How I would Change Taming

A quick editorial note before I begin, this wasn’t the post that I had planned for today, but sometimes when inspiration strikes, you gotta roll with it. The post I had planned for today was ten pets you could tame under level 20. I’m still shooting to get that out tomorrow, but for now let’s talk taming.

I recently when out and tamed a whole bunch of pets on my Hunter, Zeldra. Other than having to camp for a couple of rares, and the anticipation of getting a unique pet, it was a singular boring and uninspired event.

Hunters wander the world seeking lifetime companions and the act of taming should really be more than just walk up to the beast, channel a spell for a few seconds and done. Taming needs a face lift.

Now I know that there are a few taming challenges out there. Some by design and others player generated, based on high demand and long spawn timers. What if instead of these few taming challenges, every tame was a challenge for a Hunter?

Taming needs to be an event, a dance if you will. You the Hunter, using your skills and abilities to woo this unwilling participant into your fold. It starts out as rejection, followed by proving your worth, and wearing the beast down, until it reaches this moment of respect and surrender.

So how could the game accomplish this. For starters let’s make taming a beast a phased  encounter. Instead of a channeled ability tame beast would be instant cast debuff you place on the beast. Maybe call it Capture Beast.

Capture Beast – You capture the beast end enter the taming arena.

The beast enters a state of heightened aggression. It’s strength is doubled. It can be damaged, but not killed.

The arena would function like the proving grounds or some of the quests on Isle of Thunder. Some beasts could spawn adds that you need to deal with. Maybe you would CC the beast and DPS the adds. There’d be damage to avoid, items to click. Maybe you’d need to damage the beast. Maybe you’d need to do things to heal it.

Whatever the challenge there’d be time limit and a serious risk of failure. The beats would scale to your level. If you’re a low level Hunter, perhaps you’re given access to a temporary set of abilities like interrupts that you might not have at your current level.

Maybe taming could involve use the of the Extra Action Button. Once you reach a certain point in the event it could be used to complete the tame. Each pet family could have its own challenge. Taming a cat would be different than taming a boar.

There should be a risk of failure here too. Rare pets should be harder to tame that regular pets. If you fail to tame the beast then you’d get a debuff preventing you from stepping into the arena for period of time, maybe five minutes.

Of course this would cause problems with taming beasts in dungeons and raids, and perhaps the solution there is to make all dungeon and raid beasts untameable. I’d be  okay with this if versions of those beasts were obtainable elsewhere.

Too much to hope for? Perhaps, but a Dwarf can dream can’t he? 

7 Comments on “How I would Change Taming”

  1. For me, I would like a sort of fused tame challenge. The challenge not only of camping and spending time waiting for it to spawn like in wrath, but also the challenge that was in Pandaria of “weakening” the rare. Now that I think about, that already existed before. With Dethilac in the Molten Front: rare spawn, and once it spawned you had to kite it around, weakening it before you could tame it.

    1. Dethtilac was a good challenge. I still haven’t tried him yet. I like what they did with the Panaria rares like Savage, where you had to track them, but once you figured it out, they weren’t hard to get.

      I also like Degu’s challenge. I wish the new Spirit Beasts looked a little more interesting though.

  2. I really like Dark’s idea in general.

    Taming should be a multi-step process as Dark suggested, but I’d to it slightly differently.
    1. Instant cast ability called “Challenge Beast” on target beast applies debuff to the beast called “Hunter’s Challenge”.
    Hunter’s Challenge causes the following:
    – Beast scales to player level
    – Immunity to attacks from other players
    – Causes beast to attack player
    The tame still happens in the open world rather than in a special arena (hence the immunity to other players). Just like it is now, you can’t start the tame if you have a pet active, so you have to complete the challenge totally solo.
    2. You must complete the taming challenge for the target beast:
    – Generic challenge: You have x seconds to get target to y% health (e.g, 5 seconds to get to 50%).
    – Specific challenges: Certain pets could have specific taming challenges like we saw in Cata and Mists.
    3. After completing the challenge, the hunter has proven their worth to the beast and the beast becomes the hunter’s lifelong companion

    Rare spawns should also be changed. They should just be elites that are very hard to kill with much shorter respawns (maybe 30 minutes or something) similar to the spirit porcupines.

    1. Those are all excellent ideas. When I was first drafting this, I went the down the path you did of open world, instant cast debuff to start the process.

      “The beast enters a state of heightened aggression. It’s strength is doubled. It can be damaged, but not killed.”

      I definitely like your suggestions. I also agree that spawn timers and “mechanics” for rares need to be adjusted.

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