Hmm, the mechanics of getting a blog published around here is a bit new to me, but it seemed like a good idea to bring my gaming blog over to this community - it has been humming away rather quietly over at guildportal.com for the last year, but I don't think they really have any great way to let people explore their blogs - luckily the whole archive, and current posts, can be found at my own website, www.kaerella.com - so if you've a few hours to spare, head on over!  Last Chaos is one of the "micro-payment" type games, where you can sign up and play without parting with a cent, but you'll be tempted to buy various items to enhance your questing.  It is big, it is successful, it is expanding, and it has a pretty friendly and active community, as these things go.  But here's today's post.  Since the new European-oriented server "Auzura" began, it has enjoyed "recommended" status, to help us get our new characters moving.  But from today, sadly, it is...

No Longer Recommended  - March 6th

SirDarth got BasheR's horse to level 37 by the end of the morning - so, after an hour or two with the blue horse that SirPerivale had previously been working on, I was able to take Ratel's level 22 horse and start work on that one - Elva passed over 837 quality stones, which should be more than enough.  By my calculations BasheR's horse consumed the equivalent of 518 of them, though he started at a higher level.  I lent Ratel the blue horse, so that he still has the horse-type armour and/or attack buff over the next few days.

Sadly, the new Auzura server no longer has the "Recommended" status, with the handy little "Blessed Reward" drops for us... as a gesture to the other servers, it looks as if they'll all get a rather shorter turn as that.  Today Hatzring had the special status, so in the late morning I took my level six mage there out for a bit of levelling, and got her up to level nine.

After lunch, back on Auzura my rogue RAGE went out to Prokion Temple; the Auzura-3 back room was occupied, but luckily Auzura-4 was clear.  As RAGE is just about out of crit potions, this time along with a platinum super skill pill and a power potion I used an adrenalin one and a berserker one, for increased hit rate and a 10% chance per hit of doing double damage.  The lack of the extra-damage Blessed Reward makes it hard to compare the results, but hour one gave 756 skill points, and hour two gave 732.  It looks as if I ought to try to get a few more crit potions!  But the afternoon's total of 1517 sp does take RAGE's total skill points to over fifteen thousand now, so I guess she is ready to start levelling up now.

Kaerella had a fairly short session in the same room after that, to take advantage of the first part of the Friday afternoon "Happy Hour" and its 50% extra skill exp, just adding 75 skill points, before I got a bit sidetracked by a special offer that was to run for only two hours - spend 100 aeria points or more and get an "uber upgrade package", whatever that is...hopefully, having posted in the relevant forum thread, I'll find out what the pack contains before too long.

BasheR reclaimed his horse, and kindly passed over the white pet colouring crystal he'd promised - he also very kindly let me keep the remaining quality stones from the  900 he originally supplied.  He mounted the horse, and headed out into Dratan desert  to do some levelling on the level 53 Arcane Giants (or are they "Akane"?), so the full horse buffs should be rather useful.  He was wondering whether or not to use a black pet colouring crystal, the only trouble with them is that they don't give a solid, glossy black, it's more of a dark, stormy grey.

Ratel logged out very early today.  "The kids kept us up all night last night and this morning - so I'm kinda seeing two screens at the moment..."  Hopefully he'll have better luck tonight.  He did manage to re-freeze MrChuckNorris's experience now that Chuck has reached level 27, so Chuck made an exploratory trip through the higher-level areas of Prokion Temple, but I'll need to get all his new level 30/32 armour set up to +3, and get him something better than a +6 weapon, before doing any serious skill point farming with him there. 

Chuck did at least get enough skill points for the first level of Expert Armoursmithing, and enough cracked axes (five) to finish a quest.  Getting the reward for that one triggered a new quest, so Chuck has now got both the quests that require ten "soft sand" from the Sand Golems, it's strange that so many quest item-type drops don't have any use, but that item is needed for two different quests.

Some browsing of the various merchants didn't offer very much, there seem very few +15 weapons on sale, but then Auzura is still a relatively new server.  There was a +11 level 29 weapon, but the vendor didn't mention whether or not an Extreme Stone had been used, and if one had, then 22 million was perhaps a little too high.  If the "ES" had already been used (and one can only be used once per item), then it would be hard to get the weapon above +12.

Well, the evening's adventuring rather ran out of steam, though SirDarth kept busy, and Ratel's horse reached level 23 by mid-evening.  I got seduced by a bit of web browsing, I must admit, although it was Last Chaos related!