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Odd Jobs Community Thread

Discussion in 'Community' started by deer, Jan 7, 2021.

  1. OP
    OP
    deer
    Offline

    deer Pac Pinky

    195
    398
    191
    Oct 27, 2020
    Female
    Oddville
    9:33 PM
    cervid
    Bishop
    130
    Oddjobs
    (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. lxxiv

    The Odd Job Initiative

    This diary entry’s regularly scheduled odd job taxonomy nerdfest has been displaced! Oh no!! There must be something equally unreadable to replace it…

    Well, this diary entry itself has been a bit delayed, as a result of another project that I’m working on. I call it the “Odd Job Initiative”, because I didn’t bother coming up with a better name. To help explain what the Odd Job Initiative is, I’ve adapted a message that I had already composed for another purpose:
    The Odd Job Initiative is my genuine attempt to put the oddball MapleStory community in as concentrated of a space as possible, so that it may live — and ideally, thrive. Although the Odd Job Initiative is focused on my own guild/alliance, my motivation is not selfish. I genuinely believe that MapleLegends has the best chance of being a popular middle ground for oddball Maplers from all corners of the Mapleverse, and the Odd Job Initiative seeks to unify rather than divide. There are no concrete criteria for what it would mean for the Odd Job Initiative to “succeed” or to “fail”. Ultimately, at some point I will feel that it “succeeded”, or “failed”, or perhaps more likely, that it did something in between.

    I’ve had a lot of help from Red (Permanovice, Battlesage, Dreamscapes, Hanger), who helped me put a lot of the ideas together, gave feedback & advice on my writing, is doing some of his own recruiting/advertising, and even helped me EveryoneEveryone when I was too scared to do it! :p

    You can find a to-do list — and some other materials — relating to the Odd Job Initiative here. The thing that I’m working on the most actively at the moment is the “Introduction To Odd Jobs”, which is intended to be a gentler & briefer introduction to odd jobs than the one offered by the list of odd jobs on the Oddjobs website. It covers only the essential odd jobs (noting the existence of some others in passing), and only attempts to describe how each odd job basically works, in plain language. You can find the guide here, but keep in mind that at the time of writing, it is still very much a work in progress.

    A little adventuring, with capreolina

    I was invited to do a casual Ravana or two with some folks from GangGang & Chroma: Permanovice (Battlesage, Dreamscapes), kookiechan (kookietann, kurisuwu), Moistbeard, and Flai (FIai, NotFlai)! I wanted to get some Rav runs in on my woodswoman capreolina, so I joined the party to help take down the Ravana of legend:

    [​IMG]

    Permanovice was feeling brave, and like he really wanted to boop Ravana, so he did just that:

    [​IMG]

    Oops. R.I.P.…

    Speaking of resting in peace, my Rings of Passion are starting to expire…

    [​IMG]

    Welp, at least I have Thrust to keep me going. It seems that each Ring of Passion is assigned its own expiry at the moment of item creation, so several of my characters are still holding on to theirs.

    After some more bossing (read: Ravanas and Papus), capre was inching closer to levelling up. At the end of the last Papulatus run one day, xBowtjuhNL and Harlez decided to let me solo (or at least, mostly solo) the second body. It wasn’t pretty; I didn’t have time to take out my melee weapon before Papu was all up in my grill, so I gradually Strafed it to death… But it was worth it — that was all that capre needed to hit level 127!:

    [​IMG]

    Cool!! I knew I’d level up eventually, if I just kept, you know, going to every Rav/Papu that I was invited to ^^;

    Krexel prequests, with rusa

    Speaking of killing Ravana: After two such Ravanas, I was invited to do the Krexel prequests with Permanovice, kookiechan, Moistbeard, and CtrlNoble (NobIe, xNoble, 1122). Since I was already trying to get my darksterity knight rusa to level 135 anyways — in order to do some fancy-dancy boss runs with some friends, like Krex, but also Zakum and Scar/Tar, I suppose — I came along as rusa.

    I’d never actually completed the Krex prequests before, but I understood that they were mostly just collecting ETCs from the monsters around Ulu City. But first, we killed some Capt. Lats — I think we got a little bit confused and (mistakenly) believed that the Capt. Lat questline was a pre-requisite for the Krex questline. But, in any case, we knew that we needed Soul Lanterns for the Krex questline, so it still made sense:

    [​IMG]

    Unfortunately, Capt. Lat was being stingy with the lanterns, so we left the Ghost Ship lanternless, and headed to Ulu City to start the questline in earnest:

    [​IMG]

    The first order of business was slaying some Veetrons, and the significantly more annoying Berserkies:

    [​IMG]

    Then, our favourite dilapidated French automobiles, the Montrecers:

    [​IMG]

    Right, so, it turns out rusa can’t actually fight these. If you can’t one-shot these things, and can’t disable them in some way (stun/freeze/seal), good luck getting out of their permastuns. Thankfully, my party members were able to pick up the slack and donate some excess Oil Canisters to me. <3

    Then, we headed back to Ulu Estate II to kill even moar Veetrons. But really, we were there for the Slygies:

    [​IMG]

    It’s hard to know what these things look like, if you’re just looking at the MapleLegends Library entry. They aren’t a small collection of grass clippings. At least, they aren’t just that. You can see one of their pink wormy bodies in the image above. Pretty gross, right?

    Anyways, once we had enough severed worm tails to please Commando Jim and his masked friend, we only had one more part to go: killing Dukus for their Rafflesias, and getting that pesky Soul Lantern. We were able to finish up the former bit by hunting in Destroyed Park II, but the Soul Lanterns remained elusive… There weren’t even any on the FM! Drat.

    cervine steps closer to the big 120

    Level1Crook (Lvl1Crook, xXCrookXx, Sangatsu) and I were fortunate enough to catch some surprise GM buffs just as we were headed to a certain Taiwanese shopping mall to summarily destroy some optical discs! Needless to say, it was a very productive 60 minutes:

    [​IMG]

    WHEW… 8M EPH is probably the most I’ve ever clocked at CDs on my I/L magelet cervine! And, I was already reasonably close to levelling, sooo…

    [​IMG]

    Yey!! Would you look at that! J…ust… seven… more… l… le… levels………

    As part of the Odd Job Initiative™, I’ve been sending out goofy recruitment smegas like “i’m an I/L with 567 base LUK. ask me anything! \\\ R>Oddjobs”. Well, I sent an item smega with my tagged Elemental Staff 3 and that message, after we were done grinding CDs. I got a few bemused whispers from concerned citizens of the Maple World, but I also got a surprise gift from someone by the name of SketchySus, who appeared in Taipei 101 proper, where I was NPCing some of my CD goodies, dropped a single Elemental Staff 7, and left before I could even say anything (I tried whispering, but I guess they immediately logged out)!:

    [​IMG]

    Thanks, Sketchy!! Now, all I have to do is level up 50 more times…

    Meeting Oahu

    Speaking of the Odd Job Initiative, I was fortunate enough to attract the attention of the player behind Oahu (and Cleft). Oahu is a level 62 STRlander of Southperry, one of the original top-ranking islanders of MapleLegends, and the owner of the MapleLegends islander Discord server. Because of Oahu’s deep connections with the MapleLegends islanding scene, and his origins from, and connections with, the same scene in MapleRoyals, I was thrilled that he was so interested in the Odd Job Initiative! I met him in-game, on my DEXlander ozotoceros:

    [​IMG]

    When suddenly, Oahu surprised me with a trade request:

    [​IMG]

    I was flattered that Oahu would offer these kinds of special items to me, especially considering that I had no chairs to speak of yet — well, unless you count ye olde Relaxer. I admit, I was a bit nervous to pick one, as I knew that I had to choose wisely! In the end, I went with the flashy Pearl Shell Chair :3

    [​IMG]

    Once I had picked a chair, Oahu did a showcase for me of the chairs he’d collected over the years:

    [​IMG]

    Which is a lot of chairs. A lot.

    Before we could talk about anything else, though, Oahu directed me to Southperry, where he keeps his islander mules. I already felt more than flattered by the chair, but I didn’t want to be rude and say “no” to some other goodies…

    Many of the mules were, erm, BandanaBoys:

    [​IMG]

    BandanaBoy5 brought a very special item:

    [​IMG]

    A Lifeguard Saver is no joke for an islander — the WATK is decent (the same as ye olde GSB), but the SPEED is where it’s at. 10 SPEED (although this one was below average, with just 9 SPEED) is just about as good as it gets, and the fact that it’s a one-handed weapon is a nice bonus, for those who like to sport a cute shield (Maple Shields, in particular, give a bit of AVOID)!!

    Oahu also handed me a Miracle Cube. I wasn’t familiar with this particular April Fools’ prank item, so when he instructed me to double-click it, I wasn’t keen enough to get a screenshot (I regret this deeply). Turns out, using it makes your character rip ass:

    [​IMG]

    (Why did I hoard so many Amethyst Earrings? Iunno.) When I realised what happened, I was… bizarrely flattered to have passed gas. ’Tis an honour:

    [​IMG]

    And with that, Oahu reminded me of the venerable tradition of islander hand-me-downs:

    [​IMG]

    So, share I did. With some of the active islanders I’ve played with! A Maple Bandana Yellow for Leozinho:

    [​IMG]

    …And, because Oahu had also found a Red Flowery Tube for me, the Lifeguard Saver went to an islander yet without a good weapon, Izlander!:

    [​IMG]

    More adventures of ozotoceros~

    But wait — there’s more! The adventures of my DEXlander ozotoceros don’t end there. I grinded to level 36 ^^:

    [​IMG]

    Did a few rounds of the islander quest with Leozinho and Dexual:

    [​IMG]

    …Which propelled me to level 37 :eek:

    [​IMG]

    At which point, I met up with Subcortical (Cortical, GishGallop, SussyBaka, CokeZeroPill, WizetWizard) whilst grinding. We played a friendly match of anti-omok:

    [​IMG]

    Which turned into what is probably the only omok win I’ve ever had (ok, technically a loss, in some sense — a losswin?):

    [​IMG]

    So, basically, I’m… kind of an omok expert now. No big deal.

    I met Izlander, as well as veteran islander 1sme (Ismezin), who just sat there lookin’ cool with The Legendary Gold Poop Hat™ on:

    [​IMG]

    I also met up with some other islanders, including Christopher and Kimberly, together representing almost all of the guilds in Suboptimal (all except Victoria)!:

    [​IMG]

    (The above screenshot is courtesy of Oahu.)

    Aaaand I hit level 38! :)

    [​IMG]

    I was also deeply pleased to pass the very first(!) (and so far, only) top WDEF 10% that I’ve ever found!!:

    [​IMG]

    On a perfect clean Red-Striped T-Shirt, no less! This shirt will likely never leave my body…*

    Oh, and even with my reckless Myo Myo expenditures, I’ve managed to hit the 1M meso mark :p

    [​IMG]

    I was also able to get those GM buffs (the same ones that my I/L magelet cervine got) on ozotoceros! While I was in the FM entrance on cervine, waiting for GM buffs, I asked GM Mirror if there would be any islander buffs. It seemed that this was the only thing reminding her to do islander buffs, so in effect, I ended up requesting personal buffs for myself…

    [​IMG]

    I was a bit harried at this point — as I was operating four(!) clients at this point, for maximum GM buffage — but I made sure to thank Mirror, as I felt a tad guilty for making her come to the island to just buff me…

    In any case, I used the GM buffs to their maximum potential, at Pigs! I even got up onto that top bit where those two pesky Shrooms spawn!!:

    [​IMG]

    Wowie. I can see all of Maple Island from up here!

    Needless to say, I did some @epm testing:

    [​IMG]

    66.1k EPH, whew. Those are some phat numbers right there.

    *Cue the jokes about islanders never showering. Har, har…

    The seventh floor of the Sutra Depository

    In the previous diary entry, my darksterity knight rusa tried out 7F for the first time, alongside xBowtjuhNL, Gruzz, and Harlez. This section documents some more experiments in grinding that rusa has done since then.

    I tried duoing at Petrifighters with Gruzz, which yielded some pretty crazy results:

    [​IMG]

    I did head back to 7F again to trio with Harlez and xBowtjuhNL, which got me less EPH (18.2M or so), but is a more suitable map for rusa:

    [​IMG]

    However, what perhaps surprised me the most was when I did my first @epm test while soloing 7F:

    [​IMG]

    Churning out a whole 15.2M EPH all by my lonesome is no joke. In fact, this sort of (we’ll get to that in a second) means that rusa has graduated from CDs!! As recorded in a previous diary entry, rusa tends to get roughly ≈10M EPH (not to mention my pure STR bishop cervid’s EPH) while sadsadgrinding at CDs. So 7F actually represents a pretty big step up, which is exciting (and doesn’t hurt my eyes nearly as much as Taipei 101)!

    That being said, the MPH (mesos per hour) situation is a little different. CDs are just consistently good money; grinding there is pretty much a guaranteed payout, even if there are some minor fluctuations in that payout due to random chance. 7F, on the other hand, I have to pay money to train at. Every additional hour that I train at 7F bleeds more mesos from my purse, mostly in the form of Satays. So, inevitably, it seems that the grinding strategy here is just “sadgrind at 7F, and then sadsadgrind at CDs to make back the money”. So, you know, maybe that doesn’t truly count as “graduating from CDs”, but hey — I take what I can get.

    Oh, and that was enough to take rusa to level 132 c:

    [​IMG]

    I figured that I should directly compare against Petris, just in case soloing Petris actually was better EPH than soloing 7F. Turns out, it’s not:

    [​IMG]

    I did some 7F trioing with Harlez and a bishop by the name of RUSSOSKY, which… well… I got a lot of EXP. Like, a lot:

    [​IMG]

    As I was doing some solo grinding there, I finished up the Silver Giant set (I had already finished the Wooden Fish set, as it’s basically trivial):

    [​IMG]

    …And hit level 133~!:

    [​IMG]

    I was joined by F/P mage 2sus4u of Flow:

    [​IMG]

    Unfortunately, 7F is kind of a hostile map — it’s a bit hectic, the Wooden Fishes auto-aggro, and there are no safe spots. There’s kinda a safe spot (I like to call these “semi-safe spots”) if you stand exactly on the left edge of the portal into the dungeon, because at that point you aren’t in range of any of the Wooden Fishes, and the giants can’t touch attack you. But, as soon as a giant uses a magic attack in your general vicinity, it’s all over. So, 2sus4u decided that we should try mist training at her usual spot: FoT.

    [​IMG]

    Training this way is less dangerous, although it’s a bit fast-paced (at least, for me). We were dual-channel training, which meant that I had to follow 2sus4u into the left side of the map, sweep from left to right (hitting anything along the way), then exit the map on its right side, change channels, and repeat. This is a nonstop, continuous process, and considering that 2sus4u has Teleport, whereas I do not, I have to do a fair amount of huffing & puffing to keep up.

    After getting some EXP from mist training, I headed back to solo 7F and get rusa her level 134!:

    [​IMG]

    Also while soloing 7F, I found a legendary item only spoken of in whispers: a Golden Giant card:

    [​IMG]

    One down, four more to go…

    With the GM buffs that I mentioned in earlier sections of this diary entry, I tried some more solo 7F, and tested how much the GM buffs would increase my EPH:

    [​IMG]

    Wowzers. 19.7M solo EPH ain’t half bad… And partway through the GM buffs, I was joined by Harlez, which put my EPH into the sky:

    [​IMG]

    Later, I conveniently found a Power Stance 20 mastery book in one of the Wooden Fishes — I was just one SP away from being able to use the book myself:

    [​IMG]

    I was joined briefly by a level 169 shadower by the name of Jrmyy, who was close to levelling and wanted to get ≈3% more EXP. I agreed to duo, and we grinded until I levelled up!:

    [​IMG]

    Ah, and there it is. Level 135!!!! :D Some more grinding, and we were able to get Jrmyy his level 170!!! Grats!

    And so, I did use that mastery book. And it failed. Amen.

    Now that rusa is level 135, will we see some new bosses in the future…? Only time will tell :)

    hashishi @ LMPQ

    Permapirate Copo (Bipp, Celim, Sommer, Fino) was trying to put together an LMPQ (Ludibrium Maze Party Quest) party. Naturally, finding members is quite difficult, as no one actually regularly does LMPQ on MapleLegends. I was down to do some LMPQs myself, but because it’s only available to level 51–70 characters, I was short on options. Normally, I don’t consider PQing with my besinner hashishi, because of my experience of doing a few OPQs and feeling disproportionately useless. However, I had never tried LMPQ, so I figured I may as well give it a go. Copo recruited two others by the names of cutiewizard and DarkClover, and we set off to maze some party quests:

    [​IMG]

    Some readers are doubtless at least somewhat familiar with LMPQ, but for those who are not, the basic idea is this: LMPQ has 16 rooms, and you start in a random room that isn’t room 16. Then, you go around the rooms, breaking the boxes until monsters come out. Killing the monsters yields tickets. You take the tickets to room 16, and once everyone is in room 16, you can finish the PQ. The amount of EXP that you get directly depends on how many tickets the leader was holding when you ended the PQ. The trick is that only rooms 6 and 7 are actually worth doing; the monsters in these rooms drop WAY more tickets than any other monsters in the PQ:

    [​IMG]

    The other twist is that going from room to room is not entirely trivial. Each room has three portals, and they increase the room number by ⟨+4, +7, −3⟩, respectively. If you go above 15, or below 1, the numbers simply wrap around at those points, like: …, 14, 15, 1, 2, …*

    I’ve actually done quite a few LMPQs in my Maple career, but nowadays they are so infrequent that I have to relearn how the portals work (at the very least, relearning ⟨+4, +7, −3⟩) every time. And, because the only monsters that we were fighting were Tauromacis and the occasional Flyeye, I wasn’t all that effective at killing the monsters (although I definitely could kill them myself, if we were willing to do PQs eight times more slowly…). Nevertheless, I got the hang of navigating the rooms quickly enough that I could help break boxes to start the combat before other people got there.

    I found out that LMPQ has a few interesting reward items here and there. I remembered it being mostly a lot of potions, which is true. When doing other things (e.g. other PQs), eventually you have to go and repot. With LMPQ, the only thing that you have to do is “unpot”, if you will. There’s no way to run out of pots, given that LMPQ shoves massive quantities of them into your inventory. The only issue is making sure that your inventory has some space remaining… That being said, we got some other interesting loot, including Emergency Rescue Tubes, Yellow Umbrellas, Green Strap Shoes, Blood Snowboards, and a nifty scroll or two like cape INT 10%! Perhaps a tad disappointing is the fact that all the equipment is exactly average. None of the stats are random. But hey, still pretty neato.

    *Well, sort of. If you go into the middle portal of room 9, you don’t end up in room 1, like you’d expect. You end up in room 16. In fact, this is the only way to get to room 16. Room 16 only has one portal, which leads back to room 9. So much for a nice structure
     
    • Like Like x 6
  2. Slime
    Online

    Slime Pixel Artist Retired Staff

    641
    1,184
    381
    Apr 8, 2015
    Male
    Israel
    11:33 PM
    Slime / OmokTeacher
    Beginner
    102
    Flow
    Haven't seen Cleft in such a long time, nice to see he seems to be doing well~
     
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  3. xCheesecake
    Offline

    xCheesecake King Slime

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    Mar 5, 2019
    Female
    5:33 AM
    Bandit
    Oddjobs
    Since deer mentioned that the Odd Jobs Community Thread could benefit from more activity, and that members are welcomed to post here, I figured I'll start posting my accomplishments here!

    So I finally managed to reach level 50 on my Blood Dit which is a milestone not just for this build/character, but for me in Legends and Old-school maple as a whole LOL. (My highest levelled character in Pre-Big Bang MS is actually level 45 and level 47 in this server until now.) And I think that says a lot for my investment playing with this character/build. For the record it's also my first time playing a bandit ever in MS and my first odd-job. But I'm making steady progress.

    [​IMG]
    My priorities so far have been card-hunting and finding ways to meso farm through what I can access at low levels, and joining PQs to get gear to tide me through until I'm able to pursue and fund for my intended end-game equips.

    [​IMG]
    [​IMG] [​IMG]
    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]
    I'm working on completing each tab in full because I'm a completionist like that.

    I can see people being skeptical but pushing the threshold to hit my goals is honestly exciting for me.

    Apart from that, playing a blood dit has been a genuinely fulfilling experience that I hadn't had for a while even when playing average/normie builds on this server or during the Sleepywood locked challenge. Not just because of the challenge it presents, but the way it actually hits me with a true sense of nostalgia while allowing me to still play and savour the game at a pace I'm satisfied with without things going obsolete too quickly.

    Also the best thing is that even if I hit the ceiling it's not entirely the end because there will still be things for me to do, given that blood dits are heavily meso reliant late into the game. Not to mention I can gear down anytime and pretend to be a noob and revisit old locations and make them relevant again for funsies, now that's the true OG experience.
     
    • Great Work Great Work x 4
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  4. xCheesecake
    Offline

    xCheesecake King Slime

    26
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    36
    Mar 5, 2019
    Female
    5:33 AM
    Bandit
    Oddjobs
    Nothing much to report other than this.
    [​IMG]
    Had enough mesos to afford a YAC. Not bad for a first scrolling attempt.

    Edit: Figured I'd include this too.
    [​IMG]
    Tab 2 Zipangu cards all done!
     
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  5. OP
    OP
    deer
    Offline

    deer Pac Pinky

    195
    398
    191
    Oct 27, 2020
    Female
    Oddville
    9:33 PM
    cervid
    Bishop
    130
    Oddjobs
    (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. lxxv

    “Introduction To Odd Jobs”

    At the beginning of the previous diary entry, I mentioned the “Introduction To Odd Jobs” guide that I was working on. Well, it’s now complete!! You can find the guide here; I’ve also posted a version of the guide to the MapleLegends forums, and you can find the relevant source here. Any issues/PRs can be directed to the odd_job_guides repo on Codeberg :)

    I’ve (just barely) started translating the guide into Spanish, which you can find at README.spa-Latn-419.md (the original English version is at README.md). I’ve decided to just name the translated versions “README.x.md”, where x is an appropriate IETF language tag for the language variety (a.k.a. lect)* used in that translation. IETF language tags are quite flexible, and can contain one or more “subtags” separated by hyphen-minus characters (“-”; U+002d); furthermore, each subtag can often take on one of several different forms. In the case of the Spanish translation, it would probably be sufficient to use “es” as the language tag. But, in order to handle more general cases if need be, and to maintain consistency, I decided to only use language tags of the form xxx-Zzzz-nnn, where xxx is an ISO 639-3 language code (all lowercase), Zzzz is an ISO 15924 script code (first letter uppercase, all other letters lowercase), and nnn is a UN M49 area code.

    In the case of spa-Latn-419, “spa” is the language code for Spanish, “Latn” is the script code for a Latin script, and “419” is the area code for “Latin America and the Caribbean”. In this particular case, the “Latn” may be a bit redundant — Spanish is, after all, a Romance language, so it’s hardly ever been written in a non-Latin script. Technically, Spanish (and closely related lects, e.g. Ladino) has been written using the Arabic script (see Aljamiado; Al-Andalus) and the Hebrew alphabet. But Al-Andalus is no more, and Ladino is (regrettably) highly endangered. The use of the 419 area code is a bit nebulous (and Spanish speakers outside of Latinoamérica should be able to read it just fine), but I mostly chose it to indicate the lack of dedicated informal second-person plural pronoun and the bias towards vocabulary more common in Latinoamérica, some of which may sound foreign to Iberian Spanish speakers. However, I don’t write with any voseo whatsoever, even though several regions of Latinoamérica do use it (fully and/or verbally).

    That being said, the script can be more significant in other languages. Malay is primarily written using a Latin script, but Jawi is also used, and it has historically been written in some other scripts as well. For languages that make use of hànzì, the split between traditional and simplified characters is significant on a geographical, lectal, and cultural basis. MapleStory has a significant population from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau, and many overseas Chinese communities (e.g. in North America), where traditional characters predominate; as well as a significant population from (or originated from) Mainland China, Malaysia, and Singapore, where simplified characters predominate. These differences are often along lectal lines; Cantonese, Standard Chinese (Beijing Mandarin), Taiwanese Mandarin, and Taishanese (common among U.S. speakers) differ in their preference for script, and these lects are usually mutually unintelligible. The aforementioned geographical differences also highlight the usefulness of area codes.

    I’ve had three people graciously offer to help with translating the guide into other languages, including Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese (por-Latn-076), German (deu-Latn-276, deu-Latn-040, or deu-Latn-756, I’m not sure; I didn’t ask), and Malaysian (zsm-Latn-458)! Any contributions are welcome! ^^

    *A “lect” is distinct from a “dialect”. The term “dialect” is a purely political term that ultimately has no actual linguistic meaning. A lect is a more generic term for any language variety whatsoever (anything from what might be considered a “macrolanguage”, to an idiolect, or anything in between), regardless of its “size” (in any number of dimensions) or social status.

    capreolina tries whacking Papulatus’s second body to death

    I was doing some of the usual Rav/Papu runs with friends, on my woodsmaster capreolina, when something unusual happened during a Papu run. At about the time when the first body of Papu got down to ≈¼ HP, Harlez (with whom I was duoing) accidentally NPC-chat-button’d his way out of the map, leaving me alone with Papu…

    At first, I wasn’t sure whether or not I should just leave as well — Papulatus has no timer, so it was certainly possible for me to finish, but I wasn’t sure if I should keep Harlez waiting for run two. But Harlez assured me that I should finish, so I gave it my best shot:

    [​IMG]

    Killing the last ¼ of the first body wasn’t terribly difficult, but the real challenge was going to begin as soon as that flying second body popped out. I decided in advance that I was going to switch to my Crimson Arcglaive ASAP, once the first body was dead. This way, I would avoid the troubles of trying to Strafe (read: mostly bow-whack) to death a rapidly flying Papu second body that was aggro’d on me the entire time. And, it worked pretty well:

    [​IMG]

    I was happy with how it was working out, but of course, the entire thing was extremely dangerous. Each time that this menacingly fast boss touches me, I take 95%+ of my MAXHP worth of damage… so a single slip-up, pet auto-HP failure, or eaten button-press, is enough to spell my demise. So I was in full concentration mode. Unfortunately, I only managed to shave off ≈40% or so of the second body’s HP before one of these things happened, and I met my grave…

    Oh well, maybe next time :3

    A sneak peek of hydropotina before the next event…

    My poor swashbuckler hydropotina has been in a state of neglect for a while now. At the moment, I have a variety of untradeable (mostly anniversary) event equipment on some of my other characters — some readers will remember how hard I worked for those… I’ve been trying to make use of these hard-won equipment items, which has only perpetuated hydropotina’s neglect.

    But, I found a short occasion on which to play hydropotina, and with some luck, I can revive her in a future event!

    I was already in Mu Lung Gardens (MLG) for the Herb Town Party Quest, so I started off by killing some (Ginseng) Jars for Eliminating the Escaped Pot:

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    And I headed to the (Sr.) Bellflower Roots for Intruder — The Herb Farm:

    [​IMG]

    I went to slay some Peach Monke* for Protecting the Peach Farm, and hit level 92 in the process!:

    [​IMG]

    And snagged a Peach Monke card on the way out:

    [​IMG]

    While I was in Mu Lung, I did No Gong’s Teaching:

    [​IMG]

    And, after gathering up some of my spare Concentrates for Finding the Ingredients for Tae Sang, I went out to gather up the ETCs necessary to craft Mr. Do’s book on herbal medicines:

    [​IMG]

    While I was here at Bellflower Valley, I naturally got 5/5 Bellflower Root quite quickly, as they are notorious for their high card drop rate. But I also had pretty good luck with the Sr. Bellflower Root cards, so I decided to stay there just a little longer to get that last card and go from 4/5 to 5/5. Unfortunately for me, the game decided to withhold all such cards from me until which point I could not muster the energy to kill more elderly campanula…

    *While looking up Peach Monkeys, I found this entry in the MapleLegends Library of a seemingly identical Peach Monke that is much more powerful (level 120), but gives no EXP and has nothing in its droptable. If you look, you’ll see that these naturally spawn in a hidden map called “Save Delli!”. I wasn’t sure what to think of this at first — maybe it’s some unused content, like a PQ or something like that. Well… sort of. It’s actually not unused at all: Hypnotize is not a default skill for corsairs, so it must be unlocked via a quest that involves this map. Talking to Shulynch transports the corsair to Looking for Delli 1, which is a short JQ map which leads to Looking for Delli 2, another short JQ map which leads to Looking for Delli 3, another short JQ map which leads to the aforementioned Save Delli! Delli is an NPC who looks kind of like a hairless pink version of Rolonay, an ordinary NPC in the Nautilus’s mid floor hallway, who is in turn styled after an ordinary MLG monster called The Book Ghost. As a result, the “Save Delli!” PQ is styled to look like this region of MLG, complete with visually identical monsters. The “PQ” (if it can be called that) itself is similar in spirit to HPQ or ENPQ, in that it involves protecting Delli from the MLG monsters that spawn in the map.

    Fighting Zakum for the first time in my Maple career!!!

    In the previous diary entry, my darksterity knight rusa hit level 135~! And, as some readers may be aware, several of the major bosses in MapleLegends are level 140 — including Krexel, the final body of Scarlion and of Targa, and Zakum — making level ≥135 the crucial threshold for participating normally. So I was invited to fight the almighty Zakum with Gruzz, Harlez, xBowtjuhNL, and SmallMight/SiriusPlaque!!

    [​IMG]

    Heh… I admit, before this point, my only experience with Zakum was dying repeatedly to it and giving other people my mesos in exchange for the chance to loot some zhelm(s). Well, and occasionally trying very hard not to die, while cowering in the bottom-left corner… in exchange for the chance to loot some zhelm(s). So, this was a whole new experience for me. Just like Papulatus was always a boss that was legendary in my mind, as a wee fawn playing MapleStory so long ago, Zakum was the ultimate bad guy. I’ve fought Papulatus a number of times now, but I know now that Zakum is on a whole nother level. To keep a good record of my first true encounter with this crumbly statue guy, I recorded some video. You can watch the edited version on the Oddjobs YouTube channel!:

    rusa fights Zakum for the first time!! [YouTube]

    In this video, I refer to Zakum as “the big bad Aztec rock man”. Shortly after posting it (lol), I started to wonder if I had maybe gotten this wrong, and that Zakum was not intentionally modelled after Aztec culture by Wizet. Zakum definitely has some pretty strong Mesoamerican vibes going on, visually, including with the monsters that it spawns in battle. But upon closer inspection, I got some Mayan vibes as well… I asked Gruzz about it, and he pointed me to an old video from the prolific MapleStory YouTuber coppersan:

    MapleStory Mythology Monday - Zakum [YouTube]

    In this video, coppersan breaks down a number of the visual motifs associated with Zakum (I recommend watching the video yourself, it’s very short — perhaps too short). Among them are, indeed, a few Aztec things… at least, supposedly — and a bunch of other stuff:
    • Zaqqum tree: Zakum itself is named after a tree called Zaqqum (زقوم) mentioned by the Qur'an. The fruits of this tree are shaped like the heads of devils, and those who are damned to hell are forced to eat these fruits as a form of punishment (as the fruits do terrible, terrible things to those who consume them).
    • Monumento a la Patria: coppersan calls this the “Merida Monument”, and refers to it as “an Aztec monument from the Mayas”. This monument is indeed in Mérida, in Yucatán (one of the Mexican states), but coppersan’s description conflates the Aztecs with the Mayans. This monument is somewhat recent (completed 1956), and almost certainly celebrates Mayan culture, not so much Aztec culture. The reaches of Maya civilisation that overlapped with modern-day Mexico are all within the Yucatán Peninsula, notably Chichén Itzá, which was in present-day Yucatán. The Aztecs, on the other hand, never occupied this peninsula.
    • Chaac/Tlāloc masks: The face at the bottom of Zakum’s altar kind of(?) looks like a mask of Chaac, or maybe of Tlāloc*, the Mayan and Aztec rain deities, respectively. These two deities are actually connected, and it’s possible that they both descend from some Olmec deity. It seems that both Chaac and Tlāloc masks exist(ed), although if you ask me, the descriptions of Tlāloc’s features match Zakum’s altar more closely than Chaac’s features. But whatever, it seems unlikely to me that Wizet had any particular deity in mind here — the features are pretty generic. Later, coppersan claims that the Zakum Helmet is a Tlāloc mask, which at least seems more likely, as it does have goggle eyes and some fangs. coppersan also correctly identifies Tlāloc as an Aztec deity.
    • Wedjat eye: The eye of Horus is used in one of Zakum’s animations. This finds its origin in ancient Egyptian mythology, and can also be found elsewhere in MapleStory.
    • “Solomon seal”: One of Zakum’s animations features a circle divided into four quadrants, each with their own symbol inside. The circle is accompanied by a larger concentric circle, and between the two circles are arranged nine evenly-spaced glyphs. This seal is one of three corners of a larger triangle. coppersan refers to these symbol(s) as “the Solomon seal” (not to be confused with Solomon’s seal, which is a genus of angiosperms). The Seal of Solomon is actually a hexagram (sometimes pentagram), and is the predecessor of the Star of David. coppersan shows some examples on screen for comparison, but I’m having trouble seeing any similarities beyond them all being “Western-occultism-looking” drawings. One of the examples at least contains a hexagram, but for that matter, I don’t see any hexagrams nor pentagrams on Zakum itself. Oh well.
    So, there you have it. Zakum is an incoherent mishmash of some kind of Aztec-Maya hybrid mythology, pre-Abrahamic Egyptian mythology, Qur'anic flora, and Western occultism. Thanks, Wizet.

    By the end of it, rusa finally had a zhelm of her very own:

    [​IMG]

    As some readers might remember, I deprived rusa of a helmet for many levels, because I was dead set on getting a Ravana Helmet, and was doing everything I could to avoid doing the Zakum prequests (which I, obviously, ended up doing anyways…). She was wearing a level 10 hat until level ≈90(!) or so, and I’m pretty sure she has lasting brain trauma from that… So let this be avengement!

    *Fun fact: when you see ⟨tl⟩ in a Nahuatl word like “Tlāloc”, that’s a voiceless alveolar lateral affricate (in IPA: ⟨t͡ɬ⟩), which is kind of a rare consonant. It sounds kinda like /tʃ/ — which is usually written in English as ⟨ch⟩, ⟨tch⟩, or ⟨tsch⟩ — but it’s lateral, meaning that the air flows around the tongue, rather than being allowed to flow through the middle of the mouth. Fun!

    A bit of sadsadgrind…

    Womp womp. ’Tis time for the saddest of all grinds: the sadsadgrind™. Featuring your favourite duo: my pure STR bishop cervid with my darksterity knight rusa, in everyone’s favourite grinding spot: CDs!

    Wowowow!! cervid hit level 127 c:

    [​IMG]

    Aaaand rusa is level 136 now!!!

    [​IMG]

    Very cool. Thanks, CDs. To celebrate, I send out another one of my patented Oddjobs recruitment smegas:

    [​IMG]

    Right, I forgot that washing exists. And shoutout to RungeKutte for my first hate comment!

    All-Oddjobs LPQ!

    I hopped onto my DEX brawler LPQ mule sorts to do some LPQing with some fellow guildmates: DEXdit breakcore (xX17Xx, attackattack, partyrock, drainer, strainer, raving, technopagan), cleric gish tb303 (2sus4u), and HP fighter Cerebellum (Cortical, Subcortical, SussyBaka, CokeZeroPill, Medulla, GishGallop, xXcorticalXx):

    [​IMG]

    In the image above, you can see us struggling in stage 8 alongside unwitting random player CardcaptorSC. Cerebellum likes to make sure that everyone knows just how much they hate stage 8.

    Later, we were joined by another Oddjobs member: Cassandro the claw clericlet (Celim, Bipp, Sommer, Copo, Fino)! This brought the number of Oddjobs members in our party up to five, so I had the idea to try some all-Oddjobs LPQ runs. We had to say goodbye to CardcaptorSC for this, although we left him with a parting gift or two. We almost managed to put together an all-Oddjobs LPQ a while back, but we had some internet issues that prevented it from actually happening. So this would be the first time ever. For the occasion, I recorded it, and you can find the edited version on the Oddjobs YouTube channel!:

    All-Oddjobs LPQ! (You WON’T BELIEVE what happens to the “invincible” golems…) [YouTube]

    Vicloc status update

    Welcome back to vicloc, with your host, vicloc dagger spearwoman d34r.

    Conveniently, APQ’s bonus stage gives not only capes, but also 30% scrolls to boom them with. I’ve already made a number of capes, several of which are quite useful (including not one, but two 12 STR capes, the better-defence of which is my main cape), but APQ won’t stop giving me these things. So I threw around some more scrolls:

    [​IMG]

    Oh. Well, the first three slots of this cape passed cape STR 30%s on ’em. Sooo… originally, I posted this in the Victoria Discord server in case anyone wanted it before I recklessly threw more 30%s at it. But then I realised that I already had too many capes, so I just went for it:

    [​IMG]

    Wowza. Luckily for me, after passing 30%s on the first four slots, I had one (1) spare 60% lying around in my inventory… and passed that as well. A 14-stat vicloc cape!!! :D

    Oh, and while farming for some APQ keys, I accidentally levelled up:

    [​IMG]

    Nice~

    Trying Krexel for the first time…‽

    Besides fighting Zakum for the first time (see above), I also got the chance to fight another big bad boss for the first time: Krexel! I was invited to do Krexel with Bipp, xBowtjuhNL, Harlez, and Gruzz. As seen in the previous diary entry, my darksterity knight rusa had already done the Krexel prequests (at least, everything except for the Soul Lantern). But we wanted HS, and since my pure STR bishop cervid was level 127 (not high enough level to get EXP from Krexel normally), I could theoretically multiclient both rusa & cervid inside of the fight to provide HS, without cervid getting any EXP. So we get the prequests done for cervid as well…

    [​IMG]

    I was requested to show off everyone’s favourite STR mage party trick, “‘MISS’ing absolutely everything with your mage ult”:

    [​IMG]

    A real crowd-pleaser, that one.

    And, eventually, with a lot of running around and exchanging ETCs, we were off to fight the oversized tree guy:

    [​IMG]

    I was told that Krex doesn’t hit very hard, and found out the hard way that that’s not exactly true, when I accidentally touched the left eye and died whilst ’zerking. Luckily, another upshot of having cervid with us was that I could just… Resurrect myself. Once, at least.

    So, then I died while under the protection of Smokescreen and was kinda screwed (Resurrection has a large cooldown):

    [​IMG]

    Then xBowtjuhNL died…

    [​IMG]

    And then I died for the third time (but this time, on cervid). It wasn’t a great run. Maybe one day, I’ll be less sleep-deprived and actually kill this giant tree thing. For now, Krexel & I are on poor terms…

    alces takes down a few more quests~

    It’s time for some more questing, with my daggermit alces~! To start things off, I wanted to finish up the rest of the Nihal Desert quests. One such quest was The Fairy in Despair questline, which starts with The Fairy in Despair 1. For this, I needed some Lunar Pixie’s Moonpieces and (way too many) Fierry’s Tentacles. Luckily, I had some of the tentacles hoarded on my woodsmaster capreolina, so I only had to hunt like two of them.

    [​IMG]

    With this, Ericsson was able to brew up some Drop of Moon:

    [​IMG]

    I guess that means that Ericsson is a fairy…? Anyways, The Fairy in Despair 2 is very similar, but meant that I had to go back to Orbis and hunt some Luster Pixie’s Sunpieces for Ericsson to make the corresponding Drop of Sun. These quests are the source (indeed, the only source) of Phylia’s Warp Powder, which is essentially a return scroll to Magatia that only works from within the Nihal Desert region. Because the Nihal Desert consists only of Magatia and Ariant, the Warp Powder is only superior to a nearest town return scroll when you’re in the Ariant region. And, even then, it’s usually similarly convenient to just use the Camel Taxi. So, it’s not great. Even so, I wish it were more like Warp Cards — if you finish The Fairy in Despair 2, it would make more sense if you could purchase Phylia’s Warp Powders for a fixed meso price, from Phyllia (in addition to the Warp Powders that you already got from doing the questline).

    I also completed Humanoid Just Wants to be Human. I had already completed Acquiring the Seed for the Snowfield Rose, so I had to hunt down some Pieces of Mithril and Gelatins. On my way to hunt down the mithril pieces, I encountered this familiar bug, wherein Russellon mysteriously takes flight as soon as I enter the room:

    [​IMG]

    Having run there, Russy?

    As part of this quest, I was sent to a special-sauce map where I had to temporarily play the role of horticulturist and grow some Snow Roses:

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    I then went to do A Present for Keeny, which called for Pieces of Steel:

    [​IMG]

    …and Hardened Pieces of Steel:

    [​IMG]

    With which, Humanoid A crafted Mute’s Model:

    [​IMG]

    At first, I wondered why it was called “Mute”’s Model. I guess I thought that the mutae of Magatia had something to do with the English mutate, ultimately from the Latin mūtō (which I guess meant a lot of things in Latin, but conferred onto French and English the sense of “alter, change”). Clearly, I don’t know any Latin, because mutae (or rather, mūtae) is actually declined from mūtus, an adjective meaning “mute; silent, unspeaking”. The sense evolution is probably similar to the English dumbwaiter (see dumb as in “mute”), i.e. a machine (incapable of speech) doing the job of a human (ordinarily capable of speech).

    I also did Keeny’s Research on Roid, Keeny’s Research on Neo Huroid!, and Keeny’s Research on D.Roid!!, the latter of which required me to extract a Broken Mechanical Heart from our favourite undead robot D. Roy:

    [​IMG]

    I took a break to try my hand at scrolling a Khanjar. Khanjars are virtually worthless, it seems, as no one bothers to spend the money to scroll one, when they could “just” wait 40 levels for the Dragon Khanjar instead. For alces, getting to level 120 is a lot more daunting, so I threw some shield WATK 70%s at a perfect clean Khanjar:

    [​IMG]

    Holy moly!! Very nice :3 This is basically alces’s endgame shield…

    With that, I tidied up The Importance of Life Alchemy and The Problems with Life Alchemy:

    [​IMG]

    And that just about did it, for all the Nihal Desert quests.

    So, I headed to Shanghai to do those quests…

    The Shanghai quests are pretty simple. There’s basically just Photographer Cho’s Request, and the Enraged Livestock questline. I’m not counting the Owner Yeo quests, because those quests are stupid (don’t @ me).

    The Photographer Cho quest essentially amounts to 100 Plows, so I went to hunt some bovines:

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    The main questline requires ETCs from a handful of species around the area. Along the way, I ran into a fake Giant Centipede:

    [​IMG]

    …And some Sheepies and Goaties (not to be confused with goatees, nor with “Greatest Of All Time In Every Sense”):

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    …Which led me to the dreaded Black Sheep map — well, maybe not so dreaded anymore:

    [​IMG]

    It used to be impossible to get the Black Sheep card set after finishing the questline. The only map that spawns them is a quest-only map, so I went ahead and camped out here until I got my 5/5. I think that Tienk now sells Black Sheep cards(?), and I noticed that I didn’t lose the Shanghai Permit after finishing the questline (although I’m not sure if it would actually work to get me back into that map — I didn’t test it).

    In any case, this questline culminates in killing the big bad boss of Shanghai: the real Giant Centipede:

    [​IMG]

    Fantastic. Now Shanghai is saved. Forever. At least, until I come back here to do the quests on another character…

    Las aventuras de ozotoceros

    Aaaand we’re back on Maple Island, with my DEXlander ozotoceros and her sidekick bezoarticus. In the Pigs map, as per usual. But this time, Ice Jeans are stuck at the top of the map…:

    [​IMG]

    But, I finally figured out that with a 6 JUMP GSB, my 5 JUMP White Gomushin, and a handy-dandy Myo Myo Speed Potion, it’s actually possible for me to get up there!:

    [​IMG]

    Oh, and I hit level 39 :)

    [​IMG]

    With this, I had even more unspent AP pent up in my CHARACTER STATS window:

    [​IMG]

    I’ve been agonising over how I should spend my AP, now that I comfortably one-shot anything on the island 100% of the time with my toob. STR has the advantage of sweet flex damage, which is great, but it otherwise offers nothing. DEX gives a little bit of damage, but is not nearly as flex-friendly as STR. But it does give AVOID, and better minimum damage, in case I use other weapons that have less WATK than my toob. LUK doesn’t contribute to damage at all, but gives twice as much AVOID as DEX. LUK is, in my humble opinion, the “sweaty” option — none of the other stats actually help with grinding speed (read: EPH), except for DEX, which only gives half as much AVOID as LUK. So LUK is simply the best option EPH-wise. And being… maybe not untouchable, but at least less-touchable, is pretty cool. Especially with that pesky giant ramp that they put in the Pigs map…

    [​IMG]

    [[[MAXIMUM SWEAT MODE ENGAGED]]]

    ozotoceros is officially a DEX/LUK hybridlander now :p

    I ran into sinlander ForkMaster, who was hunting cards for his new main character WaxiIlium, and decided to help along the way (it’s nice to sometimes have something else to do, other than circle the Pigs map repeatedly):

    [​IMG]

    For my help, ForkMaster bestowed upon me a triple gift of sacred cakes:

    [​IMG]

    Later, I was honoured to meet top islander jung1e, as well as a new islander by the name of Contagion (also pictured is Kimberly, a.k.a. Gumby):

    [​IMG]

    jung1e asked me about the possibility of joining the Suboptimal alliance — jung1e’s guild, Newbology, is a camper/islander-only guild. This makes Newbology similar to Southperry, which is already a member of Suboptimal; and indeed, the two used to be allied. jung1e created, and continues to maintain, Newbology as a continuation of a guild with the same name from official MapleStory, but generally redirects new islanders towards Southperry, because Newbology is not considered “active”. I was happy to add Newbology to Suboptimal, but I had to bear in mind that adding Newbology to the alliance would fill the alliance entirely — the maximum number of guilds in an alliance is five, and Suboptimal already had Oddjobs, Flow, Southperry, and Victoria. There were some other ideas floated around for other guilds that could join the alliance, so I made sure to let jung1e know that our only issue was space in the alliance, and he assured me that it wouldn’t be an issue if push came to shove and we had to make space in the alliance. So we allied!:

    [​IMG]

    While I was doing the islander quest, I came across my first actually good GSB that I’ve ever farmed myself…

    [​IMG]

    The WATK isn’t quite perfect (just one shy), and the JUMP is the minimum possible, but hey… New personal best…

    Many (many) piggos later, and ozotoceros hit the big four-oh!!!:

    [​IMG]

    Wowie! :D

    Meet kinds

    Part of the Odd Job Initiative (see the beginning of the previous diary entry) is focused more inwardly, on the members Oddjobs (and generally, of Suboptimal) themselves. More specifically, focusing on stuff that we can do together — you know, PQs, bosses, and so on (even just grinding together is great). To that end, SPQ (Sharenian Party Quest, a.k.a. Guild Party Quest) is something that I really wanna do, and that other people seem to be interested in, based on a survey that I put out. The great thing about SPQ (besides the fact that it’s fun) is how inclusive it is: basically anyone can participate.

    But, there are still a few requirements expected of your guild’s expedition squad, when SPQing. One of those requirements is having a level ≤30 character who can do the hat room. And, furthermore, at some point you have to sacrifice someone to open the door to the final stage. Anyone can be sacrificed there (you can actually just walk back, after dying), but it’s common to have a single mule to fulfil both of the aforementioned roles. Because the hat room requires you to be level ≤30, SPQ mules coincide with KPQ mules, which is nice. So, in order to have one at the ready for when we do eventually SPQ as a guild, I made an SPQ/KPQ mule of my own:

    [​IMG]

    I thought about what job I wanted to make kinds, and after considering various possibilities like armed brawler and dagger warrior, I settled on good ol’ DEX warrior! In particular, DEX page; but the only real difference between page, fighter, and spearwoman here would be which weapon masteries I get access to (and even then, I only get one SP to spend on them…).

    By pure coincidence, Lv1Crook (Level1Crook, xXCrookXx, Sangatsu) just so happened to make a KPQ mule, by the name of Ichigatsu, on the same day that I made kinds! Here we are, doing some Nautilus quests at the Piggos map in Henesys:

    [​IMG]

    We also did the Mano quest (Legend of the Snail):

    [​IMG]

    Ichigatsu found a level 20 sword that effectively has the stats of a level 40 sword: the — well, not “the”, but aGladius! For some god forsaken reason, Chan in the Singapore CBD sells OoaK (one of a kind), untradeable, level 20 “Gladius”es for the eminently reasonable price of 40k mesos a pop. Ichigatsu asked if I had any one-handed sword WATK 10%s… of course, I had hoarded over 200 of them (they drop from CDs). I watched as Ichigatsu failed many scrolls on these Gladiuses:

    [​IMG]

    I had a go at scrolling these, as well. My original plan was to use an Aluminum Baseball Bat, or something. But this sword is just too good. I went through… probably like ≈180 of my 10%s, probably ≈20M or so mesos (including the prices of the Gladiuses and of the 30%s), and had statistically unreasonably poor luck. I probably passed like 3% of the 10%s that I used, and more like 35% of the 60%s that I used… In the end, I was forced to just settle with an okay one. After failing 42 10%s in a row, I sHOuLd hAVe KnOwN To SToP, but I wanted to be brave and keep going until I got the sword that I wanted. Well…

    Anywho, now that I had a sword and was level 21, it was time to give kinds a look of her own:

    [​IMG]

    Nice! I found out that you can get this face at Mt. Song Town — there’s no need to go all the way out to the Night Market. The description on the coupon that you buy in the Cash Shop is just weirdly misleading, for some reason.

    I did some KPQs with WaxiIlium, the same WaxiIlium who I helped with card-hunting on Maple Island earlier!:

    [​IMG]

    Had my first encounter with the slime of slimes himself:

    [​IMG]

    And did some KPQs with Ichigatsu, in which we pretended to be new to the game:

    [​IMG]

    And collectively popped the King Slime, bringing his Slime Kingdom to mere ruins:

    [​IMG]

    :)
     
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  6. Taima
    Offline

    Taima Mushmom

    57
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    May 23, 2021
    Female
    9:33 PM
    Taima
    Beginner
    143
    Oddjobs
    Nice job taking down Zakum for the first time! Great to see rusa tear up (and be torn up by) bosses just like a non-dexterous dark knight. MapleF2 I appreciated the symbolism/mythology section too. That old Coppersan video took me by surprise, it was quite a throwback. I'm sure Wizet wasn't the first to piece together a bunch of disconnected mythology bits to create their big bad boss!
     
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  7. xCheesecake
    Offline

    xCheesecake King Slime

    26
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    36
    Mar 5, 2019
    Female
    5:33 AM
    Bandit
    Oddjobs
    Bunch of updates here. So I finally hit level 55 and got my T2 ring. Next goal is to camp at EPQ until I scroll a 5/5 Glittering Altaire with LUK that is going to last me for quite a while.
    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]

    Monster Book update:

    I headed back to Ariant to finish up the quests and clear the cards of the mobs there while I'm at it. Finished 7 sets in one sitting since the card drops were fairly decent. The ones in the sunset maps took a while longer (i.e Sand Dwarfs) but still manageable when I improvised on my mobbing methods for farming. Then I cleared the Rumo and Triple Rumo cards when I landed in Magatia since they were in a range I could clear without incurring pot burn losses. F3

    [​IMG] [​IMG] [​IMG] [​IMG]

    Also I managed to earn enough mesos to grab this Liu Bei Dagger in the FM for 11m when I was nearing lv. 53. This thing sure helped me out a lot with the farming.
    [​IMG]

    Thinking of making another Blood dit but an ironman version for experimental purposes next :thonk:
     
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  8. OP
    OP
    deer
    Offline

    deer Pac Pinky

    195
    398
    191
    Oct 27, 2020
    Female
    Oddville
    9:33 PM
    cervid
    Bishop
    130
    Oddjobs
    (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. lxxvi

    Taxonomising odd jobs, pt. vi: Forestry. §2

    In the previous section (§1) of this part (pt. vi), the idea was to construct (by hand) a weak ordering on our odd job universe, ordering by some suitable notion of “primitiveness”. The result of that effort can be found at ../072/weak_ordering.ron. Now, we can use this weak ordering to constrain the construction (again, by hand) of a rooted forest that imitates a phylogenetic tree — or disjoint union of phylogenetic trees, as the case may be. I also want to explore the use of a slightly different structure (different from this rooted forest model), but that can come later.

    In order to construct tree(s) by hand, we need some format to represent trees in! We’re going to use perhaps the most common format for representing trees for generic phylogenetic purposes: the Newick format (a simpler introduction can be found here (archived)). Newick format is really very simple, which is nice. It basically just uses nested round brackets to represent the hierarchy of the tree — each pair of brackets represents an array of children that share a common parent. The length/distance/weight of any given edge can optionally be specified by using the colon notation (e.g. :4.2 for an edge with a length of 4.2). A tree ends in a semicolon. Newick format trees are stored in files with filenames that end in .tree (or sometimes, .tre).

    Newick format is great for representing the tree data themselves, but not all that pretty to look at. For visuals, we need some kind of plotting library that is accustomed to handling tree data. I’m going to go with toytree, because it aims to be minimalist and provide a relatively simple Python interface (hence the “toy” in “toytree”).

    To warm myself up and get myself used to all of these tools, I’m going to make a quite simple tree that is labelled, but is not weighted, and excludes all non-permabeginners. This sample tree can be found at sample.tree, but I’ve also reproduced it here, for convenience:
    Code:
    (((LUKginner, DEXginner, wandginner), STRginner), ((((magelander, LUKlander, hybridlander), DEXlander), STRlander), camper));
    
    To give a basic rendering of this, we can do something like:
    Code:
    import toytree
    import toyplot.svg
    
    tree = toytree.tree("./sample.tree")
    canvas, _, _ = tree.draw(ts="n", tip_labels_align=False)
    toyplot.svg.render(canvas, "./sample.svg")
    
    (The above listing can be found as sample.py.)

    Which gets us this SVG:

    [​IMG]

    As you can see, it’s pretty basic; we just label the leaf nodes, and all edges are displayed with the same length. I’ve intentionally configured it to not align the labels along a vertical axis; if we change to tip_labels_align=True, we get:

    [​IMG]

    This latter style is somewhat more typical of phylogenetic tree diagrams, but I prefer the former here, because in our case, having the more “primitive” (read: basal) jobs show up further to the left is visually nice (in my opinion).

    We’re not assigning weights to the edges, because we don’t really have a sense of time scale here. In principle, we could have a timescale based on the first genuine appearance of the odd job in question, but… that would imply actually having such information. Which, we don’t. As far as the graph structure itself goes, I want to quickly justify the sample tree that I showed above.

    The tree starts by bifurcating into outland permabeginners and inland permabeginners. We then bifurcate the inlanders into campers and islanders. Of the outlanders, we consider STRginners to be the most basal. And of the islanders, we consider STRlanders to be the most basal. This is mostly pretty self-explanatory, except that you might ask why STRlanders in particular have been chosen as the sole most-basal islander job. My reasoning is that, at lower levels, STR tends to help islanders train faster. And putting into STR is just more obvious, much like it is for STRginners — after all, STR increases your expected damage output the most, out of all four main stats. DEXlander naturally pops out immediately after, as we realise that DEX is effectively the “main stat” for most islanders. And then we have the other islanders — magelander, LUKlander, and hybridlander — in no particular order. Similarly, the LUKginners, DEXginners, and wandginners are in no particular order, other than being less basal than STRginners.

    In this kind of structure (as shown above, and the only kind of structure handled by toytree), the “inner nodes” (non-leaf vertices) are opaque. They don’t get names, but instead act merely as splitting points, with a presumed — but anonymous/opaque — MRCA. This is characteristic of phylogenetic trees, but not exactly what I had in mind when I wrote §5 of pt. iii of this series:
    If all of the inner nodes are opaque, and only the leaves actually represent our odd jobs, then “ ≤ ” never actually holds when ≠ , making the implication above always vacuously true. “ ≤ ” never actually holds because the tree-order is defined as: ≤ iff the unique path from the root to contains . But all and all are leaves, so this is only true when = . In our true phylogenetic tree case, tree-order is just not going to cut it. Instead, we need “≤” to be defined as something like: ≤ iff the unique path from the root to is not longer than the unique path from the root to . Then, defining “length” here requires that we actually assign a weight to each edge, or else consider each edge to have a weight of 1.

    Note that “≤” is technically a weak ordering now, not so much a partial one. Two distinct leaves might have the same distance from the root. And, every leaf has a distance from the root, so they are all comparable. So, we no longer want to phrase our constraint as “ ≤ → ≲ ” — the whole point of insisting on a one-way implication before was because “≤” was not connected, but “≲” was. So making the implication two-way would force “≤” to be not so partial anymore, and our rooted forest would be very boring indeed. Now, however, we have something very different going on. Let’s name the new version of “≤” as “≾” to reflect the fact that it’s now (technically) a weak ordering, and write our hand-constructed weak ordering in terms of its strict weak ordering “≺”. Then we want to maintain the following invariant: ≺ → ≾ . Again, this is a one-way implication, so that “≺” can remain truly partial (as in, unconnected).

    So, let’s try doing something very similar to the sample trees above, but weight the edges this time, and then ensure that our new constraint of “ ≺ → ≾ ” holds. You can find this weighted tree at sample_weighted.tree, and I’ve also reproduced it below, for convenience:
    Code:
    (((LUKginner:1, DEXginner:1, wandginner:1):5, STRginner:0.5):1, (((((magelander:1, LUKlander:2):2, DEXlander:0.5):1, hybridlander:1):0.5, STRlander:1):0.5, camper:3):1);
    
    I’ve actually changed the structure of the tree here, not just the weights. It’s just slightly more complicated now, with hybridlander being split off from the LUKlander and magelander, and actually put in a more basal position than the DEXlander. The reasoning is basically just to consider hybridlanders as possibly STR/DEX hybrids (in addition to their more general, experimental nature: any combination of two or more of STR, DEX, and/or LUK), which justifies their position at the very beginning of our hand-constructed weak ordering. Then, pure-DEX or close-to-pure-DEX islanders (a.k.a DEXlanders) can come just a bit later than the STRlanders and STR/DEX hybrids.

    Running sample_weighted.py gets us the following diagram:

    [​IMG]

    As you can see, we’ve had to distend the edge onto which the camper is directly connected, and the edge onto which the LUKginner/DEXginner/wandginner clade is directly connected. This is a result of our ≺ → ≾ constraint. Campers come strictly later than STRlanders, DEXlanders, and hybridlanders in our hand-constructed weak ordering.

    Okay, I think that’s about enough of that stuff. For funsies, let’s use the sample_weighted.tree graph data to mess around with just a few of toytree’s settings:

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    All-odd bossing!

    We’ve managed to put together a few spontaneous all-odd boss runs, featuring mostly members of the Suboptimal alliance, but also of our wider Suboptimal-Dream meta-alliance, and even level 151 permabeginner Without of Spirit!

    First up was #glaivegang — featuring OmokTeacher (Slime), Taima (Nyanners, Tacgnol, Boymoder, Hanyou), Gumby (Kimberly; actually the only one not using a Crimson Arcglaive, but you can’t tell because of the NX weapon cover), LawdHeComin (Snel), and my STR bishop cervid — taking on Captain Latanica!

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    During our second run, all three of the ’ginners in our party met an unfortunate demise. Dying to Capt. Latanica is a comfortable classic, as Capt. Lat is capable of dishing up as much as 4k damage with a single magic attack. The strategy here was essentially to hug Capt. Lat and try to only take touch damage from him and from the smaller monsters that he spawns. When that failed, and I had already used my Resurrection during the previous run (pesky 57-minute cooldown…), only the goofy-AP mages (LawdHeComin is an F/P gish) remained:

    [​IMG]

    A card dropped from this second run, and unfortunately Gumby couldn’t be alive to loot it — he’s been 4/5 Capt. Lat for a while now, and could really use the set. But cervid was also 4/5, so it was time to finish that set!:

    [​IMG]

    Later, I set up a Headless Horseman (HH) run with STRginners Daddyo (Dexual) and Without (Contagion). Without is somewhat of a “leechginner” (levelled via leech, usually high base INT for washing purposes), but only has 175 base INT (not that much for a level 151 character), so they were able to fight competently alongside Daddyo and I:

    [​IMG]

    Notice Without’s unusual choice of weaponry here: the Sky Ski. I asked Without if they used it for aesthetic purposes, and they said yes. For those not aware, spears and polearms have a 60% chance of swinging (and thus 40% chance of stabbing) when basic-attacking (or using any attack that animates like a basic-attack, e.g. Power Strike or Slash Blast), so spears have a pretty clear disadvantage that makes them practically unusable for permabeginners (and for some other jobs as well).

    [​IMG]

    And, down goes the horse with their horseman…

    [​IMG]

    We killed not one, but two HHs, both at Hollowed [sic] Ground! Each fight took us somewhere around 22–25 minutes.

    Not too long afterwards, I ran into permapirate Copo, who actually went hunting for a HH as well, in search of… you know, somethin’ to shoot at. Unfortunately, HH is level 101, which was like 37 levels higher than Copo. So accuracy was a real issue (even being pure DEX), and the −37% damage penalty doesn’t exactly help either… But I helped Copo calculate exactly how much WACC was necessary for him to hit HH 100% of the time, and gave him some of the Maple Pops that I had on hand. And, in order to ensure Copo’s survival (as he didn’t have enough MAXHP to actually handle a magic attack from HH), I took my darksterity knight rusa to duo with him:

    [​IMG]

    rusa kills HH pretty quickly now, so these fights (we killed two HHs) probably only took around ≈3 minutes each. Because Copo was not in level range (i.e. not even close to being level ≥96), the EXP that he got was purely from the damage that he actually did on his own. But, still pretty decent experience at such a low level!

    alces tries out Kid Mannequins

    My daggermit alces has mostly been questin’ it up — although I do quite enjoy doing various quests on my various characters, alces has been my dedicated “quester” character ever since she was level ≈56 or so. Of course, I took some breaks from doing quests in order to get some much-needed PQs in (read: OPQs and very many MPQs), but the point is that I’ve not really been grinding other than the occasional Fancy Amplifier (FA) grind sesh with permarogue xX17Xx. Well, that recently changed a bit.

    I tried some duo grinding with STRginner Permanovice (Battlesage, Dreamscapes, Paean, Hanger), and we decided to go to Kid Mannequins (KMs) for that purpose:

    [​IMG]

    It’s commonly understood (amongst those who play odd jobs where this actually matters) that Taipei 101 is the go-to place — essentially the “endgame spot” — for grinding amongst those who never get access to multi-target attacking skills (and also no access to special attacks like Meso Explosion). The EXP/HP ratios, and the map layouts, are just too favourable to be beaten out by anything else in the game. Of course, other locations still make sense for other reasons — particularly, training at TP101 can be quite expensive due to the sheer amount of damage that TP101 monsters deal. So other locations, like e.g. GS2, Voodoos, and TfoG, still have their uses. But TP101 is the place to go for EPH…

    [​IMG]

    Woohoo~! I went back and did some solo grinding in the same location, after Permanovice and I finished duoing. A little @epm 3 test revealed about how much EXP I was capable of churning out here on my own:

    [​IMG]

    3.1M EPH… Very solid!! The auto-aggro that KMs have is quite useful for short-ranged attackers like permabeginners and daggermits.

    Later, I had the pleasure of duoing KMs with fellow daggermit Keppet (Rapskal)! With this, we were getting quite impressive EPH numbers o_o:

    [​IMG]

    4M EPH!! And with that, alces is now level 94… :)

    [​IMG]

    Avenging myself against Krexel

    In the previous diary entry, I talked about how I suffered multiple deaths at the hands of (at the branches of…?) Krexel while dual-clienting there with my darksterity knight rusa (doing the attacking) and my pure STR bishop cervid (AFKing at the bottom and casting HS because she’s not high enough level to get EXP :( ). Well, ’tis time to enact avengement…

    [​IMG]

    I did something very similar this time, running Krex with Harlez, xBowtjuhNL, and xFaith! And this time, I actually lived through it!! Here we are, killing the second eye, which conveniently has a kind of “pocket” of footholds that you can sit in and attack from, without getting pushed out of the pocket by Krex’s attacks:

    [​IMG]

    Somewhat annoyingly, you still suffer from the effect wherein repeated attacks without moving stop producing actual attacks after 60–90 seconds or so. And moving enough to actually count as “moving” for the purpose of this effect is somewhat tricky while you’re in the pocket.

    Our second run (which I survived as well, by the way!!) featured a level 200(!) buccaneer by the name of TTKirnk! With all of the buffs that I was getting, and my newfound love for The Pocket™, I tried a @dpm test to see how my damage was doing:

    [​IMG]

    85.3M DPH… Y I K E S .

    [​IMG]

    Cool-looking card! And I’m now the saviour of Ulu City!! Very nice. I’m sure they have a very nice reward in store for me…

    [​IMG]

    Twenty (20) untradeable Power Elixirs that don’t even stack with normal Power Elixirs? Okay… I see how it is… It’s because I died the first time, isn’t it?

    Doing my first-ever couples-only APQ!

    I got together with my usual APQ partner xXCrookXx (Lvl1Crook, Level1Crook, Sangatsu, Ichigatsu), as well as TerakadoTsuu & FatherSteaks, and kookiechan (kookietann, kurisuwu) & Permanovice (Dreamscapes, Battlesage, Paean, Hanger)… for an all-couples APQ!! That’s right… the all-couples APQ party that we have collectively been dreaming of, as viclockers, since day one. The dream, of course, is winning one of those fancy seven-slotted capes! So many slots with which to boom it!!

    Anyways, the APQ went great. The Grog fight was a bit interesting, as none of us were particularly good at boss-fighting…

    [​IMG]

    xXCrookXx popped an apple or two…

    [​IMG]

    And, after a thoroughly satisfying Grog fight, we were very excited to try out the couples-only bonus stage of APQ. Not sure what to expect, I started the bonus stage, causing each couple to be teleported to their own JQ:

    [​IMG]

    These “JQ”s are a little strange; none of them really require much “jumping” skill per se, but there are a number of bizarrely-placed teleporters that you just kind of have to stumble upon by… hitting a certain corner of a rock at the right angle, or whatever. Along the way, we broke some boxes, which didn’t immediately appear to do anything when broken. Once we got to the top of our JQs, we confirmed that all boxes in all of the JQs had been broken… but Amos was still looking for some code pieces?

    Turns out, the all-couples bonus stage of APQ is just broken ._.

    [​IMG]

    We researched it afterwards, and found out that the boxes are supposed to spawn monsters when broken (instead of, you know, doing nothing). I reported this bug on the MapleLegends forums, and Kimmy confirmed that the bug is known, and was a regression caused by some rework of the scripts used by APQ.

    Soooo… R.I.P. the dream. ;~; Maybe someday…!

    sorts @ LPQ

    I’ve been doing the odd LPQ here and there on my DEX brawler LPQ mule sorts, to help out some of my guildies! I did a handful of LPQs with the honourable steelwoman* permawarrior Nyanners (Taima, Boymoder, Tacgnol, Hanyou, Gambolpuddy, Numidium), and clerish tb303 (2sus4u)!:

    [​IMG]

    During our LPQscapades, a curious party member asked Nyanners why she was still a first-job warrior:

    [​IMG]

    It’s understandable, really. One person can only take so much punishment.

    Later, I joined clericlet Cassandro in some LPQing, as well!:

    [​IMG]

    We had some good “fun” with stage 8 with this party… :))

    *Steel(wo)man is a variation on iron(wo)man that lifts the restriction on partying. Unlike iron(wo)men, steel(wo)men can be in parties of size greater than one; but like iron(wo)men, steel(wo)men cannot trade with, nor receive any items/mesos from, other characters. Steel(wo)men are so called because steels are the most common alloys that are derived from iron. In Nyanners’s case, the purpose of adding the carbon is to allow PQing, especially for those PQ boss cards, and those PQ-only equipment items!

    Zakum~

    In the previous diary entry, my darksterity knight rusa fought big bad lava rock guy for the first time (you can even watch a video of it here)! Well, I’ve been doing a little more igneous rock stabbing, to hone my skills…

    [​IMG]

    And when I say “hone my skills”, I don’t just mean gaining EXP so that I can gain more SP (although that is a big part of it); I also mean actually zerking, without dying by getting bodychecked by a crumbly Mayan statue…

    [​IMG]

    I call this “Bravery Mode™” (or “Hubris Mode™”, if I die…), in which I turn to the bishop(s) and declare that I don’t need their filthy green Healing, because I prefer to die alone. On the right-hand side of Zakum. Thank you very much.

    Thankfully, I didn’t actually do any dying. This was particularly good, because I had the distinct honour of selling my very first handful of zhelms!! That’s right; not buying them, but actually being one of the “sellers”. All of my experiences with Zakum in the past have been, well, mostly just letting Zakum murder me repeatedly, so that People Who Are Very Strong™ could resurrect me at the end, so that I could (hopefully) loot some zhelm(s). Once or twice, I actually fearpotted* my way through a Zakum, while People Who Are Very Strong™ killed it, so that I could (hopefully) loot some zhelm(s) when they were finished. Well, this time I got to be (or pretend to be‽) a Person Who Is Very Strong™!!!!:

    [​IMG]

    :D

    Oh, and I did a @dpm test during that run…

    [​IMG]

    OOOF — 89.9M DPH, wot da hecc… SI+SE is too powerful…

    We did another AFK Zakum run after that, but it didn’t go quite so well… >.< Harlez’s (Hucc, VigiI) internet went out before we were even done with the arms, which was a terrible start. Then, one of our bishops had some ’net issues too, and the lag caused them to die. The run took longer to start, and longer to finish, than expected, so CtrlNoble (NobIe, xNoble, Romilles, 1122) was unexpectedly forced to AFK during a chunk of the fight. With all of this, it got to the point where we were seriously running low on resurrections, and we had no choice but to put me into the buyers’ party so that I could furiously spam HB as we used our final resurrection to bring the buyers back from the grave. We instructed the buyers that they would have to fearpot, for the remainder of the fight (aided by some Healing), in order to survive. But, by that point, it was all falling apart anyways. The same bishop was still having massive lag spike issues, and died again to another spike. And the buyers fared no better. So CtrlNoble, xBowtjuhNL, and myself finished off the run by ourselves… and went to apologise to the buyers. We even chatted with one of the buyers and answered some of their questions about the Zakum-fighting process. Hopefully they did get their helm that next day, as promised (I wasn’t there)!

    In the meantime, I did a little sadsadgrinding at ye olde CDs

    [​IMG]

    137~ Wowie~!!

    And I got a new poky sticc for rusa and my swashbuckler hydropotina!!!:

    [​IMG]

    That’s a mighty fine pokin’ sticc. Farewell, mesos~

    And I did some more “SLAP, SLAP, SLAP, SLAP, SLAP, …” at 7F to get to level 138!!! o_o:

    [​IMG]

    Little did I know, I was going to need more than just a levelup to handle this next Zakum fight. As xBowtjuhNL was recruiting for another fight, he was having a real hard time finding any bishops. But technically, all we really needed was some HS… soooo… xBowtjuhNL asked me to bring my pure STR bishop cervid along >.o

    [​IMG]

    EXP wouldn’t be an issue; because cervid was level <135, she wouldn’t be able to get any shared EXP anyways. Of course, I still had to survive on both characters! This proved to be a bit tricky when Zakum started 1/1ing, and cervid’s auto-HP failed to trigger at all after a 1/1, more often than not. Luckily, I was quick enough to catch this, and prevent any deaths, by manually potting for a bit, until xBowtjuhNL dropped me some Ginger Ales. I was taught (in the middle of battle) of a technique wherein you bind a potion that heals some HP and some MP to both your auto-HP and your auto-MP pouches. Assuming no autopot failures, this would cause the potion to be consumed twice any time that you get 1/1’d. And it’s obviously more resistant to autopot failures, due to the potion being consumed at least once per 1/1, unless both autopot pouches simultaneously fail (possible, I guess, but very unlikely). Unfortunately, this meant that I was draining xBowtjuhNL of his Ginger Ales, because I didn’t have any HP-and-MP potions of my own… But we had just barely enough to make it work. If I ever have to do this again, I’ll be more prepared, armed with this knowledge… But hopefully, I don’t have to do this again LMAO

    *fearpot

    Pronunciation

    /ˈfɪəpɒt/, /ˈfɪɹpɑt/

    Etymology

    From fear + pot (verb; orthographic clipping of “[to use a] potion”).

    Verb

    fearpot (third-person singular simple present fearpots, present participle fearpotting, simple past & past participle fearpotted)
    1. (intransitive, colloquial, MapleStory) To attempt to survive in dire combat — particularly, wherein the player could be killed by any two incoming attacks not separated by some form of healing — by the excruciatingly precise consumption of HP (and possibly also MP) potions.

    Chillin’ w/ panolia
    I was invited to a certain Ninja Castle Hallway (there are, confusingly, many maps with that same name) by INTlaw Lvl1Crook (xXCrookXx, Level1Crook, Sangatsu, Ichigatsu), who was card-hunting in Japan and assured me that this was a quite good map to train on. This map is populated by Kunoichi (notable for dropping Diamond Dagger, Daiwa Sword, Aluminum Bat, face AVOID 70%, and shield WATK 60%) and Chunin (notable for dropping Thermometer, Dark Snowboard, shield WATK 30%, and face HP 60%). The map can be easily duoed by having one party member go back & forth along the top of the map, while the other member goes back & forth along the bottom. We were able to scrape some pretty decent EPH out of it, so it’s likely a pretty good grinding map for those in the 55–70 level range or so.

    Oh, and the cards:

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    We were joined by Taima (Hanyou, Nyanners, Boymoder, Tacgnol, Gambolpuddy, Numidium), with whom we casually trioed the map:

    [​IMG]

    After a while, we were lucky enough to find some Aluminum Bats, so I tried my hand at scrolling one with a 30%. It failed but didn’t blow the thing up. Then, I tried again with another clean bat that was even better:

    [​IMG]

    Nice!! Because of my past misfortune with Aluminum Bats (see pt. lv of this diary), and because none of us were aware of any other actually good Aluminum Bats out there, we decided that this bat was deserving of just some 60%s. And it turned out very well!!:

    [​IMG]

    We had Hanyou, our resident DEX WK, test the thing out:

    [​IMG]

    And we stopped our Ninja Castle romp in order to attend the wedding of trishaa (ex-Flow) and TheUnholy (of Flow)! As is typical of the unnecessarily confusing MapleStory implementation of weddings, the first wedding attempt was unintentionally prematurely ended. But, during this first attempt, those of us in the audience were goading the couple to give a wedding speech, which they had not actually prepared. So, starting the wedding over gave TheUnholy some time to prepare one. So we were all glad to have started over:

    [​IMG]

    The speech was very sweet, and I think there were a few “I’m not crying, you’re crying”s from the audience. :')

    And then, we had cake…:

    [​IMG]

    And we all got our respective single Elixirs from the Onyx Chests! Fantastic.

    Quests, wif woosa

    I had a few quests lying around that I wanted to do on my darksterity knight rusa, including the Badge of a Squad Member and Savior Of Ulu City quests, both of which I had essentially already finished. As detailed above, I managed to kill Krexel for the first time, which was all that I needed to finish up Savior Of Ulu City.

    But I also had the ETCs required for Badge of a Squad Member! This quest requires all three Marks of the Squad, which can only be obtained from the various stages of HTPQ (Horntail Party Quest). I did HTPQ already (see pt. lxix of this diary), and got the Marks from there. The Certificates, on the other hand, must be obtained from three different bosses: Pianus (see pt. lxix of this diary), Papulatus, and Zakum (see the previous diary entry):

    [​IMG]

    Killing Zakum was the last piece of the puzzle, and with that, Moira was happy to present to me the Certificate of the Dragon Squad!:

    [​IMG]

    Incredible EXP reward. Oh, and while I’m in Leafre, I should finally just do the Silver Mane quest! This quest requires 400 Wooden Shoulder Pads, 400 Skull Shoulder Pads, and 600 Rexton Leathers! That’s right: a combined total of 1.4k ETCs from high-level Leafre monsters. To start out, I headed to The Hidden Dragon Tomb II to collect some shoulder pads:

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    I actually ended up finishing the Green Cornian set here! I was here grinding Cornians for a while, and I started to get hungry as I ran out of my Satay supply. But, while I was at Ninja Castle on my permarogue panolia, I noticed that the local grocer, Ishirasu, sells some handy-dandy Triangular Sushi (plum)s that heal 20% HP and 20% MP for the price of 3k mesos a pop. Because rusa had just hit the 15k MAXHP mark, these sushis would actually be worth the price now, even if only used for their HP. So, rusa is a sushi addict now…:

    [​IMG]

    I’ve been informed that these “sushi”, so called by GMS (Global MapleStory), are actually not sushi at all — they’re onigiri. English Wikipedia makes the distinction like so:
    Indeed, many forms of onigiri look nothing like sushi. Just another l10n failure from Necksawn/Wizet…

    Anyways, once I got to 400 Skull Shoulder Pads, I headed to Dragon Forest II, the only map in the game that spawns Rextons. Conveniently, this map also spawns Green Cornians, so I could finish up my 400 Wooden Shoulder Pads as well:

    [​IMG]

    And, eventually, after many Leafre monsters slain, I finally got my very first Silver Mane!!!:

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    Z O O O O O M ~ !

    cervine ventures forth, to do something that isn’t staring at CDs

    As readers of this diary may already know, I have mostly been playing my I/L magelet in the capacity of repeatedly Ice Striking CDs, grinding my way slowly but surely to the big 120. I wanted to take a break from the compact disc grind, and look at something that isn’t a brightly-coloured Taipei 101 background. So, I ventured forth to the Omega Sector to do the Zeno quest:

    [​IMG]

    This quest is somewhat unusual, because gathering up the materials required to make a Wave Translator doesn’t necessarily progress you through the quest. Every time that you make a Wave Translator, there is a random chance that it will be a nonfunctional, or “false” Wave Translator. So you actually have to repeat that portion of the quest over and over, until you get a good one:

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    Luckily for me, the second Wave Translator that I made was a good one. So now, all I had to do was find a Zeno, and fight it to the death!! So I headed to Gray’s Prairie

    [​IMG]

    Hmmm. It was being camped, so I had no luck finding any Zenos. But, as you can see above, I did a few quests from around the Omega Sector region in the meantime. The Chief Gray’s Cell that you see above is part of The History of Zeta Lenticulan. I also did Trading with Alien Gray, which also involves Alien Gray, but unfortunately does not award any Alien Sacks on completion. BBB Hidden Street says that it does, but it seems that MapleLegends has removed that quest reward. I also did Eliminating Grays and Eliminating Chief Gray.

    Unfortunately, I still had no luck with Zeno spawns, so I took a trip to the Aqua Road, in search of some more interesting quests to do. Two of these quests, The Blocked Path of the Ocean and Nanuke’s Ingredients, required me to kill Cold Sharks. Unfortunately, in addition to obviously being strong to ice, Cold Sharks are particularly a pain in the ass for cervine because they frequently dispel. Without MG, these vicious beasts can basically just instantly shred me. So, you know, I used like three or four Safety Charms attempting to kill these things…

    [​IMG]

    I realised there were one or two safe-ish spots around the map, where I could (slowly) kill the sharks without fear of death:

    [​IMG]

    The Blocked Path of the Ocean is a cute little quest that I enjoy doing. Nanuke’s Ingredients is grindier, and unfortunately requires more Frozen Shark’s Fins than I was willing to farm alone. So I finished The Blocked Path of the Ocean, and went over the Mu Lung Garden (MLG) to do some quests there.

    I really like the MLG quests, except for two of the PPQ/MLGPQ quests: Eliminating the Pirates and Finding the Ingredients for Tae Sang. The former requires killing a total of 400 Devoted Kru and Devoted Captain, which is seriously a massive pain in the ass that you have to drag your PPQ party through many times, if you ever want to complete the quest. And the latter is at least a little better, because the Concentrates are tradeable items, which is nice. But I still don’t like it, and gathering the Bellflower Concentrates in the first place again requires dragging down your PPQ party. Other than those two quests, the MLG quests are pretty cool, in my opinion, so I just decided to do all of them. Well, except the PPQ ones. I actually never PPQ’d on cervine, and now I’m too high of a level to ever try…

    For starters, I hunted down 16 Snake Leathers from the Flower Serpents in the Snake Area, for use in Making Mastery Medicine and Making the Body and Physics Medicine:

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    For The Forgotten Master and Protecting the Peach Farm, I had to kill some Peach Monkeys and collect some of their Peach Seeds:

    [​IMG]

    To hunt for The Legendary Being’s Scroll <Advanced>, some The Book Ghost’s Sheets of Paper for Do Gong’s Teaching, and some Old Papers for The Forgotten Master, I took a detour to the Foggy Forest for some The Book Ghost kills:

    [​IMG]

    I then headed towards Herb Town to hunt for some 100-Year-Old Bellflowers from Sr. Bellflower Roots for Making Mastery Medicine:

    [​IMG]

    Also for Making Mastery Medicine, I would need some Ginseng-Boiled Water from Ginseng Jars:

    [​IMG]

    And, for Intruder — The Herb Farm, I needed 100 Bellflower Root kills. Naturally, I pretty much instantly got 5/5 on this set:

    [​IMG]

    For The Forgotten Master (and for Making Mastery Medicine), I would need some Broken Deer Horns…

    [​IMG]

    …and a Tae Roon kill!:

    [​IMG]

    For Eliminating King Sage Cat and Eliminating the Spirited Cats, I headed to Goblin Forest 2 to fight some Sage Cats:

    [​IMG]

    And, to finish off the Forgotten Master, a special bench in Wild Bear Area 1 would turn a peach into a paper note for me:

    [​IMG]

    While I was in the Wild Bear Area, I hunted 14 Bear Feet for Making Mind and Heart Medicine and Making Mastery Medicine.

    I went to 10-Year-Old Herb Garden to kill 400 Jars for Eliminating the Escaped Pot:

    [​IMG]

    And, for part II of Intruder — The Herb Farm and for Operation Eliminate Red-Nosed Pirates, I went to Red-Nose Pirate Den 2 and Red-Nose Pirate Den 3 to kill some Captain and Kru:

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    I went back to Gray’s Prairie in the Omega Sector once again, to check if Zeno was back, and indeed he was!:

    [​IMG]

    That concludes that questline!

    While I was on my way back to MLG, I stopped around KFT to do the only quest that I had remaining in that region: Mr. Shim’s Request (and its associated Wiz the Librarian quest):

    [​IMG]

    I headed back to MLG and checked again for the King Sage Cat. I ran into Helene, who was hunting for King Sage Cats, and kindly let me kill one so long as I gave her the card (if one dropped)!:

    [​IMG]

    This got me the Antidote Marble that I needed to conclude the Eliminating King Sage Cat questline. I also did the entire Do Gong Searching for the Swallow/Do Gong Seeking Swallow questline, which meant that I had to go back and kill some more Red Flower Serpents for their flowers, and some Chipmunks for their Acorns. I ended up getting a Red Porky card in the process…

    [​IMG]

    I also did the No Gong’s Teaching questline, and with that, I was done in MLG. So I went off to Magatia to do the quests there! Magatia is another favourite of mine; the quests there are great, and most of them are part of “the Magatia questline”, which is perhaps my favourite questline in the entire game.

    To start off the real questing, I did Helping Out Bedin (part of the main questline) and The Importance of Life Alchemy (not part of the main questline):

    [​IMG]

    Woohoo for Dark Sand Dwarves being weak to ice! And, The Problems with Life Alchemy, another quest from Bedin:

    [​IMG]

    For the Alcadno side, I did Russellon’s Items for Experiment:

    [​IMG]

    And again for Bedin, Getting in the Way of Alcadno had me kill 200 Reinforced Mithril Mutaes:

    [​IMG]

    For Russellon, I Destroyed the Roid:

    [​IMG]

    And when I went back to turn in Getting in the Way of Alcadno, I levelled up to 114~!!:

    [​IMG]

    When was the last time I levelled up outside of Star Avenue South Section…?

    For Zenumist and the Missing Alchemist, I was banished to the Closed Lab to search for the Magic Device:

    [​IMG]

    …so that I could make it Lightless

    [​IMG]

    For Alcadno and the Missing Alchemist, I had to kill 100 Homunculuses, and I was very fortunate to get one of their cards, and a Magic Stone of Honesty (which I’ll need later on in the questline) from the same kill!:

    [​IMG]

    For Humanoid Just Wants to be Human (not part of the main questline), I started gathering up some Gelatin from the Cube Slimes in Unit 101 of the Zenumist Laboratories:

    [​IMG]

    And I figured that that’s enough questing for the time being. :p More later~!

    kinds levels up one last time

    I did some more KPQing on my DEX warrior KPQ/SPQ mule kinds… and got to level 30~! :)

    That’s the last levelup kinds will ever get, and also time for her to take the second job advancement~

    [​IMG]

    Naturally, I would only ever get a single second-job SP to use, so masteries are the only second-job skills that are actually usable. With that in mind, I thought that page would be the natural choice, as they get access to both Sword Mastery and BW Mastery. I mostly want the sword mastery (as kinds uses the level 20 Gladius), but BW is just a single second-job SP reset away, in case I want to use something like a Red Flowery Tube (for the SPEED), a Monkey Wrench (for the swag), or a Frying Pan (for the memes). And so it is:

    [​IMG]

    kinds is looking forward to some SPQing now!! :3

    [bloopers]

    [​IMG]
     
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  9. Feeed
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    Feeed Mr. Anchor

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    5:33 PM
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    Corsair
    xCheesecakexCheesecake quick, reset that 10 base LUK before deer sees it :eek:
     
  10. xCheesecake
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    xCheesecake King Slime

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    The 10 LUK is from the dice roll which is actually allowed, though I plan on resetting it down the road once I hit my goal. MapleF2
     
  11. darkcookie
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    darkcookie Mano

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    Abused quests to go from level 15 to 24 today. With a Coke Zero Pill, 8 attack work glove, and otherwise clean equips, my Unfortundit is consistently hitting about 200 damage with double stab (90-110 per hit). That seems oddly respectable? I can go to Genins and 3HKO them if I wasn't abusing quests? Hello? Excuse me, I thought odd jobs were supposed to be weak. I may need to get a refund. Almost tempted to make a minimum-dex bandit to see how the damage compares, side-by-side.

    But, nah. Especially since end-end-game Shads are considered seduce mules and have low damage anyway (and it pains me to say that as a warrior main -- #justiceformelee), might as well commit to hella low damage, but stylish with the stability. SolidState is enough Shadower for me. Probably.

    Relatedly, it didn't quite occur to be to verify until now, but yeah, my end game dagger and shield only require str and dex, not luk. So Unfortundits really are just lower damage Shadlowdamagers. My only lamentation is that I won't be able to equip cute thief armor without a ton of luk. And although it makes perfect sense that they can't, I wish warriors could equip [Dragon] Khanjars.
     
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  12. OP
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    deer Pac Pinky

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    Oddjobs
    (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. lxxvii

    Taxonomising odd jobs, pt. vi: Forestry. §3

    In the previous section (§2) of this part (pt. vi), we considered the problem of representing the hand-constructed rooted forest that we want to make. We considered two levels of representation: a serialised format, and a graphical/visual format. I decided to represent the trees serially by using Newick format, and graphically by feeding the Newick data into the toytree library. Along the way, I switched to a different theoretical representation, in which the inner nodes (i.e. the vertices that aren’t leaves) are left anonymous (rather than each vertex being an odd job), and the members of our odd job universe are all leaves — and vice versa. This is more similar to typical phylogenetic trees, but also meant that we had to change how we constrain the rooted forest’s construction. Nevertheless, the new constraint is similar to the old one: it’s a simple one-way implication between two orderings, one of the orderings being our hand-constructed weak ordering of the odd job universe, and the other ordering being some ordering defined over the vertex set of our rooted forest.

    In the previous section, we did put together some actual tree data, and rendered it into various visual diagrams. But we didn’t include every element of our odd job universe — only the permabeginner ones. So, the task remains to put together at least one satisfactory rooted forest that includes every member of our universe. So I did that. The tree data can be found in 00-00.tree, and the script used to render the diagrams seen below can be found at render.py.

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    I wrote the Newick data by hand, starting from the data used in the previous section. From there, I basically just went through the hand-constructed weak ordering as found in ../072/weak_ordering.ron, from top to bottom, and inserted each job into the tree by hand. There were a few exceptions here and there, and I had to go back and tweak the tree numerous times, but that was basically the idea. In order to keep things more human-readable, I used indentation in a consistent way, throughout the Newick data, to make the hierarchical structure more clear. This turned out to be a slight issue, because toytree’s Newick parser can’t handle any newlines within the Newick data itself (i.e. it’s after the semicolon, or before the beginning of the data). This is technically incorrect, as Newick parsers are supposed to ignore whitespace (unless perhaps it’s found within a name). Indeed, toytree’s parser does correctly ignore some ASCII whitespace that isn’t an LF (viz. U+0020, U+000D, and U+0009), but sees an LF as a separator of multiple trees. So having an LF within the tree data unexpectedly truncates it, which generally leaves you with ungrammatical garbage. The offending line of code can be found here. However, this admits a simple workaround, which I implement in render.py as removing all whitespace from the Newick data before handing it over to toytree.

    Another thing that I had to work around was the fact that Newick data doesn’t allow certain characters to be part of names. The important ones are whitespace and round brackets, which appear in several of the odd job names (e.g. “HP warrior” contains whitespace, “woods(wo)man” contains round brackets). So the rename_nodes function in render.py performs a depth-first traversal of the tree, renaming leaf nodes as it goes (e.g. “HP_warrior” ↦ “HP warrior”).

    There are some issues with determining the structure of the tree (even if we ignore the weights of the edges), which arise naturally due to the fact that we are shoehorning our universe into a phylogenetic tree. But, before I get to that, I want to check that my tree actually satisfies the constraint given in the previous section: ≺ → ≾ . Of course, I had this constraint in mind while putting the tree together, but it’s a little difficult to really tell whether or not it’s fully satisfied by just looking at the Newick data and/or the resulting diagrams. Better is to have a program that can ensure this satisfaction automatically…

    The script found in constraint_check.py does exactly this, by leveraging the in-memory tree representation that is part of toytree’s API. This program does a depth-first traversal of the tree, building up an associative array that maps each node’s name to its distance from the root. The program also keeps an in-memory representation of the weak ordering that was constructed by hand in ../072/weak_ordering.ron. This information is then used to compare every possible pair of odd jobs, ensuring that the desired constraint is satisfied for all such pairs. Much to my relief, the program doesn’t find any discrepancies.

    With that taken care of, I’d like to talk about the actual structure of the tree that I constructed, and the issues and difficulties that arise along the way. But I think I’ll save that for next time. :)

    Horntail (1ˢᵗ-)prehead run!!

    Gruzz, xBowtjuhNL, Harlez (VigiI), Bipp (Cassandro, Copo, Sommer, Celim, Fino), ItsPav, and I (as my darksterity knight rusa) planned to do some kind of Horntail (HT) run, but just with the prehead(s). For those not familiar, HT runs proceed in a series of three stages:
    1. Fight the first prehead, which pops out of the right side of the first map, pointing towards the left.
    2. Fight the second prehead, which pops out of the left side of the second map, pointing towards the right.
    3. Summon HT itself in the third & final map, which is the main fight. This HT has multiple body parts, all of which must be slain in order to get the huge loot and EXP at the end.
    Our plan was to only do (1.) & (2.), or possibly only (1.). This is a lot easier than actually fighting HT itself, but still not for the faint of heart:
    • Each prehead has 330M HP, 1 760 WDEF, 1 840 MDEF, and can heal itself for 100k HP at a time.
    • Each prehead hits for roughly ≈15k damage if you touch it, although its magic attacks generally only deal slightly more than ≈5k damage each.
    • Both preheads are capable of seducing, which renders a seduced character unable to attack, use potions(!) (including pet autopot), use skills, move voluntarily, etc. The seduce effect causes the character to be forced to walk leftwards, or walk rightwards, or jump in place. Indeed, the only voluntary actions that can be taken by a seduced character are: using Hero’s Will (a kind of “get out of jail free card” for any debuff, including seduce, although it has a ten-minute cooldown), and chatting.
    • Both preheads are capable of summoning Wyverns, which are generally harmless unless they are Dark Wyverns. Dark Wyverns are capable of dispelling PCs, which is a big deal for those who rely on buffs like Magic Guard, HB, Meso Guard, etc. to survive. This makes Dark Wyverns particularly terrifying for mages.
    That being said, between the six of us, we thought we’d be capable of taking down at least one prehead, so we wanted to do it for the big achievement. And maybe some EXP? Who knows. One thing pushing us to do this run earlier, rather than later, was that we wanted to do it before Harlez hit level 155. Because HT (and its preheads) are level 160, any level ≥155 character gets party EXP normally. But other characters cannot get party EXP normally, effectively meaning that higher-level characters rob the lower-level characters of their EXP. The solution is, then, to make sure that everyone is on the same side of the threshold — either all level ≥155, or all level <155.

    We got everyone together, made sure that everyone had their Dragon Elixirs — and helping those who didn’t have one to do the quest — and headed into the cave:

    [​IMG]

    Most of us — myself included — already had a Certificate of the Dragon Squad, so we were able to warp the entire party past HTPQ (Horntail Party Quest), and into the proper Cave of Life.

    Our first attempt, unfortunately, was a failure. We chipped off some of the first prehead’s HP, but then xBowtjuhNL met an unfortunate demise:

    [​IMG]

    Harlez (who is a shadower) acted as effectively our “sed[uce] mule”, which meant that he was always the first character to enter any map. Seduce always targets the first PC who entered the map (unless it’s a “mass” sed), so Harlez was the natural choice, as his AVOID is very high, and he has Shadow Shifter, plenty of MAXHP, and Meso Guard. This meant that ItsPav, a bishop and our only party member with Heal, was on babysitting duty any time that Harlez got seduced. While we were talking about this, xBowtjuhNL accidentally died…

    But the second run was much better! Here we are, fighting the first prehead for the second time:

    [​IMG]

    The preheads do this really annoying attack that launches you backwards (i.e. to the left wall) and briefly stuns. It seems that even if you jump, this attack can’t be dodged. However, you can still avoid it using normal AVOID mechanics, as well as with Shadow Shifter. And Power Stance will prevent the pushback and stun, even if you do get hit and take the damage. So here is a screenshot that I snagged when I happened to be the only one (besides Bipp) who didn’t get launched backwards:

    [​IMG]

    This screenshot let me pretty clearly see at least two of my damage lines; you can see me doing a 3 216 damage line, and a 6 170 critical damage line. The critical one would have been 3 383, had it not been a crit. These are pretty small damage lines for rusa, considering that she is zerking here, and is buffed by a Cider and some level of MW (I think MW20, although it was definitely at least MW10). The reason for this is simply that the head has 1 760(!) WDEF, and rusa is 21(!) levels below the head in this image. Being a DEX warrior (particularly as a DEX DK, meaning no pre-WDEF damage multipliers like Combo Attack or elemental charges), WDEF impacts my damage a lot — my raw damage range is quite low and stable.

    We did, eventually, slay the beast:

    [​IMG]

    Hurrah! The first prehead is dead!! And we got… well, some EXP, at least. The effective EPH here was pretty bad for everyone involved, and rusa was no exception. But it was cool~!!

    We knew, at this point, that we didn’t have enough time to kill the second prehead. But we thought we’d at least go and check it out. Turns out, although the direction of the second prehead is reversed in comparison to the first prehead (it comes out of the left wall instead of the right wall, and faces rightwards instead of leftwards), they both knock PCs in the same direction (leftwards) when dealing damage. This was Bad News™ for rusa, as my ability to consistently zerk whilst fighting the first prehead was predicated on the fact that I could not be knocked rightwards (unless by a stray Wyvern). This meant that I effectively never had to worry about taking touch damage. Now, with the second prehead, the situation was reversed…:

    [​IMG]

    All-Oddjobs EPQ~!

    I had the pleasure of doing some all-Oddjobs EPQs on my DEX brawler EPQ/LPQ mule sorts!! I filmed the first one, featuring Cassandro (Bipp, Sommer, Copo, Fino, Celim) the claw clericlet, Nyanners (Taima, Hanyou, Boymoder, Tacgnol, Numidium, Gambolpuddy, Inugami) the steelwoman permawarrior, and Suzuran (xAme, AmeAme) the blood dit! You can watch an edited version of the footage on the official Oddjobs YouTube channel!!:

    All-Oddjobs EPQ! [YouTube]

    The evil bunny children diaries

    Have you ever mercilessly murdered any evil bunny children (a.k.a. “Kid Mannequins” (“KMs”*))? If not, believe me when I say that you would, if only you had met them. They are vicious and murderous creatures who will do immense damage do you without even being provoked! You can’t even get near then without being chased by them!! I, personally, have died many times to Kid Mannequins, and have witnessed many deaths of my comrades at their tiny, fuzzy, evil hands. STRginner queen Taima (Nyanners, Hanyou, Boymoder, Tacgnol, Numidium, Gambolpuddy, Inugami) and I (as my undead daggermit alces) were determined to put a stop to this madness, so we set out to eliminate them once and for all:

    [​IMG]

    On the bright side, they grant no small quantity of EXP upon being killed…

    [​IMG]

    I came back to KMs on my I/L magelet cervine when I grabbed some GM buffs on her:

    [​IMG]

    Okay, I admit — the EXP is pretty good for alces:

    [​IMG]

    …But they just won’t stay dead!! On another set of GM boofs, I joined both Taima, and a fellow STRginner Permanovice (Battlesage, Dreamscapes, Paean), as cervine:

    [​IMG]

    When training here — particularly when duoing/trioing — I like to have my pure STR bishop cervid parked in the FM entrance to give us buffs: mostly HS, but also Bless & MW9. This increases EPH by quite a bit, and also increases MPH significantly.

    Permarogue extraordinaire xX17Xx (breakcore, attackattack, drainer, strainer, raving) was passing us on the way to train at Fancy Amps, so she stopped to train with Taima & I!:

    [​IMG]

    Things get a little chaotic with three people at KMs, as the map is divided exactly in half by the two map-wide platforms. There’s no obvious way to distribute people across the platforms, but we made it work.

    And, I was fortunate enough to be there when Taima hit the big 110!!!!:

    [​IMG]

    Gratz again! ^^

    And, alces is level 99 now…

    [​IMG]

    Tune in next time, where alces will hopefully hit the big triple digits and hold that fancy GDK!!

    *Not to be confused with one of its capitonyms, KMS, which stands for “Korean MapleStory”.

    More adventures with alces

    I thought it was about time for me to get alces some pet equips, to boost her relatively fragile MAXHP. For that, though, I would need enough pets to equip all that MAXHP gear. So I headed over to the Pet-Walking Road in Henesys to do the JQ:

    [​IMG]

    You can see how surprised Trainer Frod is to see that I’ve completed the JQ, without using FJ even once!

    Now that I had Follow the Lead, it was time to buy two more pets, in addition to the Jr. Reaper that I already had:

    [​IMG]

    That’s right, two more Jr. Reapers! I guess they come with a “set effect” that makes them aggressively spout chat/thought bubbles with random images and colours…

    During our usual scheduled area-bossing time, I met up with fellow Oddjobs member LawdHeComin (Snel), the F/P archgish, to kill some HHs! We were fortunate enough to find half a dozen of them at Hollowed [sic] Ground!:

    [​IMG]

    And after killing just two or three of them, alces hit level 97~!:

    [​IMG]

    capre stares down some bosses

    On my woodsmaster capreolina, I did some of the usual Ravanas and Papulatuses with marksman xBowtjuhNL. I rarely have the occasion to use my Puppet — although that’s probably partially because I’m so averse to using it, as it used to be extremely buggy — but these runs gave me some chance to use it. Like when Rav gets unpinned from the left wall and starts waltzing around like a big six-armed dummy:

    [​IMG]

    Or when xBowtjuhNL switches to a clean PSB and lets me solo Papu’s second body:

    [​IMG]

    And, later on, Harlez introduced me to an area boss called Kacchuu Musha*. This heavily-armoured samurai zombie is no joke, with a whopping 78M HP, and a magic attack that deals over 9k damage. Now, even with HB, capreolina doesn’t have quite enough MAXHP to take a hit from this magical attack. The trick is, though, that the magic attack only hits those who are within a certain distance of Kacchuu Musha. And, as an archer wielding a (cross)bow, it’s possible to hit Kacchuu Musha from outside of this range:

    [​IMG]

    It’s a bit tough to do, and pretty much relies on being able to pin the Kacchuu Musha, but luckily it only has a knockback threshold of 250. That being said, I did die a number of times. Getting back to the map that spawns Kacchuu Musha is difficult, just because of how confusing the Ninja Castle is. All of the maps have the same name (“Ninja Castle Hallway”), and there are no explicit portals — only cracks in the wall, holes in the floor, etc. I still have troubles walking there myself (remembering the exact route is a bit tough for me), but I was sort of able to get around that by having my pure STR bishop cervid walk there, and then door capreolina whenever she needed it.

    In the end, we did kill this thing, and boy does it give some EXP. Its base EXP is 3.68M, which means that killing it solo and unbuffed (and not during an event) would grant a whopping 7.36M EXP!

    *It appears that Kacchuu comes from 「甲冑」 (katchū), meaning “helmet & armour”. And Musha from 「武者」 (musha), meaning “warrior”.

    cervine does a lil more questing~

    In the previous diary entry, my I/L magelet cervine went out and did a bunch of questing. Well, she has since continued a bit of that…

    I was in Taipei 101 for CD refrigeration purposes, so I headed back to Victoria Island. I then needed to head to Ossyria for the quests that I was doing, so I took the (flying) boat from Ellinia to Orbis:

    [​IMG]

    From there, I headed down the Orbis Tower towards El Nath for Dr. De Lang’s Notes, and to kill 100 Leatties for Acquiring the Seed for the Snowfield Rose:

    [​IMG]

    And then, I headed back up the tower to Orbis, to kill some Lunar Pixies for The Fairy in Despair 1:

    [​IMG]

    I actually finished the Lunar Pixie card set by this point, and I even got a courtesy Star Pixie card as well!:

    [​IMG]

    With the Snow Rose Seed in hand, it was time to head back to Magatia and get a Snow Rose for Humanoid A:

    [​IMG]

    I then headed to Area A-3 of the Alcadno Research Institute to kill some Reinforced Iron Mutaes for a present, for Keeny:

    [​IMG]

    I killed D. Roys until one finally dropped a Broken Mechanical Heart, also as a present, for Keeny:

    [​IMG]

    Now, it was time to get started on the latter leg of the main Magatia questline. Starting this second leg is a bit tricky, as the game gives very few hints about how to proceed — these quests can only be started by entering a hidden map, at which point a lightbulb pops above your character’s head. Before that, there’s nothing in the quest journal about any available quests, or anything like that.

    For Parwen’s Lab, I killed a bunch of these Site* things:

    [​IMG]

    I got really lucky with the cards here — I think I had 3/5 or 4/5 by the time that I finished the associated quests. Also associated with the Sites is The Secret, Quiet Passage, which I did concurrently as well. This latter quest is the one that gives you access to the passage directly between the Alcadno laboratories and the Zenumist laboratories, which is where Kimera spawns.

    With that, Parwen took me to see Dr. De Lang himself:

    [​IMG]

    This is, apparently, not actually Dr. De Lang. The wording is a bit vague, but Parwen says:
    Hmmm… Well, it looks like cervine is going to have to do some more investigation, in the next episode of Questing With cervine™!

    *These are called Cyti, when inside of MPQ.

    Dodging snails, avoiding mushrooms

    (To read this portion of the diary entry, please read the original (mirror).)

    Levelling up with rusa

    I duoed 7F — as my darksterity knight rusa — with shadower Harlez (VigiI), when we both had GM buffs. And boy, is the EXP absolutely bonkers:

    [​IMG]

    HS really is ridiculously powerful, innit. Powerful enough to get rusa to level 139, at least!:

    [​IMG]

    Later, rusa did a number of Krex runs, joined by Harlez, xBowtjuhNL, and others. In fact, in one session we did not one, not two, not t(h)ree, but four Krexel runs:

    [​IMG]

    Pictured above is the first Krex run out of this series of four. Doing the usual two Krexes (as it can only be entered twice daily, at most) is already enough mind-numbing punishment for most people. But we were, apparently, not satisfied. Because the number of possible entries resets at midnight (server time, which is just UTC), we did two a bit before midnight, and then two immediately after midnight.

    The first two were done with dark knight Jatizso and hero WarSeven, who asked me about rusa’s build. One thing that I never even really considered before this point was that rusa doesn’t have to worry about “MISS”ing the Golden Giants at 7F. Those guys have a whopping 75(!) AVOID, meaning that a level ≥130 physical attacker needs ≥276 total WACC to be capable of hitting them 100% of the time. For rusa, that’s basically nothing. But for ordinary warriors, it’s quite the challenge.

    Also, I was reminded that my Power Stance was level 19, and I still had yet to pass a Stance 30 book. So I went ahead and did that:

    [​IMG]

    Luckily for me, I passed it on the first try. These books seem to be a bit inconsistently priced, where they are rare enough to be worth something, but the demand isn’t quite high enough to keep the prices consistent. This one was 1.5M mesos, so it was a decent deal.

    Oh, and rusa is on the same account as my undead daggermit alces. The plan was to make a set of three pet equips scrolled for MAXHP, and then share them between the characters on that account (via the Cash Shop inventory). This meant that I also had to get three pets for rusa:

    [​IMG]

    Well, I got two more Rudolphs (in addition to the one that rusa already had), and it turns out that these get a set affect too, if you have three of them:

    [​IMG]

    Appropriately for the winter holidays (albeit less so for the summer holidays), this set effect is an igloo with some snow-covered conifers, a snowman, and a penguin. Unfortunately, I hate it. So, I may get rid of one of the Rudolphs at some point, and replace it with… some other pet.

    In any case, rusa hit level 140 at 7F!:

    [​IMG]

    And, I got to do a Zakum run alongside fellow Oddjobs member LawdHeComin (Snel), the F/P archgish!!:

    [​IMG]

    Also, in the bottom-left corner there, you can see Cassandro (Bipp, Copo, Sommer, Celim, Fino), the claw clericlet! He tagged along in hopes of a zhelm, but unfortunately wasn’t able to survive until the end (I could only Resurrect him once, so he had to mostly survive on his own).

    And, finally, rusa is now level 141 :3

    [​IMG]

    My first-ever CWKPQ~!

    As seen in past entries of this diary, I’ve been inside of CWKPQ (Crimsonwood Keep Party Quest) before. But only as a MoN buyer — I have a MoN on my pure STR bishop cervid, on my woodsmaster capreolina, and on my I/L magelet cervine. But I’ve never actually done the PQ! Well, that has since changed!! I got the privilege of doing a CWKPQ on my darksterity knight rusa, hosted by nightlord Keirilius of Vandals, and featuring members of the Funk guild, as well as other guilds like Beaters, Kyoto, and Athena. I tried filming this PQ — unfortunately, doing the boss fight and screen recording at the same time proved to be too much for my poor CPU to handle, so the footage stops about 10% of the way into the boss stage — but you can watch some clips from the run on the Oddjobs YouTube channel!:

    clips from rusa’s first CWKPQ~ [YouTube]

    Some time after the point at which I was forced to stop recording, the ranged folks (in this case, bowmasters, marksmen, and nightlords) came down to the floor, where the three bosses are that are typically handled by the melee folks:

    [​IMG]

    The mage and pirate* bosses spawn on the platforms above, but at this point they had already been slain, so the ranged folks came down and got a taste of how annoying the floor bosses can be (warrior, archer, thief). Basically, these bosses constantly spam stuns and seals, and also have an attack that pushes you backwards and briefly stuns (similar to the HT preheads). This makes it impossible to effectively fight these guys, unless you have Holy Shield active, or Smokescreen active, or… you’re hugging the bosses and constantly taking touch attacks from them, instead. So, as a ranged attacker, this is kind of a shit deal. But for melee folks, constantly receiving touch attacks from the bosses is much more doable.

    In any case, being able to CWKPQ was super fun, and I hope that I get to do it again in the future. By the end of it all, I got to break some (viz. three) boxes in the bonus stage, and got some nifty loot!:

    [​IMG]

    The items here that aren’t 30% scrolls are Sugar-Coated Olives and Sunblock. The former is basically just Haste for five minutes, in an item! And Sunblock is a mighty MDEF buff (+200 MDEF!!), which is great for when you need to squeeze out that extra bit of defence to avoid getting one-shotted by bosses like Capt. Latanica!

    *The pirate boss is usually called “Nagrom” (“Morgan” spelled in reverse) — the CWKPQ guide on the MapleLegends forums even names it as such — but it is actually called “Heron” in MapleLegends, including within the MapleLegends library.
     
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  13. SiriusPlaque
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    SiriusPlaque Slime

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    Wow great job with HT y’all super impressive!! They grow up so fast :cry: That cervine snow rose screenshot made me LOL
     
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  14. Myungsoo
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    Myungsoo Slimy

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    Is there a guild for Ironman? I wanna make one
     
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  15. darkcookie
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    darkcookie Mano

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    Went to Genins on my level 24 Unfortundit. Three-hitting actually feels way worse than expected given 1v1 limit, lack of range, and inability to knock back. Exp is still ridiculous nonetheless.

    Also, it was hilarious how echo on top of a coke zero pill did pretty much nothing to affect my hits to kill.

    Several days later edit that doesn't deserve its own post:

    Spent more time at Genins to get to level 25, where I can return to quests. Got my requisite old raggedy cape on every character that I never end up selling or scrolling. And then ended up at level 26.
     
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  16. OP
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    deer Pac Pinky

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    (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. lxxviii

    Taxonomising odd jobs, pt. vi: Forestry. §4

    In the previous section (§3) of this part (pt. vi), I put together (by hand) one big Newick-formatted, weighted, rooted tree that contains, as its set of leaves, our entire universe of odd jobs. I then used toytree to make some nice-looking diagrams that allow us to properly visualise the tree. I also wrote a little script to check that the tree conforms to our “ ≺ → ≾ ” constraint.

    I did not, however, talk about how exactly I constructed the tree, other than to say:
    In order to explain the logic behind this tree, I’m going to use a diagram of the tree in which all “inner” (read: non-leaf) vertices have been numbered. Then, I can step through every inner vertex, one by one, and give it a name — plus (perhaps) some accompanying commentary. I currently believe that giving a name to each inner node is an important part of justifying the tree’s structure, and of giving the tree meaning.

    Each inner node virtually — by our rather… questionable… analogy — represents some “common ancestor” within our “phylogenetic tree”. We should be able to characterise each of these “MRCAs”, and in doing so, collectively characterise (in one way or another) all of its child vertices.

    But first, an update to the tree itself! When I constructed the tree by hand, I used the example data from the initial experimentation with toytree (q.v. §2) — which contained all & only permabeginner odd jobs — as a starting point. I should have revised this starting point more, as its structure was ultimately not going to work (although it was plenty enough for a simple demonstration). I’ve since revised the tree to fix this portion of it. Furthermore, I’ve moved the “rangeginners” (clawginner, bowginner, begunner) to be siblings of the “jobbed beginners” (woods(wo)man, STR mage, brigand, etc.), instead of being their own basal clade. You can find the new tree data at 00-01.tree. So, here are the same diagrams from the previous section, but with the newly-updated tree data:

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    Naming the inner vertices

    [​IMG]
    • 0: “odd”.
      • 1: “pure HP”. An alternative name would be “statless”, as these pure-HP odd jobs are the only jobs in our universe that are statless by definition.
      • 2: “skill-specialised”. These jobs are defined solely by their specialised skillsets.
      • 3: “ammoless”.
        • 8: “pre-pirate ammoless”. I split out the pre-pirate ammoless jobs — to the exclusion of the pistol-whipper — for basically two reasons. One, I believe that the pistol-whipper is much less “primitive” (only partly because it’s a pirate) and has almost no literature behind it. Two, I believe that the pistol-whipper plays differently than the claw-puncher & the bow-whacker at some fundamental level, because it rarely actually resorts to smacking monsters with its weapon.
      • 4: “perma-first”. This is the first point at which we really have to contend with multiple characterisations of a job being in conflict with one another. Perma-first-jobs are fairly diverse in their playstyles, so when taxonomising odd jobs, it’s tempting — and sometimes appropriate — to put perma-firsts alongside other odd jobs based on playstyle, skills, weaponry, stats, etc. But here, I want to express that all five perma-first-jobs originate in the same way: from the simple refusal of advancement to second grade. As a result, the perma-firsts form a basal clade within this tree, and there are no subclades (other than the individual jobs themselves).
      • 5: “statted”. These jobs are entirely, or almost entirely, characterised by their goofy stats.
        • 9: “statted warrioroid”. The term “warrioroid” here is from “warrior” + “-oid”, in order to indicate the union of all warriors with the brawler throughclass. Like warriors, brawlers are intended to only use melee weapons (viz. knucklers) whose primary stat is STR, and whose secondary stat is DEX. Also like warriors, brawlers are intended to be more durable than average, and get their own “Improved MaxHP Increase” skill. Still like warriors, brawlers make prominent use of their single-target attack (Power Strike; Flash Fist) and their six-target attack (Slash Blast; Somersault Kick) from first grade.
          • 13: “DEX warrioroids”.
          • 14: “LUK warrioroids”.
      • 6: “weaponed”. These jobs are defined by their weapon restrictions.
        • 10: “armed”. This clade splits off the “weaponed” jobs that actually use weapons from those that don’t (read: pugilist). This split is done on the basis of essentially two things. One is the simple, literal distinction between “necessarily using a certain kind of weapon” versus “necessarily not using weapons at all”. And the other is mechanical uniqueness: the pugilist exists, and is necessarily a pirate, due to the somewhat surprising fact that pirates — and only pirates — can attack without a weapon equipped. This special-sauce game mechanic makes the origin of the pugilist special.
          • 15: “inverted weapon”. These jobs use weapons that are appropriate given their first-grade class, but are inverted w.r.t. their choice of throughclass. I seriously considered making the dagger sin a member of this clade, but ultimately decided against it, in favour of making them members of the “daggered” clade. See the “daggered” clade for an explanation.
          • 16: “one-handed melee”. These weapon-restricted jobs are, more specifically, restricted to using particular types of one-handed melee weapon. Particularly, daggers and wands(/staves). Daggers and wands are somewhat special as one-handed melee weapons. Daggers are normally considered thief weapons (not warrior weapons), and have a special game mechanic that causes their damage calculation to fundamentally change depending on the class of their wielder. And wands are, despite being one-handed melee weapons, not normally thought of as such — they are thought of as a mage’s weapon, existing only to increase the MATK, INT, and possibly also LUK, of their mage wielder.
            • 21: “daggered”. This clade groups together the dagger warrior with the dagger sin. Although it’s certainly true that both of these jobs are defined by their inability to use weapons other than daggers, this clade might seem like an odd choice, considering that dagger sins could fit comfortably within the “inverted weapon” clade. And furthermore, we usually think of warriors as being generally quite dissimilar to thieves. Nevertheless, both the dagger warrior and the dagger sin are essentially stuck with their first-grade attacking skill(s) for life (Power Strike/Slash Blast; Double Stab), and both are locked out of a similar set of their skills as a result of their weapon choice.
      • 7: “beginneroid”. This is a tough one. Similarly to the “warrioroid” term, “beginneroid” is from “beginner” + “-oid”, and unifies literal permabeginners with other jobs that are not actually permabeginners. Beginneroids that aren’t strictly permabeginners are almost always characterised by their adherence to basic-attacking. I considered naming this clade “basic-attacker”, or even “whacker” — the latter is not a common term, but I’ve personally used it a lot to refer loosely to jobs that like to basic-attack. The reason why I went with “beginneroid” instead is mostly because of one particular odd job that sticks out like a sore thumb: the swashbuckler. There’s other good reasons, too: for example, jobs like gish and woods(wo)man have alternate modes of attacking that are very different from basic-attacking (magical spells; active archery skills). But the swashbuckler poses a special problem: they are, in my mind at least, clearly “phylogenetically” closely related to woods(wo)men — yet, their style of melee combat almost never includes basic-attacking. Nevertheless, their style of melee is like the woods(wo)man’s insofar as it is STR-based (they are pure STR by definition, just like woods(wo)men) and uses melee weapons that are normally inappropriate for their throughclass.
        • 11: “inland”.
          • 17: “islander”.
            • 22: “meleelander”. This clade includes the islanders that pretty much only use melee attacks to deal damage. Although many hybridlanders are like this (e.g. my islander ozotoceros is a DEX/LUK hybridlander who only uses melee), hybridlander is basically a wastebasket taxon. So hybridlander gets effectively its own clade, due to that diversity & ambiguity. And magelanders can melee as well, but their “primary mode of combat” is Three Snails.
            • 23: “weirdlander”. This clade is just the islanders with “weird” specialisations: the magelander uses Three Snails and can only use wands, and the LUKlander is a claw user.
        • 12: “outland beginneroid”.
          • 18: “rangeginner”. This clade used to be its own basal clade within this tree, but I moved it here, mostly on the basis that rangeginners are restricted to basic-attacking by definition. Also, they are intentionally modelled after permabeginners (even though they are not themselves permabeginners). Rangeginners are not, however, closely related to any other outland beginneroids, so they form a separate clade within the outland beginneroids.
          • 19: “outlandginner”. These are our outland beginneroids that are actually proper permabeginners.
            • 24: “weirdginner”. The influence of STRginners is so strong (and so primal) that all other outlandginners are grouped into this separate clade.
          • 20: “jobbed beginneroid”. Classically, this clade is referred to as the “jobbed beginners” (among a few other names that are similar in spirit). Of course, I use the term “jobbed beginneroid” instead, for reasons explained above.
            • 25: “archeroid beginneroid”. This one has kind of a funny name, owing to the two “-oid”s in there. The term “archeroid” here is very similar to “warrioroid”: it unites the literal archers with their pirate counterparts (those of the gunslinger throughclass). As mentioned above, swashbucklers are the sore thumb sticking out here; they almost never use basic-attacks. However, they are very clearly “the pirate version of woods(wo)man”, so this deep connection of these two jobs’ origins (and their melee-and-ranged playstyle, etc.) is directly reflected in our phylogeny.
            • 26: “mage beginneroid”.
              • 28: “physical attacker mage”. These are our mage beginneroids that don’t have enough MACC to actually use spells offensively (barring Poison Mist).
              • 29: “mixed attacker mage”. These mage beginneroids are “mixed” attackers in the sense of mixing physical attacks with magical attacks.
            • 27: “thief beginneroid”.
              • 30: “unique weapon beginneroid”. The phrase “unique weapon” here is in reference to an actual individual weapon ID. These thief beginneroids are not just restricted to a certain weapon type(s), but rather to a specific weapon ID, e.g. the Scythe (ID 1312002). These jobs are beginneroids simply because they can’t be anything else, given the weapon that they are restricted to.
    Reflecting on the tree’s structure
    As you can see, there are a number of places where we’d like one job to be closely related to another, but it’s not possible to make that happen without breaking some other strong relationship(s). Possible biological analogues include hybridisation and HGT, although in our case it’s really mostly a product of how we can characterise a single job in multiple distinct ways. For example, within the “jobbed beginneroid” clade, I opted to divide these jobs up largely across class boundaries. This is because class boundaries are often conceptually significant due to shared skill selections (and other class distinctions like MAXHP gain, damage formula for daggers, etc.). Beginneroid mages get Teleport, Magic Guard, various offensive spells at their disposal, etc. Archer(oid) beginneroids always have the option to be ranged physical attackers, and benefit from WACC buffs* and summons (Silver Hawk/Frostprey/etc.; Octopus/Gaviota/etc.), while also being defensively disadvantaged.

    On the other hand, there are roughly equally strong conceptual links on different bases: for example, the “STRanger” is a powerful archetype that includes any STR-based ranged physical attacker, viz. the woods(wo)man, the swashbuckler, and the LUKless sin. All of these STRangers are proficient in ranged attacking (with (cross)bows; guns; claws, respectively), but also canonically use melee weapons to fight, as well. Yet here, we separate LUKless sins from the other STRangers on a largely class basis. Similarly, the armed brawler is placed within the “armed” clade; although it’s convenient that I named the clade similarly to the job in question, the reality is that the armed brawler is conceptually closely related to the swashbuckler, as well. Both the armed brawler and the swashbuckler rely on SSK (and the fact that SSK always “stabs”) in melee, and melee combat is essentially the only mode of combat for the armed brawler, and an important primary mode for the swashbuckler. Furthermore, these two jobs share a first-grade class, viz. pirate. And, as discussed above, we want to think of the dagger sin as conceptually closely related to both the dagger warrior and to the “inverted weapon” jobs.

    And of course, there are other issues, too. The LUKginner’s exclusive use of claws arguably makes them more closely related to the clawginner and to the LUKlander, than the STRginner is related to either of these two jobs. Yet, if such a relation exists, it is not reflected in this tree. There is pretty clear parallelism between the various islanders and the various outland permabeginner jobs… or is it not parallelism, but actually homology? STRginner is to STRlander, as DEXginner is to DEXlander, as wandginner is to magelander, as LUKginner is to LUKlander! There are some pretty deep-seated differences between Maple Island and the post-Lith-Harbour Maple World that induce some fundamental differences between our islander and our outlander permabeginner species — yet, the analogies between them are still quite clear. And we could go on: where in the tree can we see the relation between all mixed melee-ranged physical attackers, like the permarogue, the permapirate, the LUKless sin, the swashbuckler, etc.? Where in the tree can we see that the LUKless sin and the LUKless dit are defined nearly identically, even if their playstyles differ considerably?

    *The WACC buffs (passive and/or active) might seem like a minor feature, but have historically been very important (as we observed in pt. ii of this series) in characterising the archeroid beginneroids. That being said, the brigand and the LUKless sin are other beginneroids who also benefit from the same thing, so this isn’t a unique feature.

    Moving forward

    Although, in the text above, there are a lot of questions raised about this phylogenetic-tree-like rooted tree of odd jobs, I think that this basically concludes the original purpose of pt. vi of this series. I set out to construct such a tree by hand, and based on certain principles that I can (at least, personally) be satisfied with, I did exactly that. Again, as mentioned above, these are not the only possible principles that one could use to organise such a tree. But I think that this should work just fine, at least for now.

    I mentioned within some earlier sections of this part (pt. vi) that I had another construct in mind, that could be used in much the same way as we’ve used the phylogenetic-tree-like model here:
    The structure that I had in mind was some kind of DAG. Strictly speaking, a DAG doesn’t generalise the rooted forest that we’ve used here — the rooted forest doesn’t have to give a direction to any of its edges, so long as each component is a rooted tree. But we can think of a rooted forest as being kind of “implicitly directed” because we can very naturally make each edge directed away from (or equivalently, each edge directed towards) the root of the tree that the edge is a part of. If we think of rooted forests in this way, then a DAG is a generalisation of a rooted forest that allows for induced subgraphs whose underlying undirected graph is a cycle graph. This is because a “directed acyclic graph” is “acyclic” because it contains no directed cycles. To illustrate this, here’s a very simple DAG:

    [​IMG]

    Code:
    dot -Tsvg -Kneato -Gbgcolor='#00000000' -Nshape=plain -o./example_dag.svg ./example_dag.gv

    As you can see, this DAG would be ₃, if only all of its edges lost their directions. Yet there is no directed cycle within this graph: you can see for yourself that if you start at any vertex (e.g. ) and “leave” it at all (by following some edge away from it), you can’t get back to that vertex ever again. From , for example, we can get to either or ; but from , we have nowhere to go, and from , we can only get to ! So there’s no way back to once you leave it, and this also applies to the other vertices.

    This property allows us to possibly express multiple influences on a single odd job without creating a directed cycle — this is a considerable amount of extra power. As you’ll recall, the primary property that makes a graph a tree is that it’s acyclic. So now, we are generalising the underlying undirected graph to allow cycles, so long as the graph is still acyclic when taking edge directions into account.

    And adjusting our “ ≺ ≾ ” constraint to this new structure is fairly straightforward, as well. A defining feature of DAGs is that they admit at least one topological ordering. A topological ordering (here denoted by “≤”) is just a total ordering of the DAG’s vertices, such that each edge of the DAG is directed from some vertex to some vertex , where ≤ . We can then easily see that a topological ordering is just a linear extension of an underlying non-strict partial ordering (here denoted by “≼”), where ≼ iff there is a directed path* from to . With this in mind, and again denoting our hand-made weak ordering by “≾”, we want to maintain the following invariant: ≼ → ≾ . Notice that this is essentially the same invariant that I originally came up with — where “≤” was used to denote the tree-order of a rooted tree — but generalised to DAGs in general, not just to rooted trees. The final version of this original invariant was laid out in §4–5 of pt. iii of this series (ℐ is the index set of the collection of rooted trees that makes up the rooted forest):
    The new invariant (generalised to arbitrary DAGs) has an intuitive interpretation. If we think of a directed edge from to as the application of a binary relation that means “ influenced (the creation of) ” (or something like that), then we want this relation to be transitive. That is, if influenced , and influenced , then must have influenced — even if only indirectly via . Then this relation thus corresponds exactly to our non-strict partial ordering “≼”, as defined above. And of course, our (non-strict) weak ordering “≾” is supposed to mean some binary relation like “is at least as primitive as”. So the “ ≼ → ≾ ” invariant shown above can be interpreted to mean “if influenced (the creation of) , then is at least as primitive as ”. Which is basically just causality, right? Of course, this is merely a one-way implication — the converse, “if is at least as primitive as , then influenced (the creation of) ”, simply does not hold. Odd jobs that are sufficiently unrelated will not have any influence on one another, regardless of their relative primitivenesses.

    With all of that said, it remains to be seen if such a DAG actually has any merit for our purposes. It also remains to be seen whether or not I bother trying… In any case, regardless of whether or not the DAG concept becomes a part of this part (pt. vi) of this series, the next part (pt. vii) of this series is intended to cover the use of clustering methodologies. I went into great detail about these kinds of algorithmic methods for constructing trees within pt. iii of this series, but we have yet to really see it in action. There are a lot of approaches to take — lots of algorithms, linkage criteria, ways of encoding the odd jobs, distance functions, parameters, etc., etc. — all of which can be tweaked, perhaps endlessly. So the next part of this series may take any amount of time and any number of entries… That being said, it should™ be the final part of the series, as it encompasses the final category of approaches that I wanted to take to taxonomising odd jobs.

    *The path’s edge sequence may be empty, in which case it’s also true that = .

    Suboptimal bossing~!

    I had the distinct privilege of doing some bossing with the members of my alliance, Suboptimal! Some of these boss runs were planned in advance; we host weekly activities, which include things like area bossing, Rav/Papu, PQs, and special PQs like SPQ (a.k.a. GPQ) and APQ. If you’re curious, this document contains all of the relevant information about organised Oddjobs/Suboptimal activities!

    We did some area bossing by hunting down a number of Headless Horsemen. Below, you can see me (as my daggermit alces), F/P archgish LawdHeComin, fellow daggermit Keppet, and STRginner OmokTeacher (Slime, Ginner) waging war against this headless caballero:

    [​IMG]

    (The above image is a wide shot in which I took the liberty of editing out the Tombstone NPC’s nametag, because I think that the Crimsonwood Forest is really pretty.)

    Below, you can see me (as my darksterity knight rusa), LawdHeComin, Keppet, STRginner Taima (Boymoder, Tacgnol, Hanyou), and F/P archmage 2sus4u (shadowban, tb303) tearing up Ravana. Readers of this diary may know that we’ve attempted all-odd-jobbed Ravana runs before, albeit unsuccessfully. This was, for better or worse, not another attempt, as 2sus4u is a non-odd F/P mage. But it was still a lot of fun!!:

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    Hah! Take that, Ravvy boy!! Suboptimal can do “2x Rav”s too… We even got two of those Prestigious Coin thingies~!

    If you’re wondering whether or not I whited, I did not (in either run). I’m pretty sure 2sus4u did.

    And finally, I did some low-key Capt. Latanicas with Taima as well, as my pure STR bishop cervid!:

    [​IMG]

    (#glaivegang)

    c:

    Grindy

    In the previous diary entry, I did a lot of grinding at KMs with various friends, mostly STRginner Taima (Boymoder, Hanyou, Tacgnol). At this point, my daggermit alces was getting very close to the big triple-digit levels!! I was invited to do some duo grinding with STRginner Permanovice (Battlesage, Dreamscapes, Paean, Hanger) at GS2:

    [​IMG]

    GS2 is not the kind of EPH powerhouse that KMs is for (odd-jobbed) characters of our level. GS2 is certainly no slouch for its level — it’s widely understood that the Ghost Ship is a premier grinding destination for pre-Big-Bang versions of MapleStory that have Singapore as an in-game region, and GS2 is perhaps the crown jewel (although GS1 and MP3 are also quite notable). GS2 is a fairly compact map with high monster spawn density, and has a map layout (just a top platform and a bottom platform) that is easily exploited, especially by a duo.

    But in terms of raw EPH output, a duo that is high-level enough to be capable of KM grinding will easily beat the EPH that they would get at GS2 (although KMs are — unlike Slimys — not undead, so Heal trainers have little choice). The reality is that each KM kill gives 770 ÷ 250 = 3.08 times as much EXP as each Slimy kill does, and yet the KM has just 8 500 ÷ 5 800 ≈ 1.47 times more HP. And the KMs map layout is favourable in many of the same ways that GS2 is, with the added bonus that KMs will auto-aggro any PC who gets close enough to them, making KMs particularly favourable for melee attackers (and some area-of-effect attackers as well).

    That being said, although GS2 may not be the raw EPH powerhouse that KMs is, GS2 is virtually gratis to train at. Where the KM has a whopping 430 WATK, the Slimy has a mere 200 WATK. Because touch damage scales quadratically with WATK, this means that the KM hits roughly 430² ÷ 200² ≈ 4.62 times as hard as the Slimy — and this disparity only gets far greater when we take WDEF effects into account. Especially as a permabeginner, whose PDD* is extremely low, the PC ends up taking virtually no damage at all while training at GS2. On the other hand, training at KMs is a bit of a luxury… which must be paid for.

    In any case, after a while at GS2 (long enough for alces to go from 0/5 Slimy cards to 5/5), we decided to head back to Victoria Island and to Taipei 101 to spend a little more money on KM grinding…

    [​IMG]

    Yayayay!!!! alces is in the triple digits now :3 This has been kind of my end goal for alces for a while now, because I just really wanted to use a GDK (a.k.a. the kewlest dagger in the game):

    [​IMG]

    :D!!!

    And, as a daggermit (a job that never gets any multi-target attacks), I don’t really expect to get all that far beyond level 100. But that’s not going to stop me from trying…!

    [​IMG]

    You’ll notice that alces is looking a little… “washy” in this image, toting a Heart Staff and a Maple Shield (the Khanjar being her usual shield of choice)… Well, this is the first time that I actually remembered (lol) to wear some INT gear upon levelup for alces. I somewhat recently decided to totally loosen the restrictions on washing for members of Oddjobs; see here for more details. And so, for my characters who I never really planned to wash, I’m doing some ultra-casual “late washing” where I keep my base INT at 4 (or at 20, for my mages) and just try to remember to wear some INT gear when I level up. Then I can wash any excess MAXMP out into MAXHP, as it becomes available. With my darksterity knight rusa, this is even less invasive; she has so much excess MAXMP as it is, that wearing INT gear is nigh pointless. And in the case of mages — like my I/L magelet cervine and my pure STR bishop cervid — I just do some boring mage-style MP washing to increase the MAXMP that I get per level by a factor of two or so (still a very smol amount of MAXMP, but it’s aight).

    In other news, I did some sadsadgrinding with cervid & rusa, and got cervid to the big level 2⁷~!!:

    [​IMG]

    (Didn’t have to worry about INT gear here, since I wear it anyways to make my Heals more effective :p)

    And, now that cervid’s Mana Reflection was level 16, I went to the FM in search of an MR30 book to pass:

    [​IMG]

    Nice!!! …And then I realised that I actually had one in my inventory the whole time…

    Oh, and I had the pleasure of doing some grinding at FAs (again as cervid) with STRginners Permanovice, OmokTeacher (Slime, Ginner), and LoneW0lf1600 (LoneWolf1600)!:

    [​IMG]

    :3

    *Without getting into the nitty-gritty details, a lower PDD is better. You can kind of think of your PDD as a number that gets subtracted from your WDEF (although, again, it’s a good bit more complicated than that).

    Comparing some weapons, feat. Scarecrow for Training

    To make a long story short, Lv1Crook (Lvl1Crook, xXCrookXx, Level1Crook, Sangatsu, Ichigatsu) spotted a yellow-glowing SSB in the FM that had been scrolled for WATK, and that was listed for a fairly reasonable price. After some lengthy discussion in the Flow Discord server, we decided to all pitch in to help buy the SSB, under the condition that it be nametagged for the alliance (Suboptimal) and kept for use by anyone in the alliance (or any odd-jobber on the server) who had a use for it at the time. You know, a simple borrowing system.

    I headed over to the FM on my pure STR bishop cervid and bought the SSB. Over the course of a few days, some people (including Lv1Crook, cecilia (tb303, shadowban, 2sus4u), LawdHeComin, and Marcelo (Cassandro, Celim, Bipp, Copo, Sommer, Fino)) helped to buy it by pitching in their portions to me. I made a new character called Superoptimal whose sole purpose is to act as a kind of “cache” for the alliance that any allies can donate to, borrow from, and take from. The SSB (which you can see below) was then nametagged with Superoptimal’s name. And some DPM tests were requested, so I headed over to Training Zone (again, on cervid) to test my weapons (and the SSB) against some Scarecrows for Training:

    [​IMG]

    All tests were done with only self-buffs (the relevant buff being MW9) and Cider. For the details of the weapons used, see the image below:

    [​IMG]

    This is an impressive display for OmokTeacher’s Arcglaive! And my PSB and Toy of 101 follow not too far behind. The SSB, naturally, is only a level 50 weapon — but that makes its results here all the more impressive! Plus, it gives some nifty MATK and SPEED~! An excellent gish(let) weapon…

    Bossy

    I’ve been doing some more Ravving, Papping, and Krexing on my darksterity knight rusa and my woodsmaster capreolina, so you’ll be pleased to see that rusa levelled up (to 142~!!) somewhere that isn’t either CDs or 7F…!

    [​IMG]

    And I did a special little 2× Papu with the Dream gang (featuring members of both GangGang and Chroma):

    [​IMG]

    It kind of looks like capre is using Hurricane in this image, but that’s actually Flai (FIai). capre is still a member of #strafegang… Also pictured are GuildMaster (Robb) and DarkCookie (SolidState, IceGrinder), both of whom have odd-jobbed character(s) of their own.

    Oh, and cervid was not my only character to hit the big 2⁷ here! Below, we can see capre and Harlez (VigiI) lookin’ kinda washy:

    [​IMG]

    Krexel might not be the most engaging boss in the game to fight, but I did get the coolest-looking monster card in the game:

    [​IMG]

    Just… four… more… to go… :p

    (The card itself looks like this:)

    [​IMG]

    Zakky

    Krexel might be hypnagogic, but on the other hand, another level 140 boss that I actually quite like is ye olde Zakum. Luckily for me, I got to do a few of ’em on my darksterity knight rusa! Below, you can see me doing an EXP run alongside marksman xBowtjuhNL, nightlord Liad, bishop atsumoo, shadower Harlez (VigiI), and hero Vijou:

    [​IMG]

    And I got my first Zakky card, too :D

    [​IMG]

    Wow, another levelup somewhere that isn’t either CDs or 7F??:

    [​IMG]

    The background in the screenshot above looks kinda like ass because I had my graphics settings all the way down. Unfortunately, this didn’t seem to significantly affect the slideshow-like consistency of my framerate while dual-clienting in Zakum… Why does it have to be so hard to find a bishop? And when will cervid get her ass to level ≥135 so that I can play as an Actual Bishop™ (not an AFK one) in Zakum?? I’ve got it all!: Heal, Dispel, Resurrection, Mana Reflection, Holy Symbol, Bless, Mystic Door…! I even have Doom to take care of those pesky summons, and I can do some pretty mean damage with a poke-y stick!!

    Anywho, I took some loot screenshots of two Zakum runs that I did in immediate succession:

    [​IMG]

    Welp… that’s unfortunate, but at least I’m diligent about looting (and then NPCing for 500k mesos) a zhelm any time that there’s some left over…

    After these two runs, I went with two other attackers (xBowtjuhNL and Corletta) to do some very awkward 7F trioing:

    [​IMG]

    Turns out, 7F is very much designed for parties of exactly two… But hey, EXP is EXP!

    EPH testing

    STRginner Permanovice (Battlesage, Dreamscapes, Hanger, Paean) has been doing some EPH testing for a very special guide (TBA). While he was at FAs with fellow STRginner OmokTeacher (Slime, Ginner) trying to learn the ways of grinding every last drop of EPH out of the map, I dropped by on my pure STR bishop cervid! Permanovice was curious about how much solo EPH I normally get from the FAs map, so I showed them how STR bishops do it:

    [​IMG]

    The first test here was done with my HS active the entire time, and the second test was done without any HS at all. The third test was then done with HS, and the fourth without. As it turns out, a little extra raw damage range and a few tricks up my sleeve (particularly Teleport) was enough to put my EPH numbers significantly above those that Permanovice and OmokTeacher were capable of.

    I’ve now also been in the process of doing duo EPH tests at the same maps that Permanovice has painstakingly doing solo EPH tests on, so you’ll be able to see those figures when the guide is released!

    Anatomy of a flying bandit — I mean, daggermit

    Now that my daggermit alces has since passed the point of maxing all of her skills (at least, “all” of them pre-level-120…), I want to talk a little about daggermits.

    When writing “Introduction To Odd Jobs”, daggermit (a.k.a. dagger assassin, dagger sin, daggerlord, stab sin, ditsin) was one of the odd jobs that I chose to omit from the guide. The guide was intended to cover only the “classic” and “essential” odd jobs, and daggermit appears to be (somewhat surprisingly, in my opinion) not so classic at all. That being said, they feel very natural — in some ways, they act almost like an inverted counterpart of the classic sindit (hence the “ditsin” epithet). Of course, unlike most(!) sindits, the daggermit is uncompromising: they never attack with a weapon that isn’t a dagger, for their entire career. One of the major upshots of this job is that they mix the use of FJ with their melee attacks, which has often been remarked as a more “natural” combination than the combination of FJ with the usual hermit/nightlord attacks (L7, TT, Avenger).

    But, as a result of their devotion to the dagger, daggermits find themselves with some “extra” skillpoints. In the image below, you can see how I’ve allocated my SP on alces. Because you need to have spent all SP from prior jobs in order to job advance, you’ll see some unusual allocations within my first- and second-job skills:

    [​IMG]

    I still have some SP left (as you can see from the orange arrows), but I’m preferring to simply not spend it until I absolutely have to (read: level 120). With first- and second-job SP, I’ve purposely allocated the excess SP in the way that is least favourable to using a claw as a weapon. I’ve left KE and L7 completely unskilled, leaving the reach of throwing stars at a pitiful length (hardly “ranged” at all), and removing the main attacking skill of the non-odd hermit. I’ve also left Claw Booster unskilled, making star-throwing that much slower. Instead, I’ve maxed out Drain (hardly used by non-odd assassins/hermits/nightlords, other than for the occasional small heal) and put a few (just 12) SP into Critical Throw.

    The other apparently claw-oriented skills that I’ve spent SP on are Claw Mastery, Shadow Partner, and Avenger. Claw Mastery is one that I maxed somewhat early on, in order to refill throwing stars for my masteriless homies (besinners, permarogues, etc.). I put a single “meme point” into Shadow Partner because it looks cool, and because I can use it as a party trick — “you’ve seen me Double Stab, but do you wanna see me quadruple stab…?”. Unfortunately, Shadow Partner only works with throwing stars. And finally, I have Avenger at level 5 simply because you need level ≥5 Avenger as a pre-requisite to putting points into FJ.

    You’ll also notice that I’ve maxed Shadow Web. SW is supposed to be a cool part of the daggermit arsenal, but unfortunately it is totally bugged in MapleLegends. So it just… doesn’t work. :(

    HGitDFII, PP1, HHGII, BLV, and all that, and the rest, and so on and so forth…

    Oh, right. The MapleLegends X-mas event! And only a few days late, this year. This time, the X-mas event asks us to please grind Orange Mushrooms for points. And I think that’s about it, so let’s get started.

    Wait, this isn’t an Orange Mushroom…:

    [​IMG]

    These also aren’t Orange Mushrooms, but who can pass up some good old-fashioned HGitDFII grind? I farmed some points at HGitDFII on my vicloc dagger spearwoman d34r, alongside vicloc bandit xXCrookXx (Lvl1Crook, Level1Crook, Sangatsu, Ichigatsu), vicloc crossbowoman BigTittyGoth (gabagool), and brand-new hermit trishaa!:

    [​IMG]

    This map is honestly pretty legit. The spawns are varied, quite dense, and the map layout is a bit interesting and does well with party grinding. Oh, and it’s got that O.G. Vic Island drip. The only possible downside is if you really don’t like Lupins*.

    You know, I never quite understood the obsession with event-point farming at the usual high-monster-density low-level maps like PP1, HHGII, and BLV. Surely, if the points can come from any monster kill, you could just keep grinding at the usual places…? Alas, no. This kind of system only incentivises basic-attacking (or Magic Clawing, as the case may be) at these same old maps, no matter what level you are (yes, even level 200). Considering how many points can possibly be racked up to get serious event prizes, it’s hard to resist the temptation. So I tried a little of this myself, for the first time:

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    (Not pictured: me also basic-attacking PP1 monsters, but on my woodsmaster capreolina.)

    Alright, well, I admit: it’s pretty damn fast. If you can get a party of 3–4 folks in the same level range going at PP1, getting those 50 daily party points goes by pretty quick-like…

    *Why are they even called “Lupins”? They’re clearly monkeys — what exactly is so wolf-like about them‽

    Just a smol itty bit of questing, with cervid

    As the event had just started, I was wandering around looking for something to do, so I headed to the Omega Sector to do a boss quest that my pure STR bishop cervid hadn’t already completed: Artificial Combatant Zeno! In all likelihood, the reason I had never bothered to complete this questline was because of the RNG-based nature of the first half. The questline forces you to collect (and re-collect, and re-re-collect, …) the quest items necessary for the construction of a Wave Translator, until you get one that randomly happens to actually function. So it was time to kill some Grey aliens

    [​IMG]

    Oh, and while I was at it, I did the Eliminating GraysEliminating Chief GrayThe History of Zeta Lenticulan questline as well:

    [​IMG]

    And, I did a quest that I’ve actually never done before (nor even heard of, as far as I can recall): “Where is Dogon’s HQ?”. This quest starts with Chury, a Mesoranger-looking fellow tucked away within the Omega Sector Silo. Chury reports that some terrestrial folks have begun to support the invasion of the extraterrestrials (Greys), and they’ve made a headquarters somewhere hidden within the forests of the Omega Sector. Supposedly, these alien-supporters are supplying classified information to the Greys, and it’s my job to find the HQ — the titular “Dogon’s HQ”* — and capture such an informational report, to be brought back to Chury for examination.

    Tucked away in Kulan Field V, I found the Entrance to Dogon’s HQ:

    [​IMG]

    Looks pretty normal, right? Just the usual Omega Sector stuff…

    But what’s that? I can see some kind of flying saucer landed back there… Some further investigation reveals that there are some teleporters on top of the tall metal poles placed along the western half of this map. One of these teleporters (if you can get to it) takes you to Dogon’s HQ!

    In Dogon’s HQ is a bit of a “JQ” (jump quest), at least in the same sense that stage 6 of LPQ is a “JQ”. The combination to get through is baked into the map, so after some guesswork & fiddling, I was able to get to the top. And up there, where a flying saucer was parked, a single metal container:

    [​IMG]

    Well I’ll be damned. There’s a report right there! Chury will be very pleased~

    Oh, and I did make a functional Wave Translator. But, as usual, I wasn’t able to find an actual Zeno… Maybe next time…!

    *I’m not sure where the name “Dogon” comes from, but I know that MapleStory is no stranger to anadrome. So maybe it’s “no god” backwards? Bit of a stretch, but maybe this is intended to portray the unnamed people behind Dogon’s HQ as godless alien-worshippers…?
     
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  17. Slime
    Online

    Slime Pixel Artist Retired Staff

    641
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    Israel
    11:33 PM
    Slime / OmokTeacher
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    102
    Flow
    Pictured here is alces cleaning the floor of ghost ship 2.
     
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  18. darkcookie
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    darkcookie Mano

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    May 25, 2021
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    Abused quests to get to level 31 on my Dexit. Ariant busted. Haven't actually advanced yet--will finish up Nihal Desert quests through level 32.

    As much as I love the stable damage, I really, really, miss mobbing. I don't know how y'all 1v1 exclusive oddies handle it. Not entirely looking forward to another 39 levels of only 1v1 with stubby stabs. At least they'll be stable. I'm somewhat leaning towards abusing ME come 3rd job.
     
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  19. OP
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    deer Pac Pinky

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    Oddjobs
    The Kid Mannequin/Fancy Amp grind only ends when you hit level 200! hehe~
     
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  20. OP
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    deer Pac Pinky

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    Oddjobs
    (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. lxxix

    Welcome to the biggest entry of rangifer’s diary yet! Not only are there a lot of things going on in this entry, but it’s also simply the largest byte-for-byte! Hope you enjoy :)

    scroll_strategist

    There’s been another unscheduled interruption to our usually-scheduled “Taxonomising odd jobs” series…

    In pt. l of this diary, I introduced (among other things) a little program that I wrote, called scroll_strategist (mirror). In short, scroll_strategist is a small library that is capable of generating optimal scrolling strategies for MapleStory equipment items. As of this writing, the scroll_strategist has only one frontend: scroll_strategist_cli (mirror). And, it only has one optimisation mode: optimising solely to maximise the probability of meeting (or exceeding) a user-specified goal.

    However, before I possibly do more work on this library (and CLI), I wanted to give more detailed documentation of scroll_strategist’s current philosophy and inner workings. When I originally wrote the library, I put in some decently detailed doc comments that do a lot of the work of explaining the logic. But I only now took the time to fill out the README, which you can find at:

    https://codeberg.org/deer/scroll_strategist/src/branch/master/README.md (mirror).

    As you can see, I may have gotten a little carried away with the “footnotes”…

    Embossed

    I’ve been doing the occasional Big Bad Boss Run™ with my darksterity knight rusa’s MPQ krew, including Harlez, xBowtjuhNL, and Gruzz. Along the way, I had to quickly throw on some INT pyjamas (as one must feel scholarly when levelling up!) partway through the second body of Papulatus:

    [​IMG]

    Nice. Just one more level to max out Sharp Eyes!!

    And, I got to do a Zak run or two. Here’s a screenshot that I captured of a particularly chaotic fight against Zakum’s last arm:

    [​IMG]

    I did a @dpm 30 test during this run, and equipped with SE and SI, I managed to clock some pretty impressive (in my opinion…) numbers!!:

    [​IMG]

    84.5M DPH at Zakum! Roooooooooaaaar~!!!

    …Also note that I insist on having either an Archer Elixir, or Bless, active at all times. The extra +20 AVOID really helps!

    The continuing bunny-child murder saga

    You already know how it goes… It’s time for some more bunny-child murderification, in our favourite hellhole — I mean, uhm, relaxation station.

    I joined STRginner Taima (Nyanners, Tacgnol, Boymoder, Hanyou) as my daggermit alces, to vanquish these creepy plastic dolls forever… Along the way, I found something a bit curious:

    [​IMG]

    In addition to being MapleLegends’s foremost producer of Big(ginner) Poops, my grinding partner Timer is also capable of laying Big(ginner) Eggs! Legend has it that Timer’s Egg has the power to grant experience. So I looted it, to find out…

    [​IMG]

    Wow!!! I sure hope Timer lays more eggs in the future…

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    Sheeeesh… alces is level 104 now! How did that happen? Where did all of the plastic bunny suits go??

    PartyQuest III

    Another PartyQuest was hosted by IGN zkgui (a.k.a. osmanthus, dj hotpot) — this time, at Santa’s house! I’ve included PartyQuest in my diary twice before, and the basic gist of it is that it’s an online rave, held in MapleLegends and streamed (this time on Twitch.tv; formerly on datafruits.fm) over the internet for anyone to view/listen live.

    technopagan (drainer, xX17Xx, breakcore, attackattack, partyrock, strainer) was, as usual, one of the DJs for the event, and put on an amazing set!:

    [​IMG]

    (You can spot me as my I/L magelet cervine along the bottom, towards the right.)

    As you can see above, this PartyQuest was also raising money for donations; in particular, donations to Red Canary Song. RCS is an organisation that fights for justice and the rights of Asian and migrant sex workers. RCS originally formed to provide legal support for the family of Yang Song, who was killed during a police raid in Flushing, Queens, NYC in November of 2017.

    All odd, all the time~

    I had the distinct pleasure of doing a whole lot of really cool stuff with all-odd parties!

    All-Oddjobs EPQs

    First up, I did a few all-odd EPQs (after working around some rather unfortunately-timed issues with my router… ), with DEXdit shadowban (tb303, 2sus4u), steelwoman permawarrior Nyanners (Taima, Boymoder, Tacgnol, Hanyou), and bow-whacker BowerStrike (Cortical, GishGallop, SussyBaka, CokeZeroPill, Aphasia)! You can see me below, EPQing as my DEX brawler EPQ/LPQ mule sorts:

    [​IMG]

    And here we all are, fighting the Big Bad Rock Guy™ (BBRG):

    [​IMG]

    Lattin’ w/ Taima & LoneW0lf1600

    I also got to do a Capt. Lat run with STRginners Taima and LoneW0lf1600 (LoneWolf1600)! LoneWolf was new to the Lattin’ game, so Taima showed him the ropes of the ancient art of “hugging Capt. Lat and praying to the Maple gods that you don’t get hit by a magic attack”. Unfortunately, this didn’t work out so well the first time. I joined the during their second run, ready to provide some Resurrection:

    [​IMG]

    But again, this is an extremely delicate — and often simply chance-based — art, so we were unfortunately not able to get LoneWolf through this run alive, either. But soon! Anon we will prevail!!

    During a Capt. Lat run with Taima, I popped a few of my Heartstoppers to test how they would affect my damage output. Here, you can see my raw damage range with self-buffs & a ’stopper:

    [​IMG]

    A maximum raw range of 7 845 — juicy!! Just ignore the 580 at the bottom there…

    KPQ’d

    And I also got to do a few all-Oddjobs KPQs as my SPQ/KPQ DEX page mule kinds, alongside permapirate ratty (mase) and DEX dagger warrior DexDagger!:

    [​IMG]

    Oddjobs KILLS DEAD the Ravana‽‽‽

    We finally managed to get an all-odd crew together to fight Rāvaṇa again (for the third time now)… in hopes of being the first all-odd party to kill this Hindu beast!! Our party was:
    • Myself, as my darksterity knight rusa (and AFK as my pure STR bishop cervid, largely for Resurrection purposes);
    • Cortical (GishGallop, BowerStrike, SussyBaka, CokeZeroPill), the STRginner;
    • LawdHeComin, the F/P archgish;
    • and Taima (Nyanners, Boymoder, Tacgnol, Hanyou), the STRginner!
    Will our intrepid odd-jobbers survive? Can they defeat this oversized six-armed jerkass?? At what cost??? Watch the video on the Oddjobs YouTube channel to find out!!!:

    [​IMG]

    (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1Gw9PxSMCk)

    The Headless Horseman…!

    During one of our regularly scheduled oddie activities, I set out to slay some Headless Horsemen — as my I/L magelet cervine — alongside STRginner OmokTeacher (Slime, Ginner, Thinks)!:

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    Would you look at that! The Headless Horseman’s “head” chopped clean off by the blade of the Crimsonwood Forest!!

    Even moar Capt. Lattin’!

    I also did a pair of Captain Latanicas with Taima, as well as STRginner Cortical, and permarogue xX17Xx (technopagan, drainer, attackattack, breakcore, strainer, partyrock)! During our first attempt, we decided to try doing it without HB. For xX17Xx, this would mean using a dagger in combination with Double Stab, rather than her usual arsenal of claw & L7. She was worried that her damage would be much lower, as she has intentionally designed her character around claw usage (including being STRless & DEXless), but she ended up whiting anyways… :p

    [​IMG]

    xX17Xx did actually end up dying during this run, but a quick Resurrection from me did the trick to put her back into the fight. Unfortunately, this meant that when Cortical died…

    [​IMG]

    …there was nothing that we could do.

    Ouf! Well, I suppose that was bound to happen. With not one, but two folks hugging Capt. Lat for dear life, chances of permanent fatality are quite high…

    Luckily, we did avenge Cort! And we set out to do the Capt. Lat prequests with xX17Xx:

    [​IMG]

    For our second run, we decided to drag my darksterity knight rusa along for the ride, as an HB mule. Then, when Capt. Lat was at low HP, I would just send her out so that she wouldn’t leech any of the EXP:

    [​IMG]

    As you can see, this meant that xX17Xx was able to switch to her native claw. And we cleared out the monsters that Latanica summons, including via Doom:

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    First-ever Oddjobs SPQ!

    That’s right — not only were we able to put together an all-odd crew for Ravving, but we got to do an SPQ (a.k.a. GPQ) as well!!!

    SPQ is super fun, and also designed to be very inclusive — just about anyone in the 10–200 level range can participate. Of course, you still have to be able to kill big bad skeleton man (BBSM), but those who can’t survive the fight can watch from the balcony above in safety.

    Our lineup was:
    • Myself, as my darksterity knight rusa;
    • also myself, as my DEX page SPQ/KPQ mule kinds;
    • xX17Xx (technopagan, drainer, attackattack, breakcore, strainer, partyrock), the permarogue;
    • Taima (Nyanners, Boymoder, Hanyou, Tacgnol), the STRginner;
    • doiob, the STR cleric;
    • shadowban (tb303, 2sus4u), the DEXdit;
    • and GishGallop (Cortical, BowerStrike, CokeZeroPill, SussyBaka), the I/L gish!
    You can watch a video of this SPQ on the Oddjobs YouTube channel!:

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    (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ia2J__uVj4Y)

    This PQ was a lot of fun, even if it did take a long-ass time. Now that we’re more familiar with SPQ (and hopefully I can get better at the JQs…), I hope to see some more cool Oddjobs SPQ runs in the future!!

    This also marks the first time that my SPQ/KPQ mule kinds was able to fulfil her destiny…

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    :')

    The continuing compact-disc freezing saga

    I did some more compact disc refrigeration on my I/L magelet cervine! Yeet haw!

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    Looks like we’re Getting There™!! Just four (4) more levels!!! ;~;

    I did some more optical disc freezing joined by not just Level1Crook (Lvl1Crook, xXCrookXx, Sangatsu), but also STRginner Taima (Tacgnol, Nyanners, Boymoder, Hanyou)!:

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    (Don’t mind the bunched-up gravestones…)

    And, during a certain CD-grind session with Level1Crook, he surprised me with an engagement ring!:

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    :3 You know what that means…

    Mawwiage…!

    Level1Crook × cervine

    And it wouldn’t be a real Maple marriage without some improvised speeches:

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    :'))))) <3

    And the customary kiss:

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    And, of course, the customary vomiting…:

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    When we got to the wedding cake photography stage, our wedding was promptly hijacked by Permanovice (Battlesage, Dreamscapes, Paean) and kookiechan (kookietann, kurisuwu):

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    I guess this made some folks angry & confused, because a full-blown brawl erupted at the end of the wedding!:

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    No serious injuries were reported.

    Cortical × xX17Xx

    Not long after my wedding with Level1Crook, STRginner Cortical (GishGallop, BowerStrike, SussyBaka, CokeZeroPill) and permarogue extraordinaire xX17Xx (technopagan, attackattack, drainer, breakcore, partyrock, strainer) were getting married, as well! I needed something to bless their marriage with, so I rounded up all of my Black Crystals and Black Crystal Ores:

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    Yeah, so… I farmed every single one of these ores/crystals myself, by hand. And this doesn’t include the 100 crystals’ (1k ores’) worth that I used to craft a set of bfuries many diary entries ago! However, since then, there has been a big change to the CWK exchange & CWK crafting in MapleLegends. The recipe to craft a single set of bfury is still the same:
    But now, taos are much more difficult to obtain, and bfury creation is no longer exclusive to crafting. A new exchange was bolted onto the DMG NPCs, designed to entice players to try their luck at this raffle. This new raffle can award already-crafted bfuries (among other things), but is separate from the old CWK exchange. Because taos were removed from the CWKPQ bonus stage, the only way to obtain taos is now from the old CWK exchanges. This means that taos are virtually nonexistent; they used to come almost exclusively from the CWKPQ bonus stage, and now people have even less incentive to do the old CWK exchanges due to the existence of the new CWK exchange. And yet, the taos can only be used to craft things (notably bfury and Crimson Arcglaive) that you would get pre-crafted from the new CWK exchange anyways. So, CWK crafting is effectively dead — it’s almost always a stupid idea to do.

    But I did it anyways, because what else am I gonna do with all of these black crystals that I farmed?? And plus, that just makes my wedding gift that much more special! But that means I have to do the worst part of bfury crafting… farming the Typhon Feathers:

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    -___-

    I’m sorry, but farming for feathers at Typhons is pure, distilled pain. Initially, I considered farming 60 feathers so that I could make two bfury sets, but after paying 25M mesos for three taos (enough to craft a single set of bfury), and actually going to Typhons to collect the feathers, I thought better of it…

    In any case, with 30 feathers farmed, a bfury set was all ready for the wedding:

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    (Being LGBTQ+ is… recommended, but not strictly required, for members of Oddjobs.)

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    #zhelmgang rise up

    cervid × Taima

    Taima and I had already decided, roughly a week prior, that we should marry! Particularly, with my pure STR bishop cervid. It just felt right; both of us have been good friends, and early proponents of the Oddjobs guild. We both deal damage almost exclusively by basic-attacking…

    So it was time to make an engagement ring! I had some of the ETCs already prepared, so I set out to farm the rest of them, including some Horny Mushroom Caps:

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    With the engagement ring crafted, I wanted to wait for the right time to actually propose & get engaged to Taima. So I thought the cleaned Ghost Ship (the version of the Ghost Ship that you only get to see if you defeat Capt. Latanica and all of his minions) would be a cool place to do it :p

    So, I waited for the chance to do two Capt. Lat runs as a duo:

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    :D <3

    Cortical (GishGallop, BowerStrike, SussyBaka, CokeZeroPill) had the idea to hold a “level 120 party” for Taima, even though she was still level 115 (a far cry from level 120, especially for a permabeginner!). The purpose of holding such a party was largely as a prank on Permanovice (Battlesage, Dreamscapes, Paean), who was level 119 (and 99.9% EXP) at the time, just waiting for the weekend to arrive so that his level 120 party could commence. Permanovice had been a bit anxious about getting “passed” by Taima as she started to do KMs grinding on a regular basis. So, if Taima could just schedule her “120 party” a bit earlier… eventually she’d get to 120, and her party would be first! Take that, Permanovice!! :p

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    Later, but still before Permanovice’s level 120 party, I was duo grinding at Pigs (HGMotFII) with Permanovice’s islander, Dreamscapes, as my islander ozotoceros. And it was there that I told him about the “party” (which he unfortunately couldn’t attend):

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    We gave up on the “level 120 party” once it came time to hold the wedding~

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    Neither of us had the kissy face emote (largely because I had already spent 40k NX just for the wedding ticket…), but that was okay — the F3 kiss is a crowd favourite, and also a nice throwback to the MapleStory of yore:

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    You can watch an edited video of the wedding on the Oddjobs YouTube channel!:

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    We had also planned something else for the wedding. The “level 120 party” was planned to take place before the wedding, but afterwards, we had a Ravana run or two planned, to celebrate Taima hitting level 115 (and thus being high enough level to get EXP normally from Ravana)! For our Ravana party, we were joined by sniper Level1Crook (who insisted on crossbow-whacking Ravana the entire time), STRginner Cortical, crusader Kerchak, and dark knight DarkCookie (SolidState, IceGrinder). DarkCookie’s presence was most fortunate, as it prevented me from having to drag along my darksterity knight rusa for the HB :p

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    After the majority of the fight was complete, DarkCookie unfortunately forgot to refresh HB, and this resulted in Level1Crook, Cortical, and my wife Taima all dying nearly instantly:

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    Oop… Fortunately, they did all die in more or less the same spot, so I knew exactly what to do: lure Ravana to the other side of the map, and then resurrect them all at once, with DarkCookie nearby to HB them ASAP. Actually doing the luring part took a while (as monster movement/aggro/etc. was still horribly broken in this MapleLegends patch), but we managed to pull it off. With Ravana safely on the other side of the map, and DarkCookie in the midst of this grave of three, I resurrected them. Unfortunately, DarkCookie had gotten his keyboard focus stuck in the chatbar, so a few seconds went by as Taima & I cried out for HB, and then another Ravana attack came crashing down, killing all three of them again… Well actually, Level1Crook jumped when the attack hit, and somehow survived. Dunno how that works.

    But it was alright — we had another run that we could do. Noble (NobIe, CtrlNoble, xNoble, 1122, Amaging) was kind enough to TL my Resurrection, so that I would have one ready for the next run. So we went again, this time with a slightly different crew (Level1Crook stepped out, in order to let permarogue xX17Xx try Ravana for the first time!):

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    Cortical died during this run, as well, but this time we were really prepared:

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    Unfortunately, even with Ravana on the other side of the map and DarkCookie truly ready this time to HB, Cortical died nearly instantly after being revived, thanks to Ravana’s impeccable sense of timing…

    But Taima did survive this time!! Hooray!!! :3

    APQ…

    With all of those weddings, you know what’s coming… time for some apple farming!! With me playing my vicloc dagger spearwoman d34r, and Lv1Crook on his vicloc bandit xXCrookXx, we helped Cortical and xX17Xx through the first-ever APQ for both of them!:

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    And of course, Taima & I (as my pure STR bishop cervid) did our first APQ together (and Taima’s first APQ in general!):

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    In the first stage, someone told me to use Genesis to kill the Magik Fierry B… I frustratedly said “I can’t”, and Taima had a good laugh as I rolled my eyes and walked over to demonstrate that my Genesis only “MISS”es the Fierry (and then promptly one-shot’d it with my glaive). It’s typical for fourth-job mages (such as cervid…) to use their ultimates during stage 3 to help clear the monsters that clutter up the map and knock people off of their platforms. So that’s what you can see me trying to do above…

    And then we got to fight da Grog together!:

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    c:

    A little peek at Maple Island

    While playing my islander ozotoceros, I ran into a new (or seemingly new, as they were just level 14 at the time) islander by the name of Tacts. Tacts also had another islander by the name of Mesa (a level 40 islander of Southperry), but decided to start over, for aesthetic reasons. I asked if they wanted an invite to Oddjobs, or Southperry (or perhaps Newbology or Flow…), so they are now a member of Oddjobs:

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    They also started a new outland STRginner by the name of Palfrey, who joined as well! We did some Pigs grinding together until Tacts was level 16 :)

    The MapleLegends staff, although they seem to be repeatedly forgetting to lower the level requirement for event raffles to ≥30 on-island (instead of ≥70 everywhere!!), at least went back and added a Little Suzy NPC to Amherst. So I was able to get me some antlers…:

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    And I did some duo grinding with Dreamscapes (Permanovice, Battlesage, Paean, Hanger) of Flow, also at pigs. And we did some trioing as well, with 1sme (Ismezin) of Southperry!:

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    …During which, I levelled up :D

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    Permanovice’s level 120 party!!!

    And of course, as mentioned earlier, the level 120 party of MapleStory’s poggest grindginner to date: Permanovice!! I was able to make it to the beginning of the party:

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    (You can spot me somewhat right of centre, as my pure STR bishop cervid.)

    The second event of the party, after the initial photo op, was a kind of game of keepaway, where we all went to Lorang and Clang (the map where Permanovice trained his original permabeginner back in MapleSEA), and tried to prevent Permanovice from levelling up, by killing everything on the map before he could get to it:

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    Needless to say, considering how many people attended the party, this was pure chaos. Indeed, it really only took a few minutes before Permanovice had racked up enough kills to hit the big one-twenty!!!!!:

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    There were a lot of other really cool activities and events that were meticulously planned by Permanovice (with help from Nekokoro, who you can see in the Lith Harbour image above) for this party. Unfortunately, by this point, I was so deprived of sleep that I died IRL. Temporarily. But I missed the rest of the party, regrettably :(((

    But congrats again to Permanovice on this incredible achievement!!! I may have doubted you at first, but I’ve now seen the kind of intense dedication and grind that you’re capable of, and also how much of a friend you’ve been to me, and to others in the odd-jobbed community. <3 I look forward to seeing you online as part of the Oddjobs crew on your gish :D

    (…concluding nonverbal postscript to diurnal fragments…)

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