Leveling: Fun with Fleas (Caedarva Mire level 74)

We headed back to Caedarva Mire last night, making use of the Runic Portal from Whitegate, only to find the area filled with other parties. Yobun scouted around a bit and thought an area that we had to go through Arrapago Reef to get to looked promising (it's part of the eastern section of the Mire, but has a one-way drop off). So we made our way through the Reef and came back out into the Mire and discovered that section was populated with Mosshorns (giant rams), Elder Treants, and one lone Heraldic Imp.

Since there was a ram and a tree right at the zone, we fought those first before venturing further in. We discovered that Mosshorns have fleas (Chigoes), which pop off with every TP move. This leads to some interesting chaining possibilities, so we decided we would try to include the Mosshorns in our fighting.

We ended up camping right at the drop-off into the main part of the Mire, and were able to pull two imps from down below, so we were able to chain pretty well with the three imps, a tree, and a ram (and its attendant fleas). The ram fights got really messy at times, but it was pretty exciting, and an interesting change of pace. We had a full wipe on one of our ram fights (two great bleats in succession with fleas smacking us did us in), but we dusted ourselves off and continued on, making sure to only take on rams when Wendell could Divine Seal/Erase and have Divine Veil make Erase work on all of us to remove the max HP down.

During another ram fight we had an imp spawn on us, but we handled that one pretty well with the help of Benediction and Invincible. Itera's Hundred Fists might have helped too, but we got petrified just after activating our two hours. Itera got killed on another ram fight, and Kiki did on yet another. I'd flashed the ram when it did Great Bleat, but a Chigoe decided I needed to die, and with the reduced HP from Great Bleat, I didn't last long. I was killed by a flea. :(

All in all, I rather enjoyed the novelty of having fleas spawn while fighting another monster. When the rams avoided using petrification or max-hp down moves, things went rather smoothly. We ended up having Elboron sleep the Mosshorn while the rest of us would switch to kill the Chigoe (which were pretty easy to kill), then back to the Mosshorn until another Chigoe popped. We were able to get up to chain #8 once.

It was another short night, and our deaths slowed us down a bit. I ended up with about 9.5K for the night. We're getting so close to level 75, but it's going to be another week, since we're back to one evening a week for the time being.