Short Time

It wasn't all that long before seven in the evening, as expected, when I finally logged in to Last Chaos - just after I'd uploaded the blog last night, and was about to log out, the announcement came up that they were giving double experience for 24 hours as an apology for the problems and downtimes we'd been having, so I missed rather a lot of that.

SirDarth went out to do a bit more training of his level 20 horse, after I'd moved Kaerella's recent loot across to a different character to get it out of the way; Kaerella then did a bit of exploring, starting with the level 52 Giants not far west of Dratan City. Kaerella's low armour rating made them a bit tricky, I'd certainly have been in big trouble without the buffs from my mount.  At level 41, I have exactly the same defence as the knight Ratel, who's at level 30, apparently, if the pet buff (Armour Increase) from SirFrancis is included.  Using Slow Shot makes things easier, but that gets through a lot of mana, so to farm there properly I'd need some larger mana potions.

After a little while I moved across to Merac, where there was a new quest flashed up - so that involved riding out to Owl Village, and then going off to fight Gnoll Soldiers down in the south of the map.

I stopped off at Maargadum Jail; running through level one with horse buffs was easy, and level two was trauma-free, as there are plenty of safe spots, and as an archer one can generally just pick off the canines, or the Beast Scythes, one by one.  Even a side room on level three was a bit dodgy, though, as the level 46 Beast Flyers come in en masse, supported by the Beast Archers.  Easy enough over on the Cariae server, but there Kae is six levels higher, and with extremely good armour!

Running out through level one without horse buffs was also traumatic, with a lot of damage taken, but I made it, and headed on down towards the Gnoll Soldiers.  I discovered, however, on a part of the road which previously had been utterly devoid of opponents, level 37 Elite Bloody Outlaws, a new version of the Blood Frenzies, and also level 40 Elite Frenzied Berserkers - which aren't a new version of the level 34 Berserkers, but of the level 40 Highlanders.  And just along the side-path that I assume leads to one of the new high-level dungeons, I saw level 51 Elite Cerebrii.

I had two quests with the Gnoll Soldiers, and just managed to complete them both, killing 25 of them and collecting three hearts, before it was time for the Sunday Quiz.

SirDarth had logged out, and SirPerivale came on, to pass Ratel's fully-trained horse over to him - Ratty returned my blue horse, and 300 or so quality stones as a thank-you.  My rogue RAGE then logged in to Auzura-2 for the Quiz - but she, and everyone else who was in there in good time, got disconnected at about 9:15 UK time, and when they logged back in, weren't allowed to go back into the Quiz Room.  As Kae in Auzura-3 hadn't been disconnected, I guessed that the problem only affected Auzura-2, which had been the sub-server that had crashed during Auzura's first weekly Quiz... so RAGE moved over to Auzura-3, while Ratel plumped for Auzura-6.  And Kae joined RAGE of course.

The Quiz itself ran smoothly, and we all got our full rewards; Ratel used his 15 heaven stones to get a spare level 29 weapon up to +8, while I just put mine away in storage.  I do have rather a lot of them now.

Kaerella headed back to where the new elite types were. I should definitely have left those Elite Cerebrii alone - although the Wet Paint Last Chaos Wiki doesn't say so, they are protective of one another, so when I used Slow Shot on one of them, another, a bit too near, charged me at full speed, and seconds later I was ready to use my Skill Point Restoration Scroll, to return to life back in town, a couple of experience points down, but with my skill point total unaffected.

Still, the Elite Frenzied Berserkers, just one level below Kae, gave good experience, so I stayed with them for a while, killing a few Highlanders if there was a gap between respawns.  I checked up on the Elite Cerebrii - and, seeing one without any others near it, used Slow Shot again, and some running, and a health pot - and managed to kill it.  The experience gain was suitably large, but it just dropped a little cash.

Well, there wasn't time for a long session, but it was eventful at least!  One of the Elite Frenzied Berserkers dropped a level 37 +4 titan axe, which was nice.  An upgrade event was announced; Ratel reckons that, while he might have got less failures if he'd upgraded his weapon then, it would have been more likely to break, so he was happy to have done his upgrading before the event was announced.  If the Giants, or anything else, had dropped any armour Kae could have used I'd have upgraded it, but I hadn't picked up anything suitable.  It looks as if Kaerella is stuck with her old armour set for a while yet...

Kae went up 26.19% this evening, and added 32 skill points, so that wasn't bad, given the limited playing time.  Now that my "busy weekend" is over, hopefully things can go back to normal.