While Wizards are not innately a great solo class, it can be done fairly well. With the right tools and at the right level, Wizards solo even more efficiently and can be considered one of the best. But let's get something straight right here. Soloing is boring, it is tedious and time consuming, and quite honestly Everquest gets old real fast. It is the interaction with friends that keeps you coming back, not the actual game its self, which is pretty much the same thing over and over. Further, Everquest is by design and intent a grouping game. While Verant made certain classes excel at solo play with their natural abilities, the rest are intended to group. So Soloing is going to be something most will not consider a great life nor preferable over the long haul of the class.
That said, there are times you will want to solo. Either your friends aren't on yet to join you, or you can't get a group, or you just aren't feeling social today, there are a host of reasons to solo. Wizards are certainly capable of solo play and this will hopefully help you to succeed more and die less.
Escape Plan
Make no mistake, you will die. Soloing is no more foolproof than any other endeavor in Everquest, it has greater reward in terms of loot and experience than grouping, and with it comes greater risk. Wizards do not have any kind of reliable escape system built in. Spirit of the Wolf is not, despite some people's comments, part of our abilities as a Wizard, and running away quickly is the most reliable system of escape in the game.
Yes, we can attempt to port away, but I wouldn't rely on that to save my life if I were you. Because of this, to solo until you get more reliable escape methods such as Journeyman Boots or potions of Spirit of the Wolf you will need to stay close to somewhere you can get to safety.
In most zones this will have to be either the local guard or a zone line. Sticking near to where you can run to a guard will keep you alive more than hoping to tough it out, and this is part of why I am very opposed to killing any guards in the game. We rely on them fairly heavily at the lowest levels, running to the local watchman or dragoon to save us from something that ended up tougher than we'd planned. Zone lines are good for the rest of the game if you can stay close. Almost every zone has some sort of hunting within running distance of a zone, stay close to there if you can and be ready to bolt at the right time.
I need to put in some notes on Fade/Shadowstep/Yonder here. These spells were added to the Wizard class because Verant wisely noted that we lack a pet and thus are a punching bag if things to even slightly wrong. Back when the game was released, these were slightly more effective than they are now, and there is some discussion of making them work that way again. However, right now, the Fade line will not teleport you up, which means that if you are in any sort of uneven terrain, you will eventually end up in a valley going nowhere. Further, obstructions like trees and buildings can cut you off, which negates their effectiveness even more.
As I noted elsewhere, the game likes to put you in water if there is some nearby, because it is typically free of monsters. While you may swim very well, the monsters swim even better. Further, they can cast through the water plane, while you cannot do so. In addition, they do not run out of air, ever, while you must surface or drown. Lastly, anyone who has used these spells knows that they will teleport you a random distance a random direction.
What this all adds up to is that if you are not in an open, wide, flat area and aren't lucky, the spell line will tend to port you a few feet in a random direction. This has several effects:
Basic Tactics
I have covered some of this in the Strategy general page. Keep an eye on your Hit Point bar and your Mana Bar. If the blue isn't going away faster than the red, you will die. If the monster isn't dying faster than your mana is going away you will die. You will not be able to melee that creature down past level 5 or so, if it comes down to "just one more hit with my staff" you will lose. Don't fool yourself, its better to run and live than die and recover your corpse, it takes too long to get your experience back in this game.
Choose your targets carefully. While several creatures may all CON the same to you, each one will be different in its difficulty level for you as a caster to defeat. For example, you can have Ambassador D'Vinn, a Gnoll Reaver, and a Druid Bandit all standing in front of you. These can all CON exactly the same at level 18, but will be VERY different in difficulty for you to solo. Ambassador Dvinn is grossly underConned, to the tune of around ten levels. He resists magic heavily, moves very fast, attacks very fast, interrupts casting, and does a lot of damage with every attack. You will die without using a bubble of mana against him. A Gnoll Reaver is easier to kill, it resists fire and magic slightly more than cold, and hits pretty hard including bash, but doesn't have a huge number of hit points. This target is better than Dvinn. But the Druid Bandit is your best choice. Druids are good casters, its true, but as a Wizard you can mow through them like wheat. The Druid will tend to stand back and cast a few times, which is right up your alley. Caster monsters usually have slightly lower hit points than their non casting companions, although they hit just as hard in hand to hand.
Pick the monsters with low resistances, ones with special attacks, because these tend to make the monster CON higher than its power level. Melee types get torn apart by caster monsters for a variety of reasons, but Wizards love them, anything that keeps its distance is going to be served up on rye toast. Monsters with low hit points and magic resistance but high attacks and ranged attacks are perfect for Wizards. Find these out, seek them through friends, web pages, and the suggestions here.
Check your six. This means, in Air Force language, to keep an eye out for strays. You can easily be so fixated on burning that Mist Elemental to the ground that you totally miss the Earth Elemental buddy that floats in from the side to pound on you. Some people use an outside view of themselves while hunting, this works fairly well. Just don't forget that monsters wander around in Everquest, and some of them will just attack you on sight. As you go up levels, more and more of them do. Just figure that it is your reputation preceding you.
A Word on Bolts
In the early levels of your Wizards life, you have three Bolt Spells to use. Right away you will notice two things about Bolts, first they look really cool, and second, they have a huge range. This range is to your advantage when you hunt. Fire off a bolt first thing to get the monster's attention. Due to the extreme range of a bolt spell and the speed of spells casting at low levels, you will be able to get another blast off and sometimes even root before the creature reaches you. Bolt spells also allow you to target and pull something that you don't want to run up to (hey, we are Wizards, not bards).
Root and Shoot
Rooting monsters is a risky business. Root is very uneven, it sometimes will hold for an entire fight, then the next five fights will break over and over. Due to this incredibly unpredictable nature, many Wizards curse root and all it stands for. In fact, I suspect every caster has cursed root at least once. However, Root is your best tool for solo kills until you get a hold of some sort of speed enhancing tools, or snare. So here are some basic tips on using Root and how it behaves. Creatures that have root cast on them get a saving through immediately to see if they are stopped. The lower level the creature is under you the more likely it will hold, to a certain extent. Your Alteration Skill also contributes to this in some degree, making root land more reliably.
Once a creature is successfully Rooted it then gets a save every regular time interval (probably every tick) to try to break free of the spell. This can be in the middle of casting a spell, it has no relation to your actions. And lastly, the monster gets a save every time it is hit with damage. The larger the damage done in one hit, the easier this save is to make. So if you nail the monster with the best blast you have, it will tend to fly out of root and come tell you all about it. Root sometimes will break the instant the monster is hit with it, in other words, it seems to get a save INSTANTLY when the spell has successful effect. This can look like the monster never even slowed down on your screen, and is perhaps the most annoying effect you will see. With this in mind, you can expect how a monster will behave and what will happen.
Once the monster is rooted, nail it with everything you have. The monster has to die fast, because he has more hit points and more armor class than you do, and the gap only gets bigger as you go up levels. Soloing is where you don't conserve mana, just make the creature crispy. There is a nifty trick that you can use with very low resistance monsters for quicker kills. Your AE Rain spells are terrible area effect spell, but against a single target, they can actually do more damage than any single blast you have of the same level.
If you can get root to stick reliably on the monster, cast your best AE Rain spell on it. While the waves are still going off and hurting the monster, you will be able to dump one more more additional blasts into the target, killing it very swiftly if it does not resist. For best effect with this, stand just outside the area of the rain spell, which for most monsters will be outside their range of hand to hand. Even if they manage to break root and run up to hit you, they will still be in the area of effect and suffer the remaining waves of effect. This is hardly foolproof but it can break up the monotony and will kill the creatures very quickly.
Where to Hunt
While I cannot give you an exhaustive list of soloing spots, and like good fishing holes, Wizards often are very close about how they share good soloing spots, I can give you some ideas and hits for level ranges. Note, this will NEVER include guards or similar NPCs. I find the practice of killing creatures such as guards and Dwarves very distasteful and cheap. This list will expand as I remember and figure out good spots, sometimes when you try to think of a list of things your mind starts to blank out.
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