I set Galahad up on Cariae-4 for some overnight pet-levelling, but when I checked progress about five hours later, the "disconnected" window had popped up, and, while I didn't stop to read the details, the text box showed that the Cariae server, at least, had been taken down for maintenance for a while. Logging back in, I noticed that the horse's hunger bar was rather fuller than before, so some degree of "rollback" had been involved - and, sure enough, this morning the forum shoutbox was busy with people reporting lost items and other problems. Let us hope that things settle down now.
Galahad did at least get his horse about two-thirds of the way through level 31 by coffee time - but then it was time for a little more work on Sarissa. First of all, Kaerella passed that +15 weapon loaned from Friend across to SirDarth, as he is the busiest, fighting-est, character there at the moment - and then, after converting the bow into a sword and with Elizabeth's Enhancement safely obtained, SirDarth and Keerella headed back to Prokion Temple on Sarissa-5.
Due to interruptions in real life when I was starting, the session was not a long one, but we got into the back room safely. After a while an assassin-type rogue called Fatalism came in too, but there were enough orcs for both of us. She mentioned that the guild she was a guild adviser of, ChaosFiends, was just about dead, and she'd not seen anyone else in it online for weeks - guilds do tend to end up that way.
SirDarth did reach level 29, just as Friend got in touch to see how I was doing, and went up 98.41% in all; Keerella, standing back towards the doorway, added 40.79%, and they each got 100 fresh new skill points.
For the afternoon session, Keerella stayed out in the lobby of Prokion Temple, just giving SirDarth a solo party, while he used the first couple of "beginner" platinum super skill pills. They give 150% extra skill exp for an hour each, but they don't stack with the Elizabuff, so just mean 250% instead of 200%, so aren't really a big deal. With other characters I wouldn't have taken the buff at the same time, but Darth was in a hurry to level up.
The first hour saw SirDarth go up by 102.63%, taking him into level 30 and adding 345 skill points; the second hour added 84.49% and 313 skill points. For much of the second hour I was teamed up with a level 29 titan, kalama5552. which may have cut back my experience gain slightly, though the higher the level, the more experience you need to get through it.
The European "Storm the Castle" event was due at four o'clock, UK time, so Rage logged in over on Auzura-4 just in time for the "in ten minutes" notification, and headed down to Merac Castle. Luckily we had a reasonable turn-out, with quite a few people ready and waiting by the time [GM]Noboru arrived - and more people kept on coming, as time went by.
The event started a minute or two past the hour, with the usual monsters appearing. I joined in on the attack on the first thorny mantis, then killed a few of the male assassinbugs, and joined the general surge forward. The anubis archers were already taking heavy damage, and the jumping devils didn't last long at all. As usual the zamoras at the gateway went down fairly quickly, but the anubis spear men took precious time, as our GM warned us that we were in danger of falling behind schedule.
Other people dealt with the hell-otuu, while I helped with the dark harpies, and the further anubis spear men in the far corners. [GM]Noboru urged us on, and told us not to forget the throne room itself...and sure enough, once we defeated the sphinx commanders in the inner courtyard, we found that the throne room contained two flutons.
We still had seven minutes or so of our twenty left, but the flutons do take a while to kill. I'd been using Flame Arrow a lot, as it deals quite a bit more damage than my normal shots, and had to keep topping up my mana. When other rogues managed to keep the fluton we were fighting Snared, I concentrated on using Flame Arrow as often as I could, but I used Snare a few times when needed.
The second fluton went down during minute nineteen, I think, though Noboru did caution us that we'd be in trouble if there were any monsters we'd missed along the way - but then she announced that we had, indeed, cleared out the castle, and that our rewards would be spawned outside.
So, a desperate fight, and a generous reward...and then it was time for my food break.
That was about all the fighting I did; the evening was dominated by the "Hundred Meter Dash" events, hosted of course by our speediest GM, [GM]JediMike, which started at seven on Katar-5. I did manage to sort out some quests before that on Sarissa - Kaerella went up 33.78% just from quest rewards, and added 54 skill points, which were just the number she needed to be able to get the first level of the Resurrection skill. Various recent loot acquisitions were passed across to Keerella, my mage, and she went into merchant mode on Sarissa-4, to try and get some money.
Kaerella went to all six of the racing events. Katar raced from the west gate to the north gate, and then back again, before a third race, back to the north gate. JediMike had been working out, he assured us, and had bought a special pair of "speedies" - he won just about every race, except when he spotted a wounded baby fox and had to pause to nurse it back to health. The event ended, as one would expect with Mike, with a generous spawning of loot.
Cariae came second on the schedule, starting half an hour after Katar; this time we only got two races, to the north gate, via of course the haunted bridge, and back again to the west gate, but Mike generally hung out with us and chatted, and the loot got spawned at the end. Sarissa only got the one race, from the west gate to the north gate; for some reason there seemed to be people asking for money and weapons and so on, which must get very boring for a game master. "What a greedy server", I commented. I'd say that the loot spawned at the end was rather less generous, which perhaps was well deserved.
Hatzring too only got a single trip from the west gate to the north one, but that was because Mike declared that he'd hurt his leg while winning the race. The gamesage Faenwyn was there, looking very smart in her high-level healer costume (though she was saying that the armour's seals weren't very good) - I feel that she ought to have been able to cure him, but the one race was all we got. Still, Mike hung around and chatted, and the loot, when the time came for him to leave us, was suitably abundant.
Mike got a second wind on Auzura, though, and we got our three races there. before the start Razva125 whispered to me, saying that a Google search for his name plus Last Chaos would bring up some mentions of him in this blog, and I do indeed remember teaming with him a few times on Auzura, back when he was around level 53. He's a leading member of the uber-guild Vendetta now, and doing the search revealed that he's the second or third-highest level titan on the server, at level 130, so he has made some impressive progress.
The final server for the event was Tairen as usual, at 9:30, and we got three races again. Mike hung out a bit longer afterwards, telling us that he had recently been to Las Vegas... given that he doesn't wear armour in the game, I asked if he'd lost his shirt there. He was chatting about the games he plays on his XBox 360, such as Halo 3 - his gamer tag, apparently, is soapskid, and one or two people seemed to have seen that name fairly high up the online rankings. As there was no new server awaiting his arrival, Mike probably stuck around a bit longer, before he ended the event with the usual nice big spawning of loot.
By then Keerella had sold the large attack potions, large defence potions, skill point boosters, and moonstones that I'd put up for sale, and so was able to trade fifteen million gold across to SirDarth. That meant he was able to upgrade the guild twice more, getting Discipline to level six...which means that at last he could "freeze" his, Kae's and Kee's experience gain to 50%, to get a few guild points, and slow down their rise through the levels, to give them more time to gain skill points. So, that's another landmark reached. He has also become a Temple Knight, which increases his health and mana supplies usefully. There's still some way to go before he can start to level a mount or two, though.
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