Saving Randol

ColonelScarlet logged out a couple of minutes before last night's extra maintenance downtime began at eleven, UK time. "Some back end server changes to further fix the party system" were the goal, to fix the remaining disconnection issues, so let us hope all that bother can be put behind us now.

With me busy downstairs, the Colonel was my only Last Chaos enterprise for most of the day; his horse reached level 34 after an hour or so, and then started to make steady if slow progress through the new level, though the bandit he was fighting did reset himself a couple of times. Still, the work I was doing went okay, so with any luck I will have more time tomorrow.

The epic event today did indeed involve us in defending Randol from attacks to both the west and north gates, and it was interesting to compare the way the different servers were handled. Auzura went right to the full hour, and had a double spawning of hands of loot at the end, with [GM]Moose involved in the fighting, at least at one stage; Katar only lasted 45 minutes, but included a spawning of level 23 orc soldiers in the arena for lower level players, though the effect was slightly spoiled by dropping a level 100 blue dragon on top of us - and one or two arena regulars took the opportunity to kill a few noobs. The loot was slightly less generous at the end, but the GM did spawn a few final dragons for people to play with. Over on Cariae, Krash was much in evidence, chatting and generally interacting; the event was slightly shorter still, more like 35 minutes, with quite generous drops at the end - and no dragons or anything like that. He must have decided that we weren't a particularly strong group there, as Flutons didn't turn up at all, as far as I could see.

So, the first server to get "The Clash at the Gate" was Auzura, and I made RedRider my representative there, to keep everything roguish without risking Rage's skill points or remaining resurrection scrolls. She did have, at level 26, about 1300 skill points saved up, so I took the precaution of spending them on maximising her remaining available rogue skills, and then investing in some of the "special" ones too. She doesn't have any +10 armour, but that really makes very little difference when one is being attacked by something 109 levels higher.

Once the action moved to Katar, RedRyder took over, and, thanks to those orc soldiers spawning in the arena and then again later outside the gate, she actually ended up with 9 skill points, as well as 24.12% experience to get rid of before long. She has at least the +10 gloves equipped, though will have to wait until she can eventually level up before she can equip the rest of the 30/32 armour set.

At eight o'clock it was Cariae-4's turn to host the event, and I rather rashly logged in as my mage Keerella. Her Terra Spear skill certainly did a satisfactory amount of damage to the first cube guard she attacked - but it turned its attention to her then, and gave her a rather hefty blow, so I decided that it was really a better idea to switch over to my old-established local rogue Karella, and let her do the fighting. As usual we would fight at one gate, and then the message would come that more monsters were attacking the other one, so we'd need to hurry and kill off the remaining monsters and dash back through Randol to the other gate.

The original event had been on a PvP-enabled sub-server, as [GM]Beatrice had at that stage in the saga "gone bad", and come out and attacked people, "traitors" who'd failed to prevent the boss baddie from escaping before. This time, though, there was no plot advancement like that, and no sign of Beatrice, so we were able to stay on the first non-PvP sub-server of each group, which after some recent reshuffling is always number four.

At nine, I decided that I might as well have a look at how the Sarissa server would handle things; so Keerella got her chance to fight after all. My level 2 mage of that name on Sarissa, that is - who ended the hour at level 10, which can't be bad. When the monsters arrived she only had 236 gold to her name, but she was able to qualify to pick up three nice gold drops from cube guards and other attackers, so ended up with almost 80,000, enough to buy some new armour. Level 10 means she can go into merchant mode, though she didn't actually pick up a whole lot of goodies at the end, just ones and twos of the best items. Still, for her even the small HP and MP recovery pots would be useful.

Sarissa's event was a longer one, running to the whole hour. As before Krash was in quite a talkative mood, and helped with the fighting, though he mentioned that he didn't want to hit too hard, or else he wouldn't be leaving the other people very much to do. And as on other servers, some of the monsters were "bugged", so that when some skills, particularly stun-type skills and the rogue's Snare, were used, the monster's health bar zoomed back up to 100%. As ever it took a while to persuade some people to stop using such skills - but Sarissa has the dubious distinction of being the only one where one rogue admitted to using Snare just to annoy everyone else, and another rogue wanted a million gold to stop doing it.

I think all four of my characters got killed more than once, though, even in her starter armour, Keerella didn't seem to get killed any more often than the rogues. And if you are low enough in level, you don't get a death penalty, though Kee may have outgrown that at level 5, I'm not sure. Anyway, some useful loot was picked up on all four servers, and it was, generally, a fun series of battles.

It was about 8:15 when ColonelScarlet got his horse into level 35, a level which should take around twelve hours or so to get through. So the day when MistressDomino can ride around on her own horse can't be too far away now.