How to Train Your Hunter Pet in Vanilla WoW

Taming your first pet comes at the end of a level 10 quest called The Hunter’s Path that you get from your hunter trainer. This is quickly followed by three subsequent quests that include using a taming rod to tame three different types of creatures. After completed those quest you learn the Tame Beast spell. Now you just need to complete the last quest in the series called Training the Beast. Completing this final quest teaches you three new abilities:

• Beast Training
• Feed Pet
• Revive Pet

It’s important that you complete the final quest before you go and get a pet, because you’ll want to feed it directly after taming in order to make sure it doesn’t abandon you.

Notes

• You can only tame a pet that is your level and lower.
• You cannot tame a pet while you currently have one, you must abandon or stable your current pet
• If you are stunned, silenced, or knocked down it will interrupt your tame pet spell
• Some beasts can’t be tamed, use your Beast Lore spell if in doubt
• In order for your pet to get experience the mob must be at least green to you

Pet Training

Most of your default pet training will come from the pet trainer located near the hunter trainer who comes with a specific set of predefined skills your pet can learn. As you level you’ll be able to train your pet with ever increasing levels of these skills granting more stats as you go. Note that you can only learn 4 active abilities at any one time per pet. Make sure that you train your pet with the highest level of Growl currently available as it does not require any training points and will help your pet hold aggro and tank for you in fights.

Skills learned from a trainer:

• Great Stamina
• Growl
• Natural Armor
• Arcane Resistance
• Fire Resistance
• Frost Resistance
• Nature Resistance
• Shadow Resistance

Some pet skills you cannot learn from the pet trainer, these skills can only be learned certain pet types and can vary in their application based upon whether the pet is defensive, offensive, or a balance between those two. In order to learn these skill you need to go out and tame a pet that already has them.

For example if you look at the All Hunter Pets list you can see a column for Skills, these are skills that the pet will already know when trained. You are not always immediately granted the new skill just because you tamed the pet, you may need to feed them and take them into a few fights until you get a message that you have learned it. You do not need to keep the pet in order to keep the skill, if you abandon the pet you will still keep the ability to teach that skill to other compatible pets as long as they are a high enough level.

Skill learned from pets:

• Bite
• Charge
• Claw
• Cower
• Dash
• Dive
• Furious Howl
• Gore
• Lightning Breath
• Poison Spit
• Prowl
• Scorpid Poison
• Screech
• Shell Shield
• Thunderstomp

Pet training points are limited and you will acquire more as you and your pet level and it increases its loyalty to you up to a maximum of 300 training points.