Friday 3 July 2009

Another Trip to Egeha

Since I didn't feel like stumbling out of bed and starting Last Chaos when a roll of thunder woke me briefly at 4;30 in the morning, it wasn't until breakfast time that SirDarth and SirPerivale swung into action. SirDarth's horse did, as expected, reach level 31 during the morning; as he had some time off, it wasn't until the lunch break that Peri got his charge up to level 37. I had worked out that 1:10 would be about the time that the horse would get there, but I didn't get upstairs to check until a few minutes later. So, I wasn't able to stop the levelling on 0/14552, but 100/14552 looks almost as neat I think.

MistressDomina headed out to Auzura-4's Prokion Temple a little earlier than usual; as the "APAC" Friday "happy hour" had already happened, there was a chance that the promised 50% extra skill exp gain was still running. And indeed, when I made the first kill of an Orc Sergeant in my favourite back room, he did give 50% more skill experience than usual - at MistressDomina's current level, that's only slightly ahead of what one would get without any boost if one was the same level as a Prokion Temple inhabitant, but it's always nice to get something extra for free.

Before I'd set out, MD had opened twenty skill boxes, getting 4 platinum super skill pills (which will be passed on to MistressSabina), 4 five-packs of skill point boosters, 2 effort scrolls, 3 of the 15% skill pills, and 7 of the super skill pills - but now I didn't have to use any of them, or indeed fight quite so hard and fast. I added 28.13% experience, the equivalent of two full-speed hours' worth (or 28.29% if one includes the experience from killing a level 30 Pandora's beast back in Juno), 2301 pet points, which were enough to get MistressDomina's drake up to level 31, and 405 skill points, taking MD's unused sp total back over the 21k mark.

The "Stars" and "Stripes" seem to be dropping quiet nicely, though the special top hats seem a bit rare as yet. MD got 9 Stars and 6 Stripes during the session, along with 6 moonstone boxes and seven assorted pairs of boots. There was just time after that for MD to do a little mining, since she had a good supply of tool aids in her inventory, as they too drop quite often in the Temple. Fifteen hammers and tool aids were used, to get 405 quality stones, but when she rode down to SirDarth to trade them across, MistressDomina cut down severely on her existing supply of them, passing a full 800 over.

After lunch Darth unleashed another level 50 Pandora's Beast; Chuck disposed of it in the normal way, and got the full 103,200 gold dropped as a reward. Then various items had to be moved around, including pets, before LordElpus had a trip out to the wolves, and foxes. At level eight now, level one foxes still give 412 skill exp (or 618, with the 50% extra event running) and 1 experience; the level 2 wolves also just give 1 experience, at least while a player's experience gain is halved, and 550 skill exp, so in theory, as the whole level needs 16,855 experience, one could gain 927 skill points by just killing 16,855 wolves. That would take rather a long time, though.

After a while it was time to do something other than racing around bashing wolves, so I decided to see if that storage titan of mine, Cyborg, could be levelled up a bit more, with, again, the use of horse buffs to give him an amount of defence and attack way beyond the normal amount for his level. So he and MrChuckNorris went out to the Elder Werewolves, followed by the Treants, the Butchers, and finally the Berserkers; Chuck would apply the horse buffs, and then leave the party, while Cyborg killed as much as he could. It was really only against the Berserkers that he took much damage, and needed to use a small health potion for just about every one, but by the end of the session Cyborg had gone up from level 10 to level 15. And reaching that level raises the possibility of him teaming up with MistressSabina, who is only 15 levels ahead now, in Prokion Temple. With the horse buffs he ought to be able to reach that back room without being killed, I suppose. Still, there's no great hurry; he has taken Kaerella as his guardian today, so has ten days to get to level twenty.

Over the food break SirPerivale started work on the level 31 horse he received from SirDarth; Darth himself had the level eight dragon hatchling in his inventory, the one swapped for one a few levels higher to give one of Steve's characters a helping hand. Its Sympathy had fallen to about 60%, while the horse was being levelled, but the figure gradually rose, and did just manage to reach 100% by the end of the evening.

However, there was a break from pet-levelling, as again Rage took over the older computer to buy a teleport to Egeha for 800,000 gold, and Recall both Ratel and MrChuckNorris there. Ratel was in favour of the Apes, presumably mainly the Baby Apes, but my feeling was that, with the speed at which we could fight them, the last few minutes of our previous trip showed that the humble Bogles would be hard to better - non-aggressive, and plenty of them in the same area.

So, we concentrated on Bogles, and if Ratel did manage to die a couple of times, well, that was mainly a bit of lag, and probably would have been worse elsewhere! After a few minutes Ratel remarked that the Grand Gold Dragon must be near, judging by the lag he was experiencing, and sure enough the "GGD" soon arrived close by. We didn't have any trouble this time, as it wasn't directly over us - this is normal behaviour as far as I remember, the Great Gold Dragon does tend to appear alongside rather than overhead, so that even in the old days when raid boss monsters were aggressive it seldom disrupted a party. Rage was able to announce its arrival on the DreamingRequiem guild channel, and the mage Aszune quickly signed up, took Recall, and ran to where Chuck and Ratty waited. They carefully moved away for the actual fight, after providing horse buffs, as Aszune hadn't got a horse on that character today... so watching Aszune's health bar was how we followed the battle.

Despite a lack of level 12 magical defence minerals, Aszune triumphed without her health dipping very far, and was delighted to report that a rare accessory had dropped, a Stone of Life (100 extra health, +16 to physical fortitude/constitution), as well as Lucky Scrolls etc. The Cursed Weavers spawned as usual - for some reason a couple of them headed for us, possibly because we'd supplied the horse buffs (some monsters can be sensitive about such things), so we made a quick retreat towards town. Aszune killed them all, and kindly left a couple of their cash drops on the ground for us.

Rage also assisted Aszune by helping her transfer a highly-upgraded rogue armour set from XxAcheronxX to her rogue NightBlade, and using Recall to get NightBlade to that Boucu Demon spot. Using plenty of expensive pots, NightBlade was able to add quite a few levels by fighting along that road. Chuck commented that she'd added 9 levels, while so far in his session he'd added about 9%, which was only a slight exaggeration.

Rage left Egeha after that, to use Recall to help NightBlade to get the entrance of the Tomb of Theos onto her memory scroll too. At level 45 now, she was going to try her luck against the level 100 Screaming Zombies - I'm sure she did fine! Rage then logged out, and SirDarth was able to get back to levelling his hatchling.

Ratel had to log out at about 8:15 UK time, by which time he'd safely reached level 46, but Chuck continued on for another hour, using rather more health and mana potions. In all, Chuck went up 23.85%, adding 9 skill points and 1464 pet points, so that was a useful session.

SirDarth's hatchling was well into level 11 by the close of play, while SirPerivale's horse was at least most of the way through level 31. Getting that horse all the way to level 37 will, as usual, take quite a long time, and a lot of quality stones...

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