To Egeha!

As usual, SirDarth headed for Merac early in the morning, and settled in to level up the new horse a bit more.   A couple of people turned up in mid-morning, and their activities attracted the attention of the Grand Red Dragon - so Darth had to move a little further along for a few minutes, while someone switched to their main character and despatched it.  Apparently it dropped a "Chain of Tiger" accessory, so killing it was well worth their efforts.

There didn't seem to be any obvious changes to things overnight, after the usual maintenance; the Easter Eggs are still dropping, and the Pandora's Boxes still turn up - Darth sighted three Beasts, and while Kaerella didn't get any drops from two of them, a brief guest appearance by Rage did yield a 120,000 gold drop from the third.

Kaerella went out to the Sphinx Fighters and Speer Men in the afternoon, and managed to get the final 10% experience she needed to reach level 62 at last, and so was able to put on the Serenity Boots and Serenity Tiara to complete that armour set - no longer would the old green boots clash with the rest of her red costume!  The place was pretty quiet, with just a level 35 archer, Archers by name, working away, concentrating on the one Sphinx Fighter that respawns closest to the camp.  She was pretty good at fighting and running and firing, and running again, but an archer doesn't get Slow Shot until level 38, so she was at a bit of a disadvantage, and did die once.  I offered to resurrect her, and she joined the party for that, though of course left afterwards as she was capped and would get very little experience while partied with Kae.

By the end of the afternoon, Kae had gone up by 10.09%, plus 20 skill points and 723 pet points; level 62 had been reached, but Kae did continue for a few minutes after that in the hopes of getting a "bloodseal ability" on her new armour pieces.

Thanks to various purchases of the "Web: Super Stone Pack", Kae's storage was actually pretty well off for expensive and valuable Chaos Smelting Stones.  Given that the last time I tried to upgrade armour past +6, I used five runes, five heaven stones, and two lucky smelting stones (to put right two decreases) to get only two items an extra plus, I decided to take the straightforward option, and use ten Chaos Smelting Stones to get all five parts of Kae's armour from +6 to +8.  Before she could wear the new boots and tiara her physical defence stat was 1323, and after the change it was 1365 (the previous armour set was +6 too); at +7 we moved on to 1404, but as you go up the plusses the defence gets more generous, and +8 got us on to 1497.  This includes 27 levels of Increased Armour from Kae's drake, SirFrancis, without that her new physical defence is 1277...a good reason to have SirFrancis equipped as often as possible.

Ratel came online today, and was able to freeze SsnowboardS's experience gain.  He was out with the Poison Mists, but reported that, at level 34, they were hitting him a lot harder than he'd been used to, before generally only the Elite one could damage him, but now the regular ones could hurt him too.  So maybe the attack, or the monsters' chance of landing a critical or deadly hit, has been tweaked again by those underhanded folk at T-Ent, the shadowy South Koreans behind Last Chaos.  Certainly, later in the day, I noticed that even at 985 physical defence SirDarth was occasionally taking enough damage for his health bar to fluctuate a bit.

In the evening, Kaerella made her first trip to Egeha, the fourth LC map, and home to some impressive monsters - before Strayana and the high-level new dungeon areas were added, this was the ultimate high-level area, but it seems a bit quieter now.  The idea was for Kae to go hunting the level 65 Bogles, though maybe she should have made her foray here a few levels earlier, as, while they are still yellow-named (unlike the Sphinx Speer Men, who have just gone white-named for Kae), they don't give much more experience than the non-elite Speer Men.  

The Bogles do however seem more generous with the drops, and over the evening dropped two level 65 rogue crossbows, level 65 knight gloves, one pair of titan and three pairs of knight level 66 pants, and level 67 healer and titan headgear.  There were plenty of Easter Eggs too, and, after earlier getting one of those no-stat green stones, the contents revealed were 500 gold, 10 herb trunks, 50 gold, 500 again, a tool aid, 50 gold, 50 more gold, another tool aid. 10 gamma wave energy, and finally another 500 gold. So, nothing marvelous, but it's all a bonus, and there were a couple of "Hands of the Guard", as well as a heaven stone, among the other drops.

By the end of the evening Kaerella had added another 13.35% on a hill not far outside Egeha village - but Grocer Wein, the local NPC trader, had given her a quest to kill ten Bogles, so the reward for that (3,958,140 experience, as well as 90,000 gold) got her total up to 13.91%.  41 skill points and 1258 pet points also got added - so that made the totals for the day for Kae 24.00% experience, 61 skill points, and 1981 pet points.  SirDarth had got the horse well into level 21... and the idea is to put MistressDomino up in merchant mode for the night, so maybe Kaerella will be able to afford a new weapon before too long.