Mesos: Advanced guide to making money quickly

Quick disclaimer: This guide is not noob friendly and assumes you know the basics of the game. If you want a noob guide I believe those have already been made so I won't waste my time repeating the information in those.

Since I'm taking a hiatus/quitting due to some personal reasons and school starting up in 2 weeks, I figured I would make this guide because this is a question I get asked A LOT. How do you make mesos so quickly?

Tired of being poor? Always complaining about how you can never make money? Don't worry this guide will probably do nothing to change that since most people prefer to whine instead of playing the game efficiently. If you're willing to follow some of the tips here you will be on your way to making billions.

I quit this game 2 years ago and came back about 2 months ago with no items and no equips since I had given them all away when I quit the first time. I had a 173 arch mage and mules already made when I came back. In this 2 month span I amassed almost ~10B of equips/mesos so I'm going to impart some wisdom on you to help you do the same.

1) Leeching

If you made a bishop just to make money, you made the wrong class. I always tell this to people. DO NOT MAKE A BISHOP JUST TO MAKE MONEY. If your goal is to make a magician to make mesos, make an I/L or an F/P. Why? They are better at making mesos. Here's a short breakdown of why:

• Noob trap of selling low level leech: You should never sell low level leech. The return on mesos and your leveling curve is absolute dog shit. Instead of spending 20 hours to make 100m @ 5m/hr while wanting to kill yourself at jr. wraiths or god knows what other map, you could level to 130 in half that amount of time (done by duoing with a mage/bishop at 1-2 or 3-4, and I think even duoing skeles will result in being able to do 121-130 in about 10 hours) and double your meso/hour earnings by selling 1 hit WS or 2 hit skele leech as a bishop.

• Mages on the other hand never fall into this trap, because no one wants to leave and rejoin party on HS and HB mules just to sell low level leech for 5m/hour. Instead most mages will just grind to 130 and this is where the money making comes into play. You head straight to ulu2 as soon as you can 1 hit. This is 980 TMA for I/L with blizz 30 and 950 TMA for F/P with meteor 30.

Now for the actual comparison of the two classes. This assumes that you made MU, HB, HS, and sweeper mules because if you didn't you're playing the game wrong:

• Expected return at 1 hit ulu2 is ~17M per hour total:

1. 7M from 2 leechers at 3.5M/HOUR split.
2. 6M from looting mesos with MU on a sweeper mule. This includes both platforms; turn off pet loot on your mage so you're not splitting mesos with the leechers.
3. ~2-5M from NPCing equips + chance to get 49 att craven (2.5M), 50 att craven (7.5M), 51 att craven (15M). You can sell beheaders in shop for 1M each and cravens for 700K but I normally just NPC cravens below 49 att because it is not worth the effort. 6/2 pirate top and 4/2 pirate bottoms also sell for 1.5 each.
4. 1M from NPCing etc drops per hour.
5. 300K from 75 PE per hour sold @4K each.
6. 400K from ~30 DEX/LUK crystal ores per hour (usually acquired at 2:1 ratio)
7. 300K from ~1 OA LUK 60% per hour.
8. -1-2M to pots depending on how much MP you have.

• When you compare this to bishops who 2 hit skeles or 1 hit WS and make 11-12M per hour you can see why AM is the way to go. You make 1.5x the money PER HOUR STARTING AT 130.

• You also don't have to stop selling ulu2 at level 100 to leechers. Ulu3 is so hard to find most people will willingly buy ulu2 till 105 (because the mesos/exp is comparable), but what most people also don't know is that ulu2 is fairly efficient in terms of mesos/exp when compared to 1 hit skeles and 1 hit petris so don't be afraid to set up low cost leveling packages to these higher level players so you can sell for long hours if you wish to do so.

• This map has the added benefit of being completely degen friendly. It is impossible to fuck up this map because of how much downtime there is between each respawn. You can kill the whole map and have 3-4 seconds before the next respawn. This makes it so you can fuck up on rebuffing and get away with it. Maps like skeles and 5-6 are a lot more unforgiving because the respawn windows after death are so short; any inefficiencies due to your mess-ups result in less EPH for the buyer. You NEVER have to worry about that at ulu2.

• Then you bring in the cost of gen30 and mw20 and you see why you might just want to make a mage if you don't plan to use bishop for its intended purpose which is as an all-in-one class. It's a money maker who can also boss. If you don't want to boss on a bishop and are planning to make an attacker THEN JUST MAKE AN ARCH MAGE.

2) Farming DM Scrolls

• Requirements: 6 characters level 50+
• Return: ~22M per hour
• This is self explanatory. Read a guide on how to do zakum stage 1 quest. You solo it on 1 character but have the other 5 characters in party. A competent person can finish getting 7 keys and 30 documents in about 20 minutes solo once you get the hang of it. You can do 3 runs a day for 90 scrolls and sell them for ~250-300K each resulting in 22-27M of mesos for an hour of your time. You are limited to 3 runs per day so I recommend starting around 90 minutes before server reset and doing 6 runs at once.

• Additional tip: If you vote on your mules you can easily buy VIP Teleport rock and move between maps such as from Singapore to El Nath easily. You can not tele directly to zakum unfortunately, but you can rock an HS mule into deadmine (make sure you save the map), transport the rest of your mules to El Nath via TP rock (don't forget to save the map), and then door them all in to Zak after you walk over on your HS mule.

• I eventually stopped doing this because it got boring and I preferred to do #3 instead. Also this isn't something you should be doing every day. It's something you do once a week as it will take about a week to 10 days to sell the 180 DM scrolls you farm.

3) HTPQ to level 120 bishops for genesis/life root

• Requirements: 4 characters who are level 80 and 1 attacker who is ~130 (preferably your low level bishop you thought about deleting after reading about how much more you make at ulu2). You have to keep these characters in the cave so this one is a big time investment to set up, but it is EXTREMELY worth it.
• Return: ~25M per day for <20 minutes of effort.

• For those unaware, every level 120 bishop is required to do HTPQ in order to acquire life roots, which they can trade in for genesis. Due to the low population server and the requirement of 6 people needed to do the PQ (fix your game GMs and lower the #?) you can abuse this to make mesos by having 4 mules and an attacker who can kill mobs permanently in the cave.

• This one is quite insane. I was offering this service mostly for free, but during the event I decided to charge for it as I was committed to farming resets and HTPQ got in the way of doing that. In 11 days I made 295M mesos charging ~7M per run and I even did about 6-8 runs for free during this time. 1 run takes me about 4-5 minutes to complete since the keys all spawn from the same monster; you'll know what I'm talking about once you run it a few times.

• Quick tip: A lot of people I sell to speak Spanish. You can usually quickly tell who these people are because their English will be a bit hard to understand and they usually have Spanish words in their ign. I HIGHLY recommend selling to these people and using google translate to communicate with them. If I had to guess I would say almost half of my money comes from these Spanish speaking people and it seems like most people just refuse to run with them because of the communication barrier. Don't get me wrong; sometimes it can be very hard and some of these players play with insane lag due to server connection I assume, so don't do this if you get easily frustrated.

Bro, that shit you listed is too sweaty. Where are the easy tips to making mesos? Don't worry I got you with #4.

4) Using owls to merch valuable scrolls and items.

• Requirements: 1-3 owl mules that you vote on for the sole purpose of using owls.
• Return: ~10-20M per day.

• I recommend doing this with items that are mostly 5M+, stick to things like int scrolls and commonly sought after items like BWG and ele wands.
• As for the how to do it, you basically owl the item and look for items that are 1-2M below the market price. You go ahead and merch those by buying them at the underpriced amount and reselling at market value. It is insane to me how much money you can make from doing this. It is extremely easy and almost anyone can do it (I use the word almost loosely because I've seen firsthand the # of morons who play this game).

5) Scrolling to make money

• This is one where I see A LOT of people fuck up. If your goal is to MAKE money while scrolling you need to be aware of what's happening in the market and what prices are for items. When I say scrolling to make money I am not talking about when you get a BWG from gach and a 30% glove att and decide to YOLO and pray it lands and then sell for 3x the cost of the BWG and scroll. That's not how you make money; that's just being lucky and it will even out over time.

• There are specific items for which the prices are significantly higher than the cost of getting those items based on probability of scrolls landing; this is known as a market inefficiency in the real world or arbitrage opportunity. One item that comes to mind is warrior tops. Another would be int robes with the introduction of 65% scrolls and only having to pay for scrolls that pass. I will give you a quick example to illustrate what I mean. This requires you to understand basic probability concepts.

1. You can buy a 5 int 9 slot robe for 22M in FM.
2. You calc all possible outcomes if you 65 the remaining slots from 5 int 0 slot to 23 int 0 slot and it looks like this. This assumes that you pay 3.5m per pass for OA int 65%.

• Link to google doc with calculations: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KnmJgukxJvkFDoM9M-uTdPQalIMrCnwAdQgP021J-rg/edit?usp=sharing

• Basically all this is saying is on average you will make 13M per robe you scroll. That's a pretty good return on mesos considering what you put in is about ~40M per try (obviously this varies on how many 65's land). You should also note that there is a 61% chance you make money on a single robe. Doing this type of calculation on a spreadsheet takes me about 5 minutes and I have an analyst background from work so it's easy for me to put these calcs together. Your mileage may vary.

6) Selling HT book packages to make money

• This is actually a new one. When I used to play the game 2 years ago it was impossible to do this because HT groups would list books in FM significantly above what they would actually sell them for so normally negotiating took place on discord or in game. Nowadays HT groups don't negotiate with you; they just put books in FM shops and you buy it or you don't. This means any random such as you or me can come in, scoop up these books, and start selling packages woohoo.

• DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT RECOMMEND DOING THIS IF YOU HAVE LESS THAN 1.5B MESOS AS VARIABILITY CAN ABSOLUTELY MURDER YOU. Even with 1.5B it is a bit risky to start off. This is one of those things where it will even out in the long run, but if you don't have much mesos you can get massacred early on if you get one of those people who fails 8 gene books.

• What is a package? A package is where you offer to give someone books (normally MW20 or GEN30) until they pass one and they pay you a flat fee. For MW20 the multiplier you want to use is 1.7 (1.5 is breakeven) and for GEN 30 the multiplier you want to use is 2.5 (2 is breakeven).

• How do I make mesos from doing this? This one is a bit simpler to explain than method #5. I'll use gen 30 in my example. This book has a 50% pass rate. This means on average over a large sample size it will take 2 books per person you sell to. If gen 30 costs 100M in FM, you would offer this package for 250M. This means your expected return over the large sample size is 50M per person you sell it to. Quite a bit of money to be made.

• What's the benefit to the seller? Aren't you just scamming people? The answer is no. The reason for this is exactly the same as what I mentioned above. If you don't have much mesos variability can kill you and this is true for buyers who are just trying to pass 1 book. It offers them security in exchange for you taking on the volatility of a low sample size.

7) Fame Mules to make money

https://forum.maplelegends.com/inde...-mules-leveling-to-20-in-under-an-hour.34031/

 

Yup, all true. The equips section said 2-5m before as I’ve found equips are very variable here but I think I accidentally hit backspace when I edited another part of the post. Gonna go ahead and add that back in and add something about pot costs because you will lose about a mil to that like you mentioned.

 

Added. Didn't add it last night because it requires a lot of detail.

 

I move sweeper on each meteor cast so I think I do a full rotation between top and bot every minute (I also got max haste on my sweeper and finished Kenta's Advice although that is definitely not necessary to do on a sweeper since you're moving short distances) although you can obviously slow down because you only need to catch both within the 2 minute timer before items disappear. For etc's I may have double counted the ores. The 17m number should be fairly accurate though; I did about 50 hours at ulu2 for the event and I got 9m mesos per hour on average from looting/NPCing equips on my mule without selling OA luk, ores, PE, or beheaders/cravens.

EDIT: I just realized my number may be a bit inflated because I also sold watermelons/red bean sundaes from the event boxes which was quite a bit of money.

 

I think you missed the point though. In the long-run yeah sure that's the case. But arch mage needs almost 0 investment to start ulu2 at 13x. Bishop meanwhile needs gen 30 and like late 14x? (I believe might be wrong here) which is already 100's of mil of investment. I don't think that's something that can be swept under the rug just for mage ulti costing double and it would only be 600k/hour extra earnings max due to pot cost because you lost out on the income from PE.

I agree with you on the trio leech.

 

So after a month of not selling leech, I sold 2 hours of ulu2 today and here's what I got:

• 12.1m raw mesos (~6m per hour)
• 1.5m from NPCing etc drops + mana elixir + white pots (~750K per hour)
  
• 4.8M from NPCing equips (got 1 beheader which was NPCd, got no cravens, and no perf top/bots)
  
• Didn't track scrolls because I'm not sure how many OA luk my sweeper had at the start.