Skillups & Savage Blade Redux

On the night following the Charybdis battle, Feon (/Ishy), Cozmos, & Audessa were killing weapons and dolls in Ro'Maeve and invited me out. Audessa was working on skillups and Cozmos was breaking her sword latent. I came out with as much accuracy gear equipped as possible (and some rice dumplings) and worked on skilling up my sword from a measly 67. Quite a ways to go before 250 -_-;

The session went very well, although we encountered a rather tough weapon around the end which killed Feon, and a series of links shortly afterward killed Ishmael, but we pulled through. When I logged, my sword skill was at 113.

I skilled up a bit in Crawler's Nest on the following day, mostly killing Worker Crawlers, Killer Mushrooms, and making the occasional foray into the big EXP room downstairs to kill some Soldier Crawlers and Exorays. I logged out with a sword skill of 126.

That evening, I noticed most of DarkEden were in Quicksand Caves and assumed they were triggering columns for the Altepa Gate. In fact they'd just completed the Ruby column and were preparing to take on the NM scorpion. They invited me out and patiently waited as I made my slow way out of CN and over to Western Altepa.

When I eventually got there, the party was comprised of Feon, Ishy, Cozmos, Audessa, on the usual jobs and Theshadowdeath on THF/NIN (thanks for the correction, Feon). Shadow and I recognized one another and we assumed we'd merited together, only to have Feon remind us that we had KSNM'd together a few months ago. Yes, senility strikes again.

We passed a couple of RMT camping the NM antican that spawns in the room to the west of the WSNM area. They kindly offered assistance which elicited absolute silence on the /say channel but quite a few lol's on the /party channel.

The fight was stunningly fast. I really think we finished it under 2 minutes, possibly in 1:30 or so. I launched a pre-primed Mistral Axe for a Light skillchain and eventually got off a Rampage, but didn't have time to unload the next WS before it was over.

So in a matter of days, Cozmos has unlocked Evisceration and Savage Blade.

The remainder of the evening was spent killing placeholder wyverns for Ungur in Gustav Tunnel and disposing of the occasional meddling undead. The dragon never popped, but we had fun nevertheless.

I also had a wonderful time chatting with Lexxi, whom I missed terribly after her departure from the game. It was really nice to see her in the chat log again, and we caught up and compared notes on our toddler's behaviors, which is always entertaining ^^;

I've been making steady progress on my sword skill, killing almost every tier of mob in CN except for the EP scorpions by the Queen Crawler spawn and working my way up to 153. In the process, I was able to team up with Raikoh of Lifthrasir for awhile, which was a pleasure.

I want to eventually bring my skill to the 250 cap and put 8 merits into it, increasing the cap to the A+ level of 276. That'll round out my Great Axe, Axe, and Sword skill quite nicely, and will really potentiate the Joyeuse. The sword is very fun to use now on mobs I can actually hit (they're not kidding on that 50% proc rate), and I can imagine it'll be a blast to use in meripo and various other sundry activities.

No play for me tonight though... I'll have an early morning ahead of me tomorrow.