The Guild Upgraded

There was another fairly early start for SirDarth, back to levelling our own current horse now; the horse, which I suppose we should call "she" as it becomes a "Knight Mare" when turned into a mount, reached level 21 during the morning - and after getting close to level 22 at the end of lunch, got there while I was on my early evening food break.

After coffee I managed to fit in a trip to Prokion Temple for MistressSabina, the guild master of Discipline; my favourite room was ready and waiting, so a super skill pill and a skill pill were started, and I settled in for an hour of ruthlessly mobbing the Orc Sergeants and Orc Axemen.  Yesterday with a 215% boost the hour gave me 533 skill points; with a 115% boost instead, 364 sp would be what one would expect from the same number of kills, but in fact I got 417 skill points, or 444 for the full session, so I did pretty well.  The 417 actually returned me to exactly the number of points I'd had before spending some on skills yesterday, which was rather neat.

The end of the hour saw Sabina on 96.68% of level 29, so it only took a few more minutes to reach level 30 - the total experience gain for the session was 85.78%, while 1019 pet points also got added.  Back in town, I was able to visit the Royal Guard Captain, and use 240 skill points and 1,000,000 in gold to upgrade Discipline to level five... and then use 500 skill points and 2,000,000 in gold to get the guild to level six, which allows the guild master to freeze the experience gain of members.  So, MistressSabina's experience gain is now frozen, as is MistressDomino's, and new recruit Foxchaser's.  The next time Sabina farms some skill points, she will start collecting Guild Points, which are needed for any further guild level increases or skills.

Sabina spent the rest of her skill points on, naturally enough, skills, though I didn't keep enough for the fourth and final level of Flame Storm, which is now available for her.  I must get that next time, and also max out the other skills.  

By then, lunch was getting near, so Sabina logged out, and MistressDomino logged in to do some selling.  The main part of the break just saw her sell seven Wendy Bear parts at 40,000 gold each, but then I had a sudden rush of business, and almost sold out, so that in all 75 pieces got sold, bringing in exactly the 3,000,000 I'd spent on guild upgrading.

For the afternoon, Rage and Chuck headed for the Sphinx types again, and Chuck started one of the week-long 30% experience boost potions.  SugaRuSH was there too, but I was the one who got partied up with a level 36 royal knight called Alexanderdgreat.  I suppose it must have been his computer or his connection, but he was the worst fighter I've ever come across.  I'd target a Sphinx Speer Man, and if he reacted, he'd rush to where the Man had been, he'd almost never actually attack it.  And he'd often attract the attention of another nearby Sphinx type.   Well, at least he gave me the Divine Shield buff most of the time... Towards the end Alexaaaander95, another (no relation) knight turned up, but he was just level 25 or 26, so had to just "ks" from outside the party.

Anyway, Chuck did manage to level up, and by the end of the session was level 39, with four more stat points invested in Strength; his total experience gain was 80.35%, and he and Rage both gained a skill point as well.  Rage went up 15.21%, which isn't bad, for her level there, and also added 1090 pet points.

Darth did some pet-levelling, and Chuck did some herb farming, over the food break - but then it was time for Rage and Chuck to go back to their friends the Sphinx types.  And it was quite a party - Legacy got in touch just before I started, so was there from the start, and BatCow joined us this time too.  Giving part of the pooled experience gain to Chuck for just sitting there may be a slight down side, but on the other hand, Rage's higher level, better armour, and ability to supply horse buffs do give an up side to a teaming.  

Later on a level 39 titan called MADOC joined us, though he did tend to run around with less than 50% health.  Apparently he'd run out of health potions, but it is easy enough to return to town, buy a few, and teleport back, it would only take a minute or two.  A level 31 ranger called MRASASIN was too low to join the party, but we let her ks a bit, and she reached level 32.  I think most people levelled up, in fact.  Rage reached level 51, adding another 41.17%, plus 2081 pet points, and she and Chuck each got 2 shiny new skill points.  Chuck reached not only level 40, but, right at the end, level 41, going up 185.64% in that session.

MistressDomino went back into merchant mode, and sold out of Wendy Bear pieces rather quickly - somebody bought all 112 of them, at 40,000 gold each, so that was an easy 4.480,000 gold - I know other people do charge more, I just can't think of them as so very valuable.  The special Wendy Bear event may end tomorrow, when the servers go down for their weekly maintenance, or it may continue for another week, who can tell?  SirDarth did a little more late night pet levelling, getting his horse halfway through level 22 now.

So, it was quite a productive day, with MistressSabina, Rage, MrChuckNorris, Darth's horse, and the Discipline guild all levelling up.  We will definitely have to think about getting new armour and weapons for Rage and Chuck; Chuck's armour, at least, will be Rage's previous set; there is a 55/57 healer set that Rage could convert, too, but it's not as highly upgraded as her present armour, so will need some work done on it if it is to give more defence than her current red "lion-tamer" style costume.

The Black Screen of Randol

The start this morning was delayed a bit, as while it was possible to log in to Last Chaos, choose one's server, sub-server, and character, actually attempting to materialise in Randol just gave a permanent black screen.  Checking the shoutbox confirmed that it was just the Auzura server that was affected, but that's the only place I'm set up for pet-levelling, so I was a bit stuck.

Luckily when I checked after breakfast, at about 8:40 UK time, someone had just mentioned that the server was back up, so I restarted, and managed to get SirDarth rolling.  The black screen had stayed black, though, so anyone waiting for the loading to finish would just have kept on waiting.

SirDarth's horse is doing well, and reached level 35 just after lunch; by the end of the day he was just over three-quarters of the way through that level.  SirPerivale's horse is at least halfway through level 29, and running short of quality stones.

There was apparently some sort of dancing get-together last night, though not at a Europe-friendly time, and its success meant that today we were given double experience and skill exp again.  So, Chuck went along to Prokion Temple after coffee this morning, to take advantage of this generosity.  The Orc Axemen are blue-named now, six levels below him, which means they give no pet experience, but still, with the double-double on, 4400 skill exp and 2566 experience; the Orc Sergeants however are still green-named, and give 6600 skill exp (3300 in normal times, the same as the maximum one would get from Velpist Temple monsters of one's own level) and a more substantial 22762 experience.  

So, Chuck sought out an appropriate room with almost all Sergeants, and, before lunch, added 57.63%, 295 skill points, and 1364 pet points.  Progress was slowed by a knight called dragonwolf75 coming into my room and taking half the inhabitants for a while, which seemed strange behaviour as there were only just enough Sergeants respawning for one player, but when I had to wall-hug to take a phone call for a few minutes, he went away.

The afternoon session saw Chuck get the rest of the way to level 34, this time in our favourite back room, which may have more Axemen to deal with, but at least has enough that one doesn't end up waiting for respawns or running the whole length of the room to get to the next one.  Another 39.72% experience got added, making 97.35% in all; 296 more skill points made 591 as the day's total sp, while another 843 pet points got the day's total up to 2207.  The lower number of pet points just shows that a higher proportion of the blue-named Orc Axemen had to be fought, since as I mentioned they now don't give Chuck pet experience.

At level 34 the Orc Sergeants are still green-named for the final time; they go down from giving 3300 skill exp and 11381 experience (or twice that today!) per kill to 2750 and 8536, so going back to them tomorrow, well, it's a bit marginal.  But one can never have too many skill points, i suppose, and they are still more generous than monsters outside Prokion, such as the Poison Mists...

The evening session belonged to MistressSabina, who had reached level ten in just the level 5/7 "Apprentice" armour set, without getting any skills at all - which meant she had gathered 157 skill points.  That was enough to get almost all her low-level skills to level four.  So, after getting taken on as an apprentice by Kaerella, Sabina headed out to the Jaguars for a last necklace or two for Geres, and then moved on to the Sasquatches and the Werewolves - once a couple of levels had been gained, she used a scroll to teleport across to the entrance to Velpist Temple.

There is a favourite upstairs room for me there, too, though I don't go there as often as to the Prokion one - just once per character, basically.  It has plenty of level 12 and level 14 zombie types, Ancient and Berserk, the trick is to avoid attracting the level 21 Skeleton Soldiers that also prowl the room.

When Sabina had reached level 15, it was time to head back to town with 165 new skill points to spend, which again got almost everything to level four.  30 points, though, were used to upgrade the Discipline guild to level two, after MistressDomino had transferred the Guild Master position across.  To get a guild to its second level the GM has to be at least level 15; for the next level, which costs 60 sp, she'll need to be level 20, and for the one after that, costing 120 sp, she'll need to be level 25.

MistressSabina headed back to Velpist Temple, and this time, instead of heading straight ahead, went off to the left, towards the main room with the "book of life" in it, for the "human tribe" pet quests.  She never actually went in there, the room before was quite rich enough.  The level 16 Corpse Rangers were very useful, though they did have a habit of coming in two or three at a time, sometimes with a Skeleton Soldier or two as well.  But Sabina was wearing better armour now, and when she reached level 17 was able to equip the mage "event weapon", +6, so things went relatively smoothly, and she generally used less small health potions than she picked up.  

There were some other players there too, who did tend to attack my targets, but it didn't really matter, with the double experience and skill exp things were moving along nicely.  A healer called Susian asked to join my party, so that helped her to get from 13 to 15 - but boy was she reckless, she did tend to rush forward, attract three or four of the high-level types, and die rather quickly, but she kept coming back.

I left when I reached level 19, having added another 191 skill points, enough to take some of the more useful skills to their fifth level.  Sabina's drake had reached level four, so it was a pretty productive session, even if Sabina is destined to be a rather minor character in my line-up.

Ratel visited SirDarth down in Merac to pass across 820 quality stones ahead of Darth's levelling stint on his pale blue horse, and also to move some gold from Thabitha to Ratel - which he needed all in one place, as he was buying a level 41 +12 weapon for 55 million, leaving him "as poor as a church mouse", as he commented before signing out for the night.  Meanwhile, MistressDomino began a stint in merchant mode.  At the time of typing she has sold the moonstone boxes and the skill boosters, now if only she can sell some Easter Eggs too...

An Expensive Purchase

SirDarth has kept busy today again, with a couple of little gaps, once in the late morning while I needed to have two characters in Guild Wars at once (in Pre-Searing, to enter the Charr-infested Northlands you need two people, one to throw a lever to open a gate below, and the other to go through), and then after the early evening food break when some items needed to be moved about, involving Rage, Kaerella, Chuck, Calm, Darth himself, and MistressDomino.

Looking back to the 18th, I see that Bladesrus "will settle for level 31" on his horse, so I needn't take that one all the way to 37; he has made good progress, though, and is well into level 34, so I'll stop on level 35, which should keep him happy - and then think about Stavanic's latest request, which is for another mount.  As he is not exactly rich, he may have to make do with a level 31 one, we'll have to see how things go.

So, I did spend a little time in Guild Wars in the morning with my level 14 ranger Kate Woodrunner; that is about the highest level at which you can still gain some experience in Pre-Searing, and then only from four Charr bosses, who are rather close together and with plenty of other Charr close by.  Those bosses can drop useful rare items, but not today... at least I increased my supply of red iris flowers...

But after lunch it was time for MrChuckNorris to teleport out to Prokion Temple.  His two pssp-using hours yielded 552 and 572 skill points, with the whole session adding 1165, plus 2124 pet points.  There was a very slight interruption just as the first hour was ending, when a rogue charged in - but it was a guildie, Legacy, who vanished almost immediately.  I rather thought Invisibility must be involved, but a query on the guild chat channel told me that she had in fact died.  It's not the ideal room for a level 25 rogue, for sure.

She told me that her main reason for coming to the deeper reaches of the Temple was that she had the quest for Cracked Axes - so, as Chuck was carrying 31 of them, and had presumably already passed plenty more over to the storage character Calm (actually all-capitals like RAGE - a sort of balance for that name, heheh), I traded the five she needed across to her, free of charge.  And back in town later I traded four across to SsnowboardS, who also had that quest active.

I was barged in on by a knight later, though luckily he didn't stay long, so Chuck had a pretty clear run; on the Easter Egg front, we got 50 gold x four, 500 gold x two, a magic stone (accessory), 10 gamma wave energy, a tool aid, 10 quality stones, 10 herb trunks - and a Cake, which just gives 30% extra experience for ten minutes.  Somehow it seemed strange to get a cake from an egg, but I suppose the other contents are just as peculiar...

Looking through the Merchant House items for a good weapon for Kaerella, I passed pages of overpriced items - for a level 69 weapon, there was a +14 crossbow for 149 million,  +14 daggers for 200 million - ah, a +15 mage staff for 200 million... and the Eglain Dual Sword for 175 million, which, these days, seems to be as cheap as it gets.  Thank goodness there was a 200% upgrade event last night, just starting when I logged out, that must have increased the supply of such things.  I quickly changed character to MistressDomino, as she was the one with enough cash, and purchased the sword, then got Collector Ryu to convert it into an Eblin Bow for 820,000 gold - and in the general trading-across of items later, moved it to Kaerella.

At present, Kae uses a level 57 +15 Coriver Bow, with 194 + 341 +75 as its attack stats - she will have to continue with it for three more levels as she is only level 62 currently, but then the new bow, with its 264 + 464 +75 attack stats, will make quite a difference.  At the moment her Physical Offence stat is 1204, but the new bow moves that on to 1393.  That may be 4 less than one would expect from those numbers, but the old bow has got some attack-enhancing bloodseals, and the new one doesn't have bloodseals yet.

The evening session saw Rage head for the Sphinx Fighters and Sphinx Speer Men (that is the way they spell it, rather than "Spear").  To begin with, I was asked,  by a presumably higher-level member of the same guild, to team with a level 40 mage, Magikka, which I was happy to do, the more damage that is done on the Sphinx type as it hurries towards me the better.  She wasn't, however, all that disciplined in her approach, and may well have been more used to playing a melee character as she tended to stand toe-to-toe with a Fighter rather than running for safety.  She did die a number of times, though luckily that didn't negate the health and mana stealers, and crit potion, that she was using - a gift from her fellow guild member.  It must be the mage costume that does it... At least, I think, she got a mage armour drop for future use.

xXAcheronXx, currently a level 39 royal knight, joined us, and seemed in contrast to be discretion itself - well, maybe not, but there were less of his "Geronimo!" type charges than usual, and his Concentration buff is always much appreciated.  Chuck's room-sharing titan from Saturday, Zodiac, arrived after a while, and joined us; I didn't mention Chuck at all.  Zodiac has reached level 36 now, so he has been keeping busy.  Majikka left not long after that, and later Zodiac had to go too.  Acheron decided to head for the arena at about my usual log-out time - but before he went he renewed the Concentration buff on me, and I felt it would be rude not to use it, so I continued solo while it lasted... which, as it is one of the longer-lasting buffs, meant that I just had time to reach level 45!

Well, Rage would be able to wear the next set of gloves up, now; I also spent 327 skill points to learn Hyde Shot, which gives you a 300% harder hit, at the full range of 20 meters - but only if you are invisible at the time.  I could actually have grabbed it a level earlier, but it doesn't sound all that useful in PvE.  Four more points in Constitution means that I'm just one level away from being able to increase my magical resistance by 25...

Rage's total experience gain for the session was 56.10%; no skill points were gained, but the pet point tally rose by 1096, which can't be bad.  My health did get uncomfortably low on one occasion, but I managed to stay alive, which is always useful.

Death in the Afternoon

MistressDomino had a pretty successful time selling stuff overnight, though I'm still a bit shakey on the new price levels, things either sell out within minutes or are still there in the morning. The slight problem is that there don't seem to be any +15 level 65 or 69 weapons to buy at any price at the moment, though there was a +14 one which was a bit higher than I'd want to go for a +15, even now.

SirDarth was out pretty early to do some levelling on that horse of mine, but it looks as if that particular job is now suspended, as Bladesrus got in touch to transfer his level 27 horse across for some levelling, as agreed.  The only problem was that, by then, the afternoon session had begun, and MrChuckNorris had started his first platinum super skill pill, so I was a bit distracted, not wanting to lose any more playing time for Chuck than necessary.

Bladesrus came out into Merac to deliver his horse; he joined the party so that he could find Darth easily, after resetting the horse's skills so that it would be possible to trade him across.  He also sensibly passed over 350 quality stones, and the gift of a +3 level 37 Holy Sword - with the promise of ten heaven stones when the job is completed.  He will be away for eight days now, so that gives Darth plenty of time to level the horse up - he'll be on a drilling rig apparently.

So Darth swapped over from having his horse equipped to having Blades' horse equipped, and I concentrated on Chuck again - during the exchange and the chat I'd taken my eye off him a bit, and when I did look Chuck's health was mortally low, not much more than 100, and he had to run from the mob of Orc Axemen and Orc Sergeants, praying that he could get to a safe bit of wall before taking another hit.  It was a darn close-run thing, and took some recovering from.

The next time I looked at SirDarth, it was he who was lying dead - my first thought was that somehow a couple of nearby Bandits had been aggravated, but of course Blades' horse wasn't giving any Armour Increase buff to him, as his skills had been reset.  So, it was a matter of taking him back to the Animal Trainer in Randol, and getting a nice, comfortable 26 levels of the skill before settling in with the Berserker again.  Darth lost 0.01% experience, and possibly a single skill point, so that didn't matter, but I must try to remember about resetting skills and so on.

So that Darth's own horse doesn't lose any great amount of Sympathy (as it would if it was in Darth's inventory while a different pet was equipped), that animal was traded across to Keerella, who is just a "mule" type character over on the Auzura server, as opposed to the Cariae server's level 90 mage.

Anyway, as you've probably gathered, my titan MrChuckNorris had a busy afternoon in that upstairs back room in Prokion Temple.  It was probably just as well that he wasn't using that second pill for an extra 50%, just the "pssp" giving triple skill points.  That interrupted first hour yielded 473 skill points, while a better second hour managed 555.  Continuing on for a few minutes after the end of the second pssp meant that the total skill point gain for the afternoon reached 1108, while 2083 pet points also got added.

Chuck opened eleven Easter Eggs, but all he got were ten each of gamma wave energy, green herbs, and (three times) potions of haste, four 50 gold, one 500 gold, and a tool aid - so nothing approaching the 900,000 gold or so I've been known to sell the eggs for.  But one can only collect a single egg per outing - the remaining unopened one has been moved across to MistressDomino now.

Before the food break, back in Randol, Chuck decided to prepare for the next time an "old school treasure hunt" is announced, by updating his memory scroll to include locations close to the four corners of the Juno map, so that he ought to be able to get to most announced coordinates pretty fast.  As the scroll only has five slots, he has overwritten Velpist Temple and Shuraine's Oasis - but kept Prokion Temple, of course.

Rage was still doing a little mainly-afk mining when Ratel logged on, and suggested a team-up at the Sphinx Fighters.  He hadn't been there before, so Rage went first, so that she'd show the location as a party member on the map.  He asked if he could add a royal knight friend to the party too, which, with their Concentration buff, was fine with me - it turned out to be xXAcheronXx, who of course both Rage and Kaerella have teamed with before.  I advised Ratty to use a transformation scroll, a Harpy maybe, so that he could nonchalantly stroll past the Masters of Secret Technique that had done for Rage a time or two, and I think he took my advice, as his initial appearance seemed a trifle small, and there was a small whirlwind effect before he was fully revealed in front of us.  A Goblin Scout scroll perhaps?

Acheron had a couple of disconnections early on, but otherwise things seemed to work okay, prompting suggestions that we should relocate to the Tomb of Theos and take on the Screaming Zombies.  To my mind, that's a bit "Wow, we handle these level 12 Sasquatch pretty well, let's go and attack the level 109 Sphinx Commanders next, shall we?"  Acheron tended to get a bit enthusiastic on the luring/attacking side, and quite often we got not just the Elite Sphinx Speer Man, but a couple of his friends too.  My policy on such occasions was to take the friends one by one, and let the two knights keep the big guy busy!

Ratel did die, but as he doesn't carry a huge amount of skill points (more like 135 I think), he didn't have much to lose - a little later Acheron managed to die too, which, given his rather endearing recklessness, seemed fair enough, I was thinking...but seconds later Ratel went down for a second time.  I need to impress upon him the need to hide behind the fence at the back when the going gets tough.  The generous amounts of experience the Sphinx types give had, at least, enabled Ratel to reach level 35.

I remembered I had to make a brief phone call, which turned out to be a rather long phone call, and when I got back Acheron had gone off to eat, and Ratel had moved back across to the Poison Mists, so I took on a few more Sphinx Fighters and Sphinx Speer Men solo, before it was time to head back into town.  In all Rage had managed to add 48.87%, so she too does rather better experience-wise against foes of that level than Kae does.  1025 pet points got added too.

So, it was good to be able to team up with Ratel again; we did it a few days ago against the Poison Mists, I know, but that was just being in the same area, mainly, rather than fighting the same targets.  His defence buffs are certainly useful, as of course is his "Shield Strike" stun skill, which I see has a 75% chance of success, so slightly better than the 70% on my Snare.

To Egeha!

As usual, SirDarth headed for Merac early in the morning, and settled in to level up the new horse a bit more.   A couple of people turned up in mid-morning, and their activities attracted the attention of the Grand Red Dragon - so Darth had to move a little further along for a few minutes, while someone switched to their main character and despatched it.  Apparently it dropped a "Chain of Tiger" accessory, so killing it was well worth their efforts.

There didn't seem to be any obvious changes to things overnight, after the usual maintenance; the Easter Eggs are still dropping, and the Pandora's Boxes still turn up - Darth sighted three Beasts, and while Kaerella didn't get any drops from two of them, a brief guest appearance by Rage did yield a 120,000 gold drop from the third.

Kaerella went out to the Sphinx Fighters and Speer Men in the afternoon, and managed to get the final 10% experience she needed to reach level 62 at last, and so was able to put on the Serenity Boots and Serenity Tiara to complete that armour set - no longer would the old green boots clash with the rest of her red costume!  The place was pretty quiet, with just a level 35 archer, Archers by name, working away, concentrating on the one Sphinx Fighter that respawns closest to the camp.  She was pretty good at fighting and running and firing, and running again, but an archer doesn't get Slow Shot until level 38, so she was at a bit of a disadvantage, and did die once.  I offered to resurrect her, and she joined the party for that, though of course left afterwards as she was capped and would get very little experience while partied with Kae.

By the end of the afternoon, Kae had gone up by 10.09%, plus 20 skill points and 723 pet points; level 62 had been reached, but Kae did continue for a few minutes after that in the hopes of getting a "bloodseal ability" on her new armour pieces.

Thanks to various purchases of the "Web: Super Stone Pack", Kae's storage was actually pretty well off for expensive and valuable Chaos Smelting Stones.  Given that the last time I tried to upgrade armour past +6, I used five runes, five heaven stones, and two lucky smelting stones (to put right two decreases) to get only two items an extra plus, I decided to take the straightforward option, and use ten Chaos Smelting Stones to get all five parts of Kae's armour from +6 to +8.  Before she could wear the new boots and tiara her physical defence stat was 1323, and after the change it was 1365 (the previous armour set was +6 too); at +7 we moved on to 1404, but as you go up the plusses the defence gets more generous, and +8 got us on to 1497.  This includes 27 levels of Increased Armour from Kae's drake, SirFrancis, without that her new physical defence is 1277...a good reason to have SirFrancis equipped as often as possible.

Ratel came online today, and was able to freeze SsnowboardS's experience gain.  He was out with the Poison Mists, but reported that, at level 34, they were hitting him a lot harder than he'd been used to, before generally only the Elite one could damage him, but now the regular ones could hurt him too.  So maybe the attack, or the monsters' chance of landing a critical or deadly hit, has been tweaked again by those underhanded folk at T-Ent, the shadowy South Koreans behind Last Chaos.  Certainly, later in the day, I noticed that even at 985 physical defence SirDarth was occasionally taking enough damage for his health bar to fluctuate a bit.

In the evening, Kaerella made her first trip to Egeha, the fourth LC map, and home to some impressive monsters - before Strayana and the high-level new dungeon areas were added, this was the ultimate high-level area, but it seems a bit quieter now.  The idea was for Kae to go hunting the level 65 Bogles, though maybe she should have made her foray here a few levels earlier, as, while they are still yellow-named (unlike the Sphinx Speer Men, who have just gone white-named for Kae), they don't give much more experience than the non-elite Speer Men.  

The Bogles do however seem more generous with the drops, and over the evening dropped two level 65 rogue crossbows, level 65 knight gloves, one pair of titan and three pairs of knight level 66 pants, and level 67 healer and titan headgear.  There were plenty of Easter Eggs too, and, after earlier getting one of those no-stat green stones, the contents revealed were 500 gold, 10 herb trunks, 50 gold, 500 again, a tool aid, 50 gold, 50 more gold, another tool aid. 10 gamma wave energy, and finally another 500 gold. So, nothing marvelous, but it's all a bonus, and there were a couple of "Hands of the Guard", as well as a heaven stone, among the other drops.

By the end of the evening Kaerella had added another 13.35% on a hill not far outside Egeha village - but Grocer Wein, the local NPC trader, had given her a quest to kill ten Bogles, so the reward for that (3,958,140 experience, as well as 90,000 gold) got her total up to 13.91%.  41 skill points and 1258 pet points also got added - so that made the totals for the day for Kae 24.00% experience, 61 skill points, and 1981 pet points.  SirDarth had got the horse well into level 21... and the idea is to put MistressDomino up in merchant mode for the night, so maybe Kaerella will be able to afford a new weapon before too long.

A Day of Kae

SirDarth headed for the Butchers in Merac again this morning, but when his pony reached level 11, ten levels of the Armour Increase buff meant that his physical defence stat, with the defence-type accessories rather than the hit rate set, had reached 954 - which was just enough to let him venture down to the Berserkers instead, which do have the massive advantage of not dropping down dead after 20 to 30 minutes of bare-knuckle fighting.  Darth's health bar did still fluctuate, but it never got dangerously low.  Meanwhile, the previous horse, which reached level 37, is now in the custody of MistressDomino, and so in theory could be sold if the current price for mounts is tempting enough.

Kaerella managed to head out to the Elite Sphinx Speer Man and his cohorts later in the morning.  xXAcheronXx arrived after a while, he's level 35 now, and asked to come into the party for horse buffs, with the idea of moving outside the compass-map's range for his actual fighting, which seemed reasonable enough.  He did find soloing a Sphinx Fighter rather difficult, as one would expect at that level, and headed off for the Arena before too long.

Kae herself just added 4.63%, 9 skill points, and 305 pet points, before it was time to head back to Juno for some afk lunchtime mining.

Kaerella did the main afternoon session too, soloing the Elite and his friends again, and adding 9.40% more experience, 18 skill points, and 621 pet points.  Early on GreenHealer was there, and wanted to party, though at level 40 she would be "capped"...a difference of more than fifteen levels in a normal party means that, while the higher member still gets the reduced experience from there being another person in the party, the lower person gets only a small fraction of what would have been their share.  I did say I'd change to my level 42 rogue for a party, but when RAGE got there, GH had disappeared - I don't really think her English is too good. So, I changed back to Kae. The level 44 titan SyCoSiS was there for a while, and kindly gave me the buffs Fire Command (increases long range hit rate by 30 for five minutes) and Battle Roar (increases attack by 20 for fifteen minutes) - I did give him some healing in return.  It's a shame he was two levels too low for a party, titan Warmasters seem rather useful with their buffs and stuns.

I was a bit lazy over the food break, and just set Kaerella to mining on one of the low-rise bits, rather than having to dash back upstairs every ten minutes to restart her activities.  I know it's good exercise, but there are limits.  Buy a hammer, mine for a while, then use a tool aid to get 27 more quality stones, that's the idea.

And so Kaerella returned to the Sphinx types for the evening - and kept on going, with the Sphinx Speer Men and Fighters giving about 0.03% each, and their Elite Sphinx Speer Man giving 0.10%.  People did come and go; a titan called Rymcyr was there sometimes, and tended to want to monopolise the Elite at times.  Kae got a few Easter Eggs, and on opening them (as you can't pick up a new one if you've got an unused one in your inventory) got 500 gold, a "green stone" magic accessory (with again no properties), 50 gold, and a ten-minute experience scroll... so nothing particularly dramatic.  The place did get fairly busy at times - towards the end a level 28 healer arrived, and was pretty successful at "kiting" Fighters, hitting with her bow and running before they could reach her.  Risky stuff!  I did say she could "KS" me, ie attack my target, but she hardly ever took advantage of the offer.  

Over in Juno on the same sub-server, Auzura-3, the end-of-week "Mad Monster Spawn" had started - so it was perhaps no great surprise, as the same thing happened last week, when the sub-server crashed at 9:15, UK time... so that was the end of Kaerella's marathon session.  The evening had added 17.87%, 38 skill points, and 1321 pet points, so that in all today Kae had gained 31.90%, 65 skill points, and 2247 pet points.

SirDarth hurried back to his Berserker, but ten minutes later Auzura-3 had another mass disconnection - hopefully the Mad Monster Spawn had ended by then, or maybe the GM was trying to spawn some rewards for the successful warriors, and overloaded the server that way?  Still, SirDarth respawned back in Randol, and went back to levelling his horse, which grew up from a tubby little pony into a graceful young horse when it reached level 16.  With any luck he should reach level 17 by log-out time, if Auzura-3 doesn't suffer any more disconnections.

Norcaine guild member SsnowboardS has reached level 27, and wants his experience frozen so that he can farm his skill points - but unfortunately Ratel had taken back the Guild Master position, and he wasn't sighted today - or yesterday, come to that.  I hope he hasn't run out of his monthly bandwidth allocation already, that would be a problem.

Anyway, Kaerella had a short look around the shops in Auzura-1, and then MistressDomino set up as a merchant there for a while.  A hundred moonstone boxes went pretty quickly at 99,500 gold each, so that was a quick (almost) ten million to add to our funds, and a little later sixty of the regular moonstones sold too, at the same price.  She was trying to sell some Easter Eggs too, but they were in no hurry to sell.  It's strange, you can only pick one up off the ground if you don't have one in your inventory, but you can trade them between characters, so Kae, Darth, Chuck, and Rage were able to trade Eggs across to MistressDomino, so that she was able to put a number up for sale.

Well, hopefully Kaerella will be able to get the remaining 10% experience tomorrow that she needs to reach level 62; however, there aren't any new skills to learn then.  There will be a new level of Arrow of Silence to learn at level 63 (an increase in its power, and the chance of success goes up from 70% to 75%), but level 66 brings a new level of Slow Shot to learn, which doesn't just increase the power of the attack, it slows the target down a little more too, so that's something to look forward to.  The main thing about level 62 is that Kae will at last be able to wear the boots, and headgear, for the 65/67 armour set, and thus increase her armour rating usefully.  So, unless invitations to the Tomb of Theos flood in, it will be time to take Kae to Egeha for the first time, and farm some Bogles!

The Return of Kae

It was a relief to get back to normal this morning, with SirDarth out fairly early to finish the job of getting the current horse to level 37.  For a change I didn't use any of the "triple pet experience for an hour" platinum pet experience potions, so it wasn't until after six in the evening that we finally got there.

Wouldn't you know it, Stavanic has discovered that he has another character that could really do with a mid-level pet, but I had to tell him that, with the monsters hitting harder, really I can't afk-level a pet all the way from the start, it has to be able to supply some Armour Increase buff.  And anyway, he had already arranged for his friend Bladesrus to take up a few pet-levelling days later this week...

After lunch, MrChuckNorris went out to Prokion Temple, you will be unsurprised to hear, and headed for that upstairs back room.  As there are no "blessed rewards" or bonus events, it was time for him to actually use a platinum super skill pill for triple skill exp, and also a platinum skill pill (otherwise known as "the blue and white capsule") for an additional 50%, so that the Orc Axemen didnt just give 5,500 skill exp, they gave 3.5 times that, or 19,250 - almost two skill points per kill!  The Orc Sergeants, being two levels higher, gave 17,325 skill exp.  The first hour brought in 657 skill points, and the second hour added a further 670.  

By my calculations, assuming that the Axemen and Sergeants spawn in equal quantities, that means just over 360 kills per hour, or one every ten seconds.  Not as quick as an archer like Kaerella, I think (or like Barbarienne over on the Cariae server), but pretty speedy, considering that no platinum adrenaline, crit potions, or power potions were being used.  My theory was that if I had used an extra like that, Chuck would probably have been killing faster than the orcs could respawn.

As usual on such occasions, I did continue for a few minutes after the end of the second pair of pills, so that Chucks's total skill point gain for the day reached 1350 - and 2066 pet points got added as well.  He must be approaching the halfway mark in his Prokion sp farming now.

After the food break, SirPerivale went out to the Treants for a little while, and found that their mobbing habits are a bit more dangerous now than they used to be; his level three pony got a few pet points, but, just as I was logging SirDarth back in, to swap over their pets, Zenderfly got in touch, as she wanted to borrow one of my Cariae-based mage armour sets,  At first she thought it was the level 65/67 set, so I logged MistressFelicia in on Cariae-3 - but that wasn't the one she wanted, and I had to switch across to EnchantrA, as she was carrying the 60/62 set, and trade that costume across instead.  It isn't for its defensive properties that Zen wants it, I see that she is level 109 at the moment, ranked twelfth highest mage on the Cariae server and a member of just about the top guild there, Evolution... she just reckons that it is the best-looking mage set.

Once that was sorted out, Darth and Peri exchanged pets, so that Peri has taken temporary ownership of the new level 37 (as yet unmounted) horse, and Darth now has the pony.  When he took it over, including the two levels of Armour Increase Darth's physical defence was 856; after adding three more levels, and increasing the pony's sympathy a bit, it reached 893, and later, when the sympathy rating finally reached 100%, 895.  That is with a +13  level 25 shield, and the 25/27 knight armour set bumped up by one more each now, so that it is a minimum of +7, with the plate mail and leggings +8.  It's not quite enough for him to fight Berserkers without losing health yet, but it's fine for Butchers, though as ever they do tend to die after a while.

The main evening session, however, went to Kaerella for a change - and it certainly did make a change to go to the Sphinx Fighters, Sphinx Speer Men, and Elite Sphinx Speer Man, as almost their equal, only two or three levels lower than them, and be able to take them on one-on-one without any great risk of anything fatal happening.  Slow Shot may not be as dramatic as a rogue's Snare skill, but it works all the time, not just 70% of the time.  The down side is that the experience gain is rather slower, and Kae only managed to add 14.58% to her experience tally - but three more sessions like that would get her up to level 62.  30 skill points and 1012 pet points also got acquired.

There was a GM-spam in-game announcement of another special "1 ap" trial offer in the Web Item Mall, so, moving Kae to a safer bit of grass, I went to the website's relevant page, and found that the offer was for the "Web M: Skill Box"... well, for a single aeria point I couldn't go far wrong, so as there were still around 19 left I bought one.  The instructions said that it would only appear once Kae had logged out and back in again, but it was in the "Records" section when I checked a bit later, so I arranged for it to be gifted to MistressDomina, since she is more interested in skill point items than Kae is.

When MistressDomina clicked it open, however, it wasn't one of the "best skill items in game", such as a pssp, just one of the ten-minute +50% "effort scrolls"...but even that has got to be worth more than a single cent, right?

SirDarth continued to move the pony on through the early levels, which are rather shorter than the later ones.  Unless I throw more Chaos Smelting Stones at the problem, the pony will need at least another day's levelling before he can supply enough Armour Increase to keep Darth healthy with Berserkers, I suppose.

Stavanic needed Peri's assistance to transfer his level 23 horse back across from his titan, Devilboy, to his knight, as the lack of the passive buffs had made a big difference.  No wonder he's hoping for an extra pet from me, but he'll have to stand in line, his friend Bladesrus is ahead of him there.  Maybe he'll end up with the pony Darth is currently working on, if some bribery is involved....though he has promised to help Darth level up later, which will be useful, eventually.

The Black Screen of Death

My start today was delayed until the evening, as happens on a Sunday every month or so; so not even SirDarth had the opportunity to do any horse-levelling until gone six in the evening.  The horse started the evening session pretty high up in level 35, though, so had attained level 36 before the regular Sunday Quiz interrupted him.

I didn't have room to mention yesterday that xXAcheronXx was a member of the XxSNEAKYFREAKSxX guild, and suggested that Rage might join them.  The idea was a little tempting, though as xXxDELUXxXx was still in the party at that stage, and put in a counter-bid for his "LastHope" guild, nothing definite seemed to happen.  These things need a guild master or guild adviser to be located, anyway, so seldom happen instantaneously.  Acheron seemed a good person to play with, despite the number of sitting-down "mana breaks" he liked to take.

The Sphinx Fighters and Sphinx Speer Men didn't drop any Easter Eggs for us yesterday (though Rage did get one today, as yet unopened), unlike the Prokion Temple orcs for example, but on Friday Chuck did pretty well, for a change - instead of the usual 50 gold, 10 herb trunks, or on one occasion 500 gold, he got a Magic Stone accessory, which is a standard type of accessory that one does get as a normal drop...the difference with this one was that it had no enhancing properties at all!  But he also got a heaven stone from one, and a 168 hour potion to add 30% to his experience gain... a whole week's worth.  Not something Chuck wants to use yet, but when he has all his skill points and wants to level up, it is sure to come in handy.  It's in his storage warehouse at the moment,  I assume that it can't be traded across to a different character, like Rage, though.

The evening session wasn't, with its late start and early finish for the Quiz, that much of a marathon, but Rage certainly kept busy.  To start with, she visited Merac to see if there were any new quests - and there were a couple to take care of, one involving killing 25 Gnoll Soldiers, and the other gently introducing her to Maargadum Jail by asking her to collect five Spiked Canine skins.

Both those quests were pretty straightforward; just as I'd got the fourth Spiked Canine skin, though, Darkmager got in touch, asking me to come over to the Sphinx Fighters - which, once I'd got the last skin and my quest rewards, I did.

The place on Auzura-3 was pretty busy.  The leader of the party Darkmager was in, however, the knight LexyPooh, decided that their party was "full"... so I just fought the Sphinx Fighters and Speer Men solo for a while.  Darkmager intended, I think, to get his level, then leave the big party, go back to town, and then return and team up with me, but that last part never happened, though he was apparently still online somewhere.

After a while I got an invitation from xXxDELUXxXx to join him - once I'd established that he was on sub-server six, I moved across, and partied with him, currently level 37, and his fellow titan, the level 49 Cloud.  While my health did get knocked back a couple of times, we did pretty well, concentrating mainly on the Elite Speer Man.  By the time Cloud in particular had got some mana back, sitting down and using a fairly large mana pot, usually the Elite had respawned.  Why they don't use mana pots while fighting, I'm not sure.

By the time the Quiz was getting near, and we decided to call it a day, Rage had managed to add 40.89%, which was pretty good, I think - about half of it from the soloing, just about.  The 7 skill points must have come from those quests in Merac - and 801 pet points got added. too.  Delux and Cloud were talking of returning after the Quiz, I hope they didn't, as, well, conditions weren't very good then.

Kaerella and MistressDomino went to the Quiz on Auzura-3... but, horror of horrors, it was an all-new set of questions!  Luckily, the GMs had kindly left the Quiz Room door "open", so that, when everyone got respawned in town for thinking that the best forum for general discussion was "general" rather than "open", and then for not knowing how many eyes the Barren Eise has (5 or 6?), we were able to run back to the Domain Merchant, and re-enter.  I got a message from Ratel saying "how did u do with quiz?" - and while I couldn't type much, being alert for the next question, I did say "a few runs back in so far, lol"... but poor Ratty didn't take the hint, and didn't try to re-enter on his sub-server.  As it was, I missed out on the 10 toolaids, as I either got question ten wrong or wasn't back in in time for it, but both Kae and MD got the 10 moonstones - and the 15 heaven stones.

Sadly, the pressure on the servers was starting to tell; some sub-servers had disconnections, one at question 17 apparently so people missed out on the heaven stones; Auzura-3 had been lucky.  People logging their characters in started to get a black screen instead of appearing in Randol, after log-in and character selection.  An "upgrade event" was begun, which always adds greatly to the server workload - combine that with people logging out and back in to leave the Quiz Room, and using the warehouse to put their winnings away, or buying and selling heaven stones, and it wasn't surprising that there were problems.  

In the shoutbox, game sages were having to say "yes, be patient, I have a black screen too" - the upgrade event was halted, to allow people to log in.  I'd managed to get SirDarth back to work - but then there was a mass disconnection, possibly an attempt to reboot the servers and hopefully get things working properly.  While GM Moose did show up in the shoutbox, to be sworn at by one unhappy player, the comments were moving too fast to keep track of.  Kaerella did finally manage to log back in, to put her Quiz prizes away, but trying any upgrading seemed a bad idea, as that was probably switched off for a while still.  And then there was another disconnection, this time announced, ending a curiously quiet time for in-game GM messages:  "Going to reboot the servers to get things going again - 10 Seconds", followed by "Alright servers going to reboot."

SirDarth managed to get back in, and started some more pet levelling, but by then it was getting late, and for me it had been a long day.  A little later a new announcement came up:  "Rather than cancelling the upgrade event the following percentage will be 175% for 10 minutes then the event will close - we cannot risk anymore than that - thank you for understanding."

Fighting the Sphinxes

Well, it doesn't take very long to open the AVG installation package and choose "repair", after which things apparently run smoothly for the rest of the day, but it seems a strange way to run an antivirus product.  Now that I only have the one pet-leveller at work, it's easy enough to start SirDarth on the newer computer; I think the speed with which the game ran out of memory on the older one might have something to do with AVG wanting to run a full scan every day, as most antivirus types seem to want to do.

Anyway, the horse reached level 35 safely, getting through 7 starvation points every five minutes, or roughly 17 quality stones per hour.  Stavanic brought in a friend of his, Bladesrus, who seemed to want me to raise a mount for some rather small fee, but luckily it seems his pet horse is already level 26, and he'll settle for level 31, which makes for a less daunting task.  He's off for a week from Thursday apparently, so will pass his horse over before he vanishes.

As this is one of my "busy weekends" I didn't do anything active in Last Chaos until a bit after lunch.  The first thing to do was to move the +4 shirt, tiara and gloves from the 45/47 armour set that Kaerella had used across to Rage (Kae never had found the other two pieces), and get Collector Ryu to transform them into their Rogue equivalents, which cost 291,600 gold.  I then checked the Merchant House system, to see if I could buy the leggings and boots, but there were no level 47 boots on sale at all - and only one pair of leggings, at the rather high price of three million. Well, if there was only that one pair available, they must be rare, I decided, so I bought them, transformed them from Knight to Rogue (54,000), used four heaven stones to get them to +3 (so only one failure)...and then moved some lucky smelting stones across from Kae, and got all four pieces up to +6.  So, Rage now has a better armour set than Kae had at this level.

Darkmager had been in touch while I was finishing doing all that, and I'd said that I would meet him at the Auzura-3 Sphinx Fighters in five minutes - and I think I was just about on time.  Whitemessiah2 was already in action, along with a level 31 archer called Killerhealer, who must have been a friend of WM's, as she was clicked on her and afk for almost all the time.  She added me, and Darkmager, and another titan, the level 47 EDWARD, and we all set to work.  It was a bit irritating to have a healer there who wasn't healing, I'm sure we all got through a lot of health pots.  Every time my Snare failed, which seemed rather more often than 30%, I'd take a bashing... but at least I got through the whole session without dying!

Killerhealer left after a while, but the rest of us continued until it was time for my food break.  While I didn't get any skill points, Rage had managed to add 954 pet points, and 42.19% experience.

The evening was fairly similar, though with a different cast.  It was the level 35 titan xXxDELUXxXx who invited me out to the Sphinx types, over on the PvP-enabled sub-server Auzura-5,and we started off well.  He wanted to include the Elite Speer Man, and we did indeed manage to kill him. Delux's health was a bit low as he typed in "Clean kill" - but sadly he hadn't noticed that a regular Sphinx type had been spawned close by, and was attacking him.  He toppled to the ground, dead.  Since he didn't have a resurrection scroll or skill point restoration scroll active, he reckoned he had lost around 500 skill points, so he was not happy.

After a while he brought in the level 33 royal knight xXAcheronXx, who was able to supply me with the rogue's favourite buff, Concentration - increasing the chance that Snare would succeed from 70% to round about 87%.  So, there were still times when I had to run like heck, just not quite as many.  Delux is a "warmaster" type titan I think, with a massive sword instead of the huge axe that Darkmager carries, and we was able to give me a useful buff too sometimes.  But what a lazy pair, every few minutes they'd call for a break, and sit down to replenish their mana.

I did mention that larger mana potions can be bought in Strayana, so hopefully they'll take the hint, invest in some, and almost double their work rate in future.  We did have a little bit of high drama, though; Delux saw another pair there, again a titan and a rogue, get more than one Sphinx type on them, and moved in to help them kill one, but they interpreted this as ks-ing, "kill-stealing", and the rogue, Jaimi, went into PvP mode, which puts a large "X" alongside the name.  

Delux was quietly confident, and went into PvP mode himself - and had his second death of the evening.  I don't know how exactly things work, but apparently that death cost him skill points too,  So, not too good an evening for him.  But the three of us continued, joined by another titan a few levels higher, Cloud, and then the two titans left Acheron and me to duo some as well.  Jaimi returned, and I think Delux and Jaimi may well have another fight, but in the less sp-costly environment of the arena.   Delux was asking me what level I thought Jaimi was - I looked at the armour, which was my old set, so she's either below level 40 or a bit slow to change.

Acheron levelled up, and it wasn't long after that that I levelled up too.  So, as I do have to prepare for an early start tomorrow, I said my goodbyes, and headed back to town.  Level 42 means that I can wear the headgear for the armour set now; apparently level 47 boots are dropped sometimes by the level 51 Rough Jaguar of the Desert, down in the south of Dratan.  Maybe I should investigate, some time.

Rage had added a further 852 pet points, and gone up by another 41.93%, to make a total gain today of 1806 pet points and 84.12% experience.  At only one skill exp per kill out there, no new skill points were added - but at level 42 I was able to get the second levels of Master Weaponsmith and Master Armoursmith, so that was another 690 sp safely used, with Rage still having over fourteen thousand to put against future skills.

Tomorrow, as far as Last Chaos is concerned, I'll only have an evening session of an hour or two, and the Quiz, so there should be rather less to report.  Never fear, though, I'm sure I'll think of something to write...