Usually, I’ll try to get a session in before maintenance kicks in because I figure that it’s the last chance before reset to get what you need going. I could be wrong but I think I ended up taking a two day break since most of my alts had 2 bars of rested experience. But in most cases, I needed the bonus as I’ve been trying to progress my Tier 1 and 2 characters.
The major news for today was that besides an upcoming bot ban they will not be giving us the next raid/dungeon. Instead, they will extend the chicken event, which I was quite happy about since I can use more tailoring books and other honing materials. Add those to the reset of the guild shop and I feel tomorrow’s session should see some nice gains.
With regards to progress the alt I’m mostly concerned about is my Berserker. I’m trying as much as possible to push him through Rohendel’s chaos dungeons. I had a triple failure on his honing attempt which really pissed me off. It practically killed my desire to play earlier and I ended up taking a break to cool off. I think with the reset, I might try a slightly different strategy with him where I pool a ton of resources just to get him out of Rohendel as quickly as possible. That will leave my Deathblade as the only Tier 1 alt left.
Likewise, I’m trying to get my Paladin out of Yorn. I need to determine how many more Knowledge Transfers I can perform for Feiton because I don’t want to waste time leveling him through. Not to mention I still need to work on my Shadowhunter, which I will discuss in a moment. But I fully swapped him off of Lopang dailies to Shunshine, Kalthertz and Hypnos’s Eyes for increased leapstones and I’m seeing more honings. Once my Berserker and Deathblade arrive in Yorn, I’ll probably switch them to use those dailies too (my Berserker does two already but I’m waiting for him to get to ilvl 802+ to get him to do the Hypnos’s Eyes one). The only one that’s annoying is Kalthertz because of the Pirate Coin cost. But I will say that a Paladin makes quick work of the arena from Hypnos’s Eyes as well as clearing the Shunshire area.
My Gunslinger, Glavier and Scrapper are slowly moving upward in Feiton. I almost hit ilvl 1000 for my Glavier which would allow her to do the next difficulty level of Feiton dungeons. I’m quite happy for the chicken event extension though because that means I’ll have more books so that I can push my Gunslinger up once that 1060 ilvl creeps up. Around that point is where Feiton becomes excruciating for no good reason outside of “let’s just arbitrarily drag the grinding in a worthless area a lot longer.” Now, that the season pass for Lost Ark is out all I can say is that it lasts too long and there either aren’t enough rewards or there’s too many that I’m scared of using them. I keep hoarding them thinking that I should save them for when “the really big honing sessions happen.” But that moment seems more appropriate in Tier 2 while you struggle to hit ilvl 1100.
My Lopang enjoyers are great I find. I love seeing the amount of silver tick upward. Once my Shadowhunter hits ilvl 1325-1340, I’ll probably transition her into becoming a Lopang enjoyer too. The amount of silver you get at tier 3 is really good and a full week of doing them will cover your expenses for quite a while.
Speaking of expenses, I noticed that Guardian stones went down in price to 9 gold/per. Maybe it’s the time of week, but I probably will check the market today and see if it hits 10 gold again. That seems to be a good number at which I can make a small 1k fortune given the amount of stones I’ve been collecting and letting sit in my alts’ account. I’d like to hit above 10k gold sometime just for peace of mind so that I can use that small fortune to fast forward any remaining characters through Yorn and Feiton if I have the availability.
The last thing I want to talk about is my Shadowhunter. With the rest of my characters done, I finished up the night playing her and starting Punika. She’s one of the characters I feel that can handle all the annoying fights in Punika pretty easily. I got her right up to finishing the first two areas and am prepared to hit the Starlight Beach area. I think if I do all the administrative stuff first on my main today and find that there’s no Adventure Island activity going on, I might just try to finish up Punika on my Shadowhunter. With all that rested bonus XP, I’m sure she’ll manage to acquire her base 1302 ilvl gear in the first Chaos Dungeon. I have pondered sending her some extra blue accessories but the Pheon cost make it not worth the effort. On the other hand, we also have the guild shop reset and the chicken event so theoretically, I could just buy up the chicken event shop on her and get her up to 1325 ilvl quickly. Not to mention I probably can do Anguish Isle if I remember and buy up whatever is available for her too.
After my Shadowhunter is done in Punika, that leaves my Gunslinger as my next major project to get into Punika. Oh boy that’s not going to be fun. I’m not talking about doing Punika on a Gunslinger but rather honing her up to that ilvl. I feel it’ll take 2-3 weeks of consistent playing. It would take less time if my guild was in better shape though.
Speaking of the guild, one of the guys who quit decided to re-join. I wonder if he realized that he gets a penalty anytime he leaves a guild? Because I assume he got pissed and left since the guild isn’t progressing collectively. So I almost want to believe he tried joining another guild with this other person who left but possibly got insulted or was kicked out for one reason or another. Also, there’s a strange person that I see on virtually all day. He logged off once last night but later came back just before the servers went down. With all the bot activity going on, I’m concerned that this character is a bot since I see him in Chaos Dungeons all the time. His ilvl is pretty impressive and he never says anything. So I’ve thought about kicking him out for safety reasons. On the other hand, he doesn’t really contribute anything to the guild (gold-wise from what I can tell) so I have no idea what to do. The thing is that this guy has no alts and doesn’t use a strange name like all the other bots. But if he’s doing the endless chaos dungeon script to farm mats, it’s still an issue and I have no visibility into that outside of seeing him online all the time.
At any rate, if I do get banned for being the guildmaster for a guild that houses a botter, I’ll just delete this game. I don’t want to waste more time on something that causes me grief for no good reason. But I will blast the developers heavily in a future post if that happens. That means their thought process is completely wrong and that they have incompetent people running the show. I already have that prejudice based on what I’ve witnessed but I’m going to turn that prejudice into full blown hate if something happens to my account that I’m not directly responsible for.