bear, but before I tamed that creature I found a handy guard and ‘dismissed’ (i.e. abandoned) the leopard. These cats have a bad habit of attacking you when you turn them loose, but the guards make short work of them. Then on to the bear!

Ice Claw Bears can be found in the same little valley as the Large Crag Boars, behind the Thunderbrew Distillery. They come with the fake skill “Ice Claw”, a next melee attack with a 30 second cooldown that “Inflicts normal damage plus 4 to an enemy, and increases the time between its attacks by 100% for 6 sec.” I found out by accident that although you cannot tell the bear to attack a guard normally, you can tell it to use Ice Claw on a guard. It won’t actually attack the guard, but you will be PvP flagged. So .. err .. be careful. :>

And that was that! I took the bear back to Grif Wildheart to prove to him that I could tame things with a rod and he gave me the Tame Beast ability — along with Call Pet and Dismiss Pet and a quest to go see Bella Thundergranite, a pet trainer in Ironforge. This is where a lot of new hunters get into trouble — I know I did the first time I played — and run right off to tame a new pet. But Bella Thundergranite was going to teach me how to feed my new pet as well as train it and resurrect it if it dies, and those are very necessary skills. Oh, and she teaches Growl Rank 1 and 2 also. Very necessary.

So I headed off to Ironforge again. (I hate running up the hill to the gates of Ironforge. It makes me feel tired.) On the way I delivered some tools to Steelgrill at Steelgrill’s Depot, and I very nearly got suckered into doing a bunch of chores for the dwarves there. (I am easily distracted by quests.) And then I wandered around for a bit skinning someone else’s kills. (The killer was long gone, and I hate to see a littered field. I am easily distracted.) But I was on a mission! And eventually I got back on track.

I saw Bella, she gave me the skills I needed, and then I paid her extra to teach me Great Stamina Rank 1 and Natural Armor Rank 1. I noticed that she also would have let me but Avoidance and Cobra Reflexes, which is silly since I can’t use those until level 30. Buying them at this point is just a waste of money.

And then I was off to … well, to Petopia, to figure out what crab I wanted to tame. *grin* I decided to level two crabs at once: a red one and a blue one. I could pick up a blue crab in Darkshore (which may be Alliance territory but still requires that long run through the Wetlands), but for a red crab I’d have to hit Durotar — and since that was further away I decided to do that first. But just then I decided to call it a night. I’d spend tomorrow traveling and taming.