Storming Out of the Castle

It looks as if the product managers of Last Chaos are busy in their consultations with the crack team of developers (or maybe I mis-heard that) from Barunson in South Korea, as this week's patch notes announcement was identical to last week's, as JediMike's little joke. Certainly there was no new patch to download, and no sign of what for many people is the main in-game event of the year, the Halloween festivities, with pumpkin ghosts, pumpkin and "evil headband" headgear, special candies, and more. So, we continue, led forward by promises of more big excitements to come.

I was a little later than usual getting online this morning, but SirGalahad just managed to fit two trips to Prokion Temple in before lunch, with my Auzura archer Kaerella in Dratan City getting a 2% bonus, skill exp-wise, on each of his kills (without the Elizabeth's Enhancement buff or Gal's own 5% bonus being taken into consideration). On his first trip SirGalahad earned 225 skill points, and picked up a fine assortment of armour pieces and weapons for resale back in town to Geres; he then managed to spend all but 2 of the sp on assorted special skills, before going to the first degraded golien commander in Ebony Mine to lose his 99% experience. Then, after getting the Elizabuff again, the second trip earned him 170 skill points, since by then the eleven to twelve dungeon time hour was under way. All those skill points got spent too, and Gal is now ready for his next trip to Prokion.

Tuffsen had used the Meebo messenger to get in touch straight after breakfast, but it was only a matter of saying "hi", and me mentioning that I was about to go out shopping - the first time this autumn I've seen somebody scraping their car's windscreen clear of ice. Kaerella logged in on Cariae-4 before lunch, to see if her specialist sorcerer BadFairy was online - she was, but must have been away from her keyboard, as I got no response to the offer to join her afk for an hour while I had lunch. When I got back, though, I did get a response, so, after trading some loot around, a combat party was formed, and a Recall to the ancient grey mummies room was accepted.

Today, though, I gave Kaerella and RedRydeR time off, and took my level 100 mage Keerella and my level 110 archer Barbarienne along, as they both need skill points - and in theory Barb ought to kill rather more quickly than my other Cariae characters, with her level 109 +15 bow. The combat party with BadFairy was the same as usual, though. It got very briefly changed to an equal party to allow Tuffy to Recall in the level 161 mage solyana, the fourth highest mage on the Cariae server, who traded across a platinum blessed iris to her, stayed around a little while just supplying the haste buff, and then went off to reset the Tomb, to keep it on 100% easy.

BadFairy had a "power hour" from two to three o'clock, so while Keerella just fought the mummies as usual, and provided the Haste buff for BadFairy (and for herself, to make it easy to see when it ended), Barbarienne helped BadFairy to get through her experience boosters faster. This involved attacking her own ancient grey mummy, getting a Recall from Tuffy, and then, when the mummy's health got down to about 10%, luring it towards badFairy, and then taking the Recall... and then picking up recent gold drops and running off to start on a new mummy.

With a combat party, that worked fine - unlike when you are "power levelling" somebody a lot of levels below you in an equal party, and having to leave that party after taking Recall, then re-form the party for the next kill, still being in the party was not a problem, so Barb got her usual share of the skill exp, and the usual two or three million experience. So, it was no great hardship to give BadFairy the credit for the kill. She managed to go up by 29% during the hour, which can't be bad. I did try Keerella doing the same thing and taking Recall once, right at the end of the hour, but the older computer does get "sticky" fairly soon at present, so it wouldn't be practical to have both my characters do it, with Keerella's screen tending to freeze for a few seconds whenever I needed to change the camera angle.

BadFairy had to log out soon after that, to allow her boyfriend MrLegendKiller to play for a while on her computer, so Keerella and Barbarienne continued without her, gradually earning a little more greatly-needed skill exp. She had returned when I got back from my early evening food break, however, and for the five to six o'clock dungeon time we went back to power-levelling mode...though I warned Tuffy that Barb, at least, would have to leave before the end of the hour. I did say ten minutes before the end, and Tuffy kindly reminded me then, though I managed to stay another couple of minutes - and Keerella did take over, delivering a couple more almost-dead mummies for her to kill, before the end of the hour.

Six o'clock, UK time, was the time for "Storm the Castle" on Auzura-6, so naturally I had to be there...with my rogue, Rage. Twisted guildie EatfischZ, a level 117 assassin, picked me up for a party, which was useful. [GM]Darasuum was waiting at the start, but when the event began, there weren't any monsters spawned outside the castle. Just about everyone rushed forward, assuming there was a different spawning-pattern being used - so when after a couple of minutes Dara did manage the traditional spawning, we had to fight our way back to clear out the male assassinbugs, baals, death knights of iris, jumping devils, anubis archers, barren eises, and so on, before clearing out the outer and inner courtyards.

[GM]Darasuum had us gather around him for his usual rather small amount of loot, and then said that, while he couldn't give us any more drops, he could respawn the whole set of monsters for us if we wanted. The general consensus seemed in favour of the idea, so, except for the people who had left rather promptly after the loot, we began with the sphinx commanders in the inner courtyard where we were, and did the whole event in reverse, storming out of the castle.

Barbarienne was able to return to the ancient grey mummies for a few minutes after that, before moving across to Cariae-6 for the "Storm the Castle" at seven. This time [GM]AwesomeSauce was in charge; we started with just anonymous GM announcements, advising us on the timing and the position of the various mobs, but Awesome was actually there in person, wearing a "4th of July" top hat. We got through the monsters in good time, and then the GM asked for requests, as to what other monsters we'd like, so naturally I mentioned kamiras - and we got plenty of those, as well as patriarch botises and flutons. I did manage to pick up a few lucky scrolls and other bits of loot - and then we got quite generous amounts of the traditional "hands" loot in a number of piles.

We even had an invisible dragon from Strayana in the inner courtyard as part of the main spawning - and sadly the mechanics of the game seem to have changed on that. In the past, when it was in the inner courtyard, while nobody who didn't have "shadow removal powder" from the item mall active could see it, you could still target it using the [tab] key, as the nearest monster, and use a skill, or "attack", to start fighting it. That no longer works, so that there wasn't any way for me to attack it - but luckily there were enough people present who did have the powder active, since farming those dragons for new drops has been rather popular recently.

RedRyder, my level 39 rogue, went to the StC event on Sarissa-6. As often happens, there were only about five of us there when the monsters first spawned, but gradually more people arrived, so that we did manage the clear the place out inside the 20 minute deadline. The GM messages were anonymous, but we did again get some bonus monsters at the end, and I was careful to suggest kamiras - which, along with the patriarch botises and flutons did appear. It was [GM]AwesomeSauce again, I finally discovered when she did make some remarks in local chat, but she didn't actually materialise. I did have to be a little more careful around the big area of effect spells, so didn't get much in the way of kamira loot, except three crystals of experience (greater) and three hero's necklaces, one of which with better properties than at least one accessory that Red was wearing. Red's share of the normal "hand" loot included 6 item drop boosters and 5 skill point boosters, plus 6 large defence and 3 large attack potions, so again Awesome was generous both with the monsters and the loot.

Tairen was the last server to have its castle-storming, at 8:45 UK time; Hatzring and Katar overlapped with the events on other servers, unfortunately. My rogue Rage (or xRAGEx to be exact) is level 42 there, so once again some degree of caution was needed. Our disembodied voice this time belonged to [GM]JediMike, and he just did the traditional spawning of monsters - and the proper old-time spawning of big heaps of loot outside the castle afterwards, rather than smaller amounts in the inner courtyard. So, Rage ended up getting 5 skill point boosters, 3 item drop boosters, 6 large attack and 3 large defence potions, and no doubt plenty of the small HP and MP recovery pots, and tool aids. It seemed a shame not to have flutons, dragons (invisible or not), patriarch botises, and kamiras, but Mike does tend to go for shorter events - but well-rewarded ones. Rage once again survived, though it would have been a different story if my Snare hadn't kept working, as an anubis spear man did decide I was its target, and would have killed me in about two hits. Luckily it only got one...

Once that was over, Barbarienne was able to log back in, and, thanks to Tuffy's Recall, rejoin Keerella fighting the ancient grey mummies. While she hadn't quite managed to reach level 103 in that second "power hour", we had finally got her there, and after that she had left the combat party, since she needs to concentrate on getting as much skill experience as she can, and using some boosters with it, without any boosts to the experience she gains. There wasn't a whole lot of time left to the session, but the work continued, so that Barbarienne's total experience for the day reached 3.05% in level 110, plus 57 skill points and, since with the mummies blue-named for her, her drake wouldn't get pet experience, 3.99% experience in level 54 for our Scra-Chi pet, SkrappY. Since she'd kept fighting the mummies, just about, during the castle-stormings, Keerella ended up with 4.56% in level 100, 80 skill points, and 7859 pet points.

I will only be able to play actively tomorrow in the evening... my plans for that are fairly fluid at present, but |I suspect ancient grey mummies may well be involved.