Fishing for Mooks

Divide and conquer is one of the greatest military maxims of all time, the uses and subversions of which have rung out through history. And as a player, you too can put this fine strategy into practice!

This is the practice of whittling down a large group of mooks by only activating (“aggroing”) a small portion of their number at a time. Say you have a large mob of enemies obviously intended to attack you all at once if you charge straight into them. But due to the limitations of in-game AI, enemies only notice you if you come into their line of sight, or if you get within a certain distance of them. So the best way to deal with this group is to only advance close enough to attract the attention of one or two at a time, then back off from the group (with those Mooks in hot pursuit) and pick them off in detail. Commonly paired with a Road Runner PC.

This technique is also known as "kiting", since you look like a kite with a tail of mooks following you when you apply it.

Beware the Law of Conservation of Ninjutsu, if they turn out to be more than just Mooks. This is an easy way to Level Grind against Mooks who are still too strong for you to take down in groups, but who can be defeated piecemeal.

Truth in Television if just luring an individual unit or at least only part of the enemy army out and then annihilating it before its allies could aid it (a common tactic in warfare of any era,) but blatant Artificial Stupidity if done repeatedly to the same group nonstop, especially if the others are completely unaware of their comrade's fate.

When it's possible to do this in stealth-based games, it's a sure sign that The Guards Must Be Crazy.


 * In many Nintendo Hard games (for example, Demon's Souls), this becomes a required tactic if you don't want to get jumped by a gang of Demonic Spiders all at once, and usually involves getting a single enemy's attention by hitting them with a ranged attack. God Hand lets you do this with taunts instead.
 * In Dragon Age, this is frequently the only way a party that isn't insanely well-balanced (or unbalanced) can survive on Nightmare.
 * It works great in Neverwinter Nights: Hide or Move Silently works against every enemy separately, and mooks who notice the PC pursue on their own, leaving their pals idle. Thus sneaking closer until detected and then luring the pursuers so far away that others will not hear attack and death sounds makes slaughtering them much easier, up to allowing a No Damage Run.
 * This is also a reliable tactic in Baldur's Gate. Set up a firing line, send your weakest ranged in to draw off one guy, run back to the party as they pelt the poor slob at a distance, then switch to mêlee and gank the (probably quite damaged) slob once he closes the distance, repeat until victorious. The first game had one annoyance that made this futile though, which is that if you allowed the Fog of War to cover an area, Respawning Enemies would sometimes appear out of thin air.
 * In Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusades, in the Gerald mission where you are trying to get a group of Paladins along with your lieutenant away to bring reinforcements to your besieged city, you are blocked by a massive army made up of level 50 and 100 foes. By using this tactic it is actually possible to fight your way through one unit at a time. Its not easy and involves abusing the SP system, but with enough graft, the result is more experience and gold than you could ever have hoped for at those levels. Not to mention feel like a total badass for cutting through an entire army. Its a good thing too: the next mission is That One Level and some may find it harder than breaking through the mass of overlevelled orcs: at least time isn't a factor there!
 * This is an important tactic in Streets of Rage. You do not want to activate more foes than you have to at one time.
 * In many Fire Emblem (And other Strategy RPG) games, there are enemies that only move when you're on their line of sight. Thus the best way to defeat them is putting a strong unit just on the edge of their movement range to kill them one for one, or lure them out with an unarmed Crutch Character and then rush them with your other characters.
 * In Diablo II, the barbarian's taunt ability can be used to lure fallen shamans away from other fallen.
 * In most Halo games on the Legendary difficulty, this is a common option if you're low on health and have an empty or weak weapon. Fans call this the 'Trap Door Spider Method'.
 * Literally done in Minecraft. You can use a fishing rod to pick up enemies and have them suffer fall damage.
 * That's easy to do in Nippon Ichi tactical RPGs for most melee-based enemies, who in most maps won't try to attack you unless you're in range. In other maps, they will all try to swarm you instead, however.
 * Again can be done literally in Makai Kingodms. The fishing rod can be used to pull an enemy to the other side of the attacker, seperating them from their allies.
 * Useful in several parts of Summoner, particularly in Wolong. Take Flece, use sneak and solo mode, get where just one enemy can see you then run back to the others. Nobody wonders where their friends are running off to…
 * It gets worse, if you can remain outside aggro range (usually out of sight) and drop an AoE spell close enough where their position overlaps with part of ground zero, enemies will simply continue to stand there doing absolutely nothing while their health slowly vanishes.
 * To get through the Temple of Trials at the beginning of Fallout 2, players who don't have a good melee or unarmed skill will likely resort to this tactic.
 * This and Kiting will be your two mainstays in Myth, especially since the most powerful weapons in the game are inaccurate, extremely dangerous in close engagements, and enormously amplified by traps that can only be set in advance. To balance things out, small groups of enemies are alerted all at once, but really big groups can be broken apart in numerous chunks like this.
 * In most RTSs this also applies to you. If you've got an unattended group of units that falls under attack—no matter how tightly packed—and your group takes up more space than those units' aggro range, they'll blithely stand around shoulder-to-shoulder while their squadmates are annihilated before their eyes.
 * You can do this in Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City with Sonic Batarangs. As well as a few other tricks.
 * This is one of the most common traps in League of Legends and other Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas. However, because your enemies are humans, luring them takes a certain degree of deception.
 * Through difficult to pull, this can be done in Xenoblade. The game even gives you a different battle-starting command to help you on doing this: throwing a rock that does Scratch Damage to the enemy to have them chase you.
 * One of the main uses for the Taunt Button in God Hand is this.
 * Dark Souls has cheap wooden arrows designed for precisely this purpose.

MMORPG

 * MMO players have two terms for this: Pulling is drawing specific enemies away from a group, be they mooks or bosses. Herding is gathering all the mooks together for an AoE attack.
 * Same idea but different term: in EVE Online its called baiting against human opponents. Works especially well in 0.0 space. The pulling tactic is used against rats in missions or belts. Shoot the rat at range, then run to keep them at range, all while continuing to shoot of course.
 * Variants of this exist in City of Heroes, as certain power sets and archetypes effectively turn the proximity of an enemy into a secondary resource. Combined with the existence of some degree of in-combat regeneration for almost everybody, which means there's some level of constant attack that any character can survive, mook management in the game expands to include pulling extra mooks into an ongoing fight because the battle actually becomes easier.
 * Most notable are “Invulnerability,” which increases a Tanker's or Brute's defense with every nearby enemy regardless of their power level, and the infamous mass-resurrect “Howling Twilight,” available to Defenders, Corrupters, and Masterminds, which casts as a debuff to a group of enemies.