contemplating upping the bar on some of the easy to train critters, but not sure on this since the passives on them is so low... may wait for that til I get the others up there first?... Will make it seem easy after doing all these hard ones I suppose? There is a major difference in how long it takes each critter's focus to get up to 100% or 99% with the various tricks... so far left right combo on boxer seems to take the longest to come back up, but I suspect it also gives most experience. Haven't really paid a lot of attention to how much exp each gives, but see that some others in forum have done those types of tests...
I suspect that eventually Mindark is going to continue to tweak things, so make certain objectives harder and others easier over time?... ah, speculation...
I've still had some thoughts in the back of my head about moving to other planets, but since many of the critters can't be exported til they reach a certain level, I suspect I'll be on Calypso for a long while til that goal is reached (well, may move a while around Halloween or Xmas to collect the freebie yearly gifts, but we'll see... may give up on that endeavor?... but maybe not... kinda depends on how many item slots will still be left in apartments after the zoo eats em up.)
As far as the bristlehogs go, the 'corner' by the beach near PA mall is interesting. On the little island by the tree, that corner is where they congegrate. I suspect the spawn point is in the center of the hill there, but most of them migrate down the hill towards the tree, so if you stay on the outside edges of the beach or top level of the hill, you can easily do one critter at a time... near the bottom of the hill you easily get swarmed with about 5 at a time, and more show up every half minute or so. I'm usually taking on 2-3 at a time so that I can let the health bars repair enough to attempt tames easily... The viper's low damage and low attack per minute speed means you can hit one mob with it, turn around to the other, hit it, and by the time you are back to the first one they have had time to heal enough to take another hit usually.
I could probably go tame the hell out of the critters north of Archipeligo, but choose not to at the moment since I don't like the fact that the revive there is so far from a tp... (well that, and I'm a bit of a 'mall rat' so hanging out near the mall just makes sense to my avatar, lol)... probably more skills per mob there, but if I'm just juicing them anyways, doing lowest cost to kill taming mob seems the way to go, especially since upping the prereq bar is set at a specific rate per mob... Also the slow old viper whip forces me in to a lower cost per hour than taming there would be. Typically at the moment I'm using the cobra for first hit, and then viper to finish up the tame. I sometimes use moccasin too, but it's low max tt value makes it not work too well vs the higher tt value of the viper or cobra... has to be repaired a lot more often. (someday, when I get around to it I'll repair this old embra c1 with it's high tt value and go for some extended hunts somewhere for a while. Mindark if you are reading this, please introduce some way in game to upgrade these to the adjusted version since as far as I know at the moment there's no way to do that even though the regular and adjusted version both exist in game...)
Rifi Mentor Edition Armor seems to work fairly well for these little guys. It is likely overprotection, but in some ways it seems to be holding up better than the adjusted pixie was... Probably since the pixie needed a repair I'm guessing? Wonder when Mindark will make the skill level thing on armor go in game?