Animal Handling working strangely

[Zov]

Hi everyone,

I've been observing some strange behaviour with Animal Handling.

If you have a high level Animal Handling, you can powerlevel your secondary skill really fast.

For example, if you take Druidism as your secondary skill.

When you enter a fight, and have your pet on assist, and don't use any skills, all the experience goes into Druidism when the mob dies. This means, you just agro the mob with a body pull, and have the pet kill it, and you get FULL EXP on the other skill. I would have thought, if the pet does damage, it would contribute to animal taming EXP, but that is not true.

To me it doesn't make sense.

Similarly, if you don't have your pet out, and kill a mob with your other skill, the experience is shared between other skill and Animal Handling.

It seem strange to me. If pet is out, you should get experience in Animal Handling if the pet attacks at all. If pet isn't out, you shouldn't get any experience in Animal Handling.

Just wondering what the rationale was for the current implementation.

Thanks,

[Tagamogi]

Combat xp is generally awarded for skills that you use during combat or shortly before. If you use any of the animal handling abilities on your hot bar, you should get animal handling xp for a fight. If you just have your pet attack and don't use any animal handling abilities yourself, you would not get any animal handling xp. (I believe your pet should still get xp for itself towards its next level, but I'm not 100% sure how this part works.)

If you don't use either of your combat skills during combat but get xp for one of them, you most likely used that skill's abilities shortly before combat - quite possibly Hunter's Stride for druid since that's a pretty frequent cast. I don't remember the exact timer, but skills used a minute or so before the current combat will still get combat xp. You can see this effect too with first aid or armor patching - if you use either skill towards the end of a fight and then move on to a new fight, you are likely to get first aid/armor patching xp for the following fight or two as well, even if you don't use the ability again.

[Zov]

Hi Tagamogi

Ah that makes sense now. Thanks for clearing up how the mechanics works.