In the Arena

Poor RedRackham got ks'd twice overnight, leaving him and his horse standing around uselessly, but he did manage to get the horse up to level 36 by morning. Logging on at breakfast time, Galahad did a little work on the drake too, which is consequently nicely into level 42 now. At that level the pet is no greedier than it was at 41, so I guess we can continue a little while before it gets moved across to Barbarienne.

One thing I did after coffee was update the Last Chaos forum's thread about "Epic Events" with some of the screenshots I took last Friday - mainly from the Katar run, though with an Auzura shot slipped in. As MistressDomino sold out of quality stones at 3,950 gold each rather quickly last night, the next step was for her and Kaerella both to buy some herb-gathering knives and stone-mining hammers, and go out and use all the tool aids they had got to amass further supplies. It's a shame a bulk purchase I made yesterday of perfect stones (from item mall packages - they satisfy 9 points of hunger, as opposed to a quality stone's 5 points) at 2,000 gold each was on another server.

After Kae had transferred her new green leaves and quality stones across to MD, in exchange for most of the profits from MD's overnight selling, ColonelScarlet logged on, and, after he too got some of MD's gold, he went to upgrade the Discipline guild, which is now level six, and thus can freeze its members' experience gain. MD was his first recruit, and is now a guild adviser.

Since some guild points are needed for any further progress, the Colonel set his experience gain to 50% before heading for Prokion Temple for a shorter-than-average session. Kaerella joined him once he had found the back room available - he went up 8.44% and 60 skill points, while Kae, who'd gone up almost 6% at the zombie invasion last night, got her total gain up to 13.95% and added 57 skill points.

The afternoon session was more of the same, though FuEnTe1 asked to join us after a while, and moved on from level 26 to level 27. He then asked if he could change over to his rogue, RoGuE10, who needed some more skill points, so I agreed, although at level 35 she did bring the experience gain per kill down a bit. She has an "Ichi" type new pet called sir-fuzzy, which joined in on the action, though I don't know if it would gain much experience from the Orcs, especially the blue-named Axemen.

Even with his experience gain on 50%, ColonelScarlet added another 32.12%, so that was a fairly productive afternoon. He got 204 skill points as well, and gave the Discipline guild its first 452 guild points. Kaerella added 29.14%, and 192 skill points - she arrived a little later, and the older computer did freeze up once, running out of memory - well, at least, the game froze up, and needed to be restarted.

After the early evening food break, I got MistressDomino signed up as an apprentice in the Guardian system - Kaerella kindly agreed to act as her mentor. I did do some browsing through Trader Roy's stock, and saw that I could afford to get Kae a second Pierce of Wind accessory... but I decided to wait until I could afford a Stone of Shadow. It may give slightly less dexterity, but it improves on the short range evasion, and adds some long range evasion too, which does come in handy sometimes. Those Beast Archers in Maargadum jail, for example.

Staying with the Katar server, the idea was for MistressDomino to go out to Velpist Temple in Juno, while Kaerella did a little more mining and provided the solo party. So, MD headed out there, and, as she was level 10, started to kill the wandering zombies. Before long though RoGuE10 got in touch, and asked Kae to join her in the Prokion Temple back room, this time on Katar-1. It was only after Kae had respawned on Katar-1 that she said that she wanted Kae to do her share of the fighting. Anyway, I got there, formed a Combat party... and literally within a minute Rogue10 said that she had to log out, and vanished.

So, Kae returned to her mining on Katar-5, and MD carried on with the zombie-killing, moving on from the right-hand corridor and its level 10 wandering zombies to what I guess counts as my favourite upstairs room there, at least I've spent quite a few sessions in it, either attacking the level 12 ancient zombies and the level 14 berserk zombies, and carefully giving the level 21 skeleton soldiers a wide berth (as I did today), or killing the level 21 types.

By the end of the session MistressDomino had gone up from level 10 to 14, and her dragon hatchling had gone from level 1 to 3 - 399.15% experience gain, I made it, plus 164 skill points. The weekend's extra experience and skill exp had been switched off by then, so that was pretty good going - it puts MD within range of Kae for an Equal-type party if I need to zoom her up quickly in Prokion Temple. And Kaerella had got some more quality, imperfect and flawed stones...

The evening's event was called an "Arena Prize Drop", and started at the Randol arena on Auzura-3 at nine o'clock, UK time, followed 45 minutes later by Katar-5, and then Cariae-3. Generally it meant that GMs Kali and Krash turned up there, and spawned masses of Flutons and other monsters, so that people died a lot - but death in the arena carries no penalty, people just need to run back from the respawning area. Krash, and sometimes Kali, ran around at a suspiciously high speed killing people...and then at the end nice tight piles of the usual Hands-type prizes were spawned.

As low level people can't either attack or be attacked, and given that people were sure to be killed when the prizes were spawned, I went along to both Auzura and Katar as a level 2 healer, Barbarella. I got killed pretty often by Flutons, but just respawned, used Self Heal, and ran back, and was ready to leap into action when the drops were finally spawned. With the 132 level difference, I was entirely unable to hit a Fluton, so my experience remained unchanged. On Cariae, though, my level 1 healer FoxChaser must have actually connected with one of her attempts - when that particular Fluton died, she went up three levels! Luckily she was still low enough, at level 4, to avoid the PvP side.

The drops were pretty good, and I was helped on at least one server by Kali running around killing the other people close by who were attempting to grab loot. My haul varied between 4 and 7 large defence and 2 and 3 large attack potions, 9 and 14 tool aids, 3 and 6 item drop boosters, and 2 and 5 skill point boosters, plus of course a dozen each or more of the small HP and MP recovery pots. And it was a very colourful spectacle to end the evening on...