shaodu cub skills

Unfortunately, all the pets except the legendaries involve some sort of compromise. The drawback of the cub is its low attack. So you will want to level another pet, something with high attack, for when someone else is tanking.

That means the focus of the cub should be on tanking. To tank, it has to keep aggro, so Bash is a good choice. As for which skill to drop, Tough is a tanking skill, Pierce is mostly duplicated by Ironwood until higher levels. So most opt to drop Pierce. (A veno who melees a lot may feel differently.) If you really wanted to keep aggro, you could replace Flesh Ream with an 8 sec elemental attack skill. But that would make Pounce the default skill and you would have to remember to select Bash every time you summoned the cub, just like the herc.

Pounce is nearly impossible to replace, so most don't want to get rid of it. But replacing it is an option too since it has a 60 sec cooldown and the stun and attack speedup are only marginally useful. It's your call. I kept it since it's my only land pet with a stun, and it does come in handy to stop certain kiting mobs (most archers will not run after a stun/freeze even after it wears off).

I found the cub to be a pretty good pet up til about level 60. But I still kept my magmite leveled for its high attack and ability to tank high phys damage mobs which the cub couldn't handle. At 60 you'll start doing TT and encountering reduced damage bosses. Player damage against these bosses is reduced by 75%, while pet damage is unaffected. So your pet ends up doing the majority of the damage, and this becomes one of the primary jobs of the veno. Unfortunately the cub's weak attack really hurts it in that role, and you will find yourself using it less and less in favor of a high attack pet.

Luring with pounce is not very smart. Firstly, it deals no damage (or did it? cant remember, i have to check) meaning it doesnt aggro the mob when you store it. Second, it has a 1 minute cd, not very spammable for luring. I would use pounce as a life saver, go just added DPS when tanking.

Bash is generally a better aggro holder than flesh ream because of its lower cd (8 seconds instead of 15).

rst777 wrote: »

ok, so it is not a dps pet, no problem. it will suffice to be a tank and with pounce maybe a lure too? i imagine the stun is nice in giving time to re-summon.
i will keep my mag leveled too. though i want to use him as little as possible. i just dont like it may not be a great reason, but its the truth.
i thought that flesh ream was a good skill for keeping agro? does bash do a better job?
as for the bashes, they are all equal aside from the elemental bonus right? thats why i was thinking the metal one as an added bonus since so few enemies are metal resistant. but im sure regular will do fine too.
i think that pierce will be the one to go.
as for boost, would you consider that better than tough? hp restore over def? boost gives 8,10, or 12% hp back with a 10sec cooldown, where as tough has a 60sec cooldown and the skill only lasts 15secs. if anyone has done the math on this it would be appreciated.
thanks for the help

I used my cub until level 80 without too much problem. Like you, I just didn't like the golems at the time (mainly hated a huge pet that always got in the way).
On my cub, as someone said before, I opted to remove Pierce and added Bash. All other skills I kept. I found that by selecting Bash as the auto-skill each time I summoned the pet, the pet was able to hold aggro quite well. Occasionally I would have to use Flesh Ream between Bash cast times to help on tough/high HP mobs tho.
Since Bash has a much shorter cooldown than Flesh Ream, I would suggest using that as your primary auto-skill rather than Flesh Ream (8 sec cooldown vs 15 sec cooldown). This will help the cub maintain aggro. Then, as I was doing, you still have the Flesh Ream to grab aggro back if he loses it (and pounce as another alternative to prevent getting hit).
The only problem with the elemental bashes is that some mobs are more resistant to them, while others are less resistant. Since you can't always choose which mobs you want to grind on, this can lead to losing aggro more easily.
As for Tough, I rarely used that skill during grinding, but used it quite often on bosses or when the pet was being attacked by multiple high-damage mobs. Since you want to use this pet as your primary tank, I would suggest keeping Tough rather than adding Boost (sorry, never did the math to figure the Boost skill VS the Tough skill).

yeah, its definitely a pain to havta retrain urself to right click bash (b/c its slot 4 when added), but u get used to having to do it after a while.

but adding an agro skill (like bash) to shadou cub (or evn any pet u'll be keeping for a long time, like eldergoth marksman / herc / w/e) is definitely worth doing. the better the pet can keep the mob's attention, the faster the two of u can kill it, making it easier to quest/grind/lvl pet. but, as some have said, id definitely keep pounce. got rid of it on my herc for an agro skill (bash in my case), but definitely decided to keep it on the cub. its practically impossible to replace, and however limited it definitely has its uses.

rst777 wrote: »

it will suffice to be a tank and with pounce maybe a lure too? i imagine the stun is nice in giving time to re-summon.

just dont ever lure bosses with stun because this skill never lands on bosses

kenlee wrote: »

just dont ever lure bosses with stun because this skill never lands on bosses

Bosses are immune to stun type skills anyway... And yeah, using debuff type skills doesn't work to lure. b:surrender Used to forget I had my debuffs on my Kowlin when I used him for luring.

rst777 wrote: »

lets assume that this 50% damaged hit only comes twice in one minute.

That's just it. When you need Tough, you're not going to need it for just 2 hits. You're going to need it for nearly every hit those 15 seconds.

Lemme put it this way. Boost helps you do what you normally do (grind) a little better. OTOH, Tough lets you do things you normally couldn't do. Boost saves you a little bit of healing. Tough lets you survive situations (extra mob or two attacks pet) where you would have died without it.