Abbey Party (again), new skin

--Saturday, 4/18/10--

Got an IM from Michelle late last night after getting a decent amount of my CS164 pset done (phew) and she said there was an Abbey party forming in Morroc.  I hopped in and found her char so I could friend her, and waited to be invited to the party...

Here's us just chilling at the entrance while we're waiting for everyone else to get here.

It was my first time being part of one of these really big crowd-type parties.  Of course, things are necessarily disorganized when you have a swarm like this, so the most you can really do as a priest is heal people who are dying, rez people who are dead, and buff whenever someone complains.

Eventually I caught on and started using the Party menu in order to quickly see who needed to be healed or rezzed, and did so.  Made things a lot easier, though I wish you could extend the window to show the entire party instead of just 8 people at a time.  I was scrolling up and down through the list a LOT.

We had two or three wipes.  Pretty inevitable, given the type of party we were in.  Though, I have to admit I was at least partly (mostly?) to blame for one of them.  I accidentally hit Q (my teleport key) and so I was away from the group for a bit while I frantically teleported around until I got to a (relatively) safe place.  When I ran back to the group, not only were they in worse shape because I wasn't around to save their asses, but I brought a bunch of other aggro'd monsters with me.  Oops.

Ryo-Ohki nibbling on a carrot.

We found a spring flower in the middle of the dungeon, hahaha.  We ended up leaving it behind, though.

Some guy randomly got up above the wall xD

Of course, being the multitasker I am, I had no trouble checking up on Ryo-Ohki and making sure she didn't get hungry, in the midst of all the healing and whatnot. ^^;

Overall it wasn't bad at all--I hit level 97, which is great, and I have to say, I'm =really= liking the priest role in the party.  I don't know if I'd feel nearly as satisfied with any other role.  But as a priest, I feel important--after all, you're the only one who -everyone in the entire party- directly interacts with.  The other dps guys are just kind of there throwing damage in the mix, but nothing they do actually affects you (well, except when they're stupid and try to tank things that they can't).

Eventually it got pretty late (like 5:00AM or so) and we had a wipe so I called it quits.  Michelle stayed on, probably.  Not sure how the party did after that--a part of me hopes they had more trouble because I was important. =P


--Sunday, 4/18/10--

Remembering that I saw some alternative skins in some screenshots included in guides and whatnot, I browsed around for some cute skins today.  There was a Hello Kitty one, but it was strikingly blue and...well, blue.  So I opted for this pink angeling one instead.  Hooray!~

No pics because I'm laaazy

After Timmie's post about pets, I thought I might try to get some of my own...but after looking at the list, the only two that appealed to me were Bongun...and Baphomet Jr. I thought I'd start small and go for Bongun first, but my sin got partied by some cool people, so I ended up leveling (to 81!) with them instead.

We started out in the Clocktower (too hard), tried the coal mines (too easy), and eventually gathered a group and ended up in Amatsu level 3. Or at least, I think it's 3. Shinobis and Papers and Tengus and everything aggros; it's a very scary place. We had two sins, two priests (one tranced), and a taekwon, and we kept dying. The problem was, the taekwon kept pulling stuff...though even after he left we had plenty of trouble. So much aggro. @_@

On the bright side, I ended up getting a Shinobi Sash (the tranced guy got it as a drop and gave it to me), and another of my party members gave me a matching Ninja Suit later. Nice people. :o

Anyway, we left there and headed to Rachel Sanctuary, the place Timmie and I had leveled in before. Turns out, the place is really good for the assassin skill Grimtooth - the monsters are slow and (most) can't detect you when you hide, so you can gather up a bunch of them, hide, and Grimtooth them to death. Easy exp...the clicking gets tiring though.

After a bit of that we tried Sphinx 4, because our tranced priest said we could try Anubi...He had Turn Undead, which had a chance of instantly killing them, which is much easier than wearing down their high HP. Turns out two sins with Grimtooth can fare pretty well in there, though - our priests were on the other side of the map for a while and we did fine.

At that point we'd all hit about 80, so we decided to call it a night.

...Wow, that was a long aside. The point of this post was actually to ask for help: Taro, Timmie, if either of you have a chance, or are on when I am, would you mind helping me gather the stuff for Bongun/Baphomet Jr pets? I've got nothing so far, as the long sidetrack-story kind of implies. (I did kill a few Marduks while headed toward the Anubi, but none of them dropped a book.)

Say hello to Ryo-Ohki!~

--Wednesday, 4/14/10--

I check routinely throughout the day to see whether anyone's on.  Hadn't seen anyone, but I ran into Kotaro at late-night, and shortly thereafter saw him logged on.  I finished up the anime that I was watching (and the quesadilla I was eating, yum) and met up with him.

He wanted me to help him kill this bear in this certain dungeon (can't remember which), so I followed him and buff/healed him.  His homunculus died about 5 times during the process, haha.

After that we decided we'd head to comodo beach to try and kill seals to level Reinforce-san.  First I had to get there and memo it so I could cast the warp portal, so Taro gave me directions while I teleported around and walked to the beach.

The seals were alright...except when we got mobbed.  Still, it was probably easier than clock tower or thanatos tower, with the nasty ridewords and other assorted meanies.

After that Taro sold the drops and split the money with me.  I jokingly brought up pets and said that the only pet that I would want would be like...Angeling =P (you can't get an angeling as a pet).

Thinking about it some more, though, and looking over the list of possible pets, I decided that I would either want a Poring or a Lunatic.  I decided lunatic would fit my character better, and went off to whack a bunch of them in prontera field to get rainbow carrots.  Unfortunately, my first few attempts at catching one failed...I did manage to get a lunatic card drop while I was hunting for rainbow carrots, though =D

--Thursday, 4/15/10--

I woke up at 12:30 or so and logged on to see if anyone happened to be on...and said hi to Vina!  I had actually been planning on maybe just heading back to bed for a couple of hours (I didn't have class until 4:15), but this motivated me to actually wake myself (probably healthier not to sleep in too late anyways xD).  Though, I had to stop by the dining hall and grab some food first.

Anyhow, Illyria looked toatlly different from when I last saw her; not only was she a priest now, but Vina had discovered the stylist, so her outfit and hair were different colors!

We decided that since we were still in valid lvl range for the sharp leaf quest, we'd go and hunt some Les at Moscovia dungeon again.  I took Signum (my knight) and we set out...but we didn't really find that many; there were some othe people who also happened to be hunting them at the same time, so there weren't many around.

However, I remembered that if you go from Beach Dun, past the NPC where you turn in the sharp leaves, there are dryads who also drop them.  So I took signum there and...found that I couldn't even hit them. xD  Not enough dex...I stood there for a while, hitting them once every 5 swings or something, until a harpy came by and totally owned me.

After that I decided it'd probably be better to just take Miyuki-san (my ninja) and throw kunai at them.  I was also able to take out the harpy (it helps that the ninja has the shed cicada skin skill that makes you avoid damage and jump backwards when you're hit), so that was cool.  I soon found out that the dryads are immune to wind, so my wind huuma shuriken was totally ineffective against them, whereas the monkeys in the area were immune to fire, so my fire kunai didn't work against -them-.  So I used the fire kunai against the dryads and threw my huuma shuriken at the monkeys ^^;

We stumbled upon a Spring flower, so we took off our weapons and started whacking it xD.  After a long while (would have been much shorter with my knight or monk T_T) we got our magic paint.  Yay!  Michelle says I might as well just hang onto it and finish the event quest instead of trying to sell it...but iono; you need -25- of them, as well as 50x chocolate (which you get from easter eggs/bunnies).  So I'm not entirely sure if that's doable.  maybe.

Anyhoo, we had a bunch of sharp leaves at this point, so I handed 50 of em to Vina and she leveled to about 79 (I was also around that level at the time).  Hooray!

After that I decided I'd continue my hunt to tame a Lunatic.  Luckily I hadn't changed my save point for Miyuki-san, so I used @die and respawned in the initial novice spawn area and proceeded to massacre a whole crapload of lunatics (and some porings).

I figured, though, that before I caught a lunatic, I should make sure I can buy food for it.  I needed to do the juice quest, which requires a piece of meat.  I looked and didn't see one in my inventory, but I knew that the monkey guys (where we just were) dropped it, so I decided to head there.  Along the way I saw this guy in beach dun who was using Throw Stone to herd a bunch of golems o_o.

Anyhow, it turns out I already had a bunch of meat anyways; I had looked under the wrong item tab since I forgot meat is a consumable item x_x.  Oh well.  Anyhow, off I went, activated the juice maker, and went to payon and had him give me like 50 bottles of carrot juice (i had like 50 empty bottles and 200 carrots xD).

In the meantime Vina gathered a few more rainbow carrots for me.  And finally--success!  I caught one poring and two lunatic eggs =)  I handed one of the lunatic eggs to Vina (who also wanted one as a pet) and kept the poring egg.  In the meantime, I prepared to hatch my own lunatic...

Here's us wearing lunatic hats to celebrate ^^;

And here's my lunatic!  Isn't it cuuteee???

You get one name-change for your pet after you hatch it.  Since I couldn't think of anything, I went with...

Ryo-Ohki! <3

So now I have my very own cute pet.  Hooray! ^_^;

Iono if I'll ever get the cute silk ribbon to put on it though; it only drops from Eclipse, and...well, the eclipse bunny is a LOT rarer than the regular lunatics. T_T

Downtime

Today we will update eathena. These is a part of what’s coming:
- Sealed Shrine
- Hidden Enchanter

Please report any bugs you might encounter!

Maintenance starts at 17:30 server time and finishes at 20:30.

Apparently the server's down for 3 hours today.

Unrelated: is there a way to get email notifications of comments to blogspot posts?

The Endless Tower

The observant reader will notice that I have no part in Timmie's story of reuniting with his friend. The reason? I was probably out cold at the time. My sleep "schedule" has been so messed up lately that...well, here's an example.

This post is being made at 12:20 PM, which feels approximately like 12:20 PM, since I went to sleep at a reasonable time last night. The pictures in this post come from approximately 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM yesterday...which at the time felt something like 5 in the morning. Never mind when I went to sleep before that.

Onward.

So I logged in at my 'ungodly hour' to see what mischief I could get into as long as insomnia wouldn't let me sleep. Instantly I got a party invitation for some party called "Endless." Turns out I'd logged in right in the middle of the gathering place for people headed for The Endless Tower - a special dungeon of 101 floors filled with the hardest bosses in the game.

As people gathered, it became pretty obvious that I was outclassed: everyone here had 'tranced' - trancended, or rebirthed into the next level of character.












They also came with killer equipment, where I was using the basics: here's screenshot of one guy's equips (he'd unlocked it briefly to show a party member his helm). The pic was, if you couldn't tell, taken out of envy for his sprint ring...













Eventually, once people stopped arriving, we set off for the tower. I didn't take any pictures of it, but basically you go south a little way from where we were in the last screenshot, talk to a captain guy, agree to pay him 10k, and listen to his story. After he's done talking, he'll take you to a tiny island with a rock on it. If your party leader has created the instance already, click the rock, and it'll let you in.

Here we are on floor 23, blasting things apart:












We had some truly amazing priests along with us, by the way. There were three of them, and keeping track of who had been buffed with what at what time, who needed what at any given time, and who had done what so they didn't overlap buffs is an unenviable job. I don't have screenshots of it, unfortunately, but they also did an amazing job of keeping everyone alive - healing people (and yourself!) in the middle of a gigantic battle is no mean feat.

Of course, this is hardest dungeon in the game, and they couldn't protect us from everything:













I believe that's floor 45, with the Samurai MVP (Most Valuable Player; a kind of boss where players get prizes depending on how much damage they do to it) and his loyal Shinobi followers. Never mind the little guys, that boss did some kind of AoE attack and BAM everyone but the Lord Knights was dead.

As it said in the picture, we had to wait for one of our priests to run back up the tower - I think it's possible to skip to floor 25, 50, etc, if you've been there already and use Ashes (special item automatically acquired in the tower), and the floors are extremely small maps. That said, floor 25 to 45 is still a bit of a jog.

Eventually they began to cautiously revive people, starting with those furthest away from the (offscreen, fortunately) gigantic boss.













I wish I had a picture of him, but, well, this will have to do:













So we moved on. In the course of climbing the tower, it'd become apparent that I'd have to frantically bail out my inventory as we went: items are acquired automatically, and if enough built up, I wouldn't be able to regenerate HP and SP any more. For a mage, that means a swift, magicless death.

Losing items didn't really bother me, as I was in Endless for fun and exp, but there was one item I was really sad to part with: a massive 250-pound weapon known as "Bardiche." Given that Timmie had created a cast of Nanoha characters...well, who wouldn't want to see Signum with a Bardiche? ('Fate sama' wouldn't be able to use her precious weapon because she's a mage and this weapon is only for swordsman characters.) Alas, 250 pounds was too much for my feeble mage. It joined the litter on the floor.













Much bailing later, we arrived at floor 50, home of a motionless monstrosity known as Amon Ra. You would think that a monster that never moved and was unimpressively sized wouldn't be much of a challenge. You'd be wrong.













It's kind of hard to see, but take a look at that max HP: 1,214,318. What you can't see is the reason those people are dead: Amon Ra insta-casts Meteor Storm on anyone in his range. Additionally, he summons a deadly group of peons if provoked.

The fact that we got him down to anywhere near half HP is a testament to the kind of firepower we had, and the awesomeness of our priests. Apparently we were supposed to have brought a sniper along; when I looked up Amon Ra I discovered why. If you're in range, as I said, MS and summon. However, there's also a list of certain spells that will set him off (50% chance to summon more monsters). One of those spells was Storm Gust, which one of our High Wizards had been casting as much as possible on him...Add to that the fact that Amon Ra is weak against fire, not water, and you begin to see our problem. (Which is to say, most of us didn't know what we were doing.)

Add to that the fact that half of us spoke one language and half another...

...Well, in short, we didn't beat him. Around the time that picture was taken, our priests began to run out of blue gemstones (necessary to resurrect), and people began to give up and leave.

So while I was impressed with our group's firepower and priests, the teamwork and preparation left something to be desired.

I'm looking forward to trying this tower with a guild.

Hello, old friend!~

--Monday, 4/13/10--

What a wonderful surprise awaited me when I logged onto RO last night!  I got a PM from a character named Illyria, saying "guess who!".  I had a slight inkling that it was one of my drawmates or something, but I figured it was another char that Natalie had created.  Or perhaps Colleen or Michelle.  But lo and behold, it turned out to be a friend from high school!

She hadn't played RO in years, and I think when she had played it was on one of the official servers, so no custom Gaia town; no teleporter/job change NPCs, and of course extremely low exp rates xD.

She was planning on making her character into some kind of priest...so after telling her about the handy-dandy job-changer NPC (no more having to do the actual job-change quests...), she became a cute lil acolyte! <3

We headed to the left of prontera and whacked some porings/fabres/etc. to get her a few jlvls, but then I realized that instead of following her around with Reinforce-san I could just switch to one of my 4 unleveled characters and party with her ^^;.  I decided on Miyuki-san (ninja) since I still have NO IDEA how the taekwon classes actually work, and I already have a mage (fate-sama) so Caro-chan wouldn't be that exciting (not to mention a mage and a priest leveling together probably wouldn't be the best combo ^^;).  Of course, I didn't know that much about ninja builds -either-, so I had to look up some stuff (e.g. pump strength because it affects your throw damage).  She had to take a shower anyways, so that gave me some time to figure out what the heck to do with my stat/skill builds.

We headed to payon dungeon and I taught her some more of the basics while we levelled a bit more.  I got throw shuriken at first, and then throw kunai as soon as possible.  And...it was really good!  I think it always hits too, so I just pumped pure strength and didn't have to worry about dex/agi at all.  No cast time either--fun stuff!

Some random person in town.  Sooo cuuteee~

We then met up with Taro (and his Homunculus), who had logged on in the meantime, and went hunting Les monsters in Moscovia dungeon for more Sharp Leaves.  The ninja hunts them REALLY fast actually; you just have to throw two fire kunai (instant cast!) and they're dead!  Also, I have no idea why there's a random dead guy in the picture here.

After amassing enough exp and sharp leaves, I handed 50 to Vina and took another 50 from storage and we handed them off to the NPC.  We both hit jlvl 50 I think, yay!  So it was time for Illryia to become a priest!  .....boo ugly outfit.

I switched over to Fate-sama and we decided to see if we could do any good in the Clock tower with the three of us as a party.

...again we had some problems at the entrance T_T.  We eventually managed to get past them, with the help of this guy named Noob3rt, who acted very friendly.  I pmed him about whether the quest after the sharp leaf quest was worth it (he said no, since you can't buy the requisite item anymore), and went and friended him with my main account (reinforce-san) later.

After hanging out in the second floor a bit we decided to go deeper, into the level with the alarms.  It wasn't too bad at all; it helped a lot that Vina had gotten Suffragim (I had totally forgotten about that spell, btw), so she was able to reduce my cast time by quite a bit!  We walked around awhile and chatted about some random things while I nuked stuff ^^;

Eventually we got owned by some books or something or other.  By this time Vina had to leave anyhow (it was about 2:30AM).

And me and Taro...decided to just lie there for awhile.

"see me, i look dead.  but you...you look like you're just taking a nap.  leaf on head and all."

And at some point an Alarm decided to STEP ON ME.

Back in town, Taro showed me some of the headgear he picked up randomly while killing stuff, and I handed him a set of dragon equip that Enki had given to me.

Taro making some potions.

The last thing I did for the night was to respec my Priest.  I got rid of ME (I hadn't been able to actually use it anywhere anyways; the cast time is way too unwieldy) and respecced to full support, with suffragim, gloria, etc etc etc.

--Tuesday, 4/13/10--

Natalie PMed me and said she had this dungeon she wanted to try, so I took Reinforce-san and we headed to Rachel Dun.  She said some/one of the monsters there were weak to holy element, but...uhm, I tried healbombing all of them and it didn't work on any xD.  Later I grabbed the aco and priest quest skills (holy light/redemptio) and tried using holy light, but it wasn't really that great.  Hm, I wonder if ME might have worked.  Ah, but there still wouldn't really be too much point anyways; it's faster and safer to do what we did, which was have Natalie nuke the crap out of things with firebolt/SG and have me support with suffragim and lex aeterna.

The experience was slow, but that's how it is when you're at such high levels ^^;  We both managed to get a 

level each, so that was good.  We might look into doing Abbey or Endless for better exp...

Gas mask xD

Guild get!

--Sunday, 4/11/10--

Logged in and Taro was on with his alchemist, whacking elder willows.  He didn't tell me where he was, but I teleported around Payon field until I found him. =P  He wanted to try Endless tower with me but apparently you need a party of at least =10= people to do it.

A few hours later, Natalie emails me and tells us that someone by the name of "Enki" invited her into a guild, looking at MvP and then WoE/PvP later.  We met up with him and he gave us 400k zeny each, as well as dragon armor.  He gave me a Divine cross too!  After some tips on what to do as far as leveling goes, we left.  Natalie went off to get the Energy Coat quest skill while I was doing something else or other (IMing or reading or something).  Then she made a Hunter (as per Enki's suggestion) and we went off to Payon to have her level for awhile.

We found 2 Spring Flowers, and commenced whacking...haha.  Apparently the magic paint sells for a pretty good price, so more money for us (hooray!).

Speaking of money, apparently Taro got the skeleton worker card to sell for 3 mil.  I guess we're filthy rich now xD

Oops?

#main : [DiabolicConjurer] i rip off many people
#main : [DiabolicConjurer] sorry wrong chat XD
#main : [TaoNeko] real smooth

hahaha...