Venomancer Tanking

Tanking
Tanking means "Getting the monster to hit you instead of everyone else." A successful tank will have lots of defense and hitpoints. They will also have skills to make the enemy hit them instead of others. Venomancers do not, usually, make particularly effective tanks.Their pets, however, do.

Basic Pet Tanking
The basic routine is the following:


 * 1) Send your pet to hit the monster.
 * 2) The monster starts hitting your pet.
 * 3) Hit the monster yourself.
 * 4) The monster keeps hitting your pet.

You have to be careful to not pull the monster off your pet. The safest way to do this is to ensure that you do less damage to the monster than your pet. However, it is relatively safe to pull a melee monster off your pet if you are able to kill it before it reaches you.

Your team-mates will most likely deal more damage than you, so you have to inform them to hold back on their damage and let the pet generate enough aggro.

Gaining Pet Aggro

 * 1) You have to manually use the skills. Your pet will only auto-attack with the first skill in the list, by default.  Either change the default skill by right clicking, or left-click (or use Alt+2,3,4) to trigger them manually.
 * 2) You want to have high level skills on your pet. This means buying skill books at the Zoologist and leveling them up.
 * 3) You want them to be skills which deal damage. Bash is the most obvious choice, but the set of elemental bashes (Lightning, Sandblow, Toxic Mist etc.) are all just as good. Flesh-ream can work as a secondary skill.

If you have a second Venomancer pulling for you, then you will want your pet to perform the other important function of a tank - grabbing the monster before it reaches them. Stand between where they run back to and the monster, send your pet to attack before the monster arrives (but not so soon that you lure his friends) and generally emulate a real tank as well as you can.

Multiple Monsters
Your pet attacks something, all his friends turn and start in on your pet. You heal your pet. Now, all of a sudden, almost every monster turns around and blows you away. This is because whilst your pet attacking their friend generates a little bit of aggro, your healing the pet generates a lot.

In a situation with a lot of monsters, if you don't want to be stuck with most of them yourself:


 * 1) Have your pet hit them all at least once before you throw any heals.
 * 2) Or, at least, hit the ranged and magic ones. Your pet may be able to attack the melee ones before they reach you.
 * 3) Don't throw mass amounts of damage onto the ones your pet is not currently attacking.
 * 4) This means avoid using your AoE (Area of Effect) skills.
 * 5) This also means avoiding using your DoT (Damage Over Time) skills. Because these will keep doing damage even if you have shifted your pet onto a new target.
 * 6) If they're close to death, you can just kill them.
 * 7) If you start a cast and the pet is about to kill it, switch the pet onto a new target or abort the spell (hit escape).

Monsters have the tendency to wander around and respawn on top of you. A single-monster situation can easily turn into a multiple-monster situation without warning.

Keeping Pet Aggro
Your pet mustn't stop attacking.

Pet Death
If your pet dies, then you may be screwed. All that aggro you took? You still have it. Your newly summoned pet has none.


 * 1) If you didn't damage the monster yourself (or didn't damage it much), then this is the same as Venomancer Luring.  Get some range, summon a new pet, and go.
 * 2) If the monster is close to death, finishing it off may be faster than trying to summon a new pet.
 * 3) If you've got friends with you, have them attack it. Although Wizards and Clerics are probably in an even worse situation.
 * 4) Kite the monster instead of tanking it.
 * 5) Don't forget that you've got a pretty good arsenal of defensive skills. You can afford to get injured occasionally.

Switching Targets
Sometimes you need to switch the pet onto a different target for a while. Maybe it just popped, maybe something decided to hit the Cleric and so on. This is pretty simple to deal with; stop hitting the old monster, and start hitting the new one. Make sure everyone else realizes too.

Resting
Sometimes your pet may stop attacking for a while. It might happen due to lug and terrain bugs. It can happen if you are outside and using a flying pet; especially if the target monster moves. The pet will often get stuck trying to fly through the ground to reach the monster, and stop hitting it. This can happen inside dungeons as well, where in monsters run to places the pet can't reach them.

All that can be done is to watch out for these. If you don't notice, you might pull unwanted aggro. You can use the follow command to persuade your pet to move somewhere new, and attack from there. Unsummoning your pet should be a last resort if you've already damaged the monster yourself.

Roar
Roar (the pet skill, not the Barbarian skill) makes the monster aggro your pet. It clears all of the aggro generated by any previous skill and then adds a small amount to your pet. The monster will attack your pet next, but it doesn't take very much effort for you (or others) to pull the monsters off of your pet again, especially since all the aggro your pet has been building up is now gone as well.

You can grab the boss off of a Cleric quickly, or ease the damage a tank is taking but occasionally redirecting the boss's attention to your pet. This is especially useful for tanks aren't geared enough to survive boss hits but can barely making by having the tank and the pet switch aggro from time to time.

Use with caution. It's a bad default skill, but a very useful emergency skill.

Tanking Yourself
Sometimes you may be the best choice of tank rather than your pet, usually because of your gear.

This is one of the few times that you can really stretch and unload your arsenal. Spam Venomous and Ironwood as soon as it recharges. No need to heal your pet, no need to stop. Use your Spark Burst skills. Make sure your pet doesn't out damage you. You may need to turn off its aggro dealing skills for a while. If you have Howl on a pet, use it to make the boss take more magic damage from you. Alternatively, a Cleric or a Stormbringer can use their own magic defense debuffs.


 * (In case it isn't clear, by staying at range and using magic attacks, you cause Krixxix to use his magical attack in return. Others, including your pet, can hit him at close range, but as long as you keep aggro, he will ignore them.  Be careful though, many bosses have an AoE and can hit you all at once...)

Hercules
The Hercules is the best tanking pet, although a few pets with defense buffs and reflect can tank pretty well too.


 * It has a huge defense, and a long-lasting buff to massively increase that defense.
 * If has a huge magic defense, and a long-lasting buff to massively increase that defense.
 * It has high HP.
 * It doesn't have high attack, but it has reflect which is an important means for pre-evolution Hercules to keep aggro.

Reflect and AoE Grinding
Reflect works in the same way as your Bramble buff. When a monster hits the Hercules, a big chunk of that damage is sent right back at that monster. With the high of defense that the Hercules has, monsters will kill themselves on the reflect before they can kill the Hercules.

This reflected attack counts as your Hercules hitting the monster, and generates aggro. This means that you can have your Hercules concentrate on one monster whilst the others create plenty of aggro even though the Hercules is ignoring them. So you can, amongst other things, heal the Hercules before you have had it hit everything in the area.

The disadvantage of reflect is that it only works on melee physical attacks. It won't help you with ranged attacks, or magic attacks. To get the most out of reflect, you want to have as many monsters as possible hitting it so that the most total damage is done in the time.

Ranged and Magic Monsters
You have to have your pet hit them the old fashioned way. There are also several monsters which have both a ranged and a physical attack. These will happily attack you from range, but if you or your pet gets in their melee range they will start using melee attacks. These monsters won't chase your pet.

If you have a pet with a ranged attacks then you can often force a monster to use its magical attack instead of a physical attack. This is useful if the monsters ranged attack is particularly weak, compared to its physical attack. Which is a fairly rare situation, but worth knowing about.