A Free Trip

As expected, I was busy all day long, but ColonelScarlet managed an overnight pet-levelling session - he wasn't interrupted, though someone passing by must have decided to open a few Christmas Gift Boxes, as he didn't have the full number in the morning, by any means. Unlike what has been happening when someone is standing around in the guild hall, the computer didn't run out of memory overnight, and things lasted well into the morning before I needed to relog him.

It was just around four in the afternoon when the horse, in reindeer guise, finally reached level 37, so that's another job that can be ticked off the list.

Over on Cariae-4 Enchantrella did a bit of standing around in the Norcaine guild hall, and managed to get herself a mage shiny Santa hat; as the next hour's box dropped a healer-type one, a minor character of mine there, Karanne, logged in, and was able to get into the guild hall and grab it.

Ratel got in touch, and Christmas greetings were exchanged. He mentioned that he had made a Night Shadow, and not been very impressed - so that means that Ratel, the stalwart temple knight, must have reached level 90... I think that would be the Auzura version, but I'm not entirely certain. Honestly, these people who have characters with similar or identical names on various different servers do make life complicated, don't they? Heheheh...

After the early evening food break, though, I was able to swing into action for a while. Our friendly GMs had announced that they were offering free trips to Egeha's Lust Trum Tower on the four US servers' fourth sub-servers, so it seemed a good idea to take advantage of saving the 800,000 gold teleportation cost. Thus it was that Rage went over to the tower, using a special teleporter NPC, Suran, spawned outside Randol's north gate, similar to the way masses of teleporters got spawned there for some of the "epic events".

Rage fought a few level 87 wights on the ground floor, but the place seemed a bit cramped and busy, and so a "return to village" scroll got us to Egeha village. My titan MrChuckNorris soon joined her; at level 62 to her 72, a combat party seemed the way to go. Having a slightly lower-level member in the party means that monsters between their levels give better experience and skill exp, so it was worthwhile to quickly "farm" bogles (level 65) and dark bogles (67), before we settled in with the apes and baby apes. The apes themselves may only be level 74, but they are boss monsters, and give good experience, though they take a while to kill. We settled into a routine of killing the nearest ape, and then a nearby baby ape, with a few nearby bogles and dark bogles to fill up any time waiting for respawns.

Chuck would use Smite, the titan stun skill, between Rage's Snare effects, or more quickly if Snare failed to work - a system they have used before now against Screaming Zombies in the Tomb of Theos. We didn't stay a huge amount of time, though, as Rage had a few Egeha quests to sort out. After that, Chuck just remained safely in town, to provide the solo party boost; in all he had earned himself 7.09% by then, and a couple of skill points.

Rage's solo activities included reaching an NPC quest-giver, Assistant Rouin, quite close to Lust Trum Tower; the Skinwalkers are passive, so not a problem on their own, but they are protective of the boucu demons (and the triceratops-type endemic demons), so Rage just had to run past those and ignore any damage they inflicted. There's a bug that has been going on for a while which sees the boucu demons half stuck in the ground in some places, which I think restricts their mobility usefully. I got to Rouin safely, but he himself was surrounded by the ghostly level 88 cursed weavers and level 90 cursed liches, which are aggressive, protective of each other, and have magical attacks, so the new quest he gave, to harvest some "counteracting poison of the leaf" locally, will have to wait a while.

It would have been shorter as the crow flies to go from Rouin (who, with a name like that, appears to be involved in archaeology, naturally enough) to another local pair of quest-givers, Battle Leader Koon and Patrol Leader Zen, but those weavers and liches are bad news, so I teleported into Lust Trum Tower again, and hurried down the road from there, avoiding the boucu demons as much as possible, and took a hard right turn to head for the arena - not a place where players fight, as in Randol or Dratan, but just part of the map.

There was a quest to go back to town and return, so I did that, coming back the same way as before; a new quest required Rage to kill ten boucu demons and ten skinwalkers. After killing a couple of boucu demons there, I moved across to the old boucu demon spot, where parties used to fight, and continued there. I got the ten boucu demons easily enough - but my attempt to kill a skinwalker there ended in failure. The trouble is that, as bosses, they take an age to kill, so it's no use killing the nearby boucu demon and then attacking the skinnie, the boucu demon will respawn well before the skinwalker is down to 50% health.

In fact, things got very dangerous, with the skinwalker's debuff slowing my attempt to escape, and my health getting extremely low - however, he didn't chase me into the rocks, and I was able to use "pet return to village" to get the heck out of there. Rage can kill skinwalkers - but not if they have friends joining in! That was the end of the adventure; Rage had picked up a couple of level 72 helms, and a "Crystal of efforts", which would halve the skill exp loss from getting killed, for eight hours, plus a useful amount of gold.

It had made a change to wander around Egeha, especially without having to pay to get there, and, while the skill point gain was minor, including various quest rewards Rage went up by 13.26%, taking her past the three-quarters mark in level 72, so it can't be too long before she can start using her new level 73 crossbow, and let Auzura's version of Kaerella have the level 69 +15 weapon. With no pet-levelling currently under way, things reached a natural conclusion. It looks as if teleporter Suran will vanish at breakfast time tomorrow, in theory - if by any wild chance Suran should happen to remain longer than that, maybe my Cariae mage Keerella, currently level 93, might hop over to Lust Trum Tower tomorrow, if food and television and present-unwrapping and so on allow such activities.

Anyway, Merry Christmas to all our readers; if page view statistics are to be believed, quite a few people looked in at GuildPortal, but sadly their system seems nerfed at present, and new posts just haven't been uploading. Ah well, there's still blogger, and kaerella.com...