Luu's Journey to a Main

Spoiler: Backstory

So, a couple of years back I started doing a playthrough of a LUK mage (documented here), to try and have the "classic" nostalgia experience with this game from my childhood.

The fact that my attempts at this last a grand total of about 40 days before I take a hiatus for a year and then restart the thing on my return should speak volumes as to how well this was actually going.

What went wrong? Well, a few things come to mind:

1. Having a playthrough entirely contingent on my goals being a matter of whether or not RNG happens to be in my favor is rather demotivating when things just take absolutely forever and a half to drop.
2. Mages might be effective for grinding, but they aren't necessarily the most enticing of gameplay by themselves.
3. Chasing nostalgia doesn't work when my nostalgia for this game ends at level 40.
4. I don't actually really enjoy the "casual" experience with an MMO and never really have.

For a while, I thought it was just that I didn't really enjoy this sort of grind-y, repetitive gameplay, and that my inability to play this game on any character past level 40 (level 50 or so here, due to double experience) was simply because the gameplay burns me out fast. However, my brother recently asked me to join him in a private server for a different game that we also played a lot of in my childhood, except this was a game that I would also go back to much more often on my own compared to MapleLegends. The game is certainly just as grindy, and honestly even more dependent on getting lucky with RNG for the bulk of the gameplay. What was the difference?

I figured it out after two days of playing that other MMO with my brother. Before even making my character, I already had my entire character progression plotted out in order to min-max my character's growth as much as possible and as quickly as possible. The problem, it seems, was never that I didn't enjoy this sort of grind-y gameplay. The problem was that I was trying to do it "casually".

If playing the game the way I tried to do here never got me past level 40 when playing it when I was younger, why was I expecting it to go any differently now?

Why was I expecting to enjoy playing a game like this in a way that clearly I had not really enjoyed in the past for more than a day, when the way that I do seem to enjoy these games is significantly... for the lack of a better term, sweatier?

The solution, once the problem is phrased like that, is as clear as day. Stop playing the game in a way that I think will be fun but isn't, and instead play the game the way I actually enjoy. Which is to say, min-max the hell out of things.

This is a journal of my attempts to do a more "proper" playthrough of ML in the way that I would actually enjoy, rather than my attempt to chase nostalgia that was doomed from the start (see the above). Which is to say, I want to actually set up a proper bossing character, washed and all (yes, I know the HP challenges are coming, but I want more than what they're offering).

Which is to say, my goal is to do my best to follow Krythan's 30k washing guide here and have a bucc that (per the update) should have 30k HP at around level 170. Now, while I might have a level 50-something IL wizard lying about from my previous attempts at playing, I'd rather start fresh with making a cleric for self-leeching purposes rather than use that character to that end, so that I can at least take advantage of the NX I have lying around on that account rather than needing to start completely fresh. That and this gives me time to acquire more NX/money for the necessary INT equipment.

It's also worth noting that I probably won't be exclusively self-leeching the bucc character all the way to level 140, but also try to do some solo play to get a feel for the character. Having a high-level character means nothing if you can't use it, after all. That and, given that this is a bucc and not a ranged character, it should be able to hold its own after a while and the self-leeching priest will probably be reduced to an HS mule by the end of it.

Any suggestions/support/guild invites/discord invites are welcome!