One More Day

As suspected, Episode 2 "dropping" on us today actually means, as far as the UK is concerned, that the servers will come down at 11:00pm, and so the new content won't appear here until the early hours of Friday morning, presumably giving us a rather large new patch to install, and removing the Hallowe'en event.

This does rather suit me, as today was one of my "busy" days, keeping me out of mischief working downstairs throughout the day. The up side of that of course was that some serious pet-levelling could be done.

ColonelScarlet did keep going through the night again, but he did lose an hour or two to a ks-ing, which might have been a friendly visit from the titan dayking, since he left a message just saying hello. Soon after breakfast, however, the pale blue horse reached level 22, so that there were three technical points to spend, on another three levels of Armor Increase, the next time the Colonel was back in Randol.

RedRackham restarted his endeavours on the older machine over on Cariae-3 just before breakfast, and made good progress through level 36, which in all was going to take over thirteen hours to get through. He did in fact get to his target later in the day, so that is another level 37 horse ready to be mounted.

So, for playing there was just the evening session, and in case Damor wanted to get in touch, it seemed simplest to give the original, level 49 cleric, Cariae version of Kaerella her turn. Progress with the level 52 Giants is rather slow, and over a lengthy session she just added 8.66%, but a useful 55 skill points - and 2030 pet points, which shows that it was quite a long slog.

Ratel got in touch, and we had our own solo party for a while; it was good to catch up on things with him, we've not been able to chat much recently. He's only level 31 on Cariae, so was in Prokion Temple, though found it hard to find a good spot. After a while he decided to switch to Auzura, but kindly logged in Liezl to continue to provide the solo party for Kae - and later on was able to report that over on Auzura Ratel had reached level 84. He said that the sphinx fighters had dropped him six empty baskets, so I assume he was in the Tomb of Theos, down where Keerella and Barbarienne had a session not too long ago.

One old name from Kae's Cariae friends list got in touch, rikie - and then arranged to delete herself from the list, to bring in her new character HarD instead. Just as I was logging Kae out, the titan dayking got in touch with ColonelScarlet, again suggesting a team-up, but as usual I had to stress that the Colonel was only pet-levelling at the moment. I offered a solo party type team-up, and we managed to set that up, with me cautioning him not to come too near me or I'd make off with half his experience and loot.

Soon after ten, UK time, after the first warnings that the servers would come down for maintenance in an hour, they announced that GM OgreKing would be in the forum shoutbox to answer questions about episode 2 - and what he told us had some shocks for us. It seems that a lot of the new content will only be available and accessible for people who are level 140 and above - and boy would it be expensive, in boosters etc, to slog one's way there, from Barbarienne's current level 101. As someone commented, "this is hilarious, 90% of the new content applies to a total of maybe 75 players on all servers, what was all the hype for...?"

The main shock was that the new NightShadow class won't be available in the same way as the other six classes, starting from level 1 - instead, you need to already have a level 90 character on that account, and the NightShadow character himself will start at level 90, with appropriate armour - I think with random seals, and I suspect without any upgrades, so a lot of smelting stones, lucky smelting stones, runes of protection, heaven stones, and chaos smelting stones may well be needed to make a viable character. Hmm, Aeria will sell a lot of item mall goodies in the next few days!

So, no "phoenix" NightShadows, as such characters have to be lower than level 30; I must admit I was a bit worried that the big changes to the game might break it, and make it something other than the game that the current players enjoy...and now I am significantly more worried. I will probably make a NightShadow on the same account as Barbarienne - but that means he won't be able to team up with her for the Tomb. Making one on the Keerella account would be slightly better for teaming up, but really the other three slots are taken up by viable characters I'd hate to lose - Kaerella, and Enchantrella, who is all set up for her main power sp-farming stint in Prokion Temple... and Karella, who is also almost ready for that, with special skills sorted out, and was my original LC character...we don't get any new character slots, I am told.

Ah well, there may be some advantages to this system, though it is incredibly weird that the hype for Episode 2 never mentioned the level 90 character requirement. At least Prokion Temple won't be flooded by everyone's new NightShadow, though it looks as if the Tomb will be. It looks like an interesting time, we are heading for.