New coercer - what am I doing wrong

[Fazio]

<DIV>My pet nearly always dies when I attack and If i try to help it i get the aggro and get killed. And that is a solo mob its worse when there is more.</DIV>

[DwarvesR]

<P>In the early levels, you absolutely must assist your pet, or the mob will kill it for sure.  And a lot of times will kill it anyway.  The way to help your pet and not get aggro is to root the mob and keep it rooted.  5% break chance means it's pretty stable, so usually even if the mob hates you more it will stay on your pet.  Hit your stuns to help prevent the pet taking damage, and nuke as much as you can.</P> <P>The other realllllllly important thing to do is to upgrade your charm as high as it will go.  Your pet will do more damage if you have a better charm, which in turn means the mobs die faster, pet takes less damage, pet has better chance of keeping aggro, mob dies faster if it gets on you anyway, etc.</P> <P>Welcome to the ranks of ultimate power!</P>

[Fazio]

Thanks for that.

[Rominian]

Yep, as he said, you need to keep the mob rooted as much as possible, and stun whenever you can. Also remember that our pets get scaled WAY down from what they were in terms of HPs and DMG output, so dont expect it to be able to stand toe to toe with another mob. I have found that if I use root, and get agro myself, the pet can still whack on the mob for me, and I stay back and nuke, if the root breaks, I re-root, or stun if root is not recharged. It seems to me that DoT's break root more often than regular nukes do, probably because they are active every few seconds, and if you have a lot of them running, thats a lot of chances for the root to break. Its a matter of practice really, eventually you will get a system down that works well, though it wont work every time and you will get owned. Dont give up though, in the end a Coercer is one of the most powerful classes in the game, difficult to play sometimes, but very rewarding.