rangifer’s diary: pt. lxxxvi

Talk to Amos one too many times, and poof! Sticked!! Eventually, HolyJuice and I were able to put together an APQ party and get on with it, but still… ’Twas embarrassing…

Meanwhile, on my vicloc clericlet d33r, I joined a very special Fitness event! It was very special because it was the actual worst possible Fitness event. With the addition of invincible Stirges to each map, it became effectively impossible to know where your character was, due to all of the people falling down, due to the Stirges’ extreme bullying:

A participant by the name of GenjiDeflect aptly summed up the experience:

Eventually, the GM who hosted the event took mercy upon us and killed all of the Stirges. It was after this point that people started actually finishing the event at all:

I’ve no clue how Holidays managed to do this Fitness in only 11:20, but I also wouldn’t be too surprised if Winterein was the last person to finish… So, no SoS after all of that effort >.<

In other news, I did some sadgrinding at FoG on d34r… And hit da big level 84~!:

My OPQ mule sets is really enjoying the free leech :]

Oh, yes — another GM event. But this time: Ola Ola! I had never done Ola Ola before (that I can remember), but I had Harlez (VigiI) on voice chat explaining to me how it works and trying to give hints. Ola Ola is largely a game of luck. It proceeds in a series of stages, each one larger than the last. Each stage is a JQ map (so no mobility funny business; everyone is stuck at 100% SPEED & 100% JUMP), and furthermore, does not allow jumping. The only things that you can do are walking left & right, and climbing ladders that you are directly beneath/above. Walking left versus walking right, and choosing to climb one ladder rather than another, constitutes choices made to navigate this labyrinth; at the top of each stage is a row of many portals, but only one of those portals leads to the next stage! The rest only lead to the bottom of the current stage, forcing you to start the stage over.

As a result, because the labyrinth is to a great degree randomly determined, Ola Ola ends up being largely a game of luck, as I mentioned before. However, some strategy can be employed: collusion helps in solving the maze more quickly, as getting hints from your fellow conspirators (e.g. “the second-from-the-left portal in stage 2 is fake”) helps narrow down the possibilities. Furthermore, you can use /find to try to track fellow competitors and check whether or not the portal that they just went in is fake.

As you can see, Harlez actually managed to place in the top three, and claim a game cash prize! I was not so fortunate, but with info from her, I finished not so far behind. So I still got an SoS!:

Meh.

d33r also did some HOT VICTORIA ISLAND QUESTING, including the King Clang questline. The first three quests just ask for 50 kills of each of the main three Florina Beach species: Lorang, Clang, and Tortie. Sounds easy, right? Well, maybe not so easy for a vicloc clericlet…

I donned some physical attacking gear and my trusty Sweet Fork Cake, so that I could throw Ilbis at these annoyingly sturdy little crustaceans (and reptiles):

Along the way, I even managed to get one card! Impressive, considering how long it takes me to kill just one of these little shits:

Eventually, after many stars thrown (and a fair number of Magic Claws slashed), I finished the requisite 150 kills…!:

Now it was time for the big finale: actually killing the King Clang. I fully expected this fight to be miserable for d33r, but with a Wizard Potion or two, it wasn’t so bad!:

Get absolutely REKT, King Clang!! >:)))))

As usual, I did even moar APQing on d34r… Including with hermit trishaa (MatchaLattes)! We did one such PQ where everyone was crying about having no “attackers”, so I politely informed them that anyone can be an attacker! Just press the attack button!! So we killed the Grog anyways:

In another run with trishaa, we were being led by Timbaland, who guessed (incorrectly) during the second stage that the combination would be 131 (read: [1, 3, 1]), and sent out a map effect to pre-celebrate:

Ouf.

When vicloc I/L mage Vicloc (Cassandro, Copo, Celim, Sommer, Fino, Gets, Schiller) went to Someone Else’s House to farm some Fairy cards, he was surprised to see a Mushmom actually spawn! He called me to come help kill it, so I got a sweet MM kill out of it B)

…Plus a few more that I found when scanning the other channels :P

d33r continued her EPIC VICLOC QUESTING journey by doing the next quest in Muirhat’s questline: Eliminate the Drakes! I knew that this one was going to be super difficult for d33r, so I waited until I got GM buffs to do this one…:

And again, to my surprise, I actually managed to produce a card, even at the rate that I was killing these things o_o

This quest only requires 50 Ice Drake and 50 Drake kills, but it took up the first 45 or 50 minutes of my GM buff! Still, the EXP is joocy~

Yay!!! :3

And finally, I have a very special announcement to make. After quite literally months of obsessively checking for Fausts every day, I have finally accumulated enough to finish d34r’s shield! And what’s more — it’s perfect!!!!!!!!:

F55555555555555555555555 I AM THE MOST EPICEST @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

The shield pictured above now stands as my single favourite item in all of MapleStory.

To summon the beast, one must first kill this annoying flying robot thingy:

And there it is, in all of its ugly glory!!:

Berga has three bodies; as it transitions from one body to the next, it loses some part of its structure. From body one to body two, it loses its rotary autocannon. From body two to body three, it loses its laser weapon. Although this suggests that its third body may be the weakest, it doesn’t quite pan out that way. Although the first body is definitely the “strongest” in terms of how much punishment it can take, the first body also doesn’t try that hard to kill you (although it definitely still can kill you…). The real punishment comes with the third and final body, where Berga loses its laser weaponry, but gains a new cannon on the front of its body that hits quite hard (≈14k damage to an unarmed & unarmoured target) and stuns. What’s worse, you now have no choice but to dodge the missiles that Berga has been shooting this whole time, because not only do they hit harder now (≈12k damage to an unarmed & unarmoured target), but they seduce you!!! The seduce appears to always be a jump sed is always a left-jump sed (forcing the victim to walk leftwards, jump repeatedly, and do nothing else, not even eat potions/food!), and thus tends to cause PCs to jump at the top-left corner of the map. This is because the attack also knocks back, thus naturally imparting a leftward momentum on the victim, and because the bottom of the map (where you can actually attack Berga) is actually water, so a few jumps yeets you high up into the air:

Berga also has the ability to stun, and even to briefly stun sed! Stun sed is a bit unusual, as it sort of works like other types of seduce, except that you don’t move at all, and it’s invisible as well! That’s right: no seduce icon above your head, and not even a chat message saying “You have been seduced, […]”. Getting stunned or stun sed can be pretty deadly, as it prevents your ability to dodge the falling explosive missiles that do the left-jump sed. Of course, the knockback from the missile attack can be thwarted by For reasons that I only poorly understand, Power Stance which causes the seduce victim to remain in range of Berga’s attacks while they are seduced is a bad idea for the third body of Berga, as it appears to interact dangerously with Berga. Worse is if you get seduced and stunned at the same time…

So, needless to say, I died.

Owie.

We tried again, aided by corsair danicuwu and buccaneer KaLin:

…Aaaand I still died:

As you can see, I died while in the middle of Smokescreen. Obviously, this should not be possible, as Berga cannot damage reflect (DR; although we will see a certain boss that can DR later on…). Rather, this is just a result of Berga cheating and sometimes instakilling players for no reason. What’re ya gonna do. 🤷🏽‍♀️

In any case, for the next run, I decided to keep eating the Onyx Apples that Harlez gave me so that I could pretend to almost be like a normal DK… And I took a look at my raw damage range:

That’s a crisp 3k〜4k range right there! Holy moly!!

And with that, I finally survived a Berga run… 😌

Next time, I got the distinct privilege of dying to the same bug again, but this time alongside Sagie:

However, that one clear I got was enough to continue the questline! So I started on the NTPQ prequests at 2095 Park. While I was there, I finished the very easy Prototype Lord‡ card set!:

And, after a while of grinding here (and some help from Harlez, Sagie, and danicuwu), I managed to nab the Twisted Radar that I needed!:

Now it was time to try the aforementioned NTPQ (Neo Tokyo Party Quest). I had heard about “NTPQ” many times in the past, and always wondered what it was really like. SmallMight (SiriusPlaque) told me that it’s “like PPQ, but for grown-ups”, so I was kinda excited to see it. As it turns out, it’s more like a cross between HPQ (without the planting seeds stage) and ENPQ. It takes place in this strangely pristine and cheery-looking children’s park that has been rather rudely invaded by giant terrifying flying robots with high-tech guns, wherein you must protect Dida & Marr, two small children who are understandably upset by the sudden robot invasion.

This amounts to a neverending swarm of high-powered robots that you have to hack your way through until you finally collect all ten of the Energy Transmitters that drop from the Maverick Bs here:

With all ten transmitters, you can turn them into Dida to clear the PQ:

Besides giving some nifty coins, and giving me a nifty card set or two(!), finishing NTPQ for the first time unlocks the next area of the NT questline: Akihabara (秋葉原).

Akihabara means access to Iruwatas⸸, the monster that drops SSBs!!! But really, I just need their laser guns and one of their transmitters. The NT guide on the MapleLegends forums says that this quest item (the “Eruwater Transmitter”) is actually quite easy to get, and that I should have it before even getting the 300 laser guns…

While I was there hunting Iruwatas with Harlez and Sagie, we found out that a certain spot in the map is a tad bit buggy, trapping PCs who get too close:

The only way to get out is to change channels, or use the FM button, etc. And its prey is not limited to PCs; pets can get stuck too! As my poor Monkey found out the hard way…

R.I.P. Monkey, 2021–2022 😔

As it turned out, I did not get so lucky with the Iruwata Transmitter. I had well over 300 Iruwata Laser Guns before I finally found the damn thing! Luckily for me, Sagie stayed and kept helping me farm even after Harlez had to sleep!:

On the way back to the Akihabara command centre, I noticed something about the 2102 Akihabara map…:

Oh, it is an MRT car that I know all too well. This is the same exact MRT car found in B3 ⟨Subway Depot⟩, B2 ⟨Subway Depot⟩, and B1 ⟨Subway Depot⟩ — the former two being my vicloc clericlet d33r’s favourite places to train :')

In any case, this marked the end of the Dunas¶ prequests. Dunas prequests? More like DONE-ASS PREQUESTS!!!

So I joined a party with Sagie, Harlez, and corsair ToasTea to take on Dunas for the first time!:

Here’s a pretty good shot of what a Dunas fight looks like:

Dunas’s main gimmick is that they’re capable of DRing (damage reflecting). Nominally, this ability does what it says on the tin: if you attack a monster that is DR’d, you don’t damage the monster, but rather get the damage that you would have done to the monster reflected back at yourself. This kills the PC. We will later see why this isn’t an accurate characterisation of DR, but for now it’s good enough. You do get some warning: when Dunas casts DR, they appear to merely be weapon-cancelled at first: all physical attacks deal damage lines that are either “1”s or “MISS”es, but the actual damage reflection isn’t active for another ≈1 second or so. Without this grace period, DR would certainly be unfair; besides the obvious reaction time necessary, it still remains that many attacking animations in the game commit the PC to attacking long after the player has actually given input. In any case, what this effectively amounts to is: “if you start seeing ‘1’s, stop attacking”.

While I was doing my first Dunas run, I was on voice chat with my other three party members. ToasTea instructed me that the purple circular “pop” animation (which ends in a kind of purple crescent, with the crescent’s opening facing upwards) is something that Dunas always does immediately before DRing. This turns out to be correct. However, ToasTea also added that Dunas DRs after every fifth “pop” animation (even counting the pink — i.e. not purple — ones). This turns out to be not so correct…:

In the end, we actually all died. Well, except for Harlez. So we got to watch Harlez solo the rest of Dunas on a live stream:

Eventually, Harlez successfully finished the solo Dunas run! And got the chair!!!!!:

Grats!!

Still, this wasn’t enough to get me a Dunas clear, so we tried again later, but this time as a duo with just me and Harlez:

And I died again. So we went for round two. But it didn’t work out…

There is this weird visual bug where, every time that Dunas does a purple “pop” animation, I see a “1” damage number, even if it’s not actually DRing at all. This turned out to be super confusing and must be some weird client-side thing, because other people don’t report seeing it. In any case, I eventually got used to it and learned to spot DRs more accurately in spite of this dumb bug.

So, on another day, we tried again!

But it didn’t work out… and Harlez had to go to sleep…

But you will notice something: Dunas is already down to like ≈30% HP, right? And I’ve still got three hours left on the clock, right?? So I can just solo it, right???

One major mistake that I made was bringing very few ACPs with me. I forgot to restock, but I probably would have had enough ACPs between me & Harlez (assuming that Harlez had some extras) to finish the run, if we had been duoing the whole time. Alas, while soloing Dunas I very quickly ran out of ACPs and had no way to dispel Darkness when Dunas cast it on me…:

At first, I was not very good at soloing Dunas. I still didn’t quite understand all of Dunas’s animations and how their spells work, so I effectively wasted a lot of DPS by doing other things that aren’t attacking. The first thing that I learned was that the bottom-left corner of the map is essentially a safe spot. This came in handy when I had to take a trip to the little Maplers’ room. Furthermore, you can usually go a bit to the right without getting so close as to be attacked by Dunas, depending on Dunas’s behaviour at the moment — this can shave off a few fractions of a second here and there. So usually, when Dunas was DR’d (or I was Darkness’d lol), I would go towards the bottom left and rebuff there. Then I can sit in my mount until I’m ready to attack, and use the mount’s jump to yeet myself out of the water (yes, the bottom of the map is water) and directly onto the platform that Dunas occupies.

I later learned to avoid getting Darkness’d altogether; when Dunas does their annoying “teleport” thing, you have to be either horizontally further left than, or further right than, the horizontal positions that Dunas starts and ends at when teleporting. Otherwise you get Darkness. Also, for some reason, Dunas is weirdly invincible (or maybe its hitbox is just somewhere else) about half of the time that it teleports. The other half of the time, their hitbox actually follows their visual position as you’d expect. I also learned how to hug Dunas to get invincibility frames and dodge some of Dunas’s other nasty tricks, like the stun-and-knockback, and the dispel. When I did get dispelled, I learned to only re-cast three of my buffs (which is like half of the buffs I that would normally re-cast): HB, Spear Booster, and Power Stance. Notably, I did not re-cast MW, as its cast time is too lengthy to justify. I am basically forfeiting like two attacks just to cast MW (so that it can get DP’d later…).

I also learned that DR appears not to work as naïvely explained. As far as I can tell, when attacking a DR’d Dunas, it does not matter what attacking skill (or non-skill) you use. In particular, it was tempting to me to try to probe Dunas for being DR’d by basic-attacking it. I learned that my basic-attacks against Dunas tend to deal (with ordinary buffs like Cider, MW, etc.) roughly ≈4k at absolute best, meaning that I could easily test Dunas for DR status by giving them a little poke (you could also consider crouch-poking), with very little repercussion if Dunas does happen to be DR’d. It might seem like a weird thing to do, but the fact is that Dunas waits a really long time to actually show the DR icon above their head, so if you’ve just seen a purple “pop” animation, and you haven’t attacked recently, it can be really concerning not to know whether or not Dunas is currently DR’d. The “haven’t attacked recently” part may also seem strange, but fighting Dunas just really sucks hard if you are a melee attacker. I mean, it blows. So when fighting in a party of only melee attackers (like me & Harlez duoing, or me soloing…), it’s not uncommon to have significant periods of time where no one attacks Dunas, even when they aren’t DR’d! But this turns out to be the wrong idea; as far as I can tell, the amount of damage that you take for striking a DR’d Dunas appears to only depend on your raw damage range and some bespoke formula, or something like that. Maybe it’s like, uniformly selecting a value from within your raw damage range, and then multiplying it by some constant? I don’t know. The point is that, unlike what you would naïvely expect, using weaker attacks does not appear to save you when it comes to Dunas’s DR.

In any case, I learned all of these things too slowly, and I took too few ACPs with me. I am confident that with better preparation, I would have killed Dunas myself. In the end, I had even used two or three Onyx Apples, but still to no avail. It was starting to look pretty close for time, as it was hard for me to gauge how long it might take me to kill the rest of Dunas at the now-accelerated rate due to my improved strategy.

And then, it did not matter. Because I accidentally killed myself.

Pictured above: My soul physically leaving my body after 3.5 hours of largely continuous Dunas-fighting. I will never recover. 🪦

Although my soul may no longer inhabit my body, I still trudged on, another day, to fight Dunas alongside Harlez and corsair Dabulator:

Now that we had a ranged attacker in our party, I did my fair share of “fake pinning” (Dunas has a KB of 50k(!!) so actually pinning it is more for like, paladins and stuff…) by Rushing Dunas into the left side of their platform:

And finally, at long last, a Dunas clear!!:

Clearing Dunas unlocks the Nibelung※ prequests, which consists of hunting an apparently very rare quest drop — the Portable Laser Guidance (PLG) — from Mavericks Y. The new area associated with Nibelung is 2102 Old Fox Flagship Deck:

On this map, we can see a more mature Dida, some ≈7 years later, but still the same Dida that we saw at 2095 Park and NTPQ:

Speaking of NTPQ, it was time to go back 7 years to do that PQ some more, until I can get a PLG >.< Below, you can see me NTPQing with Harlez and paladin ItzLeo:

After that, I did just one or two more NTPQs with Harlez, and managed to get the elusive PLG!!!:

I guess it’s time to fight the ol’ Nib now… Tune in next time for more NTing!!!

It was alright though, we had enough Resurrections :P In fact, I levelled to this prehead!!:

Level 164, woo hoo! :3

And we were blessed by the skillbook gods! Horntail drops are very much a feast-or-famine affair, and this one was a feast, with a MW20 and a Gen30!!!:

During another run, our regular (read: not sed) bishop idoybh2, whose first-ever HT run was our previous run, got a sudden “promotion” when sed bishop Flamous’s client unexpectedly crashed:

Apparently, the skillbook gods once again gazed with pity upon our suffering, as we got not a MW20, but a MW40‽‽‽:

F5

And, not to continue picking on Sagie (I love her, I swear), but she did die again as the sed target LMFAO

Two rather strange places to die, I must say. But it seems that Horntail simply requires blood sacrifice in order to give up its hoard:

WTF??? AGAIN?????? 🤑🤑🤑

I did a quick & dirty lil @dpm 10 while hopped up on Energizer, MW20, SE, and SI, and cleaving from the left side:

Not bad for a pretty optimal situation, I guess :P

And not too long after, I hit level 165~!:

Unfortunately, the middle head of this HT was giving us a real hard time, seemingly perma-weapon-cancelling while it had very little health…

😴

I mean, I will give HT some credit: if you’re low on HP and don’t wanna die, repeatedly weapon cancelling is a pretty damn good strategy.

But lo & behold, we were once again(!) rewarded with feast!!:

On another day, we also sold a non-AFK HTP to buccaneer oatmetal of the Chroma guild. Although you can see nothing but a sliver of her HP bar in this image, you can see that she’s in our ranged party so that I can keep her HB’d most of the time:

This run turned out nicely, which is always extra nice when you have a buyer LMFAO. It is rather embarrassing to have buyers watching your scuffed run, or worse, dying/disconnecting because you scuffed too hard 🤦🏽‍♀️

In the next run, buccaneer Yescando was a little too excited to enter the second prehead map, and accidentally found himself as the sed target (instead of shadower Harlez (VigiI), the intended sed target)…:

Luckily, buccaneers ain’t too shabby at being sed targets themselves, and they even get their own version of Dark Sight! Plus, getting sed during preheads isn’t too difficult :P

Oh, and did I mention that we got MW20 AGAIN AGAIN AGAIN???:

I also helped xBowtjuhNL sell some HTPQ! Always good for a quick buck if you have a buyer and are already caved* :P

We sold yet another AFK HTP service, this time to bishop MiguelQc:

Extremely unexpectedly, upon killing the first prehead, the buyer went into the second prehead map, walked to the left, and jumped down, thus triggering the second prehead to spawn:

Deeply unfortunately for everybody involved, not everyone in the expedition had entered the map by that point, including dee (IGN sukker, a bishop) — so the run was kind of botched, as a result. Bizarrely, the buyer immediately left the map by “crystalling out” (asking the Crystal of Roots to send you out to safety) without saying anything, and was unresponsive for some time. This turned out to be very confusing, as we couldn’t be certain whether or not they were intentionally griefing! And if it was an honest mistake, why did they immediately leave without making any communication? Because we were only planning on doing one run anyways, we left this botched run before even advancing to Horntail’s Cave.

In the end, it seemed that it was indeed an honest mistake, and the lack of communication was probably due to a combination of embarrassment and a lack of command over English. We managed to negotiate another run with the buyer, which went much more smoothly! And I even levelled!!:

:D

I’ve been doing a lot of Horntail lately, and in lieu of an explanation for this, here are a few reasons why:

• xBowtjuhNL is addicted to HT (LOL), so I get the chance to run reasonably often by signing up for the Funk (xBowtjuhNL’s guild, as led by Palladino) HT runs.
• Signing up for HT runs means that I don’t have to figure out what to do when I log into MapleLegends :]
• HT is really fun. There’s a lot of coordination and teamwork that has to go into a run — particularly a scuffed one! And although each run does take quite a while and can be tiring, at least you aren’t just doing the same thing for the entire run. Horntail’s multi-part nature means that you have to be attentive and move around a lot, mixing up your strategies to fit the circumstances. Plus, if you get 10 or 12 people together to do a difficult boss, there’s bound to be some chat & voice chat shenanigans c:
• HT is pretty nice EXP (I was getting ≈10% EXP per run at level 165), and when the splits are good, they are real good. As seen above :P
• HT is offensively strong enough that HB becomes a very serious asset. The effects of HP washing are often decried as devaluing skills like HB that form (or would form, as the case may be…) a core part of job identity & party composition. So as a spear(wo)man/DK, it’s nice to do something where people are fighting over you :P