Extra Concentration

SirGalahad on Tairen-4 and his Cariae-4 equivalent both stayed busy overnight with their pet-levelling duties, so that SirGalahad got his pale blue horse to level 31, the first level at which it could be mounted, by mid-morning; level 37 is what we are aiming for though as usual, for the full-strength horse buffs. Galahad (or XxGALAHADxX to be precise, the simpler versions of good names get snapped up quickly) on Cariae got his horse to level 24 soon after, having added three levels in his session.

One thing I'd been doing last night was to check my various characters on the different servers, to remind myself where stashes of good items and undownloaded item mall packages were, and as a consequence I was able to transfer a package of chaos smelting stones across to Rage on Auzura, to improve her armour rating before she does some Tomb of Theos work, hopefully next week. It was interesting to see how the defence on her boots increased; +8 gave a total of an extra 71 on top of the unaugmented number, +9 and +10 each added another 12 - and then at +11 an extra 38 got added, going down again to 18 more when I got the boots to +12, making a total of 151 extra, until I can add an extreme stone.

One thing I'd discovered during my checkings-around on various characters, their inventories and so on, was that on Auzura my royal knight, GALAHAD, was level 34 - but if I could get him to level 35 he would be able to learn one more level of Concentration, which would increase the boost to the chance of success with skills like Snare from 25% to 35%, and also double its duration from ten to twenty minutes. This particular Galahad doesn't have all his skills maximised, the main idea was for him to be able to give Concentration... he just needed a little more work.

So, this afternoon's trip to Prokion Temple wasn't on Tairen, it was on the Auzura server, and featured Galahad teamed up, in a combat party, with RedRider, my level 27 rogue who is set up to go along to low-level Mad Monster Spawns or other events, and is in the process of learning the special skills. The back room was free, so that's where we settled down.

We did have a visitor, a daggers-wielding rogue called PLaYeR, but she didn't stay very long. It seemed strange to be playing a knight, using dual swords, rather than a crossbow-wielding rogue - Gal would rush straight up to any orc I targeted, rather than fighting from a distance. Still, Red picked up the loot in a helpful way, including most of PLaYeR's, since she wasn't bothering to pick things up. The session was a reasonably long one, and Galahad did reach level 35 easily, going up by 44.60% in all and earning 500 guild points for the local branch of Discipline. RedRider added 29.29% and 72 guild points, and they each gained 304 skill points.

Back in Randol, Galahad spent 200 of his skill points to get that new level of Concentration - and is now officially ready to team up with Rage some time, to increase the chance of her Snare skill working. Then RedRider spent her newly-acquired skill points, plus 28 she already had, on the last two levels of expert weaponsmith. She has plenty more special skills to learn yet, though. She then headed for Misty Canyon, and let the first Introducer Cameo there kill her 23 times, to get her experience back down to the start of level 27 again.

For the evening session, it was time for my Cariae cleric Kaerella to head out to the sphinx types again, this time just using a blessed iris for three hours. After a few false starts I managed to get a solo party going, including the level 122 player Quqluque, and we had a bit of a general discussion about Last Chaos, past and future. Memories of demon parties, and hopes that the skill points cost of the higher level skills might one day be reduced to something a bit more realistic. As it is, high-level characters, particularly night shadows, have to earn a heck of a lot of sp, fighting creatures a lot less forgiving than orcs. "No wonder Koreans drop dead in cyber cafes", I commented...

Kaerella just basically slogged away for the three hours; luckily there was the "Turbo" event running for most of the time, without any announcements, which added an extra 50% to both experience and skill exp. In all Kaerella went up by 34.64%, along with 70 skill points and 2466 pet points. At that rate her next session ought to see her level up again.

SirGalahad had continued with hsi pet-levelling while Kae was out killing the elite sphinx speer man and his friends, and got his horse into level 32 about halfway through Kae's session. There still seems a long way to go before level 37 is reached though. Will that be the last horse I need to level on Tairen? Time will tell, I suppose.