Darksday, 5/8/1037

Crawlers' Nest. Level 51. Defeats = 0

It has been a long time since my last log entry. Truth be told, there has not been much of interest to write about. I spent the majority of the last few months hording gil to buy some equipment that I always wanted to get. That is to say, I have spent days upon days farming creatures for loot or underground in some goddess-forsaken mines. I did manage to save up enough for my afore-mentioned Apollo's Staff, as well as a Woodsman Ring, Dark Staff, and Valkyrie's Mask. I am still not done though. I still want to get another Woodsman Ring, and some other gear for when i reach level 55.

I did spend some time adventuring in good old Crawlers' Nest. One thing I recently discovered was that the entrance to the Nest is an excellent place to practice defensive skills. This was good, because my skills had fallen woefully behind. I spent a lot of time there, pulling Death Jackets (Bees) to the zone and fighting them with weapons that I wanted to skill up, such as Sword, Club, and Dagger. But I was primarily interested in building my Shield and Parry skills. With Signet and Regen, you can last a long time against each bee before stopping to rest. The nice thing about doing this as a Beastmaster is you only need one Bee. Once you have to rest, all you have to do is Charm the Bee, use Stay to have it regain health while you rest, then when you're ready, use Leave to uncharm it and immediately re-engage before it despawns. The only times I had to get another pet was when the bee inconsiderately used Final Sting (and it seems to only to do that when it is below 50% health).

I kept that up for as long as I could stand, then made my way below to gain some experience. I still needed lizard skins to help level my Smithing skill, so I went back to the Labyrinth Lizard rooms on the second floor. At level 51, these lizards are slow experience, only ranging from Decent Challenge to Even Match. However, their drop rate is so good that the camp was nice for farming and leveling at the same time. I camped in the hallway, using Witch Hazels as pets, and primarily focused on the North room. When that room was clear, I would occasionally grab a lizard from the south room as well, if it was safe to pull. The hardest thing about the camp is the initial breaking of the camp. The Lizards aggro and link and start off really close together, making it very difficult to pull them. I used Charm and Leave when I first arrived to pull Lizards away and make them despawn, thus making it easier to pull the remaining lizards. After that, the camp is very routine. As usual, you want to be a little wary about using Sic; the Sapling pets have two large area, relatively useless attacks and only one single target attack. The other thing you might have to worry about is Baleful Gaze. But the Witch Hazels are very good tanks and would very rarely lose hate. If the Witch Hazel is hit by Baleful Gaze, you can either wait it out, pet swap to the other Witch Hazel, or pet swap to a jug pet and use Snarl. The last option is he safest, so I saved it for a last resort just in case anything went wrong.

I grinded away for about an hour and a half (Earth Time) with little incident and was making good progress. Of course, this means I was destined for some bad luck. This time it came in the form of some other punk Beastmaster wearing a Gaudy Harness, also level 51, trying to muscle in on my camp. I hate when that happens. As always, I had a search comment with my camp, prey, and location, but of course it was to no avail. Apparently The Beastmaster Code is dead. (In fact, I think it's the second time that same guy came to camp on top of me. Grrrrr.) Long story short, things really slowed down from that point on. Often I would defeat one Lizard only to look up and find the second Witch Hazel pet gone, taken by the other Beastmaster. At those times, I had to resort to Lizard vs Lizard fights. The sad thing was there were almost enough lizards in the two rooms to support the two of us. Almost. Anyway, enough sour grapes. I dutifully and slowly grinded my way to level 52, and once there immediately set up camp to log out for the day. I was somewhat discouraged by the expeience. It might be a while before I adventure again.