White Knight vs Crossbowman(HPWashman)

I'd say u should go for fourth job on white knight. It's already a lot closer than your xbow to the level where you can start doing things like zakum / cwkpq.

You'll earn alot of mesos on that character, and although they appear to be two different classes, a lot of the gear on your white knight is directly transferable to the xbow (earings, face, eye, glove, cape, and shoe in some cases).

You can go back to the xbow with better gear later, or remake into a bowmaster, which is sadly the most optimal thing to do given the current state of marksman.

 

You can always come back to the crossbowman later. If you're voting on both accounts you can just hoard a ton of it for the crossbowman, and use it to hit a solid amount of HP.

A half-decent short term washing plan might look like this:
Let's say you get 120 int on him. You'd be level 53 and you could do a bit of MP washing on him. For 30 levels you can MP wash 150 times(465k NX), so at 83 you'd have an extra 2,000 or so MP, which translates to 3,000 extra HP at the cost of 516k NX.

Overall it would probably take you about 5 months to get that much NX. You could probably work on the character again in 2-3 months time if you casually pace it. If you keep that int until level 150 then you'd have a minimum of another 1200 hp to wash as well(more if you get some int gear or do more MP washes). With some equips that would probably leave him somewhere around 9-10k HP overall when he's a high level. To reset that int and do the rest of those washes it would take another 576k nx, or like 3 more months of voting. But leveling slows down a bit so that becomes less difficult to acquire. You could make a very solid Marksman by the end of the year, it just takes a bit of patience.

If you're really patient you could make one with a silly amount of HP, in which case I would remake him with 200+ int, but really it just depends on what sort of player you are. Many of the really end-game people aren't mainly playing their first characters anymore, they just had the patience to vote it out and have fun in the meantime as the passion projects took shape. White Knight is a good choice for a first character though, and it does pick up after level 130 or so and you can dispense hammer justice.

 

Yeah I wish it wasn't the case either, I really do hope staff gives xbows some kind of buff. This post probably best explains why the class is in such a bad spot: https://forum.maplelegends.com/index.php?threads/buff-marksmen.27868/

Also, I use to share your opinion about bowmasters, but after watching high level bowmasters play in Horntail, I actually think bowmasters are the more technically challenging / fun class to play (between the two archers).

 

Marksman do have to be a lot more attentive but I don't think it really translates to a lot more "challenging". Only real challenge it has that Bowmaster doesn't is to try and not Snipe into a cancelled head or shoot the floor in general.