Griffin

The Griffin is one of the Creatures in ARK: Survival Evolved. It is one of the new Creatures from the Expansion Map Ragnarok. It is hard to tame and is not breedable. They are mythical creatures from Greek Mythology, portrayed as lions with the wings and head of a bird of prey.

Behavior
Aggressive and easily distracted so bringing multiple flyers would make obtaining one difficult.

Appearance
It is a chimera with a lion's body, tail and two hind legs, and with the wings, head, and talons on the two front legs of an Eagle. They are predominantly various shades of brown, but can sometimes be found red out in the wild. The face and belly can also be white.

Combat
This section describes how to fight against a wild Griffin.

General
Griffins are often seen alone or in a pair, most commonly among trees or at the top of cliffs. They have a rather wide aggression radius, and will chase a survivor for long distances before disengaging. Special care should be taken to be aware of your surroundings, as even the small amount of knock back dealt by their attacks might push a survivor to a death at the base of a ravine.

Strategy
The Griffin is a surprisingly resilient opponent, and does not appear to take the bonus damage from ranged weapons that other flying creatures do. Fortunately, their attacks also appear to be somewhat weak in comparison to other flying creatures of the same level, and easily avoided owing to their large turning radius. Griffins might occasionally attack a survivor from the ground. They seem to be easily distracted, and are prone to switching targets.

A good strategy would be to deal the first hit with a long-range weapon such as a gun, or bow and arrow. From there, the griffin will chase you. For this part of the strategy, you'll either need a lot of stamina and movement speed, or a fast mount with rider weaponry. By getting the griffin to chase you, it will follow you in a straight line, instead of circling you, allowing for a clear shot to the head. Once you're far enough away to stay clear of its attacks, but close enough to land a few hits on it with your ranged weapon, shoot it in the head. Alternate running away from it and attacking it until it begins to flee. Once it starts to run, chase it and continue to shoot it. Make sure there are no other griffins nearby, as they will aggro and attack you if you're not careful. Keep firing at it until it either goes unconscious or dies.

Weaponry
Ranged weapons and pikes seem to be particularly effective, owing to their propensity to circle the player at short range. Be mindful of other hostiles in the area, as the areas they spawn are home to many Carnotaurus and Terror Birds. Mounts with a wide area of effect attack and decent damage such as the Rex will make short work of these creatures.

Danger
This creature does decent damage (a wild level 150 deals around 120) and will kill you if not careful.

The griffin also has a powerful dive-bomb attack.

Weakness
Its turning radius is atrocious, so one can stand and it'll simply fly around you.

Taming Strategy
Though difficult to tame, it may be worth attempting to tame a Griffin as high a level as possible since they are not breedable and you therefore cannot breed for better stat mutations. Knock the Griffin out, make sure to make a pen that it cannot get out of, as its torpor raises closer to max it'll fly away and it'll be impossible to knock it out. They don't take up a lot of narcotics. When caught in a pen the Griffin can enter a "panic state" behavior, camera shake will be massive, can be turned off in options.

Grab one Pteranodon, at least 5 stone dinosaur gateways, and 2 gates. Set them down in a row leaving a space to walk out and put a gate on each end, keep one end closed, then you aggro the griffin and bring it back to the trap. When you are near speed up and get off the Pteranodon. Aggro the griffin on foot leading it into the pen and walk out of the side, then go around and close the open door. It is now trapped. The griffin can now be tranquilized at leisure and will be protected from other wild dinosaurs, although beware of attacks through the walls.

Another way to tame a griffin is to make a small pen made out of stone, grab a Pteranodon with high stamina and a tamed dodo. Griffins like to aggro on anything that isn't you, so with a Pteranodon holding a dodo you can lure it in a pen.

Griffins can be captured and reeled in by a Bloodstalker. This can be utilized for taming griffins easily by placing down a wall of stone doorframes in between you and a wild griffin. Using this tactic, you can use a Bloodstalker and position yourself to reel it in between the doorframes and hop off to tranq it; the doorframes will prevent the Bloodstalker from automatically reeling it in and begin eating it.

A simple, early game method for taming a griffin is use its huge turning circle against it and let it fly around you while hitting it with tranq darts. It does have a relatively high base torpor, so make sure you bring plenty of tranq arrows. You may need to do some circle strafing to keep out of its way, but it is possible to do it without being hit a single time. Eventually it will flee once its torpor is high enough - chase it down with a fast mount (Such as a Sabertooth) and get the last few tranq darts in while it flies away, being careful not to aggro anything in the process.

Keep in mind its torpor drains extremely quickly, while its food drains relatively slowly, so prepare plenty of narcotics beforehand.

Make sure to monitor the Griffin's health, as it may die if you use tranq arrows, so it's highly recommended to use tranq darts or shocking tranq darts with a longneck rifle.

Another way is to use a Griffin to take out a Griffin while shooting Tranq darts from its back.

Roles

 * Carrier: The Griffin is a fast flyer, and a rider who has it tamed can pick up players and small-class dinosaurs. (Level Health and Weight)
 * Combatant: The Griffin is a land and air predator. It has a dive bomb attack that thrusts you towards the ground for quite a bit of damage. You can pound the ground for three times your base damage, or dive and pull horizontal and attack with your base attack for ten to fifteen times more damage than your landing attack. (Level Health and Damage)
 * Keep in mind, a player who is holding an item CANNOT dive attack with a Griffin. So make sure your hands are empty! Even things like es and maps count.
 * Aerial Firing Platform: The Griffin can carry two riders, both of which can use their weapons whilst flying. This combined with its ability to strafe sideways makes it useful in chasing down wild creatures for taming, or as a gunship in PvP. (Level Health and Weight)
 * Energy Dogfighter: The extreme increase in speed whilst diving allows the Griffin to easily escape aerial engagements by simply going for the deck. Much of this speed is retained when pulling out of the dive into level flight, and the momentum can even be used to regain some lost altitude. Though the Griffin suffers in air-to-air combat due to its poor turn radius in level flight, practicing 'boom and zoom' tactics is a viable alternative. (Level Stamina)
 * Wyvern Egg Collector: With its high base speed, dual passenger seat and skydive ability, the Griffin makes an ideal egg picker mount. Using a whip makes this very viable. (Level Stamina and Health)
 * Taming Assist: Due to their ability to lean forward in midair, even a single person can easily shoot s and darts at any creature while staying out of their AOE. This comes with the additional benefit that most creatures will stay perfectly still facing towards the player. Griffins also have a decent movement speed allowing you to catch escaping carnivores. In singleplayer it is possibly the best dino to bring along to tame a as you can fly after the Quetzal while  shooting at it. (Level Stamina and Weight)

Carrying
A Griffin is capable of carrying smaller creatures and Human players.

Currently on official, and most unofficial, PVE servers, wild animals may not be picked up to prevent griefing.

Carry-able Creatures
The Griffin is capable of carrying the following creatures:

Though not stated in the above table, the in its small form can also be picked by the Griffin.

Notes/Trivia

 * Warning: When attacking out of a dive, it is possible to strike your target before your attack completes, which turns a Diving Swipe maneuver into a Dive Bomb, and places the Griffin in Walk mode. It can be difficult to tell that you are not, in fact, flying, and severe or even fatal fall damage may result when you strike the ground. If you suspect this may have happened, quickly press the jump key to resume flying.
 * In real life, Griffins are speculated to have been inspired by fossils of Protoceratops, an earlier relative of that lived in Mongolia.
 * The Griffin can strafe, go backwards, and go forwards, like the and Tropeognathus.
 * Before Patch 259, in singleplayer, whenever one pressed the sprint button while aiming downwards on a Griffin to dive, the rider would lose HP due to the G-force and for some players the instant they began diving they would lose 25% of their max life.
 * After Patch 275.4, the following changes were made to the Griffin: Base hp reduced by 30%, hp gained per level(wild) reduced by 25%, hp gained per level(tamed) reduced by 22%, base stamina reduced by 10%, diving swipe damage reduced by 50%, and dive bomb damage reduced by 25%.
 * Wild Griffin can't harm Wild creatures, but will still proceed to attack them relentlessly.
 * The dossier name translates as Magnificent Griffin.
 * It's actually easy to tell whether your Griffin will use its dive swipe or not. (Right claw is normal swipe, left claw is dive swipe, so its left claw is 5x stronger than its right claw.
 * Both and Griffin are the only creatures whose Creature Dossier couldn't be obtained.
 * Tamed Griffins have the ability to remove Leeches from the player’s character (This only works for tamed Griffins).
 * Tamed Griffins can easily out-fly a Wyverns and at times overpower one too. As far as we know this can only be achieved if leveled up properly. They are very helpful for exploring due to their speed and power to defend against wild carnivorous dinos (Dilphosaurs, Raptors, Compys, etc.) and like mentioned above, a Griffin’s left claw attack is much stronger than its right.
 * Even though the Griffin was featured in the Valguero map trailer, it cannot actually be found there.
 * They are found in Crystal Isles however, sharing the same biome spawn as Crystal Wyvern Heir.
 * Gender of a Griffin is not assigned by the game, making players unable to breed them.