KoL - Advent Calendar 2011

lolrus

 

I'm currently posting this on Day 7 of the Advent Calendar, with the 7th prize being another monster for your Lollipop Forest. But the most important prize that I wanted to talk about is probably the 5th one, where it finally unlocked the other item drops for all the monsters in the Lollipop Forest; some tasty fruit gem candy. o_o

 The gemstones you find from the monsters in the Lollipop Forest are what you want to farm now more-so than the lollipop sticks. By now, it seems like the sticks are easily dropped from them compared to day 1 for some reason that it's not even an issue anymore. The gemstones however, are fairly low-drop rates, and you'll really want to get at least the pearidot to make your farming more efficient. According to many people, having + Candy Drop Rate % will help increase the chances of these gemstones to drop, but not the lollipop sticks, but that isn't an issue at the moment, I would think. I ended up with over 300 or so sticks easily, without even Rave Stealing. Which means that there are 2 equipments in particular that are very important for collecting these fairly hard to get gems. The Peanut Brittle Shield and the Pair of Pearidot Earrings.

Those two items will offer so much more Item Drop Rate than anything else for their respective slots. The peanut brittle shield is obtained from the Crimbo Tree in the VIP Lounge, if your clan has one. The item is a Gift Item however, so you won't find them in the mall, but if you go in the /trade channel, you can easily find sellers for them. As for the pair of pearidot earrings, you need to get a pearidot to drop from a lollicat first. When it finally does, you'll need to be able to jewelry craft it with a precious piercing post to make. I hope you have the tools for jewelry crafting though, as it seems to be untradeable.

After you get those two equipments, you're pretty much set for effective farming in the Lollipop Forest. I also like using the Tourmalime Tourniquet as it makes the monsters scale to your stats. It might even make my V Crisis strategy viable finally, if not for the fact that I'm a Sauceror with not-so-much HP for taking lots of hits, and using a weak shield for defending as well. It will still be an option though. Anyway, here's a list of the gemstones that the monsters will drop.

• Lollicat - Pearidot
• Lolligator - Tourmalime
• Lollipede - Bananagate
• Lolliphaunt - Kumquartz
• Lolrus - Strawberyl
• Trollipop - No gems, just troll dolls.

I gotta say though, I love the gem names. Even the porkstone gems too, but these sound a little more colorful at the same time.

As for the extra lollipop sticks now, I've been making an awful lot of scaffolds after getting myself a samurai set for myself. Too bad they're untradeable as well, so no means of making a profit off of them in the future, unfortunately. Hopefully these scaffolds will be in high enough demand for how much a lot of us are making.

Other than that, I'm currently on the fence of whether to get this month's IotM or not. I'm not sure if I will like the peppermint sprouts as much as I do using pumpkins in-run, although they were mostly used for pumpkin beer. The peppermint cocktails seem like they'd be better than the pumpkin beers, only if you have access to basic booze. I don't always get bottles down in the Tavern Cellar, but instead get some cans of beer. If that happens, the peppermint sprouts wouldn't be able to help me with turngen, unless I make a peppermint patty and eat that instead of using it for booze. Booze is what I usually need on Day 1 though, so... I'm very torn on what to do here. If I do get it, perhaps I'll give another Trendy run a go, although I may have to go without a Fax Machine by then, and I still won't have a spleen familiar to use either. Hmm... =/