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.

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 it, and all the friends go home, whilst the one you hit comes a-running. Simple.

Misbehaving Bosses

When near bosses (even if it's just a boss in the area that you don't want to have anything to do with): 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.

Center

It is also worth mentioning here that whilst luring usually works the simple way, some bosses do not follow the normal rules of Aggro and will attack whatever they darn well feel like.

A relatively low-level example of this is "Suzerix the Elder" (Found to the north west of Sumor Camp) who has a pair of wolves running with her. If you have a pet try to pull a wolf, then Suzy will Aggro on your pet - which involves running some distance away and then firing off a fan-shaped AoE. Which is quite likely to catch you, or your team. And if it does, then Suzy now has you on her hate-list. which she relatively rapidly turns into a 'kill kill kill' list.

Pulling from as far away as possible is the simplest solution in this particular case, but it gives you an idea of the problems bosses can cause.

The only advice I can give you, really, is to get used to what each boss does and to practice.

And to be very careful around bosses with an AoE.

Simple Luring

The absolute simplest form of luring is this:

Choose the monster you want to kill first.

File:Minimap MonsterAtEdge.png

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. (Even 'Pounce' can fail to pull, if only the stun portion lands.)

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.

File:PetBarGUI FollowCrossed.png

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.

Timing Notes

You can unsummon your pet as soon as you see it start to do its attack animation. The attack will still complete, and you will still lure.

If a monster hits your pet as it is unsummoning, the unsummon completes immediately and the pet is undamaged by the attack.

Both of these things let you start summoning the tank pet sooner.

The latter is also useful when fighting things which get off one final attack, or explode, when they die.

Luring Without the Pet

Ok, there are a few ways that you can lure without a pet. I'll mention them, but you shouldn't ever need them.

1. Tame pet. Tame pet doesn't do damage, so it doesn't annoy all of the monsters friends. So yes, it can be used to pull. The downside is a somewhat limited range (you might annoy the monsters just by being too near) and the stupidly long recharge time. The mana cost doesn't help either.
2. Genie skills. Most genie skills do not work for pulling any longer, they work like a normal attack. The current exception is the starter skill on a zeal genie. Again, range is an issue here.

These things will bring a monster to you, but will bring all of the nearby ones too. Still, this is useful when all you want is to bring monsters closer, or snag a wanderer, or move something whilst the wanderer is away:

1. Throw a spell at it.
2. Send your pet at it, then (with your pet on manual so that it doesn't resume the attack) hit 'follow', bringing your pet, and all the monsters interested in your pet, back to you.

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.

File:Map PullFromBehindTheTank.png

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.

(Ok, since unsummoning takes time, you can hit 'halt' and then unsummon, which might help. Especially if it's not on auto, so won't retaliate even if the monster notices it.)

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.

And, of course, the pet might attack whilst it is being unsummoned.

Do not hit 'follow'. 'Follow' is a way to bring a huge pile of monsters back to you. You're trying to cancel the pull.

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.

Note: You don't have to run away in a straight line, which could lead you into another group of monsters. You can run circles, or repeatedly jump over the monster to get it to lose interest. As long as you don't fight back (and brambles counts as fighting back) it will lose interest eventually. If you're sufficiently tougher than the monster, and for some odd reason don't want to kill it (perhaps it's a pet you want to tame) then you can run through it repeatedly, and it will eventually lose interest.

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 barbarian's 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 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 reached 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.

Another useful skill in this situation is pounce. Unfortunately a rare (and therefore costly) skill, it has a chance to stun the monster - which stops it attacking and freezes it in place for a short time. Since pounce does deal damage, it works well for luring. However, the stun effect often fails. The easiest way to try out pounce is to get your paws on a Shadou cub.

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, choose a new target, let your pet hit the first, then send it at the new target. 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.)

To make this explicit: Once your pet is stowed, and the monster is chasing you, you need to run far enough back that the monster will stop between the tank (who should be out front) and the rest of the party. Which, taking into account the monsters attack range, means that you probably need to run a fair distance behind everyone else.

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. (It may be safer to leave your pet behind, rather than risking it drawing aggro too early.)

File:Map PeekRoundCorner.png

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 they won't have had time to Aggro on you. Now you can just 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, even though you can't see the monster you can still attack it as long as you still have it targeted. (Sometimes called 'blind pulling').

You can even cast spells on things that you can't see, even through walls. And since they can cast back and your melee guys can't get in between you, it's not a good idea.

It will take longer for your pet to reach the monsters, as it wanders round the corners, but it should get there eventually.

Now let it hit them, unsummon it, 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.

File:Map LeavePetInHarmsWay.png

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.

Center

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!

L-Shaped Pulling

If you find that your pet is having significant difficulty making its way around the corner you may consider doing an “L-shaped Pull”. An L-shaped Pull is essentially a combination of the two previously mentioned luring techniques. First of all you will need to select the mob that you wish to pull. This requires you to travel to the end of the hallway/room until the desired mob is visible. Once you have your target selected, halt your pet at the end of the hallway/room (your pet should be parallel to the mob that you have selected). You may now travel a bit further away in order to place a safe distance between you and the mob that is being pulled. Note: Be careful not to move too far away from your pet though as it might bounce back to you when you initiate the pull. Your configuration should look as follows:

File:L-ShapedPulling.jpg

When you’re ready press “Attack” on your pet’s Pet Panel. While you won’t be able to see your pet attacking the mob, the best way to know when to stow your pet is whether their special attack is on cooldown. The attack should look like the following:

File:SkillCooldown2.jpg

Once your pet has been stowed, only the mob that your pet has attacked will begin to run towards you. In the meantime you should be summoning a pet.

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)

File:RetargetPull Comic.png

Running Away

Your pet will continue an attack from further away than it will start one. This means that you can start running away as soon as you send your pet to attack. This gives you a little extra range between you and the monster, giving you a bit more time to work with as it heads towards you.

This can be useful if the monster has a large attack range, or is fast; and you don't mind risking 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?

Different monsters have different ranges at which they will pursue you. Low level monsters often won't chase you unless you are closer than you need to be to send the pet in (the harpies surrounding Farren in FB39 are an annoying example of this) - but many higher level monsters will.

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.

Another thing to not about unsummoning pets is that although when you resummon them the skill-bar will show their skills as in cool-down, it is lying. Your pet can still use those skills, either automatically or because you trigger them. This means that, done carefully, you can hit a monster with a long-cooldown skill as you lure, and then hit it again when it arrives to be tanked. This is of limited use, because you'd need to lure with your tank, and you could always put the skill on the tank as well as the lurer if it's that important, but it's good to know.

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.

In the Air and Underwater

When flying or swimming, things work much the same as on the ground. The only difference is that monsters are often a lot further away than they look; partly because the height difference counts, and partly because most air and water mobs are freakin huge!

One thing that helps is to get to the same height as the monster you wish to attack, and then use the minimap to judge distance.

It's a lot harder to judge distance in the air, so my advice is simple: If in doubt - pull.

Just Kill It

It is not uncommon to misjudge the distances of other monsters, or for the monster your pet goes for to run in an unexpected direction - and you discover that your pet has it solo.

In this situation, if your pet is good enough (for example, if you targeted a 'weak' monster) you can just sit back and let your pet finish it off, rather than pulling.

The one thing you must not do is run forward and heal your pet. You can guarantee the other monsters will choose just that moment to take notice, and they will all come running.

If your pet looks like it is in trouble, the correct thing to do is just go back to your original plan. Unsummon the pet, and lure the (wounded) monster.

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.

Note: In case the Mob or the Boss is higher level and surrounded with more mobs, Use Herc but dont put reflect on it and this helps it behave as a normal pet with good health and defense to lure bosses.

You can remove the reflect from the Herc (and indeed remove all buffs from any pet) by unsummoning and resummoning it.

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.

Don't run too far away from the monster. It may fail to Aggro on you, or you may even cause your pet to teleport back to you, drawing out every monster in the area.

Don't wait too long after pulling before hitting the monster - it will give up eventually. If you want a monster to follow you a long way for some reason then you will need to hit it periodically.

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

Don't use 'tame pet' to lure. This does actually work, in that it pulls a single monster. Its limitation is that it costs a lot of mana, doesn't have a huge range, takes even longer than a pet lure and has a gigantic cooldown. Oh, and the tame might succeed, though that does at least get the monster out of the way.

Don't Lure unless the rest of your group 'gets it'. Failing at this is possibly the most annoying thing in the world. If the rest of your group doesn't know what you are doing (and you did tell them, right?) then they are likely to get too close to the group of monsters and draw them all in.

Make sure they know how far they need to stay back (which varies depedning on the situation) and that they want to pull. Make sure they know about monsters that shoot through corners, too. Just because they can't see it, doesn't mean it can't kill them.

There's often no need to pull, in which case, why bother?

Don't bother luring the last monster in a pile. Unless you know the others will respawn soon, you might as well just jump in and pile on the last guy rather than luring him to you. Again, make sure the group know this is what you want to do - if they don't realise quickly enough, you may end up with a dead pet.

Why Won't My Pet Attack?

The most common reason for this is that your pet is out of range of the monster. Remember both that you can see monsters from beyond your pets attack range, and that your pet is probably a little bit behind you and so doesn't have quite the range you might think. In short - get a bit closer and try again.

Also, of course, check that you didn't tell your pet to 'halt' five minutes ago, and left it in another room. That's embarrassing. Unsummon it and summon a different pet and pretend that you just wanted to change pets and did it on purpose.

The only other reason for not attacking is because your pet can't find a route. The simplest example is when you tell a ground pet to attack an air monster that is too far up, or a water one too far from the shore. It can also happen if there's too many walls in the way, or on a cliff edge. (Especially prevalent in FB59 where the monsters will happily run about a thousand miles up the walls, leaving your pet scratching its head and the monster pinned. To fix it, you just need to unsummon your pet, but be aware that the aggro is likely to go haywire when you do.)

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 to have one) - so you can often just tame a monster of your level and get a decent lurer.

You want a pet which will go to a far away target, which will do it decently fast, and which will live to make that hit. Ideally it'll live long enough to be unsummoned (because resurrection is slow, and uses a lot of mana).

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. Be careful using 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 howl (to recover monsters). 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.)

--Carimre 17:12, 3 August 2009 (UTC) (Credit: L-Shaped Pulling Section and Dungeon Map Image bases used throughout the guide.)