When gains start slowing from Polar bears and walruses, its time to move onto bigger game. You will still be gaining every now and then from polar bear and walrus Re-tames (Animals previously tamed by another tamer). However your primary animals you gain from will now be the Snow Leopard and white wolf. You will also be working with occasional Great Hearts at this phase.
The place to get Snow leopards and White wolves in abundance is in the northern snow cap of T2a, they can be found in plenty back on ICE island, however the high number of re-tames often puts them out of you skill level, and you will need a LARGE pool of available animals to tame, so your going to work both locations all through your power hours, and any additional time you care to spend.
At this new location you need to watch out for the ICE trolls, but a much more serious danger is the snow elementals, just standing next to them gives you cold damage, their are also ICE snakes, by themselves they are mostly a Nuisance, but since most tamers wear only leather armor, or no armor they can work your health bar down after a while. There is also the Giant Ice Serpent here :) This is the same one that will occasionally have a glacial staff as loot, if you have time don't hesitate to hunt a few of them down, finding a glacial staff might pay your reagent bill for the next few months.
Since there are so many predators (monsters) here at the Ice cap, there is a high cycle rate of released animals and new animals spawning. I would make this your first stop of the day, then work ICE island, then Deluca and back here, usually there are mostly newly spawned animals by the time you get back to the Ice cap.
At some point your skill gain will start slowing a bit, and you are going to have to start using a higher animal to keep getting good power hour and off hour gains. From a purely skill difficulty standpoint Grizzly Bears, Great Harts, Snakes and Giant Spiders are all in the your current gain zone with a taming difficulty of 59.1.
Grizzly bears are good, but hard to find in sufficient numbers in any one or two locations, tame those that you come across but you will want to use Great hearts because they have a more reliable spawn.
Giant Spiders and Snakes can be used as well, but for some reason not a lot of people like to practice taming on those.....
Great Hearts are a good Choice.
In between White wolf and snow leopard runs, your going to recall to Barrier Isle (Strip of Land east of Trinsic) or Deluca and try and tame some Great Hearts. Delucca has a good population of great hearts that are in the hills outside the front (east) gates. Barrier isle has an even denser population, but since there are often red NPCs here, its sometimes beyond the tamers ability to "survive" long enough to tame the great hearts here. You will probably need to visit several locations each power hour. In the beginning when your skill is still in the low 60s you will almost never tame one, however you will still get good power hour gains.
All the Red dots are frequent Great heart spawn points that are near the city of Deluca
As your building the skill up you will start having better and better successes with Great Hearts and want to spend more time working with them then white wolves and snow leopards. In addition to the hills just outside of the east gates of Delucca great hearts spawn all over the place, beyond the hills there, just outside the north gate along the road, in Tamers Canyon just outside of the Northwest Gate, and to the plains north of that until you meet the river.
When you hit 71.1 skill don't fall into the trap that almost every tamer at this stage falls into.
"Bulls..."
Two things change for you at this level.
1. Power hour becomes far less effective for gaining during failures. Its still a great time to tame, but you wont be getting this Crazy Skill gain from it.
2. There are not very many bulls compared to the amount of people trying to tame them. Taming is an incredibly powerful skill, and keeping the Bull supply low is one way that OSI controls how easy it is to build up a tamer. It might sound unfair, but really that is a good thing. Some people absolutely hate tamers, that is usually because some kid managed to build a tamer up to a decent level, bought some dragons and went around being a Lamer to everyone he met. A lamer in a dungeon is bad enough, a Lamer with a Dragon can be extremely disruptive. Its the reason that its one of the more difficult skills to raise and that taming takes as much time as it does.
At 71.1 most people recommend you drop it all and start up with Bulls during power hour, that advice is HORRABLE, true most people did it that way, but most people spent too long training taming up, and few actually reach GM.
Stick with mainly great hearts until you hit 74.5-75 You can still try the occasional bull from 71.1 on, however you have those two things working against you that we mentioned earlier (The less potent power hours, and the shortage of bulls to tame on)
Barrier Isle
Not to long from now all those Snow Elementals will not seem soo tough.
