A More Normal Day

The pressure is off. The Cariae server is now, after the usual overnight maintenance downtime, back to normal, though the forum "patch notes" entry for this week does say "We have received a great deal of positive feedback so look forward to similar events in the future.

" The new patch ended the Easter event too, so no more Easter Eggs will drop. I'd say that about half the eggs I opened yielded 10,000 gold, which was an improvement over last year's 50 gold but still not very stellar, but I also got heaven stones, large attack potions, large defence potions, medicines, candies, item drop boosters, mana stealers, and a power potion.

There were no fixes for existing bugs, or other game improvements, in the patch this week, apparently; just a couple more packages for the in-game item mall, which would perhaps be mildly tempting if they ever did a "buy one get one free" offer on them. So, no drama to report there.

SirDarth started some pet-levelling at breakfast time, on Sarissa-4, and was joined a little later by Galahad (or XxGALAHADxX to be strictly correct) on Cariae-4. Darth's pony started the day at level 14; Gal's horse was moving steadily through level 33. They would both get fairly long sessions, as I was not going to be able to fit in a morning session. The 600% event was extraordinarily well-timed, from my point of view, as we are now starting the approach to one of my "busy weekends", so if it had been run a week later, I would have been lucky to get half its value.

After enjoying the luxury of a cooked, hot lunch, after five days of just eating something cold while busy at the computer desk, it was time for some relatively mundane Last Chaos activities. SirDarth had got his pony to level 16 by then, which meant that it had grown up to being a larger-size horse; Gal had got his horse into level 34, too. So, Sariisa-5 was the sub-server, where RedRyder and Kaerella headed for Prokion Temple in their combat party, with the Elizabeth's Enhancement buff on.

My favourite back room was free, and we had an uninterrupted afternoon, except for a single titan who came in, didn't respond to my "hi", attacked a group of orcs - and was soon running for the exit, orcs in hot pursuit. So, RedRyder reached level 37 in the course of adding 47.31%, with 715 guild points gained for Discipline too; Kaerella, who was down to the start of level 27 again, added 41.85%, along with 105 guild points.

Both Kae and Red earned 460 skill points; that took Red's reserve over the 4,500 mark, and meant that Kae could spend 449 sp on various special skills, including the last level of flawless stone processing, all of herb trunk and zeta wave processing, and the first two levels of green herb and epsilon wave processing. Another 462 skill points, in a similar length of session, will finish this stage of Kaerella's evolution, after which she can start to level up, and keep the skill points she earns - after one last set of suicide runs in Maargadum Jail, to take her back to the start of her level, that is.

SirDarth did some further pet-levelling over the early evening food break, and just managed to get his horse into level 17. After that I did a little bit of moving stuff around on the Cariae server, giving MistressDomina there some of the recently-acquired loot - but time passes quickly when one is doing that, and it was soon time for Rage to log in over on Auzura-4, for the European "Storm the Castle" event.

For a change, [GM]Valsharyn was in charge, though she relayed [GM]Noburu's good wishes. Val arrived just after I did, and there were already a dozen or so people waiting, so people are starting to plan ahead, or have been so short of this sort of event recently that they were careful not to miss their opportunity to storm Merac Castle.

It was very much a "by the book" storming, with no surprises, just the regular monsters. We didn't get a blood shadow dragon in the inner courtyard, but there were a pair of flutons in the throne room. The GM did mention the possibility of doing another run, but didn't follow through on the idea - I may have been out of range of any responses to the suggestion, or maybe everyone was concentrating on the idea of grabbing their share of the loot.

In the end, all we got was one more "late arriving" fluton, and the loot spawned outside. It's always a dodgy minute or two after the end of the storming itself, when people don't know where the loot would be spawned - guess wrong and, if the GM doesn't make an announcement, you can miss out entirely. For some reason Val didn't do the standard tightly-packed circles outside the castle - we got a fair amount of loot in piles out there, but not all at once, so it was a matter of grabbing, waiting, running to the new site, and grabbing again.

Once Val vanished, Rage logged out too, and I went back to moving items around, including getting potions, platinum blessed irises, and experience boosters loaded up on Keerella, so that she is ready for future Tomb of Theos sessions...and I was able to trade some platinum super skill pills and more skill point boosters across to RedRydeR too. Since I've got them, I may as well use them!

Since the Norcaine guild on Cariae is really about finished, since Zenderfly was made its guild master so that she could keep in touch via its message system and then vanished completely, it looks as if most of my characters will move out - some to ForceWithin, but, with Kaerella at least, it would be fun to get her into the Discipline guild, since that's her guild on the other servers. A level 20 mage called Memree was the GM there, but I've transferred the position across to SirPerivale, after Memree recruited him. He had the advantage of being high enough level to upgrade the guild from its current first level, and also wasn't in another guild, which simplified things.

SirPerivale does have disadvantages too; he was created, on Cariae, really just to get a spare set of the 30/32 +10 armour, and was power-levelled in the Tomb of Theos, so, while he is level 31, he came with only 4 skill points, and absolutely no skills except the level 1 of knuckle spear he arrived with. So, he moves slowly, regenerates health slowly, has a lower attack speed, doesn't have any enhancement to his physical defence, and has less chances of deadly or critical hits.

As usual on most Wednesday evenings I had to log out soon after eight, UK time, but I just had time to take SirPerivale through the Dratan desert to Prokion Temple, to get its location onto his memory scroll, which until then only had the entrance to the Tomb of Theos on it. He got the seven silver fox "feathers" needed for a quest en route, and fought a few orc sergeants when he got there, but only ended up with eight more skill points. At least it showed that the +10 armour was enough to stop the orc sergeants hurting him, even without any passive skills.

That's another thing for my "to do" list, then - farm enough skill points with SirPerivale to allow him to get the Discipline guild on Cariae up to level six. And if he is going to keep that armour set, I guess I may need to power-level another character in the Tomb. A rogue, perhaps?

The pet-levelling event, now called "Creature Carnival" was scheduled for this evening, but unfortunately the start times for these events do seem to be drifting .later in the day, and the first server to get the event, Auzura, didn't start until 9:40pm, UK time, with other servers following along every ten minutes, since it takes a while for [GM]Cara to spawn all the wafes involved. The timing meant that I couldn't get actively involved, but Galahad and SirDarth both got double pet experience for an hour or two, which meant that Gal's horse reached the halfway point in level 34 before the end of the evening, and Darth's horse was moving swiftly through level 17 when last seen.