rangifer’s diary: pt. lxxxi

While we were duoing Wraiths together, I found some very valuable vicloc items!! A Mighty Bullet (the most powerful bullet in all of vicloc):

And the legendary Red Whip!:

Later, I was joined by a vicloc non-odd cleric by the name of Lanius (xXCrookXx, Lvl1Crook, Level1Crook). Lanius’s Heal wasn’t so high-level at the time, so we teamed up to take on Line 1 ⟨Area 2⟩ together, with Lanius focusing on the Stirges (annoying bats that like to fly around willy-nilly, unaffected by Heal…):

While we were there, d33r levelled up to level 57~!:

Later on, when Lanius had a much higher level of Heal, we decided to duo Big Napkins together. But we wanted the real Big Napkin map, which means B3 ⟨Subway Depot⟩. The trouble is, getting to this map requires doing the entire B3 JQ… The B3 JQ is the third of the Kerning City JQs, and is required to complete “Shumi’s Lost Sack of Money”. Unfortunately, this JQ is actually pretty difficult… but we went for it anyways:

After Lanius levelled up, we took a break and hoe’d for the rest of the time left (you can only stay in the map for about ≈98 minutes before you get kicked out). Unfortunately, no Red Whips were found on this day…

Meanwhile, on my vicloc dagger spearwoman d34r, I was doing some APQing. For some reason, this involved new names for my & xXCrookXx’s buff macros:

Now that I’m jr barlog [sic], xXCrookXx has an excuse for his habit of randomly basic-attacking me…

During one APQ with STRginner extraordinaire Taima (deerhunter, Tacgnol, Numidium, Boymoder, Hanyou, Nyanners, pilk), one of our party members disconnected partway through the first stage, thus leaving our APQ doomed to fail. Stage 2 absolutely requires a party of six, so we instead activated plan B…:

1. Q: The prime factorisation of 150 is?

   A: 2 × 3 × 5².

2. Q: What is the smallest 𝑘 for which 150 is 𝑘-smooth?

   A: 5.

3. Q: The sum of 150’s proper divisors is?

   A: 1 + 2 + 3 + 5 + 6 + 10 + 15 + 25 + 30 + 50 + 75 = 222.

4. Q: 150 DEX grants a warrior how much WACC?

   A: 150 × 0.8 = 120.

5. Q: 150 DEX grants a warrior how much AVOID?

   A: 150 × 0.25 = 37.5.

6. Q: Which of NPC Miki’s %-based potions don’t stack to 150 per slot?

   A: Ginseng Root & Ginger Ale (both stack up to 100 per slot). Mapleades stack up to 150 per slot, believe it or not.

7. Q: 150 is often cited as the maximum number of people with whom a single human can maintain stable relationships. In this context, 150 is known as?

   A: Dunbar’s number.

8. Q: 150 CE was how many years ago?

   A: 2022 − 150 = 1872.

9. Q: 150 BCE was how many years ago?

   A: 150 + 2022 − 1 = 2171. There is no year 0.

10. Q: What is the least residue of 31337, modulo 150?

    A: 137.

11. Q: What is the name of the Unicode character with a codepoint value of 150 (decimal)?

    A: Start of guarded area (“start of protected area” is also acceptable).

12. Q: What is the name of the Unicode character with a codepoint value of 150 (hexadecimal)?

    A: Latin capital letter O with double acute.

13. Q: What sequence of two Unicode codepoints becomes the single codepoint U+0150 (hexadecimal) after normalisation?

    A: U+004f (Latin capital letter O), U+030b (combining double acute accent).

14. Q: How is the number 150 spoken in English?

    A: One hundred and fifty (“one hundred fifty” is also acceptable).

15. Q: How is the number 150 spoken in Spanish?

    A: Ciento cinquenta.

16. Q: How is the number 150 spoken in Malay?

    A: Seratus lima puluh (“satu ratus lima puluh” is also acceptable).

17. Q: What is the (Greek-derived) English name for a 150-sided polygon?

    A: Hectopentacontagon (also acceptable: “hecatontapentacontagon”, “hectopentecontagon”, “hecatontapentecontagon”, etc.).

18. Q: An interval of 150 semitones (in 12-TET) is octave-equivalent to which non-compound interval?

    A: Tritone (also acceptable: “augmented fourth”, “diminished fifth”, “doubly augmented third”, etc.).

19. Q: A musical interval of 150 cents is commonly referred to as?

    A: Neutral second.

20. Q: What is the amount of EXP necessary to advance from level 1 to level 150?

    A: 2 681 167 427.

21. Q: An interval of 150 savarts is most closely approximated by what named interval?

    A: Tritone (also acceptable: “augmented fourth”, “diminished fifth”, “doubly augmented third”, etc.).

My Blizzard took up so much room that, in order to share the map, trishaa and Lvl1Crook each took half of the bottom row… During this basket-grinding session, cervine hit level 121~!:

Later, I wanted to do some more of cervine’s fourth-job quests…

In order to unlock Ice Demon, I had to get a Frozen Book of Ice from Blue Kentauruses. Thankfully, I already had one (I’ve had it for so long that I don’t even remember where I got it), so I gave it to Gritto, who ate it. To find a replacement, I had to go around and talk to a bunch of NPCs (including Jeff), asking how exactly to make another legendary artefact such as the Frozen Book of Ice. I found out that there is an Ancient Icy Stone amongst the El Nath Mountains, which can only be shattered by the strongest hammer in all the land. But, some powder from this ancient ice would suffice to make a nice (but perhaps imprecise) replacement for the book that Gritto ate. So I talked to Vogen, hoping that he would know something about hammers. Fortunately for me, he did, but he needed some materials to make such an Orihalcon Hammer:

• A Moon Rock,
• two Orihalcon Plates,
• and 30 Ice Pieces (from GPWs).

I returned to Vogen with the aforementioned items, and Vogen followed through and crafted an Orihalcon Hammer for me. Hammer in hand, I headed back to see Jeff again at Ice Valley II. And Jeff led me to a secret special-sauce map called Ice Valley (notice the lack of numerals in the name)…:

…Within which, I quickly stumbled upon the Ancient Icy Stone of legend:

So, I took a whack at it:

With a bag of Ancient Ice Powder now in my palms, I suddenly felt the urge to foolishly repeat the same mistake that Gritto made. So I gobbled up the powder:

I have to say, it was delicious. And gave me brain freeze. But was also scrumptious. Oh, and it made me learn a new skill??:

Powerful stuff.

Finally, my last remaining quest was for Ifrit, the I/L summon (which deals fire damage). Although it may seem strange that the ice/lightning summon deals fire damage, Alcaster explains the significance of this to us:

Now that I’ve learned the second-job I/L skills, the third-job I/L skills, as well as Blizzard, CL, and Ice Demon, it would seem that I’ve mastered all that there is to possibly learn about the magic of ice & lightning. So what else is there to learn? Alcaster casually suggests that I “just” have a “[C]opernican revolution”. Now, I reckon that having a Copernican-style revolution is more easily said than done — but I’ll give it my best shot.

Actually, Alcaster seemed to have something specific in mind, as he immediately sent me off on a quest to gather some ingredients for an experiment that he wanted to perform. So I headed to Leafre to collect Kentaurus’s Flames from Red Kentauruses:

And to collect some Small Flaming Feathers from Blood Harps:

Note that Small Flaming Feathers do not drop nearly as often as Blood Harp’s Crowns, the other “leftover” ETC that Blood Harps drop.

And finally, I headed to a secret spa in Japan to hunt for Firebomb Flames from Firebombs:

I took these ingredients back to Alcaster, who promptly failed the experiment that he wanted to try. Having now run out of ideas, Alcaster referred me to Hughes the Fuse of the Orbis Tower, who had his own experiment in mind. Again, I needed to collect the ingredients, but this time they seemed to mostly be metals:

• Ten Orihalcon Plates,
• five Adamantium Plates,
• five Mithril Plates,
• and a Soul Pouch.

However, the only person who knew how to make a Soul Pouch was, again, Alcaster. So Alcaster needed ingredients, as well:

• 50 Free Spirits (from MSTs),
• 30 Binding Bridles (from MDTs),
• 50 Evil Spirits (from Dark Klocks),
• and 30 Summoning Rocks.

So I painstakingly farmed up some Free Spirits myself. MSTs only spawn at FPoT1, where they make up only about ⅓ of the map’s population. Yet, MSTs are immune to ice and strong against lightning, whereas the other species on the map (Soul Teddy) is strong against both ice and lightning. So I was F5’ing the whole time…:

Eventually, I did get 50 Free Spirits, so I moved on to FPoT2, which has a similar situation with Dark Klocks only making up about ⅓ of the map’s population. Thankfully, however, both Klocks and Dark Klocks are neutral against ice and lightning. Along the way, I found a Klock card:

…And the 50 Evil Spirits that I needed:

After some running around, I got Hughes all of the ingredients that he needed for his experiment. Thankfully, Hughes’s experiment was successful, so I returned to Alcaster with the good news. However, Alcaster said that there was still one thing missing to complete this new summoning magic: a Fire Soul Rock. Unfortunately, this special rock only drops from Elemental Thanatoses, so I had to figure out how to find some of those. Only Flo, at the Path of Time, knew how to go to this otherworldly elemental plane where the Elemental Thanatoses reside. Flo would take me there, but only if I had an invitation. So I harassed some Gatekeepers, seeking an invitation:

And lo, there it was; the Gatekeeper’s Invitation:

With the invitation in hand, I went to Flo. But actually, I needed just one more thing before Flo would allow me into the elemental plane: another archmage to accompany me. So I enlisted the company of Tacgnol (Taima, deerhunter, Boymoder, Numidium, Hanyou, pilk), the F/P archgishlet. And we ventured into this unknown realm…:

Here, we were made to fight twin Elemental Thanatoses:

Although they may look like identical twins, these two are not totally identical. I easily killed one of them, but I couldn’t seem to deal any damage at all (other than “1”s) to the other — not even with Magic Claw! So Tacgnol had a go at it, thwacking it with her staff:

And with that one also dead, the Fire Soul Rock dropped before me:

And, finally, Alcaster showed me how to put it all together to learn Ifrit:

Unfortunately, actually putting SP into Ifrit requires having level ≥5 Ice Demon, so I’ve no real access to it yet! But soon, hopefully!!

There were surprisingly few deaths from poor Taima, who had to face up toe-to-toe* with Bigfoot the entire time!

And with a similar crew (although with me on my darksterity knight rusa this time), we did some more Rāvaṇas!:

Wowee! A coin pouch~!

And we even fought the Pepper Lattice; but this time, accompanied by dark knight DarkCookie (SolidState, LightCookie)! Now that I didn’t have to provide HB, I took capreolina this time:

On a different occasion, Level1Crook & I went hunting for Headless Horsemans, with me as my daggermit alces:

We had a particularly crowded BFing party with not just me (capreolina) and Level1Crook, but also trishaa, Bipp (Cassandro, Copo, Fino, Sommer, Celim), and shadowban/2sus4u (uayua, tb303):

…During which, we had a bit of a toe moment:

And, finally, on a separate occasion, we were joined by 2sus4u once again for a few trio BFs:

So long, & thx 4 all the toes (& EXP)!

The first time that I tried running JC on my darksterity knight rusa, with cervid there for HS, was a bit of a failure…

cervid fell victim to pet autopot failure, caused by getting 1⧸1’d near the beginning of the fight. So I did the trick of binding Ginseng Root to both auto HP and auto MP, and that has actually worked quite well since then.

Now that xBowtjuhNL, Harlez (VigiI), and I have really gotten the hang of JCing, I’ve noticed that JC seems to be fairly generous with the cards:

While I was training just outside of JC’s lair with Harlez, I finally finished one of the hardest card sets in the game: Golden Giant!!:

And that wasn’t all; the JCs that we did immediately after…

Got me to 5⧸5 on both JC and its clones! That’s three tough sets completed, in one session!!

And, finally, here’s rusa in her INT pj’s, hitting level 151 :P

(Pictured above: deerhunter (Taima, Tacgnol, Numidium, Boymoder, Hanyou, pilk), the vicloc woodswoman; and Macer (Level1Crook, Lvl1Crook, xXCrookXx, Lanius), the vicloc gish cleric.)

I also did some KPQing with vicloc page Mootage (Mootsama, Mootmage). You can see in the image below that I’ve gone back to popping the King Slime (PC)* myself…:

I also came across a wild occurrence of staff-whacker Aphasia (Cortical, Medulla, GishGallop, SussyBaka, CokeZeroPill), who is a noob:

And, who also suggested that we try getting a Pass from every party member during the first stage, so that we could actually clear the PQ without dealing damage to King Slime at all. Normally, the first stage asks for everyone, except for the leader, to collect Coupons from the Ligator (PC)s*, and then to turn in the appropriate number of Coupons in exchange for a Pass. The leader can then only proceed by giving the NPC n − 1 Passes, where n is the size of the party. But there is a well-known trick, often used when someone gets the “STR required to take first-job advancement to warrior” question (thus requiring the collection of 35 Coupons, more than any other question): you can pass the party leader to another person, and have the old party leader collect Coupons instead. The old party leader usually has a different question (as the question is randomly selected for each party member), thus decreasing the overall number of Coupons that need to be collected. If this is possible, then it seems like you could collect “all” n − 1 Passes, but then before clearing the stage, you pass the party leader position, and have the old leader collect & turn in Coupons themselves, thus bringing the total number of Passes up to n.

We tried it, and this does work — you get n Passes total. Of course, that didn’t necessarily mean that we could get to the next stage with an extra Pass. It could be that the NPC checks that you have at least n − 1 Passes, and then confiscates all of the Passes that you have before making the stage clear. But, as it turns out, this is not how it works; it does take n − 1 of your Passes, no matter what. So when we got to the final stage, Aphasia was excited to see that the Passes from this final stage do stack (read: share the same inventory slot) with the ones from the first stage (i.e. they have the same item ID). And this was how we achieved the “good” ending of KPQ, where we peacefully left King Slime alive & unharmed:

In another session, I did some KPQs in a party consisting of me, deerhunter, and a few random folks. This resulted in some confusion when the random folks insisted on referring to deerhunter as simply “deer”. Here, they rolled to see who gets the King Slime’s loot, and then magepig announces that “deer[hunter is the winner of the roll]”:

While I was writing the vicloc guide, I wanted to get some more concrete numbers on how much EXP one gets from a single run of HPQ — along with similar numbers for the various other vicloc PQs. I considered running three clients to do an HPQ or two by myself, but when I mentioned it in alliance chat, uayua (2sus4u, tb303, shadowban) and deerhunter came to the rescue. So, I ran an HPQ with them on my permarogue panolia:

In other PQs, I did some EPQing on my DEX brawler EPQ/LPQ mule sorts. Here, you can see me, Furca (Gruzz) the clawslinger, and Numidium the STR cleric, all attacking BBRG (Big Bad Rock Guy) with an… unusual selection of weaponry:

During these EPQs, I decided to try — for the first time — actually throwing hands at this BBRG, instead of standing back and letting my pew pew do the talking:

This worked well enough. However, it was certainly slower, and furthermore, was a good bit more dangerous and potion-intensive…

Yeahh… it’s a little tough actually seeing anything, what with all the fog/mist in the map, the Dreamy Ghosts (“Himes”), and the flashy skill effects…

I had the privilege of doing two sleepytime tree runs with MM xBowtjuhNL and BM Odyssea, as well as fellow DK DrakeSworD, during which sleepytime tree got extra sleepy for some reason. Because the tree stopped even so much as attempting to harass us, we were forced to @gm for help turning comatime tree into sleepytime tree. So we were paid a visit by GM Nightzy:

xBowtjuhNL was right. It won’t drop anything, anyways.

Later, I did a pair of Targa runs with Harlez, xBowtjuhNL, NL OverEasy, and helm buyer I/L archmage Mater, who joined us for the fight:

I’m still very much at that point where the third body of Targa (and even the third body of Scarlion) are a sweatfest for me, as rusa. Keeping my zerking consistent is nervewracking, made even worse by Targa’s (and to a lesser extent, Scarlion’s) insistence on moving around willy-nilly and casting control-reversal debuffs. But with more levels and more MAXHP, hopefully it will get a bit more relaxing!!

After partially scrolling one of the helms that he looted, Mater decided to give up the last helm that was remaining on the ground. I won the roll and looted it, only to find that it was an INT helm, and a 19 INT one at that…:

R.I.P.

In other Crow news, Harlez & I were so incredibly fortunate as to find a Stonetooth Sword‽:

The stats weren’t amazing (100 WATK, which is one below average), but still an epic find.

Also lurking amongst the area bosses of Japan is Female Boss (perhaps better known as “Anego”*). Now, I’ve never so much as attempted to fight this boss, nor any of the bosses in the “hideout” region of Showa Town. Anego is incredibly tough: although she is “only” level 130, she has 75M HP, 3k WDEF, and is capable of slapping those who come too close for up to ≈19k damage!! Yikes!!! Needless to say, I wasn’t going to be zerking against Anego… but at least her KB is only 1k, so I can still knock back consistently :P

In any case, I had honestly never even been to the hideout in my entire Maple career. I never got nearly powerful enough to believe that I could survive a jaunt in such a place (even the Extra Ds, and so on, were quite scary to me at one point…), so this was my first experience seeing the interior:

I met up with Harlez and xBowtjuhNL, and we fought this Anego to the death:

As it turns out, perhaps the main thrust of fighting Anego is obtaining her comb (although she does also drop wand 30%s and cards, which is nice, I guess) — this special comb is actually worth quite a bit, as it can be used to summon Bodyguard A†.

I also did some Zakking on rusa — Zak and JC are probably my favourite two bosses that I’ve fought thus far. During one such Zak run with some members of the Funk guild (including xBowtjuhNL, shadower Soblet, and of course I/L archmage Nightz), xBowtjuhNL and I were the only ones during the arms stage that were up on the platforms and attacking the highest-positioned arms — everyone else was cleaving the arms from the bottom-centre of Zak’s body. So naturally, it was a race between me and xBowtjuhNL (Ramon) to see who could kill their arms first. With a little help from my friends, I managed to win B)…

Later (alongside NL BeMyRavebae, Harlez, and others), I sold non-AFK zhelms to fighter Sohda, who immediately recognised me, as they are also known as STRginner Duhm! Sohda looted two helms that were unfortunately quite under average, but had quite a resurgence of luck, as the final helm turned out to be 17⧸17⧸𝑥⧸𝑦 !:

In another run with a similar crew (although this time, joined by bishop Screed), we had the misfortune of xBowtjuhNL’s client process crashing at the beginning of the run :(

One of our NLs took this as a sign that they were not going to be finishing the run in time for their obligations, as we were now missing xBowtjuhNL’s damage, as well as the immense additional damage afforded to the NLs — and to a lesser extent, myself & Harlez — by SE. So here we were, desperately trying to finish as a quartet. BeMyRavebae even bought an Onyx Apple (the one (1) that I happened to have in my inventory) from me during the run…:

Then, things took an even worse turn, as Zakum grew wings and flew up to the top-left corner of the map without warning!:

One @gm ticket-filing later, and GM Oolong came to the rescue, repositioning Zak to… well, almost its original position:

Unfortunately, after Oolong left, Zak was back on its old shit, this time suddenly breaking by stopping all attacks…

In the end, this run was just botched — we got our arms EXP, and that was it.

In even more Japanese area boss news, though, Harlez & I managed to find another 100 WATK Stonetooth Sword‽‽:

Now that we have two, we each get one! I have something special in mind for mine…

And along the hallways of the Ninja Castle, we found some Kacchuu Mushas (perhaps better known as “Samu”s‡), who gave us their tasty fragments:

And, slowly but surely, I fill up my Black Crow card set :P

At yet another pair of Zakum runs, I had the pleasure of running with I/L archmage extraordinaire Edann:

OPQ really was good times!! And, on an unrelated note, it’s humbling to see Edann casually hitting upwards of 130k–140k+ lines with Blizzard on Zak arms o_o

And finally, during the second of these two runs, I levelled up to level 152 at the end~!:

:3