Train Animal Skill Feat, does it have a use?

[DoomedDruid]

The Train Animal Skill Feat makes no sense to me. One of my players is building a ranger for the playtest and wanted to know what tricks he could teach his animal companion using Train Animal, so I took a look.

Train Animal states that you can teach tricks listed in the Command an Animal action. However, when looking at Command an Animal, the only tricks I can see are those listed in the sentence: "Most animals know the Leap, Seek, Stand, Stride and Strike basic actions". But if an animal already knows those actions, what use does teaching them those actions have? Isn't that completely redundant?

And if there are tricks that most animals don't know and could be taught, you would expect to find them in the Command an Animal section, as stated by the Train Animal feat. Since this isn't the case, to me it seems as if Train Animal is a completely useless feat.

I hope that some of you have some ideas!

[Fuzzypaws]

They forgot to put it in the playtest book. Hopefully they'll remember for the final version or issue an errata in the meantime. (Also hopefully they'll break handling and riding an animal into its own Handling skill and not require a feat to be able to ride.)

[Charon Onozuka]

Since I haven't seen any errata about it yet, wanted to bump this thread as I recently ran into the same confusion when trying to figure out how the Train Animal feat worked.

[Franz Lunzer]

About a month later, I now have the same question: What's the use of Train Animal? What tricks can the animal be taught?

[Charlie Bell]

Train Animal... what would you say you do here?

[Arkandru Pavlencas]

Same question. I’m building a level 5 ranger for Arclord’s Envy and cant figure out whether I need to use this feat or the Command an Animal action at all with respect to my animal companion.

[Edge93]

Arkandru Pavlencas wrote:

Same question. I’m building a level 5 ranger for Arclord’s Envy and cant figure out whether I need to use this feat or the Command an Animal action at all with respect to my animal companion.

For an animal companion at least you just need to Command an Animal, spending 1 action per round to give them 2. Also if you have a Hunted Target, if you don't spend an action to command on your turn the companion still gets one action to Stride toward your target or Strike them.