Solo Rattling Farmer

[quadgamer]

Sorry. I didn't mean "get it all", tho you can. I meant get what you need. Soloing a Farmer must be hard. So give him a little ... help.

[JohnWordsworth]

I have done a 4 farmer run (normal difficulty) to about half way through. It gets tough in places and spreading food out 4 ways is pretty thin. Fights are tough but mostly okay with a few massive spikes where you need to find tricks to survive (or use up your bombs!) but that is expected given the circumstances.

I actually reckon it would be the right balance between very challenging but doable with 2 Farmers. Losing every other attack by having just 1 guy is gonna make progress slow and some fights would becone very long and possibly tedious.

[Saice]

So yeah I poked around with a solo farmer a little bit. it looks vary doable if you farm the respawnables (got to level 5 in the first zone just framing turtles and resting). But man it is one hell of a grind I think it would be vary possible to get ridiculous levels if your willing to do the grind of food farming. But in the long run yeah I don't think it works well something else would work beter for a solo run. Maybe a knight for the ridiculous protection levels or some such.

So looks like I'll go back to my Rat Pack of 4 to finish my first play through instead.

[Pyros]

- air elementals appear long before the Ethereal Blade can be collected

Don't think that's the case, at least if you know where the Ethereal Blade is and how to get it. Even if you don't know, you get access to the hint to open the cemetary gates before you encounter the first air elemental(in stormbreach I believe, though not sure when the respawns in sleet island happen). You can kinda go grab it before you do anything else if you wanted. If you wanted to go the dispel route, you'd need 1water too, since for some reason it requires water.

I think you might be better off making a mage than a melee, however without an alchemist, energy potions are in very limited supplies so probably not the best idea as you'd run out of energy too fast.

Overall I'd say the challenge seems near impossible on hard difficulty at least. Monsters just hit way too hard and there's many situations where you're forced to face tank several of them and even if you can get them stuck to fight them one by one, that's a very long fight where you'll drink several potions and the supplies are limited on these. There's just not enough healing potions herbs to complete the game, I'd say. On normal, maybe. I think intelligently using your first gold key(instead of getting the dagger, maybe you go get something else) and skipping a lot of stuff to get some food and collect some key items.

[minmay]

I played through on hard and don't recall ever having to tank a monster. For cases like the ancient claymore room, you can just use invisibility or bombs.

[minmay]

All right, finished this exact character on hard with all secrets, treasures, and epic items (no ironman though, too impatient). I didn't realize experience cost would jump to 1,000,000 at level 19 so my skills ended up a complete mess.
Comments:

SpoilerShow

First, you definitely don't ever need to face tank anything. There are only 4 places in the game where you get easily surrounded by monsters:
- Barren desert
- The ancient claymore room
- The ratling boss
- The mummy room that you get teleported to when you pick up the arquebus

The arquebus is hardly even worth mentioning since you can just not pick it up - it's a useless item and there's nothing in the chamber you teleport to. Besides, it's just mummies. The other three are easy if you just spend a few bombs or potions or use invisibility.

I specifically beat my game without brewing any extra potions other than +stat ones so that I could say you don't need alchemy, but it still gives you near-infinite healing and haste and a bunch of stat increases, so...yeah.

I went with heavy weapons because I felt like a challenge and wanted to try out the cool-looking special abilities, but ended up regretting it - the abysmal damage-per-time is more annoying than challenging, you just spend longer dodging attacks, and the special abilities weren't altogether that cool between the charge-up time and the doubled cooldown.

Armour skill was a waste like in the first game. With 5 skill, the meteor set, scaled cloak, and the shield spell (around 145 protection) I still couldn't even reasonably tank the cemetary undead. Just mummies and rats. Might as well just avoid hits from all monsters (instead of 99% of them) and use those skill points on, say, killing things three times as fast. I guess with evasion being impossible to get in LoG2 it might still be worthwhile to wear heavy armour with 0 skill? Probably not.

I'm going to have to do at least one more solo character anyway to test something. For a solo character I don't see anything that competes with backstabbing, invisibility, and alchemy. My path for that next character will probably be light weapons -> critical -> concentration 2 (invisibility staff) -> alchemy. I'll be rushing at least part of Pyramid of Umas for the good weapons anyway so might as well go whole hog and get the staff from the desert too. Remember that you get an early book of knowledge from the summon stones, and a not-early-at-all book of knowledge in Castle Nex.

Also, I found farmer surprisingly fun. It's really nice to have experience dissociated from monster kills, you're allowed to deal with monsters in fun ways like jumping on them or letting them hit each other without the game punishing you for it by taking away your XP. That only goes for a solo character, of course, I can't imagine food-based XP being anything other than a micromanagement nightmare if there are other characters in the game.
By the way, someone was recommending that you grind the herder den for farmer XP. I highly recommend not doing that if it's a solo farmer. It's agonizingly slow and you get to level 19 really fast by playing normally.

[sapientCrow]

Toorat... hah
19 seems pretty nice for a normal playthrough.

Did you figure out how the respawn triggers work?
My first playthrough the respawn seemed way more plentiful. Now I keep going back to beach to check and nothing is respawning at all.