Killing Giants

My usual seven characters logged on to get their daily attendance allowance sorted out, before coffee, ending with SirGalahad doing a little pet-levelling with a spike canine in Maargadum Jail, behind the teleporter.

MistressDomina had killed a fox on her way to the mine, earlier, and it gave 2 experience and 1 skill exp, which revealed that today the GMs had absent-mindedly left double experience running. This meant that SirGalahad wasn't able to do any skill point farming on the ghouls in Prokion Temple, so instead I did a little checking up on what armours and weapons I had on various storage characters - and upgraded some armour pieces that MistressSabina will be able to wear relatively soon, as today there is a raffle with free entries for people who upgrade items. It's interesting how much larger the defence gain is from +10 to +11 on a piece; if for example a pair of mage boots give a basic 66 defence plus 39 at 8, they go up to 45 at 9, 52 at 10 - and then 72 at 11, followed by 82 at 12 and 93 at plus 13.

Checking, transferring, and upgrading took up most of the second half of the morning, really, if one includes looking through Roy's merchant mart. My main search was for a good level 53 weapon for MistressSabina, but there was nothing above +12 available, so she will have to stick with her level 45 one for a while yet, which is +15. At least a pair of level 55 +13 gloves were only half a level away, as armour can be worn, without penalty, five levels before its marked level, until one reaches the pre-sealed types a little higher.

For the afternoon, while CaptainScarlet kept busy pet-levelling, MistressSabina went out to the giants, to take advantage of the double experience. They seemed to drop a good number of the level 61 weapons, which helped build up Sabina's gold reserves, and by the end of the session, she had gone up by 16.77%, and earned 61 skill points. Her drake had added 949 pet points, too.

The evening belonged to MistressSabina too, with more giant-slaying. Kamira still stayed away, so things were relatively unexciting, with the high points being the various first-grade ignition runs. The double experience continued, even after the double pet experience, today's scheduled "event", was switched on. CaptainScarlet started to use the hour-long platinum pet experience potions he had, then. Sabina levelled up, and, as soon as I'd allocated her new stat points to intelligence - had a disconnection, along with Cap. Luckily she wasn't actually fighting, but it meant that a weapon that a giant had just dropped couldn't be picked up - and the giant must have respawned before Sabina faded away, as her drake was down to 10% health when she logged back in.

CaptainScarlet hurried back to his death mask lancer, so as not to lose more potion time than necessary - and MistressSabina hurried back to her giants too, but the weapon had vanished by then, and it was almost time to log out, anyway. She did at least stay long enough for her drake, also, to level up, reaching 44. During the evening, Sabina had added 30.17%, 140 skill points, and 4045 pet points.

Back in Randol, MistressSabina had a new passive skill to learn - the first five levels of Mental Preserve, for 573 skill points increasing her physical defence by 100, and increasing her attack speed, though, the way the game works, that entails decreasing her "offense speed" by 2, from 14 to 12. More defence and a faster attack certainly sound good to me.

CaptainScarlet continued a little longer, of course, with his pet-levelling, and, using the potions, actually got his drake past the two-thirds mark in level 48.

A special "tiered leveller" event had started running this weekend - which was a bit strange, as an attempt to redesign the website's item mall had led to it crashing out entirely, so that only the three "BOGO" offers are available from there, with the in-game mall's rather limited range of things the only other place to buy stuff. And the "tiered spender" page itself isn't working, with just a note that it is "temporarily down for maintenance". Apparently people who do spend enough aeria points will get their bonus packages eventually, though it sounds as if the poor GMs will have to send the packages out individually. Not very good planning, there.