Cindy with a good crew of 4

This evening Zopar, Sango98, Selenil and I ran Cindy, a crew of 4, without any problems. All 3 players are really nice players who seem to understand all aspects of the game including play of different types of characters. My hat(s) off to these three for their skill and understanding.

One of them said "people like this remind me of why I love to play this game," a statement I second and appreciate. TMW can be frustrating at times, especially on long quests where it takes massive collections of difficult to get items.
So what else is new? About 55% left to level, but about 7 million experience to go. Very close to first time around the Love Triangle quest, 1 eye and 4 ears left I think. I have enough Diamonds and Jack'o souls for the next part.

I started the paper quest, but have a way to go for it too.

Quick tip for Warriors (& others)

Higher level warriors stated for tanking may not necessarily be the fastest or strongest hitters in the field. Sometimes it helps to have a boost. That boost can come from taking Iron Potions and Concentration Potions at the same time. Iron Potions boost damage and Concentration Potions make you hit faster. Iron Potions are easy enough to get, Spiky Mushrooms drop them often enough that 1/2 and hour of work can get you a lot. Concentration Potions however are a bit more of a rare drop. Sea Slimes drop them, but not nearly as often as Iron Potions from Mushrooms. You can buy either, but at 500gp per you need to spend 5000gp just to get 10.

A much simpler method is to take out a bunch of Pink Flowers and trade in pink pedals to Rauk. For every 2 pink petals Rauk will give you a Concentration Potion. Flowers are simple enough to kill for a well stated warrior. Save your gold for something better, use flower power (petal power rather) to get those speedy potions.

Advancing in the graveyard

Graveyard courtesy

The "Graveyard" is still the best place to advance in levels. Between Zombies, Fallens, and the rapid dispatch of Skeletons it's hard to beat the graveyard for pure experience per minute.

There's something for everyone in the Graveyard: mages can electrify skulls and Jack'O, archers can pick off zombies and skeletons pretty quickly, and high level warriors tank pretty good in combination with other players against fallens, zombies, and skeletons.

All this makes the graveyard a popular place. One of the things I try to do is when I see a single player fighting a monster I hit that monster once and move on. Why? Simple, generally single players are trying to level and hoping for a drop. You might think helping completely destroy a monster will assist a player, and in some cases this might be true, but mostly it's not - here's why:

As soon as a second player hits a monster, the experience points the monster gives out on death is doubled. Each subsequent hit subtracts from that pool of experience. For example: say a zombie is normally worth 8k experience. You hit that zombie once, now his experience goes up to 16k (minus about 300xp for hitting it). If you don't hit the zombie again, the player who keeps hitting and kills the zombie gets 15,700xp (roughly, these are just example numbers). Now if you start hitting again that number shrinks. The faster and more powerful you are the more experience is taken away from that pool. Now you could be a speed archer and take away a kill, but this is in extremely poor taste.

Techniques like this hold especially true for mages wanting to kill skulls. If you can hit a skull, hit it once and let the mages kill the skulls (they do a much better job anyway).

Now if a group is banding together to speed kill skeletons, zombies and fallens it's a different story. Experience can be racked up pretty quickly with the right group of speed archers, mages and warrior tanks. Normally I find archers and mages get the most experience, but it can be worth a warrior's while to lump in with speed archers and mages (remember to protect them though) because of the sheer speed with which zombies and fallens can go down with the right group. The experience per second just is faster this way, and it's a good way to level. It unfortunately isn't usually a good way to get items (at least not for a slow warrior), the faster, more agile players normally get the drops. So if you're looking for drops, solo, or duo with a helpful player, and remember the one hit experience trick.

Experience versus focus, evening the odds

I've spoke before about the unevenness between classes, in particular the fact that some classes can kill players many levels higher.

It does make sense that a spell like lightning can cause full damage (or even extra damage) on a warrior equipped with full plate armour.

On the other hand it doesn't make much sense that a warrior almost 10 levels higher can be killed by a lower level mage. This is especially true at higher levels. Consider how much experience divides a level 81 mage and a level 89 warrior. The gulf of experience is enormous, extremely enormous. One must really consider the huge gulf of experience when looking at a show down between high level characters. Consider the number of wizards who attempted to stop Conan... and failed.

So the question is how do you bridge the gulf between a wizard's lightning and a high level warrior?

One answer is ... magic. It could be magical armour, or it could be something like a sword scabbard with magical protection properties.

What it shouldn't be is something that reduces the existing armour of a warrior. It shouldn't be an item in which a warrior needs to reduce his armour class to be immune to lightning. Perhaps it's something limited to warriors of a certain level, or something that requires enchantment by elves or a wizard.

Another reason to use the 4144 client

I've mentioned some of the reasons why I like the 4144 client better than the "official" client. Now there's one more reason 4144 has included auldsbel.org in the server list in the client. Despite being online 24/7 for over a year auldsbel hasn't seemed to have made it into the official client yet. It's been listed on the wiki for at least half that time, if not the whole time. And as many of you know I make nightly backups, so if there's corruption, there's not a huge amount of work players need to do to catch up.

Part of the reason I think auldsbel hasn't made it to main was that it wasn't different enough. It has a lot of content similar to the official English server with a few quest additions, and some stores to make it easier for warriors. Yes, there are plans to make it quite different, but it takes time and experimentation (on a dev server).

Anyway, enough ranting: the gist of this post is that I've been promoting 4144's client all along because it has a number of really nice features, and now it has one more nice aspect - auldsbel listed in the server list. (Note: if you already use 4144's client you might have to reload the server list to see the auldsbel listing).

Level XX

Funny I posted about the wolverns first today. I guess it upset me more than making level XX. So yes, tarq levelled this morning. I spent some time in the graveyard this morning and even getting 1% was a big job - even with archers picking off zombies with me. This next level is going to be a long road.

It snowed (for real) last night, but I think this might be the weekend not to play, a weekend to get out, maybe do a little reading (I want to read some books on sed and awk so I can better process the files on the auldsbel server), and spend time with friends and family.

Wolvern spawn rate appears to have changed

Why am I hunting squirrels in Nivalis? Because hunting wolverns just got a whole lot more boring. There was a spot in Nivalis where wolverns spawned almost one right after the other died - it was great hunting for warriors. I actually warped to Nivalis hoping to make a quest out of hunting the wolverns - something like trying to reach 10% exp hunting wolverns, but they spawn so slowly now that it's not realistic, and not fun - at all. What was fun is now quite boring. While others were running the new quest it was nice to be able to decimate a few dozen wolverns while watching the action above. Now all the action is above, one could sit, and wait, and wait, and wait for a wolvern to spawn. I think I understand why it happened, people were killing wolverns and getting enough animal bones to feed the wolf quicker than it might have been intended... but it's 1 lousy quest, and a bit of a ridiculous one that depends a lot on speed or group effort rather than time in. The wolvern area was fun because you didn't need to be really fast to get a lot of kills, the wolverns spawned fast enough that you could rack up a bunch of kills even if you were slow as molasses.