a night out with talhe

went to shadowfang keep last night. why? well, i know i'm a little old for the incident, but i'd heard you could make a bit of cash there as it dropped some fairly good stuff you could throw on the ah and forget about. i only meant to go in and see how things looked in there and get out. however, i was telling talhe about my journey, and she popped up out the front and demanded entrance. never one to disappoint - and always one looking for a reason to kill stuff - i popped out and pulled her in. another guildie, azza, also asked for a hand in, but he was off in the gulch and would be a while.

in the meantime, talhe and i wandered further into the keep. i'd already wiped out everything up until the last few buggers in the courtyard, so we continued from there.

first thing we did was die as i annoyed all the horses and they dived on me.

brilliant way to impress my newest party member. watching me get wiped out by rogue stablescum.

from thereon in we did well, pretty much wiping our boots with corpses in some very close but flavoursome fights. it was a fantastic effort. even though my level is 31, hers was 25 (turning 26 i believe), and we managed to guzzle down elites like they were blades of grass.

then azza joined in.

first thing i do is get us killed. seemed like a tradition. get a new party member and die with them. brilliant.

we'll call it a team-building exercise.

in any event, it turned out a little harder than we thought. we were a hunter, a mage and a warrior with an axe just ploughing through. i found it difficult to survive because i didn't expect to be going this far in and hadn't brought more than two healing potions. i'd really only gone for a peek and should have gone for healing potions when talhe joined.

sadly, we got almost all the way through and she had to leave. then azza and i died some more and watched our armour go that delicious shade of red which means we had to pause and consider our future.

it was a sad and miserable end to an otherwise very hearty and delightful expedition. i'm sure i could have made it all the way through with just a few more bottles of potions. the times we died we died only barely, with creatures left on the weeniest of health points. those jars of juice would have made all the difference and i'm really annoyed i didn't have any.

well, at least i've learnt my lesson today. always expect the long haul. it is, after all, a game of addiction...