I’m largely a solo player. I like work­ing in groups, but my time in LotRO is often very spo­radic … Try­ing to gather a few peo­ple together quickly can be dif­fi­cult in any MMORPG. It’s more due to my envi­ron­ment than any real choice.

As such, I’ve devel­oped var­i­ous meth­ods and rea­sons for solo­ing the way I do. Today I wanted to cover how I approach tak­ing on mul­ti­ple ene­mies. When solo­ing, you likely already try to make an effort to keep fights one on one, unless you’re fac­ing a bunch of weak­lings. Unfor­tu­nately, you’re bound to attract some unfriendly atten­tion no mat­ter how hard you try.

This cre­ates many sit­u­a­tions where you’re fight­ing against two (or more) ene­mies simul­ta­ne­ously. A good per­cent­age of the time one of these ene­mies is stronger. “Stronger” can mean dif­fer­ent things, but gen­er­ally I’m refer­ring to over­all Morale (and likely over­all level too).

There are two ways to go here. The first is to take on the stronger guy first, while the sec­ond is to take on the weaker guy first. For some the assump­tion may be that get­ting the big guy out of the way makes more sense. After all, he’s respon­si­ble for more dam­age and will be there longer.

I usu­ally go the other route. In this case, I’d take out the weak­est link first when solo­ing. Based on my expe­ri­ence, I’ve found this to be the best route for sur­viv­abil­ity. For Tip Time, I fig­ured what the heck; why not try to back it up with some­thing a bit more solid. Chart time! Read the rest of this entry »