High-Level Monsters

MistressDomino stayed in merchant mode overnight, and managed to sell her pet healing potions, tower boxes, strong medicines, physical attack potions (from a recent quest that MistressSabina did), and a few other oddments, so that, by mid-morning, her supply of gold was looking a lot better - though it still wasn't enough to be able to think of getting MistressDomina any more +15 armour pieces, should they become available.

RedRackham logged in at breakfast time on Auzura-4 to work on levelling Kaerella's drake, SirFrancis, for a couple of hours, which was long enough to get our plucky miniature dragon past the 60% mark in level 42.

However, after coffee it was time to check out the Tomb of Theos. On Cariae it was on 80% - but on Auzura it was on 100%. Apparently the guild that won the castle siege last night is pledged to keep the Tomb reset, and they've also reduced the cost of getting in, from 3,000 gold for each of one's levels to 2,500, which makes a substantial saving when one is level 103. SacSalop and some other Twisted guildies assisted them in the castle siege, they told me.

So, in a solo party with MistressDomino back in Randol, MistressDomina went on in, and headed for the ancient grey mummies. A night shadow was mobbing all the mummies in the main room, so MD started with the few in the end of the corridor, but the night shadow left pretty soon, so MD moved a little way in.

This time, since the Tomb was on 100%, MistressDomina used one of her three "training spells" for an additional 15% skill experience, bringing the skill points per kill up to 5.544 - except briefly when a low-level rogue turned up and tried ks-ing a bit. By the end of the hour MD had used 59 skill points boosters, and gone up by 0.84% - roughly three-quarters of the "power hour" had been during dungeon time, with its 50% boost to a player's experience gain. 326 skill points were earned.

MistressDomina stayed in the room over lunch, and then immediately launched into another hour, with a second training spell on top of the pssp, finishing just as the two to three o'clock dungeon time hour began. Again a rogue, this time LordRyosuke, ks'd, and took a bit longer to persuade not to - again this caused one skill point booster not to trigger. MistressDomina added 0.59%, and, using 55 boosters, gained 307 skill points.

Back in Randol, a guildie, ChronoX, was reporting that someone was selling the small crit potions, near the animal trainer, for 2 million each, and reckoned they were a bit of a bargain - so MistressDomino spent almost all her gold buying 300 of them, in three instalments.

I'd taken a break for a few minutes, so the next "power hour" had slightly over half in the dungeon time, with the last 25 minutes in the calm time afterwards. Unfortunately not long after I started the various potions, both MD and my merchant got disconnected, so I lost a bit of (expensive) time there - but MD dashed straight back, and by the time the pssp ended, had managed to use 53 boosters, to gain 0.67% and 288 skill points, plus 916 pet points. I'd been chatting with the knight Firetrap at the time, so my first indication that something was wrong was when what I typed in to him didn't appear. ChronoX actually turned up in the room; he too is farming skill points, though it seems that a specialist sorcerer's area of effect skills mean he can get rather more skill points per hour, taking on a mob of five or six mummies at a time.

There was time for one more hour before the food break, so MistressDomina settled down and got to work, using Terra Spear as often as possible. ChronoX gave me the special sorcerer buff that means a buff applied while it is on will last longer, so I had the mage buffs for a while. What I didn't have was that 15% "training spell", as I'd run out of those. I will have to buy a "big" one, lasting I think for a whole week, but as I won't be able to play much, particularly at sp-farming times, from Thursday to Sunday, that had better wait until next week.

Anyway, that fourth hour saw MistressDomina use 58 skill point boosters, adding 0.60% and 308 skill points, plus 962 pet points, so MD has put on almost 2,000 skill points since reaching the start of level 103. That means she is pretty much on target to get all the skill points she needs before the end of the level, though quite a lot more potions and boosters will need to be bought along the way.

The six o'clock Mad Monster Spawn for high-level characters (91-139) was on Auzura-5. We didn't get a visible game master or a Kiene Tower to rally to, but the anonymous GM announcements did eventually get replaced by speech credited to [GM]AwesomeSauce, and she was happy to keep on spawning plenty of monsters, starting with barren eises, darkmind terrains, apes, scorpionmantises, dark bogles, and so on, and working up to the usual horde of all six kinds of cave spirit, plus patriarch botises, flutons, lilits (one of which chased me, in the guise of my local rogue Rage, right across the battlefield), and something I think with the second name Tion.

Rage got recruited into a party before the start, along with Firetrap, though I failed to mention that I was the mage he'd been talking too earlier, when sharing the ancient grey mummies' room. We had one really high-level member in the party, so I guess I was "capped", but I still got a little useful experience, and gold - and a level 69 titan axe as a drop, plus an item drop booster, two large defence potions, three skill point boosters, and four large attack potions, plus no doubt some tool aids and small HP and MP recovery pots.

When the GM was asking for suggestions, I remarked that "a flock of kamiras would look pretty", and my request was granted - but with the high-level people there even a bunch of probably at least a dozen lasted mere seconds, and all their drops were grabbed by the people responsible for their speedy demise. [GM]Awesome did mention that they are working on new and better drops, so that is something to look forward to.

Being level 44 meant that Kaerella on Katar could in theory learn the first five levels of Poison Arrow - except that her dexterity won't be high enough for three more levels, as she has opted to get intelligence and constitution to 17 first to allow skills that require those to be acquired. Still, it isn't a skill my other archers tend to use. Since I didn't intend to take her along to the Katar MMS, she had a rather short session in Maargadum Jail - just long enough to get the 265 pet points she needed to get her drake into level 40, as a fair amount of the time she didn't have the drake equipped. 6.60% experience was gained, and 37 more skill points.

Barbarienne teleported out to the Mad Monster Spawn location on Cariae-5, and found quite a few people waiting - as well as [GM]Darasuum. The event was fairly similar to the Auzura one, but the single spawning of loot wasn't very generous, and Dara didn't do any requests for extra monsters. When the final lot of flutons, patriarch botises etc was spawned, he announced "MMS is not over. Thank you all for coming out!" Spot the slight mistake he made there. As ever people hung around afterwards; we hadn't reached the full thirty minutes then, so he was sneaking off a bit early. Still, Barb managed to avoid getting into too much trouble, apart from when she and a level 125 "roaming spirit of the archer" were exchanging shots, which did get her health a bit low before some other people rushed in.

So, if I was giving the two high-level MMS events I attended marks out of ten, [GM]AwesomeSauce's Auzura event would get eight, since although the GM didn't appear she did eventually chat and take requests for monsters to be spawned, while [GM]Darasuum's Cariae event would come in at five, for a lack of interaction, a single rather light loot spawning, and an early, slightly inconclusive finish.

There wasn't really time for any more adventuring after that, so there was just some window-shopping done on Cariae and Auzura - master stones +17 seem a bit expensive on Cariae, the cheapest i saw were 900 million each. I looked all through Roy's merchant mart on Auzura to see what it would cost to buy platinum super skill pills for gold, and he only had a single pssp for sale, at 14.95 million.

MistressDomino continued her selling session through the evening, and made a few useful sales, of heaven stones and HP stealers mainly. Once the window-shopping was finished, RedRackham took Kaerella's drake back to the death mask lancer on Auzura-4 for an hour or so...which took SirFrancis up to just about the two-thirds point in level 42.