Tairen's First Event

Maintenance last night did very little, apparently, on the positive side - two new items for upgrading weapons and armour have apparently been introduced, devil rune ore and purified rune ore, but they are only for use on items that are level 146 or above, so of no great general interest. Roy's merchant mart should apparently be less laggy, and "the remaining episode 2 bug fixes are in the pipeline", apparently, which is only slightly reassuring.

SirGalahad managed to fight a few gnoll lancers, starting at breakfast time; they each last just over 20 minutes for him at present, which isn't unreasonable I suppose, I remember when SirDarth used to get through butchers at about that rate. But now that Gal has his +10 armour, and +10 dual swords, it was time to use the first of his five "beginner" platinum super skill pills, to build up his supply of skill points, for possible future guild upgrading.

So, after coffee I headed for Prokion Temple on Tairen-4, since I didn't want to use Elizabeth's Enhancement, got into the back room with the orc sergeants and orc axemen, and started my pssp. Unfortunately, after about ten minutes the GM announcement came up, "ATTENTION: Servers will be coming down for an emergency maintenance in 30 minutes to fix some issues please logoff to prevent data loss" - so another week's patch can be classified as a bit unfortunate. There had been a mention earlier of a "death motion" glitch, or exploit, to avoid, and that if we didn't know what it was we had nothing to worry about, but it looks as if eventually our Aeria chums panicked and decided to bring the servers down quickly. "The developers hid an update in the patch that we were unaware of initially", ol' S1lent reported. It would be nice if they gave at least an hour's notice of such things, sigh, but at least I hadn't paid an admission fee for Egeha or the Tomb of Theos.

By the time I logged out, with less than five minutes left before 11:00am UK time, in 45 minutes SirGalahad had added just 6.58% (with his experience gain set to 50%), and gained 126 skill points. The servers were actually not down for much more than half an hour, but that didn't leave enough time before lunch to get back to Prokion Temple and finish off the pssp. It was a substantial patch that was added, rather bigger than the earlier "regular" one. So, RedRyder and MistressDomino just took the opportunity to use the tool aids they had in their inventories to stock up on quality stones and green herb leaves.

When SirGalahad did log in after lunch, it was a relief to see that the remaining six "hours" (15 minutes) were still there on the pssp, but it did take one of them to actually get back to where I was fighting - annoyingly, my first attempt to get into the Temple ended up with me in its foundations, so that I had to 'port back to town and back again and try again. Gal managed to add another 3.23%, and 45 skill points, though that included a bit of an overrun beyond the actual end of the pssp. A second pssp brought in 8.94% and 167 skill points, and the third added another 8.76%, and 167 skill points again, taking Gal's sp reserve back up over a thousand. There are just two more of the "beginner" pssps left now, after that I guess it will be a matter of going back to Tairen-1 with Elizabeth's Enhancement, which should help SirGalahad to move along towards level 32, and the new passive skill he can learn then. At that point, it may well be worth investigating the possibility of pet-levelling inside Maargadum Jail...

It was going to be a shorter Wednesday evening again, as far as Last Chaos was concerned, but that still left a couple of hours for RedRyder, who, in a solo party with SirGalahad while he pet-levelled on the gnoll lancers, headed towards Prokion Temple. And by that I mean, just left the city and went out into the desert in that general direction, as she had a quest to kill seventeen of the cunning little foxes of the desert, which was quick and easy enough to do, and then had both the quests for "soft sand", which is obtained from the sand golems. That particular quest item doesn't drop very often, so it was the best part of an hour before I was finished, out at Shuraine's oasis. The game seems to think both quests are complete when you have ten soft sands, but you do need "20/10" before you are done. And then it was a matter of heading across the desert to the reward-giver for one package of ten, and then going back into town for the other quests to be completed. Still, the experience gained helped move Red on through her level.

When I was finally able to actually go to the Temple, I got a "send error report?" crash as I was running towards my back room. I allowed myself to be persuaded to actually send the report for once, and that got me to Microsoft's updates, where I discovered that, as an optional update, they had a new driver for my graphics card, so that took a few minutes to install. The good news was that it seems to have set Guild Wars right, a quick check didn't show any double-image problems... but it all meant that Red's actual time in Prokion Temple was a bit limited.

The back room was in use by then, so I ended up with those three orc axemen just by the end of the "corridor room", and an occasional orc fighter to help pass the time. Still, with the quest rewards and the sand golem fighting etc, it all added up to 91.01% experience gain, getting RedRyder into level 28, along with 183 skill points, and 717 pet points, which were enough to get Red's dragon hatchling into level 5.

While I was technically committed elsewhere from eight o'clock, with SirGalahad continuing his almost-afk pet-levelling, I did see on his screen as nine o'clock approached that Tairen's first low-level Mad Monster Spawn was about to begin, so switched from Gal across to Red, who luckily had been able to spend all 183 skill points on some attack skills, and took her down to the Great Horn Beast lake edge, where the other recent low-level MMS events have been.

With all the people, and eventually all the spawned monsters, the older computer was, not surprisingly, a bit slow and laggy. I assumed from [GM]JediMike's recent events that this would only take ten minutes or less - but in fact it was [GM]Moose who was in charge, so we got multiple waves, and a wider range of creatures, including a wight or two and barren eises - he even spawned some level 100 blue dragons at the end, but then, realising that we were a bit under-powered, cut it back down to just one. I was able to do my bit on the Snare front, and we emerged victorious.

With the faster computer and my full attention I'd have done more, but RedRyder did her share of fighting and snaring,though she only added 2.80%. The loot she picked up wasn't too dramatic, maybe around two each of the good items, but even the health recovery potions are useful at low levels.

Later, I was able to get SirGalahad back into gnoll lancer-bashing action, and the horse, cunningly disguised as a reindeer, actually reached level 25 before log-out time.