Odd Jobs Community Thread

cervine’s level 120 party!

• Who: My I/L magelet cervine!
• What: cervine’s level 120 & fourth job advancement party!!
• When: 2022-01-30 (Sunday) 01:00 Server Time (ST = UTC = GMT = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time).
• Where: We’ll be starting at The Area of Red Kentaurus.

The party will start once enough people are present:

• I’ll start the party off with a brief prepared speech.
• Then, I’ll kill Red Kentauruses until I hit level 120.
• Then, I’ll start the job advancement process. Everyone can stay in Leafre while I VIP Teleport Rock to El Nath and back.
• I’ll need to kill a Manon and a Griffey to get the Heroic Star and Heroic Pentagon. Feel free to help here — I won’t be very good at fighting these guys, particularly because they will dispel my Magic Guard…
• With the star & pentagon acquired, I will then advance to the honourable rank of I/L archmagelet.
• At this point, I want to do just one of the fourth job skill quests: the Blizzard (https://maplelegends.com/lib/skill?id=2221007) quest. Anyone who wants to help hunt the Cold Heart of a Wolf (https://maplelegends.com/lib/etc?id=4031460) from Lycanthropes (https://maplelegends.com/lib/monster?id=8140000) can head to El Nath at this point, while I VIP Teleport Rock around a bunch of maps and talk to some NPCs. Lycanthropes spawn at Wolf Territories III, IV, and V.
• The party will then be concluded with the luckiest mage ultimate ever cast. ꞉）

Everyone is invited! And if you can’t make it, or you just want to drop by, or send some support via smega, that’s cool too!! <3

 

Thank you!! <3

Nise’s Formula Compilation is where I got my figures. In my essay about islander dodge chances, I wrote (emphasis added):

In the snippet of Nise’s Formula Compilation that you quoted, it states (in the context of non-thieves, which is all we care about as thieves do not exist on Maple Island) “chance to hit must be within 2 - 80%”. Although this is written a bit confusingly, I interpreted this to mean “chance to hit must be within the interval [0.02, 0.80]”. Because getting hit and dodging are complimentary events, this is exactly the same thing as saying “chance to dodge must be within the interval [0.20, 0.98]” — the complement of 0.02 is 1 − 0.02 = 0.98, and the complement of 0.80 is 1 − 0.80 = 0.20. Then, we have to write these in the opposite order, because “[0.98, 0.20]” isn’t a real interval. So we end up with exactly what I said in my essay (which talks about dodge chances, not hit chances): [0.20, 0.98].

 

I was directed by Soblet to this thread: “Maplelegends avoidability formula?”, in which shot gives the correct (well, almost correct; the program has an unrelated bug in how it handles user input) avoidability formula vs. incoming physical attacks. As it turns out, the figures from “Nise’s Formula Compilation” are incorrect (in addition to being poorly written), so I’ve since updated my “Dodging snails, avoiding mushrooms” essay to reflect that the dodge-rate cap for non-thieves is 80%, not 98%.

You can find the relevant commit here: https://codeberg.org/deer/rangifer_diary/commit/fbcee09846fbe75d66fa98f755a71b24bdc7d069 (mirror).

And, you can find the latest version of the essay here: https://codeberg.org/deer/rangifer_...6/README.md#dodging-snails-avoiding-mushrooms (mirror).

 

(You can also read the original diary entry here. If odd-jobbed characters interest you, you should know that Oddjobs is recruiting!!)

rangifer’s diary: pt. lxxx

Welcome to the 80th entry of rangifer’s diary!! Like the previous entry, this is a special entry, albeit for different reasons…

This is… the biggest entry of rangifer’s diary ever, and this took me approximately one æon to complete from start to finish!!!

Getting cervid a new helm

My pure STR bishop cervid has been using the same 13 STR, 31 DEX zhelm since… well… she was about level ≈55. Now, 31 DEX is pretty respectable, and the main reason that I’ve been using the same zhelm for so long is the rather… personal story behind it. That being said, 13 STR is the worst possible STR (discounting the possibility of Chaos Scrolling), so I’ve been wanting a replacement for a while now. The choice is obvious: a Scarlion Hat! Trouble is, I gotta do the Scarga prequests first.

Luckily for me, I already had most of the ETC items necessary for the various quests in this questline. But I still had to do all of the killing, so I headed to the Fantasy Theme Park to whack some Vikerolas:



…And some (Doom’d) Booper Scarlions:



…Some Galloperas (better known as “Gallos”; not to be confused with the Latin/Romance term meaning “rooster”):



And after all of that whacking — quite a bit of whacking, I must say! — it was time to finish things by recovering those little thingumabobs riding on the backs of the Rodeos:



Thankfully, Rodeos are not quite as tough as the other monsters that I’d been fighting, so this didn’t take too long. Plus, the Rodeo map isn’t part of the Fantasy Theme Park region, so I didn’t have to put my graphics settings all the way to the minimum >.<

Just after I had finished up the prequests, I saw a smega from MuscleUncle (*Uncle) announcing the sale of some Scarlion Hats, so I jumped on the opportunity:



Ah, yeah. So, no, I did not get Scarlion Hats and Targa Hats mixed up. The more STR/DEX, the merrier…

I was fortunate enough to come away from this Scarga run with a perfect (i.e. 19/17/x/y main stats) Scarlion Hat (STR). My luck with the helm DEX 60%s (which, I might add, are a bit pricey…) was a bit mixed at first, and eventually it got to the point where I was at 19 STR, 29 DEX, and 1 slot. I just needed to pass the last slot to make this new helm have the same DEX as my old one (and 6 extra STR, of course), but I wasn’t sure if I had the courage to throw a 70% at it. I vented about my predicament to Taima (Boymoder, Hanyou, Nyanners), and eventually decided to channel my inner not-a-coward and throw a damn 70% at it:



Yay!! Getting stronker!!!

Visiting Neo Tokyo for the first time

For those not already familiar, Neo Tokyo is the collective name for a collection of maps found in the far future of Zipangu. The way that the maps are organised is a tad bizarre, and my understanding is that the GMS (Global MapleStory) version of this region went by a different name: Neo City. In fact, Neo City was apparently part of Ossyria*, divorced from Zipangu entirely. Instead of entering Neo City through the Mushroom Shrine, Neo City was entered via Leafre.

In this version (MapleLegends), you can enter Neo Tokyo by completing a quest given by Asia (who can be found tucked away in Kamuna), who weaves an extremely long-winded and largely incoherent tale about… uhm… I don’t know, something about how there’s a book that has the entire history of Zipangu written in it, down to the level of every movement ever made by every person (in Zipangu) in history, except that Asia is somehow not in the book (despite being a resident of Zipangu). And she finds out that because(?) she’s not mentioned in the book, she’s the only one who has the power to change the history written in the book, and to communicate with outsiders. She somehow finds out that Zipangu is going to be ruined by some kind of robot uprising in the distant future, and she’s the only one who can salvage Zipangu’s future by altering the history written in That One Book™. Of course, altering the contents of That One Book™ is tantamount to rewriting history, and that means the usual trouble with time travel and all that mess. So all of this means that you, the adventurer — and outsider who is conveniently not mixed up with all of this destiny book stuff — are tasked with… something. That’s the gist of it. But Asia isn’t convinced that you’re tough enough to handle Neo Tokyo (what with the scary robots and all that), so you have to gather up some ETCs to show that you are indeed capable of fighting big bad guys.

In any case, I’d never been to any version of Neo Tokyo, and I didn’t have those ETCs (certainly not the oil dropped by the big bad Toad). But I was assisted by Gruzz (Furca) and Harlez, plus the Kacchuu Musha fragment that I already had from killing Kacchuu Musha! So, I was able to enter the place we call NT for the first time:



What in the got damn hell, indeed. I’ve never fought monsters quite this annoying, nor have I had the distinct displeasure of being “zombified”!? Now all healing (including from potions) is reduced to half of its usual efficacy??? How am I supposed to be zerked when I’m randomly zombified half of the time? In any case, I talked to the guy in this first map, and did his quests:



Naturally, the quests ask for bespoke quest-only ETCs, so you can’t buy your way out of this nonsense. Also, just like Asia’s dialogue, this Ponicher guy loves to blab on, with endless dialogue boxes. The problem is, this map actually has monsters on it (and they fly, too), so I didn’t get to read any of it. Instead, I just furiously mashed my keyboard to get through the dialogue as quickly as possible, while Gruzz tried to protect my now-defenceless (as you can’t use potions while NPC chatting) body. Eventually, and with a lot of help from Gruzz, I collected all of these bespoke ETC items, and I was brought to the next map in this subregion of NT (which is, by the way, “2100 Odaiba”, i.e. Odaiba in the year 2100 AD):



It is fun (if you can call being in the same map as OverLords and AfterLords “fun”) to romp around in a post-apocalyptic Japanese artificial island, but this is actually where my NT journey ends — just as quickly as it started. At this point, the only way to progress (AFAIK) is to fight a superbig superbad guy (Bergamot or something? I don’t know), so I’m gonna need to come back in like… 30 levels. -_- NT is, after all, the highest-level content in MapleLegends, I think. Except Pink Bean, or something. I’m not really sure.

Spoiler: Footnotes for “Visiting Neo Tokyo for the first time”

*See pt. lxviii of this diary, where I talk about what is included in the massive continent that is Ossyria.

cervine on the home stretch

My I/L magelet cervine has been closing in on level 120, so I’ve been paying special attention to grinding and questing on her. Speaking of questing, in past diary entries, I did some of the Magatia questline (my favourite questline) on cervine. Welp, it’s time to polish that questline off:

Spoiler: cervine on the home stretch~

That’s right. Take that, Homunsculler! Gimme yr blood!! Once I took the Homunsculler Blood to Alcaster, he had me hunt down those other three stones and put them into the Black Magician’s special-sauce trigram.

For the Magic Stone of Trust, I needed to hunt down some D. Roy:



And, lucky for me, I already had a Magic Stone of Honesty from the Homunculi that I’d killed earlier in the questline. So I just had to put the stones into said trigram. Of course, doing so means actually walking to the trigram… through treacherous, unlit jumpquests…



This was not the only time that I fell while trying to get to the Black Magician’s Lab -_-

Okay, there we are: the lab. Just gotta put the stones into the trigram in the correct order…



And huzzah! Magatia is saved!! Again!!! I don’t know why I keep having to save Magatia over and over again, but it’s pretty fun, so I won’t complain.

Anywho, now that I’m done with all the quests that have decent rewards, I guess I’ll head back to CDs…



I did some CD grinding with Taima (Nyanners, Hanyou, Boymoder)*:



Including an incident in which I got to 99.99% EXP and waited for Taima to return (so that I could make another dumb “chicken butt” joke), only to look over a little too late, after Taima had already killed a few CDs and unwittingly levelled me up:



And with not only Taima, but also INTlaw Lvl1Crook (Level1Crook, xXCrookXx, Macer, Lanius, Sangatsu, Ichigatsu):



Level 119!!! So close…

So, I came back to CDs later on, to grind my way to 99.98% EXP. Partway through my sadgrinding session, a mysterious man came along, B>Leech…



So, yeah, I did in fact sell one (1) hour of CDs leech to a stranger, as a level 119 I/L magelet. It truly is a bizarre world that we live in…

Spoiler: Footnotes for “cervine on the home stretch”

*¿Adivina qué? is a literal translation into Spanish of the English guess what?, so don’t take it too seriously. Also, culo is probably a bit more vulgar than the English butt (cf. English ass), but whatever, it means the same thing anyways.

cervine is an archmagelet.

And now, for the moment you’ve all been waiting for…

cervine’s level 120 party!!! You can watch a video of the party (including the speech that I gave) on the Oddjobs YouTube channel!:



(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dLmk0ERy0g)

The music heard in the video is cervine’s Theme [CC BY-SA 4.0+]. You can download a recording of cervine’s Theme here, on my bandcamp page. You can also obtain the score (as a MuseScore 3 file) here. I also talk about cervine’s Theme at length, at the end of this diary entry.

There was also a bit of an afterparty in Pianus’s cave, where Taima (Nyanners, Boymoder, Hanyou), Harlez, Level1Crook (Lvl1Crook, xXCrookXx), and I fought this oversized fishy:



…And were later joined by Gruzz and 2sus4u, at which point everyone decided to beat me up and loot my corpse. Kind of a weird (and, I might add, rude) “congratulations on level 120” present, but alright…



(The three frames making up the image above ended up being stitched together the wrong way for an LTR language; they should be viewed from the right to the left. I can’t be arsed to fix it.)

Well, at least it’s comforting to know that I drop something shiny and valuable-looking when I die…

Getting a Horntail Necklace for cervine

Now that cervine is level 120, it’s time to get her the ultimate magelet item: a Horntail Necklace (HTP)!! Not only does the HTP pack a real punch when it comes to TMA (which is greatly appreciated!), but it also makes a huge addition to the magelet’s already quite high AVOID.

Of course, it’s not quite so easy as “just buying” one. I need a way to get into the Cave of Life (CoL), and a way to sign for the Horntail (HT) expedition. After all, I do have to, you know, actually attend the HT run — even if I’m not doing any of the HT-fighting work. To get into CoL, I need a Dragon Elixir that can turn me into a cornian, so that I can sneak past security. And to sign for the HT expedition, I will need a Certificate of the Dragon Squad (CotDS)! MapleLegends somewhat recently changed both of these things. The Dragon Elixir quest is significantly easier; it doesn’t require finding one of those pesky Manons, nor even the Cornian’s Marrow or the infamous Busted Dagger. I do have to farm some Tough Dragon Skins though:

Spoiler: In pursuit of the ultimate magelet item!!

On the other hand, actually signing up for an HT expedition has an additional barrier now: everyone has to have the CotDS, or they can’t even sign. Fortunately, the CotDS quest (which I had already completed before, on my darksterity knight rusa, just for the heck of it) has been made somewhat easier as well. In particular, you don’t have to do HTPQ (Horntail Party Quest) anymore, which is great. Needing a team of six people inside of CoL just to do HTPQ and scrounge around for those coloured stone thingies was a real pain in the ass. But I still need those pesky certifications, which means killing:

• Papulatus,
• Zakum,
• and Pianus.

Damn, if only I had already started this quest before having my level 120 afterparty…

Well, in order to do the first two, I have some prequests to do. Both Papulatus and Zakum have prequests, and I had yet to do any such prequests. Cortical (SussyBaka, CokeZeroPill) also wanted to do the Papulatus prequests, so I headed to Deep Ludi with Cortical and Taima (Nyanners, Boymoder, Hanyou) to start killing some Buffies:



…And some Lazy Buffies:



Once we had enough Mysterious Powder from the Buffies to satisfy everyone, it was time to head to Lost Time and collect some mysterious ETCs from the MDTs there. In so doing, I found out something very unsavoury about MDTs…:



I AM epic — so there!!

After a sufficient quantity of MDT-themed torture, we headed to Forbidden Time to hunt for pieces of crack from GPWs. I somehow forgot how the Papu prequests work, and mistakenly believed that we had to fight both GPWs and GSVs to get the pieces of crack. We really could have just gone to GSVs, which are weak to lightning and neutral to ice, unlike GPWs, which are neutral to lightning and immune to ice -_-



But we got all of the cracks anyways~



And, finally, those Ludibrium Medals!



And I fought the Papulatus and took its certification!! But that was actually during Taima’s level 120 party, which is covered in a section below this one.

With the Papulatus prequests out of the way, I also had to do the dreaded Zakum prequests. I figured I’d just do ’em in order, and get it out of the way. So that meant hunting for some keys in some randomly annoying chests (And sometimes, randomly annoying rocks) inside of an active volcano:



Excellent! A piece of molten lava rock! I’ll just keep that in my pocket. Sounds safe.

And now, for the part that I truly dread: the Zakum jump quest. Now, at this point, I’ve successfully completed the Zakum jump quest many times, over the course of many characters. So you’d think that I’d be pretty good at it by now. And you know what? By my own standards, I think that I have gotten a lot better at it. And yet, I still dread it every… single… time.

So I’ll spare you the images of me sobbing whilst standing upon a tiny rock inexplicably suspended above a bed of magma and surrounded by countless deadly booby traps. Suffice it to say that I did it. Again. And still yet, Lira refuses to take her smug eyes off of that piece of parchment that she’s holding and acknowledge my achievements!:



Ugh.

I guess I’ll take out my angst on some Miner Zombies. And maybe they’ll give me the gold teefs that I need to complete the final leg of the Zakum prequests:



And, at last, with 30 golden teefies farmed: the Zakum prequests are complete.



Almost immediately after I finished the prequests, I saw a smega from a Zakum expedition who were offering to sell a Zakum certificate (amongst other things), so I decided to buy:



Verdict was the bishop of the party, which otherwise consisted of Matsuri members. I didn’t have an issue with buying the cert, because I know that in order to get the cert to drop, you have to not only “poke” (read: deal >0 total damage to) the boss before it dies, but you also have to be in the same party (the “killing party”) as the character who whited. This is unfortunate for someone like me who wants to get a cert without actually contributing, because Zakum parties are customarily six people… and yet, six is the maximum size of a party.

In any case, I did get the cert, as promised:



Oh, right — and the Pianus cert! I guess it’s time to head back to the afterparty cave. Thankfully, I was assisted by marksman xBowtjuhNL, who helped me by dealing much less pathetic DPM than me…:



And with that, my very own CotDS!!!:



Now with the CotDS and a Dragon Elixir (actually two Dragon Elixirs, as the quest awards two of them now) in hand, I could finally buy an HTP. The question remains of whether I should buy it AFK or not. With cervine’s pitiful MAXHP pool, and even more pitiful MAXMP pool (thanks to being INTless for life), I had to guess that I wouldn’t survive HT’s most powerful attacks. And even more so, Horntail is a big fan of dispelling everyone on the map, which would mean that I have to be quick enough to re-cast my buffs (especially MG) in order to survive. So… yeah, nah. I’m buying AFK.

As it turned out, that AFK HTP run was going to cost me a smol fortune: about 90M mesos. Believe it or not, the same person who sold me that Zakum cert also sold me the AFK HTP!:



(You can see Verdict in the image above, although she’s largely obscured by a single MTK… god, those things are truly ugly as sin.)

Here I am, nearing the end of the run, getting mass seduced~ Wowee~



And I decided to take a screenshot of the drops from the run — looks like they got a MW20!!:



You can also see that exactly two HTPs dropped. I picked up the rightmost one, and it had average INT (7) and average LUK (7), but below average on just about everything else. So, I figured that that was a good excuse to reloot, and dropped it to take the other one instead. The other one turned out to be really good, amazing stats on all counts… except for the INT… which was the minimum possible INT (6):



Ouf. They asked me, as we were leaving the run, for the stats on the HTP. One runner commented that “2 INT is nothing to sweat about”, and Verdict commented that “well, we know what your real main stat is ”. All true, but I can’t help but feel a little betrayed by RNGsus here. I need that damage!! Aaaaa!!! Well, it certainly beats a MoN, so I won’t cry about it.

In any case, time to egg it!:





Still very joocy.

Victoria-Island-locked

It’s time for a little bit of vicloc adventures~ Nearing the end of the X-mas event, I started actually doing some points-grinding on my vicloc dagger spearwoman d34r. After all, she is high enough level to raffle (level ≥70), and having special-sauce event raffle prizes as a viclocker is pretty exciting stuff. At the end of one such points-grinding sesh, I was so close to levelling that I decided to head back to the ol’ TfoG to cap off the level:



Level 78~ Very kewl~

Speaking of X-mas event raffling, I did four such raffles on d34r. And this is what I got:

• Rudolph’s Shiny Nose
• 10 Heartstoppers
• 10 Heartstoppers
• Purple Christmas Sock (2 DEX)

Honestly some really nice pulls! 20 Heartstoppers is insane for vicloc — normally, the most powerful WATK buff is Drake’s Blood* (+8 WATK), not to even mention the AVOID that Heartstoppers give! And the Rudolph’s Shiny Nose, as usual, is completely broken for WACC-starved jobs, with +2 allstat and +50 WACC on average; and d34r is the epitome of WACC-starved… a vicloc dagger warrior!

And on my vicloc clericlet d33r, I decided to do some more napkin murder dungeoneering? For some reason?? d33r already reached her goal level of 54, so you might think she’s retired now… but think again!



Look at that GM boofs EPH!! 603k!!!

And would you look at that: a level up for d33r



As you can see, Santa has some lovely gifts (read: ⚠️ FREE SHIT ⚠️) for viclockers who aren’t on his naughty list (read: viclockers who actually log in!!).

I decided to try killing Wraiths (a.k.a. big napkins), to test out if I have what it takes to train in big napkin murder dungeon. And the results are pretty promising!:



Wait — what’s with that black napkin with a lock on its head? I tried Healing it to death (napkins have a well-known weakness to healing), to find out:



Gee whizz. A card and a stylish cap with the Victoria emblem on it? Pretty neato.

Oops! Accidentally levelled up again…

Spoiler: Footnotes for “Victoria-Island-locked”

*Of course, APQ is available in vicloc, which means Onyx Apples. But we’ve always had a rule (rule 10) that prohibits the use of Onyx Apples (and Victoria’s Amorian Baskets) that originate from APQs that aren’t all-vicloc. So… yeah, we might still have to “lovingly ignore” that rule if we ever hope to do a vicloc SPQ >.<

The marriage of tb303 & Cassandro

I was honoured to attend the wedding of two odd priests: gish priest tb303 (2sus4u, shadowban) and claw priestlet Cassandro (Copo, Bipp, Celim, Fino, Sommer)!



During which, tb303 had to come to terms with the fact that she’d just married a snail:



Scandalous.

To help assuage tb303’s newfound gastropodophobia, we decorated the wedding cake real nice-like:



Admittedly, the snail thing made it a bit awkward. But, you know, snails gotta farm them apples too, right…?

Scarlion & Targa, sittin’ in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G

I did a whole bunch of Scarlion and Targa runs on my darksterity knight rusa, alongside xBowtjuhNL and Harlez, amongst others. I may have had a rocky start when it comes to Scarga (I was super tired and died during my first two Scarlion run attempts…), but I had more luck avenging myself during later runs.

I did a Scarlion run with Gruzz (Furca) and ToasTea, during which we were visited by GA Nightzy:

Spoiler: Scarga

During which, I got my first Scarlion card



I had my first-ever encounter with Targa, alongside #mpqcrew. I was told that Targa is a lot more annoying and deadly than Scarlion, so I had to be sure to stay alive to keep everyone HB’d…



As it turns out, Targa is indeed far more annoying than Scarlion. As with Scarlion, the first two bodies can barely do any damage. But the third body hits just about as hard as the third body of Scarlion, but hits more frequently. And it does these insane animations where its hitbox gets yeeted across the map:



And it can cast control reversal (the debuff with the greenish chomping skull icon with the whirling eyeballs that makes your arrow keys’ effects reversed). And… it sux. Strictly speaking, I don’t think that Targa is actually capable of more per-hit damage than Scarlion is (if it is, the difference is minute), but its deadliness (and annoyingness) comes from its much more aggressive behaviour.



Worse yet, the items that Targa drops are generally a bit worse than those dropped by Scarlion. Except that Targa has something special: Targa Hats! Targa Hats (INT) are important for mages, because they have two more INT than zhelms on average, but the same number of slots. And Targa Hats (LUK) can be useful too, although they are probably the most marginal out of the four types of Scarga hats (including Scarlion Hats (STR) and Scarlion Hats (DEX)). This is because non-odd mages are the only non-odd jobs that use LUK as a secondary stat, and yet, many such mages opt to eschew LUK entirely (“LUKless”). The emphasis on secondary stats is important, because of the existence of Maple Warrior (MW), which grants additional STR/DEX/INT/LUK to the PC based on their base stats, thus encouraging the player to optimise for their secondary stats on their equipment, so that they can spend more AP on their primary stat(s). Nevertheless, Targa Hats (LUK) can still be optimal for:

• INT-based mages who wear equipment that requires some nontrivial amount of LUK,
• Thieves that are pure LUK or close to pure LUK (see especially: permarogues),
• Claw-wielding non-thieves, e.g. besinners,
• Certain varieties of LUKless thieves, when wielding a claw or a dagger.

And, they’re certainly not bad at all for ordinary thieves, either.



We did another Targa run. But this time, we were doing Targa for the only reason that really makes sense (other than to try it for the first time): selling the hats! Given that Targa gives the same amount of EXP as Scarlion, and that it has somewhat worse drops, and that it’s considerably more difficult/annoying to fight, and that it drains more of your potions and time, and that it drops Targa Hats (INT) — INT being the most valuable out of the four main stats — it’s no wonder that buying Targa Hat service on the market is significantly more expensive than buying Scarlion Hat service.

This time, we were joined by nightlord BeMyRavebae:



As I mentioned before, Targa isn’t really capable of higher per-hit damage than Scarlion, but it does behave much more aggressively. This makes it a lot harder for me to zerk against the third body of Targa (compared to the third body of Scarlion): whereas I can, at this point, zerk probably ≈90%–95% of the time against the third body of Scarlion, I probably can do like ≈30%–40% at absolute best against Targa. And even then, that’s pushing it (a.k.a. a deathwish).

Here, you can see our half-naked buyer looting some hats:



And I did some more fun Scar runs, with Odyssea and Gruzz:



And with xBowtjuhNL’s guildies Kiarath and doujiang:



As you can see in the image above, I did a @dpm 25 to capture exactly how much I was actually contributing, damage-wise, to the fight. Note that the “Total Damage” is what we’re looking at here — the “Damage Per Hour” and “Damage Per Minute” are spurious, as I wasn’t actually fighting for the entire duration of the capture. Looking at how much HP Scarlion has:

• 60M in first body +
• 90M in second body +
• 150M in third body

…is 300M HP total. That means that I did one damage out of roughly every ≈11.3 damage dealt to the beast (ignoring healing, which is very slow for Scarlion anyways). That’s obviously less damage than you would expect if we were all contributing an equal amount of average DPM; in the ideal case, I would be dealing one damage out of every 5 damage dealt to the beastie, as we were a party of five. So, in the end, I dealt a factor of roughly ≈2.267 less than the ideal case. That’s honestly not even bad!! Obviously, I don’t expect to be keeping up with my party members — who are not-so-odd-jobbed, and also higher level than me — in terms of sheer DPM. That being said, this is somewhat optimistic, as I did have SE and SI the entire time…

And, finally, I had the interesting experience of participating in a Scarga (Scarlion + Targa) run with the same crew, during which we summoned both of these terrifyingly adorable doll-bosses at about the same time:





During which, I died, because I’m bad:



Fortunately, someone had their bishop tagging along, so they were able to Resurrect me. And we got Targa Hat buyer Mater the hats that he was promised:

Pqrti qvqsts

I did some KPQing, on my DEX page KPQ/SPQ mule kinds, with some interesting characters. Below, you can see me battling King Slime alongside LvXV (Copo, Bipp, Cassandro, Sommer, Fino, Celim) — a “perma-level-15” archer who retains the same equipment & skills of a level 15 archer, for life — and Furca (Gruzz), a claw pirate (and later, clawslinger)!:



And also with HP page AychPea:



And later, I did some LPQs on my DEX brawler LPQ mule sorts with Furca, STR cleric Godswood, and fellow LPQ mule Sangatsu (Lvl1Crook, Level1Crook, xXCrookXx, Ichigatsu, Macer, Lanius). During which, clawslinger Furca attempted to recreate “rangifer is ranged” [YouTube] during stage 7…



Here, you can see all of us, fighting the nipple whale:



Later, we even did some EPQs, joined by swashbuckler Sommer and again by Furca and AychPea:



Here, we can see a particularly chaotic snapshot of one fight that we had against BBRG (Big Bad Rock Guy):



Later, when AychPea left, it was down to just me (a DEX brawler), Sommer (a swashbuckler), and Furca (a clawslinger)…:



And later, we were instead joined again by STR cleric Godswood:



As you can see above, I’m either getting shot directly in the eye by BBRG, or I’m about to laser-eye the shit out of BBRG. I guess we’ll never know.

And, finally, I did some PPQs on my permarogue panolia, with steelwoman permawarrior Nyanners (Taima, Boymoder, Hanyou, deerhunter, Tacgnol):



During which, I got a Lord Pirate Chair! For my islander, ozotoceros!! Hooray for chairs that are also Cash Shop items…!

Helping Taima farm Leafre ETCs for the Silver Mane

As STRginner Taima was nearing level 120(!), I asked her if she planned on doing the Silver Mane (level 120 mount) quest, or if she’d already done it. She hadn’t thought about it before, but naturally, it’s a worthwhile investment. It is quite the investment:

• 400 Wooden Shoulder Pads,
• 400 Skull Shoulder Pads,
• 600 Rexton Leathers,
• and 50M mesos!

But, as a permabeginner, this is as close as it gets to 4th job advancement — plus, the Silver Mane is damn fast! So I set out to help Taima collect the necessary ETC items. First, on my woodswoman capreolina:



Then, remembering that I had to do the Dragon Elixir quest anyways, on my I/L archmagelet cervine:



This didn’t last very long — as you can see in the image above, I wasn’t actually knocking out very much of the Cornians’ HP pools per Blizzard, and casting Blizzard is quite expensive when you have like 7.3k MAXMP! Plus, I realised that, as mentioned previously, the Dragon Elixir quest doesn’t require Cornian’s Marrow/Busted Dagger anymore…

So I logged onto my darksterity knight rusa to cheaply dispatch the Cornians:



After we collected all 1.4k(!) ETCs, and after Taima hit level 120 during her 120 party (see below), we found out that the Silver Mane quest is unavailable to beginners -____- #silvermaneforginners

woosa~

I decided to do a little card-hunting on my darksterity knight rusa, finishing off the last easy Victoria Island set and moving on to the Orbis Tower. The last remaining Vic Island one was the humble Dark Axe Stump:

Spoiler: woosers

And I had already done some Orbis Tower cards, so I finished off the Ice Sentinel set:



…And the Fire Sentinel set:



Did the Leatty set:



…And the Dark Leatty set!:



…And then stopped there. Because I realised that I still benefited more from grinding EXP (at bosses, or at ye olde 7F) than from getting Monster Book Ring tiers, which kinda killed my motivation. But I will have to grind out those tiers at some point!

In other news, I made a new cape!:



This cape is an improvement on my old Crimsonheart Cloak, which was essentially the same, but with 17 STR instead. This cape is not just for rusa, though; I also use it on my daggermit alces.

I still had like five V-day baskets left sitting on various characters, including rusa, so I made a plan to use one with I/L archmage Gruzz (Furca). Unfortunately, my grinding spot of choice is 7F, whereas Gruzz’s would be more like Petris. But Gruzz decided that 7F was the more balanced choice, so away we went:



38.6M EPH! S H E E S H . That one hour of basket was enough to get me just over ⅓ of a level!!

Later, I finished off that level by doing some 7F duoing with shadower Harlez, where I was able to put up some very impressive EPH numbers even without HS!:



And, I finished off the next level also at 7F, but this time just sadgrinding:



I promise rusa doesn’t just get all of her EXP from 7F, though. Here she is, testing her damage range with an Unripe Apple during a Zakum run:



2340〜3207! Spicy!!

And… again… I finished off another level by sadgrinding at 7F:



But then, I had the distinct privilege of doing some 7F duo with a hero by the name of Hidesake, who brought an HS mule along:



Yeah… 44.2M EPH… who knows if I’ll ever see an EPH number larger than that LOL

To finish off this level, I painstakingly tried to whack 7F mobs with a Red Umbrella while wearing my INT pyjamas:



Harlez and xBowtjuhNL were already trying to recruit me for Jiaoceng, so I was getting a little impatient — thankfully, Gruzz came along and helped me get that last 0.005%:



And, finally, I levelled up again — but this time, while sadsadgrinding at CDs…:



Levelling up with INT pyjamas equipped is a lil easier at CDs. Speaking of CDs…

Back on the TP101 grind

I did a lil bit of CD grinding on my I/L archmagelet cervine, alongside Lvl1Crook (Level1Crook, xXCrookXx, Sangatsu, Ichigatsu, Macer, Lanius) and Taima (Nyanners, Boymoder, Hanyou)…:

Spoiler: Taiwanese shopping mall hell

So yeah, Blizzard is pretty broken at CDs! Mine not so much, since I can’t even consistently 1-shot the damn things, but still!!

In other news, my daggermit alces is still at it with the bunny child murder!!:



I started doing some KM grinding with DEX WK (a.k.a. “sex WK”) Hanyou, and we were briefly joined by INTlaw Lvl1Crook:



And after a lot of bunny-child slaying with my new DEX warrior friend, I hit level 106~!:



I did some CD grinding on my swashbuckler hydropotina, as well. Here I am at CDs, with Taima and LoneWolf1600:



And there’s level 93!!:



I even did CD grinding on my pure STR bishop cervid, and not even the sadsadgrind kind!:



While we were there, Taima switched over to her STRmit Boymoder to grind some more CDs, and also to show off some fancy level 1 SM~!:



These shadowy mesos lie in wait, to be used for boss-shredding one day…

And, once everyone fled the scene, I was left to do some sadsadgrinding with these same CDs… and level up cervid to 129~!!:



Again with the hoarded V-day baskets: I decided to finally use hydropotina’s, alongside Lvl1Crook, who was nice enough to grind out my basket without the benefit of HS:



After some ¾ or so of my basket was elapsed, Boymoder also came to CDs with us, and used her own basket. So I kept grinding with her to finish off her basket as well, and ended up getting very close to levelling. Boymoder was hiding in the Cash Shop to save the rest of her basket while she was AFK for a bit, so I decided to finish off my level before she came back. That way, I didn’t have to fiddle around with INT pyjamas and all that while Boymoder was trying to use a basket. I got all of my PJs all nice and ready, and went to KMs to finish the level off solo. As I was close to levelling, I decided to kill just one more KM before switching to my PJs, so I did a basic-attack with my spear… and it levelled me >w<

武林妖僧

Spoiler: 武林妖僧

I had the distinct privilege of doing my first-ever Jiaoceng (武林妖僧) runs — on my darksterity knight, rusa! Back in pt. lxviii of this diary, I did what was technically my actual first-ever Jiaoceng run. But it wasn’t a real run; we were just goofing around and wanted to see what JC’s lair was like. This time, I was joined (many levels later) by shadower Harlez, marksman xBowtjuhNL, I/L archmage Gruzz (Furca), and shadower Bipp (Copo, Cassandro, Sommer, Celim, Fino):



And, between the five of us, we killed JC in less than 6.5 minutes!!:



Huzzah!

As it turns out, Jiaoceng isn’t actually so bad for me, from a… zerking-and-also-not-dying-and-also-not-passing-out-from-exhaustion standpoint. Passing out from exhaustion is somewhat less likely, given that Jiaoceng is defined by the very tight 10-minute timer. Actually having to kill the guy in less than 10 minutes is what makes Jiaoceng so challenging. And although JC is capable of something around the ≈8k damage range per attack, he doesn’t actually manage to hit me with such attacks all that often; some of the attacks do considerably less damage, and my avoidability is enough to dodge a decent number of the attacks entirely, as well. So I can actually maintain a zerk for about ≈98% or so of the time that I’m fighting, which I’m quite satisfied with.

Later, we tried the same thing, but with a reduced party: just me, Harlez, and xBowtjuhNL. I snuck probably half a dozen Heartstoppers in my mouth during the first run, and nearly as many the second run, and we were just so close:



(The above screenshot is courtesy of xBowtjuhNL; I couldn’t capture one in time.)

SO close. v_v

I did another trio with Harlez and axe hero 5nortin5peed, in which we barely squeezed through one run! The image that you see below has been edited to crank up the brightness and contrast to ridiculously high levels in comparison to the original image, which was taken as the screen was fading to black as we got kicked out of JC’s lair.



If you look closely, you can see that the only thing that JC dropped was a single Elixir… so I guess we weren’t missing out on anything by finishing so late. In our other run, we unfortunately had no chance of making it, due to the untimely death of 5nortin5peed…:



R.I.P.

In more optimistic news, I did some quartet runs with Gruzz, Harlez, and xBowtjuhNL, which allowed us to finish with plenty of time to spare, thanks to Gruzz’s extra DPM!:

Getting some EXP w/ capre~

I haven’t been doing much, if any, CDs grinding on my woodsmaster capreolina. Once I grinded my last CD and hit the big 120, I kinda said “peace out cya laters” to compact discs. But as capre inches closer to the big 135, it’s time to get back on that grind again. As many readers will know, the big 135 is “big” because it’s the lowest level at which a fledgling archer may competently SE in the general direction of everyone’s favourite crumbly rock villain. At level 135, capre will acquire the power to make people regret smega’ing “R>SE” by showing up to Zak with max SE and a whole lot of STR. Is this a noble goal to aspire to? Maybe. Do I at least like crumbly rock villain guy? Yes, it’s my favourite boss. Will people stop asking me “135 when?” if I get to level 135? Yes. Do I really just want to level up so that I can put more SP into Hurricane because it’s a funny skill and literally goes “brrrrr”? Also yes.

In any case, I’m still leaving CDs behind. Now that I have Big Crits™ (read: SE), I think I’m ready to repeatedly & tirelessly whack a different, more powerful breed of monster: Galloperas (Gallos)! Sniper Level1Crook (Lvl1Crook, xXCrookXx) had already planned to grind alongside capreolina once my I/L magelet cervine made it to the honourable ranking of archmagelet. So the time is now, and the SE is making Level1Crook’s damage even more impossibly high:



Unfortunately I didn’t get any screenshots of Level1Crook goofing off with an Onyx Apple while enjoying capre’s SE. It was galling to see someone 20 levels below me do 60k damage with a single Strafe…

After some Gallopera-slaying, capreolina has broken into the 13X levels!!:



Now that capre is level ≥130, she has finally maxed SE. By coincidence — well, only partially coincidence, as channel 6 FM 9 (6-9) is the HQ for the entire Suboptimal/Dream meta-alliance, so we tend to be in channel 6 most of the time — some of the folks from the Dream alliance headed to our Gallos map for a different reason: to fight Scarlion! As it just so happened, they were looking for an archer to SE them… and I had just maxed SE! Of course, capre is still not technically high enough level to to Scarlion/Targa yet: the third and final body of these bosses is level 140 (similar to Zakum or Krexel), so you have to be level ≥135 to get EXP normally. That being said, the first two bodies are lower in level, and in any case, I was excited to try out a Scarlion run for the first time on capre! So I obliged:



It was pretty cool! And I actually got decent EXP — somewhere around ≈4%, I think? I’d definitely do it again, and the Dream folks were grateful for my SE

Taima’s level 120 party!!!

I was honoured to attend the epic level 120 party of my good friend and Maple wife Taima (Nyanners, Hanyou, Boymoder, Tacgnol, deerhunter, Numidium, Gambolpuddy, Naganohara, Spagonia, Inugami), the STRginner!!! Taima has been an extremely important person and good friend of mine since almost as long as Oddjobs has been a public guild (see: “cervid × Taima” [YouTube]), and she is as “legitginner” as it gets!! For her big level 120 party, we headed to the Whirlpool of Time to watch Taima level up to a Timer kill. The use of time, timer, etc. here is a pun on the pronunciation of Taima (/ˈtaɪmə/) vs. Timer (virtually /ˈtaɪməɹ/, but non-rhotically /ˈtaɪmə/ in the absence of a linking R) in English. For the occasion of the party, Taima put together a collection of screenshots of herself throughout the ages, from level 0 (literally character creation) onwards! At the end, there are some photos of her freshly-opened Global MapleStory iTCG cards! Fancy!! You can find the images at TaimaStory (archived).

Here’s Taima, at the Whirlpool of Taima, killing Taima and levelling up to level 120~!!!!:



Once she hit level 120, it was time to fulfil her destiny as a true pigginner~:



For the occasion (as level 120 is the minimum level to get EXP normally from Papulatus), and because we were nearby anyways, we did two Papu runs to celebrate!:





While we were waiting to do a second run, we made an inexplicable bench stack and started uncontrollably vomiting:



And although it was quite early in the morning, OmokTeacher (Slime, Thinks) was able to make it in time for the second run~:



As a corollary, I was able to get my Papu cert for my I/L archmagelet cervine :3

Congratulations again to Taima on the big 120~ Your legendary journey & determination is an inspiration!!

Bosslike

Speaking of Taima, I’ve started doing somewhat regular bossing with Taima and Level1Crook (Lvl1Crook, xXCrookXx), each weekend around the scheduled time(s). Here we are, fighting Rāvaṇa (with me on my darksterity knight rusa)!:

Spoiler: Matando jefes

A single Rav run tends to run for roughly ≈25 minutes, so when we get some nifty loot, we really earned it



Unfortunately, although I have opened quite a few MP1s (Mysterious Pouches 1), I have yet to receive more than one Prestigious Coin from the same pouch… -_-

We were joined by STRginner Cortical for one run:



(It’s hard to really see Cortical in the above image, but at least you can see the cape balloon with sharp teeth.)

Here’s a screenshot of Ravana dying during another run that I did as a trio (if you look closely, you can spot a Vifennis and a Devil’s Sunrise in flight):



After this run, we did another — and we were still thirsty for more, so we went and did Papu as well!:



During another regularly-scheduled event (the low-level/area bosses event), I joined forces with permapirate Copo (Cassandro, Bipp, Sommer, Celim, Fino) and Cortical to fight some Headless Horsemen, as my fresh new I/L archmagelet cervine~:



Look at that CL go!!





Ahhh… Another headless caballero and his fuchsia mare, vanquished!

I’ve also been doing Capt. Lats with Taima, on my pure STR bishop cervid — below, you can see a screenshot from one such run, for which we were joined by Cortical:



I noticed that every time that I go to Resurrect someone, it’s usually too nervewracking for me to remember (or consider) to take a screenshot. It’s very easy to screw up Resurrections, as the resurrected(s) are often in a position to die immediately after being brought back to the realm of the living. But I remembered this time, during a Capt. Lat duo with Taima:



During the same session, we went to do the repeatables for Capt. Latanica (i.e. the White Essence quest), and I happened to have my INT gear on hand. So partway through the quest, I decided to try using my INT gear for shits & giggles. Behold, the fabled deergenesis:



Not bad at all!! The damage looks impressive thanks to Slimys being weak to holy, and I actually was getting a roughly ≈80% hit rate against them! We went to GS6 to kill Mr. Anchors, and I tried my Genesis there. Not so impressive; probably more like ≈40% hit rate…

Although my woodsmaster capreolina has had her T10 ring for a while now, I was still pleased to finish her Papu set…



…And even more pleased to get a Papulatus chair for cervid!:



I kind of refuse to fight Papu on cervid, after a traumatising experience of getting instakilled by a dispel (DP) at the same time as a touch attack… Papulatus just wasn’t made for melee mages, who rely on Magic Guard and/or Invincible to survive touch attacks, and yet must straddle the Papulatus Clock just to hit it! But I had cervid tag along for HS purposes (leaving and rejoining the party as necessary to avoid leeching EXP), so she managed to get a Papu chair anyways

During a low-level/area boss event, I stumbled across a BF at FP, and Copo decided to hop onto their non-odd shadower Bipp to come kill it! I took capreolina, so that I could stand back with my bow like a coward and never actually touch the beast:





In between BFs, I fought an HH alongside Bipp as cervid. You can see my MR going off:



And I got to fight Rav on cervid, as well!:



I like using Doom when Rav starts summoning so that I can turn those scary goblins into less scary snails! Does it actually help? Yes. I just lied… maybe. It’s debatable.

Also with Bipp (but this time as rusa), I got to do some Krexelling with the crew (this time, as rusa):



It’s always nice to do a big boss just with people whom I know While I was there, I did a little @dpm 1 on stoppers:



114M DPH ain’t half bad~ Also on rusa, I did a pair of Papu runs with Harlez, xBowtjuhNL, and Bulgoki, a shadower whom I met back in OPQ, and who I haven’t had the chance to play alongside in quite a while!:



Bulgoki is actually invisible in this screenshot, thanks to Boomerang Step… But you can see that he’s now a member of Chroma, and thus of Dream (and thus of the Suboptimal–Dream meta-alliance).

Contagion’s level 50 party!!

I was fortunate enough to attend the level 50 party of islander Contagion (Without):



Hitting level 50 is a pretty huge achievement for any islander, and for Contagion, there was something a little extra special. Although it was very unclear if it was even possible to redeem the level-based (level ≤70) rewards from Santa even after the X-mas event officially ended (but Happyville was still temporarily open), Contagion gave it a shot, and was pleasantly surprised! They were able to get another upgrade to their Rudolph’s Toy Hat, which means another +2 to all stats!! While we were there in Santa’s House celebrating, we were paid a visit by GA Nightzy, who came to congratulate Contagion on their achievement:



Cortical’s T10 ring party~!

I was also fortunate enough to attend the T10 ring party of STRginner Cortical, who has — as you’d expect for a permabeginner who farmed their own T10 ring — been impressively dedicated to farming cards for quite a while now! Cort decided on their last (300th) set being the crog set. So, with 299 completed sets, and 4⧸5 crog cards, we flew back & forth between Ellinia and Orbis in search of crogs & their cards:



It took just a few tries before the moment of truth…





Congratulations again to Cortical, the first-ever T10 ring permabeginner who’s never been banned!*

Spoiler: Footnotes for “Cortical’s T10 ring party~!”

*Permanovice (Battlesage, Dreamscapes, Paean, Hanger) was the actual first permabeginner to T10, but was briefly banned due to a false autoban…

(…cnvpstdf…)

Spoiler: cnvpstdf

cervine’s theme

This section makes up the majority of this (80th) entry of rangifer’s diary. If you’d like to read it, please direct yourself to the original version of this section (mirror).

 

(You can also read the original diary entry here. If odd-jobbed characters interest you, you should know that Oddjobs is recruiting!!)

rangifer’s diary: pt. lxxxi

A guide to vicloc

As readers of this diary will know, I’ve been involved in a certain gameplay style of MapleStory referred to as “vicloc” (a.k.a. “viclock”, “Victoria-Island-locked”). I have two of my own vicloc characters on MapleLegends — d33r, a vicloc clericlet; and d34r, a vicloc dagger spearwoman — who are part of the Victoria guild, a member guild of the Suboptimal alliance that is dedicated to vicloc.

There are a number of vicloc-related resources at https://codeberg.org/Victoria/resources, and I recently worked to start & complete the guide associated with this repository, which you can find at:

A guide to vicloc

You can also find a lossy (as the forums cannot support some of the text and some of the formatting) version of this guide on the MapleLegends forums: https://forum.maplelegends.com/index.php?threads/a-guide-to-vicloc.44893/

Odd-jobbed new year’s photoshoot, 2022

To celebrate the new year (albeit slightly late), I put together a very similar event to the one that we did during MapleLegends’s X-mas/new year’s event last year. Regrettably, I forgot to include this in the previous diary entry. In any case, you can view the 31 images that I took during the photoshoot below:

https://codeberg.org/deer/gists/src/branch/master/odd-jobbed-new-years-photoshoot-2022

Victoria-Island-locked

Speaking of vicloc, I did some grinding at Wraiths — yes, BIG napkins, not smol napkins! — for the first time on my vicloc clericlet d33r. Big napkins are pretty strong, but d33r is strong enough now to take them on. I was joined by fellow clericlet (but outlander) AppleBasket (LawdHeComin) at Line 2 <Area 3>:

Spoiler: Vicloc…

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…:

rusa’s level 150 mini-party!!

As my darksterity knight rusa has approached the big level 150(!!), I decided — partly at the behest of the folks whom I surveyed about whether or not it’s a good idea — to hold a level 150 mini-party for her. The mini-party that I planned was pretty simple: level up at the West Domain of Perion, and then have a game of 21 trivia questions on a particularly relevant theme. I had modest prizes lined up for the top three contestants in the game of trivia. You can watch an edited video of the mini-party on the Oddjobs YouTube channel:



(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Wdtmu0D5H4)

As mentioned in the video, I chose the West Domain of Perion as the location of the mini-party for a very specific reason: this map is the closest Perion map to Kerning City — indeed, this map has a portal to the Construction Site North of Kerning City. Going further around the rim of the island of Victoria takes you to Lith Harbor and then Henesys. There’s thus a sense in which DEX warriors (and LUK warriors) are “western warriors”; although they are ultimately from Perion (due to being warriors), their affinities lie with the thieves of Kerning City and, more distantly, the archers of Henesys.

Also, when writing the trivia questions for my mini-party, I wanted to write more interesting questions than the usual trivia questions based on rote memorisation — trivia questions that exploit, rather than eschew, the fact that we’re connected to the internet (and thus the WWW) the entire time anyways. I made the slight mistake of not making it extremely clear at the outset that this was intentional, which caused some initial confusion. In any case, I’ve reproduced all 21 questions here (although not in the order that I gave them at the mini-party; I shuffled them for that purpose):

Spoiler: 21 questions

1. Q: The prime factorisation of 150 is?
   
   A: 2 × 3 × 5[sup]2[/sup].
2. Q: What is the smallest for which 150 is -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.).

Although they weren’t able to make it to the mini-party, Cortical came through on their promise to award a CFA30 to the first odd-jobber to (legitimately) achieve level 150…:



The whole CFA30 thing was kind of a joke, but hey, I’ll take it! I donated it to Boymoder (Taima, deerhunter, Tacgnol, Numidium, Hanyou, pilk), who failed it on a Skanda :[ Oh well…

The adventures of cervine, the world’s stupidest I/L archmage

In the previous diary entry, my I/L magelet cervine advanced to the honourable rank of archmagelet. In this entry, we find her back at the ol’ CDs, using her long-hoarded Valentine’s Day basket from last year’s St. Valentine’s Day event, along with INTlaw Lvl1Crook (xXCrookXx, Macer, Lanius, Level1Crook) and hermit trishaa:

Spoiler: The adventures of cervine

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!!

A new robe

I recently made an equipment upgrade to a very important equipment item that I use across several of my characters: my STR robe. This upgrade has a slight story behind it. Someone by the name of Stonedaf smega’d that they were selling a female bathrobe scrolled for STR. Unfortunately, I wasn’t online at the time, but Lv1Crook sent me a screenshot of the smega. So, I buddied them on one or two of my characters that I was playing frequently at the time, and was frequently typing /find Stonedaf to try to find them. I never found any trace of them, and eventually gave up.

Fast-forward some months, and as I was doing KPQ on my DEX page KPQ/SPQ mule kinds, I saw a smega from Stonedaf looking for offers on that same robe! I wasn’t sure what to offer on it, so I did some rough calculations based on the most recent OwlRepo p25 values at the time, in combination with scroll_strategist_cli, and found that at current market prices, it would take roughly ≈114M mesos (on average) to produce an item of this quality. This might seem like an obnoxiously high price for a STR bathrobe — an item that has no real use to non-odd characters beyond a low level — but makes sense, given the price of scrolls for overalls for STR, and given that the robe necessarily starts with 0 STR clean. Not wanting to bid so high right out of the gate, I decided to throw out a bid of 80M and see what happens…



Stonedaf was thrilled by the offer, at which point I immediately realised my mistake: looking only at the cost to produce such an item is unfortunately grossly misleading when trying to appraise it. Such items are specialty items that are not really worth much per se, even though they cost a lot to make. Female STR robes, in particular, have no real market whatsoever — male equivalents are not super popular either, but I’ve been able to find several of them with a single owl on multiple separate occasions.

In any case, Stonedaf was pleased to see that someone really wanted to robe, and agreed to sell it to me right then and there. In the trade window, they explained to me that they had made the robe themselves, that it had a long history, that they had been trying to sell it for a long time, and that they had just recently come back to the game after a hiatus. When I said that I had been on the lookout for any female STR robes for a long time, they assured me that the robe would serve me well.

Suboptimal bossing

And now, back to our regularly scheduled bossing activities…

I had the pleasure of killing some BFs with not just Level1Crook (Lvl1Crook, xXCrookXx, Macer, Lanius), but also STRginner Taima (Tacgnol, Numidium, deerhunter)! I took my woodsmaster capreolina so that I could help to pin BF from a distance, using Hurricane and/or Strafe:

Spoiler: Suboptimal bossing

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)!

Spoiler: Footnotes for “Suboptimal bossing”

*Pun intended.

A few Masteria quests, with alces the daggermit

I did some quests in and around New Leaf City (in Masteria) on my daggermit alces. The first order of business was actually Featherweights, a completely useless quest if it weren’t for the fact that it’s a prequest for Urban Warrior. This meant hunting for Boomer Cores at Jungle Valley:



During which, I stumbled across an Urban Fungus card or two:



And also, I had to kill like 200 Gryphons, for this quest, and for Cleaning Up the Streets at the same time:



Needless to say, daggers are not the most effective means of slaying Gryphons. Then again, it’s kind of a massive pain in the ass no matter how you do it.

I also went ahead and started the Subani’s Legacy questline, which meant — among other things — slaying some Fire Tusks:



While I was in Big Ben, I killed some Wolf Spiders for Urban Jungle:



…And hunted some Electrophants for their Hyper Glyphs:



To wrap up Subani’s Legacy, I hunted for the pieces of the MesoGears map from I.AM.ROBOTs:



…During which, I found not an I.AM.ROBOT card, but rather, an Electrophant card…:



And there it is: Subani’s Legacy! Now gimme those newly-buffed MesoGears Rings…



Getting better at Jiaoceng

In the previous diary entry, I talked about my first experiences of running Jiaoceng (武林妖僧) for the first time. Again, for anyone not familiar, the salient feature of JC as a boss is the tight time limit: 10 minutes or less, no exceptions. However, for those capable of defeating JC within the time limit, you may be rewarded with EXP, card(s), and/or some valuable loot (including the occasional Mysterious Pouch 1). Given that one of the main perks is EXP, the need for HS naturally arises. So, xBowtjuhNL wanted to help me get my pure STR bishop cervid through the JC prequests so that she could provide HS for our runs. Beacuse cervid is level <135, she’s not capable of leeching any of the EXP from the clones, much less JC itself. This would, in principle, make things pretty easy.

So we headed to 1-2 F and 3-4 F of the Sutra Depository to kill some metallic monks:

Spoiler: 武林妖僧

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 qorked 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

Pee queues

I did a lot of KPQing on my DEX page KPQ/SPQ mule kinds, during which, I decided to occasionally take it easy on the whole “carrying” thing, letting my party members build character by doing things themselves…

Spoiler: Peek yous

(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…

Spoiler: Footnotes for “Pee queues”

*What does “PC” even stand for? Party Cuest?? And for that matter, “(JP)” is used for the LMPQ monsters (see, for example, the familiar Tauromacis(JP)) for seemingly the same purpose: to distinguish PQ-bound versions of the monster from other versions. But what does JP stand for??? Japan???? Just Party????? What about the “GL” of the APQ monsters like Curse Eye GL?????? Good Luck??????? Good luck figuring it out!

Killing Galloperas, with capreolina

Along with getting EXP from the occasional Bigtoe, Papa Lettuce, and Rav, I’ve been doing a little Gallopera-slaying on my woodsmaster capreolina. After levelling up to 131 just after a double Paper Lattice kill…



…I went to finally grind out another long-hoarded Valentine’s basket with sniper Level1Crook (xXCrookXx, Macer, Lanius, Lvl1Crook):



By the end of it, I was at roughly ≈93.5% EXP, so I came back to Gallos later — this time, alone — to grind out the last ≈6.5%. As it turned out, this took a li’l while — it takes me upwards of >7 hours of pure grind to churn out a full level at solo Gallos. In any case, I pushed through to level 132, INT pj’s & all~:



Now that I hit level 132, my Hurricane got to level 7, meaning that I could now try passing Hurricane 20s (although I wouldn’t strictly need to do so for another two levels). Luckily, Hurricane 20s drop from Petrifighters (“Petris”), and are thus worthless. I snagged two for 50k mesos each and passed the second one:



Cool! Unfortunately, as I said, I won’t actually be able to go above level 10 Hurricane for another two levels (level ≥134); this means that Strafe remains my primary means of dealing sustained single-target DPM with a bow until then.

rusa vs. even moar bosses

I killed quite a few Black Crows on my darksterity knight rusa, thanks to shadower Harlez (VigiI) dilligently hunting for them at Encounter with the Buddha. Here I am, with Harlez and I/L archmage Gruzz (Furca), taking on this goofy-looking guy:

Spoiler: rusa vs. the world

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

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 somethign 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



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

Spoiler: Footnotes for “rusa vs. even moar bosses”

*This name is the rōmaji of the Japanese 姉御, from 姉 — a neutral term meaning “elder sister” — and 御, here used as a suffix with an honorific sense. The intended sense is “boss’s wife”.

†I only just then learned that “Bodyguard A” was what people meant when they say BGA in smegas…

‡The name (or nickname?) Samu is, as far as I can tell, a clipping of the Japanese 侍 (rōmaji: samurai), derived from the fact that Kacchuu Musha is an undead samurai. Thus, in Japanese, this would presumably(?) be さむ (in katakana： サム； pronounced /samɯ/). This (particularly サム) could also, for example, be used to phonetically approximate e.g. an English name like Uncle Sam： アンクル・サム． So Samu may also be further shortened to simply Sam.

(…cnvpstdf…)

Spoiler: cnvpstdf

 

(You can also read the original diary entry here. If odd-jobbed characters interest you, you should know that Oddjobs is recruiting!!)

rangifer’s diary: pt. lxxxii

rusa continues the endless card-hunting journey…

As I’ve mentioned before, these days, I am often hesitant to card-hunt. I got T10 on my woodsmaster capreolina, and then kinda realised that I “have to”* do the same thing all over again on my other characters, like my darksterity knight rusa, my I/L archmagelet cervine, my daggermit alces, my pure STR bishop cervid, …

Sheesh. But since I have special things in mind for rusa, I can make this less overwhelming by concentrating most or all of my card-hunting efforts towards her. So I headed to the Orbis Tower to finish up the remaining sets there. First up was Jr. Pepes:



And then Scuba Pepes, just because their best map is technically part of Orbis Tower (Orbis Tower<B2>). Note that Scuba Pepes also spawn in small numbers at Ocean I.C., so I will probably get one or two excess cards once I come back to hunt Upper Aqua Road cards:



With the Orbis Tower all cleared, I headed Aquarium → KFT → Ludi for the Eos Tower cards. If you’re wondering how I chart out my card-hunting path, I make heavy use of Nimbus’s “Card Hunting Guide: Get your Tier 10 Ring ASAP”. I find that simply following the order that Nimbus has the regions listed (with more deviation as the list goes on & the cards get harder to farm) helps me to organise my journey, instead of excessively worrying about all of the details — most of which are unimportant — myself. So, first up are the Chirppies on the 92nd floor:



Thankfully for rusa, she has rawr to help her farm these outdoor areas with lots of little shits flying around.

Then, of course, the easiest card set in the game: the Trixter…



…And their still very easy cousins, the Green Trixters:



On the 60th floor, I did the Helly† set:



Aaaand that’s all for now

Spoiler: Footnotes for “rusa continues the endless card-hunting journey…”

*Not actually, but, you know… The temptation…

†Not to be confused with Helly.

Big boss

It is time… for the obligatory Bossing™ section(s)! I’ve been doing some more of those chunky bosses on my darksterity knight rusa, including — but not limited to — Scarlion (Scar):



The Scar run that you see pictured above was the result of Harlez (VigiI) hosting and recruiting three randoms: buccaneer Matttyyy, corsair Snaipperi, and bowmaster QuantumA. And it’s a good thing that I didn’t die in either run, because we had no bishop!! Phewf!!!

Also hosted by Harlez were some Zakum runs. Here’s one set of runs that we did with marksman Rainsford (Pinch), bishop SiriusPlaque (SmallMight), shadower SNES, and nightlord Brokeen:



In the second run, Rainsford also played on their (level 200‼) nightlord Pinch to help with attacking.

We also did a very interesting pair of Zakum runs as the following team:

• Me as rusa, my darksterity knight;
• Harlez, shadower;
• SNES, shadower;
• Sagie, shadower of GangGang;
• 5nortin5peed, axe hero;
• and Kiripo, bishop (who was level 129 at the time).

As you may have noticed, this team is conspicuously lacking “range” of any kind. Furthermore, essentially all of us would be considered “cleave”, with the exception of Kiripo (unless you count Genesis during arms stage to be cleave ). But we still killed Zak from start to finish in about half an hour, because who needs range??:



SE??? Never heard of it:



I’ve also never seen it, because we are all standing directly on top of Zakum and smoke’d half the time, so I really can’t see anything other than flashing lights and crumbling rock:



Fun times. Oh, and I finished my Zakum card set!!:



I also did a little impromptu single Krexel* with xBowtjuhNL, Odyssea, DrakeSworD, and first-time Krexeller Egrofan:



And, finally, I did some of that Jiaoceng (JC) with xBowtjuhNL and Harlez:





We did at least four runs that I can remember, but unfortunately, our very last one was spoiled by running out of time. But hey, it happens.

Spoiler: Footnotes for “Big boss”

*I’m fond of stealing LawdHeComin’s (AppleBasket) term for Krexel: naptime tree.

Smol boss

I also did some less chonky bosses, again mostly on my darksterity knight rusa (gotta get that HB!). Harlez (VigiI) & I went on the hunt for some Sams again:



We even managed to pull an Eye INT 30% from one of ’em! Score!!

On my woodsmaster capreolina, I did some Rāvaṇa with Harlez and dark knight DarkCookie (SolidState, LightCookie, Autoimmune):



…As well as the usual Papping afterwards:



The horror, indeed.

I got Harlez, myself (as rusa), and sniper Level1Crook (Lvl1Crook, xXCrookXx, Macer, Lanius) together in a party to do some of our own Ravapapping. Level1Crook had the idea to covertly eat an Onyx Apple at the beginning of the fight, so that he could pretend, to Harlez, that his Onyx Apple damage was just his normal (Cider or whatever) damage. Then, when Harlez commented on it, he would just act casual and say something like “yeah, too bad I never really play this character anymore…”. I even had capreolina SE us on the way in, to ensure juicy & flashy crits. Unfortunately, it didn’t go as planned…:



(xBowtjuhNL is Ramon.)

After that, we decided to go for some Platyplatpus:



(It’s hard to see Harlez in the image above, although you can see the Tokyo guild tag. They’re just behind the Machine Apparatus, an amazingly-named NPC that presumably does… nothing. It’s just a machine… apparatus… device… appliance. Thing. You know.)

And, we even convinced Level1Crook to come to Lower Aqua Road and kill some Pianus with us:



I’m thrilled to say that rusa is now at the point where I can pretty effortlessly fight (and zerk the whole time, of course) Pianus ((R) and/or (L)) without any real fear, even with someone like Level1Crook attacking the Bloody Booms at will. Unfortunately for Level1Crook, out Pianus fights used quite a few of their Safety Charms… getting dispelled by Pianus (R) can be a real pain!

Suboptimal boss

I promise that this is the final bossing section (of this diary entry…)! And the most important one: bossing with the Suboptimal alliance!!

STRginner Taima (pilk, Tacgnol, Boymoder, Hanyou, deerhunter), sniper Level1Crook (Lvl1Crook, xXCrookXx, Macer, Lanius), and I (as my darksterity knight rusa) got together to do our weekly bossing, and were joined by F/P archmage 2sus4u (uayua, shadowban, tb303) for some Ravvanners~!:



Although we were unfortunately not joined by 2sus4u for the Paper Lettuce runs that we did, that was maybe a good thing, considering that the three of us (myself included, as you can see) were on the verge of sleep and/or the verge of losing sanity:



Don’t worry, I only DSoD’d for like six seconds…

And, here’s a screenshot from the same fight, during the chaotic moments of the second body:



We also did a lot of BF’ing (bigfooting? bigfeeting? bogfotting?), including some easier ones, like this BF that Level1Crook & I (as my woodsmaster capreolina) duoed at FP:



However, not all of the BFs that we killed were so easy. In fact, this one was particularly excruciating:



The screenshot above was taken at Evil Rising, a map that — in addition to being much smaller than the other maps that BF spawns in (with the exception of the somewhat similar The Evil Dead*) — has Elderwraiths and Jr. Wraiths floating all over. Now, Jr. Wraiths are something that we can deal with normally — Jr. Napkins also spawn along the five TP maps. Elderwraiths, on the other hand, are chunky: 51k HP and 940 WDEF is no joke. We died a lot of times just attempting to maintain a pin, and after a lot of struggling over the course of probably an hour or so, we did manage to kill this BF in Evil Rising. Now that’s some hard-earned BF EXP!!

On another BF-hunting expedition, we were joined again by 2sus4u, and capre hit level 133~!:



Wowee~ Just one more level until I can swap Hurricane and Strafe on my keybindings!

Getting capre to level 133 actually seemed to have a significant impact on the ability of Level1Crook & I to maintain a pin on that pesky Evil Rising BF. What also helped was that we developed a strategy where I consistently hold Hurricane to pin BF to the left wall, as Level1Crook takes care of anything that might be coming at us from the right side of the map, as necessary:



Get rekt, Evil Rising!!!

Spoiler: Footnotes for “Suboptimal boss”

*Not to be confused with The Evil Dead.

GM BOOF

That’s right, GM BUFF!!! I duoed some GM buffs, as my darksterity knight rusa, at þᵉ olde ſeuende flore of þᵉ ſutram Depoſytorie with shadower Harlez (VigiI):



As always when duoing 7F with HS, the numbers are bonkers: 44.1M EPH?? Of course, now that rusa is level 153…:



:3

…44.1M EPH isn’t even that much anymore. A single level is over 172.8M EXP! Yikes!!

I also caught the GM boofs on some other characters, including my vicloc dagger spearwoman d34r. So I did some training at TfoG…



Level 79~! Hehe~~

Oh, and don’t forget my vicloc clericlet d33r! In the previous diary entry, I trained at B3 <Subway Depot> for the first time, with vicloc cleric Lanius (Level1Crook, Lvl1Crook, xXCrookXx, Macer). Of course, B3 <Subway Depot> may be a wonderful training spot, but it has a catch: you gotta do the entire JQ first. I internally debated whether or not I should even bother attempting the JQ while on GM buffs, and decided to not be a coward and just do it:



Well, only took me like half an hour or so to do the JQ. That’s not bad, I guess. I’m just glad that I had any buff left by the time that I got to the subway depot!

And there it is, level 58



SiriusPlaque’s level 200 party!

I had the great honour of attending the level 200(!!!) party of bishop SiriusPlaque (SmallMight), someone whom I originally met at MPQ (where he gifted me the Toy of 101 that I used for so long), and continued to meet along my journey: at OPQ, at boss runs (like the Zakum run discussed above!), helping me get an HTP for my darksterity knight rusa, and even as a reader of this diary! :3

Believe it or not, SiriusPlaque has done hardly any grinding: the way to fourth job was paved almost entirely with quests and PQs, and I take it that the way to level 200 has been a whole lot of bossing, and not so much 5–6F! As such, it was only appropriate for the level 200 party to be quest-themed, for one of the most dedicated questers of MapleLegends.

First was a little game, where he stripped nakey, and then proceeded to slowly re-clothe himself, one equipment item at a time. Not so much a game of strip poker bizarrely in reverse, rather, the actual object of this game was to divine the name of the NPC that gave him the equipment item in question.



The first player to whisper a correct answer to him would win one Onyx Apple! This proved to be a more frustrating game than you might imagine; you can perhaps imagine my frustration when he equipped an equipment item from a quest that I’d done multiple times over, and yet I still had no idea what the NPC name was… But that’s okay! Just like the game that I played for rusa’s level 150 party (q.v. the previous diary entry), part of the fun is exploiting already-acquired knowledge in tandem with the power of the WWW.

I did manage to win just one of the rounds, on a particularly tough equipment item (Electric Guitar Necklace):



Jer–ry! Jer–ry! Jer–ry! You can see that although I did specify “jerry yan”, SiriusPlaque (incorrectly, or loosely) refers to him as “JERRY”, which is actually the name of the potion shop NPC in Magatia. Of course, they could be the same person… with a clever disguise…! I did actually get the answer here by consulting pt. lxx of this diary (although Jerry Yan is mentioned by name & image in pt. xxxv), thanks to SiriusPlaque’s hint.

The other equipment items that were part of the game included:

• Muey Thai String; awarded by Jit. This was deemed too difficult, so it was only used for the example round, before the actual game started. The actual hat used during the game was:
• Bone Helm; awarded by Alfonse Green.
• Blue Crystal Earring; awarded by Chai.
• Pig Illustrated; awarded by Utah.
• Mechanical Glove; awarded by Keeny.
• Blue Sauna Robe; awarded by Mr. Wetbottom.
• Red Musketeer Cape; awarded by Muse.
• Fonla’s Slippers; awarded by Ponlaa.

(Hopefully, I didn’t forget any…)

With the fun quest equip game over, it was time for SiriusPlaque to Beat MapleStory™ by finally returning Arwen’s Glass Shoes back to her…



Grats again on the big 2–0–0!!! And grats on being able to finally complete those last two quests: for Echo of Hero and Red Draco, respectively

(…cnvpstdf…)

Spoiler: cnvpstdf

 

(You can also read the original diary entry here. If odd-jobbed characters interest you, you should know that Oddjobs is recruiting!!)

rangifer’s diary: pt. lxxxiii

It’s time… for the St. Valentine’s Day/Lunar New Year event!!

Comparing DEX warriors

You can read this section on the original version of this diary entry.

Hunting for roses

One big part of the Valentine’s Day/Lunar New Year event (moreso the “Valentine’s Day” aspect) is hunting for roses to get the awesome Ring of Passion. For each ring, you need one of each of the rose colours:

• Yellow Valentine Rose.
• Red Valentine Rose.
• White Valentine Rose.
• Blue Valentine Rose.

Each one of these roses has its own set of monster species that it drops from, but it’s designed so that each rose is dropped by at least one monster species that exists on Maple Island; that way, basically anyone can farm all four colours (with some slight exceptions like campers, and possibly some exotic region-locked characters). So I started hunting…

Spoiler: Hunting for roses…!

On my vicloc characters, I decided to farm White Valentine Roses at WKA. Although the map is named for its Wild Kargo population (and it is the best map to hunt Wild Kargos, in my opinion), its Cold Eye population is notable for being very dense and quick to respawn. Because Cold Eyes drop White Valentine Roses, and because WKA generally gives pretty good EPH to endgame viclockers, it seemed like the right place to farm. However, it was probably around about ≈5(!) or so hours of grinding WKA before I found my first white rose. Thankfully, the second one didn’t come too much later, but still. I was starting to really lose faith that Cold Eyes even dropped roses at all… By the end of it, I had a full 5/5 set of Wild Kargo cards (the most difficult set in Victoria Island, in my opinion (not counting Ergoth)), and around ≈600 or so Wild Kargo Eyes.

Outland, I benefitted from having a few roses left over from last year’s V-day event. Nevertheless, I went on a rosehunting crusade on my darksterity knight rusa, turning it into an opportunity to do some card-hunting at the same time. As you can see in the image above, I went and did the Straw Target Dummy set (and got a yellow rose or two along the way), the Krip and Mask Fish sets (and got a red rose or two along the way), the Jr. Lioner set (and got a yellow rose along the way), the Red Kentaurus set (and got no roses along the way…), and the Reinforced Mithril Mutae set (and also got no roses along the way…). Once the game decided to stop giving me roses entirely, I gave up.

Raffles on raffles on raffles

As with basically any event, the V-day/LNY event also features a good ol’ raffle. However, this raffle is a little different from most other raffles: rather than using event points to raffle, you must complete a random quest that is assigned to you, each time that you do the raffle. The quest is then gated by a 20-hour cooldown, but is otherwise rather permissive; any level ≥30 character can obtain such a quest. This is a really cool design, in my opinion (at least, when compared to most raffles), but has the downside of sometimes assigning impossible tasks:



Doing a new random quest every day is pretty fun, but as far as I know, there’s no such thing as Cheap Amplifiers on Victoria Island! Indeed, as of yet (and I have checked every single day), my vicloc dagger spearwoman d34r has not gotten any raffle quests that are possible to complete. On my other vicloc character, my vicloc clericlet d33r, the results have been more mixed; although usually I get something impossible, I occasionally will be assigned to kill 100 Fire Boars, at which point I can Teleport my giddy self to tBLIII and kill me some Fire Boars.

On my Maple Islander ozotoceros, I originally had no luck, as the raffle worked the same way on-island as off-island, and would thus always assign impossible tasks. However, thanks to a suggestion post on the MapleLegends forums by Snuggles, the Maple Island raffle was later changed to be different from the off-island raffle, so that it always gives possible tasks to Maple Islanders.

Here’s another collage, but this time of me doing some raffle quests!:

Spoiler: To be doing raffles, for great justice!

For one of the raffle quests that I did on my darksterity knight rusa, I had to kill 100 Memory Monks. As it happened, my STRginner friend (and Maple wife) Taima (pilk, Nyanners, Boymoder, Hanyou, Tacgnol) also got the same task, so we went to ML1 to do it together! Unfortunately, there is another caveat to the quests given for this event’s raffle…:



In addition to the fact that it’s unlikely for you to randomly get the same quest as your friend does, even if you do, you can’t really do the quest “together”; the kill credit is in no way shared between party members. This makes the raffle quests rather “SoloStory”-style, which is great for those who like questing alone, but those who like questing with friends will have to look elsewhere.

While we were at ML1, I was fortunate enough to turn up a Memory Monk card. I decided to give the card to Taima, especially considering that I don’t much want to card-hunt in ToT anyways:



As it turned out, I was so fortunate as to produce five entire Memory Monk cards in the time that it took for both of us to finish our quests! So much for ToT being a difficult card-hunting region!! And congratulations to Taima on the Memory Monk card set completion

The first or second raffle that I actually managed to complete on d33r awarded me with a few magical Prestigious Coins:



As it turns out, this is the first Mysterious Coin Pouch 1 that I’ve opened (out of many MCP1s that I’ve opened) that actually gave more than one coin! Vicloc luck FTW!! Unfortunately, the coins are borderline useless in vicloc, so I handed them off to an outlander.

Also amongst the raffle prizes were some new year’s tiger body parts, like this body (which is, contrary to what the name “New Year’s Tiger Body” suggests, not an overall; it’s a hat):



Fabulous.

And I’ve already come away fro mthe raffle with two chairs, including this stylish Princess No Chair~:

LF>Nintos

One day, when I went to do a raffle on my I/L archmagelet cervine, I got a task to kill 100 Nintos. Now, I don’t know my way around Ninja Castle all that well, so I tried using Hidden Street’s mapping of the castle to guide myself to the map with the most Nintos. In so doing, I ended up unexpectedly running into a jump quest (JQ) that was standing in my way!:

Spoiler: LF&gt;sexy ninjas

Now, I may be rubbish at JQs, but I was on a mission! To kill sexy ninjas!! Lemme in!!!



Ow.

Okay, eventually, I did finally get past that part. It’s pretty hard, and I’m not entirely sure how I beat it, other than by blindly running through it. Thankfully, this JQ has checkpoint thingies, so when I failed numerous times at the next section…:



…I didn’t have to start completely from scratch. This next part was so difficult that I was really about to give up. So I looked to YouTube™ for guidance. And guidance is exactly what I found: “Maplestory – Ninja Castle Jump Quest”. This video depicts GMS IGN Sylvananna completing the entire JQ in roughly ≈38(!) seconds. Although I’m not exactly capable of doing the JQ quite that quickly, watching how Sylvananna does it helped me immensely to complete the JQ myself. With that, I was able to bypass the ninja star/blowgun hell, and proceed to the third and final section of the JQ:



After copping Sylvananna’s style some more (at least, to the greatest extent that I was capable of…), I managed to bypass this last section as well, and finish this dreaded JQ!!!:



Not gonna lie, I was pretty proud of myself at that point. And it felt good to be rewarded with…



Huh? Who is this guy? He wants a Kacchuu Musha Fragment? I’m afraid I don’t have any of those…

Oh well. Back to killing Nintos in the Kacchuu Musha map, I guess. -_-

Viclocked

Meanwhile, on Victoria Island, vicloc I/L mage Vicloc (Schiller, Cassandro, Copo, Bipp, Gets, Fino, Sommer, Celim) asked my vicloc clericlet d33r about some wand and staff scrolls. I had some scrolls that I had no use for, so I traded them to Vicloc. In exchange, I got a rare and valuable triplet of Rice Puffs!:

Spoiler: Meanwhile, on Victoria Island…

I also had the pleasure of doing a Chocolate Basket grind with vicloc assassin pilk (Taima, Boymoder, deerhunter, Naganohara, Hanyou, Nyanners, Tacgnol), also on d33r, where we decided to head to L2A1 to do some Jr. Wraith/Necki grind:



I was getting quite good EPH on d33r, but for pilk, it was even more profitable: she leveled not once, not twice, but thrice in the duration of a simple basket (60 minutes)!!

After this excellent grind sesh, we decided that pilk deserves a claw upgrade in the meantime before she hits level 40 and can use the Adamantium Avarices that Jr. Napkins drop. So I helped her out with a few materials, and she was able to craft the almighty Meba!:



That’s a huge step up from the Garnier, especially when considering the speed category difference!*

Thanks to my rose-hunting efforts on Victoria Island, my vicloc dagger spearwoman d34r now has all four ring slots filled!!:



I never thought that would ever happen, but there it is: a Monster Book Ring <Tier 2>, a Moonstone Wedding Ring, a Zombie Army Ring, and a Ring of Passion!

And d33r gets a Ring of Passion as well, of course:



Among the few raffles here & there that I’ve been able to do on d33r, I won a special pair of untradeable earrings~:



2 INT and 1 LUK clean! Very nice. Once everyone agreed that this was vicloc-legal, I began scrolling it with Earring INT 60%s. So far, I’ve passed two slots and failed one slot, so we shall see how the final two slots turn out once I can get my hands on some more scrolls! If I can pass at least one of the two remaining slots, these earrings would already be better than my current Leaf Earrings in terms of TMA. And the LUK certainly helps too!

I’ve also been doing a little bit of grinding on d34r. On the first day of the event, I did some FoG grinding with bandit chwis (Christopher, Chr1s, Reikan, Statless) of the Funk guild:



And later, while soloing a Chocolate Basket at FoG, d34r became the first viclocker to achieve the big level 80~!!!:



d34r is a big girl now!! I did a quick @epm 5, and found that I was capable of achieving nearly 1.1M(!) EPH while soloing FoG on basket:



This meant that I was capable of achieving over 1.7M(!!) EPH while duoing FoG with vicloc bandit (and my vicloc husband) xXCrookXx (Macer, Lanius, Lvl1Crook, Level1Crook):



During this session, I temporarily lost track of my EXP bar, and leveled in the middle of chatting in alliance chat…:



And later, while farming for Lip Lock Keys at PWF1, I sneezed:



d33r had her first encounter with ZMM, where I found out that it was possible to simply Heal her to death!:



And later, while killing ZMMs on d34r, I found another Hwabi!:



And, while hunting jrogs, I encountered my old frenemy, the Golden River…:



Of course, it was below-average WATK. Just to mock me!!

Spoiler: Footnotes for “Viclocked”

*It appears to be a little-known fact that the Garnier actually blows ass. The Garnier is the only claw in MapleStory that has a speed category in excess of 4 (speed 4 is referred to in-game as “fast”, although speed 5 also has the same name, so the names are not that useful), as it has a speed category of 6 (speed 6 is referred to in-game as “normal”)! Technically, the Neva is speed 5, but it doesn’t exist in MapleLegends, and it’s still faster than the Garnier anyways (5 < 6). Most claws have a speed of 4, which means that they already hit the speed cap (2) with just Claw Booster active. Some claws are even speed 3, like the Meba, and the Mapleversary claws (levels 35, 43, and 64), but this only matters for boosterless claw-users like sindits and permarogues. Meanwhile, the claw that is just 5 levels higher than the Garnier, the Steel Titans (and other Titans, like the Gold Titans), is speed 4, which puts it not one, but two entire speed categories faster than the Garnier. This is considerable, especially for non-vicloc claw-users, who will have easy access to Steel Titans that can be purchased from NPCs (in Ludi, Mu Lung, Herb Town, Ariant, NLC, Orbis, Singapore, and Malaysia) just like the Garnier can be. So, next time that you’re thinking of scrolling a pog Garnier for low-level thieves, try a Titans instead!

Meanwhile, on Maple Island…

I’ve also been doing some event stuff on my Maple Islander, ozotoceros. I took this opportunity to farm a full set of roses:



And I did a Chocolate Basket duo grind at DF with LUKlander Schiller (Vicloc, Cassandro, Copo, Bipp, Gets, Fino, Sommer, Celim):



During which, Schiller hit the big level 30~!:



Also, look at that @epm test! 97.4k EPH!! Pretty wild stuff. This was enough to propel ozotoceros the rest of the way to level 42~!:



And, I accidentally squandered my first set of Valentine’s ETCs that I farmed, by turning it in for a Love Letter (instead of for a Chocolate Basket) -_-



On the raffling side of things, my raffles have unfortunately been quite poor. So far, the only item that I’ve managed to raffle (after many raffles) that has remotely any use on-island is a single CSS20. Now, that’s a pretty good item, and I look forward to trading it with another islander in exchange for something that I have a use for, but I admit to being a bit tired of getting Ssiws Cheeses, New Year Lunchboxes, Lunar New Year Merchants, Teleport Cokes, etc. But hey — at least some of that stuff can be usefully transferred to viclockers!

Suboptimal BOSSINGGGGG

This is the section where I kill lots of big bad bosses as my woodsmaster capreolina, alongside other members of the Suboptimal alliance! Starting with killing Boyfriend alongside sniper Level1Crook (Lvl1Crook, xXCrookXx, Macer, Lanius, Sangatsu, Ichigatsu) and F/P archmage 2sus4u (uayua, shadowban, tb303, deucer)!:



I’ve been getting pretty good at pinning BF with Hurricane, so our BF runs ain’t too shabby now. And I do love me a good Boyfriend Toe.

We fought Rāvaṇa as well, with 2sus4u pinning Rav to the left-hand side, and with me and Level1Crook compulsively vomiting:



I did some more Ravving later, but this time with Level1Crook, STRginner Taima (pilk, Hanyou, Boymoder, Nyanners, Tacgnol, deerhunter), and STRginner Cortical (SussyBaka, CokeZeroPill, GishGallop, Medulla, xXcorticalXx, moonchild47):



R.I.P. Qwertycal. What a noob.

And, finally, I did some more BFs that were surely terrifying for Taima, our squishy close-ranged combatant…:



Now you see why consistently pinning is so important!

Love letters~

One interesting feature of this V-day event is the introduction of Love Letters (a.k.a. “simp letters”). Love Letters can be crafted through a repeatable quest that asks for the same set of four ETCs that the Chocolate Basket quest asks for. Each Love Letter is a USE item with an expiry, tagged as being “made with love” by the IGN who completed the quest. The item cannot be dropped, but can be /trade’d, and the PC who uses the letter is awarded with a cash item (also with expiry, and tagged with the same IGN as the letter that it originated from) resembling a red, heart-shaped box of chocolates. Each one of these boxes of chocolates that a PC has in their inventory contributes to an animation of red hearts above their head; each box produces another floating red heart. The hearts actually work a bit like tally marks (but counting in tens, instead of the usual fives): for every ten boxes, you get a single large heart, and the excess 0〜9 boxes show up as the corresponding number of small hearts.

In any case, I accidentally used a set of V-day ETCs not just on my Maple Islander ozotoceros, but also on my vicloc dagger spearwoman d34r. So I found someone to give the letter to:



And I got a Love Letter back! How sweet.

Later, I got another Love Letter from Crook, but this time, on his sniper Level1Crook (who is a noob, as can be seen in the image below):



So, yeah. This letter was actually made with my ETCs. SMH.

And, finally, I got a letter from xBowtjuhNL, just as we were about to go in and do a Zak run!:



<3

Chillaxing

I helped outland staff-whacker Aphasia (Cortical, Medulla) and vicloc assassin pilk (deerhunter, Taima) with some KPQ runs, on my KPQ/SPQ mule DEX page kinds:



It seems that the King Slime is allergic to pickle milk.

And, I helped up-and-coming paladin BodyGuardP with their Rush skill quest, on my darksterity knight rusa. They were excited to learn that I was an odd-jobbed warrior:



And, also on rusa, I ran into the OPQ mule of a priest (now bishop) with whom I had done some Heal–rawr training at CDs and at Dreamy Ghosts~:



Grinderino

I’ve been trying to use this event — which hands out Chocolate Baskets — as a good opportunity to do some grinding on my I/L archmagelet cervine. The HS is obviously incredibly convenient, the +100 AVOID from GM Bless is a powerful boon, and of course, HB makes it so much easier for me to cast Blizzard. As a magelet who has access to not only a mage ultimate like Blizzard, but also to Element Amplification, the naturally impoverished MAXMP pool of magelets becomes a serious barrier to using my full skillset.

When I was nearing level 120 on cervine, I claimed that once I hit level 120 and got my fourth-job skills, I would never come back to CDs ever again! And I meant it!! Unfortunately, I seem to have lied!!! Now that I have Blizzard, my main skill appears to be “killing CDs even faster”, as I can barely one-shot the damn CDs, even with the almighty Blizzard. So I headed back to the dreaded Taiwanese shopping mall hell, to join STRginner Taima (pilk, deerhunter) and INTlaw Lvl1Crook (Level1Crook, xXCrookXx) in, ironically, the crusade against my favourite physical form of music distribution:



During which, I was met with further confirmation that I do, in fact, have noob MAXMP…:





I also did some basket grinding at CDs with dagger sader Medulla (Cortical, Aphasia). At the end of one of these sessions, after Medulla had already died and lost their basket buffs (R.I.P. noob), I hit level 123~!:



(/"t_SI.kIn bVt/ is the X-SAMPA encoding of /ˈt͡ʃɪ.kɪn bʌt/, which is the pronunciation of the English phrase chicken butt.)

And, after the end of another basket grind with Medulla where they died again and lost their basket buffs, my daggermit alces hit da level 107~~~~~~~~





This was actually my first time training at CDs on alces — usually, I train at KMs. CDs unfortunately have much shorter hitboxes, and their incredible ability to proliferate (killing a Greatest Oldies spawns three Latest Hits Compilations) without retaining aggro makes CDs much more difficult to farm than KMs, for those who are stuck with single-target attacks.

However, now that SW is fixed, I actually have something that allows me to deal with CDs! And it’s honestly pretty frickin’ kewl; I took some video of alces training at CDs, to show it off:

A daggermit training at CDs (Star Avenue South Section) [YouTube]

woosers

This section documents the various things that I’ve done as my darksterity knight rusa in preparation for the ultimate challenge*: Horntail!!!

For starters, I was already nearly level 154, so I finished off level 153 with my INT pyjamas on, desperately Power Striking the 7F monks to death with agonising sluggishness… until I finally ding’d:

Spoiler: woosa~

And, I got my T3 ring!:



As the planned date for killing Horntail loomed in the near future, I started to get a bit antsy about my goofed-up Mapling schedule leaving me with no one to train/boss with. So I started much more deliberately seeking out anyone who could duo Chocolate Baskets with me at 7F. I did one with paladin Tenuto:



And one with a hero by the name of MrBit, who had an SI mule in the FM. Although I’m not terribly good at getting the 7F monks off of my back so that I can warp to the FM, the +100 AVOID from GM Bless, plus the naturally somewhat high AVOID associated with being a DEX warrior, was enough to make it work:



And I think ≈50.8M EPH is just about the highest EPH I’ve ever clocked!!

On the bossing side of things, I joined a random Krexel party that had an archer and a buccaneer, so I was treated with both SE and SI. I took this as an opportunity to do some @dpm tests…

This first @dpm 5 test was done versus the left eye:



And this second @dpm 5 test, versus the right eye:



These are both with MW20 and Cider, but with no Echo. The discrepancy in damage ranges is due to MW20 expiring towards the end of my first test.

And I joined a random Zakum party, as well. Throughout almost the entirety of one of the runs, nightlords NLKapach and pureluksinz, and bishop 3minem, were engrossed in a discussion about scrolling claws:



And at long last, while training with Harlez (VigiI) at 7F, rusa hit the big 155~!!:



Now I am Technically Qualified™ to fight the Horned Tail! But let’s not stop there…

I did some Jiaocenging with Harlez and xBowtjuhNL:



I think that, out of the bosses that I’ve fought so far, Jiaoceng and Zakum are my personal favourites. Both feel compelling: Zakum’s four stages and many mechanics make for a dynamic fight that justifies many support skills (Heal, Dispel, Smokescreen, Holy Shield, Armour Crash, etc.), and Jiaoceng feels fast-paced with the tight timer (10 minutes or less to finish the fight), in addition to placing serious emphasis on both single-target DPM and multi-target DPM (cleave). And both are pretty rewarding, in terms of both EXP and items/mesos. Compare this to something like Krexel, which is more or less a glorified sack of EXP that you mindlessly whale on until it pops and gives you EXP, or until you fall asleep — whichever comes first.

In any case, I did some more 7Fing with whoever I could find, which happened to be a buccaneer by the name of Egrofan in this case:



I’m very used to taking the left-hand side when duoing 7F. The map is asymmetrical, and the left-hand side has a higher proportion of Wooden Fish to Giants (Silver and/or Golden), in addition to just generally having somewhat fewer monster spawns. This makes the left side easier to efficiently eliminate for me, as my damage is somewhat lower than most, as a result of being STRless, and my Dragon Fury is capable of hitting many of the monsters at once due to its relatively generous hitbox. I’ve gotten pretty adept at positioning myself around the bookshelves to maximise the number of monsters that I’m hitting at once. But Egrofan wanted to take the left side, so that’s why you see me struggling to do the right-hand side in the image above.

And I levelled up to 156 during another trio JC with Harlez and xBowtjuhNL, thus surpassing my goal for my first HT!:



We also did some quartet JCs with bishop SweetJesus (f.k.a. ItsPav)…:



…Although the second run ended in disaster when Harlez got disconnected as we were entering the fight. ;~;

I also did some Pianus hunting with Harlez:



And I’ve started collecting the Pianus card set!:



And finally, here’s a screenshot from one of the Zakum runs that I did with Harlez, bishop OmegaBS, and shadower Bipp (Schiller, Celim, Cassandro, Copo, Vicloc, Gets, Fino, Sommer, LvXV), where we all decided to show off our Zakum Chairs:

Spoiler: Footnotes for “woosers”

*At least, “ultimate challenge” in the context of version 62 of GMS — nevermind the fact that MapleLegends has added Neo Tokyo and Pink Bean…

My very first Horntail runs!!!!!

xBowtjuhNL planned/organised & hosted an HT run to be my first HT! We invited basically anyone who I know and who was capable of HTing, and in the end, we were joined by Harlez (VigiI), Melokie (Skateboard, Alrightyo), SmallMight (SiriusPlaque), Soblet, and others!

This really was my first-ever HT, not just rusa’s first. I never really expected to get so far on, franky, any of my characters — far enough to fight the almighty boss of fourth job land (a.k.a. Leafre)!! So I was pretty nervous, as you’d expect, but I think it went pretty well overall. You can watch edited footage of this first run on the Oddjobs YouTube channel:

rusa’s first Horntail!!! [YouTube]

Of course, as you may have expected, I did die… Here’s a (rather low-quality) screenshot that xBowtjuhNL took of my death (which can also be seen in the above video):



But that was my only death! At least, in the first run All in all, I actually did four runs (two on Saturday and two on Sunday), and I died once in each of the first three. But I did level up during my second run:



But not without the death, of course…:



My fourth run — the only one of the four where I didn’t die at all — probably resulted in my survival for two reasons. One was that, after looking back through some video footage, I figured out what was likely killing me every time. I was told to prepare for a maximum damage per hit of about ≈8k (due to having maxed Achilles), but as it turns out, the left head hits me for more like ≈12.5k. When I Rush the left & mid heads to get into position to cleave both of them at once…:



…There’s a chance (depending on what, I have no idea) that instead of stopping at the edge of the foothold like normal, I get yeeted off and likely hit the left head on the way down. This kills the rusa (sometimes). So I have to make sure to have >12.5k HP when Rushing this platform, and then I can damage myself after positioning, if necessary to engage Berserk. The other reason was that I was having some pretty serious client issues where I was hovering around probably like ≈8 frames per second throughout most of the run. This meant that I had to be pretty cautious anyways, as it’s already rather difficult to navigate around HT even with 60 FPS.

The next day, when I went to help 2sus4u (uayua, shadowban, tb303) with a Ravana kill for her raffle quest, we were joined by corsair milton of Funk, who also responded to 2sus4u’s smega:



Great… Now I’m “the rusa who died”…… -_-

In any case, I was very grateful to have folks who actually wanted to HT with my stinky DEX DK! And HTing was a lot of fun!! Chaotic, but fun!! So thanks to everyone who signed up, and to xBowtjuhNL & Harlez, for organising/hosting!!! <3

(…cnvpstdf…)

Spoiler: cnvpstdf

 

(You can also read the original diary entry here. If odd-jobbed characters interest you, you should know that Oddjobs is recruiting!!)

rangifer’s diary: pt. lxxxiv

It’s time… for the second half of the St. Valentine’s Day/Lunar New Year event!!

Riff-raff(le)

It is now time for the second — and final — stretch of raffling for this event. You can see my previous raffles, and some comments on the raffling system itself, in the previous diary entry.

Spoiler: A journal of riff-raff(le)

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!!

MI stands for “Maple Island”

Speaking of ozotoceros, I did some Maple Island grinding! Here, you can see me trioing a basket with fellow islanders jung1e (Plucks, Koph) and Kimberly (Gumby, nodeathrun, MADlSON):



And I duoed two baskets with Contagion (Without) at Pigs, as well!:



While I was there, ozotoceros hit level 43~!:



And I raffled this goofy (but ultimately useless) hat:



I exchanged some Maple Island Love Letters with jung1e!:





…And got an even more special gift from jung1e: a (+2) White Gomushin!!!



I’ve been trying to pass ≥2 scrolls on the same Gomushin for… well, for as long as ozotoceros has existed, pretty much. Unfortunately, (+1) seemed to be the best I could do for a long while. So this is a huge upgrade!!

Speaking of upgrades, I found an even better White Valentine Rose. It was one less than perfect WATK, so jung1e traded it with me in exchange for his spare perfect one!:



And finally, again in the spirit of love and Valentine’s Day, I gave a Love Letter to a random stranger who happened to be passing through Amherst:



This was actually just after the event had ended. I happened to have the quest in progress, and spent a set of V-day ETCs to get this letter which appeared to have no expiry. Unfortunately, it turns out that an item whose expiry is in the past (i.e. an expired item that has not had the chance to actually be deleted from the game world) appears to have no expiry, but will simply disappear as soon as you renegotiate with the login server (e.g. going in and out of the Cash Shop, CCing, relogging, etc.). So I don’t think that they had the heart effect for very long x)

Vicloc: The second coming

Meanwhile, on a somewhat larger island by the name of “Victoria”, my vicloc clericlet d33r levelled up while doing a raffle quest at tBLIII!:

Spoiler: Vicloc makes a comeback

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 they 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 no 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…)

Spoiler: Footnotes for “Vicloc: The second coming”

*Not to be confused with CSS 3.

Suboptimal bossers

I tried to do some Papu runs with Flow members Level1Crook (Lvl1Crook, xXCrookXx, Lanius, Ichigatsu, Macer) the sniper and 2sus4u (uayua, shadowban, tb303, deucer) the F/P archmage, on my woodsmaster capreolina. After our first run was thwarted by some technical issues (see “Technical difficulties” below), our second run was also scuffed, but for a different reason. You see, after we put the piece of crack into the finicky hole that it belongs in, Level1Crook thought that it would be funny to jump into the Time Sphere (Papulatus’s “0th body”)…

Indeed, as it turns out, the Time Sphere is level 100 and has a whopping 980 WATK! In any case, 2sus4u and I were able to salvage this run — albeit more slowly than it would have gone, had Level1Crook neglected to yeet himself into a violently turbulent and luminescent orb of pure time energy.

We also killed some Rāvaṇa, in which we were joined by STRginner Cortical (Medulla, SussyBaka, CokeZeroPill, xXcorticalXx, GishGallop):



And in which, capre hit level 134~!:



Just one more level before I can start griefing Zak runs >! But I’ve already got my Hurricane to the level where I can finally swap it with Strafe on my keybindings ^^

A little SPQing with GangGang

If you thought that all that my OPQ/LMPQ mule sets was good for is activating HS and accepting small quantities of leech from odd-jobbed viclockers, think again! Because she’s GangGang’s official mascot (Red told me so!) and regular SPQ participant!!

So I did a few SPQs with GG, during which, I did the leftmost JQ in that one room where you have to place the giant red spears in stage 2 for the first time:



As it turns out, I didn’t actually need to complete it — Bellicose (illadvised, Permanovice, Battlesage, Paean, Hanger) had already done it. But it was good to try it for the first time, and learn that it’s actually incredibly easy…

As usual, I was on shoes JQ duty:



And I — also for the first time — actually entered the bossfight map the “normal” way (to be distinguished from the “coward” way, where you simply sit up in the top balcony)…



I kinda just stood there and watched, as my not-quite-two-thousand MAXHP was not going to withstand any serious attacks from these guys. But, you know, it’s still slightly more brave… right? In any case, these folks are some real pros who took out Ergoth in a matter of seconds. Fun times!

Horned Tail

In the previous entry of this diary, my darksterity knight rusa did her first Horntail run! And not only that, she did a total of four runs!! It was a heck of a lot of fun, although I did die once per run in the first three runs.

However, since those first three deaths, I’ve actually managed to consistently survive in Horntail (sort of — we’ll see what I mean by this down below)! And I’ve got a number of additional HT runs under my belt now. One of the biggest keys to stopping dying was that I had video recording of my deaths, so I was able to go back and see what killed me. I’ve already explained the phenomenon in the previous diary entry, so I won’t repeat it here.

As I was hunting for some Tough Dragon Skins at Leviathan’s Canyon, I just so happened to run into a real live Levi! So I soloed it!!:

Spoiler: Hornytail

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

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

Spoiler: 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 their 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.

The will of the hero

After so many HTs, I realised that I had neglected to even get the Hero’s Will skill, a key skill for seduced HTers in dire need of a get-out-of-jail-free card! I’d never done the questline for this skill before (I never had the occasion to), so I headed to Carta’s Cave in search of a clue. Carta told me that if I were strong enough, I could bring to her Miniature Pianuses, and in exchange for each one, I could enter a warped dimension for about five minutes. In that dimension, the monsters that I killed would drop Pieces of Courage. 40 of these pieces would be sufficient courage to bestow the will of the hero. I already had some Miniature Pianuses, so I took a look inside of this “Warped Dimension”:



The monsters in here aren’t actually too scary; they’re pretty much just run-of-the-mill Deep Aqua Road monsters like Gobies, Bone Fish, and Sharks:



The first time that I went in, I managed to get 27 of the 40 pieces. So another try was sufficient to finish the 40 pieces that I needed:



Okay, so, it looks like I can’t just start shoving all 40 pieces into my mouth and somehow get the will of the hero. Instead, I had to retrieve something called a Ragged Wristband, which drops from our old friend Griffey:





With this, Carta was able to forge me a Firm Hand:



Now, I could shove this giant blue fist into my mouth, and then I’d finally have the will of the hero! Cool!!

With the questline all done and another levelup under rusa’s belt, I spent an SP on Hero’s Will. Somewhat confusingly, the skill description strongly implies that Hero’s Will is capable of dispelling one or more debuffs in addition to seduce. But testing it in a Zak run revealed this to be simply misleading. I was hoping that I could perhaps use it to occasionally dispel a stun. But it seems that stuns (and slows, for that matter) are totally undispellable! A whole lot of good the will of the hero and a giant pile of ACPs have done, then!!

Ground

Empowered by the basket, I did some 7F grinding on my darksterity knight rusa, duoing with shadower Harlez (VigiI). Along the way, I hit a levelup or two whilst grinding…:



Including the big level 160~!!!:



And, over at CDs, I duoed some baskets with dagger sader Medulla (Cortical, SussyBaka, CokeZeroPill, GishGallop) on my I/L archmagelet cervine, which got me another levelup to 124~!:



I tried a quick @epm 5 while I was there, and found that this setup really is pretty damn strong:



I may have sworn never to come back to CDs once I hit level 120, but I’ll be damned if those compact discs don’t give me that sweet, sweet EXP…

And also at CDs with Medulla — but this time as my daggermit alces, and additionally accompanied by permarogue extraordinaire xX17Xx(!) (drainer, breakcore, partyrock, attackattack, strainer) — I utterly destroyed even moar compact discs:



Crunch crunch!

Technical difficulties

NOTE: This section should be read with the fact that I am running MapleLegends through Wine in mind.

A lot of the MapleLegends gameplay featured in this diary entry has been plagued by technical difficulties. I mentioned above that the MapleLegends servers have been having a rough time of it, as a result of their dedicated host intermittently failing and seemingly randomly dropping connections.

In addition to this causing a whole lot of turmoil, I also struggled with some pretty severe frame dropping (read: low frame rate) during one of the HT runs that I did. Someone suggested that the MapleLegends client’s sound engine has performance bugs that could cause this kind of thing, and Harlez/VigiI told me that Kimmy herself proclaimed the deletion of Sound_DX8.dll to be a safe way to resolve audio engine bugs. So I tried it myself, and the game didn’t immediately crash or anything, so it seemed like it might work…? I made sure to put the volume of background music (BGM) and sound effects (SFX) as low as possible, and then “MUTE” each one by ticking both corresponding checkboxes in the “SYSTEM OPTIONS” menu in-game.

Then, when attempting a CWKPQ with xBowtjuhNL, Harlez (VigiI), and others, my client mysteriously shut down during the Test of Agility stage… Normally, my client is extremely stable, and I almost never actually crash — at most, the server might drop my connection So we tried again, and the same thing happened again (and someone else also got disconnected in one way or another during the next stage, so that PQ was abortive as well). Harlez noted that both times, I got disconnected as soon as the Mage Sigil was activated, so they prompted me to send in a ticket via @gm asking to have the bug reproduced. I couldn’t find any logs in my MapleLegends installation directory, nor in the "Crash Logs"/ subdirectory, so I really had nothing to work with.

To my delight, a GM did respond to my ticket. GM Nightzy (Nightz) asked me a few questions about the issue, and then jailed me to try and reproduce the bug:



I’d never been jailed before, so I had no idea that the jail was in Ellin Forest LOL

As you can see, Nightzy spawned a Mage Sigil to give it a test, and then used Ice Strike in an attempt to activate the sigil. Unfortunately, this didn’t actually work, as it seems that the relevant PQ scripts need to be running in order for the sigils to operate as intended.

As I mentioned in “Suboptimal bossers” above, the first Papu run that I did with Level1Crook and 2sus4u failed. The actual reason for this failure was that, when the Time Sphere was spawned, no one attacked it. So I stepped up and started Hurricaning it, and as soon as the first arrow hit the Time Sphere, my client closed in just the same manner that it did back in CWKPQ when the Mage Sigil was activated. For the second Papu run, I restored my Sound_DX8.dll, and lo and behold, no crashes.

I now keep the Sound_DX8.dll intact, but also keep BGM and SFX muted and on the lowest volume. So far, this works decently well, although it’s always hard to tell if, or when, I will get degraded performance.

Embossed

As usual, I did a handful of bosserinoes on my darksterity knight rusa. One Jiaoceng run that I did with shadower Harlez (VigiI) and marksman xBowtjuhNL went south as we found ourselves losing DPM to some technical issues. As a result, Harlez started Meso Exploding:



Unfortunately, although the exploded mesos were certainly a good DPM boost, they also compounded the client-side issues that xBowtjuhNL was having, so he told Harlez to stop. In the end, this was a failed JC. :[

On the bright side, we also did several successful JCs, including this one with nightlord illadeIph:



As mentioned above in “Technical difficulties”, I had tried to CWKPQ to no avail, due to technical issues. On the bright side though, I also did a successful CWKPQ! Here I am, soloing the warrior room of the Hall of Mastery:



Cool!! Admittedly, the warrior room is really not very difficult — it’s just killing some monsters with no JQ nor puzzle aspects, and the monsters aren’t really that tough. But still, I proved my power and laid claim to the Master Sword!! Hah!!!

Here’s a screenshot from the preliminary bit of the CWKPQ boss fight, where a bunch of really tough (but not-so-boss) monsters are spawned in a big mob and we have to dispatch of all of them:



And, here is what most of CWKPQ looks like from a cleaver’s perspective:



For anyone not already familiar with the CWKPQ boss fight, the three bosses that you see pictured (not actually, as they are covered up by the edge of the map and a flurry of skill effects) above have some nasty tricks up their sleeves that make them essentially impossible to fight unless you meet at least one of the following criteria:

• You have Holy Shield (HS) and/or Smokescreen (Smoke) active on you.
• You are hugging the bosses against the wall of the map.

The former of these is not sustainable, as HS and Smoke both have significant cooldowns. And the latter is simply not possible for ranged characters. As a result, ranged characters who try to fight the “cleave bosses” will find themselves perpetually stunned, sealed, shoved backwards, and to make things worse, hit for sometimes rather large amounts of damage. So this is why this boss trio is for “cleave” only. While fighting in this way, I did a @dpm 5 test:



194.6M DPH! Not bad for a poopy odd-jobber!!

And, at the end of it all, I got the chance to loot a MoN:



And it was pretty good! The highlight is that it has 5 WATK, and in addition, it has 4 STR, 6 DEX, and a rather unfortunate 290 MAXHP. I tested my damage range when swapping between this 5 WATK MoN and my HTP, and as expected, both the minimum and maximum of my damage range suffer significantly when using the MoN. But still, it’s nice to at least have one

Oh, and here’s a screenshot from another one of those not-so-failed JCs — this time, featuring bishop Balake:



After killing some Pianuses with Harlez, we went to check Seruf real quick, as rusa was still 0/5 on that card set. I didn’t find any Serufs, and Harlez found only one, but boy was it a good one!:



My first Seruf card and a Seruf chair?? Score!!

In pt. lxxxii of this diary, I talked about a pair of Zak runs that I did where we had absolutely no range of any kind, and were all huddled on the middle of Zak’s body the entire time in Smoke. Well, I did another quite similar pair of Zak runs again…



This run featured me as a darksterity knight, shadower Harlez, shadower MoistLips (SafeSex), DK dildil, hero Hidesake, and bishop Warum. Not an amazing team for killing Zakum’s top-right arm, but otherwise fantastic!

I also did some fun Zaks with shadower Sagie, bishop Flamous (whom I knew from HT runs), Harlez, and xBowtjuhNL:



During one of which, rusa hit level 161~!:



:3

rusa × Harlez

On the way from KFT to Ludi, Harlez (VigiI) surprised me with an engagement proposal!!!:

Spoiler: rusa &times; Harlez

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 their entire Maple career! So of course I had to show him 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

Failed duo Zak attempt

As mentioned in “Technical difficulties” above, the MapleLegends server was shitting itself quite a bit at some points. During one of these self-soiling episodes, xBowtjuhNL was still bored and wanted something to do, so he asked me if I’d agree to try duo Zak on my darksterity knight rusa. We figured that we could maybe kill the arms and call it good, or whatever. And if we get disconnected by the server… well… we tried, at least.

The hard part, though, was actually getting the ≥6 signs necessary to even enter Zakum’s Altar. I had to conjure up not just rusa, but also four(!) of my other characters to come sign, including my pure STR bishop cervid to door everyone. In the image below, you can see almost all six signatories, including my I/L archmagelet cervine and my permarogue panolia (not pictured is my woodsmaster capreolina, as she is on the same account as cervine, so I had to relog for that sign):



We had an apparently good start, attacking the bottom-right arms (as they are the ones that cast WDEF buffs, and we have no way to dispel such buffs), but it wasn’t too long before we had some serious lag spikes, and then we both got disconnected by the server…:



We did try again one more time (as Zak can be attempted a maximum of twice daily), but it went similarly. Oh well… Maybe next time…

(…cnvpstdf…)

Spoiler: cnvpstdf

 

(You can also read the original diary entry here (mirror). If odd-jobbed characters interest you, you should know that Oddjobs is recruiting!!)

Special note for those reading on the MapleLegends forum: At this point I am weary of XenForo butchering my diary entries, so any sections that I know in advance are going to get butchered will not be posted here. Sorry for the inconvenience…

rangifer’s diary: pt. lxxxv

Suboptimal as a community

For those unaware, Suboptimal is the name of an in-game alliance that I lead, which is currently composed of the following five guilds:

• Oddjobs (open to all odd-jobbers who don’t leech),
• Flow (open to anyone, but focused on outland permabeginners),
• Southperry (open to all islanders and all campers),
• Newbology (open to all islanders and all campers),
• and Victoria (open to all viclockers).

It’s a pretty cool alliance, if you ask me , but you’ll notice that the alliance is already full — five is the maximum number of guilds that can occupy a single alliance together. I had a discussion about this, in alliance chat, with Red (Permanovice, Battlesage, illadvised, Dreamscapes, Hanger) and jung1e (Plucks). Naturally, even as a full alliance of five whole guilds, Suboptimal tends to be pretty sparse. Most people do not opt for playing MapleStory in unusual ways (notice that this statement is more than a little bit tautological), and of those who do, some will treat it — in one way or another — as a kind of “vacation”, away from their “main” character(s). So it would actually make sense for us to go beyond the limit, and add even more guilds to Suboptimal; having so many guilds in a single alliance chat might sound spammy, but for an alliance like Suboptimal, a better word might be “cozy”, or “inclusive”. We floated the idea of actually making a suggestion thread on the MapleLegends forums to allow some mechanism for increasing the alliance size cap beyond five — it already starts at only two anyways, and you have to purchase expansions with mesos. But we knew it to be unlikely that such a change would be made to the game, so we considered some other approaches to this general problem of uniting “people who play MapleLegends weirdly”.

This general problem of uniting may sound familiar to those who are already familiar with the Odd Job Initiative, something that I have talked about in previous diary entries. And indeed, all of this falls under the purview of the Odd Job Initiative.

One possible option is to try to cram more “guilds” into a single alliance chat by creating “superguilds” that subsume two or more other, smaller guilds. In the process of subsumption of these virtual guilds under a single superguild, each one must naturally sublate its identity, including the distinctions of who belongs to which virtual guild, the name of the guild, the emblem, etc., in favour of some compromise. Furthermore, in the case that the virtual guild started its life as a real guild, the transformation from a guild into a virtual guild means losing members — in many cases, lots of members, some of whom may be inactive or may be taking a temporary break from the game. These rather extreme compromises make superguilds possible, but generally distasteful for most people.

On the other hand, the internet obviously exists well outside of just the game (viz. MapleLegends) itself. In this vein, the two platforms that Maplers (at least those who play MapleLegends and similar servers) are actually familiar with, and that they are willing to use, are Discord™ and forums (in our case, the MapleLegends forum in particular). I already had previously proposed the idea of a Suboptimal–Dream meta-alliance (which includes the five guilds of Suboptimal, in addition to GangGang and Chroma of the Dream alliance; we share a headquarters in channel 6 of FM 9) Discord™ server. So I floated that idea, along with the idea of simply a Suboptimal Discord™ megaserver.

Of course, for such a server to exist, it would need an emblem…! And alliance emblems don’t exist in-game (only guild emblems), so we were free to come up with whatever. While brainstorming ideas, I suggested a snail (like an ordinary Blue Snail, for example), but with Mano’s Rainbow-coloured Snail Shell as its shell. Slime (OmokTeacher, Thinks, Ginner, Slimu), the talented pixel artist that he is, put together just that!:



There it is! The emblem of Suboptimal!! Why a rainbow snail, you ask? Well, the rainbow snail reminds me that opening the door to oddball ways of playing MapleStory has a wonderful and profound effect: it makes things more colourful. When playing MapleStory conventionally, the premise is essentially this: pick one of the dozen or so different jobs, and be the best version of that job that you can be. While this is certainly fantastic on its own, opening the door to other styles of play makes things unboundedly more colourful. Also, we are all LGBTQIA+. Maybe. Just kidding, you don’t have to be LGBTQIA+ to be a Suboptimal member. We accept straights too

In any case, we now have a Suboptimal Discord™ server dedicated to all manner of oddball styles of play, and if you’re already in the Oddjobs, Flow, or Victoria Discord™ servers, you already got an invite. I’m considering opening this server, in an appropriate way, to non-oddball players (including other members of our meta-alliance, and possibly also those who may simply be curious), but that decision has yet to be made. If you’re interested in joining, feel free to drop a DM and/or friend request by me on Discord™ @deer#1028. <3

With all of that said, I always feel that there must be more work to be done in this space. What exactly the next step is, however, I do not know.

Raffling… still‽

So, the Valentine’s Day/Lunar New Year (LNY) event of 2022 has ended. Or has it…?

As it turns out, if you started a raffle quest before the event ended, the quest persists until you complete it — even though the event is already over. So I took the opportunity to do just a few more raffles…



And I got a few Prestigious Coins out of it! Not bad at all!! And, due to the raffle quest of my daggermit alces, it was the first time that I ever fought Yeti and Coketumps. But as we shall see, it will not be the last…

메이플 아일랜드

Over on Maple Island, I had the good fortune to duo some Dangerous Forest (DF) with islander extraordinaire (and leader of Newbology) jung1e (Plucks), on my islander ozotoceros, while on GM buffs! jung1e was kind enough to let me have the bottom layer (which is full of juicy Orange Mushrooms), so I tried a quick & dirty @epm test:



90.8k EPH o_o Spicy!!

And, he was also kind enough to gift me a spare cat mug random chair! So now I have two of the LNY 2022 event chairs on ozo!!:



At the end of our training session, ozo hit level 44



And finally, I was honoured to, uhm, do the honours of levelling up both jung1e and 1sme (Ismezin) with a single Pig!!:



Grats again to these two epic islanders :3

Suboptimal vs. the world

As always, I did some nifty bosserinoes with the Suboptimal krew. While I was hunting for Tough Dragon Skins on my darksterity knight rusa, I came across a Levi! So I asked in ally chat if anyone wanted to kill Levi, and daggermit Keppet responded to my call:



In total, we killed two Levis, but the first one dropped a chair!!:



And I won the roll, so rusa now has a snazzy (and rather adorable, I might say) dragon chair!:



During another scheduled event, Level1Crook (Lvl1Crook, xXCrookXx, Macer, Lanius) and I were unfortunately the only ones in attendance. But we didn’t let that stop us from killing some Ravs:





And some Papal Atlases, too! Level1Crook dared me to touch the spicy ball, so I did:



Ow. But I did survive…:



And here’s a nice action shot of us killing clockless Paper Lattice:



The meteoric rise of one “d33r”

Read the original here.

Cyn × Noble

I attended the wedding of LunaS2 (Cyn) and NobIe (Cexy, xNoble, CtrlNoble, Amaging, 1122), where we got some moving (but definitely Platonic…!) vows from NobIe:



The analogy with PB&J is humorous, but appropriate. Who doesn’t like a good PB&J, the holy & immortal sandwich of kings?

And we also got some… perhaps less Platonic “vows” from Cyn, after some prodding…:



o.o"

Grats again on the power marriage, you two :]

Sweetest nut hath sourest (g)rind

Over at everyone’s favourite library packed with hammer-wielding bodybuilder monks, I helped my marksman friend xBowtjuhNL level up, on my darksterity knight rusa:



Ramon likes to emphasise just how much he hates 7F, but he was so close to levelling, that it was the most reasonable option at the time…



And there it is! Level 172~!! o_o Big numbers!!

I did also two or three grind sessions at Galloperas (Gallos) on my woodsmaster capreolina, duoing with sniper Level1Crook (Lanius, Lvl1Crook, xXCrookXx, Macer):



Inching closer to the big level 135 :]

And finally, I was delighted to be joined by NZPally (NZIslander, LoveIslander, NZFire) at 7F, again on my darksterity knight rusa, after beggin— I mean, politely asking in the Suboptimal Discord™ server if anyone wanted to 7F with me so that I could use my hoarded GM buffs



Ty again for the party! ^^

Moloch horridus

Read the original here.

Moar viclockin’

Read the original here.

Deer 2

The owner of IGN Deer came back and found me, seemingly just to taunt me…



As it turned out, she was having some pretty serious issues with getting a stable connection to the MapleLegends servers, so she just kept D/Cing. :[ But she was around long enough for me to notice that she was a permabeginner, so I invited her to join Oddjobs:



Great… Now people are REALLY gonna think that IGN Deer is me!!

In any case, Deer showed off her Omok skills in a livestreamed Omok match against the OmokTeacher (Slime, Thinks, Ginner) himself:



As it turned out, even while quite rusty on Omok due to not having played it in a long time, Deer was very strong!! I don’t know anything about Omok, but OmokTeacher said that she’s very strong, so I believe him.

I later found out that, indeed, I didn’t know Deer before learning that she was the owner of said IGN. The IGNs of her main characters are Japansy and Japanties… But don’t be fooled — I am not IGN Deer!! I offered to purchase the IGN (after Red informed me that this is, in fact, not considered RWT), but they said that they didn’t really want to sell. So you can now see her in the Oddjobs and Suboptimal Discord™ servers as “Deer v.2”…

Hittin’ big bad guys with a stick

It is time for our regularly-scheduled boss-beating with our resident darksterity knight rusa…!

I did a pair of Zak runs with freshly level 135 shadower Bulgoki, as well as Harlez and xBowtjuhNL. That’s four members of the MPQ krew in one Zak!



And, during a JC run while rusa was level 161, I tried to do a clean @dpm 5 to check out my damage:



Heyo, 180.8M EPH ain’t half bad for SE, Echo, MW9, and a Cider! Once the clones start rolling out, my DPM really goes up ^^

Meet tara

Oh boy… That’s right, deer went and made yet another peepee poopoo garbo odd-jobbed character to add to her collection >.<

Spoiler: Meet tara!

Or did I?? Meet rangifer’s lil sis, tarandus!!



RANGIFER IS DEAD! LONG LIVE RANGIFER!!

Or rather, long live tara! I like calling her tara because tara is a prefix of tarandus, and also I think that Tara is a pretty name. Her name was easy to come up with (at least, after I decided that I didn’t want to reuse rangifer), as rangifer is a monotypic genus, that is, it contains only one species: Rangifer tarandus.

You probably already guessed that tara is a pugilist! However, she is not a carbon copy of her big sis rangifer. Here’s an overview of some of the differences:

• tara has a different subjob: she’s a shield pugilist! I debated between shield pugilist (for its extra damage) and shieldless pugilist (for its, in my opinion, superior aesthetics ), but ultimately decided that using a shield would be worth it in the long run.
• tara is a lil washy…! For better or worse, brawlers/marauders/buccaneers have considerably less MAXHP than their warrior counterparts, despite often having to get even closer & more personal to their enemies to pull off several of the moves in their arsenal.
  
  That being said, I’m not a big fan of deeply washing characters; I need my characters to be fully functional (or almost fully functional) starting at level 1 onwards, because the low levels are the best part of the game! So I’ve decided on simply 40 base INT, to be washed out down to 4 base INT whenever I feel like it (currently, the level that I would theoretically expect to wash out at is ≈120 or so — we’ll see if I even get that far!).
  
  Due to the whole washing thing, I have to put INT pyjamas on every time I level, which generally means equipping a weapon! >w< So what I’ve been doing is putting on my washing sticc and simply Three Snailsing my way to victory, instead of trying to SSK or anything like that.
  
  Honestly, my end goal would really just be the ability to — at max HP — touch Zakum’s third body and (consistently!) live to tell the tale. Anything beyond that is “just gravy”!
• I made sure to plan tara’s build — particularly SP build — entirely in advance, before even creating the character. This was an issue with rangifer, as I had issues with SP allocation that couldn’t be reversed by SP resets (as SP resets allow you to reset SP from a lower job to a higher job, but not vice versa — yes, you read that correctly…).
• tara’s “route” (i.e. way of levelling up and playing the game, which stuff in the game you do, & all that) is, in many ways, drastically different from that of rangifer. Whereas on rangifer, I did lots and lots of juicy PQs, tara is much less PQ-focused. Instead, tara is on a mission to do quests. All of the quests. Well, almost. I’m not a quest completionist, as quest completion counts really mean nothing to me. However, if I can finish a quest, and I don’t already know that the quest is a pain in the ass that I don’t wanna do, then I do it. That’s it; those are the criteria. As a result, this means that I will be skipping very few quests, relatively speaking. I have already skipped at least some: I left Maple Island at level 7 (with several unfinished quests) for washing purposes. I already know that I will almost certainly be skipping The Record of Goddess Minerva. I absolutely love OPQ, but god damn that quest…
  
  So far, all of tara’s EXP has been from questing. I even skipped over my beloved KPQ entirely!! I intend on persisting with this path of quests-only until it becomes prohibitive. Or until I feel like it. You don’t know me. I can do whatever I want.
• I made a new outfit for tara, based on rangifer’s old outfit. I’ve retained the hairstyle and face, but changed the hair colour and eye colour, changed the colour of the touque, and changed the rest of the outfit to match. I decided to go with bare feet for tara (unlike rangifer, who wore military boots), so that all of my limbs are fleshy weapons of mass destruction!!

Anyways, here’s a little résumé of what tara has been up to so far!:



Given how much I adore KPQ, you might reasonably wonder if my experience has suffered as a result of skipping it. In this case, I actually enjoyed skipping KPQ very much! It allowed me to continue questing, and thus to do a lot more quests than I normally (“normally” meaning: still sating my PQ appetite) would be able to at lower levels.

As part of my questing journey, I’m doing all of the Coke™ Town quests.



Before making tara, I had never done any of these quests, so I figured that I owe it to myself to at least explore this isolated region of the MapleLegends world (as Coke™ Town is not an event map in MapleLegends, it’s a permanent addition). Unfortunately, Coke™ Town kinda sux. There’s no better way to say it; everyone who I’ve asked about it who has actually done the quests says it kinda sux too. The quest rewards are modest at best, and the actual end reward (kinda the “whole point” of doing the Coke™ Town questline) — the Cokeplay™ Shield — is completely broken, and thus unattainable in-game.

But that’s not the only broken part of Coke™ Town! Most of the maps have broken monster spawns



These quests take a long time not because they are “difficult” per se, but moreso because you have to wait three weeks for a single Coke Snail to respawn.

I’ve done about half a dozen of the quests now, including Polar Bear Lolo’s ladder to the sky 1, which requires collecting ETC items from the Coketump Lites™ that you see below:



…And from ordinary Coketumps™ as well. These are both found in the bizarrely-named Coke™ Ski Camp B1648, which thankfully appears to have spawns that aren’t buggy.

One case of buggy spawns that is really more humorous than anything is Small Alley, which has almost all of its spawns concentrated on a single small floating platform that takes up probably like ≈3% or so of the map’s total surface area:



I fell off of this tiny-ass platform countless times trying to kill these damn seals… In any case, we should see more of tara doing Coke™ Town quests in the next installation of Questing With tara™!

tara is level >35 now, so she could LPQ. However, LPQ has no quest tie-ins, and I don’t really need the glasses (I prefer a nice pair of specs myself!), so it’s actually rather unlikely that I will do any LPQ.

If you’re curious about the planned-out SP build that I mentioned above, I’ve copy & pasted it here:

Spoiler: tara’s SP build

0th job

level	SP
2–4	+1 Three Snails [MAX]
5–7	+1 Recovery [MAX]

1st job

level	SP
10	+1 SSK [1]
11–16	+3 SSK [19]
17	+2 BT [2], +1 SSK [MAX]
18–23	+3 BT [MAX]
24–26	+3 Dash [9]
27	+2 FF [2], +1 Dash [MAX]
28–30	+3 FF [11]

Final:

• BT: 20
• FF: 11
• SSK: 20
• Double Shot: 0
• Dash: 10

2nd job

level	SP
30	+1 Imp MAXHP [1]
31–33	+3 Imp MAXHP [MAX]
34	+1 CSB [1], +1 Barrel [1], +1 BSB [1]
35	+2 FF [13], +1 DUC [1]
36–37	+3 FF [19]
38	+2 DUC [3], +1 FF [MAX]
39–43	+3 DUC [18]
44	+2 DUC [MAX], +1 CSB [2]
45–50	+3 CSB [MAX]
51–56	+3 BSB [19]
57	+2 Barrel [3], +1 BSB [MAX]
58–59	+3 Barrel [9]
60	+2 Mastery [2], +1 Barrel [MAX]
61	+3 Mastery [5]
62–67	+3 Booster [18]
68	+2 Booster [MAX], +1 MP Recovery [1]
69–70	+3 MP Recovery [7]

Final:

• BT: 20
• FF: 20
• SSK: 20
• Double Shot: 0
• Dash: 10
• Imp MAXHP: 10
• Mastery: 5
• BSB: 20
• DUC: 20
• CSB: 20
• MP Recovery: 7
• Booster: 20
• Barrel: 10

3rd job

level	SP
70	+1 Trans [1]
71	+2 Blast [2], +1 Charge [1]
72–80	+3 Blast [29]
81	+2 Charge [3], +1 Blast [MAX]
82–93	+3 Charge [39]
94	+1 Charge [MAX], +1 Drain [1], +1 Stun Mastery [1]
95–100	+3 Stun Mastery [19]
101	+2 Drain [3], +1 Stun Mastery [MAX]
102–106	+3 Drain [18]
107	+2 Drain [MAX], +1 Trans [2]
108–113	+3 Trans [MAX]
114	+3 MP Recovery [MAX]
115–120	+3 Wave [18]

Final:

• BT: 20
• FF: 20
• SSK: 20
• Double Shot: 0
• Dash: 10
• Imp MAXHP: 10
• Mastery: 5
• BSB: 20
• DUC: 20
• CSB: 20
• MP Recovery: 10
• Booster: 20
• Barrel: 10
• Stun Mastery: 20
• Charge: 40
• Blast: 30
• Drain: 20
• Trans: 20
• Wave: 18

4th job
I really have no idea about the 4th job stuff. This build — which only goes up to level 150… if I somehow(‽) surpass level 150, I’ll just have to figure it out as I go LOL — is based on iPippy’s A Buccaneer’s Field Guide (2021 Update+Pink Bean). It seems fine (I like the idea of prioritising Demo over DStrike), but I may consider moving TL to be maxed even sooner? Maybe that’s sacrificing too much fighting ability early on, but I have learned the true strength of TL, and it is mighty.

level	SP
120	+1 SI [1], +1 DStrike [1], +1 TL [1]
121	+2 SI [3], +1 Barrage [1]
122–123	+3 SI [9]
124	+2 SI [11], +1 STrans [1]
125–134	+3 Demo [MAX]
135–140	+3 STrans [19]
141	+2 TL [3], +1 STrans [MAX]
142–150	+3 TL [MAX]

rusa, the darksterity knight

Read the original here.

(…cnvpstdf…)

Spoiler: cnvpstdf