ok 1) no ZOMBIE (they are not skeletons)sailors spawn when you kill a spider 2) to solo spiders use ROOT (duh) then they cant poison you 3) i have killed about 20 spiders and not gotten one single silk!
I am currently in Erud's Crossing with my level 13 mage, and every spider I saw conned blue. I am 90% sure that 12 is the highest level the spiders get.
They are really good solo exp. The key is not to let my pet just tank one, cause the poison and damage will kill him, quick. I let my pet tank and I nuke as fast as I can (mostly Shock of Blades). I can drop 1, med a bit til my pet is at least 3/4 health, and go for the next. By the time I was oom, I killed 4 or 5. and had a full yellow of EXP. Fire pet works good, but the water pet works better due to high regen rate and more HP.
These spiders are tough at lvl 10-15. After that, anyone able to cast cure poison can own em. No guild raid would be necessary. The skelly sailors are held by random spiders. Once one of these is killed, the skellys pop. Watch out for the plauge shark when pullin skellys. BTW I recently went there for fun and wiped out all of the spiders for fun and silk. This was done at 32 by a cleric.
Fought these nasty little critters 15-16 solo as a Druid. Good exp but at the expence of much hp due to poison. You should pull one at a time from the beach. They tend to wander down from the volcano.
Trolls don't have much problem with poison in general - the weak poisons won't even hurt us and the stronger poisons (Darkweed snakes, asps, etc) are only mildly anoying at worst - any troll out there get stung by one of these guys yet?
Also, for those of you who have been swarmed by these spiders, do they take you out from multiple hits or is it the poison?
I saw like 20 of these guys and someone attacked them. He was in a group but got swarmed. They had to kill 3 of them. They killed them all but then one of the guys just dropped down a DIED. It was so funny. There posion is deadly you better get a big guild raid to kill these guys and when you done kill all the skeleton sailors
The spiders are not that tough for a lvl 13 or higher when taken 1 on 1, but on the island attacking one too close to the centre of the island can cause every last spider to come out, instant death for anyone on the island who can't get off.
Just a subnote. If these guys start hitting you, don't run into the water. I started to fight one, two others joined in and my level 10 druid ran into the ocean. BIG mistake. I got to do a corpse run, because they all followed me out into the deeps and killed me when I tried to Gate. Did you ever try to find your corpse after a panic run into an ocean? It sucks, big time.
Poison on these is very strong...but so is the XP you get.
Plus, people usually ignore them so there are loads around, unlike the wisps. If you can cast cure poison (or team weith someone who can) these are good hunting.
The spiders on Erud's Crossing are better exp than the wisps. They may be higher lvl than 12? I have levelled 2 chars to 15 on wisps but needed spiders to get them to 16.
The poison these guys leak out hurts alot. Example: in a battle with one, the spider took me down half a bubble of health before i finished roasting it with shock of lightning. The poison, well after the end of the battle, knocked me down to one bub of health. considering my level 13 High Elf Wiz has about 45 HPs per bubble of health, 150 points of poison damage is pretty harsh. Suggested attack for fellow wizzies: get up resistant skin, root and shoot as much as possible.