Venomancer Luring

A form of Aggro management, specific to the Venomancer class. Indeed, the major reason to have a Venomancer in a group. (Although their sustained damage output doesn't hurt. Wait, it does hurt. Which is good. Oh, you know what I mean.)

This can be a bit tricky to get right, but done properly is a completely safe way to draw a single monster out of a crowd.

I'm sure there are many more tricks out there. But these are the ones I know.

TODO: Pictures. Lots and lots of pictures.

Basic Principle

When a monster is attacked, it calls for help from all of its friends. That can be very bad. But if the thing attacking them vanishes then they go back to what they were doing.

So you hit them with your pet, unsummon them, and all the friends go home, whilst the one you hit comes a-running. Simple.

Have your pet on 'manual' rather than 'auto' attack. Otherwise monster AOE will often make your pet change its mind about what to attack, which could be very bad.

Simple Luring

The absolute simplest form of luring is this:

Choose the monster you want to kill first.

Make sure you're near enough that it will come to you once your pet hits it, but not so near that all of the monsters attack right away.

Just on the edge of your minimap at the most-zoomed-in level is just about perfect, though you can safely be closer to most monsters. Much further away than that and either the pet will fail to attack, or the monster will fail to come to you.

Now, send your pet in to attack. If it has a skill active, then make sure it's one that does damage. Slow or Howl are not sufficient.

Wait for a real attack to be started by your pet. If you ignored the above instruction this takes a bit longer.

Now you have two choices:

1. Store the pet in its bag.
2. Let the pet die.

Either of these will cause the monster that your pet hit to come to you, without his friends.

Important: Do not hit the 'follow me' button and have your pet run back to you that way, this will bring every monster in the neighbourhood.

Important: Do not cast a spell on the monster, attack the monster, run towards the monster, or heal your pet. Don't allow anyone else in your team to do so either! This would also cause all the monsters to come running.

(Of course, this only applies when luring. If you want a whole stack of monsters to come to you, then go ahead.)

Now, the monster is running towards you. Once it is away from its friends, you can cast spells on it, or resummon your pet and have your pet kill it, or have a little tea party, or whatever it takes to make the monster die.

Helping the Tank

A tank is a veno's best friend. (Well, a tank with a cleric is better still) Be friendly to your tanks!

After you pull the monster, it will continue to chase you for a little while, so you can get cute.

Run back so that the tank is between you and the monster. The monster will run past the tank, completely ignoring him, and the tank can smack it from behind. Tanks really like it when they don't have to chase monsters all over the place.

Now you can blow the monster up with spells, or resummon your pet, or whatever.

Tricks

There are a few things you can do to get cute and do even better. You may need some practice with these, though.

Abort!

Aborting a pull, if your pet hasn't got there yet, is easy. Unsummon the pet. Don't panic, don't do anything else. Just unsummon the pet.

If your pet has hit a monster, you've pulled. It's too late. You will bring that monster. Anything you tell your pet to do at this point will only bring more.

All you can do is try to lose that monster. If you can get out of range, then that monster will start towards you, give up, and go back.

To put this simply: Run away. Running (or better, flying, dropping into a lake - whatever it takes that the monster can't reach you) away is all that you can do.

Unsummoning your pet will slow you down. It may well be better to just let your pet die. If you get far enough away (including getting into the air/sea) then your pet will automatically unsummon anyway.

To Delay the Pull: Let your Pet Die

Seriously. Your pet is expendable. Yes, you have to buy food to get the loyalty back, but compared to a barbarians repair bill you can swallow that expense.

If you are worried about not having enough time to do everything you need to do, because some wandering monster decided to eat your cleric whilst you were pulling - then just forget your pet and deal with the immediate problem.

This has the added advantage that the monsters will take a second or two to chew through your pet (maybe even longer, depending on what you sent) so your group won't have to deal with that problem for a while.

Full On Sacrifice

Ok, the monster is going to come to you. You can't get out of range in time, and it's sure to wipe out your group.

All you can do now is take one for the team. Run in towards the monster and die.

Now your pet is gone, you are gone - and unless your team followed you in, the monster has no aggro on anything and will go back.

You're dead. Your cleric isn't. This is much much better than the alternative.

Still, try not to let it happen in the first place, ok?

Fast Monsters

The monster is too fast for you to get back and resummon your pet? It's hitting on you (and not in a good way)?

My friend, you need 'slow'. Slow is a wonderful pet skill, causing the monsters run-speed to be drastically reduced. Great when soloing. (In a group, it's not so much of a problem, because someone else will usually pull the monster off of you.)

Even better, some pretty good luring pets have have the slow skill built in. Many wolves have it (though not your starting wolf) and they are good luring pets anyway, since they generally have a high runspeed (again, not your starting wolf).

It's not a perfect skill;

Firstly - slow alone won't cause the monster to come running, you need to do physical damage. A useful trick here is to click (or use the Alt+2/3/4 key) one of the skills which is not the default skill when you send the pet in.

This will cause your pet to use that skill first, and then the default skill. Which should be enough.

Secondly - slow can be resisted. Monsters with a high magic resist will often ignore it. The solution here, of course, is for your pet to have be a high level, and have a high level of the slow skill.

Slow doesn't last very long - so make sure you unsummon the pet quickly after it starts to cast it. It is best for your pet to use its attack skill first, and then the slow, for this reason.

Drawing More Than One

Isn't the whole point of luring to get only a single monster? Well, no. The point is to not get more monsters than you can handle.

So if there's a pile of twenty, and your group fancies that they can take more than one (but not all of them), it's pretty simple to grab a couple.

Send your pet at one, then at another. Unsummon after it's hit them both.

Both will come to you, the rest will stay.

It is usually, however, better to pull one at a time - just pull them more often. You can have a new one coming to the group whilst they are still killing the first one. Just be sure you stop if people run out of mana!

Ranged Monsters

Ranged monsters have two problems.

The first is simple: They can hit you from further away, so you just need to run further back.

The second is that they tend to run diagonals, and run away and...

For running away, make sure that you pull them past the tank. Then when the tank hits them, they will run away from the tank, and towards everyone else. (And since there's an exception to every rule, including the exceptions: Don't do this with exploding monsters. Your 'everyone else' won't thank you.)

For the ones which run diagonally? (The casters in FB39 are probably the first you will meet which do this to any great extent) All you can do its practice. After a while you'll recognise their patterns, and you can work out where you need to stand to bring them near to the tank.

Corners

Corners, especially with monsters which can shoot through walls, can be a pain.

But there is a solution, as long as you remember that your pet can (usually) manage to navigate round corners.

Quickly pop your head round the corner, target a monster, and run away. If doing that causes them all to chase you, then sorry, I don't think you can do any better than just trying to kill them all in one go.

Presuming you were quick enough (and the genie skill 'Holy Path' is wonderful for that) then you keep them targeted whilst you get as far away as possible.

You want your final position to be a minimap radius away, but you can't let any part of the path from here to there be much further than that - your pet won't go round the whole of FB51 to get over a wall, for example.

Make sure that wherever you stop you'll have at least the monsters range in clear view - it's no good pulling it from one corner to another one.

Now send your pet in as normal. It will take longer to get to them as it wanders round the corners, but it should get there eventually.

Now unsummon, and watch the monster navigate back to you.

This will take a while, but you're trading speed for safety. You could always just rush in, instead.

Pre-Position your pet

This one is for catching really fast monsters that are roaming, when your pet is too slow. Scrunchkins in FB51 (and some in the boss room in 59) are a good example of these.

It's dangerous. Far better to use a faster pet, if you can.

Ok, warnings over. This one is actually pretty simple. All you do is have your pet follow you to somewhere you know the roaming monsters will be.

That's the dangerous part. Time it wrong, and the monsters will be there, and beat you up.

Now, hit 'halt' on your pet, and run back to somewhere safe - though not so far away that your pet will teleport back to you, or unsummon.

When the roamers turn up, have your pet hit them, unsummon your pet and continue as normal.

Don't forget to take your pet off of 'halt' mode when you're done!

Changing Target

You're at a huge risk of bringing more monsters doing this, use with care.

Send your pet towards one monster. A bunch of other monsters get drawn out of position running towards it. Before your pet attacks the first monster, switch it to attacking one of the new ones.

Use a slow pet for this, otherwise it is likely to have started its attack before you can get it switched.

This lets you attack round a corner without sticking your head out (and getting it chopped off)

If you get this wrong, however, you will pull both monsters.

The only place I've found this to be useful is FB29, where you can bring the lanterns from around the corner, by bouncing your pet off of the towerling (which can't move, so can't be accidentally pulled)

Running Away

You can start running away as soon as you send your pet to attack. This can give you a little extra range between you and the monster, giving you a bit more time to work with as it heads towards you.

Possibly useful if the monster has a large attack range, and you don't mind your pet dying.

However, be very careful. In increasing order of nastiness:

1. You might get too far away, the monster would then be unable to see you and so wouldn't be pulled. Wastes your time.
2. You might get far enough away to cause your pet to unsummon. Again, wasting the pull. Hard to do, usually the next one happens first:
3. You might get far enough away to cause your pet to teleport back before it has gotten anywhere. Wastes your time, but is a big warning sign...
4. You might get far enough away that your pet teleports back to you after it's woken up the whole crowd. And since the pet didn't vanish, just moved, they will run towards the new position. And, often, run into range to notice you before your pet unsummons. Worst of all, this might happen the other side of a wall so you don't notice until it's too late to do anything except die.

In all, I'd say this tactic has too much risk and not enough of a benefit.

Of course, if you started your pull from closer to the monsters than the maximum range, you can happily run away with out causing any problems at all. Just... be careful, alright?

It also seems that different pets have different ranges at which they are willing to attack. This may be related to run-speed. Get comfortable with what your pet can and can't do on monsters that can't kill you before you try it out in a real situation.

Instant Unsummon

If you unsummon your pet just as it takes damage, it returns instantly, and without taking the damage. And any skill it had started using will still activate.

It helps to have a pet whose attack animation is easy to see from behind.

Done right, this will mean that your pet gets its lure on, and comes back to you instantly and undamaged, ready to be resummoned for the next lure.

This trick is also really useful when killing exploding monsters such as the reverex in FB39, until you are a high enough level that your pet is sure to survive the blast. Just be sure that the monster has burn/poison/bleed/teammates or something that is sure to kill it (lest you accidentally lure an exploder onto yourself) and practice to get the timing just right.

Cacti, Eldergoth and Other Ranged Pets

There are many advantages to ranged pets, when pulling it boils down to three things:

1. They don't need to get as close to the monster, so they can often avoid getting close to the pack and so won't take damage.
2. That gives them a greater total range, meaning that the monsters starts further away from you, giving you longer to deal with it.
3. Eldergoths have a nice obvious attack animation, so you can easily time when to unsummon them.

Now, you have to be careful of a few things - you can't have a skill selected, or the pet will try to get right up close to use it first (which sort of defeats the object)

And, of course, you do still need to be near enough that the monster can see you and will come to you when your pet is unsummoned.

Things That Don't Work

(Or at least not very well)

Don't try to pull with the herc. Not just because it's a pain to put the buffs back on - but because it has reflect. This will cause it to 'attack' every monster which does a physical attack on it. You'll pull the whole lot.

Don't pull with a pet that doesn't have many hitpoints. If it dies before it hits the monster, you won't pull.

For the same reason, default skills which take ages to activate are a bad thing.

Don't use a slow pet to pull if you can help it. No only does it take longer, but it may well get hit by other monsters on the way to the one you want.

Don't be flying (or standing ankle deep in water) when you pull land monsters - they will often refuse to come to you at all.

Using an archer, or a wizard, or a genie to pull. They just aren't as good. Tame yourself a proper pet!

Good Luring Pets

There are basically three things in a good lure pet. Range, Speed, and Survival. They do not need a high attack (although it doesn't hurt) - so you can often just tame a monster of your level and get a decent one.

You want a pet which will go to a far away target, which will do it decently fast, and live to make that hit. Ideally it'll live long enough to be unsummoned.

There's always a lot of discussion about what pets are good, and it deserves its own guide, but here's a short version:

• Higher level wolves come with 'slow' and have a high run-speed. They don't have much defence, though.
• The cats (greymalkin) have a high runspeed and look pretty.
• Antelopes are reasonably fast, and have a good magic defence. Useful only in some situations, but good-enough much of the time.
• Eldergoth sharpshooters / marksmen and Cacti have a ranged attack, which gives them a special use in luring. I personally think this is overrated, however. They just can't survive if anything goes slightly wrong. Worth having up your sleeve though.
• The Shadou cub (rare pet) has a fairly high speed, and a good defence. Remember to turn off the 'pounce' skill though, since that takes a long time to channel.
• The Kowlin (rare pet) is the 'designed to be the best luring pet' pet. It is stupidly fast, and has a pounce (to stun the monster) which doesn't take ages to channel. There's some arguments about whether the Kowlin is 'worth' it, but none deny that is good. Best? That depends upon personal taste. Some prefer the ranged pets, and the Kowlin is pretty fragile. It's also not available until level 60.
• You can even use a golem. They're slow, but nothing is likely to kill them on the way to their target. Not ideal, but if you've run out of pet bag slots it can work.

--Vitenka

(Seriously, Venomancer luring is a lot more flexible than most people realise.)