Level 70!

Hurnscald

Well I did it, level 70! As a pre-celebration to 70 I dropped some coal outside of Hurnscald. I was close enough to 70 that I fulfilled the last 6% in the mines north of Hurnscald.

I met kr0n05 again, rather kr0n05 III. I had a bit of a talk with kr0n05 and it was refreshing to meet someone who wanted to do quests rather than ask others for items. I offered kr0n05 III some equipment which he politely turned down -- these are the kinds of players you want to help when they need something small that you've got (antenna, logs, etc.). After my bad experience (which is very rare) with the potty-mouthed players a couple of days ago, kr0n05 restored my faith in players.

Still no word on the RAM for the Auldsbel server, but I should have something to post in a day or two.

Graveyard Time, leveling and the conclusion of the sea slime quest

Stacking in the graveyard

Yes it's gravy time (graveyard time), and wow what a difference the graveyard makes! In a relatively short period of time I shaved off 15% experience and leveled to level 69. About 40 minutes later I was 44% to the next level. Thanks to Jack Black who's not in this photo, but stacked for almost all those 40 minutes.

I think it was Mr. Demon Wolf who reminded me yesterday while we were stacking in the spider/black scorpion area of the mine north of Hurnscald that I didn't post about the finished sea slime quest. Yes, I killed 1,000 sea slimes. Of those 1,000 I only got 11 pearls. Much of the time I was by myself, but there's a possibility that others collected some pearls from their kills. Probably the biggest benefit would be the 500+ arrows, 300+ candies, and over 100 oranges and red apples I collected. I understand now why Monique and Dark Wind dropped oranges and candies when they celebrated their level 99 - they must have killed a lot of sea slimes!

After killing the slimes I set another goal, 500 Spikey Mushrooms. I completed that with surprisingly few iron potions dropping (around 25). I also spent some time in Nivalis killing Mogguns, but quickly grew bored.

Before hitting the graveyard itself I mulled around killing poltergeists, lady skeletons, and skeletons. Of the three skeletons being the most dangerous one on one because of the criticals they seem to score on me (taking as much as 300hp+). I've yet to assign me level 69 stats, but I doubt they'll make much of a difference in the graveyard. Even Jack Black, who was scoring 300hp+ damage on some of the graveyard minions was getting criticals scored on him by those nasty zombies (though he held his own without blinking and seemed to be taking the brunt of almost all the fighting) - thanks Jack!

It was good to see Knight again in the fighting. I wrote awhile back about Knight and I killing Mogguns when I was first able to kill them. Knight helped out quite a bit, so thanks Knight.

The 1,000 Sea Slime Quest Continues

Stash as of Jan 8, 2011

Setting a goal like 1,000 sea slime kills is rather ridiculous, but it's been pretty fun so far considering that the rest of the quests ahead of me require I be in the level 80 range. There isn't much for level 68-79 unless you switch professions and become a mage. So an artificial quest like the one I set in a previous post killing 1,000 sea slimes makes the time and experience pass a little quicker.

Sea Slimes are not worth a lot of experience, but slowly mine is creeping up with the added benefit of over 80 oranges, 10 concentration potions, 88 apples, 4 bottles of water (oddly enough only 4), 9 pearls and a whopping 289 candies. All this at a confirmed 811 kills. The number of kills is probably a couple of dozen higher, but last night I got thrown off my count a little, so I started with the last known count. Oh, I forgot to mention the 589 arrows. I guess if I turn archer these would come in quite handy.

TMW Abuse

I've mentioned more than a few times that there's a great TMW community. Most of the players, developers  and GMs are amazingly helpful, but occasionally you do run into people that are just crude, rude, or abusive. That was the case this evening while I was working on the 1,000 sea slime quest. A couple of players, or maybe one player with a bot in tow, decided to start cursing up a storm at me when I didn't immediately answer him (I was fighting sea slimes). It wasn't as if they kept saying hi and I ignored them, but even if I was there's no excuse for abuse (the server rules list this as rule number one). In the screenshot below it appears they're swearing at one another, but it's not the case, I just snapped the screenshot at the wrong time. They made it pretty clear it was directed at me by running all over my character shouting the insults while they tried grabbing drops (not that the drops, mostly bugs legs were all that useful to me). Still, be wary that there are uncouth people in the game... and if you happen to see these jokers (luxciano & santiagoroda) in your travels don't help them out -- let the abusive players fend for themselves.

More pearls of wisdom from the slime yard

7 Pearls after 541 Sea Slime Kills

This evening I spent about another 30 minutes or so hunting sea slimes on the coast. My goal really was just to accumulate more oranges and red apples so I could heal when I ventured back to the graveyard to face Skeletons, Lady Skeletons and Poltergeists. It turned out to be a pretty good run. When you set artificial goals like 1,000 sea slime kills you sometimes forget you're also gaining experience (however little). In my case it felt like quite a bit for half-an-hour. I'm almost half way to level 69.

In the time spent this morning and this evening I racked up 541 sea slime kills. The total pearls they dropped were 7. This brings the percentage of pearls to kills up to 0.012939002%, closer to the 0.02% the web site suggests the drop rate sits at.

And for those with keen eyes, yes I have 53 green presents just waiting for next Christmas.

Monique and Darkwind level to 99, Pearls, Oranges and other adventures

Congratulations to Monique and Darkwind who both leveled to 99! They held an event in which they dropped a lot of candies and oranges. I stuck around the event long enough to get a reward/drop from Sugar's mule who dropped 5 iron ore. As much as I would have liked to stick around and collect oranges the server was a bit laggy with so many people vying for the same stuff.

A little after I spent some time hanging around the graveyard and discovered that one on one Lady Skeletons no longer give me a problem and regular skeletons can be handled as well (though they still deal me some pretty nasty 200hp+ criticals). I squared off with a few poltergeists as well and seemed to manage. What I noticed at this point was that if I was going to take on Skeletons I needed more healing, and oranges (which heal +60hp) are an okay source of healing. Recalling that Monique and Darkwind's drop I remembered that Sea Slimes drop both oranges and candies (candies are kind of useless at +5hp, but better than nothing).

When I first got to the area I saw Friedel struggling with a bunch of sea slimes. He was managing, but they were spawning faster than he was killing them. I started attacking to help out and pearls started to drop. Now normally I don't usually hone in on an area someone's working, especially if it's an area like Mogguns where the monsters group attack you. So when the sea slime slaughter was done I gave Friedel the pearl I'd picked up during the slaughter... fair is fair, he would have got it eventually.

After Friedel I decided to kill 1,000 sea slimes. With time short (I only had 30 minutes) I ended up killing 320 sea slimes. The drop from those 320 sea slimes resulted in 3 pearls, 26 oranges, I didn't bother counting arrows or  candies which were not my main interest. (320/3 == 0.009375) According to the monster charts the drop rate for Pearls is suppose to be 0.02%. I guess everyone else was getting the Pearls. A few people were hunting slimes. Of course there's no guarantee the percentages will work out, but it's an interesting statistic and helps people get some sense of what to expect from drops.

Gathering Time, or the End of Regular Quests

With the completion of the ring quest I've now done all the non-magic quests except for the Graveyard and Terranite quests, both of which are still too difficult for level 67 Tarq.
The Graveyard quests are listed from level 60, but I've found that I can only take on one skeleton at a time and only if they don't get a critical strike on me (which means more Luck and Dex are in order).
So what to do in this downtime??? Well this is usually the point where I invent my own quests. At some point I will turn mage and start doing the magic quests, but for the moment I'm content being a fighter. As I see it there are a couple of things I can do: 1) help new players and 2) gather components for spells.
The ring quest required 50 coal and 100,000 gp. The coal didn't take very long to collect, but the 100k took awhile considering I just spent 100k to get past the last present problem I had in the Christmas quest. I ended up trading in 36 roots I was storing for when I became a mage. So with roots in mind as a spell component one of my new quests will be to gather 50 roots. Along the way gathering raw logs, which are also a useful low level spell component.
When I played 11 months ago I had a robe in almost every colour, and I collected all the cocoons to make each robe, so obtaining 1600 or so cocoons is a secondary quest.
Of course there are a lot more spell components, and one of the important ones involves the various leaves, so I'll be hacking on plants for awhile.