I just trained another 40 blunt, so I am now at 1362 blunt. My current skills are as follows:

skill name       lvl/ bns    #    skill name       lvl/ bns
-----------------------------#-----------------------------
combat          1115/ 469    #    | unarmed        500/ 468
| melee         4757/1260    #    | | punch        500/ 468
| | edged       1297/ 754    #    | | kick         500/ 468
| | blunt       1362/ 772    #    | defense       1095/ 551
| | pointed    11610/2256    #    | | dodge         40/ 132
| missile         27/ 107    #    | | block       2150/ 996
| | thrown        30/ 114    #    | special        300/ 362
| | fired         30/ 114    #    | points          10/  67
| | guided        20/  93

I did a comparison with a staff of good versus a tainted knife, in terms of how fast I could kill my old friends, the Darkmoor swamp gnolls. This is what I came up with:

Tainted Knife - 38  36  42
Staff Of Good - 51  48  49

The numbers listed is the time in seconds it took me to kill each gnoll, I killed three with each weapon. As you can see, I'm still a ways off from being able to kill gnolls with SOG as fast as with the tknife.

I've waited too long to post, I need to be more up to date.

So, of course, Santa Gear is back again. So, the other day I had godly armour on for about an entire 2 day boot, as did Antari. We basically did a run on Dasendreth, using scrolls to repop him. We killed him 5 times in about 7 minutes, we had like 3 scrolls left, when I stupidly hit my stop/quit key instead of my dissect key. I was not very happy, I had demon on and insane stats from wearing godly for the majority of the boot.

I've been wearing godly quite a bit for the last few days. Yesterday I wore godly for about 24 hours and ended up with:

Hp: 2994/2994   Gp: 2061/2061

Str: 38*  Con: 42* 
Int: 44*  Wis: 35* 
Dex: 46*  Cha: 16 

On for 1 day, 6 hours, and 12 seconds.

You are nearly a God when you have demon on with numbers like these. Basically one rounding each of the santa mobs, and with a couple of heals from ginors I can take down das in one round also.

Oh, and last week that bitch Banger killed me. I just about made it a year without dying, but I was at 900 hp when Banger ran northeast, I wimpied northeast from Sven, got kicked in the head by Banger dropping me to under 500, then Banger ran southeast and yep, wouldn't you know it? I ran southeast too and WHAM, dead. I had trained exp thankfully. Still annoying.

This has been my gear for normal exp'ing and aa'ing during Tharsis Christmas:

Wielding: a tainted knife.
Wearing : a wedding ring, a Most Gigantic Cock Ever Seen badge, a ring
          of eternal strength, a godly armour of fire, a gloves of the bear, a
          pair of black boots [shimmering], Rose bracelet, a black shield, The
          Rose Crown of Andor, Rose necklace, Santa's
          mittens, Santa's boots,
          Santa's hat, Santa's
          belt, Santa's suit, a cloak of
          lightning and Bracers of Speed.
Carrying: a stone of Weightlessness, two Staves of Ginor and a
          Tual-masok.

I go with the ring of eternal strength because with santa gear, it's the one time of the year you don't have to worry about f'ing gaining hp as quickly. A ring of nature is mostly useless for a thief, considering it's hard enough to use this much GP regenerating this fast. The godly is fun, especially when gearing. I had probably twice as much gear in the box the other day using high stats from godly most of the boot and then demon gear to go gearing for like the last 6 hours.

The cloak of lightning is great for gearing, but without Santa I would be using Gleeman for healing. Of course the ginors change, some days I don't have any.

Long Boot With Godly Armour Results

Str: 45*  Con: 33*
Int: 33*  Wis: 37* 131376
Dex: 31*  Cha: 16

Hp: 2580/2580   Gp: 1895/1895

----QTY---ITEM-------------------------------DONOR---------
     5    A ring of nature                   Minion
     7    A stone of Weightlessness          Minion
     2    A Staff of Ginor                   Minion
    23    A Tual-masok                       Minion
    37    A tainted knife                    Minion
    21    A black shield                     Minion
    21    A pair of black boots [shimmering] Minion
     5    A gloves of the bear               Minion
     5    The Rose Crown of Andor            Minion
     6    Rose necklace                      Minion
     8    Rose bracelet                      Minion
    10    Cloak of the Gleeman               Minion
    22    Bracers of Speed                   Minion
     1    A godly armour of fire             Iori
    36    A helmet of Ksehn                  Minion
     5    A staff of good                    Minion
     6    A demon spear (bloody)             Minion
    22    An ancient blade                   Minion
    20    A black plate                      Minion
    21    The Crown of the Ancient Kings of Hel Minion
     6    A sturdy crowbar                   Minion
    16    A glittering dagger                Minion
     6    Pair of Rose gauntlets             Minion
     4    Pair of Rose boots                 Minion
     5    A Great Serpent ring               Gabriel
     5    A boots of the fox                 Minion
     5    An armour of the ox                Minion
     4    A jerkin of the raven              Minion 

Results From Using Santa Gear 2006

So this boot, Santa gear is gone for another year. Had I known it would be the last day I would have gotten about 6 sets for the box, but as it was we only had one set, and of all the people or guilds to have a piece of santa after boot, it was Lionpaw and the storms, he had one pair of Santas Mittens. Oh well.

I spent the vast majority of my time doing blackjack runs in Elfrea, Newbie Academy, Nazi Lab, and Bat Caves, and at times running around Tolnedra. Then I would go on period stab runs thru Shadow Realm, Valley Of Light, and Riva.

I'm sure what everyone wants to know is: How did I improve THIS holiday season?

26 Hp
41 Gp
17 levels
56 glevels
412 pointed
541 attack
42 edged
102 sneaking
103 sn.inside
101 sn.outside

I probably gained about 20 blunt or so too, maybe more, but I've been training it, so far up to 864/615, so I wouldn't know exact numbers.

Oh, I died to Ms. Claus. I had set up stop;s;e to leave the room, but I was in the wrong room to use that set of commands, so I got stuck in the room with her and she caught me with a couple of big hits.

Experience Differences Using Lightning Cloak

With lightning cloak, unique bracers, black plate, black shield, black boots (shimmering), ring of nature, rose crown, gloves of the bear, rose necklace, and rose bracelet. Wielding: A tainted knife. I killed five gnolls in Darkmoor Swamp.

41359 per mob
41822
41513
41715
41825

19735700 overall exp
19777522
19818543
19860056
19901771
19943596

Now with no lightning cloak, everything else the same:

41828
41830
41822
41823
41828

19985895
20027723
20069553
20111375
20153198
20195026

Now same gear, lightning cloak on, using stabs to kill:

30403
34530
30579
32459
28833


20236850
20267253
20301783
20332362
20364821
20393654

Use of stabs (guild commands) severely limit your experience gathering.

10,000 ATTACK!!

Well, by today I'm actually at 10057/2043 attack. Santa gear of course is helping me along in that respect. Pointed is at 9150/2002.

I'm currently doing blackjacks to try and raise my sneaking, and there's been a lot of question about whether the staff of good or staff of banana is more powerful. My blunt is at 676/544. So I took both staffs and headed for darkmoor to do a little testing of my own. I killed five gnolls using the staff of good, then five more with the staff of banana, one by one. I started each attack with a blackjack.

The results were interesting.

Staff of Good

1) 37 (time in seconds to kill)
2) 41
3) 47
4) 48
5) 37

Average = 42 seconds

Staff of Banana

1) 42
2) 40
3) 38
4) 38
5) 36

Average = 39 seconds

I was actually surprised how quicky I was able to kill gnolls with a blunt weapon. The staff of banana is 3 seconds faster by average but I would have to compare them more to really see any difference. From the results I'd say there isn't really that much of a change between using one staff of the other. I'd say the staff of good was likely designed to have the extra hit that it used to have, and that made it better than the staff of banana. But now that it no longer has that extra hit, there isn't much of a bonus to having the SoG over a SoB, in my opinion.

I also killed five gnolls with the tainted knife.

Tainted Knife

1) 33
2) 46
3) 36
4) 38
5) 34

Average = 37 seconds

Interesting how having more than TEN TIMES the amount of pointed than blunt, and there is little advantage to using the knife over either of the staffs.

Working Towards 2000 Block!

I know, I haven't posted in some time, oh well. I'm at 1940 block right now and moving on up, I hope to have 2000 before the Santa mobs arrive this year. I totally missed out on them last year which was quite disappointing, so I'm really looking forward to seeing how my improvements affect my performance against them.

I think I'll avoid being killed by Banger, that is for sure!

7000 pointed!!!

Well 7004/1752 that is. I thought I'd get there earlier than I did, but being deployed doesn't help my ability to play the game all that much haha. I'm currently at 7468/1761 attack. Oh what fun. Working on block now by the way, it's at 1580. Not sure where I'll take it to.

I now have the highest stealth sneaking inside at 1012. I'm not sure what Metallica has. I am thinking about continuing to raise it up, no one really has that high of stealth sneaking, and it determines the rate at which backstabs do or do not land. With 1500 each inside and outside I don't see how I could miss them. Unfortunately, I really need to start raising up my ot.st again to get my hp higher.

So, anyways, I was really pissed off after my last death, lost a LOT of exp, stupidly too. So now that I've had a mandatory wait period for being that angry, here's the death statistics:

Last Death

Died to: Angelic Protector
Time: June 2, 2005
Reason for Death: I dragged about 10 of them into the entryway to Valley of Light, then I was in an argument in another window on Alamak and I got banned, so I was trying to find a proxy address to get back into the chat and not paying any attention to the Tharsis window and right as I clicked back over, I died. Someone had gone into VoL and now I had all 18 VoL mobs in the room. Every one of them was at least at wounded, and I had two Staffs of Ginor that I hadn't even used BAH!!
Exp Lost: 136,000,000
Stat Lost: Int
Coins Lost: None, church, drank a few potions I had been saving, went back right away to get my gear and coins.

I've been focused on raising stealth sneaking again, to further upgrade my backstabbing abilities. Metallica has 1100 or so, and his opinion is that it doesn't make much of a difference, but because the backstab is such a valuable asset to a thief, I'm going to raise it to 1000. Right now:


sneaking 853/ 611
inside 833/ 604
outside 873/ 618

My next 40 is roughly 60 million, so you can see, it's going to be an exp-ensive goal to reach. I think our thieves get screwed when it comes to landing backstabs anyway, considering, but hey, you already know my feelings on that haha.