Editing Venomancer Tanking (section)

=== Gaining Pet Aggro ===

The first, most important thing here is:
:'''Use high-level damage-dealing skills'''

This splits out into several smaller pieces of advice:
# You have to ''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.
# You want to have high level skills on your pet.  This means buying skill books at Mrs (or Mr) Zoologist.
# 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 and pierce work too.  These are often available cheaply in the auction house, or you can go to the zoologists.

Now, of these skills, Bash (and the bash-like skills) are probably the best to start with.  They have the advantage of having a very short recharge time (short enough that if you put four on a pet then that pet will probably never get a normal attack in).

They also do respectable amounts of damage, which is good in and of itself.

Flesh Ream has the advantage of generating a little bit of aggro when the bleed ticks, which gives you a bit more flexibility.

Pierce doesn't really draw enough aggro to be useful for that purpose.  It can save you casting Ironwood scarab (which tends to draw aggro) though.

As a side tip, if you are lucky enough to 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 pelts them.  Stand between where they run back to and the monster, send your pet to the 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.