A Special Deal

It was another relatively full morning of pet levelling for SirDarth and SirPerivale. Darth's horse reached level 31 within minutes of Peri's drake reaching level 37, so that triggered the expected swapping-around of pets. Chuck upgraded from a level 35 drake to the new level 37 one, and MistressDomina upgraded from her level 33 one to the level 35 one - and Cyborg inherited the level 33 drake.

So, the level 31 horse was moved over to Peri, and Darth, after simplifying matters by putting the drake eggs and ordinary pan flutes he was carrying into storage, took his blue pan flute to Lorraine, and then took it on to Jajan in Dratan City, obtaining a cute little pale blue pony.

The only problem was that, now that the school uniform type "cover" for his armour, with its extra +1 to the four armour pieces, has expired, Darth didn't have quite enough physical defence to be safe fighting Berserkers without any pet Armour Increase buff, while using just the +5 shield, so for the later part of the morning, and over lunch, he had to make do with fighting Butchers, while Peri fought a Berserker in the usual way, for which he needed the +13 shield. Butchers don't last forever when hit for 26 damage, so I did have to keep checking up, and moving Darth from one Butcher to another. Forbbiden was at the Butchers too for a while, training one of his pets.

Today's new patch makes it possible to save one's log-in name from one session to the next; it also fixed a bug with the merchant card (which allows one to sell things whenever and wherever), ended the "Independence Day" event with its Stars, Stripes and top hats, did something about "dead spaces" in one's item records apparently... and introduced a new "Ignore" feature, which sadly is still a bit buggy, but rather useful. Just type in the name of a gold spammer, and you no longer see his spam - type in the name of a second gold spammer, and, well, you'll probably just add the first name to your "ignore" list again, but it's a step in the right direction. It seemed a fairly large download, as patches go, but that's about all I noticed initially.

However, fellow pet leveller Koolyo pointed me towards the Events section of the forum, which says that, for a while at least, as a "Player Appreciation Event" characters will get a free set of armour and a weapon when they reach level 31, and another free set at level 60. That only started after maintenance of course, so poor Cyborg has just missed out as he is already level 31. MistressSabina is level 30, though, so ought to qualify in a few days. Newly created characters get some hour-long skill and experience boosters, too, but they can't be traded across to a different character or sold.

What we didn't get overnight was a restocking of the Platinum items in the web mall, to which they have all now moved, so I am thwarted in my desire to buy a couple of the platinum skill pills. Annoyingly they use that pill's blue-and-white graphic to illustrate a special half-price offer on the platinum super skill pills, of which limitless numbers are available.

I opened ten skill boxes for MistressSabina; for some reason they don't offer the 50% psps as a possible reward, but I did get one more pssp, one effort scroll, two skill pills (aka training spells, for 15% extra), and six super skill pills, for double skill exp, which ought to come in handy.

As Sabina was only 12.96% of the way into level 30, and on the 50% donation of experience "freeze", I thought that it ought to be safe to take her to Prokion Temple for the afternoon. I solo-teamed her with SirDarth, who, as Peri was off duty, was able to borrow back his +13 shield, and was thus able to tackle the Berserkers once more.

I used a 200% pssp and a 15% sp, so that the Orc Axemen gave 4814 experience and 12127 skill exp, and the Orc Sergeants gave 9011 and, instead of their regular 4950, 15592 skill exp... and after one hour Sabina had added 466 skill points, and 24.20% experience. This was nice on the skill exp side, but a bit high on the regular experience side - I had intended to do a second hour, but I would like two hours in level 30 with the 350% skill exp gain, when I can get hold of two psps, so I had to stop for today at that point.

So for the remainder of the afternoon Cyborg took Sabina's place in that back room, though as his armour isn't as good, he did have to be a bit more cautious, and used the occasional small health potion. Still, he added 14.45% experience, and 58 skill points, so it was a trip worth making.

Ratel was on for a short while, though he seems to be coming down with the flu or something, he reported. I suggested he might like to wait a day or two before passing his drake across for a levelling boost, so that when I lend him the blue pony in its place, it has a few more levels than it has at the moment, so that he gets a reasonable pet buff. Apparently he killed the Grand Red Dragon again, after Stavanic had lured it.

Thinking over the "Player Appreciation" deal, it seemed like a good idea to rush through a brand-new mage, and try to get her to level 31 relatively quickly, so I created MistressBlaze, and sure enough she had five each of special newbie versions of resurrection scrolls, platinum super skill pills, and platinum blessed irises in her inventory right from the start. I took her through the tutorial dungeon, and then on to fighting foxes, deer and wolves for Healer Yabo's early quests, and, moving on to dire wolves and berserk wolves, it didn't take very long to get her to level seven. This was high enough to team with SirDarth, so we went to the Butchers for a while, though the arrival of the Grand Red Dragon prompted us to move on to the Berserkers before too long. By the end of the evening Darth had added about 20%, so is still safely well inside level 22, while MistressBlaze is level 15. Lorraine's treasure chests gave her some gold, and some candy; before teaming with SirDarth, MistressSabina recruited her into the Discipline guild, and Kaerella took her on as an apprentice in the Guardian system.

Tomorrow, MistressBlaze will probably hang out with Chuck for a little while, though before that I'll need to see what mage armour I've got in stock for her... I mean, a level 15 character still in the starter armour, and still with the level one weapon? Chuck can give her horse buffs and then leave the party, while she fights something suitable - Treants or Great Horn Beast perhaps. Once she has added enough levels, team-ups with Cyborg, and indeed MistressDomina, become possible. She did only get 49 skill points from her evening, most of which I've now spent on appropriate passive skills

So, to get a good armour set, it may be worth doing this with a knight as well. It seems just to be the level 30/32 armour set that one automatically receives, rather than the level 35/37 one, which is a bit of a shame; I see that the special newbie platinum super skill pills, platinum blessed irises, and resurrection scrolls have to be used "when under level 35" too, so it's no use saving them for later. Still, it is a nice change of pace, and ought to fit in quite well with the idea of teaming a character a bit too high for Orcs with a lower-level type in Prokion. I just hope the event lasts longer than a week, it would be nice if Chuck, currently level 54, got to level 60 and got the armour reward for that, but that's not something he's likely to do for a few weeks yet

SirPerivale has got his horse well over halfway through level 31 now, while SirDarth, who was still levelling his pony while he was levelling MistressBlaze, albeit not quite as quickly, got the little blue fellow into level 11 by the end of the evening. Stavanic was opening some lucky pet boxes and experience boxes, with mixed results - if you pay five million for a box and get a colouring crystal worth one million or less, that is a bit of a downer, but he got some nicely valuable platinum blessed irises. He got some pet experience pills from one box, but not the platinum, triple experience for an hour type - they were the regular, double experience for three hours ones, which I didn't even know could be got from those boxes. Sadly, they couldn't be traded across to Darth, he'll have to use them himself.

He was asking me what tower boxes could give, but a Google search for "tower boxes" + "last chaos" wasn't much help. This blog actually turned up on the first page of the results, though!