Venomancer Tanking

Before we begin: Get yourself a Barbarian. And a Cleric. Barbarians are superior tankers, and with a Cleric to keep them alive you'll usually do far better than you will trying to tank yourself.

See also: Aggro for a basic guide to making monsters act the way you want them to.

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.

Not A Venomancer?

OK, so. You're not a venomancer and you're reading this guide. Good for you! Here's the main things I need you to take away from it:

Venomancer pets can tank, but not as well as a barbarian.
The Hercules will not hold Aggro on magic monsters.

OK? An Arcane Venomancer will often be holding back their casting to avoid pulling the monsters off of their pet. You can almost certainly out-damage the veno if you try. If you're an Archer or Wizard then you probably need to try hard not to out damage them.

What do you have to do? Same as with a Barbarian, you need to wait a while to let them gain aggro. You just need to wait longer.

Now, the Hercules. This draws most of its aggro from reflecting monsters attacks back. On magic-only monsters (I think that the first you will encounter is Hercule Trioc in FB39) this doesn't work. So although the Herc can soak the damage, if you deal more damage than it (and at that level it's doing about 800 DPS) then you will pull. When we say "Slow Down" we really really mean it.

Pay attention to the level of the boss you're fighting. Pets, both Venomancer and Mystic, do not suffer the damage reduction that players do on [?] targets. If you've been playing with a veno and have primarily fighting [?] targets and switch to a numbered leveled target, be prepared to scale back your damage. Conversely, if you've been fighting normal mobs and you get to a [?] boss, you should be able to up the ante sooner than normal.

One other thing, which applies no matter who lured: Please be prepared to grab the monsters as they pass you. Ranged and magic monsters especially don't always run where the lurer expects them to, so you might have to move. But please, be prepared to snag them just after they pass you. The lurer may be running a long way back - partly to ensure that the lured monster comes into range, and partly because arcane Venomancers are squishy and archer mobs can 2-shot them.

Basic Pet Tanking

You've almost certainly done this already. Let us recap.

Send your pet to hit the monster.
The monster starts hitting your pet.
Hit the monster yourself.
The monster keeps hitting your pet.

Simple. But there are some caveats.

First of all: 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, although what with skills generating a bit of hate above the damage they do you have a little bit of flexibility on this.

Any time a monster is about to start an attack, and isn't stunned or whatever, they will pick a new target, if there is one available that they hate more. You can't do half the damage in one lump and then let your pet do the rest and expect the monster to stay on the pet - it needs to be (roughly) half the damage at any given time.

Secondly: And contradicting the above advice - it's relatively safe to pull a melee monster off your pet, you've got time to run away before you get hit and if you do this just before the monster dies it doesn't really matter who has aggro.

Thirdly: Your team-mates probably do more damage than you, and almost certainly do it in larger spikes. So you need your pet to out-damage them.

To reiterate, because it is important: If your teammates haven't teamed with Veno's much before, they may not realise that they need to slow down. If they act like they do when playing solo, or with a Barbarian tank, then they will cause the monster to ignore your pet, and it will get them killed.

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.

Multiple Monsters

OK, you remember why you learned Venomancer Luring, right? Because the monster brought all his friends to come crush you? That still applies. And worse.

At first, things start off as you expect. Your pet attacks something, all his friends turn and start in on your pet.

Next, if you haven't cheated and skipped ahead in this guide, you heal your pet. And 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 hate, your healing the pet generates a lot. (As does attacking the friend yourself, being in the area and breathing too often.) So they turn on you.

The monster your pet is actually hitting will probably stay on your pet, at least.

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

Have your pet hit them all at least once before you throw any heals.
1. Or, at least, hit the ranged and magic ones. Your pet may be able to smack the melee ones before they reach you.
Don't throw mass amounts of damage onto the ones your pet it not concentrating on.
1. This means avoid using your AoE (Area of Effect) skills (Noxious Gas, for example, is a bad idea)
2. This also means avoiding using your DOT (Damage Over Time) skills (such as Blazing Scarab and, again, Noxious Gas). Because these will keep doing damage even if you have shifted your pet onto a new target.
If they're close to death, you can just kill them.
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). No sense wasting time.

Remember - monsters have this nasty 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

The simple tip here is: Your pet mustn't stop attacking. Or, if they do, so must everyone else.

There's a few reasons your pet might stop attacking:

Excuse the first: Pet Death

If your pet dies, (or you accidentally unsummon it. Don't laugh! It happens! OK, well, try not to let it happen, but...) then you may be screwed. All that Aggro you took? You've still got it. Your new pet has none.

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.
If the monster is close to death, finishing it off may be faster than trying to summon a new pet.
If you've got friends with you, have them smack it. Although Wizards and Clerics are probably in an even worse situation.
Kite the monster instead of tanking it. (Kiting, in this case, meaning running screaming for your mummy, whilst throwing spells behind you now and then.)
Don't forget that you've got the second best set of self-heals in the game. You can afford to get injured occasionally.
Last, and least: Have a cleric ready to bring you back to life.

Excuse the Second: Switching Targets

OK, sometimes you need to switch the pet onto a different target for a while. (Because it just popped, because something decided to hit the Cleric, whatever)

This is pretty simple to deal with - just stop hitting the old monster, and start hitting the new one. Make sure everyone else realizes too.

Excuse the Third: Resting

OK, not really an excuse this one. But sometimes your pet may just decide to stop attacking for a while. The normal cause is lag.

It can also 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 even happen indoors, especially in FB59, if the monster decides to run up (or down) a cliff and your pet can no longer reach him.

All that can be done is to watch out for these, and fix them up when they happen. If you don't notice, you'll often pull Aggro.

This can actually solve the problem, as long as you only pull a little bit. The monster moves to attack you, the pet re-acquires it, hits it, the monster switches back to the pet and you're fine.

You can also use the 'follow me' 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.

Lag there isn't much you can do except to hammer the attack and pet heal keys, and hope, and apologize afterwards.

Flesh Ream

First of all, this isn't the Barbarian skill of the same name, although it serves a similar purpose.

Flesh-ream does a fairly nice chunk of damage, and causes bleeding, which is damage over time.

This generates a nice chunk of aggro, and can work to your advantage.

For example - if your pet runs in, puts Flesh Ream on one monster and then starts attacking a second then the first monster will keep gaining hate on your pet. Enough hate that you can probably get in an attack or two before it decides that it hates you more.

Which, if it's not a terribly tough monster (or is earth based, making it wood vulnerable) may be enough to wipe it out.

There is a downside, however: If the monster can't hate your pet (unsummoned or dead - or even just far enough away) and the bleed ticks, then the monster will hate you. (This also occurs with poison and burning, from Noxious Gas and Blazing Scarab, those skills generate more aggro than you may expect.)

Not normally a problem, but worth mentioning. If things go badly wrong, and monsters have Flesh Ream ticking, then things are going to get worse before they get better.

The other disadvantage to flesh-ream is its recharge time. It just plain takes a long time to come back up compared to Bash.

Roar

Note: This is not the same as the Barbarian skill of the same name. Not even slightly.

Frankly, this deserves its own guide, but in short:

Roar makes the monster hate your pet more than anything else in the world. 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 (although if it's already mid-attack it will finish what it's doing first, and if that attack takes long enough, someone else might have hit it enough to make it change target again...)

But.

Roar doesn't make it hate your pet very much more than everyone else. 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 suddenly gone.

Higher levels of the skill do draw more aggro, however it is best to treat a monster after a pet-roar as though it was newly pulled.

So, the good part is: (Nearly) Instant effect. You can grab the boss off of the cleric effortlessly, rather than needing to out-hate them first. (Which can be tricky if the cleric is chain healing themselves, which, because the boss is eating their face, they may well be.)

Another use for roar is if someone manages to out-damage your pet. The pet can grab aggro back quickly, allowing them time to realize what they did and slow down. If they follow up with another huge attack, there's no much you can do, though.

The sequence would be something like: Bash, Normal hit, (archer steals aggro), Roar (pet steals it right back)...

The bad part is that this isn't very much use for holding Aggro. It can in fact hurt your efforts, reducing the hate from previous damage and skills to just the level of the roar.

Use with caution. This makes a very bad default skill, but a very useful emergency skill.

Good Pets to Tank with

As I said in the introduction: A tank needs good defense, lots of hitpoints, and a way to keep the monster on them.

Several pets partially meet this description. One almost completely meets it. None are as good as a real Barbarian but here we go anyway.

Magmites / Golems

These walking lumps of rock, first available at level 18 outside the human FB19, have stupidly high physical defense and hitpoints.

They also do decent damage, and have a couple of decent aggro generating skills.

They have the disadvantage of not having a terribly high magic defense (which becomes important later on, as you meet more magic-dealing monsters) and, although not actually vital for tanking, they are so very very slow that it's worth mentioning as being a problem.

There's really no reason to not at least try out a Magmite, but if you're dead set on not using one, then the scorpions and beetles fill a similar role; trading a little bit of defense for better damage.

Antelopes

First available at 30, from the hills east of shining tide, these pets are often said to be good magic tanks.

That is, they have a high magic defense. They also hit pretty hard.

As an added advantage, they have a self-heal which can give you a bit more room to attack.

The only real disadvantage is that you don't face a great many magical enemies at that level.

Frog

The frog is a rare pet, with a lot of magical defense, and a decent physical defense. It doesn't hit very hard, though. Nice and fast.

Shadou Cub

The Shadou Cub is another rare pet, and another decent magical tank, although it's more often used as a puller. It's more of an all-rounder though, having a decent physical defense.

It has the advantage of having a suite of decent aggro-generating skills; pounce, bash and flesh-ream.

Baby Hercules

Legendary pet, from the Cash Shop (or from other players who bought the bits there)

This pet gets its own full section later on. For now it's worth saying that this pet has a stupidly high defense, stupidly high magical defense, more hitpoints than a battleship and the offensive capabilities of a pink blancmange. (Possibly a poisonous pink blancmange.)

Direct Damage / DPS Pets

If the monsters don't hit particularly hard, and most non-boss monsters don't, then a direct damage pet is often a better choice as a tank.

Doing more damage, it holds aggro better, which means that you can unload your spells more quickly; meaning that the monster dies sooner - which is the object.

Of course, if the monster does hit hard, then you need to heal more, or put up with having a dead pet. So this isn't always the right choice.

A good choice of direct damage pet for this purpose is the Eldergoth (Level 41) because it is useful in other situations, and comes with 'Roar'.

I don't advise this as a primary tank, but as a secondary ready to go, it has big advantages.

(The Eldergoth, being a ranged pet, also has some special tricks available)

Tanking Yourself

No, this doesn't mean making sure that you survive your own attacks and attack no one except yourself. That would be strange.

This means that sometimes, very rarely, you may actually be the best choice of tank - rather than your pet.

This is a very rare situation. But worth knowing about.

I shall take Krixxix (an elite quest monster, outside of Orchid Temple) as my example.

Krixxix punches far above his weight in levels. He does a lot of damage. Huge amounts. Earthshattering amounts. Your pet is petfood, amounts.

He also has both a physical attack and a ranged magical attack. And this is where you step in.

As a Venomancer you can take magical hits reasonably well. If you can keep him on you, then with potions (or a cleric) you can survive that.

So, in this situation (where a monster will hit you for magic, but absolutely cream your pet, it is actually better for you to tank.

How do you do it? Just reverse the usual advice. You need to out-damage your pet (and your group)

This is one of the few times that you can really stretch and unload your arsenal. Ironwood as soon as it recharges, lucky as soon as it recharges, make sure that the enemy is poisoned and on fire at all times. No need to heal your pet, no need to stop. Don't forget your spark!

Well, some need to stop. To stay alive you probably need to use your healing skills on top of potions (unless you have apothecary items or a cleric)

You also need to make sure that your pet doesn't out damage you. You may need to turn off its aggro dealing skills for a while. If you've got 'reduce magic defense' skills, use those, they're great.

(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...)

Right. Enjoyable as all that is? It's almost certainly a suboptimal (if not actively bad) idea.

First of all, a wizard is almost certainly better than you as a magic tank. (They have element-specific buffs) Secondly, a ranged pet can possibly do it better than you. Thirdly, just go and get a group. A barbarian and cleric will do the job, if they're high enough level.

But getting your revenge on Krixxix is sweet, and deliberately pulling Aggro off of a Barbarian is fun. You don't get to do it very often, so enjoy the chance when it presents itself.

(Accidentally pulling Aggro from a Barbarian is, of course, a bad idea that usually leads to your demise.)

Hercules

The Hercules (Herc) is the tank of choice at higher levels (although it is available even at level one).

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 a tonne of hitpoints.
It doesn't have a particularly great attack...

But it has reflect.

Reflect

Reflect works, basically, in the same way as your bramble buff. When a monster hits the Herc, a big chunk of that damage is sent right back at that monster.

With the stupidly high amount of defense that the Herc has, it's often the case that monsters will kill themselves on the reflect before they can kill the Herc.

This reflected attack counts as your Herc hitting the monster, and generates Aggro as such.

Put together, this means that you can have your Herc concentrate on one monster whilst the others create plenty of hate even though the Herc is ignoring them. So you can, amongst other things, heal the Herc 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. Though it will work on a few boss AoE attacks.

To get the most out of reflect, you want to have as many monsters as possible hitting it (obviously not so many that the Herc dies), so that the most total damage is done in the time.

For absolute maximum efficiency, switch the Herc and your own attacks between the monsters, and use AoE attacks.

As a note, technically there's nothing stopping you putting reflect on another pet. Except that the scroll is only available in a high level dungeon and sells for tens of millions in the auction house. Still, reflect will work the same way whatever you put it on.

AoE grinding

OK, you've got to be careful. Getting this wrong is a recipe for having ten monsters walk all over you.

This can be done with other pets, but the Herc makes it much much easier.

The basic principle is simple. Get a lot of monsters to all hate your pet, then use Noxious gas on them all in one go, so that you do a huge amount of damage in total, and can kill more monsters than you could one at a time.

There's really nothing for it except practice. You need to learn how long it takes your pet to get enough Aggro on each monster that they won't come after you when noxious lands (and again, when it ticks).

You need to learn how many monsters your pet can safely take on at once, and how fast (and where) the monsters respawn so that you can replace the dead ones at a useful rate without overwhelming yourself.

you need to pay special attention to the modifiers - especially increased defense (which will cause the monsters to hate you more than the pet) and increased (and sacrificial) attack - which you will need to kill sooner than normal monsters (or heal more).

So yes practice. Good practice areas include the Scrunchkin Beserkers near kings feast (just north of Krimison) and the various Aerox just South-East of there.

Ranged / Magic Monsters

Ranged / Magic monsters do not trigger reflect.

Really. They will go for you in a heartbeat.

So, if there are this sort of monsters around then you will need to have your pet hit them the old fashioned way. Which means you need to go for them first.

Usually this also means that you can't AoE grind on them. but there is one exception.

When you've got a lot of physical monsters and you intend to finish them off with AoE attacks, your pets own physical attack its pretty much going to go to waste. So in this situation, having one ranged monster for your pet to attack can be useful.

There are also several monsters which have both a ranged and a physical attack. A good example are the red dodo's in FB39. These will happily stand off at range setting fire to your pet, but if your pet closes to melee range they will also happily fight back - killing themselves on the reflect.

Most of this class of monster won't chase your pet, however, so unless they happen to be close together, you usually can't persuade more than one at a time to go physical.

On the flip side of this - if you have a pet with a ranged attack (such as the Cactus, or an Eldergoth) - then you can often persuade a monster to use its magical attack instead of a physical attack. (Be sure to turn off your pets default skill, or it will run up to use it, triggering the close range 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.

Air Tank

You don't very often need an air tank. Usually a high attack pet is a better idea, killing the monsters off nice and quickly.

So the usual advice applies. For an airpet, the buzzsaw that is the sawfly, or a foxwing if you want a bit more defense.

Remember that in the air you do only half damage to ground monsters. That can work to help you hold aggro, or can hurt (if you're on the ground and your pet isn't)

I should mention the rare flying pet here. Windwalking Piggy. There, I mentioned it. It's an OK tank, but not much good for anything else and is a pain to get hold of because people tame it to make the all-class baby-pet. You probably don't need it.

Water Tank

Turtles. Any turtle will tank like a champion. Get two. Name them 'Sharkey' and 'George'. They're the golems of the sea.

Ahem

Right, OK. Yes, turtles. Huge defense, they come with tough for even more defense, and lots of hitpoints. Slow, but reliable.

It is a huge pain to level up a low-end turtle, but they are hugely powerful if you do. The higher end turtles are still pretty good.

The top end 'Plumpfish' is probably the best water tank, but is only available at very high levels.