Arachnophobia!

Soloing in the Elven Forest

By Shayalyn

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I don’t like spiders. I’ve been able to come to an uneasy truce with the small ones (as long as they stay out of my personal space), but the big ones give me a serious case of the heebie jeebies. Unfortunately, the spiders in Vanguard are not just big, they’re gigantic. Fortunately, the virtual spiders in Telon are not quite so scary because my Druid comes well equipped with the tools to handle them.

I started out this evening with a level 4 Druid and about an hour to play. With only an hour of playtime, I knew I’d be soloing instead of looking for a group to adventure with. I checked my quest log and spotted a quest to eliminate some spiders. Aha! Nice and simple; the perfect little newb quest to kill time with. (Don’t worry, not all low level quests are of the “kill 10 bugs” variety. Vanguard has a few of them for each class to help ease you into the game.)

I made my way across the hilly forest landscape near Leth Nurae to a valley where I knew I would find spiders lurking. And not just any spiders, but big aggressive spiders that could eat my elf head in one bite. Vanguard uses a dot system to help players consider the strength of mobs before attacking them. Looking at the target information for these creepy crawlies I could see that they were what we beta testers call “three-dot blues.” A blue con means that the mob is about a level below you, but three blue dots on the indicator (which goes up to 5) tells you that it’s actually a bit stronger for its level. As the game plays right now, a three-dot blue will put up a decent fight. I knew that if I played well I would most likely win my battles against these ugly arachnids, and yet they’d be tougher than the even con two dot whites I’d been fighting earlier. Since I like a challenge, and I knew I’d get more experience fighting the three dots, I planned my strategy and got to work.

The first thing I did was buff myself with Okeli’s Shield. This spell blocks 100% of the damage from the first two hits I take from the mob. When a mob is doing significant damage with each hit, this spell can mean the difference between winning the fight and winding up a corpse. I targeted a venomous Araneo and made sure that I was at the longest possible range for casting my lighting spell, which is the sole direct damage spell I have at this level. I fired the lightning bolt, and as soon as the spell left my fingers I began to summon an earth elemental. My earthen brute materialized and immediately went to attack the spider. I can’t control my elemental, but he’ll fight for me to the death as long as I’m engaged in combat. (Once I leave combat, he dematerializes.)

The Vanguard Druid isn’t a standard pet class--its elemental pets are more like a damage over time (DoT) spell than a true pet. I knew the spider would ignore the pet and come after me, so I continued to fire lightning bolts in its direction. The Araneo attacked swiftly, but my Okeli’s Shield deflected the first two blows, and before I even began to take damage from its bites my pet and I had whittled its health down to about a third. With a few more quick lightning strikes the spider was defeated.

That was one spider down, and 11 more to go. I got to work knowing I could finish this quest easily in the hour that I had if I played things right. I sat down to quickly regenerate my health and energy, and then set my sights on another spider. I repeated the tactics, spider after spider, until I’d killed my quota.

Now, if this sounds suspiciously like exp grinding...it is. I’ve never found a means of soloing in any game that didn’t amount to some degree of grinding. Yet I was completing a quest objective, and I was definitely having fun. And there are certainly things that will make soloing more of a challenge. Going after higher level mobs (if you’re one of the classes that handles themselves well soloing) always makes things more interesting.

Getting adds can also keep solo gameplay interesting. Although I was careful, I did get an add or two while I was spider hunting. Fortunately, I knew that I had enough power to use my calamity, a devastating spell called Deadly Swarm. A Druid’s calamities (harmful spells) and wonders (beneficial spells) draw power from a limited resource pool that regenerates very slowly. They’re for use only in emergencies, but when you’re able to use them they definitely do the trick. My Deadly Swarm took out the spider add with one mega-hit that was about 8 times more powerful than my typical direct damage spell.

After I’d killed off my share of spiders, and dinged level 5 in the process (thanks to the extra experience I was getting fighting the three-dots), I had enough time to wander around a bit and admire the elven forest. The landscape is lush and beautiful. The trees and grass sway in the breeze. The way the light and shadows play as the sun begins to set makes the whole world seem alive and vibrant. All of my characters have always loved the forests, and the Thestran landscape around Leth Nurae feels like home to me. I was so awed by the beauty of it all that I felt compelled to stop and capture some screenshots.

I returned to my quest NPC and was rewarded with some shoulder pads for my spider slaying efforts. She then offered me a quest that would have me delving into the depths of a cave infested with spiders in order to kill the spider matron. I knew that this quest would require the help of friends. The massive train of spiders I’d seen scurrying out of the cave after a troop of halflings was proof enough that I shouldn’t venture into that lair alone. That quest would have to wait for another day, and another adventure.

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