A New Knight

SirDarth had a successful overnight session levelling Ratel's blue drake, so that it had reached level 22 by breakfast time; I did manage to keep going last night just long enough for SirPerivale's horse to reach level 33. Darth won't be doing any more overnighters for a while, as the drake will be too hungry to last for around eight hours without being fed some quality stones. When Ratel gets his drake back, though, the pale blue horse I loaned him might just be able to have one more overnight session.

I managed to fit two hours of levelling for MistressBlaze into the morning, using two of the special newbie 250%-only platinum super skill pills; she was fighting in my favourite back room, in a solo party with SirDarth, who kept on pet-levelling. Halfway through the first hour I decided to use the first of my five newbie platinum blessed irises as well, and soon discovered that it too was 250% rather than the Real Deal's 300% - strange. I just hope there's not some strange missing bit in the newbie resurrection scrolls!

The first hour added 363 skill points, and, reflecting the fact that you get less skill exp from monsters as you get another level above them, the second hour added 349 more - the whole session added 729, all of which I later spent back in town. It was very neat, when I had 82 of them left, the next skill level I wanted to get required, yes, 82 skill points. But lunchtime arrived when I was just 2.60% below level 31, having gone up by 182.00%.

After Peri had joined Darth in Merac over lunch, MistressBlaze returned, to get a quest reward, and to do a couple of quests involving the Desert Spiders near Prokion Temple. Level 31 came up halfway through that, so in all MB just added 3.21% and 4 skill points. The level 30/32 armour set, and the level 33 mage staff and wand, all duly arrived in MB's inventory, all +10, so that particular campaign had been happily concluded.

I logged in over on Cariae briefly, and apparently my rogue Karella is only level 25 - my mage Enchantrella, on level 27, would seem the ideal candidate to take up to level 31 for the reward... though perhaps it might be just as easy, given that Enchantrella's experience gain is 50% frozen, to start a brand-new character, and thus have the newbie pssps and pbis to help progress along.

Stavanic had dropped in on SirDarth, and after a few minutes I noticed a new line of speech from him, "fk fk fk fk" - what I hadn't seen up until then was that he had managed to lure the Grand Red Dragon, and had fought it valiantly, only to be overwhelmed when the Cerebrii spawned. It was time that Darth logged out anyway, so I switched to Rage, and rode down to at least take care of the Cerebrii. Steve of course returned to attack the Grand Red Dragon, as I and another rogue watched, carefully not getting involved lest we spoil his chances of a good drop... and, while there wasn't a Tears of Knight or any madly valuable accessory dropped, he got the usual assortment of minor items.

My next project was to make a new knight, and try to get him to level 31 - after all, knights don't just get the armour and the two weapons, they get their shield as well! While I already had a low-level knight called SirGalahad, for the newbie extras I needed to start from scratch... so as, not surprisingly, the name "Galahad" was taken, I made a new knight called "GALAHAD" - though, as with "RAGE" and "CALM", I will tend not to bother with all those capital letters here.

So, after getting some low-level armour from his near-namesake, getting three useful accessories from a storage character, being recruited into the Discipline guild by MistressSabina, getting Recalled to useful locations by Rage, and choosing Kaerella as his Guardian, Galahad set out into Juno. The first stage was entirely normal, with the usual fighting of foxes, wolves of various kinds, and jaguars, and it didn't take very long to get to level eight. Then it was a matter of exchanging computers with Darth - and the pair of them set out for Prokion Temple.

First of all SirDarth got rid of the 30% experience he'd gained in level 23, by taking his armour off and rushing at the nearest Orc Sergeants a few times. Then he and Galahad teamed up outside, Darth added horse buffs and divine shield, and in they went, to run to the back room, with Galahad hot on Darth's heels...though as Galahad doesn't have the Uncanny Movement passive skill to increase his speed, Darth did have to stop and wait for him to catch up a few times.

The corridor outside the room was busy, but the room itself wasn't, so once Galahad was behind the torch/brazier, Darth just kept attacking the local Orc Sergeants and Orc Axemen, who, thanks to his excellent armour, couldn't hurt him at all. A mage called Sierra did try to help a little, but I warned her that it was a dangerous room, and she was last seen running for her life, pursued by Orcs, despite my best efforts to keep them focussed on me. By the time I had to log out for the early evening food break, Darth's mission had been accomplished: while he himself had added 26.07%, Galahad had zoomed up to level 16.

After the break, the next step was to team Galahad up with MistressBlaze, and, helped along by the first of the five "beginner" pbis and pssps, we got him all the way to level 24. In fact, it would probably have been a good idea to continue that team-up, with MB doing the work and Galahad just watching, but it seemed time for Gal to get back into action himself - so SirDarth lent him the good knight armour, and the +6 event weapon, and, partied with SirPerivale just for the solo party bonus, Galahad headed back to Prokion to do some fighting on his own behalf.

Things did go smoothly enough; Gal had acquired his own dragon hatchling, and by the end of two hours, using the second and third each of the pbis and pssps, the hatchling had just reached level four. The only problem was that, well, a +6 weapon hits nowhere near as hard as a +15 one, so the Orc Soldiers, Orc Fighters and Orc Axemen all took quite a few hits to kill. That said, Galahad did manage to reach level 27, which was the prime objective, adding 324.22% and 475 skill points.

Ratel had got in touch to say that his junior knight over on the Cariae server, who'd done us such good service as a pet-leveller back in the old days, Leo, had now reached level 28.44 - and he was suitably impressed when I said that my new knight was already 26.42, at that moment. It does help when one can use two computers at once, and team up appropriate characters to help one another - and let's face it, starting a character a little while after lunch, and getting them to level 27 by the end of the evening, is pretty speedy. I wouldn't call it exactly power-levelling, as everyone was within the normal party range, but we do seem to be well on our way to getting the new knight his own set of +10 armour, plus weapons and shield.

Darth got his armour back after the Prokion session, and was able to join Peri for the late-night pet levelling session. Peri definitely won't get his horse to level 34 tonight, but the new level is getting relatively close; Darth is a similar distance away from level 25 for Ratel's dark blue drake. It seems that Lilwonderer may well join the ranks of Merac pet-levellers soon, the knight under preparation for the job is level 17 already, it seems.