Old Haunts

The morning and afternoon sessions were pretty lightweight, for a change. SirPerivale joined SirDarth, who had successfully pet-levelled his pale blue horse throughout the night, and continued the good work. Darth had got his horse to level 24 - and after lunch Peri's horse reached level 35, so we are making good progress.

There was no big Prokion Temple session in the morning, instead I concentrated on moving all the sellable loot that various characters had accumulated over to MistressDomino, who is now pretty well off for Candy, Moonstones, Moonstone Boxes, Stars, Stripes, and indeed Heaven Stones. I do need to check the current prices for that sort of thing, and set MistressDomino up in merchant mode...but on the other hand, prices are more likely to go up than down, so it may be better to have them in my inventory, rather than more gold.

SirPerivale was able to continue pet-levelling for most of the afternoon, as, first of all, Stavanic wanted Darth's help in getting a blue name. Not being experts at that sort of thing, we rather assumed that if Darth killed him often enough, Darth would get a red name - and if he killed Darth a few times, he would get a blue name. But it wasn't that simple, and while Darth was able to get a red name easily enough, however many times Steve killed him, Steve's name remained resolutely white. The reason, we discovered eventually, was because SirDarth is quite a few levels lower than Stavanic. He did ask if MistressDomina could get involved, as at level 38 she is the same level as him, but with her carrying over 28k now of unused skill points, I wasn't too happy with that idea.

We'd gone to Auzura-6, as a fairly empty PvP-enabled sub-server, and I'd suggested that Prokion Temple was the best place, as rather than respawn back in town when you die, you respawn just a few yards back in the main hall, so that no time is lost in continuing the campaign. There were two or three other people there who gladly helped, asking politely before joining in. Darth went all the way up to -100 on the Evil scale, though being repeatedly killed in turn got him down to about -5, before he ended up at -20, with a "PK value", whatever that is, of -5.

So, SirDarth currently has a red name, and that -20 means that, rather than hitting a Berserker, bare-handed, for 27 at a time, he is currently hitting them for 25. My understanding is that being active in a non-PvP sub-server should mean that the red wears off after a while, but at present it is handy not to be hitting Berserkers quite as hard. Lots of pet-levellers do have red names for that purpose, after all.

It seemed a good idea to create a couple of new characters, to take advantage of the "Player Appreciation Event" beginner pssps and pbis they get in their inventory to start off with; as well as Doing that on Auzura, I also made a second new character over on Cariae, another healer-type LadyAuzura, in case she would be needed later, and got her up to level five so that she would be able to do a small amount of healing if needed. The version of Galahad I made over there had Kaerella as his guardian, but this time I gave Keerella, my level 100 mage, the honour.

So, after the food break, off I went to Cariae-3, logging in as my level 100 archer Barbarienne. I used a memory scroll to move to the entrance to the Tomb of Theos, and then used a Summon book/scroll to bring Galahad to me, so that he could get the entrance onto his memory scroll too - that way, although it cost 11,600 gold to get him in at level 4, if he got disconnected he could get in again easily, and I wouldn't need to use another Summon on him. Barb entered too, it cost her a bit more as it is "per level", 290,000 gold in fact. Usually it's 3,000 per level, but they must be having a slight discount at the moment.

So, this Cariae version of Gal equipped my level 50 "human tribe" Scra-Chi pet, SkrappY, got safely close to the wall, and started one of his beginner-type platinum blessed irises... and Barbarienne started to kill the local level 100 Screaming Zonbies. It didn't take much more than twenty minutes to get Gal to level 20, completing the guardian system, but it took three hours, all with a newbie pbi so the equivalent of 7.5 hours, to get him all the way to level 31, so that he got his special +10 30/32 armour, shield and the two level 33 weapons, the single sword to use with the shield and the dual blades to use alone. And very impressive he looked, too, even though he only has a total of 30 skill points so far!

As arranged Elvastar arrived before long; he was glad I'd chosen Cariae-3, as Cariae-4, which tends to be busier these days after Cariae-3 went through a period of being unreliable, often has a rather cliquish bunch in its Tomb apparently. He's a level 56 specialist sorcerer there, and would rather like to get to reach level 60 before the special armour deal ends...whenever that is...

So, I stopped using Fast Bow Fixing to increase my hit rate, and Elva settled down to ks-ing, that is, attacking my target from outside the party. He'd have been "capped" if he was inside the party - he was generally getting more experience than Gal, even taking Gal's pbi into account, though at a lower level you need much less experience to complete a level.

Still, he found it slow going, and while he had been hoping to get to level 57, he had to settle for 80% of the way. That was better progress than Barb made, over four hours she added just about 1% I think, though of course adding experience wasn't the object of the exercise for her.

Once Galahad had finished, and traded SkrappY back to Barb, Elva asked if he could finish a Zonbie or two, but I'm afraid that didn't work out. Trying to be clever, I unequipped my bow after luring the next Zonbie, which meant that I only did 72 damage per hit, though a "critical" hit was still over a thousand. Unfortunately, after a while the Zonbie turned its attack from me onto Elva, and he didn't manage to get to the wall quickly enough. I suppose in retrospect he should have waited for me to finish the kill and resurrect him, thus saving him some portion of the experience loss, but, eager to get back in action and have his revenge, he respawned at the back and rushed back into the fray.

He then asked if he could "finish" a Zonbie or two, but that didn't do anything miraculous for his experience gain. And soon it was time for him to log out. So, it wasn't as big a boost for the character as he had hoped, but it was great to fight alongside the original Elvastar again - and the other people there were friendly too, no doubt influenced by Elva... Kalrak in particular was chatting about sf shows and things like that, on his way to finishing level 77. I did see Krokignon a little later, a familiar name from the old days, I was a bit surprised that he was still fighting the Screaming Zombies and not something deeper in the Tomb by now, or maybe he was just farming some skill points.

LadyAuzura was summoned to join me, to replace Galahad, and I passed SkrappY across, and again it only took twenty minutes to get her to level 20, completing the Guardian system. That takes Keerella's Reputation to 920, which keeps her at number 23 in the Cariae Reputation rankings I see. By the end of the pbi hour she was around 20% into level 26, so that's pretty good progress; she left the Tomb courtesy of the teleporter, and added the location to her memory scroll, so the option exists to continue her progress there for two more hours if I have the time.

Barbarienne has as a pet a horse, though if it didn't have a label saying "Barbarienne's horse" you'd think it was a cute little reindeer, as "temporarily" transformed last Christmas. Four hours of shooting arrows at Zonbies gave it a good few pet points, so it is moving nicely through level 36. The main news, however, is that SkrappY, my cat-like "human tribe" pet, currently in LadyAuzura's custody, levelled up, and is now level 51, which is pretty good for a pet of any type I think.

Still, once the fourth pbi had ended, LadyA's first, it was time to leave the Tomb, and Cariae. SirPerivale had logged in to Auzura-4's Merac while Barb killed a final few Zonbies without having to share the experience with anyone, and reach that 1% gain... and then Barb logged out, and SirDarth logged in, to join SirPerivale. Peri should get his horse a quarter of the way through level 35 before he logs out, while Darth's pale blue horse soon reached level 25, and ought to be at least a quarter of the way through that level by the time he retires for the night.