The Missing Experience

SirDarth got his drake-levelling off to an early start, and, again, SirPerivale got some quality time with his horse too.  I didn't have much time for actually playing in the morning, but FoxChaser, my level one healer who is now safely in the Discipline guild with her experience frozen, managed to put in a session fighting the foxes just outside the north gate of Randol.  Since the drops she picked up included a couple of moonstone boxes, a skill point booster and an item drop booster from a Hand of the Guard, and a large defence potion from a Hand of Protection, she just about earned the two million gold that MistressDomino traded to her in exchange for them.  Oh, and three or four fox tails got picked up too, they are vital for one of the "human tribe" pet quests and thus do sell for a hundred thousand or two.  She may well end up with a set of +4 armour, if she farms those tails long enough.

There was a general exchanging round of items after lunch, which means that MistressDomino is now exceedingly well stocked with Wendy Bear pieces.  The idea was to put her up in merchant mode tonight to sell them, but at about 9:10 in the evening, UK time, an announcement came up that the servers would all be coming down for a maintenance period in fifty minutes.

After a day or two off, MistressSabina went back to Prokion Temple for the main afternoon session.  I opened some of the skill type of lucky draw boxes, and, along with scrolls and skill boosters, got a supply of the 15% "skill pill" and 100% "super skill pill" potions, so used one of each, for each of the two hours, so that at level 30 Sabina was getting 10642 skill exp from each Orc Sergeant, which is just over one skill point, and 8277 from each Orc Axeman.  The first hour got me 311 skill points, and the second hour 299, so that, with the usual little bit of extra time, I ended up with 627 more skill points, which I quickly invested in maxxing out Sabina's absorption-collecting skill, getting the whole kaboodle of Alchemy, and starting on armour crafting.  2156 pet points came in, too; using a wand rather than a staff does mean more hits per minute, and so more pet experience, but it does cut back on the damage per hit.  And some skills use the damage per hit as the basis for the damage they do, so Flame Storm isn't quite as formidable as it could be...

The evening session involved Rage, MrChuckNorris, and the Sphinx types.  Rage soloed the Sphinx Fighters and Sphinx Speer Men for a while, and then recruited Norcaine specialist sorcerer Ghostt when he came by.  He's just about the same level now, but his evasion stat is more than twice as good as mine.  I see that specialist sorcs have a passive level 50 skill that increases it by 177, Sudden Precision, so that and three Stones of Shadows would help that along.  

We were also joined by an early-fifties rogue in the top "Vendetta" guild, who was asking if she could have any level 57 boots that dropped for us, as she needed them - I had to break it to her that, while monsters like Akane Giants and Arcane Golems do drop the production manual, for the actual rogue boots she'd need to venture into the Forgotten Temple and fight the Wane Spiders there, which isn't a very good idea at our level, at least alone.

A rogue called XxXtigretonXxX was operating next to me too for a while, but replied to a general remark "so much simpler when Snare works" with "no inglis sorri", so we couldn't communicate much.  She was only level 28, so found things a bit risky.  I wondered why, a little later, she said "plis", then saw that she was being chased by a Sphinx Fighter, so quickly killed it, for which she was grateful.  I think she left soon after that.

For some reason Acheron has temporarily left the new guild of his that he recruited Rage into, which is called "NefariousShadows".  And it was well into the evening session that I was just idly wanting to compare the experience that Chuck and Rage were getting per kill - only to find that Rage wasn't getting any experience at all, just the 200-odd skill exp.  Acheron had, without telling me, frozen Rage's experience gain!  It was apparently a mistake, he was surprised when I mentioned it when he (in his alternative guise as xXArcheonXx) was asking me later which level I thought the new guild recruits ought to sp-farm at - luckily his trusted friend WINTER, who had been installed as guild master in his absence, was able to unfreeze me, but it must have cut Rage's experience gain tonight significantly...it added 4075 guild points for the guild, however, which may be useful.

Ratel was on, and, having spotted a bargain-price knight sword, a level 47 +13 one for, I think, around 47 million, asked to borrow 24 million from me, so after my initial reaction of "Hello?  Sorry, you're breaking up, what was that...?" (which might have been more convincing if we used audio rather than typed messages), I briefly changed to MistressDomino and passed the gold across to him.

WhiteMessiah2 came out and teamed with Rage and Chuck for the latter part of the evening, so we did some pretty speedy fighting.  I didn't continue for very long after she left... after all, the special extra maintenance time was approaching.  Apparently they hope that what they are doing will cure the recent run of crashes we have been having recently: "Party process zoning crash fix."

Rage's experience gain was 15.66%, and she also got 13 skill points and 2046 pet points, so that her horse is now 30% of the way through level 36.  Chuck meanwhile did actually level up, reaching level 45 and adding in all 87.05%, plus 12 skill points.  If we have another long session like that he may well get back to being only ten levels behind Rage, allowing a combat party without anyone in-between as leader... until Rage pulls ahead again.

The servers coming down stopped SirDarth and SirPerivale from having their usual end-of-evening pet-levelling sessions; perhaps they'll be back up in time for MistressDomino to attempt some overnight selling of Wendy Bear pieces, but at the moment it's hard to say for sure.