Wednesday 1 July 2009

A Hot Time

In the end Chuck did ride down last night and kill the wandering level 50 Pandora's Beast, getting 72,000 gold for his trouble; it wasn't just SirPerivale and SirDarth who were pet-levelling there, another knight called Capitan was also busy. This morning Peri and Darth didn't get a particularly early start, but were both in action slightly before eight in the morning, UK time - and Darth's horse reached level 27 before lunch.

My mage MistressDomina, or indeed since she is level 32 now I should call her my wizard, was able to head out for Prokion Temple on the Auzura-4 subserver, and put in her regular hour's skill point farming in my favourite back room. Using a super skill pill, for double skill exp, rather than a platinum one, giving triple skill exp, cut back her skill point gain, but she still managed to add 264 skill points while the pill lasted - 265 in all in the session, due to the usual "test kill" at the start and finishing off the current mob at the end. A gain of 13.94% experience reinforces the idea that there ought to be five more sessions before level 33 is reached, at that point we'll possibly stop the "50% experience freeze" situation, and just start moving onward and upward, though MD is likely to still be fighting Prokion Temple's Orc Sergeants and Orc Axemen for a couple of levels yet.

And one MistressDomina stops hunting there, and levels up enough to graduate to a different armour set, then it will be MistressSabina's turn to gather some more skill points from Prokion Temple's Orc Sergeants and Orc Axemen. She of course doesn't have any points at all saved up yet, and is already level thirty, after upgrading the Discipline guild so many times, so she'll never have a huge stash of sp.. still, it will be useful to have a witch-type mage who doesn't risk a big death penalty, to take to Mad Monster Spawns and that sort of thing. And I've never actually played a witch...

Once I was back in Randol, I reported a couple of gold-spammers on the official Last Chaos forum's shoutbox, and they were soon silenced by the GameSage who was on duty, which was good; their incessant spamming, usually a number of posts per second, does stop real players from chatting and generally makes the place unpleasant. It looks as if the new procedures they've put in place have helped to cut down on the spammers, or at least on the time that each spammer remains in action.

But then it was time for Peri to log back in, joining Darth for some more pet levelling over the lunch break.

After that, Chuck logged in, and headed for the Sphinx types, in a solo party with SirDarth. The mage Wortex was there, but didn't seem inclined to suggest teaming up, and didn't stick around long, so Chuck just fought solo, avoiding the Elite Sphinx Speer Man. However, back in the real world, it was just about the hottest day of the year so far, and the room with the computers in is south-facing, and, well, with two computers putting out a fair bit of heat themselves, things were starting to get a bit warm.

So, with regret, Chuck's session came to rather a premature close. He had only added 3.47% experience, 3 skill points, and 182 pet points, so it hadn't been a very long session. I went downstairs, for a cooler, north-facing room, after getting Peri back to work.

A level 7 titan called Fanfrit had added Darth to his friends list; I had rather assumed it was Stavanic, er, Steve, but I'm not entirely clear on that. Anyway, he wanted horse buffs, so Chuck ended up logging back in a for a few minutes, and accompanying him to the Treants close to Velpist Temple in Juno. I did drop a memorising scroll for him, so that he could get the Temple entrance memorised, but even with horse buffs I don't know how long he was going to last fighting level 27 Treants, which do have the tendency to come in from all directions if you attack one of their number. Still, they don't move particularly fast, so he may have been okay. I'm not sure that he wasn't hoping that Chuck would hang around and re-buff him every time the horse buffs ran out, but I wasn't going to stay in the hot room for that, so Chuck logged out, Peri logged back in, and I scurried off downstairs.

So, the day's adventures rather petered out, though this meant more time for SirDarth and SirPerivale to do their work...and also meant that I had time to finish reading a novel that in theory I should have finished yesterday. There wasn't the usual server maintenance last night, and there was an announcement on the website to that effect, how people could continue their play without interruptions... but this evening there was a new announcement, that there would be server maintenance today, and at 1:00pm PST...which is nine o'clock UK time, and thus a bit inconvenient normally for us European types.

So, Peri won't be able to get his horse to level 36, which might otherwise have been a possibility tonight; Darth did have time to get his four-legged friend well into level 28, however. A little before eight the Grand Red Dragon put in an appearance, but after the usual 14 minutes got bored and went away again. As usually happens on a Wednesday evening, though we skipped the last two weeks, I had other things to do from eight... though Darth at least did keep pet-levelling until, a few minutes earlier than advertised, the Last Chaos servers came down.

The weather forecast for Thursday is for more of the same, unfortunately; hopefully at least a morning session will be possible. On Friday, things should be cooler, I'm happy to report.

The "patch notes" inform us that, when the servers are back up, as is appropriate for a week containing the 4th of July there's be an "Independence Day" event, with drops of "stars" and "stripes", which are items that give a bonus to damage and xp/sp gain... I suspect that large Uncle Sam type top hats may be involved too. The hardware for a couple of the older servers is being upgraded - "All Katarian and Cariaeian players rejoice, as your latency problems will be heavily reduced after this maintenance" - so maybe the down time will be a bit longer than average. Oh, and the level cap is being raised to 145 from 140, apparently it should have been the latter all along, since level 145 weapons had appeared in the game but couldn't yet be used. Not a problem I encountered... And of course the item mall will have been updated too.

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