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rangifer’s diary: pt. cxx

BRAND-NEW Questin’ With tara™! (Wow!)

Hokay, I’m bacc.

The first thing that I noticed — apart from all of my fuccing Cash Shop items expiring — was the lightbolb 💡 upon my head. Wiz, the librarian of Helios Tower’s library, recently observed that the book responsible for chronicling the pre-Ellinia experiences of humankind in the Ellin Forest began to glow, & to alter the words on its own pages. Naturally, the first thing that he did in response was call me personally (we have each other on speed dial), so I rushed to the Helios Tower to check it out:

Marty tara! You’ve gotta come back with me! Back to the future past!

The newly-chronicled words say that the mysterious time-traveller — that’s me! — returned to Ellin Forest once again, presumably to do Something Of Great Importance™. Fate goes ever as she must, so I really have no choice — I gotta go back.

I get that Karen’s one & only job is to gatekeep the time machine, but she’s really harshing my vibe here. I don’t care if the time machine is malfunctioning. If it glitches out & I get stuck in some kind of warped time-traveller’s limbo indefinitely, that’s fine. I will just lay down & perish.

After much verbal negotiation & seemingly an eternity’s worth of elevator-riding, I get to use the dang’d machine:

Destonen & Boulder Mountain

Athena Pierce gets right down to business:

Ephenia is the big bad bitch of the forest. And that’s a problem, because Athena is supposed to be the big bad bitch, & there can be only one.

But we’ll get back to that later. First, we need to go way out west to meet with Destonen & offer our assistance.

I’ve talked about Destonen a lot — like a lot — in past diary entries, so I won’t be reiterating that here. I’m just very glad to see Destonen “in the (pixel) flesh” for once.

This place where we’ve met Destonen is inside of Boulder Mountain. If you’re a long-time reader of this diary who has the memory of an elephant (not to be confused with a memory of an elephant), then you might recall that, way back, MapleLegends inadvertently added this map into the game, & I stumbled upon it in the “sorts does the Ellin ring questline” section of pt. liii.

This time, the Violent Primitive Boars that inhabit this cave ain’t quite so scary. Not because the boars themselves were changed — they’re still chunccy bois with lots of HP who hit for ≈2k damage or so — but because I’m playing tara, who’s, like, level five billion or whatever (I can’t remember). And I’m doing this questline with my Maple hubby Lvl1Crook (Level1Crook, xXCrookXx, Macer), who is like level four billion:

Late Pleistocene

Speaking of memories & elephants, one thing that Primitive Boars (Violent or otherwise) & many other species of Ellin Forest have in common with elephants is that they’re well-described as megafauna. Megafauna are exactly what they sound like: mega- “big” + fauna “animals” = big animals. Naturally, this isn’t a well-defined category, as what constitutes “big” varies pretty wildly in this context.

Nevertheless, it’s clear to me that the use of bigger — that is, megafauna — versions of familiar Vicky Island species to populate Ellin Forest is an allusion to real-life megafaunal mass extinctions:

During the Pleistocene [ca. 2.58⁢ Ma 〜 11.7⁢ ka], megafauna were diverse across the globe, with most continental ecosystems exhibiting similar or greater species richness in megafauna as compared to ecosystems in Africa today. During the Late Pleistocene, particularly from around 50⁢ ka onwards, most large mammal species became extinct, including 80% of all mammals greater than 1⁢ t (2 200⁢ lb), while small animals were largely unaffected. This pronouncèdly size-biased extinction is otherwise unprecedented in the geological record.

The exact reasons for most big animals going extinct aren’t abundantly clear. If you know your geochronology, then you know that the Pleistocene was the second-latest epoch, coming before only the very recent Holocene (ca. 11.7⁢ ka 〜 present). These mass extinctions coïncide with the widespread dispersal of anatomically-modern humans out from Africa, as well as with the waning of the Pleistocene — an epoch defined by its glaciation. The above-quoted paragraph ends with: “[…] the relative importance of either factor has been the subject of significant controversy”.

Nevertheless, the chronological coïncidence itself is enough. The correspondence presumably goes something like this: Lūdus Lake & the El Nath Mountains as “Africa”, Ossyria in general as “the Old World”, & the Victorian Archipelago as “the New World”. The arrival of Athena’s crew & passengers in Ellin Forest represents the first spread of humankind to the “New World”, which — after an ill-defined number of years — comes to be widely inhabited by humans, but also hotter (& much drier, in the case of Perion).

Chao!

And the biggest, baddest megafauna of them all is Chao — king of the Primitive Boars:

Believe it or not, this is not just a special quest thingy — it’s a brand-new, fully-fledged boss. The Chao battle can be entered as a single party of any size, has a ten-minute timer(!), & can be entered at most twice daily. Other than that — & the prequests — there are no requirements to duke it out with Chao. That’s pretty friccin’ cool, especially because, being a level 100 boss, Chao is totally doable with a party of some level ≥95 characters. The timer is tight, but you know, hopefully you can find a party of six level 100s. 😃 And the EXP ain’t half bad.

But in addition to the Chao kill & 100 Violent Primitive Boar kills, we also need 100 kills of the not-so-Violent kind:

Okay, nice. Destonen: assisted. Time to head back to camp.

The Fairy Forest

So now we’ve got this letter that Ephenia wrote. I didn’t have the energy to painstakingly transcribe this entire questline like I did for the HP Challenge quests that I’ve done so far, so I’ll maybe do that… later. But I can tell you that the letter is pretty much just Ephenia being a cartoon villain. She admires the “White Mage”’s plan to wipe out the pesky humans, decides that the world really will be a better place without ’em, cackles evilly, etc., etc. All that stuff.

So someone’s gotta be the bearer of bad news, & this time, it’s me:

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Ellin: You again? Look, I can’t spare ANY more time. Did Yuris send you here to ask for fruit?

tarandus: I’m not here because of that. I have something to tell you.

Well, I talked to Athena, & she pretty much just gave me a really serious look & said “you know what to do”. Let me guess: more monster-slaying, but this time they’re fairies?

These fairies — Ancient Fairies — are to be found at the Fairy Forest Entrance, which is accessible through a new ominous-looking dark-purple portal at the centre of Eastern Region of Mossy Tree Forest. They’re even chunccier than the VPBs, being level 104(!) & all that.

World geometry

This is my favourite new map, & indeed, just my favourite map in the entire Ellin Forest region. You can see in the above image that I’m standing on an uneven treebranch adorned with a vine, some leaves, & mosses. Partly because this makes heavy use of recoloured textures from the O.G. Vicky Island maps, there’s a definite “Ellinia” vibe. But what I think is equally important in this case is the geometry: these “uneven treebranches” make up almost the entire walkable space of this rather tall map, which the player may fall down by hopping from haphazard branch to haphazard branch.

To me, it feels like the most interesting map in a region that currently also contains what I like to call “big dumb box” maps. Sure, you could make a map that’s virtually just a box with some monster spawns in it — adorned as always with the beautiful quasi-pixel-art textures so deeply characteristic of MapleStory — but you could also… not do that. To be sure, the textures will make it easy on the eyes, but the physical geometry of a map is what makes it come alive.

Moreover, the “big” in “big dumb box” reflects a tendency that I’ve observed in post-BB versions of MapleStory — & thus also in MapleLegends, with its insistence on backporting maps from such versions — to “upgrade” maps by making them into even bigger, even dumber boxes. This only compounds the problem by exacerbating the boxiness: having absolutely more space makes the emptiness & amorphousness of that space more manifest. Even furthermore, absolutely more space means absolutely more distance to travel, thus encouraging the implementation of intramap portals as a kludge to bypass the map’s actual geometry via ✨⁠magic⁠✨.

Although the Fairy Forest Entrance is a relatively “big” map, it is far from being a “dumb box”. If we look at the maps of Vicky Island, we see that many — if not most — of them are pretty clearly experimental, or at least free-form, in nature. The folx at Wizet in ca. 2001 or whatever were having a lot of fun designing those maps, & it shows. It shows in the clear sense of identity that each map has, & in the sense that each portal — hidden or otherwise — hides behind it some wacky bullshit that you’ve never quite seen before — even if you ultimately decide that the map is more “bullshit” than it is “wacky” or anything else.

The Fairy Forest Entrance has an energy somewhere between The Forest North of Ellinia & the Sleepy Dungeon — & for that, I salute it.

Fairy Forest 2

There are also Fairy Forests 1 & 2, although we didn’t spend much time in the former. The entrance has Ancient Fairies, Fairy Forest 2 has Shining Fairies, & Fairy Forest 1 has both. So it’s easier to just use the monocultural maps.

Shining Fairies are yet tougher, at level 107:

Ephenia

Now that we got all those kills, though, it’s time to really take care of business. By defeating Ephenia, of course. Which will surely be similar to defeating Chao—

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You have:

• Tougher Leather: 40 ⧸ 40
• Chao’s Tusk: 1 ⧸ 1
• Ancient Fairy’s Wings: 42 ⧸ 40
• Shining Fairy’s Wings: 40 ⧸ 40

A maximum of 1 Fairy Heart is possible in this exchange.

How many Fairy Heart would you like to exchange?

Ah. So it’s more like Rāvaṇa, where you have to farm ETC items from the monsters in the area to craft thingies that you use to summon the boss. We’re just gonna skip over the part where Lvl1Crook & I didn’t realise that we were gonna need those ETCs, and so had to go back & farm some more…

One Fairy Heart oughta do the trick for now. It’s worth noting that you can craft Fairy Hearts sans Chao’s Tusks, but it takes like twice as many of the other items, so it’s really not worth it. If you can kill Ephenia, I presume you can kill Chao; so I think the option mostly exists just in case there are larger parties doing Chao than are doing Ephenia. Or something like that. Good to have the option, I guess.

The entrance to Ephenia’s lair is at Fairy Forest 2.

Fifteen minutes on the clock this time. That’s five more than for Chao, but we’ll soon see that the Ephenia fight is a little trickier.

Oh, my eyes. Dear lord, my eyes.

Thankfully, not all of Ephenia’s attacks are quite this visually noisy. But the fight is characterised by a lot of moments where Ephenia goes invisible-&-untargetable, which gets a tad bit annoying. I thought I got footage of this fight, but later realised that I was recording the wrong window, & got a fat 60 seconds of Free Market Entrance footage. Incredible.

Ephenia likes to start out with her seduction, which is a right-walk sed that lasts for something like 5〜6(?) seconds, I think. It seems to have a cooldown of maybe three(?) minutes, & I think the animation is reasonably distinctive: it’s the swirly spiral one.

She can also teleport around, during which she’s untargetable. And of course, she can summon both Ancient & Shining Fairies.

One of her main attacks is a lightning attack (which is probably not actually lightning at all, & is just elementally untyped, if I know Nencnkson^® well enough to judge) that notably stuns for quite a while. The warning looks something like this:

Although this is an easily-recognisable cue that the stun is about to happen, that seems to be… pretty much it.

Lvl1Crook isn’t being literal here; you can dodge the stun, under any of various circumstances. But unlike the stun pillars in the Zaqqūm fight — or comparable attacks in other bosses — the apparent visual indicators (viz. the orbs) don’t seem to have any relation to whether the stun will get you, as far as I can tell — in addition to not giving much time at all to get out of the way. Sometimes I duck clearly well below an orb & still get stunned for three years, and other times I get orb’d right in the face & nothing happens. Who knows.

The final & most dastardly tool in Ephenia’s belt is her damage reduction. You can see in the images above that my damage lines are… not so good. She appears to be “strong against” basically all damage, including magical, physical, elemental, or whatever combination of the above. This is basically like the damage reduction (not to be confused with damage reflexion, a.k.a. DR) of PB’s main body. So basically, she takes a while to whittle down.

But we did it.

Wrapping up

By far the most important end-reward of this questline is Ephenia’s Ring:

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Ephenia’s Ring

One of a kind Item, Untradeable

• Req lev: 105
• Category: ring
• STR: +2
• DEX: +2
• INT: +2
• LUK: +2
• HP: +100
• MP: +100
• Accuracy: +1
• Avoidability: +1
• Number of upgrades available: 3

This ring replaces the ol’ Ellin Savior’s Ring, & it’s a pretty neat upgrade! An extra +1 allstat, and +1 to ACC & AVOID, to boot. It also has three slots, but we’ll get back to that…

The big bad fairy queen is dead, but there are still loose ends to tie up, right? I misread one of Athena’s lines of dialogue & thought that I had to talk to Perzen myself:

Thx for the info.

Mostly I just need to return the Ellin Forest Chronicles (or whatever it’s called, I can’t remember) to the Helios Library, & deliver Destonen’s letter to his daughter. That would be Kyrin, of course:

But that’s not all! Order now, & you too can be stuck in Ellin Forest… forever

Oh, you thought that was it? You thought it was just a questline? Thincc again. Ephenia & Chao are just bosses, & you can run them each twice daily:

For some reason, Ephenia drops bare pCoins — not MCP1s. Given that she seems to drop 0〜3 pCoins per kill, I don’t really see the point of avoiding MCP1s, but maybe it’s just to make splitting slightly easier. pCoins are rather annoyingly undroppable, after all. I think Chao might occasionally drop a pCoin as well, but I’m not sure.

In any case, Ephenia’s most special-sauce drop is not her bare pCoins, not her exotic mage hats, not her Elemental Staves(!), & not even her card; it’s her shards. Those orange-&-purple plectrum-shaped rocks in the above image? They’re pieces of Ephenia’s immortal soul… or something like that.

With five shards & another entire boatload of damnable Fairy wings, you can make an orb — an “Ephenia’s Soul Crystal”, if you will. Each orb is a 15% scroll that only works on her ring, & doesn’t destroy slots when it fails. So the maths work out like this: 5⁢ shards ⋅ 3⁢ slots ∕ 15%⁢ success rate = 100⁢ shards. (That’s an expected value, by the way.) It seems like we tend to get ≈1⁢ shard per person, per Ephenia run, so that’s something like ≈100⁢ runs (successful ones, that is) — plus a metric shitton of Chao’s Tusks, Tougher Leathers, Fairy wings, etc. — to finish a single ring.

So if you like having finished rings, you’re gonna be here a while…

I continued to do some Ellin Forestry with Lvl1Crook, although he was experiencing some internet connectivity issues:

Transcription of the above image

tarandus: try chao?

Lvl1Crook: i might dc
hmmm

tarandus: i can bring a stopper or two
in case u dc lol

Lvl1Crook: okay lol

tarandus: i mean idr how tight the timer is

Lvl1Crook: whatever, it surely cant happen a 5^th time

tarandus: mkay

[system message]: Unable to find ‘lvl1crook’

tarandus: LOL

Ouf.

And so far, I have crafted one (1) orb:

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[system message]: You have gained an item (Ephenia’s Soul Crystal)

tarandus: ok time to fail this orb

[system message]: The scroll lights up, but the item winds up as if nothing happened.

Aaaand we’re back to square one! Alrighty.

My unsolicited opinions

The new Ellin Forest expansion is amazing. The new maps are fantastic, we get new bosses that you don’t have to be sweaty to survive — much less fight — against, & most importantly… new friccing quests!!!

I get the idea that this new game expansion is intended to walk one tightrope with each foot:

• The questline begins at level 95, although it may be considered overall “level ≥105” content insofar as the ring is level 105, & the monsters go up to level 107. This places it pretty squarely in the awkward “hell levels”, “late 3^rd job” — or whatever you wanna call it — phase. Given that the “hell levels” are called that for a reason — particularly the lack of rewarding, or even fun, content at that level range — & the mysterious drying up of all quest content somewhere in the level ≈70s, this is sorely needed.
• The monsters involved (boss or otherwise) are nontrivial enough that even mature 4^th-jobbed PCs will feel keenly the difference between farming Ellin Forest and, say, farming Ellinia. The grind of ring completion will keep even the sweaty Maplers coming back. And hey — there are a few pCoins & useful scrolls to be had, right?

I think this to be pretty commendable, even if I’m not yet sure how good of a job they’ve done. It seems well-done, at first blush. The only potential pitfalls that I (fore)see so far are:

• I really want to see PCs in this ≈95〜119 level range doing the questline themselves. I always dream of MapleStory content being more diversified, so that — to name only a few examples — PQs & quests aren’t just “low-level content”, & bosses aren’t just “high-level content”. In a “low-level” context, this implies full or relatively-full parties — or even expeditions — of “low-level” PCs taking on thoughtful & challenging bosses that test their abilities acquired up to that point, & that test their party compositions as well. Although Ephenia — & to a greater extent, Chao — aren’t necessarily that interesting in terms of testing PC abilities & party composition, what I’m getting at here is that I don’t think it’s happening anyway.

  Instead, I expect (but pray to be proven wrong) that people will simply continue to leech past these levels, or else will only start the questline later on, or else will start it in an appropriate level range, but form a party of two with some far-stronger PC who will virtually “solo” the bosses.

• The chasm between mature 4^th-jobbed PCs & the PCs nominally targeted by this questline is made up of many things, but one of those things is definitely “ability to deal a fuccload of damage”. So the natural tendency is to just make the monsters have a fuccload of HP. Determining HP values is undoubtedly of great importance, but inflated HP values have the potential to turn monsters into little more than annoying sacks of HP.

However, I think that this last concern is actually something that MapleLegends’s implementation does a good job of addressing. Realistically, the problem of HP sacks only arises once you decide that you want to craft Ephenia’s Soul Crystals, or otherwise want to run Ephenia with any regularity. This notably does not include the questline itself, & also doesn’t include half of the bosses (viz. Chao).

Speaking of the bosses, I have come to think of Chao & Ephenia as kinda like “JC, if he was ≈45 levels lower”. Both centre around tight timers similar to JC’s, differing only by 0 & 5 minutes, respectively; both have summons as a major part of the battle; & both like to jump around or otherwise elude the PC’s ability to target them with attacks.

Questline & storyline stuff

This new questline has the advantage of basically being short & sweet. That being said, I like quests (can you tell?), so I wouldn’t mind it being longer, so long as it’s not just padded out with runarounds & half-baked dialogue, or just makes each individual quest more tedious.

Dialogue

Speaking of half-baked dialogue, some of what makes the Ellin questline less-than-compelling is inherited from Nexxhon™’s version. For example, I absolutely adore Destonen, but boy does he act like a complete chump during all his interactions with the PC:

[PC]: I’m from the future, & if you do the thing that you’re about to do, you’ll die.

Destonen: What did you say, random stranger? You’re from the future? That’s crazy.

[PC]: Yeah actuall—

Destonen: Just kidding, I completely believe you for absolutely no reason. So anyway, see ya. Gonna go commit suicide.

And that’s fine. I would never suggest that any of the original be overwritten, unless there were a very compelling & fleshed-out reason for it. On the other hand, I did just read an NPC dialogue box that consisted solely of a lone exclamation mark. Not to be rude, but… what?

I almost always think that NPCs need to have more “C” rather than just having the “NP” part. Because they usually do. But I think I’ve gone over this point multiple times in the context of the HP Challenges, so I’ll just leave it at that.

The initial runaround

Now, I know that whoever wrote this questline is getting a kickback from the Helios Tower elevator industry, but I do have to wonder if the whole initial runaround is strictly necessary. This is a compressed version of a fuller Ellin storyline, & yet the greatest section of it is dedicated to the “Marty! You’ve gotta come back with me! Back to the future!” part.

I do love that Karen is involved, but the PC can just take the book from Wiz at the very first quest, right?

Character involvement

I think that leaving out Tess was probably a good move, even though it leaves his appearance in the old questline unexplained. Tess is basically useless, & even Neggzon^®™ had to contrive a way to effectively erase him from the game without just having him randomly die.

IIRC, Kirston is not mentioned so much as even once throughout either Ellin questline. Moreover, I think there’s generally little or no connexion to ToT in general. I’d wager that even though time-travel is kinda stupid, this is a mist opportunity^[1], because Kirston & Kao both exist as NPCs in MapleLegends, outside of Ellin. Kirston is in the PB fight, & Kao is just the “Amnesiac Temple Keeper” NPC. Perhaps even worse, eliminating Kirston means that neither of two major plot points ever occur: Destonen is never murdered, & neither is Yuris. IIRC, the readable letter ETC item doesn’t make any connexion to Kirston nor to ToT, so maybe that would be a place to put it? Not sure.

The fundamentally important implications

The end of the questline is where its compression most clearly shows. Even someone with no preëxisting knowledge of Ellin Forest whatsoever will probably notice that everything kinda suddenly happens at the end, because you’ve just defeated Ephenia — the main boss — & now all the loose ends have to be tied up real quick. The most important loose end is Kyrin.

Ultimately, what we materially care about is that the Ellin Forest questline has two important implications:

1. The founding of Vicky Island as a place inhabited by humans (including demi-humans like elves, half-elves, or whatever — IDK how it works): Ellin Forest becomes Ellinia (where fairies & humans coëxist), Crawls with Balrog grows up to be Dances with Balrog, Athena is actually quite old (but has elven blood, so she lives longer, or whatever) & led the expedition to Vicky in the first place, and all people & places involved were originally refugees & refugee encampments fleeing from Ossyria.
2. It lays the groundwork for the notably late introduction of pirates, as led by Kyrin. Where did this “Kyrin” woman come from? How did she bring a whole-ass discipline (the playable archetype known as “pirates”) with her? Why would she come specifically to Vicky Island for this purpose? Why does she already know Athena personally? Where’s the rest of her family? Why is she so fucking cool? And so on…

MapleLegends’s version does a serviceable job with (1.), & is indeed very explicit (in case it’s not already obvious, I guess) that Ellin Forest becomes Ellinia. More involvement of other Vicky locales would be nice, but not necessary.

With (2.), not so much. We don’t really get the idea of what happens to either of Kyrin’s parents. Someone who has been reading every NPC dialogue of every quest that involves Kyrin (& presumably writing notes) will be able to piece together that her parents must have disappeared somehow; & in the case of Destonen, he must have disappeared in a way mysterious to both Kyrin and Athena, because otherwise Kyrin wouldn’t have spent all those years looking for his (actually dead) self. We also don’t know what’s up with Tess (he actually doesn’t die) but like I said before, I’m downplaying that part.

The relationship between Kyrin & her parents is, character-wise (as opposed to “worldbuilding-wise”), the single most consequential part of the Ellin Forest questline (& arguably has worldbuilding implications too), but the player gets precious little of the emotional impact. Destonen’s dialogue is honestly chumpier than I expected, brief, & we don’t learn what happens to him — & the situation for Yuris is arguably even worse. We deliver Destonen’s letter to Kyrin, which is good & important, but Destonen says nothing of value about it, Kyrin is vaguely emotional but not really, & we don’t get to read what the letter says. (It’s okay for the letter to not be readable — it would be quite rude for the PC to open it, after all — but I’m just saying it doesn’t help.)

Final stray thoughts

MapleLegends’s version of the Ellin storyline is an awkward mishmash of the “original” & “new” versions (both due to Nicksohn™). In the case of MapleLegends’s “part II” (the level ≥95 questline), I think what happened was that it tried to be the “new” version, but in order to compress the questline, they left out things that Nexxsun^®’s “original” also left out. But, you know, maybe Nehckssawn™ had a good reason or two to go to the trouble of rewriting the damned thing.

(As a final sidenote, it’s funny to me that “oh, well that’s definitely their handwriting, so they really must’ve written it” is the strategy used at least twice in this part II questline to get NPCs to credulously believe something. I didn’t realise MapleStory NPCs were forensic handwriting analysts. LOOL)

Wait a sec… This isn’t Ellin Forest

Let’s take a little break from Ellin, shall we?

How about a little bit of chillaxing with our good friend Rabanana — joined by ✨⁠corsair⁠✨ Gock (Harlez, VigiI)?

Oh, & I duo’d some Bug ’Em Offs with Harlez, where I hit level 166~!!:

Wow. That’s so many levels. I can’t even count that high!

Unfortunately, my levelling up angered the Burger Moth, & its anger was taken out on Harlez:

Welp. What is that? Like ≈75% of third body’s HP remaining? I’ll give it a go.

Oh, right. The Overlords. Imagine being a stinky little boucanier whom’st cannot even use half of their attacks when both feet aren’t firmly planted on the ground. Couldn’t be me.

Eventually, however, I avenged Harlez!:

Once again with Gock & Lvl1Crook, I did a little bit of Bigfeeting…

Classic.

And just to round it all out, how about some J. Seeing…?

We even defeated all the clones (& the real JC, of course), with nearly a minute to spare! So stronmq. 🩵

Footnotes for “BRAND-NEW Questin’ With tara™! (Wow!)”

1. [↑] A little pun for those familiar with Neksaon™’s newest version of the storyline, I guess.

rusa’s turn to take the cool new questline for a spin

But u know yr grrl ʁuzɐ needs that ring too. Just imagine the upgrades… extra maxMP… extra AVOID…! Yummy yum yummers.

So I headed to the top of the Helios Tower with marksman Level1Crook (Lvl1Crook, xXCrookXx, Macer) to travel back in time. Again again. It’s time to help Destonen with those pesky boars in that pesky cave of his…

…Not the least of which being Chao himself.

Easily done.

Level1Crook was a little more worried about Ephenia, since she does have that nasty little sed, & this character is on the much squishier side, being unwasht & all that. But I’ve Haipa Badi & Aian Wil, so we’re good!! 😤

Yeet. Ring acquired: 💍. Maybe I’ll max it eventually…

Marriage of convenience

On my Vicloc dagger spearwoman d34r, I attended the ✨⁠premium⁠✨ wedding of Pood & cowgirl Dakota (MiIf, GiIf, Milfers). Pood & Dakota already knew each other from playing their islanders, & Dakota was mysteriously missing their APQ entrance privileges because someone (👀) deleted their character.

Neither of these two individuals is single, however, so this is strictly a marriage of convenience…

It’s quite the tightrope to walk. Standing close enough to not make it obviously a sham marriage — we wouldn’t want the Amorian Authorities to get suspicious, would we? — but also not so close that anyone gets the wrong idea…

I think they did a good job of it. I may or may not have made it slightly more awkward during the Chapel stage by blurting out “VOWS @@@@@@@@@@@” out of sheer force of habit. 😳

But one thing that we’re all here for is the Onyx Chest prize at the end:

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[system message]: You have lost an item (Onyx Chest)
You have gained an item (Elixir)

d34r: oml i got one (1) Elixir

Dakota: NAUUUR
..

d34r: sobbing

😔

OK, I will be stabbing you now!

And finally, you just know I had to get going on this new Ellin content on my stabby stab artist alces. I started with the VPBs, which proved to be a little difficult to hack through. But I did it.

Naturally, my SW helped immensely, & so did my venom (which is pretty high-level at this point). In fact, my SW was doing a fat 6 000 damage per-monster-per-tick! Because my SW is obvs maxed (read: level 20), it deals

$$\frac{\mathrm{maxHP}}{\left(50-\mathrm{skillLv}\right)}=\frac{\mathrm{maxHP}}{\left(50-20\right)}=\frac{\mathrm{maxHP}}{30}=\mathrm{6 000}$$

damage. It’s thus easy to infer that the $\mathrm{maxHP}$ of each VPB must be $\mathrm{6 000}\cdot 30=\mathrm{180 000}$ = 180k. Whew! Them’s some chunmqy bois indeed!

For comparison, GPWs — which are the exact same level as VPBs — have 60k (≈ 33%). Skelosauruses — which are 14 levels higher than VPBs — have 85k (≈ 47%). Chief Oblivion Guardians (ToT’s toughest non-boss monsters) have 141k (≈ 78%), in spite of being 32(!) levels higher. Their maxHP is more comparable to that of a Maverick V (a non-boss NT monster) at 200k (≈ 111%), which is 44 levels higher!! That being said, they do give pretty good EXP, I think.

At least the normal Primitive Boars are easy. :P

Of course, Chao — or more specifically, Chao’s strict ten-minute timer — was going to be a problem for ya girl alces. So when Gock (Harlez, VigiI) wanted to run Chao & Ephenia (“Chaophenia”, if you will), I asked to do Chao round № 1 on alces. I expected that it might be tight for time, so I offered to Apple… & ended up just Gelting the entire time:

There are some complications.

In the end, we finisht with just 16 seconds to spare!

Wowie. I think Gock claimed to have made some mistakes (forgetting to use WATK buffs or something), but I figure it was probably gonna be somewhat tight anyway. 😅 That’s the JC experience!

Anywho. I’ll get around to the latter half of the questline sooner or later… Ephenia is gonna be rough. But with a bigger party, I think I can do it (& maybe even survive sed whilst I’m at it…)! 🖤