Beastmasters: Leveling 50 -> 53

We spent most of our in-game time this weekend leveling our BSTs. We started out at 50, with less than 2K to-next-level, and decided to try Sacrarium, hoping we'd maybe get keys for our maps. It didn't go so well, so we grabbed our cookbook pages for Jonette, and finished up the level fighting DCs and EPs in Misareaux Coast.

From Tavnazia, we headed to Fei'Yin, and had a really good time pitting bats against the Droma, Talos, and tough bats. The Talos are dolls, with a nasty Meltdown move, so we let our pets fights those with us standing a good distance away. Since our pets were getting hit for 1k-3.5k damage on the Meltdowns, that was a wise decision on our part. Everything else we'd fight alongside our pets, and the exp piled up.

This was our first time leveling with our Gaudy Harnesses and our full sets of Crow gear. The Gaudy Harnesses are a great way to ensure you always have some MP, since it provides a refresh effect whenever you fall below 49 MP. And the Crow gear proved to be very good at keeping hate off of us and on our pets. We'll typically start out our fights in attack gear, but if we pull hate, we swap in the Crow gear, swapping it back out again when we use Leave and finish off the mob.

We had a couple of "incidents" that required us to run up from the basement and out of the zone. Fortunately this is possible in Fei'Yin since most of the mobs are magic casters and will stop to cast things on you as you're running away. The first time we had to zone was when we decided we'd see how bats did versus Shadows. The answer was "terribly", and we decided to cut and run. The second incident was when Grym was a bit too close to a Droma when casting sneak. We had quite the train on us that time, but again safely made it out to Beaucidine Glacier.

As we were sitting outside Fei'Yin, recovering our HP and MP, a character named Asphodel said "Celebrities!", causing us to spin our cameras around to see the famous people. We saw only Asphodel, a Mithra Dragoon, and some guy who seemed to have just zoned with us as well, but appeared to be a friend of hers. Then she said something about liking my blog, so we knew she'd meant us. I didn't know what to say, so I /blush'd at her, and we ran back into Fei'Yin to get back to getting to 52 so we could go home and try on our Beast Gaiters.

Odd to think people actually read my endless babble. :-)

Sunday, our fuzzy winter boots on our feet, we decided to try a few different places. First we headed to Western Altepa Desert, but the DC Beetles made pathetic pets against the VT Anticans, and it was pretty disappointing. We headed into Quicksand Caves near the Cloister of Tremors, but there weren't enough spiders and worms to keep us busy. Next we tried Crawlers Nest, and we settled into a decent groove there, using hornflies and blazer beetles as pets to fight hornflies, blazer beetles and mushushu. There was a group fighting exorays for the mold drop for G1, so we left those alone. The exp was a bit disappointing compared to Fei'Yin, but we figured that would have dropped off at 52 anyway, so we stayed put.

We logged for a few hours to run errands, and the place was emptier when we came back, so we added exorays into the pet/prey mix. When we were probably one kill away from hitting 53, I managed to aggro two tough exorays after grabbing one even exoray as a pet. This normally wouldn't be a problem, as Grym already had her pet, but I think I hit my "leave" macro instead of my "fight" macro, and ended up dead. Grym let herself die as well, and we HP'd to Windurst, 1K away from 53.

Determined to get our level, we set out for Fei'Yin, and quickly got the exp we needed on 6 Droma, 2 Talos, and a handful of bats. We wondered why on earth we'd slogged our way through the level in Crawlers Nest when we could have gone back to Fei'Yin and gotten it much faster. Then again, we would have done a lot of waiting for respawns, and maybe it wouldn't have been so good for the full level. Plus it's fun to try different areas, just for some variety.

I'm not sure where we'll head next, but that's part of the fun as well.