I agree, i'm a 36 mage and chain cast a low level nuke to prevent aggro and when the time comes, I use my best one to kill it preventing unwanted guests being attracted to my pet. I used focused water and it ended up with more than 60% hp, monster summoning 1 did NO damage and barely survived.
45 Mage just wandering around Thurgadin checking out the stores when behold, I see a rat. Casually hit my melee button, after all this is just a rat. He kept coming, so I decided maybe I'll cast one spell and blast him out of there. I could not get a single spell off, pet is not up because...who expected trouble in town?...and I'm dead meat. How humiliating.
I'm 34 barbarian warrior (not twinked), and I got attacked by one of these rats. Killing it wasn't much of a problem I only lost 2 bubbles of health. The rat conned blue to me.
Rats are tuff little buggers. As a 51 Ranger I was scouting out the mines. I fell into a pit and could not get out. A rat was siting at the top of a ladder I needed to climb up and a tar goo at the bottom. My fear animal did not work. I was killed how embarassing. Rats can hit for 65+ BTW
I came to Thurgadin with a level 29 pally, and I was a level 26 necro. We tried pulling a scuttle rat out of the cave the're in, and then fought it. I had my level 24 pet that conned blue to me(About the highest pet you can get at this level!) The pally double attacked often for about 60 dmg a hit, and I sent my pet and nuked. Shock of poison was resisted a few times, and when it hit it did no more than 10 dmg(This spell normally hits for 150!!) And my tap spell was often resisted. I burned all my mana, and then my pet was really low on health, and the pally had about 1.5 bubs of health of remaining, and the stupid rat still had a little over half it's health!! We had to get the guards to kill it, and we BARELY made it alive!
I'm not quite sure what the problem is... i'm a cleric, which we all know don't make great soloers, and i solo'd him at lvl 37 with no problem at all. I still had 30m and 60L. hmmm. i would think a lvl 34 pally and 24 cleric should do fine.. i'm only 3 lvl's higher. Who knows.....
These con blue to a level 35 and still con blue to a level 40. They start conning green around level 40.
Loot: Common: Rat Ears, Rat Whiskers etc. -- yep -- that's right!! They drop common items that a large rat would drop and nothing else.
No other loot that I found -- and I hunted the mines for 4 levels.
Notes: All of the four mine creatures (tar goos, scuttle bats, scuttle rats and crytal spiders) are KOS but have a very low aggro range. Only the spiders swarm. You can hit a bat that is sitting right on top of a rat and pull only the bat. I don't know if this will help to determine level but while they were green to the 50th level characters who came down for a quest PC, they still attacked them.
ps....they are called Scuttle bats and Scuttle rats, not shuttle....FYI