alright, well huinting in the catacombs is difficult. you need to have completed your elven wizard quest, and be over level 20. talk to a priest of dawn/ priestess of dusk to compete for a seal. youll sign yourself onto one of these seals and the more you hunt, the more drops you get. be warned tho: the mobs inside each catacomb are 4x hp, and some are magic resist/resist hold/resist sleep.
talk to gatekeeper ziggurat (at any catacomb entrance) to gain the quest for blank scrolls (these sell for great cash) but you got to get last hit on the mob to get the scrolls. and sometimes they dont drop.
anyhow, each mob in the catacombs (with a handful of exceptions) drops seal stones. these are red, blue or green in colour and vary in value. when you turn in these stones to the dawn/dusk side you signed up for, you get ancient adena in reward. the black MARKETEER of mammon will straight exchange ancient adenas (AA) at a rate of 1aa to 1a. but thats not enough for some players. when you sell the stones to players in buy shops (lots in giran town) they will buy as i said for upwards of 2a/aa up to 4a/aa in the right shop.
keep in mind though that the blacksmith of mammon appears in catacombs only. and at that onle in the "seal validation period" (every second week) IF AND ONLY IF the seal of gnosis is broken by either dusk or dawn. and to upgrade your D stuff, you need ANCIENT ADENAS!
so now youre faced with a decision: participate in the seal of gnosis, hunt like mad, and turn in your stones to the side you signed up for and get only 1x the value in ancient adenas, or sell your stones for regular adenas then buy ancient adenas later?....
its a tough call, but if you really need that upgrade (remember: the attibute of the weapon youre looking at is MATK - you want this as high as possible cause this is the factor of the weapon that makes your spells do damage) hunt like mad for weeks. youll gain levels, and in the process, hopefully some blank scrolls.
now as an aside i will tell you what blank scrolls are good for; theres antoher mammon guy that only comes to the necropolises during the seal validation period. he is the merchant of mammon. he takes blank scrolls and some ancient adena and you can buy ENCHANT scrolls for a relatively small price. for example: an ENCHANT D ARMOR scroll costs about this (
http://boards.lineage2.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=316891&an=0&page=0#Post3 16891) much.
lets do some arithmetic .... how much have you spent in adena buying ancient adena (if you bought it at all) ? take that number and set it aside call it variable C (for cost). how many enchant scrolls (variable N) can you purchase with the blank scrolls you got and the ancient adenas you got?
how much do the scrolls sell for ($)?
take these numbers and do some math ... (N*$) - C = profit.
gogo profit!!
lets throw some numbers into there to make some sense of all those symbols.
in a week's hunt youll gain about 75 blank scrolls and 300k ancient adenas. on armor enchants grade D, we can purchase ... 7 armor enchant scrolls grade D, and 1 blessed scroll of escape.
some servers vary in enchant prices, but for the sake of argument, lets say 100k is the average price of that particular scroll.
C = 0. you hunted for everything. so the onyl cost is what you spent that week in BSPS if anything.
N = 7
$ = 100 000 adena
you just made 700k. you MIGHT have spend 100k in bsps D. oh and the blessed scroll of escape - 400k. just throwing that out to you cause every higher level uses one at some point in those "oh cr$p" situations.
bingo. merchant of mammon = free money.