Help a noob

You can actually get one of those Strider-birds that you see walking around
or the boar near the entrance of the city of Ascalon where the rogue bull is or in the across the wall quest.

What you do is you talk to the Tamer that is next to Ranger master Nente and she will take you animal away from you so you can get another one.

Careful though, Stiders are level 1-3 at best and the Boars are level 2. So do this at the beggining or your animal will be lower level than you. The Melandru's stalker is level 5 so it's a really good companion pre-searing.
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Elementalist. Later you get skills later called: Conjures. They add more damage to bows that you have that have the same elemental atribute (ex cold dmg bow+conjure cold = lotsa extra cold damage).

Mesmer. Rangers are good at stopping ennemies from casting and the mesmer is the spellcasting counterpart of the ranger in that sence. Put them together and you'll be a very good interupter which really helps later on in the game because their are alot of spellcasting creatures.

Monk. A ranger monk would make you more self relient than others.

P.S You don't need to delete a character to go back to pre-searing you can make a new one. Besides, doing all the quests in pre-searing isn't really important

lol, i have a warthog which is now level 8. so i guess i have a friend for life.

funbun - it's quite funny because I keep doing pre-searing (trying new builds, get them to Shiverpeaks then re-start as something else.. LOL) and i keep finding things I hadn't spotted before. Sure they are only little things that I find amazing and/or pretty or just interesting, but for me that's the magic of exploring pre-searing whenever I end up there again. I like trying to see if I can spot something i've enever spotted before, or try and find an area I've never been before.

Some might find pre-searing boring and want to move on asap - thats their choice as they play to have fun their way. I say good for them. However you need to realize some people don't play that way, they like to take their time and see what they can see and just enjoy things. I saw good on these people and wish them their fun.

TimberOwl - it's just like people in reality. Most people are impatient and just want to GoGoGo! The thing is they either have work or school commitments they need to make, so have limited time to play games and thus want to rush through everything to get to the end as fast as possible.

Course they then whine and complain that the game is boring and too shallow or too short, etc and so on. LOL! Their own fault.. I still laugh to think that there were people who were doing the last PvE storline missions the day after the game was released. Talk about rushing through the game... *shrugs*

But anyways, as for pre-searing.. I'd say do what you want to do. Just make sure to do all the quest's for your primary & secondary profession's as well as the "Primary" quest's and then do a;ll the other quest's if you feel like it. It's your game, have fun the way you want.