Welcome to ICE island, your going to spend most of your time as a young tamer here.
The main thing you will be taming here is Polar bears and walruses, it is possible to tame here long past 65 (on white wolves, snow leopards, and re-tames of polar bears and walruses) however there are significantly more effective places to go, so I only recommend staying here exclusively up to about 65. You will still make frequent trips back to ICE isle after 65, but this shouldn't be your only source of training animals.
The island is chalk full of Polar bears and walruses, a lot of people only tame the bears, but you can tame either they are identical as far as the game is concerned (both are 35.1 taming difficulty). There are a lot of tamers that train up on ICE isle, but there is almost always more than enough animals for everyone to tame, so its an Excellent location.
The other thing that makes it so good is the high amount of re-tames you will run into, each time an animal is tamed (by a different tamer) its taming difficulty increases. (Check the taming skill table In the guide) Because of re-tames the island will still be the prime training location from 55-65
There are a few things you should know.
1-Orc camps spawn all over the place, they can be a serious concern if you have a new character, or a very poor connection. In addition to the Orc camps there are ICE trolls, ICE trolls hit hard, and have a huge armor class, Just for the heck of it I tamed 7 Polar bears and had them all attack a single ICE troll at the same time, he killed them all.... Don't fool with them unless you have some combat experience.
2-If you do die, There is a Shrine on the island that you can "Rez" (Resurrect) at, you should be carrying a charged rune book in your pack just for this case, because your on an Island, if you die and forget to have a charged rune book back to the mainland your going to be here until you find someone that can gate and is willing to gate. The entrance to Deceit is a good place for "thumbing a ride".
You are basicly going to tame as many polar bears and walruses as you can, the vast numbers of them in this place will leave you never having to search far for a target. I have never been able to make a complete loop of the island in a single power hour taming all the polar bears and walruses I see. Starting at one end, and working your way around the mountain so you dont re-tame the same animal twice. Animals that -you- tame twice will not give you skill gain the second time, but animals that another tamer has tamed and released/went wild are harder to tame, and will give you a good skill gain.
Those animals (tamed and released) are called Re-tames, they are harder to tame the second time around (and the 3rd, 4th, and 5th). Because they are harder to tame, you have a better chance of gaining skill from them. The very high number of re-tames walking around ICE island makes it an Excellent spot until your in the 65 skill range.
Even when you hit 65 skill in taming you will still be making regular stops on ICE isle to tame the snow leopards and white wolves in the area.
As a final note. When taming you must practice the "Tame, Name, and Release" Method.
Tame the animal
Change its name so people know its been tamed. I change all the names of my animals to "one" and if I'm taming a re-tame I change it to "two" etc so other tamers know how many times the animal has been tamed. But even just changing the animals name to "a" works fine.
Release Whatever you change the animals names to that you practice with is what you might put into a release speech macro. If you use "a" then you would put "a" into a speech macro that says "a release". Its possible to use "all release" but I would strongly recommend against that. If you have "all release" set up on your keyboard eventually it will happen and at the worse time. You will be out with a Dragon or Wyrm in heavy combat, hitting keys as fast as you can... and you will try and gate, or heal and the "all release" macro will go off. Been there, Done that, Don't want to do it again!
You will soon be able to tame Frenzied Ostards,
they can tear an Etton limb from limb FAST.
