Wednesday 27 May 2009

New Boots

MistressDomino sold almost all her items by the time that the servers went down for their weekly scheduled maintenance last night, with only some tool aids and three Wendy Bear pieces left, so that makes me fairly prosperous again - which is just as well, as there is new armour to be bought, and it also made me resolved to buy a new +15 weapon if I could find one.  SirDarth also kept pet-levelling safely until the closure, and then got a fairly early restart too, so that our horse was able to reach level 27 by the end of the lunch break.  By the end of the evening he was more than halfway through that level.

Halfway through the morning, however, Darth got a Pandora's Box next to him which, when he opened it, released a level 50 Blood Frenzy-style Pandora's Beast.  Luckily it didn't attack Darth, who was able to retreat, followed by his Berserker, and continue his pet-levelling, but it meant that Rage had a good reason to log in, and ride down to deal with the Beast - which she did, getting a 40.800 gold drop for her trouble.

I'd been reading on the "Wet Paint" Last Chaos Wiki that level 47 manuals to craft boots are only dropped by level 47 Death Mask Soldiers and level 48 Beast Crawlers; the boots themselves are dropped by some fairly tricky monsters in Dratan desert, varying between classes but usually including level 55 Dragons and things like that.  So, as Rage was close to Maargadum Jail, it seemed a good idea to head down to its lower levels and check things out.

I've had other characters killed very easily by Beast Crawlers, but they are passive, so if one doesn't attack them, or any nearby Beast Flyers, they shouldn't be a problem.  So, I rather tiptoed through level four of the Jail, and found my way down to level five. That takes one a bit close to the local big boss, the Death Knight, but he does have his own room just beyond, so hopefully doesn't get lured out by fighting there.

The knight SirRenDippity was already there, but after a while I realised that he was pet-levelling, off to one side with a level 44 Death Mask Lancer - which seems like a good set-up, as long as nobody lured an aggressive, pet-eating Death Mask Soldier in on him.  Hopefully such people don't bother to go all the way down there to do such things.  Anyway, I started off cautiously, not going into the far half of the rather impressive room, and just targeting the Death Mask Soldiers as they respawned.  After a while I did actually get the drop I needed, the level 47 boots manual, but I continued, in case they might drop a second one, since such things are rather valuable.

I didn't get a second boots manual, though I got a couple of other manuals from around that level - and three assorted pairs of level 42 boots, which are themselves slightly hard to come by.  One pair, as does happen sometimes in the Jail, was already +4, so I think Ratel, or at least one of his characters, may well be interested in those.  I also realised that I did still have a quest active to kill "Beast Leaders" for their rings, and that it was Beast Crawlers that they meant - a quest I had attempted once or twice on the Cariae server, with fatal results, because as soon as my cleric, or whoever, had attacked one Beast Crawler on the Jail's fourth level, others had also attacked, often using deadly magic through the walls, and before I could retreat up the stairs, I'd die.

Roaming around the whole room on this more open fifth level, I noticed that at the far end there were a couple of Beast Crawlers, one on each side of the main path, and while they did each have a Death Mask Soldier close by, otherwise they were alone and out of range of any protective friends.  So, I decided to risk attacking them in turn, and, without being mobbed by magic-users, didn't have a problem - I got the three rings I needed eventually, and returned to Merac Caron village.  Once I'd got the reward for that quest, a new quest came available - and for that, Rage will need to go back and fight some more Death Mask Soldiers, which won't be difficult now that I know my way around down there.

After lunch, it was time to use that level 47 boots manual, and craft a pair of level 47 titan boots, so that Chuck would have the complete armour set - and my other characters following on behind would have the full set in turn.  The ingredients needed do vary, but for the titan boots 8 gold, 12 black diamonds, 8 imperfect wind crystals, and 8 cotton fabric were what I needed; to make them I processed 84 imperfect stones, 84 quality stones, 20 gamma wave energies, and 18 green herb leaves, using the appropriate processing scrolls.  Each processing operation had a risk to it, if I'd had no failures the numbers would have been 48,  72, 16, and 16 again... and the actual making of the boots, once the ingredients were all assembled, is risky too, but I clicked the button, and the boots were successfully created, to my great relief.  Then it was just a matter of transferring them across to Chuck, using four heaven stones to get them to +3 (so, just one failure), and using three lucky smelting stones to get them to +6, to match the rest of the armour....or at least the gloves and headgear, the shirt and pants are a bit better, as they were a rather expensive impulse purchase, at +11, a few weeks ago for Rage's set.

The other four parts of the set were changed from rogue items to their titan equivalents; Chuck couldn't actually wear the new helmet and boots yet without an armour penalty, but a trip out to the Sphinx Fighters with Rage would soon sort that out.

After the time taken to harvest and process the ingredients, and generally move items around between characters, the afternoon session at the Sphinx types was an hour shorter than usual, but Chuck buffed Rage, and Rage set to work.  Chuck needed almost 25% experience to reach level 42, but, in our two-person equal party, we got there by soon after four.  The next item on Chuck's wants list is a new weapon, since his old one, while nice and shiny and +15, is a bit below him now.  What he needs is Rage's current weapon - but he can't have that until Rage is high enough for her next weapon, and for that she needs to be level 53, rather than the level 51 she is now.

It all gets complicated, with the different characters inheriting armour and weapons, but, thanks to MistressDomino's overnight sales, I was able to afford to buy a level 65 +15 weapon for Kaerella, which cost 142,332,682 gold from the Merchant House (I don't know how the seller, XDarkSageX, arrived at that price, but it seemed relatively fair by current standards on Auzura), and that meant that the bow Kae had been using could be passed down to Rage, and converted into a crossbow.  It is a level 57 weapon, though, so Rage will need to be level 53 before she can use it properly.  Then Chuck can have Rage's current weapon, MistressSabina can have Chuck's weapon, and MistressDomina can have her staff back from Sabina...

Since Rage's levelling was now a higher priority than Chuck's, I changed the party type, just before Chuck levelled up, from "equal" to "combat".  Provided that combat party members are close enough together to be on the compass-map, people get experience based on their actual contribution to the fight, plus a boost based on the number of people in the party - so Rage would get slightly more experience than soloing on average if Chuck was within range, while he'd get some experience too, though not as much as in an "equal" party.  He'd still get a full share of the small amount of skill exp, and his share of the loot.  A combat party will only work when members are within 10 levels of the leader, so it couldn't have been done much earlier.

Legacy came out to join us soon after that.  She wasn't able to play for very long, as she is studying for examinations this week, but she sat down by Chuck afterwards, and was happy to find when checking back later that she'd been boosted by 11% by then for doing nothing.  By the time I took my food break, Chuck was up 25.28%, while Rage was up 22.80% - her horse had reached level 35, gaining 1039 pet points.

Legacy was afk for almost all the evening session, which had the usual early Wednesday ending at a little before 8:00pm UK time; BatCow did come out for a while, but wasn't convinced by the idea of a combat party and stayed in her own solo party.  The place got pretty busy, with a team from the DamonBlut guild doing a lot of work, so that often the only Sphinx type I could attack was the Elite Speer Man himself, but things calmed down after a while, and when another rogue from Rage's Friends List, WhiteMessiah2, came and teamed up, we made pretty good progress. I do find WM2's spelling hard to follow, it was only after she left that I worked out that her final question had been as to whether she too should sit and watch...but as I had to log out soon after that, it didn't make a great difference.  Hopefully Legacy checked her screen and logged out as well, before too long, and was happy with the progress she'd made.

The evening session ended with Chuck adding another 22.63%, and Rage adding 27.90% - and at level 51 you need a lot more experience to go up by a percent than you do at level 42.  Rage added another 1127 pet points, and they both got a couple of skill points in each session.  SirDarth was able to resume his pet-levelling from around 8:00pm, but there was a disconnection at about 11:15, due to an upgrade event going on - with the lag and black screen problems that tends to bring, it didn't seem practical to try to return him to Merac just for a few more minutes.

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