The Search for Armour

SirDarth did do a little pet-levelling early in the morning, but then I had to go out shopping for a while, so he had some time off. Later in the morning, though, he was able to get the horse to level 35 for Bladesrus, ready for later in the week. The horse was then traded across to SirPerivale for safe keeping; Darth got a new pan flute from MistressDomino, who had been doing some quite successful selling during the morning, and headed for Lorraine, and then Jajan in Dratan, to get a brand-new pony.

With his upgraded armour, particularly the +13 shield (96 + 135 defence), Darth was able to take the brand-new pony to the Butchers in Merac without any problems, he didn't need any Armour Increase buff there. But the advance announcement of a 200% "upgrade event" for 4:00pm UK time, aimed at European people who may find the usual US-oriented timings of such events impractical, led me to decide to upgrade his armour further - that and a "buy one, get one free" offer on the "Web: Stone Super Pack" combined with a 100% rebate in a few weeks!

But before that, there was time for MrChuckNorris to head for Prokion Temple, for an uninterrupted two hours or so. The first pssp brought in 533 skill points, and the second one a further 505 - the whole session brought in, as well as 2137 pet points, 1067 skill points in all. There are people who gain points faster I know, but Chuck is only using the pssp, not any power, berserker, crit, or adrenaline potions.

One thing that was mildly strange was that today Chuck was not losing health at all - he didn't have to use the health recovery pots almost constantly, plus the occasional small health potion. The fact that the skill points per hour figures are a bit lower than recently rather chimes in with what Darth was finding at the same time - his Butchers were lasting a lot longer than normally. So perhaps the monsters have been adjusted once again, to hit less hard, but they either have better defence or evade more?

Chuck logged out when the announced thirty minute upgrade event began, and BaronIce logged in, grabbing the necessary runes, heaven stones and chaos smelting stones from either the storage chest he shares with Kaerella, or from the "Receipts" area of the Item Mall window.

BaronIce may only be level two, but he boldly went off to Merac to join Darth, and borrowed his various bits of armour to upgrade, using chaos smelting stones to get the pieces up to +10, and then a heaven stone and a rune of protection 2 to get to +11 - as the worst failure you can have with a rop-2 is a decrease to +10, there's no great risk in using them to go from there to +11! Presumably the event meant I had less failures to manage that upgrade, five successes out of seven can't be bad.

So, SirDarth's enhanced armour meant that he could move along to a Berserker even without any Armour Increase buff - with +11 gauntlets, the rest of the armour at +12, and the +13 shield, his physical defence is 1048 - or with the defence-type accessories equipped, 1062.

Before he'd left, BaronIce as an experiment did what a player or two have tried, he attacked Darth's target Butcher - and sure enough, after a minute it turned on him, and only some speedy retreating kept him alive - not that a level two player gets a death penalty. He had got the Butcher's health down a bit, but his retreat out of its range meant that the health reset to 100%, and, although he came back within range, when Darth killed the Butcher, the Baron didn't get any share of the experience.

The evening session was rather bitty, and, as some research and travel was needed, not really all that productive - Rage just added 8.29% experience, 23 skill points, and 762 pet points.

The idea had been to try and get Rage her next armour set, which is the rogue "Fatal" 50/52 armour. As MistressDomino is quite well of for gold currently, the first thing to do was to have her check out Roy's Merchant House - where only one pair of level 52 boots was for sale. These boots, like the level 57 ones, are exceedingly rare, so it was a nice surprise to find that there was a pair on offer, even if the price being asked was 19,999,999 gold. So I swallowed hard, and parted with the cash.

I then checked out the rest of the armour for that level on offer, and found the gloves for 50 million, upgraded to +8, and the hood for 40 million, upgraded to +7. High prices, true, but prices are high now, and if I'd bought cheaper un-upgraded ones I'd have been adding expensive lucky smelting stones and chaos smelting stones, and ended up, in reality, paying more. A small bonus was that all three items are already part of the rogue Fatal armour set, so no transforming from another class, courtesy of Collector Ryu, is needed. There were some nice bloodseals too...

Rage was able to equip the gloves right away, as she is level 45, which increased her physical defence from 772 to 809, so that was a good start. Doing some research on the Last Chaos "Wet Paint" wiki, it seems that it is the Wafes that drop most of the armour at this level. They are level 58 to 62, and are next to the Sphinx Fighters, so would be easy enough to visit - but, while they are passive, they are also protective of one another, all four types, they buff and heal each other, and two types have a strong magical attack... so Rage is going to keep well clear of them.

There was a possibility of one armour piece being dropped by the Akane Giants, so Rage rode out to them, in Dratan desert. It's a place I've been to many times before - Kae got the manual for her boots there - but I didn't get any worthwhile drops at all, mainly because they were, at level 59, 14 levels above her - and the closer you are in level to the monster you're fighting, the better the drops, which explains why the sp-farmers in Prokion Temple do so well.

A move to the Salamander Ruins down in the south of Merac didn't do much, either; the Sallies may only be level 50 and thus yellow-named for Rage, but they are protective, and the Cerebrii in the area, with their magic attack, are protective of them too. And no good drops...

I checked my stock of manuals, held by Calm, and luckily found that I did have both the ones I need, which was a pleasant surprise. The two have been moved over to Kaerella, as our most talented armour-crafter, and, after research, it looks as if, if there wasn't a failure rate in processing materials, 180 quality stones, 60 gamma wave energies, and 170 green herbs would be needed to start off. So Kae got a few tool aids out of storage, bought the farming implements needed, and has, at least, stocked up on those three materials. Transforming them into black diamonds, imperfect earth crystals, cotton fabrics, and good quality tinctures can wait until tomorrow. And then when everything is assembled, there's a chance that the crafting will fail and one will need to gather and process the raw materials again, sigh.

By the end of the evening, despite a disconnection just after Rage was back from Merac, and a couple more associated, I suspect, with the "Mad Monster Spawn" on Auzura-3, Darth had got the new pony to level 10. Being able to use a Berserker from the start was worth a small investment of cash, and at this kind of level the pony takes a good long while to get hungry, so things are pretty relaxed for Darth as yet.