Plenty of Mummies, Plenty of Levels

Just after the blog was "put to bed" last night, an hour of "175% upgrade" time was announced, which meant that, when using a heaven stone, with or without a rune of protection, to attempt to upgrade an item, your chance of a successful +1 would be 75% greater than usual...though failures, downgradings and breakages would still be possible. Hopefully some people did get a positive result - the first thing I noticed was that RedRackham got disconnected. There were people in the shoutbox complaining about lag and lagging out, too.

These upgrade events always bring big lag problems, and this was shown when I managed to log RedRackham back in - when he got to the teleporter to move to Merac Caron, the teleporter NPC wasn't there. He moved back to central Randol, where people were moving around... he saw someone running towards the teleporter, but they quickly vanished from sight. Another trip across town got him to Teleporter Eteal, and this time he was able to move to Merac, and get back into Maargadum Jail and continue his pet-levelling.

Another thing with upgrade events, I remembered after a few minutes, was that people suddenly find they need to buy more heaven stones, and indeed runes of protection, so MistressDomino went into merchant mode on Auzura-5, and soon sold her supply of runes of protection 2. People were still selling heaven stones rather cheaply, and I didn't sell any at what until recently would have been a very competitive price, at least during the upgrade hour... curiously, leaving MistressDomino in merchant mode overnight, she did sell a dozen, as well as most of her remaining tower boxes...and in the morning someone cleaned out her stock of moonstone boxes as well.

RedRackham got back into action at breakfast time, and soon got the drake he is currently working on, Kaerella's SirFrancis, into level 42, a level which will take 22 hours or so to get through. He managed the first couple of hours of that before he logged out, so that I could make use of the eleven to twelve dungeon time hour.

Keerella checked on Cariae-6, and found that the Tomb of Theos there was only on 30%, which would have made fighting inside dangerous, and a bit slow, so Auzura won again - the Condition there when I checked was 90%, though it did fall to 80% before I got MistresssDomina and Kaerella inside... and, judging by the damage MD's terra spear did, went back up to 100% during the hour.

MistressDomina and Kaerella had the ancient grey mummies room to themselves, with an assassin-type rogue called Marrow in the corridor nearby, so made pretty good progress - they both levelled up, in fact, with MD reaching 102 after about ten minutes, and Kae reaching 100 just before the dungeon time ended. MistressDomina added 22.59% from 51 experience boosters, while Kaerella went up by 29.62% from 61 of them.. MD's drake added 1392 pet points, Kae's temporary drake added just two less, and both MD and Kae added 26 skill points.

Another member of Twisted, MasterWingStarX, mentioned that he had finished skill point farming now - he has about 30k more sp than MistressDomina has, and used around 12k skill point boosters to get there. That does sound rather expensive, we will have to do a calculation of what would need to be bought for MD to go through level 103 without experience boosters, but with skill point boosters instead, which, with a platinum super skill pill, would give 5.28 skill points each. Let's see, for 30,000 skill points that would mean roughly 5,700 skill point boosters, and if MD could manage 57 kills per hour, 100 hours, using 100 pssp, plus the other potions...

Reaching level 100 meant that Kaerella could learn level eight of Survival Training, which for 400 skill points added 50 to her health and 20 to her physical defence. Level 102's skill for MistressDomina was more complicated - it required an expensive skill book, but luckily a couple of guildies had volunteered to pass one over free, since they'd done enough "cube" runs to be well supplied with such things. BaronSengir was the one who kindly supplied the skill book for the attack skill Fire Ball, via a rogue storage character of his, HansLanda; getting the skill cost 1020 skill points and 20 million gold, for a useful ranged attack, with 400% power - not as powerful as Terra Spear's 550% (until one gets its third level at 118, for 600%), and with a 60-second cool-down apparently, but useful to have, I'm sure, particularly in PvP.

For the two to three dungeon time hour it was more of the same for MistressDomina and Kaerella. MD got 23.67% in level 102 from 55 experience boosters, while Kaerella got 28.91% in level 100 from 65 boosters. MD's drake gained 1144 pet points, and Kae's added 1191 - and they each gained 27 skill points. The Tomb's Condition had started at just 70%, but it soon improved.

For the second half of the afternoon RedRackham and MistressSabina went to Maargadum jail on Auzura-6; Sabina got a couple of quests in the village first, requiring her to kill beast flyers and giant larvae. The middle of the third floor was being used by a knight, but RedRackham went on down to the fifth floor for some pet-levelling, and Sabina just used one of the side rooms for a while - long enough to kill the thirty beast flyers the quest required. As despite his three-hour Elizabeth's Enhancement buff ending the knight kept on fighting, it seemed a good idea to head off to the giant larvae and get that quest done too, so MistressSabina left the Jail, and rode down to south-east Merac. It didn't take long to kill the necessary ten giant larvae - so then Sabina returned to Merac village, and got her quest rewards, plus the quest to get three rings from the "beast leaders" - in fact the beast crawlers. So, Sabina headed down to the fifth floor of the Jail; a couple of death mask soldiers were fought within compass-range of RedRackham there, but the main fighting of the beast crawlers was right at the far end, where it didn't take very long to get the three rings needed.

The four quests, including an errand-quest to the local archbishop, brought in 84 skill points, thanks to the doubling-up from the Elizabuff, and around 11% experience, so that the whole rather brief and varied session brought MistressSabina 14.08% plus 106 skill points, as well as just 153 pet points. RedRackham was able to continue his pet-levelling through the food break, of course.

I managed to get MistressDomina and Kaerella back online just in time for the five to six o'clock dungeon time hour; Auzura's Tomb was down to 70%, but that was still better than Cariae's 50%, and it did, again, improve as time passed. The night shadow Voldemort was just ahead of MD and Kae in the race to get to the ancient grey mummies room, but there was room for all three of us...though I must admit that life was easier after he had a disconnection at the 25 minute mark. This time MistressDomina added 22.22% from 53 boosters, and Kaerella added 27.23% from 62. MD's drake got 1073 pet points, and Kae's got 5 more... and MD and Kae each added 26 more skill points.

Once the dungeon time hour was over, Kaerella logged out, and MistressBlaze logged in. She teleported to the Tomb, and, with horse buffs, was able to run down to the ancient grey mummies room, and then target the ancient grey mummy that MistressDomina was attacking. As we were now having a double experience and skill exp event, I didn't bother with any boosters for MistressBlaze, or indeed for MD. When the dungeon time hour, eight to nine o'clock, was running, MistressDomina was getting 72 million experience per kill, and 8360 skill exp... less whatever proportion of the kill MistressBlaze's efforts earned her.

MistressDomino added just 3.32% from this session, but 56 skill points as well, plus 3160 pet points; MistressBlaze didn't get any skill points, she is still too low-level, compared to the mummies, for that, but gained 161.11%, taking her comfortably into level 67, as well as 2722 pet points for her level 42 drake.

Back in town, MistressBlaze got the bits of the 70/72 armour set she needed, and converted them into their mage equivalents. MistressDomina had passed across some platinum refining stones, to give the armour a 24-hour boost to +15 when needed, and Kaerella and MistressDomino passed across the necessary potions and boosters. Once MistressBlaze has the level 69 +15 weapon, currently still with MrChuckNorris, she will be ready to have a "power day", just to get her to level 87 or so, which will mean that she can take over as a screaming zombie fighter to assist the lower level people battling them. Though that will mean either getting another 85/87 mage armour set, or waiting until MistressDomina moves on to a higher-level set, presumably the 105/107 armour...and with all those skill points to farm, that may have to wait a while.