I read a lot of posts about the difficulty of solo fighting post-Patch 1, and I'm afraid I don't completely agree. Most of the comments seem to refer to problems with gingos, especially in the low-ish level areas surrounding cities, but since (I will claim) gingos are the best animal to solo fight in these areas, I am putting up or shutting up -- i mean, posting my 'Guide to Gingo Fighting'.
This will be a long post, so i have divided it into sections:
1. About Ryzom Soloing
2. Gingo Goodness
3. Being Safe
4. Starting a Fight
5. Working up the Food Chain
1. About Ryzom Soloing
Compared to a number of other MMO games I have tried, soloing in Ryzom is not as difficult or as boring. Other games frequently have more downtime between fights when you solo than Ryzom does, not less. It's probably easier to get killed in Ryzom, but getting rid of a death penalty is not terribly time-consuming (the best way is via foraging, but you know that already, don't you?).
2. Gingo Goodness
In many places gingos and ragus are found together. Since what I am saying works for both animals, I'm not going to mention ragus separately, mostly. Everything I say about gingos applies to ragus too. This guide is mostly for players up to about level 50, though much of it applies to higher levels too, so I mostly talk about the starting mainland zones (the one containing the main city), and gingos of levels vigorous, growling, scowling and baying.
In the starting mainland zones, gingos are an excellent kill target because they give the best XP of the zone, relative to the difficulty of killing them -- better than kipees, for example. By all means kill kipees, and yubos and other herbivores, if they give good XP for your level, but for maximum goodness, go for the gingos.
Before you go out, visit your local corporals, and take as many missions killing gingos as you can find. (Fill out your current mission list with kipee missions, and whatever else is easy to kill. You can do these other missions as the opportunity presents itself. Personally, I don't bother with missions that require you to bring things back to the NPC. I think they're too much trouble.) If you do a full roster of missions, get the money reward, quarter all the corpses and sell the loot, you can easily earn 30K dapper in an hour or so -- once you learn to survive the gingos. For that part of the story, read on ...
3. Being Safe
In order to survive gingos, it is vital to know -- at any given location where you might be walking or standing -- whether it is gingo-safe or gingo-unsafe. If you stand in an unsafe area for any length of time, and especially if you try to fight a gingo (or any animal) in an unsafe area, you will die soon.
Let me repeat that: If you stand or fight in unsafe areas, you will die sooner or later, usually sooner.
An unsafe location area is any area that gingos wander through, or any place from which gingos can see you while wandering (about 10-15m away, at least for scowling gingos). A safe location is any place else. (Safe from gingos, that is -- there might be other hazards, too).
For the areas you frequent -- especially around the cities and towns that you travel through a lot, you should spend some time in a safe place close to the city/town borders, just watching the nearest gingo populations. Learn where they spawn, and learn where they path (wander). You will eventually learn things like "If I stand behind an imaginary line connecting these 2 trees, I can see the gingos pretty close up, but they will never see me or sneak up on me."
(The exception to this is if a gingo is chasing an animal or another player. This might bring it into a normally safe area. If you die as a result, be philosophical about it.)
For areas you don't know, working out what is safe is a little harder, but not too hard. First, since you survived getting to where you are now, you probably were in a safe place a little ways back. So if you need to stop, go back 25m or so the way you came. This is not a GREAT assumption -- gingos do wander away leaving a nice clear looking area for a while, then wander back or (worse still) respawn next to you.
But there is a trick to finding safe places in unknown lands. Look for concentrations of passive animals (kipee, yubo, bodoc, capryini, raspals, mektoubs, etc in Matis; corrosponding herbivores in other lands) or plants, and go stand in the middle of them. This works for 2 reasons. One, the game design tends to keep gingo spawn places separate from other animal/plant spawn places. Second, when gingos attack animals, they scatter, so if you see a cluster of animals close together, there probably aren't any gingos there, and haven't been recently.
Finally, keep your eyes open, watch the landscape and watch your radar. (I like to set the radar to 50m.) When traveling, always practice avoidance instead of fighting your way through -- because the location of such a fight is BY DEFINITION unsafe, and you know already: unsafe location = death. If you have to cross unsafe areas because you can't find a safe way around, always stop somewhere safe first, and watch the traffic patterns before you move.
4. Starting a Fight
In order to stay alive, you must always fight one gingo alone. You may sometimes succeed with 2 or more at once, but mostly you will die.
The wrong way to begin a fight is to let a gingo see you. By definition, again, this means you are in an unsafe place, and you will probably die soon one way or another.
The right way for melee fighters is to "pull" the gingo to where you stand in a safe location. Magic is best for pulling because of its range. If you have any magic at all (if you began with it, or bought Magic Start), you will have at least Acid level 1, and this is fine for pulling if you have nothing better. The gingo will come to you even if the spell is resisted.
Whatever spell you use for pulling, edit it so that it has no "Range" credit stanzas. You want the maximum range, 50m, for maximum safety. If your compass radar is set to 50m, this means anything you can see on the radar, you can pull. (The range is reduced if you are wearing medium armor, and reduced more if you are wearing heavy armor. In that case, you have to get closer, so be careful.) Let the gingo come all the way to you, don't run towards it.
If you have no magic, then make sure you have Taunt, and use that to pull. Taunt has a smaller range than magic, so you need to be more careful using it.
If you are a mage, target your gingo, then back away till its red dot is at the extreme edge of your 50m compass radar. Ideally, you should then cast Root (edited to remove "Range" credits), followed by your best elemental damage. If all goes well, even though the gingo will become unrooted after a while and run towards you, you will kill it before it reaches you -- or at least before it kills you. Don't bother to re-root, it just wastes time. If you don't have root, or if the root is resisted, just use whatever you have that most speeds the kill, over and over as fast as you can. The perfect pull is when you kill the gingo while it is about still about 20m away -- you won't take any damage because it never reached you, and the corpse will skid to your feet for you to quarter without your even moving.
Whatever attack spells you use, edit the actions to remove range and cast time credits. You want maximum distance, and minimum time between casts. Buy HP credits to supplement the sap credits instead. And use a magic amplifier and light (or no) armor, of course.
I've never had much trouble pulling a single gingo out of a pack, even when they are fairly close together. So long as they don't look like they are actually touching each other, you should be fine. If you are worried, just wait a bit for some of them to wander away.
5. Working up the Food Chain
I hope this is obvious, but generally you shouldn't attack gingos you can't kill (one-on-one, I mean). So, start by pulling only the easiest of the breed, namely Vigorous Ragus, to see what happens. If you die, go back to yubos till you level a bit more.
When you are first able to kill a Vigorous Ragus, you should get 1000 XP or more per kill, which is pretty good for soloing. When you level some more and the XP dips below 500 XP per kill, start killing the next most difficult: Growling Ragus and Vigorous Gingo. These should net you 2000 XP or so to begin, gradually falling off as you level. Again, when the XP drops below 500 XP, move up the doggy food chain to Scowling Ragus and Growling Gingo. And so on. Remember that ragus are easier to kill than gingos having the same description (growling, scowling, etc).
Personally, I find it worth killing the easier ones at least until the XP is below 300 (because it's fast XP at that level, and the quartering yields sellable materials), but you can decide for yourself when you think killing easy ones is no longer worth it.
If you follow the steps I've outlined above, you should become a fearsome gingo slayer. You will still die at times (especially when you move up to a new level of gingo), but not enough to seriously interfere with your enjoyment of soloing. Everyone who plays Ryzom hates gingos, it seems, and there is a real feeling of accomplishment in knowing that you know how to handle them without any help.
Enjoy.
Adayl
Gingo Slayer of Matis
