Jade Dynasty still has the ability to surprise me, and I love it for that. I’ve said before that Jade is a lot like Final Fantasy XI, in that everything possible is not always obvious. In Jade, the easiest and perhaps the quickest way to make money is to sell the provisions you get as drops. Every fifteen levels you get a new set of four provisions, and they sell for decent money especially the higher level grade provisions. But you can also turn in provisions and get honor. Honor or reputation works rather similarly to World of Warcraft in that the more reputation you have, the more it opens up to more loot. I started playing Ettarre again and got a new esper. Because each esper can be upgraded by getting an Esper Tome and an Esper Accessory to make it even more powerful during invigorate. Searching through the forums it became apparent to me that the best way to get both of these was through quests I could get if my honor reputation was high enough. But for as long as I’ve known about it I couldn’t seem to turn in the provisions for rep, I’d get a log full notice and that would be that. Finally I read a post that says I can only have eight quests as a maximum. Jade lets you have twenty or so in your log so I’ve always had fifteen to twenty or so in quest log, so that explained why I kept getting an error.

So right before I hit seventy-five on my character Lionhand I stopped playing him. Seventy five is pretty momentous as plateaus go. New equipment, new tier skills, etc. I can’t even really tell you why but I did it but I’m having so much fun playing Ettarre. I went to Cave of Fangs, the first dungeon. It was alright, kind of anticlimactic actually. Finished off a few of the red explorer quests but the exp from them was so little as to be frankly worthless. I get more experience off the curse events each day. Speaking of, around 83 or 84 I hit a wall leveling. For the most part I was doing the Sleepless event quests in conjunction with my grinding. So I’d put an eight hour session together and then turn in the quest and I could tack on 3 to 5 million experience, which is a fairly nice lump. But every three or four levels the mob that you need to kill to get credit changes and this time it moved on as normal but the mob swarms you. So I did a cost benefit analysis on how many health pots I would have to use versus the experience I’d get and it just wasn’t worth it. If I could get a party together I’m sure it would be a much better experience rate, but I run alone.

By the time you read this I should have hit ninety on Ettarre. As I got closer and closer to ninety I thought it was a great spot to take a break from leveling and start raising my crafting levels. As I told you before, it gets difficult to start crafting later when leveling a character. You have to go back to areas where drops will be scarce. Or you can do what I’m doing now and create a toon specifically to get you crafting materials and recipes. It’s actually quite interesting that way because it is rather easy to do once you’ve done it once and it pays for itself entirely. In fact my farming characters probably make me a little money. Leveling my crafting now doesn’t seem like it will have any real appreciable effects on my character but I didn’t have or take the time to sell the mats and now that I’ll be able to use them I have a better chance to make weapons and armor to get them refined to higher levels. The thing I’ve learned with refining items is that it’s best to go the brute force method and have a large amount of pieces of armor from which to get a small amount of high level refined items. After I finish leveling crafting I’m looking forward to trying to get my pet grade up. Increasing grade on pets can be an expensive endeavor. The average high roller only has around one or two thousand gold and it takes at least that much to even begin to put a sizeable dent in raising grade. Buying celebeans is the fastest way to do it but inordinately expensive and finding or winning celebeans while far cheaper is incredibly time consuming. Add to the fact that celebeans must then be traded for items from which you can upgrade your pet; you can see how increasing your pet grade could literally take months to do.

There is a mob that shows up when you’re camping; maybe because my character is female he read a poem to me as I was killing him. So I will leave you with a poem from the one and only Frog Prince:

With tears in your eyes you’re telling me
That in the fairy tales they are all lying
I can never be your prince.

Maybe you’d never see
That after you said that you loved me
That in the sky
The stars still shimmer

I will be the angel in your favorite fairy tale
And enfold you in my wings
Let us pretend that things will be like a fairy tale one day
There we’d rest in eternal bliss.

Morte