Another Level

SirDarth and SirPerivale both started pet-levelling nice and early.  When Peri logged in there was a level 50 Pandora's Beast close by, so Darth's arrival was postponed slightly while Rage logged on instead and rode down to deal with it - it dropped 42,800 gold, so it wasn't the most generous of Beasts, but all contributions are welcome. However, I soon found that there wasn't any double pet experience going on, so it looks as if not enough people were able to post "Mexican flag" screenshots of coloured pets.  Indeed, the few screenies on the forum that I looked at were fairly humdrum, and tended just to show one green, one white, and one red pet, I was assuming that crowds would be gathered together by the bigger guilds for more, well, flag-shaped displays...

Later in the morning I did a lot of shifting items around, mainly to give MistressDomino the latest loot to sell, such as Easter Eggs - but I also took the opportunity to get MrChuckNorris back the Orc Ornaments he now needed for a quest, passed his old level 29 +15 sword across to MistressDomina... and passed Rage's old level 35/37 +4 armour set over to Chuck, along with enough lucky smelting stones to move it up to +6.  With his old armour (without his drake equipped) Chuck's physical defence was 652; this went up to 707 with the new set at +4, and 771 after it was upgraded to +6.  MD also got her armour upgraded from a mixture of +8 and +9 to straight +10, increasing her defence from 670 to 711; changing from a +13 to a +15 staff meant her magic attack went up from 407 to 486.

There was time before lunch for Chuck to get his quest reward, by handing in the Orc Ornaments in Dratan - where he got a new quest, which involved hunting down and killing 35 Death Goddesses.  A quick ride down south from Dratan city, and Chuck found them - they were yellow-named (level 35), and, like most Dratan mobs, aggressive, protective pet-eaters, but Chuck managed to handle them okay, with a little help from his horse buffs, and completed that quest before the lunchtime switch across back to SirPerivale.  Chuck had added 1.55% experience, most of it from the two quest rewards, plus 6 skill points and 76 pet points.

With the lack of double pet experience I'd assumed that everything was back to normal, but, once Chuck was back in Prokion Temple after lunch, Argoth pointed out that this wasn't so - we did at least have double skill experience running.  Chuck had finished his 15% "training spells", but did still have one last 50% "platinum skill pill", and with that was able to get, at level 32, 9625 skill exp from the Orc Sergeants, and 6875 from the Orc Axemen.  The hour yielded 281 skill points; the whole afternoon added 549.

Argoth had decided that he wanted to upgrade the Norcaine guild by a level, so Ratel passed the Guild Master position over to Chuck, who passed it back to Argoth; once Argoth had done his upgrade, he passed the position back to Chuck, who also upgraded the guild by one level, as well as adding two "expension of the guild" skill levels.  I would have done another level of guild upgrading, but after spending around 3.4 million on the one level and the two "expensions", Chuck didn't have quite enough cash... and Ratel decided that we'd done enough for now anyway.  So that was 599 skill points used.

Chuck went back to Prokion Temple in the evening, and got back into our favourite room - and eventually managed to reach level 33, which meant he had enough stat points to put the necessary 12 of them into Dexterity, so that he could learn the stun skill Smite...so that used up 262 skill points.  A brief trip to Merac showed a couple of quests there of the riding-around with messages variety, which he attended to - there is also one to kill some Butchers and Pilferers, which can wait. In all Chuck had gone up 104.04% in experience today - and down by 15 skill points, which considering he spent 861 sp can't be bad.  And 2707 pet points were enough to get his drake up to level 33, too.

There was less than an hour left, but it seemed time for a change, so MistressSabina, my new level 8 mage, headed out into the fields of Juno to battle the wolves.  She reached level nine, and took the trip to visit Bant in Dratan, another message-delivering quest, and then did the repeatable quest to supply Merchant Geres with Jaguar fangs a few times.  Ratel, who was in the solo party, rode out to pass across some items for his level 10 healer Thabitha, and gave me horse buffs, which made for an invincible few minutes battling the Jaguars, the buffs add a huge percentage to a low-level character's attack and defence.  

Ratel also passed over three heaven stones, a "down payment" for a new pet levelling task for Darth.  Ratel's special-blue horse is around level 17 at present, and he'd dearly like to get it up to a mount level, so that he can have two characters with mounts.  Which seems good to me.  Unlike Stavanic, Ratty does supply the necessary quality stones, rather than just a few tool aids, and a pony or horse that already has a good few levels done.

The plan with MistressSabina will be to make her Kaerella's apprentice soon, and get her up to level 20, and beyond.  Unlike my main characters she won't farm any skill points beyond her normal present requirements, plus ones for the Discipline guild, which means that while she'll never be high-level, she can attend "Mad Monster Spawns" and things like that without risking a big skill point loss when killed.

Ah well, a different approach keeps things interesting, yes?