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rangifer’s diary: pt. xl

Getting the T1 ring for rusa (and some questing along the way)

I wanted to do some card-hunting on my DEXgon knight, rusa, as a way to get a little beefier (more STR!), or maybe just as an excuse to rawr. Who knows. In any case, lugging around a T0 ring is a little embarrassing, so off I went:

rusa card-hunting

Completed the first tab! Great start!!

WHERE are the Jr. Necki cards… ;(

And yeyyy! T1 ring for woosa!:

While I was at it, I went ahead and did the “Lost!” and “ReVersal” quests:

And the level 52 followup to the I Need To Find My Daughter questline:

cervid tidies up some missed quests

I never went and did the King Sage Cat and Tae Roon quests on my STR priest, cervid, so I went back and did ’em:

Some nifty cards along the way. :)

And down went the King Sage Cat:

And in like fashion, Tae Roon:

Oh, and I went ahead and did “Lost!”/“ReVersal” once more:

Meet dama

Oh, my. You know the drill; yet another one of deer’s shitty peepee poopoo garbo characters. This time, I was forced (forced, I tell you!!) by Cort (Cortical, Phoneme, GishGallop, Subcortical, WizetWizard, MageFP) to make a brigand. For those not familiar, brigands are built like STR-based permabeginners, but take the rogue → bandit → chief bandit → shadower job route. While they tend to play somewhat like ordinary permabeginners, brigands benefit from the obvious utility skills associated with rogues/dits/shads, and brigands are capable of attacking with Disorder, Steal, and even Meso Explosion. Brigands do not use daggers.

While brigands are unusual for bandits in that they do not use daggers (some other bandit-based odd jobs, like blood dit and DEXdit, do use daggers), I am playing dama with a slightly more rogue-ish twist: the brigand equivalent of a sindit! Perhaps “sindit” is a bit of a misnomer here; brigands are barely dits, and even less so are they sins. Brigands must stick with basic-attacking when using claws, for lack of LUK to make any good use of Lucky Seven. But brigands, unlike e.g. besinners, have access to Keen Eyes, which (when at max level) makes their claw-using genuinely ranged… even ranged enough to serve as range in LPQ! And thus, much like the bandit can pretend that they are an assassin for a little while, as they continue to use Lucky Seven into their second-job life, so too can the brigand pretend that they are a STR sin for a little while, as they continue to use their claw into their second-job life.

Here I am, as lil baby dama (sporting some random equips that I had uselessly sitting in my cash shop inventory), getting harrassed by one of Cort’s islanders:

I was, after having been forced(!) by Cort to create this character, harassed by them, nonstop, from the training camp (where Cort had a camper) onwards, until I finally left the island for good…

But before then, we met up with strainer (drainer, xX17Xx, maebee) and chilled in Amherst:

Well, the harassment didn’t entirely stop upon leaving the island… Cort’s besinner-to-be (hopefully “to-be” soon, as long as the anniversary event comes with cake forks), Amygdala, had her fair share of telling me to CC PLS. And also of generally littering trash all over Kerning City:

And so I set off to bring dama up to KPQ level:

“YEET” goes the Steel Titans!

And although I did like dama’s cute lil noob look, I set out to come up with a look more permanent and more suitable (and with less event-bound equipment):

Again, with the trademark Metal Axe in hand (this particular axe also features further along in this diary entry…):

rusa hunting for dolls yet again

rusa is back at it again, still looking for a Ravana Helmet… just… a helmet. Please.

Unfortunately, my luck was not about to improve right away, as I joined the single worst Ravana run that I’ve attended yet. The group sent out a smega in an attempt to recruit “attackers”, but upon entering Ravana’s lair, I found myself realising that there were going to be no such attackers. Instead, it was a party of me… and three (3) bishops, the highest-level of which was 136. So I got to see a whole lot (well over 30 minutes, in fact!) of Genesis being spammed on a single monster. Indeed, despite being just level 89 at this point (and STRless, to boot), I was forced to contribute what meagre DPS I did have:

I had very nearly run out of Honsters by the time that Ravana was slain, and having spent well over 30 minutes in this painful Ravana run, and having spent roughly a million mesos worth of potions, I got to see something that I’d never seen in a Ravana run before: Ravana dying, and dropping absolutely zero dolls whatsoever. By this point, I was just miffed enough that I figured it was time to take a bit of a break from MapleStory…

Fortunately, my luck turned around not too long after I took a break, as I was able to attend a second run, this time with some lovely friends who had helped me before with getting Ravana dolls! <3 I turned in this doll and, lo and behold, my first real helmet!!! It only took 15 tries (that is, 15 dolls, not counting runs in which there were no dolls left for me to loot), but I finally got one! The first thing that I did was, of course, check the one stat that I really care about: the STR. And lo, it was the worst possible STR: 16!! Incredible. The search for more real helmets continues, I guess…

Polishing off rusa’s hit list

Crappy as my new helmet was, it was still a lot better than the level 10 hat that I had been using since, well, level 10. So, I took this as being just good enough to push forward and finish off rusa’s hit list, for the work-in-progress video.

Down went HH, SoR, Thanatos, Gatekeeper, Capt. Latanica:

And finally, after some grinding to get from level 89 to level 90 (expedited thanks to Jacquemus!) so that I could start the Snowman quest, rusa was able to tick the final boss off of her hit list:

Now I had all of the footage I needed for the video!! Now all that was left was to edit the damn thing…

capreolina tidies up some missed quests as well

I wanted to do the same for my woodswoman, capreolina, as I did for cervid, so I tidied up the King Sage Cat and Tae Roon quests:

With thanks to Cortical, I was, thankfully, able to kill a Tae Roon and finish that quest! I did the King Sage Cat one first, which involved nearly two hours of busy-waiting (>.<) at the map where King Sage Cat spawns, including a point at which I lost internet connection for 2 minutes or so, and had to desperately hope that no one sniped my map during the time that I was gone…

In any case, I also had not done the Capt. Latanica quest on capre, and I had a bit of a go at soloing Capt. Latanica. That did not turn out so well, as I simply got one-shotted by the captain, wasting my White Essence and my Safety Charm.

Fortunately, however, JumpQuest (OmokTeacher, Slime) offered to help me out by duoing the captain with me! JumpQuest is a DK, so he was able to cast HB on me, which was more than enough to keep me alive. We made quick work of the captain!:

rusa rawr!!!!!!!!

Again thanks to Jacquemus, I was set up with a low-level (73 at the time) priest by the name of Phishem as a rawr + Heal combo at CDs, on my DEXgon knight, rusa!

At first, I was worried about my damage, being STRless and all, and so I made sure to be very clear that my damage would be… relatively lacking. But Jacquemus and Phishem said they were OK with it, and so off we went:

And it really turned out much better than I had speculated! The simply huge range of rawr, and its ability to hit up to 15 monsters at once, made my ability to generate EXP extremely impressive, even if it took me a few extra rawrs to really kill the things dead. I think I measured something like 6.8M(!) EPH with an @epm 5 test!

I was there at CDs for quite a while, with varying party lineups (at times, with party sizes up to 4 or 5!), and had a heck of a lot of fun. :P Who knew that grinding in a big ol’ party is less sad than solo grinding at CDs…?

Cort scrolls a legendary artifact and then hits level 70

Cortical (GishGallop) scrolled a legendary artifact that we have (as odd jobbers) been speculating about for months, and that Tacgnol (Taima, Boymoder, Numidium, Yotsubachan) made an attempt at, after being so lucky as to find a Flamekeeper Cordon from a Firebrand. Unfortunately (very unfortunately), Tacgnol’s Flamekeeper Cordon had just one(!) pass out of the five 60% scrolls that she used on it. :( The issue here is not so much that it’s extremely difficult in general to pass some GFAs on a pair of gloves, but rather the issue is getting the Flamekeeper Cordons to begin with. They are rather rare, and the average of 8 MATK that they come with pushes their value up even further into the 40M〜50M meso range, per-pair. But their potential is largely ignored: the combination of the 8 MATK with the 20 WACC makes it an amazing candidate for gish, gishlet, and even STR cleric/priest/bishop gloves.

Cort managed to find a pair for “only” 20M(!) mesos, and set out to prove the worth of these gloves once and for all. Thankfully, they had much better luck than Tacgnol, and were able to avenge her 2 WATK Flamekeeper Cordons:

Transcription of the item in the item smega in the above image

Cortical’s

Flamekeeper Cordon (+4)

• Req lev: 50
• Category: glove
• Weapon attack: 8
• Magic attack: 7
• Accuracy: +19
• Number of upgrades available: 0

8 WATK, 7 MATK, and 19 WACC on a pair of gloves… truly legendary.

And Cortical held their 3rd-job permabeginner party not too long after:

Transcription of the above image

Cortical’s fireworks: WOOOOO LETS GO

[system message]: [Congrats] Cortical has reached Level 70 as a Beginner!
⟨Party⟩ Cortical has reached Lv.70.
⟨Alliance⟩ Cortical has reached Lv.70.

Congrats!!!

rusa is a STRless warrior.

At this point, I had finally finished the editing process for rusa’s video! You can watch it on the Oddjobs YouTube™ channel!!

This video compiles a series of many fights with boss monsters that rusa has soloed over her career, over the course of a 20〜21 minute video!

Music

The music is rusa’s Theme, which I composed for the video, and have released under the CC BY-SA 4.0+. You can find the original MuseScore file (the piece was written in, and then rendered with the built-in MIDI sound(bank/font) of, MuseScore 3) at ​https://codeberg.org/deer/gists/raw/branch/master/rusa-s_Theme.mscz; you can also find the theme on bandcamp at https://capreolina.bandcamp.com/album/rusa-s-theme, if you wanna listen to it separately. :P

Attending Eoka and xBowtjuhNL’s wedding

I attended the wedding of Eoka and xBowtjuhNL, both of whom are lovely people I met while MPQing on rusa!

The wedding was really cool, as I got to attend a premium wedding for the first time ever in my Maple life. Pila Present skimped out on me a bit with the gift reward, awarding me just one (1) Elixir… but it was still cool. :P

The couple went to China on honeymoon very shortly after the wedding, as they wanted to have a cow to exchange for the wedding, and unfortunately no GM was willing to comply with their request to !mob 9600006 at their wedding. :P

Congrats on the wedding <333!

In which I am reminded why I rarely solo grind on cervid

My STR priest, cervid, is level 114 now, and at this point solo grinding is something that I do less and less often, for its lack of real EXP reward. But I got an Echo of Hero, and wanted to test my hand at it in the usual spot once again: Fancy Amps. Keep in mind that I did an @epm 5 with full damage gear equipped, and Echo of Hero, Cider, and Holy Symbol active the whole time:

Transcription of the above image

cervid — Lv.114 Priest — Total EXP: 105,600 (0.49%)
EXP Per Hour: 1,267,200 — EXP Per Minute: 21,120

With this as a benchmark, it would take an estimated 17+(!) hours of continuous sweatgrinding if I wanted to solo grind my way from the bottom of 114 (cervid is not actually at the bottom of 114, but just hypothetically) to 115. And this is with the luxuries of Teleport, Holy Symbol, etc.

I got bored of that pretty quickly, and spent the rest of the Echo doing something that psychologically felt more productive to me…:

capre hunts thousands, nay, millions of cards! (…and hits level 112 in the process)

Speaking of card-hunting, it should be obvious to anyone who knows me or my diary that my excessive abundance of characters must be a serious barrier to getting higher-level Monster Book Rings. In an attempt to set some priorities, it seems that my woodswoman, capreolina, is somewhere near the top. Obviously, any character whatsoever can benefit from higher Monster Book Rings (unless they already have T10, of course). But for cervid, for example, higher tiers are somewhat of a micro-optimisation. cervid is already extremely tanky, so the extra MAXHP and MAXMP helps, but not as much as you would hope; and the STR/DEX/INT/LUK can help too, although being pure STR already does most of what I want AP-wise anyways. So you can see how Monster Book Rings end up being more of a micro-optimisation.

On the other hand, my I/L magelet cervine can benefit relatively more: being somewhat less tanky than cervid makes the MAXHP/MAXMP matter more, and the TMA from the INT is extremely vital for cervine’s playability (especially at such a high level). Add to that the fact that cervine will really need that MAXMP if she gets to fourth job (actually having enough MAXMP to cast Blizzard even once is a serious concern when you are INTless), and the bonus AVOID from the DEX and LUK, and farming rings for cervine is simply far more efficient than it is for cervid. Then there’s the really squishy characters: capreolina is my oldest and highest-level such character, being the unwashed archer that she is. Also included here are my swashbuckler hydropotina, being an unwashed slinger, and my besinner hashishi, being an unwashed permabeginner. Even rusa can benefit quite a bit, as the STR is very desirable as a STRless warrior, the DEX helps damage as well, and even the MAXHP can help, in the case that rusa ever manages to hit fourth job.

So I set off to card-hunt on capreolina (made smoother by Arrow Rain), and managed to muster a T2 ring and level 112 along the way~:

capre on the hunt

YEET!!

Transcription of the above image

[system message]: ⟨Party⟩ capreolina has reached Lv.112.
⟨Guild⟩ capreolina has reached Lv.112.

capreolina: imagine leveling to 112 while cardhunting in eos tower
like a nerd

W H E W .

Scrolling “jobbed beginner” weapons

There are some jobbed (meaning, “not common”, i.e. “having non-trivial class requirements’) weapons that, as far as I know, have existed in MapleStory since version 1. In particular, I have in mind jobbed weapons that are not oriented towards the intended playstyle nor skills of the jobs that can equip them. There are actually (perhaps unbeknownst to many, or most, MapleLegends players) very many of these in the game — and even more, if you count ones not acquirable in MapleLegends — and many can even be purchased at ordinary NPCs.

Because of my new brigand, dama, I got the chance to revisit some of these special weapons. I set out to scroll some of these, and this is what I came up with.

First is the Metal Axe, which costs 3k mesos when purchased from an NPC. This is a two-handed axe that can only be equipped by warriors, archers, & thieves. On average, these have 32 WATK clean, and that is what you will get if you buy one from an NPC. But I had one that I got from a monster drop, which was 35 WATK, and scrolled it to a nice purple glow!:

Transcription of the above image

Metal Axe (+6)

• Req lev: 10
• Req. class: warrior OR bowman OR thief
• Category: two handed axe
• Attack speed: normal [6]
• STR: +6
• Weapon attack: 48
• Weapon def.: 1
• Number of upgrades available: 0

The last two slots were actually 100%ed, because the axe was supposed to be purple-glowing by the time that it had 2 slots left; but Noam (OmokTeacher, Slime, JumpQuest) had apparently just been mistaken about how many excess stats above average you need to get a purple glow. After using a 100% scroll to see if a single extra stat was enough to do it, it was still blue-glowing. Only after the last slot landing a 100% scroll did I achieve the glow that you see above.

And second was the Monkey Wrench, which costs 20k mesos when purchased from an NPC. This weapon is similar to the Metal Axe in that it can only be equipped by warriors, archers, & thieves, and also in that it is two-handed. But the Monkey Wrench is more powerful, being a level 25 weapon, and also it’s a blunt weapon, not an axe. After going through 22(!) 10% scrolls, I finally managed to land one, and had quite good luck the rest of the way. It was already purple-glowing by the time that it had 1 slot left, but OmokTeacher convinced me to throw another 30% on it, which passed!!:

Transcription of the above image

rusa’s

Monkey Wrench (+5)

• Req lev: 25
• Req. STR: 25
• Req. class: warrior OR bowman OR thief
• Category: two handed mace
• Attack speed: slow [7]
• STR: +11
• Weapon attack: 66
• Weapon def.: 3
• Number of upgrades available: 0

The Brigand Brigade sets forth upon the land

Now that I had some sweet weapons for dama to use, it was time for the Brigand Brigade to roll out! Also in the brigade is dendrite, Cortical’s brigand. And with both of us at level 22, it was KPQ time!:

Transcription of the above image

Mesotron: Let me guess
str rogue?

dama: yus :3

dendrite: hell yeah

dama: brigand

Mesotron: I love y’all oddjobs guilds
guildies*

dama: :D

Mesotron: Most impractical jokers in MS
And yet more powerful than me

Wrench power! Fruity Bamboo power!!:

Here’s dama, showing off her STR sindit skillz at the boss fight:

After very many KPQs, we were both level 29 and roughly 95% EXP. And dendrite insisted that we race each other at “Shumi’s Lost Coin” to hit level 30, although I was reluctant (as usual) to do any JQing…

dendrite enticed me by promising me a gilded eggs pan (originally, the promise was for a “gild eggs pan”, meaning money for a guild expan(sion)), if I were to emerge victorious in the JQ race. So off we went, and by throwing caution to the wind (and thus taking a truly immense quantity of lasers to the face), I actually managed to win the race!! dendrite challenged me to finish again before they could finish for the first time, offering me another gilded eggs pan… Again, I was reluctant, but dendrite insisted that their pride was on the line, and so… uhm… I did it again:

Transcription of the above image

dama: ok um
thats 2
LOL

dendrite: i want to die

dama: u_u

dendrite: if u come back
and do it agian [sic]
i will cry :D

dama: pls no

Considering that I really did not want to make dendrite cry, and also didn’t want to do any more JQing, I made no attempt to complete the JQ a third time…

Once dendrite did finish, and revealed the prank reward to be literal “egg pans” this entire time… — which I did not accept — we were both level 30, and so it was time to advance to bandit!!!:

Transcription of the chatlog in the above image

dendrite: PREPARE FOR TROUBLE

dama: AND MAKE IT DOUBLE

[system message]: You have lost an item (The Proof of a Hero)
[2^nd Job] Congratulations to dama on becoming a Bandit!
[2^nd Job] Congratulations to dendrite on becoming a Bandit!

We still don’t have Steal yet, as it has level 5 Haste as a pre-requisite, but soon we will Steal ALL the things!!!!