What I found about challenges (part 1 – Island)

Soloing island quests are not easy. Be it regular or Epic. Partly because of the actual components of the challenge but also because of the dramatic increase in stats from minimum to max. Like how you can easily do it on lower levels with a competent build but struggle dramatically using the same tactics at level 20. It’s not just because they’re tougher and you have several abilities that might be past their prime – but mostly because the aids you have – such as hirelings and turrets are simply not effective.

However – the same lesson (with modification) can be used at level 4 all the way up to level 20.

Kobold Chaos is good through level 15. It’s your basic kill Kobolds for material, kill fishpeople hitting your extractors and eventually fire up a large extractor.

Soloing it I generally start at small extractor one drop the hirelings off there and open up 2, 3 and finally 4. At 4 I generally have enough to upgrade it right away, then back to 3, 2 and finally 1 and as soon as I have enough shards – fire up large close to 1.

Here you both have time and resources to upgrade the turrets to level 2. It’s worth it in the long run since they tend to be able to kill anyone attacking them, unless a red named spawns nearby. It can be worth letting hirelings and a turret protect a large while you go ‘rescue’ a small extractor.

Disruptor Island is similar, in a way. You have about the same amount of time as the first, but with a twist. Now and then a large giant skellie spawns and he’ll shut down all extractors from gaining you any shards. So killing it is important to your success. The bad part is that you don’t know WHEN it’ll spawn and how many times. Which is different from other quests where you can rely on certain red names to spawn and try to attack your nest.

I don’t think this quest is well designed. I understand that the skellie spawns and you don’t really know when – but more then once is not a challenge. That’s just pure random idiocy. There’s no way to develope a good tactic around this since it can spawn just as you fire up the large with 2 minutes to go ruining your chances get anything simply because this random factor.

Compare that to red named spawning in the lava caves where you KNOW they will show up or the red named in extra planar that arrives pretty much at a certain time. That is a challenge you can PLAN around as suppose to hoping just for one skellie and not 3.

Other than that at level 20 and in Epic I suggest that you use command undead on the skellies. It’s a pretty good way of keeping them on your side and a perfect way of getting some extra help when you fire up a large.

The devil island one – short cuts – is just plain bad design.

First off; you have much less time and the idea is that you can take these portals and end up somewhere else. But they all throw you out randomly; sometimes even in the same spot. So how can you PLAN around this random mess to somehow figure out a succesful way to operate.

And since you’re so short on time soloing generally ends up with you unning around rescuing your small extractors and never having the opportunity to fire up a large. All in all expect about 150 mat at the most, which is unfortunate.

I don’t mind using my caster in all 3 island quests – as insta killing spells works fine; but monks are good in either as well and especially short cuts, since it’s ‘free’ to stun and quiver palm stuff to death. Plus monks are naturally fast and if you’re a light monk you can heal yourself. Arti’s are good too, but the run arm does slow down the entire run somewhat and it feels better in lower level challenges rather than higher end ones where time is more crucial since you need more DPS and more time to kill stuff.

I’d say Arti for Kobolds Chaos, Caster for Disruptor and Monk or arcane caster for Short cuts.