If you are at lvl 22ish or so, its the perfect time to get yourself a Gobby Gazooy ring for instant /click invis animals !
You can charm tigers in LOIO right where the courrier pops and just have a grand ole time...i believe i was lvl 28 when i finally got a ring to drop.

Also, my tip for the day....Panic Animal....LEARN IT, LOVE IT, LIVE IT !!!!

Keep your pet snared and your target mob snared and you will live a long long time!

<Insert SweetAss Sig Here>
Mrtwig

Animal fear is a great crowd control spell.

Daldaen Nailed the common procedure.

However if you're dungeon crawling later in game (mostly Chardok and SolB) you can also buff your pet a bit and keep it healed, specially if you get a high level one.

But for XP it's that. From my experience when breaking a pet, a goblin ring works superb, but if you don't have the money, hide works good too. Focus on buying another items first, like an ES vambracers if you still don't have a pair.

My method for charm kiting:

1. Pull mob to charm with ensnare. If both near each other, snare both.
2. Charm pet.
3. Send it after target
4. Keep target rooted
5. Try to keep my pet 3-5% higher in HP. If needed, add dot or nuke to keep it like this.
6. Right before target (or my pet, if it hits the fan) dies, break charm via Invis vs. Animals
7. Finish both with a dot (ES arms are perfect)

Obviously if I am charming in Kedge and patriarch spawns, my strategy changes to "not give a crap about my pet and just get him dead", but that is the general strategy

Use animal fear too, its super mana efficient amd allows your pet to do more damage as well as allowing your dots to hit for full damage.

Most times what I would do is just keep 1 badass pet and keep him fully buffed and just burn through mobs using snare/fear/es vambs. Can keep up kills non stop, so the pet taking half your exp isn't even a problem. You could always find a melee partner to pull for you and add DPS; this would eliminate any pet exp penalty.


I think snare + terrorize animal is like less than 50 mana.

On my original druid on live I never did charm kiting. I never liked it. I am trying to do it on this version of Aveenia, I still don't like it. It seems dangerous & I always seem to use a full bar of mana so with med time it takes as long to kill 2 mobs as root rotting. Maybe I just have super bad luck with charm breaking? I fully understand the theory & methodology of doing it, it's just not for me I guess.

There's no danger to it at all (if you're doing it outdoors) and it takes almost no mana (the lack of mana usage is what makes it such great EXP). I think if you're having that much trouble with it you're probably going about it the wrong way. Make sure the monster you're charming is a low dark blue con to minimize resists. Apart from that, without more info on what exactly you're doing, I dunno what might be going wrong.

I seem to have Aveenia's trouble as well. I feel like charm lasts a minute or two and once it breaks I'm scrambling to control two mobs instead of one. Right now I'm trying this in EJ at lvl 46 and charm just doesnt seem very reliable. I did, however, have some pretty good success in OT in the lower 40's. Wish there were more outdoor zones with animals in the late 40s.

Finding low dark blues has definitely been a help to me at a low level. My first charm was a white-con lion that aggroed me in NK, and I couldn't get charm to stay on for more than 20 seconds or so, but I rarely have issues with any dark blues, especially if I know they're on the lower end.

When I was doing raptors back when they could be charmed before sundawg who plays on red99 nerfed it I would leave level 24 or 19 whichever level we get fear then up. Was long enough to snare your broke charm pet and re charm it. Use this one over your higher ones, saves mana.