New Druid Advice from the experts

[bcbrown]

Here's all the criticisms I think are legitimate of the idea of spending a bunch of levels in LoIO hoping to get a ring while XPing:

It sucks to get to. Practically speaking, you'll have to take a boat ride to get there, because you're too low level to safely run there from any port location, so that's a minor hassle. And then the run to LoIO from FV is a pain with all those spiders in the way in FV. They're red and they can see invis and root you. If you go there before level 19 you won't have any ports, so either you can bind at FV and have to run that gauntlet every time you gate, or you can bind near the camp and hope you can level to 19 before you need to vendor.

It'll be a bitch to find the placeholder. You don't get track until 20 and I don't think you'll get it to a usable level for several levels at least - mobs might be greening out by then. Even if you do find the placeholder and find the spawn point, you're not going to be able to sustain a 30s/mob kill rate while they're blue. Nukes and dots certainly won't be sustainable. Your best bet might be treeform + thorns but that might need good AC to work, and you'll need to snare every mob to keep them from fleeing out of melee range - even then if you're using a 1h weapon often times they'll get pushed out of melee range.

If you're gonna try to keep a charm pet against the 30s spawn point, it'll probably get beat down pretty quickly and won't last a few minutes, if it doesn't break before then. Even if the pet was invulnerable I'm not sure you could med enough to keep ahead of the charm breaks - plus you'll be taking a couple hits every charm break.

No matter melee or charm, you'll need to fight the ph on or near the spawn point, and I think they all have plenty of pathers around so you'll have to handle a constant stream of adds. And if you want to rely on gate as an escape hatch you'll have to consider your bind point, the run from FV through the spiders, and when you get self ports.

I still think it's a good suggestion and I'd like to come back and level here - I do remember spending a little time here on my first druid. I think the play is to charm animals and pull pathers from around where the spawn points are - maybe you get lucky and you kill a ph and spawn a courier and that courier has the rare drop.

But the primary reason you're unlikely to come away with a ring after leveling there isn't because of how rare the drop is - it's because you can't sustain holding down a spawn point while it's blue while solo.

Perhaps what I'm most curious about is what the XP is like as an xp-green camp. The bigger level differential might make it more sustainable and the 30s respawn rate might give really good xp overall. But I think you'd still have to be pretty lucky to pin down a spawn point and PH.