An Early Finish

Both ColonelScarlet and RedRackham logged on at breakfast time for a little peaceful pet-levelling with either berserkers or bandits, and the Colonel's pale blue horse reached level 32 at coffee time - at that stage, Red's horse still had about five hours work to go before the magic level 37 would be reached.

I managed to fit in an hour with a platinum super skill pill for Kaerella on Katar-4 in Prokion Temple; after a while I settled into ignoring the Orc Sergeants entirely, so that I had all five of them following me around but, thanks to the armour and the 5% suction of life accessory, not managing to do me any harm. With the pssp for triple skill exp, and a 50% freeze on experience gain, the Axemen were giving me 16500 skill exp and 6419 experience, while the Sergeants were giving 14850 and 9485; since the more skill points I can get per level the better, the Axemen were definitely the better bet. By the end of the hour I'd gone up another 31.66%, a pretty similar amount to the previous two hours in level 27, and added 393 more skill points; Kae's drake had moved along nicely too, reaching level 24.

Back in town there was time to look at the "Potions" category of Trading Agent Roy's merchant house; since it became possible to trade them for the first time with the new patch, there were a lot of super skill pills for sale; they give double skill exp for an hour, which isn't as good as the platinum version's treble, but still useful. They seemed to be mainly 3 or 4 million each, but I managed to buy four for 4 million, put up for sale by JayLeno; they ought to come in handy at about level 34 I guess.

RedRackham logged in for some lunchtime pet-levelling, but when he arrived at the berserker spot, there was a Pandora's Box there - which when opened, unleashed a level 50 Pandora Beast. So, Red discreetly logged out, and Cariae's Kaerella rode down to deal with it. The Beast dropped 55,200 gold, which made Kae's trip worthwhile.

The afternoon started with another pssp hour for Kaerella in Katar-4's Prokion Temple; this time she managed not to kill any Orc Sergeants at all, just Orc Axemen; 27.30% experience gain got her well into level 28, where the experience per Axeman dropped by 5%, and the skill exp dropped by 10%, but the ratio of skill exp to experience remained a lot better than the Sergeants would have given. 395 skill points were earned, and 1063 pet points.

Doing some shopping in Katar-1, I found a healer called LIVIA selling platinum super skill pills for 3 million each, so bought eight, which was all I could afford. After that, there was just time for RedRyder to have a short session on Katar-1 using Elizabeth's buff; she got up to level 8, and, after getting Merchant Geres the jaguar teeth for his necklace for the first time, had just enough skill points to get the last level of the passive skill Reinforce, increasing her physical attack. The jaguars were kind enough to drop a Hand of the Warrior, with its heaven stone, which is always good to see.

The evening session started with the Auzura Mad Monster Spawn at its regular 5:00pm time, as far as the UK is concerned. Rage went along, and things were just starting when Zenderfly got in touch with ColonelScarlet, and, hearing what I was up to, created a healer on Auzura specially - Merun, like her Night Shadow. She ran straight from the starter dungeon to the MMS location, and I traded some memory scrolls across to her, which was a good idea as she did die a time or two, in the starter armour, so needed to use them to return to the location. By the end she had gone up from level 2 to level 17; I did ask if she was intending to do any work on the character, in which case I'd pass some money across for armour etc, but she said no.

Despite sharing party experience with Merun, Rage managed to add 2.04%, which isn't bad, and she didn't die there, which was good - she was stunned once by a Fluton's flamethrower skill, but luckily it didn't follow up its attack. The only bad thing about the MMS was that the drops were poor, instead of the usual piles of hands up along a ridge, there were rather fewer piles in towards the middle, so I didn't get much, though a monster or two did drop some gold for me at least.

Zen had been wanting to level up her witch Damor from 89, so we went to Cariae-1's Tomb of Theos. Barbarienne ran down to the first room with the level 106 Anubis Spear Men, and Damor used a teleport scroll to join her; she then used party recall to get Keerella to join us. All Kee had to do was stand in a safe spot with my cat-style pet, SkrappY, equipped, as part of the combat party (and a necessary one as Damor and Barb were more than ten levels apart). Barb had to target an Anubis Spear Man, and then when its health was down to about 5% take a recall to Damor, and then start attacking the next one.

Damor borrowed Kee's staff, but didn't have a full armour set - whatever she was wearing reminded me of Princess Leia in the "slave girl" costume - and so had to be a bit careful, but things worked fine. Damor supplied Barbarienne with a crit potion and a mana stealer, though Barb uses so few skills that the latter was hardly necessary. The first hour did so well that Damor decided to slow things down in hour two, with me not using a crit, and her using only a few experience boosters instead of one on each kill. She got into level 90 easily, but didn't want to reach the top of that level as yet. Her Night Shadow Merun joined us for the second hour, occasionally fighting but mostly standing near Kee, just helping to boost the combat party bonus.

When her task was done Damor left - with Damor now the same level as Merun, she could get a red name, and then he could kill her and get a blue name and the "hunter" title - at least, that is how I understand it. We had partied with another Night Shadow called GRITS, since he was in the same room and the combat party boost helps everyone, and Barbarienne continued there for a little while, though Keerella went back to the start, via recall, to get her staff back and get some items from Damor which she wanted traded across to Zenderfly.

Kee logged out, and then back in in Randol for the trade with Zen, and we managed to remember every item between us, though for some weird reason the medium experience elixirs which Damor had traded across to Keerella, Keerella couldn't trade across to Zenderfly - she couldn't even drop them. Oh well, they aren't exactly valuable, so Zen didn't mind leaving them with Kee.

A couple of red-named Night Shadows in the TheChaoticLegion guild turned up in Barb's Tomb room, GenxThexNub and CantTouchDis, and killed GRITS, who was in a corner afk at the time - and then killed me too. I didn't resist, being interested to see what skills were used. It was useful to find out that a resurrection scroll now has a five minute countdown, so isn't much use for, for example, afk pet-levellers. "You are dead. Do you want to use an order of resurrection experience recovery? If cancelled, you will move to the resurrection point. (Automatically move after time expires.) Remaining Time: 4 min 59 sec"

I respawned up at the start, and decided to kill a few screaming zombies there, to finish the session. The red-named duo did turn up back there, but didn't get very far attacking a titan who was zombie-farming. I'm no expert on PvP, but I possibly one-hitted at least one of them when they attacked me again.

The regular weekly maintenance was brought forward a few hours, presumably to give the technicians more time before the end of their working day, and I logged out a few minutes ahead of that. ColonelScarlet logged out with a few minutes to spare too; he'd not had a long evening session, taking over the older computer from Keerella, but he did manage to get the pale blue horse into level 33. The servers presumably went down a few minutes before ten o'clock, UK time, which was when the US "Mad Monster Spawns" were scheduled to begin. Oops...