rangifer’s diary: pt. lxxxiv

And after all that & more, I came away with this nifty Cherry Blossom Chair, amongst other things:

In the previous diary entry, I lamented that, despite raffling every single day on my islander ozotoceros, I had yet to raffle anything of note besides a CSS20 that I could maybe use to barter with other islanders. Fortunately for me, my luck turned around! I got the Cherry Blossom Chair on island as well!!:

And what’s more, I got some epic Lunar Gloves!!!:

These Lunar Gloves are essentially perfect, for my purposes. The STR/INT/WDEF don’t really matter for my build, so a “perfect” Lunar Glove for me is any that has 2 DEX and 2 LUK. Lo and behold!!

And with that, d33r was invited to her very first Fitness event. For those not already aware, Fitness is the name of a certain JQ that is often used as the setting for GM-hosted events. In MapleLegends, a Fitness event generally consists of doing this JQ within a certain time limit — 20 minutes, or something like that. Those who complete the JQ within the time limit are awarded with the mystical Scroll of Secrets, which can be turned in via special quests in either Kerning City or Ludibrium, in exchange for a random prize. The top three fastest finishers also get some game cash (special NX that can be used to gift Cash Shop items to other characters), and those who do not finish within the time limit get nothing. I’ve tried the Fitness challenge before, even on vicloc (viz. on my vicloc dagger spearwoman d34r), but I’ve never been able to actually complete it within the time limit.

But I figured, you know, gotta learn how to do it at some point, right? I mean, not really. But I do want that juicy Scroll of Secrets!! So I gave it a go…:

WOWEE I actually finished it for the first time!! I was so proud of myself that, when there was another Fitness event not too much later, I took d33r again and finished that one within the time limit as well!!! Well, let’s see what my first Fitness Scroll of Secrets gives me…:

Ooooh~ A Top LUK 30%…! Very nifty, and very special. Can’t get something like this anywhere else on Victoria Island. Oh, and my other SoS left me with a Shoe JUMP 60%. Although Shoe JUMP 60%s aren’t necessarily special in vicloc (they occur naturally), they are still pretty dang rare, and very valuable. Score!

In other vicloc news, we’ve actually had a recent influx of new viclockers, thanks to the efforts of jung1e (Koph, Plucks) in recruiting Maple Islanders to come try out vicloc! Here I am on d34r, walking back to Henesys from the Henesys Pig Farm, with vicloc permabeginners Reikan (Christopher, wulas) and Koph:

I helped these two out with forming a KPQ party, on my SPQ/KPQ DEX page mule kinds:

And I watched them hit some of the stuff in the final stage…

A noble effort to slay the monarch of all slimes.

And, I joined vicloc woodswoman deerhunter (Taima, pilk, Tacgnol, Hanyou, Boymoder, Nyanners, Naganohara) in hell (a.k.a. tBLI) for some Fire Boar slaying in the name of raffles…

…And in the name of love <3

The lovey-dovey spirit of Valentine’s Day has really gotten to d33r, to the point that she even temporarily transformed into a lovestruck grizzly bear!:

Vicloc I/L gish VigiI (Harlez) managed to raffle a random cat chair thingy, as well as a CSS3*. I took interest when she tried to sell the raffle rewards to other viclockers, and we came to an agreement in which I would take both the chair and the scroll, and in return, VigiI would get a set of some of my most powerful gish-friendly gear:

Unfortunately for me, the CSS3 failed (I used it on my Tangy Earrings). But the chair is really nifty, as I didn’t manage to raffle any chairs for my viclockers during this event!

In other news, I finally found a goddamn Shield STR 60%. It only took me like two or three weeks of hunting Faust every day!!!

And, in the moment of truth, it passed. An upgrade already!:

Hopefully I can finish it up nicely! Or, at least, quickly… 😒

I did some more partly-vicloc KPQs on kinds, but this time with vicloc STRginner illadvised (Permanovice, Bellicose, Battlesage, Dreamscapes, Paean, Hanger)! And also with fellow KPQ mule Ichigatsu (xXCrookXx, Macer, Lanius, Lvl1Crook, Level1Crook)~

I got an Echo on d33r, and decided to take the opportunity to use a basket all by my lonesome. I considered going to somewhere a bit easier to get to, like L1A4, or something like that. But ultimately, I decided to brave the B3 JQ in pursuit of the ultimate training map for me to solo: B3 ⟨Subway Depot⟩. So, I let the suffering commence:

And thankfully, I finished with an entire half of the Echo left!!:

A quick @epm 4 test, and I revealed how truly powerful a solo basket in B3 is for d33r:

Oh, but it gets better. I was invited to grind even moar Wraiths, but this time at L1A4 with fellow vicloc cleric Lanius. When I got there, Shade was up, so I took the opportunity to finish d33r’s Shade set!:

With the set done, I headed to Lanius’s channel to do some duo basket grind:

Indeed, the population of Victoria Islanders has seen quite the bump…:

While I was duoing a basket there at L1A4 with Lanius, I did some @epm tests…

1.2M EPH?? What in the got damn hell??? I thought getting 1.05M EPH when solo basketing at TfoG on d34r was pretty good. But 1.2M EPH at level 60???? Oh, speaking of level 60…:

YAY d33r breaks into the level 60s!! :3 I never thought I’d see the day…

Speaking of solo basket EPH at TfoG on d34r, someone in the guild gave me the idea of having someone to give leech to whilst you basket, in order to activate the HS. This other character in the party doesn’t have to actually do anything — their mere presence in the party, in the same map, in EXP leech level range, is enough to activate the HS. So I tried it out myself…

My OPQ/LMPQ mule sets fit the bill: she’s in level range to leech at TfoG (viz. level ≥54), but she’s just a mule (and isn’t even odd), so I have no issue with giving her leeched EXP.

Yep. That’s higher EPH, alright. Imagine being a perfectly normal outlander assassin with 4 base INT, accepting TfoG leech from an odd-jobbed viclocker! Pitoyable !!

Also on d34r, I managed to find a few specimens of the rare & endangered species known as Faust. And I let illadvised have a go at it:

An impressive showing for a beginner of illadvised’s level, but unfortunately not enough to slay the beast, so I had to do that myself.

Also with illadvised, I duoed a basket on d33r at L2A1:

This was decent EXP for d33r still, although she shreds Jr. Napkins pretty hard at this point. And it was a good opportunity for illadvised to get five Jr. Napkin cards!

With illadvised’s other off-island permabeginner, Permanovice, I duoed TfoG on d34r:

Now this is the real juicy EPH for d34r. And with that, she hit level 83~!:

(That should be “buttocks”, not “burrocks” lol)

Vicloc assassin bak2monke (Babbi) decided to put together a Victoria guild photoshoot at A Hill West of Henesys:

After we got sick of taking photos, we started vomiting uncontrollably (as one does):

And later, I visited wulas and Plucks (the gunslinger and hunter of Reikan and Koph, respectively) and illadvised at Monke Forest, the favourite training spot of ranged viclockers everywhere:

And did something I haven’t done in a long time: some Jrog huntin’…

Jrog is stingy, as usual.

And, finally, bak2monke was so kind as to gift to me the two(!) Shield STR 60%s that they found on their own Faust-hunting journey!!:

And I passed both of them?!?!?!?!?!? YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA~ (Time to fail the rest of the slots in the next few months…)

You may remember that rusa has soloed Levi before, in the context of Boss (Rush) PQ, which is documented in rusa solos BPQ (but not the last stage) [YouTube]. But this time was much easier — rusa has grown a whole lot since then!

In any case, with some Dragon Elixirs on hand, I went to do a pair of HT runs with xBowtjuhNL, Sagie, Harlez (VigiI), Flamous, LunaS2, and others~!:

These runs went pretty well, although the corsair who you see pictured above (BAZ00KA999, a.k.a. 5nortin5peed) — who was our non-AFK HTP buyer — unfortunately died too many times to make it through the run and loot some HTPs.

Besides these perfectly normal HT runs, I also joined some… less reputable runs, for funsies~

Pepega run #1

At the time, the MapleLegends servers were having a pretty rough time of it, as a result of their dedicated host’s suffering (see “Technical difficulties” below). In the midst of all this, it was looking like a pretty dumb idea to do much of anything in MapleLegends that might seriously punish disconnecting from the server, and/or that might suffer significantly from lag spikes. So, you know, a lot (but not all) of the usual stuff that Maplers do. And this of course includes HT!

With all of this going on, a level 200 bishop by the name of helloooo decided to host an HT run anyways. She sent out some smegas advertising a “d/clegends pepega HT run” that was looking for any and all participants. Harlez, xBowtjuhNL, and I all agreed to join, and after a while, we had assembled a crew for a rather inadvisable HT run:

In the image above, it should be noted that in addition to helloooo, we had yet another level 200 bishop by the name of Kiaraaa, and even a third bishop by the name of xBrett (Bretticuss). This rather powerful trio of bishops became relevant when, after not too long of fighting HT itself (the main body fight, after the two preheads), we accidentally triggered mass sed!

For those not familiar with HT mechanics, sed is the common abbreviation of “seduce”, a debuff that forces its victim to relinquish all control of their character (including the ability to eat potions/food — yes, even pet autopot) for its duration, instead blindly walking left, right, or jumping in place. Seduce is a normal occurrence throughout all stages of HT (even the preheads), but is usually limited to only one victim at a time; and that victim is always the live (as in “not dead”) PC who least recently entered the map. This allows an HT expedition to carefully enter each map in an intentional order, so that the first PC to enter becomes the so-called sed mule, as their primary job is to survive being regularly seduced (usually — but not always — this is a shadower, as they are relatively sturdy, but also have extremely high dodge chances against incoming attacks). However, two of HT’s body parts (viz. its left arm and its right arm) are capable of seducing just about everyone* on the map in unison; this is the so-called mass sed (sometimes simply mass). However, each arm is only capable of casting mass sed if its remaining HP is less than 30% of its MAXHP (viz. its HP is <69M). So, the typical strategy is to simply avoid damaging the arms too much until all three heads (and the legs and tail) are dead, so that mass sed poses almost no threat to the HTers’ lives.

When you have a powerful bishop trio spamming Genesis, though, you might accidentally bring the arms’ HP down a bit prematurely…

Oopsies! You can see in the image above that JoeWick specifically calls out the right arm as being the one that cast mass sed. This is significant, as each of HT’s arms is only capable of casting its evil dragon magic when there are one or more PCs within its half of the map (the left half, or right half, respectively). So if the right arm was the one that cast mass sed, the obvious thing to do is to have everyone stay on the left half of the map, and get as much work done there as possible. All the while, also taking care to damage the left arm as little as possible, as it would likely be close to <30% HP as well, if it’s not there already. Plus, if we know that one arm is capable of casting mass sed, then we can look for its little purple-glowy middle finger wagging animation to know when it’s about to mass sed again.

Uh oh. It seemed that we were having trouble determining which one (or both) of the arms was in HP range to mass sed!

After several un-Resurrectable deaths, we managed to simply kill the right arm entirely, so that we could stay on the right half of the map without fear of mass sed. Unfortunately, with the right arm, wings, and right head dead, I had nothing to attack without crossing to the left side!

I later learned (in a future HT) that it’s possible (albeit frustratingly difficult and finicky) to attack the mid head from the right side of the map as a DK. For some reason, Rushing to the leftmost edge of the platform by Rushing the right head (assuming that it’s alive) only seems to work about 10% of the time to get you in position to hit the mid head with Crusher. This defied my intuition that Rush seems to always take you as far as possible before stopping short, in any cases where stopping short is necessary due to the foothold that you’re on terminating (or due to some other obstacle, like a wall). Indeed, it’s possible to position yourself even further to the left on that platform by carefully tapping the left arrow key while in mid-air a few times until you can actually connect with the mid head via Crusher.

In any case, after all was said and done in this scuffed pepega HT run, here were the drops:

Eh, not terrible. An MCP, a Genesis 30, a chair, and a decent number of equips :P

With all of that said, this HT run was easily my favourite HT run that I’ve done so far. Perhaps I’m biased by the fact that I didn’t die, but the thrill of accidentally running into mass sed, and having to deal with it amongst all of the chaos, was super fun LOL

Footnotes for “Pepega run #1”

*I think that, in actuality, only the ten (or fewer, if a total of <10 PCs are in the map) live PCs who least recently entered the map are mass sed targets. So that’s not necessarily everyone (e.g. a 12-Mapler run in which everyone is still alive), although it is everyone in many cases. Any HT experts should feel free to correct me on this one.

Pepega run #2

After the thrill of the first pepega HT run (keep in mind that these are only single runs, not pairs of runs), helloooo organised a sequel the next day. This run was actually basically a normal HT! Despite having helloooo’s extremely powerful Genesis aided by the Meteor Shower of level one-hundred-and-seventy-something F/P archmage MaoMaoTheCat and the Genesis of sukker, we didn’t trigger mass sed early, and the run went as you would expect:

Notice the blue glowing maple leaves on top of each of our heads in the image above. This is actually the buff-receiving animation for the Horntail buff (Horntail Squad : Victory)!

Although I didn’t get this visual bug myself, sukker reported a screenshot of this strange-looking afterimage of a dead Horntail:

As we later found out, MaoMaoTheCat forgot to switch from their Elemental Wand 6 to their Elemental Wand 5 when transitioning from preheads to the full-body fight, so that may have been why mass sed didn’t trigger early…

Pepega run #3

That’s right; there was a sequel to the sequel. For pepega HT run #3, MaoMaoTheCat remembered to switch wands this time, and lo and behold, the mass seduces came forth…

R.I.P. Flamous :(

We were again having a really hard time deciding where to go, or even what arm was casting mass sed, so in search of something to smack, I asked for a decision:

Not helpful. SMH

As the mass seduces continued, more tombstones rained from the skies…:

At this point, only three of us were left standing: me, Harlez, and another shadower by the name of LoveShuffle. So we abandoned our original two-party structure and formed a single party of three:

At this point, it was looking like we could maybe make it if all three of us could stay alive and kill the arms, thus allowing us to Onyx Apple to victory. But it was all over for me when I got 1⧸1’d right after being seduced…

And now you see why I said “sort of” above, when I claimed that I’ve actually managed to consistently survive in Horntail since those first three deaths…

LoveShuffle died as well, leaving Harlez to solo HT all by her lonesome…:

I felt kinda bad for LoveShuffle and paladin LordJudge, as this was only LoveShuffle’s second HT run ever, and it was LordJudge’s first!! Don’t take this as an example of how HT runs usually go!!! LOOL

After a few minutes of watching Harlez valiantly take on Horntail one-on-one, one too many seduce-dispel combos finished Harlez off:

And then there were none.

As usual, I was too surprised by the proposal to remember to take a screenshot of the actual prompt that pops up. But anyways, I said yes!!!

On the weekend, we planned to do our wedding (a premium wedding, of course!) in the cathedral. And I was very pleased to see how many people turned up!:

Among the attendees was GM Nightzy (Nightz), so we were treated with a casual mass down-sed…

This was at Nightzy’s request to “kneel before” the bride and groom, but it ended up sed’ing everyone on the map, so Harlez & I were seduced too…

As the wedding commenced, we were honoured to have Bob as our ringbearer:

And as always, the main feature of the wedding was the wedding vows (note that Nyanners is also Taima):

:')

NOW KITHH~

And, more importantly, VOM~

At this point, Harlez surprised me with an Aluminum Bat… And some Massage Oil……

The Massage Oil was even specially made by Nightzy! A collector’s item!!

In addition to the lewd gifts, Harlez also gave me a bunch of cool dark scrolls!:

At the wedding cake photo op stage, Nightzy spawned the customary marriage Cow for us at the top of the cake. And then someone killed her for absolutely no reason???:

Yeah, for future reference, no cow murder allowed at my weddings!! Hello?? Thank you!!!

And then Nightzy forced us all to eat cake…

For the wedding rewards from our Onyx Chests for Bride and Groom, we both got level 50 ducc toobs! So Joyce (ducklings) was at least there in spirit :')

As a result of one of the congratulatory smegas that were sent out, I met with IGN Deer… Who is of no relation to me and has held the IGN since some time in 2017…

We sat and chatted, but they refused to reveal to me what their main character’s IGN is, although they claim Deer to be “just an alt”.

After the wedding, I used some of my event points to put together a Valentine’s Day look for rusa:

Not bad AHAHAH I can’t figure out if I look cute or look like a goob in this outfit. In any case, the main downside is the fur boa that the dress features. You can’t see it in the image above, as rusa is standing still and holding a PSB. But it’s pretty tacky.

One important thing about this marriage is that Harlez had actually never done APQ in her entire Maple career! So of course I had to show her how fun APQ is!! Here’s rusa in stage 1 of her first APQ:

And here we are, in Harley’s first-ever APQ, breakin’ down the gates of stage 5:

Anyone’s first APQ is a bit confusing at first — just like any PQ, really — but hopefully we will get the opportunity to APQ more in the future ^^

<3