So this is my first “Pet Profile”. Basically, I’m gonna take a few pets that I have experience with and talk a bit about what I think makes them so damn awesome. For this debut post, I wanted to write about a surprising little spider that I picked up in Searing Gorge. I think you might find it interesting.

NAME: Ash Spiderling

LOCATION: Searing Gorge

LEVEL RANGE: 13

SPECIAL CONDITIONS: None

So as I was leveling my pet team, one of the pets I still needed for my collection was the Ash Spiderling out of Searing Gorge. Since my pets were around the right level for the Gorge, I decided to head that way and farm up some pets and maybe hold some more “auditions” for my 3rd spot.

Turns out, at level 15, the Ash Spiderling becomes a force to be reckoned with.

At level 13, I thought he was great because not only does he come with a Webbing ability called “Sticky Web”, but he also has an ability called “Leech Life” which not only does damage and self-heals, but does double-healing if the opponent is webbed. Sounds good, right?

Well not only does he have good contain and good self-healing, but he also has a couple of other abilities that make him a powerful offensive threat, too. His alternate 1 ability is called Poison Spit, a basic direct damage spell that applies a 3-round DoT to the opponent. This makes a nice replacement for “Strike”, his level 1 DD spell. At level 15, however, he gains a replacement for Sticky Web called “Brittle Webbing”. While it loses the ability to contain the opponent’s pet, it does act as another direct-damage-to-DoT spell which ALSO applies the “Webbed” debuff. That means not only am I doing significant damage to my opponent over two DoTs and all the DD I can deal, but I can also dish out a Leech Life to keep my health up. I can often handle a whole 3-pet at-level team with the Ash Spiderling alone.

Interesting additional bit of note about Brittle Webbing is that the damage part of the spell is dealt at ANY time the other pet deals damage. So if a pet starts to unload with a multi-shot ability like Swarm or Flurry, the pet will take damage from the debuff every hit that lands. I can’t tell you the number of rats and roaches that have killed themselves while trying to swarm me.

I’ve affectionately referred to this pet as “Flo Spida” to go along with the rest of my pet name theme (I’ll post about that soon), and he’s going to be very, very hard to replace on my roster.

NOTE: It should be said that while I understand that pretty much every Spider pet in the game shares the moveset of the Ash Spiderling, I chose it due to it’s convenient level placement just before the great upgrade at level 15, which is where I feel it goes from good pet to great pet, but that isn’t to say thatany other spider wouldn’t be useful in this role.