There are three basic soloing strategies I have found/heard for beastlords.

Tank Basically, the strategy is to pull a mob to a safe spot, slow it, possibly even dot it, and engage it alongside your pet. This strategy is more equipment dependent than the other two strategies, but will help to keep all the beastlord's skills up and increase his or her survivability in groups. As the beastlord gets low on health, they can back off while the pet tanks, long enough to heal themselves back up and re-engage.

Pet Cleric This strategy entails pulling a mob to a safe spot, as before, but instead of engaging the mob alongside your pet, you let the pet take the full brunt of the melee damage. The beastlord would obviously slow the mob to reduce the damage on the pet and toss in a few nukes or dots to help speed the fight along. As the pet loses health, the beastlord simply heals it back up with our formidable pet heals. While the pet heals are significantly more efficient than the general heals, these fights tend to take longer than the tanking method because of the lack of the beastlord's melee damage output. As such, I've found that I spend almost as much mana tanking for my pet as I do letting the pet tank for me.

Agro Kite While this strategy is typically the necro's bread and butter, a beastlord can acheive much the same thing, albeit at a much faster pace. The strategy entails pulling a mob and doing enough damage to it before allowing the pet to engage it that the mob stays focused on the beastlord. However, instead of allowing the mob to close with and beat on the lightly armored beastlord, the beastlord continues to run away from the mob while his or her pet beats on it from behind. It is important for the beastlord to make sure the pet's taunting ability is turned off for this strategy since the mob will eventually turn to face the pet and the agro kite will quickly turn into a pet cleric fight.

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That being said, I've found that while I can handle the tanking and the pet cleric methods with relative ease, the agro kite method is difficult for me to maintain throughout the entire fight. If I wait to send in the pet until the mob is down to about 90%, my pet can usually gain full agro on it, even with taunt off and using Spirit of Snow (supposedly reduces pet agro) by the time the mob has reached 50%. I've been using our poison dots to drop the mob's health and try to keep it focused on me, but am still having significant difficulties. If I try to wait until the mob is down to 80% before sending the pet, I have usually had to refresh the dots at least once. I may have to switch to using primarily nukes to keep the mob's attention, but haven't had extensive success even with that route. My pet in almost every instance will regain the agro before the mob is down to 40%, regardless of whether I'm nuking it to hold agro, dotting it, or even a combination.

Does anyone have any recommendations on how the agro kite can be maintained by a beastlord or if this is even a viable method still at level 63 to solo, since that's what I find myself doing most of the time.

Edited, May 30th 2007 7:49pm by Mahatma

For the aggro kite method, try chain slowing and keeping a dot on it at all times. Damage gets a bit of aggro, but debuffs seem to get insane aggro. I'm sure you could use lower lvl slows just as sk's can use lower lvl snares to generate aggro.

argo kiteing with the snare works fine... some what slower than tanking and ofcourse u need pet snare to even try but i have never had a whole lot of luck doing it :) most the time it is a spur of the moment save ur life move :))) great move to know but not really effective in the everyday game :) IMO ...Jegg