Chuck Moves Up

SirDarth made a fairly early start, for a Sunday, and by lunchtime had got Ratel's horse to level 24, which rather concluded that particular operation  It's at that point, two levels above Darth, that a pet starts to get hungrier, for one thing.  Rage did have to ride down once for a wandering level 50 Pandora's Beast, but the two boxes that Darth himself opened discharged a level 30 one which he was easily able to deal with - and he also got a drop of five physical defence minerals, level 12, which are always useful.

MistressSabina took advantage of the morning being relatively quiet in Prokion Temple; her first attempt to teleport in landed her down in the basement foundations again, but the second try got her into the starting lobby safely.  Using the pssp-sp combination again for a 215% boost, so that the Orc Sergeants gave 16458 skill exp and the Orc Axemen gave 15592, while she was level 28. this time the hour gave her 533 skill points, which was rather better than yesterday.  It seems that the condition of the Temple does vary, so that sometimes the Orcs are harder to kill than at other times; I was also really pwning them, getting groups together and using Flame Storm as much as possible.  As usual I stayed on for a few minutes after the hour ended, and netted 544 sp in all; Sabina also went up by 83.02% on the experience front, reaching level 29 before the end of the hour - doing a few minor quests added another 7.01% to that.  And let's not forget the 1082 pet points...

After lunch, Rage headed for the Sphinx Fighters and Sphinx Speer Men, but she didn't go alone - as she was only 15 levels above my titan, MrChuckNorris, I decided to take him along too, and give SirDarth the afternoon off.  BatCow was there as well, but it didn't seem a good idea for us to party up as Chuck would be getting a share of the experience for doing very little - just standing in a safe spot, and giving the Battle Roar buff to increase Rage's attack a little.

Chuck's fellow Norcaine guild member Legacy did come along and team up, though, and didn't mind Chuck getting his share; she is a level 38 assassin-type rogue, a melee character using a pair of daggers, so finds it useful to team with a bow-user... and two people with Snare in a team is always a good idea.  We were able to kill the Elite Speer Man easily enough, and kept suitably busy.

After a while Legacy (or "Legs" as we call her - be glad that a player called Titianna isn't in our guild!) had to do some revision work, so joined Chuck over at the side, which seemed fair enough as she'd been donating experience to him until then.  Unfortunately they were not quite far enough over, we found after a while - I was fighting just around the corner, when I suddenly saw that Legacy's health bar was black - and Chuck's was down to about a third!  A Sphinx Fighter had spawned just too near them, I guess - I managed to get Chuck to safety behind the fence, and killed the Sphinx Fighter in question, but it was a nasty surprise for Legacy.  Still, she had managed to reach level 39 by then.

Legacy did return, and fought some more, but managed to get herself killed by the Elite Speer man, so all that studying hadn't improved her in-game skills.  The "Sunday Teatime" event gave us 50% extra experience from 3:00pm until 5:00pm UK time, so I kept on long enough to get full value from that - and a little longer, as there was a junior titan who needed to ks a little, but in the end hunger won out.  By then Rage had gone up by a very useful 43.00%, plus two skill points and 2127 pet points, which shows just how long a session it was.  Chuck hadn't had his pet equipped, but I have him down as having gone up by 16 skill points - and 241.33% experience, which is rather better than what he was getting from soloing the Poison Mists.

After the early evening food break, which wasn't as early as usual, there was time for a bit more levelling at the Sphinx types.  SugaRuSH, a level 52 rogue, was there as she quite often is, and another rogue, CHERRY, who knew her turned up as well, as she asked Suga if she could ks I assume she was only in the mid-thirties, level-wise, but, soloing, she seemed to be doing pretty well, though she did die once.  It wasn't a very long session; Ratel logged in just before eight, so Chuck logged out and Darth logged in, to transfer the level 24 horse across, help him move a pet or two between characters, and get back the level 19 one I'd loaned him.  He was suitably grateful for Darth's efforts, I hope the higher-level pet for his healer Jacqueline does help her to survive in Prokion Temple.

Rage had added another two skill points, and 15.74% experience, plus 971 pet points; Chuck had spent 585 skill points on two new skills when he reached level 38: Bellow, which would reduce the defence of any foe within two meters by 100 for 30 seconds, and Fire Command, increasing the long range hit rate of any bow-user within five meters by 30 for five minutes.  He had gone up by a further 60.17%, which had taken him comfortably into level 38.

So, Rage's gain for the day was 58.74%, plus 4 skill points and 3098 pet points, while at the same time MrChuckNorris had added 301.50% and 16 skill points.  I'll have to do some more team-ups like that!

Most of the Norcaine people seemed to join Kaerella and Rage for the Quiz in the Auzura-4 Quiz Room, and thankfully the questions were the ones that we are gradually becoming familiar with, so there were no upsets or surprises.  People on other servers have been known to lose all their prizes from s sudden disconnection afterwards, and its "rollback", so I quickly logged out.  

As usual after the Quiz, logging back in was a bit of a problem; SirDarth got in fairly quickly, after only a very brief black screen, but found some things very laggy - guild chat took a few minutes to appear, and checking the guild status screen, it took quite a while to load the Norcaine details.  He was already fighting his Berserker by the time the log-in guild message appeared.

I tried to log MistressDomino in to Auzura-1, but got a black screen for ages - I restarted a few times, allowing about ten minutes of black screen each time, and finally got back in, but as you can imagine the forum's shoutbox was quite busy with people complaining about black screens, crashes, and lag.  MistressDomino went into merchant mode selling the Wendy Bear pieces at 50,000 gold each, all except piece two which I sold out of earlier, plus the large attack & defence potions, and took in a few million.

SirDarth's horse reached level twenty not long before his log-out time; just before that someone killed his Berserker and ran off, not even stopping to pick up the 446 gold it dropped, but I only lost a few seconds...and gained the gold of course.  Still, it does demonstrate that keeping Darth going overnight to level up his horse just isn't practical at the moment.