I decided to level up my MW again because well I love healing and I think it’s time for another healing alt.  I enjoy the druid very much but I wanted to start trying different styles again. I use to play them all, back in the day.

Anyway I’ve been running Timewalking dungeons and it’s been mostly ok, though every tank seems hell-bent on outrunning the entire group, constantly.  My monk has double (just got triple) roll and my favorite little spell (Tiger’s Lust) which increases my running speed.

We got that troll dungeon and the tank is literally running for miles.  At one point he goes afk or something, and the paladin starts pulling, so I heal the paladin through it.  The tank (warrior) gets back and he runs through that twisting area headed to the boss who can transform into animals, and just pulls pulls pulls.  I can’t keep up and I’m throwing heals I can do when moving (Essent Font), I get aggro, and I die.  No one will rez because everyone is too busy running forward, so it’s standard practice to release and just run back.  While I’m running back they start the boss, and the paladin complains “where’s heals? bad heals” I’m like lol are you serious?

So we continue on and he’s berating me about being terrible heals and of course I tell him to STFU and EAD.  It’s so frustrating though.  The tank was clearly running too fast, pulling too much, not waiting for the healer to get back, but yell at the healer anyway. Would suck if it was a new healer right?

I had to write about this because it was completely wild.

Alright so I phase into a new Ashran.  We decided to go to the left where you can farm the ogres for points to summon your big guy, in our case, Fangraal.

Only, we get wiped.  Then Horde gets the orb, and Horde gets the Ogre King, and horde gets the AA, then Horde almost kills our mage.

It’s not looking good, at all.  They have all the HKs, we’ve got nothing.  They summon their rock dude, they are rolling frost dragons, the healing serpent, and get to our base.  They are pulling our boss, it’s over, it’s over!

A very small stealthy team is at the horde base trying to take down the boss, and I’m about mid map in prowl.   I tell some druids and some rogues who are in the Horde base that it’s ‘over’, I join them in trying to take down their boss.  It fails.

But, would you believe it?  We kill the Ogre King, we save our mage and heal her up, we summon Fangraal, we get the AA, and we march from our base all the way to the horde base.  The kills start to even up around 30, so we’re 30 and 30.  Then 25 and 25, then 20 and 20.  Then 10 and 10.  It’s like whaaaat no way.  5 and 5, 1 and 1.  I’m not even kidding!!! We end up WINNING 1-0.

Sometimes sticking around is just worth it.

So ok, now I get Nightshade.  He has a 1 to 1 heal that is fairly quick and can be used in a pinch or for off healing in a group.  He uses the lowest shots of them all at only 2 per hit, which is an enormous savings in shot cost and carrying weight, not to mention less trips back to town.  He has like 300 patk less than the strongest pet, but that’s not really that big of a deal.  With a zone with herbs him not having VR isn’t much of a problem, and he has the highest mdef so he’s GREAT around mobs with magic attacks. He also has an AOE taunt which is super useful if you have to pop pet UD and pull ranged mobs in so you can hit them.

I basically only use him when grinding solo these days.  I call him Coupon Shadow because he’s so cheap to run.

Funny story, so I had plans on going back out to VoS to grind but with all the sieges going on I couldn’t port hardly anywhere.  I ended up in Aden and thought I would just got to Seal of Shilen for a bit.  Well, like 5 minutes into it, a Guardian Sword dropped.  Top B!  I sold it for 115m, bought my BW light set outright, bought a maj necklace and ring (sealed though, I forgot unsealing costs so much, like 880k aa!) but held off upgrading my weapon or shield.  I’m not meleeing with my pet so I’m going to keep my balance around 100m for the moment.

This game is interesting money-wise, especially when it comes to gear.  There are no repair costs, but literally everything costs money, and a lot of it.

1. Ports: it costs a small fortune to move through just one town, anywhere from 1200 to 10k or more.  This is cost prohibitive to new players, which is why newbie travel tokens came into play.  How about just reducing the port cost altogether?
2. Warehouse fees:  Why does it cost money to put stuff in a bank, or send it to someone else? WoW came out the same time as L2 and sending mail to anyone cost nearly nothing, and your bank was free, outside of optional purchase of bags to make it bigger.
3. Weapon and armor upgrades: Holy beans does this get out of hand.  For example my no-grade (level 1 to 19, technically) gear was probably around 45k.  I skipped D grade but a mithril set was probably 1 mill.  My C grade set was 3 mill.  So from no grade to C grade, a 6500% increase.  You can see how it’s basically pointless to sell your own gear to help with newer gear.  Letting a 3 mill C grade set go for a 30 mill B grade set is ridiculous 900% increase.  3 mill is nothing in that case.

Then even if you do come up with 30 mill, you need more than that to account for other increases, especially in the realm of weapons.  Shots and spiritshots cost more as your weapon gets better.  As any class but especially summoner, you can’t drop all your money on your armor because you need some at a minimum for shots and crystals to even summon your ‘weapon’ which is your pet.

I still want BW light because I get hit quite hard just once or twice if I can’t get my pet to pull aggro quick enough, but I’ll have to buy it at 30m but have 40 mill just in case for other things.