Odd Jobs Community Thread

(You can also read the original diary entry here, and/or read the diary entry on the Oddjobs forum.)

rangifer’s diary: pt. xxxvii

STAFF UPGRADE YEAAAHH

In the previous diary entry (xxxvi), I showed off the new Elemental Staff 3 that I made for my I/L magelet, cervine; it was TMA 147. Well, I’ve already managed to best it! Meet my new and improved TMA 151 Ele Staff 3!!:



cervine is doing some pretty epic damage with those Ice Strikes now — at least, for a magelet…

More Capt. Lat, with Taima and OmokTeacher!

We were back at it again with the quad Capt. Lats~~

This time, Taima (Tacgnol, Boymoder, Gambolpuddy, Yotsubachan, Numidium), STRginner of Oddjobs, was coming with us! Here we are (with me as cervid, the STR priest), trioing Capt. Lat (also pictured is, of course, OmokTeacher (Slime)):



Unfortunately, while trying to save precious mesos on potions, OmokTeacher bit the dust and lost his basket buffs So Taima and I continued on to finish the rest of the quad Capt. Lat:



Unfortunately, Taima died in the third (i.e. penultimate) Capt. Lat fight, but she bravely came back for the fourth and final fight without the HB from basket :O! And survived! Oh, and I got a Capt. Lat card from the third fight, in which I had to solo the last portion:



Take that, ‘tanica!!!!



More mist training with Tacgnol

I did some more mist training with Tacgnol, the F/P gishlet. Tacgnol wanted to use two baskets, but I only had one on my STR priest, cervid, so I ended up also using a basket on my woodwoman capreolina:



The EXP from this mist training session got capreolina very close to level 110, so with some more training under her belt, it was off to get a MoN!:

capreolina gets a MoN~

Now that I had already seen CWKPQ twice when getting a MoN for cervid, getting one for capre was not quite as nervewracking (although still a little bit lol). My concern initially was that I would not have enough HP to survive looting MoNs that drop, but Toughish assured me that he could Rush each boss out to the left side before it dies, so that the MoN would drop far away from where they were fighting. Here capre is, mid-CWKPQ, with Toughish roleplaying as a bearded mushroom:



And I was very grateful to be so fortunate as to get an amazing 5 WATK MoN, the first one that I looted!!!:



With the MoN on my neck, a basket in my stomach, Echo of Hero active on me, and sweat dripping down my face, I was able to record an @epm 5 for a whopping solo EPH of 6.45M!:



…Although this proved not to be very sustainable…

LPQing with Pals

I bumped into a friend of mine, PeachyKid (JustPeachy) at CDs, and we did some grinding together, with me playing my I/L magelet, cervine:



We ground until my basket ran out, by which point we were both rather tired of the grind (especially Peachy, who loathes grinding, in favour of PQing instead). While we were there, though, Melokie (Alrightyo, Skateboard) showed up to hang out with us a bit, and we got the idea to go and LPQ with our lower-level characters, alongside another friend, Aino (Tsukino)! Here we are, fighting Alishar for great justice (here I’m playing as my besinner, hashishi):



Along the way, we had a party member by the name of protea who noticed mid-PQ that I was a beginner:



Beginner on the inside, assassin on the outside!!!

rusa is back at it again with the OPQ

I did some more OPQ as my DEX spearwoman, rusa. At OPQ I met Bulgoki the chief bandit and Introvertida the F/P mage:



Bulgoki is on the left, Introvertida is on the right, and pictured here also is Valfreyea (with yellow-red hair and a red cap). Unfortunately, this crappy screenshot is the only one that I took… In any case, rusa is now level 61~

X-TREME mist training sesh w/ Tacgnol

I did some more mist training with Tacgnol, but this time only as cervid. We actually went for just about 3 hours (taking breaks in between hours, of course), once with GM buffs, and twice more with baskets. During the GM buffs, all of the 5-6 F and 7 F maps were taken, so we tried out the Forest of Towers (FoT):



After that we went back to 5-6 F, but by the time we were finally done, we were absolutely pooped:



On the bright side, by the time we finished, cevid was level 113, and Tacgnol was level 117!!

Finishing my final chair quests of the event

I had already started and completed most of Romeo & Juliet’s chair quest on my besinner, hashishi, and my MPQ-mule-to-be, potpan. I wanted to finish, but the drop-rate for Love Tickets had been lowered so much that it proved to be quite difficult to get even a single Love Ticket. Along the way, though, I did find this:



And eventually, I was in fact able to finish the quest on both of them:



…Although I did give up entirely on finishing the questline on sets, after a few hours(!) of grinding. Hunting even for gachapon tickets turns out to be quite a bit more fruitful than hunting for Love Tickets…

More MPQ with Level1Crook and PsychSpace

Sniper and Flow guild member Level1Crook was wanting to MPQ to finish his Franky card set, and, naturally enough, was having a difficult time of it. So I offered to help with my pugilist, rangifer, once the party had filled up to 3 and they just needed one more. And so off we went:



And Level1Crook was able to finish his Franky card set after just a few PQs! Grats!!

Meet sorts

I regret(?) to inform you that I had yet another idea for yet another character. At this point, I am definitely a crazy cat lady, if you replace the cats with MapleStory characters…

In any case, I had the idea to create a wonky (and yes, odd-jobbed) LPQ mule. Because anyone with maxed Double Shot (the first job pirate skill), an equippable gun, and some usable bullets, can serve as range for LPQ, and because Oak Barrel allows brawlers to do the thief portal, I have had the idea for a while now to create a brawler LPQ mule. I decided that pure DEX was the way to go (for high WACC, AVOID, and ranged DPS), so meet sorts, the DEX brawler:



I toyed with the idea of being a bullet bucc in addition to being a DEXaneer, and as of yet I’ve only been using guns, but I think that in the future I will opt for a more gun/knuckler hybrid style, in true DEXaneer spirit.

Either way, I was inducted into Meiko’s (MeikoHonma) guild at the tender level of 21, when I first showed up for some KPQ action. Meiko has a guild by the name of Renaissance (part of the Enlightend [sic] alliance) that is dedicated to helping new players and giving them a community! I’m not exactly the target audience for this, but I obliged anyways, to see what was going on inside the guild/alliance, and perhaps help out some newbies myself

I had a little bit of fun in alliance chat when I took second job advancement:



And, actually, sorts is already level 35, hehe. So she’s already prepared to serve LPQ and the fine people who inhabit it!

Duoing HH with OmokTeacher

OmokTeacher (Slime) came online and wanted to fight the Headless Horseman (HH), so I gathered my equipment together onto my STR priest to prepare. We were lucky enough to find an HH at the first Hollowed [sic] Ground map that we checked! As OmokTeacher prepared the potions necessary to survive, I did a little card-hunting and went from 1/5 Jr. Wraith cards to 5/5!:



The fight with HH went pretty swiftly, although OmokTeacher had some issues with surviving, due to HH’s rather vicious magical attacks:



And the EXP from HH dying was enough to being cervid to level 114!! Yay~~~

Booming another Toy

SmallMight (SiriusPlaque) was kind enough to let me take the last of his clean Toys of 101, in exchange for another completion of his special player-bestowed-to-player quest: to hunt for 50 Power Crystal Ores. This one was 94 WATK, 4 STR, 4 DEX, and 7 slots, and I had a 30% scroll stowed away for a while, waiting to use it on this Toy. And by “use it on this Toy”, I mean blow the Toy up on its first slot.

As per usual, my hands seem not to be made for scrolling. Oh well, I’ll have to find a way to get even more of the damned things…

 

(You can also read the original diary entry here, and/or read the diary entry on the Oddjobs forum.)

rangifer’s diary: pt. xxxviii

End of the V-day event

Now that the V-day event had come to a close, it was time to redeem all of those chocolates. I toyed with the idea of trading all of mine in for Unripe Onyx Apples, but because I was already getting a bunch of those anyways (from characters who were too low level to do the raffle), and because I didn’t feel like making another character just to hold apples, I spent all of the chocolates that I could on raffling. Here are my results (“gets” refers to the number of raffle instances that produced that item, whereas “qty” is the actual quantity of that item obtained across all raffles combined):

Total number of raffles: 58 (232 chocolates).

item	gets	qty	useful
New Year Lunchbox	9	450	yes
New Year Rice Soup	5	50	yes
Owl of Minerva	5	15	no
Sweet Heart	4	8	no
Triangular Sushi	4	12	no
Cookiebear	3	3	no
Unripe Onyx Apple	3	9	yes
Bananabear	2	2	no
Bunny Heart-Shaped Balloon	2	2	no
Heart Headset	2	2	no
Mickey Mouse Balloon	2	2	no
Blue Pony Overalls	1	1	no
Cupid’s Wings Cape	1	1	no
Cutesy Heart	1	1	no
Friends of the Forest Camping Chair	1	1	no*
Glow Stick of Love	1	1	no
Man’s Shirt	1	1	no
Porong Fan	1	1	no
Ramling Hair Pin	1	1	no
Ramling PJs (Sky)	1	1	no
Red Circle Chair	1	1	yes
Red Pony Overalls	1	1	no
Red Ribbon Hairband	1	1	no
Strawbear	1	1	no
Teddy Earmuffs	1	1	no
Valentine’s Day Sweet Chocolate	1	1	no
White Choco Bunny	1	1	no
White Mouse Headband	1	1	no

*The Friends of the Forest Camping Chair is untradeable and therefore useless.

So, obviously, this is prettty much crap. Of the things that are at least nominally useful, we have:

• 450 New Year Lunchboxes, which I consumed over the course of roughly 60 minutes of training/grinding.
• 50 New Year Rice Soups (4.17 hours’ worth), which I have yet to use, but the +30 WACC buff might come in handy when really trying to stretch for a higher hit rate on high-level monsters.
• 9 Unripe Onyx Apples, which feels like a bit of a joke, considering that I can (and did) just get those by directly exchanging chocolates for them.
• 1 Red Circle Chair, which is the only actually actually “good” item that I managed to raffle; hopefully it will be worth something some 7 or so months from now…

Gathering up ETC items for the Ellin Ring quest
I have, I think, four more characters who have yet to obtain an Ellin Savior’s Ring, who I want to eventually get one:

• hashishi, my besinner (who especially needs it, considering that +100 MAXHP may as well be portable HB for hashishi).
• potpan, my F/P mage MPQ mule.
• sets, my assassin OPQ mule.
• sorts, my DEXaneer LPQ mule.

So I decided to just go ahead and collect all of the ETC items that I would need for the final quest in the chain, for all four characters. That means:

• 400 Hardened Pieces of Steel.
• 400 Dark Stone Golem Rubbles.
• 300 Wild Kargo Eyes.
• 200 Firewoods.
• 400 Firebomb Flames.
• 100 Lazy Buffy Marbles.

I actually collected all 400 Hardened Pieces of Steel, along with a little over 100 of the Firebomb Flames, while futilely attempting to complete the V-day chair quest on sets. For the rest, though, I hopped onto my I/L magelet, cervine:



I, naturally, got cervine a few cards along the way:





And I am now the proud owner of all 1800 ETC items listed above ^^;

…wooOOOoosa…

You already know what time it is: OPQ time!! My DEX spearwoman, rusa, was back at it again… Well, my buddy Introvertida invited me to OPQ, but when I got there, my spot in the party had been filled, so I farmed cards to get rusa from 0/5 Sentinel cards to 5/5:



And then it was time for a whole lot of OPQing…

Spoiler: rusa @ OPQ~

And I met some lovely people along the way, like avocatto, Ooshy, Erebus0, ducklings (a permabeginner), nangs420, Gamericious, Came, and Kiona & MiniSushi! And I got to OPQ with some Suboptimal allies, like Ismezin, drainer, and Cortical (all permabeginners)!

<333

potpan LPQs with odd-jobbers

My MPQ-mule-to-be, potpan, is still at LPQ going for that second pair of Broken Glasses. potpan herself is, perhaps, not very interesting yet: she won’t be able to fulfil her destiny until at least level 71, so for now, she just does obscene quantities of damage with Fire Arrow, and that’s about it. But I did join my DEXginner friend Gambolpuddy (Taima, Tacgnol, Boymoder, Yotsubachan, Numidium) there at LPQ:



And later, when Gambolpuddy had left — and indeed, most LPQers had left — I was forced, out of desperation, to run both potpan and sorts (my DEXaneer LPQ mule) if I wanted to keep LPQing. It was a little mind-bending for me, since I already have enough trouble controlling just one character, as it is, but I was able to bang out a solid 2 or 3 LPQs this way:



Which means that sorts was finally able to fulfil her destiny for the first time

OmokTeacher defects!



OmokTeacher (Slime) may have defected once again, back to Flow, but we will remember That One Time™ that he left Flow to join the dark side — I mean, to join Oddjobs…

woosa advances to the rank of DEXgon knight

After many an OPQ, it was finally time for my DEX spearwoman, rusa, to advance to dragon — I mean, DEXgon knight.

On the way to & from El Nath, I stumbled upon a stray Fire Sentinel card and a stray Jr. Pepe card:





Here’s rusa, on the way to kick Dances With Balrog’s ass:



I’ve been screen-recording rusa soloing a variety of bosses (starting with King Slime), and eventually I will record enough to stitch together into a sweet YouTube video Her fight with Dances With Balrog will be in there as well~



As discussed in a previous diary entry, I have been debating rusa’s third job skill build. Having thought about it since then, and with NobleFantasm (SiriusPlaque, SmallMight) suggesting that it may even be possible for me to Heal myself (with cervid, my STR priest) at CDs, and with me actually remembering that rawr targets up to 15 monsters at once (much more than Fury’s 6), I have decided that I want rusa to have max rawr by the time that she hits level 86 (and thus graduates MPQ). I will be rushing to level 16 Fury before then (as Fury tends to be more useful in MPQ), but I decided to be a little greedy and put 3 SP into Sacrifice so that I could have level 1 rawr by the time I was level 71. Here is rusa, rawring for the first time, in the middle of an OPQ:



woosa MPQs for the first time~

And now that rusa had fatefully graduated from OPQ ;( it was time for her to MPQ for the first time, with EddieSmurphy the marauder, Gamericious (a priest, who I already knew from OPQ), and shinning the priest:



As usual, being both low-level (less than 77 or so) and being an odd-jobbed character made it a struggle to really contribute the the combat portions of MPQ. But, as always with rusa, I love being able to cast HB and IW on my party members, so that I can feel useful even when my damage is lacking



I’ve actually already completed the Ravana prequests on rusa, and I hope to tag along on some Ravana runs soon, so I can get some dolls, and hopefully a nice Ravana Helmet (rusa is still using a Rudolph’s Horn)~!

 

(You can also read the original diary entry here, and/or read the diary entry on the Oddjobs forum.)

rangifer’s diary: pt. xxxix

Suboptimal Capt. Lat

We did an all-Suboptimal Capt. Latanica run, featuring:

• Me playing rusa, my DEXgon knight (Oddjobs).
• OmokTeacher (Slime), a STRginner (Flow).
• Gumby, a STRginner (Flow).
• Phoneme (Cortical, GishGallop), a permamagician (Oddjobs).
• Outside (TestChars, Dodogge), a STRginner (Flow).

As rusa, I could do the job of providing HB for our party, drastically reducing the risk of death, particularly for the permabeginners of our party. To prepare, I went ahead and completed the prequests:



Hoo-rah for Dragon Fury!

We did two runs, both of which I filmed:



(Apologies for the poor image quality; this is a frame extracted from a video.)

Good times and some nice EXP were had by all, although unfortunately we were not able to bring Gumby from 4/5 Capt. Lat cards to 5/5, as neither run dropped a card :/ Gumby has actually managed to achieve the T9 ring(!!) as a permabeginner by farming all the cards himself!!! Hopefully T10 one day!!!! :O

Scrolling a new STR robe

After realising that I really would not be able to purchase a bath/sauna robe scrolled for STR, due to the general lack of STR robes (overall STR scrolls are generally too pricey for people to find it worthwhile to use them on non-endgame overalls), and the even further lack of specifically female ones, I decided… I’m really very unhappy with the 12 STR one that I ended up with after spending some 11M+ mesos on scrolls >.<

So, using just about a third of the funds that I used to make my 12 STR robe, I managed to scroll a nice upgrade!!:



16 STR, finally a STR robe I don’t have to be embarrassed about…

MPQ <3

In the previous diary entry, rusa was just starting to MPQ. Now, she has graduated (level >85)! It really feels like a blur, and an extremely fun one thanks to the people with whom I MPQed~

Spoiler: rusa, MPQing

Pictured above: MPQ stage 3 with Harlez (a chief bandit), Introvertida (an F/P mage), and ducklings, a STRginner of DuckNation who was always there to bravely defend us from the mutaes during the fight with Angy Fanky~! <3333



Pictured above: rusa during stage 6.



Pictured above: rusa gets a rather impressive-looking stage 6 combo of 111 111 111 2d! (Note that this is slightly less impressive than it looks, because the first 1 is effectively a 4.)



Pictured above: rusa trying out Spear Crusher for the first time~ Stab, stab, stab!



Pictured above: Gruzz (I/L mage) loves decorating stage 6.5. He also likes typing his stage 6 combos in chat in coded forms that make my head spin. F3



Pictured above: rusa doing the left-hand JQ in stage 4.



Pictured above: Angy Fanky fight with gogigagagigo (permarcher of Oddjobs), xBowtjuhNL (a sniper), and xxmtg (an I/L mage).



Pictured above: rusa dies during the Angy Fanky fight >.<



Pictured above: Angy Fanky fight with RosePink (an F/P mage who is a bit difficult to see in this image), sliwa (a priest), and xBowtjuhNL.

I really had an absolute blast MPQing as rusa, and I’ll be honest, I was a little “F4” irl when I did eventually graduate. One of the amazing things about MPQ, in my personal experience, is that, because the PQ is so difficult for its level and requires a lot of teamwork and cooperation, because it takes so many PQs to get from level 71 to level 86, and because MPQ gets such little traffic (compared to KPQ, LPQ, EPQ, or even OPQ), MPQ has the ability to occasionally produce camaraderie more intense than I’ve frankly ever seen in other areas of MapleStory. A solid MPQ party that PQs together regularly is one of the greatest blessings one can receive in this game. So I would like to thank some of the people with whom I MPQed as rusa:

• ducklings
• Harlez
• Gruzz
• Radiohead
• Eoka
• RosePink
• xBowtjuhNL
• sliwa
• …and any lovely people who should be on this list, but are not, due to my feeble memory.

And on that note, I have worked my way from level 71 to level 86 through MPQ on several other characters. But because I only started writing a diary relatively recently, almost all of this experience has gone unwritten. So, still bearing in mind my feeble memory and recollections, I want to make an attempt to thank the people who made those experiences possible:

• Vauri/Cira
• PoultryWoman/Fabienne
• zoomzombie
• Trei
• StealthSword
• PeachyKid
• Tsukino
• Skateboard
• Tacgnol/Boymoder
• kuromii
• Jule
• CreepyTimmy/SillyTimmy
• ETAN
• PastaSauce
• JesseABadBoy
• Keki
• Zechs
• Pando
• DWN009
• DotAncient
• DogsAreCool
• BigScrund
• Zennko
• Lovecraft
• SweSticer
• CanTuna
• MitchFitch
• Ynnairam
• …and all of the lovely people who should be on this list, but are not, due to my feeble memory (and lack of more screenshots to reference).

<3333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333…

Vertida’s wedding

Introvertida, and her cleric, Extrovertida, with whom I have done many an OPQ and MPQ, married herself. So off we were, rusa and the rest of the MPQ gang, to Amoria~



Congrats!! Haha~ To celebrate, we did an HPQ together:



…and we even did the bonus stage, for that sweet, sweet EXP. 80k EPH, wow~!

We were going to fight Crimson Balrog on the ship to Orbis, with the mission being to protect ducklings (who would surely be one-shotted by its magical attack). But, none ever raided the particular ride we took:



Also pictured above is the world-famous instrumental duo, BBB (Burnt Banana Bread).

Graduated MPQ ;(

Now that rusa has graduated MPQ, it’s time for some questing, preparing for CD grinding (lol), and ticking the rest of the bosses off of rusa’s hit list! As mentioned in the previous entry, I have been collecting footage of rusa soloing bosses since she was level 31, and I plan to compile all of the footage into an edited video/montage/whatever once I’ve ticked enough things off the hit list to my satisfaction. Here I am, PPQing with Radiohead, with whom I had been MPQing:



Although PPQ is a PQ I typically try to avoid (sorry, I just don’t find it fun), it was necessary to cross Lord Pirate off of the hit list. I also did the Mu Lung questlines to kill Tae Roon (The Forgotten Master) and to kill King Sage Cat (Eliminating King Sage Cat). I had a little family reunion in the Mu Lung forests:



Oh, and I wanted to cross Snack Bar off of my hit list as well, and there was surprisingly little info out there about this, so I kinda just did Taiwan quests until I eventually got to the one that would allow me to fight Snack Bar:



And I now have quite the collection of clips:

Code:

rusa_vs._Alishar.mp4
rusa_vs._Angry_Lord_Pirate.mp4
rusa_vs._Angy_Fanky.mp4
rusa_vs._Blue_Mushmom.mp4
rusa_vs._Crimson_Balrogs.mp4
rusa_vs._Dances_With_Balrog.mp4
rusa_vs._Eliza.mp4
rusa_vs._Jr._Balrog.mp4
rusa_vs._Kimera.mp4
rusa_vs._King_Sage_Cat.mp4
rusa_vs._King_Slime.mp4
rusa_vs._Male_Boss.mp4
rusa_vs._Papa_Pixie.mp4
rusa_vs._Poison_Golem.mp4
rusa_vs._Snack_Bar.mp4
rusa_vs._Tae_Roon.mp4

Now all I have left are:

• Headless Horseman (high HP/WDEF; waiting on Ravana Helmet to make my damage somewhat less pathetic)
• Spirit of Rock (high HP/WDEF; waiting on Ravana Helmet to make my damage somewhat less pathetic)
• Capt. Latanica (high HP/WDEF; waiting on Ravana Helmet to make my damage somewhat less pathetic)
• Snowman (waiting until level 90, so I can start the questline)
• Thanatos (high WDEF; waiting on Ravana Helmet to make my damage somewhat less pathetic)
• Gatekeeper (high WDEF; waiting on Ravana Helmet to make my damage somewhat less pathetic)

Technically, Thanatos and Gatekeeper are not considered bosses AFAIK. But they’re in there for funsies.

Oh, and the Ravana Helmet? It is commonly understood that, when you turn in a doll, the probability of getting a Ravana Helmet from it (rather than one of the knockoffs) is 25%. As of yet, I have turned in 12 such dolls, and out of those 12 dolls, 0 of them resulted in a Ravana Helmet. For those following along at home, there’s a 0.75^12 = 3.17% chance of getting that few (or fewer, not that you could get less than 0) helms after 12 trials. Incredible. Hopefully I can finally get one at some point (20 STR please!!!)…

 

(You can also read the original diary entry here, and/or read the diary entry on the Oddjobs forum.)

rangifer’s diary: pt. xl

Getting the T1 ring for rusa (and some questing along the way)

I wanted to do some card-hunting on my DEXgon knight, rusa, as a way to get a little beefier (more STR!), or maybe just as an excuse to rawr. Who knows. In any case, lugging around a T0 ring is a little embarrassing, so off I went:

Spoiler: rusa card-hunting~

Completed the first tab~ Great start~~









WHERE are the Jr. Necki cards ;(

And yeyy~ T1 ring for woosa!:



While I was at it, I went ahead and did the “Lost!” and “ReVersal” quests:



And the level 52 followup to “I Need To Find My Daughter”:





cervid tidies up some missed quests

I never went and did the King Sage Cat and Tae Roon quests on my STR priest, cervid, so I went back and did ‘em:





Some nifty cards along the way~

And down went the King Sage Cat:



And in like fashion, Tae Roon:



Oh, and I went ahead and did “Lost!”/“ReVersal” once more:





Meet dama

Oh, my. You know the drill; yet another one of deer’s shitty peepee poopoo garbo characters. This time, I was forced (forced, I tell you!!) by Cort (Cortical, Phoneme, GishGallop, Subcortical, WizetWizard, MageFP) to make a brigand. For those not familiar, brigands are built like STR-based permabeginners, but take the rogue → bandit → chief bandit → shadower job route. While they tend to play somewhat like ordinary permabeginners, brigands benefit from the obvious utility skills associated with rogues/dits/shads, and brigands are capable of attacking with Disorder, Steal, and even Meso Explosion. Brigands do not use daggers.

While brigands are unusual for bandits in that they do not use daggers (some other bandit-based odd jobs, like blood dit and DEXdit, do use daggers), I am playing dama with a slightly more rogue-ish twist: the brigand equivalent of a sindit! Perhaps “sindit” is a bit of a misnomer here; brigands are barely dits, and even less so are they sins. Brigands must stick with basic-attacking when using claws, for lack of LUK to make any good use of Lucky Seven. But brigands, unlike e.g. besinners, have access to Keen Eyes, which (when at max level) makes their claw-using genuinely ranged… even ranged enough to serve as range in LPQ! And thus, much like the bandit can pretend that they are an assassin for a little while, as they continue to use Lucky Seven into their second-job life, so too can the brigand pretend that they are a STR sin for a little while, as they continue to use their claw into their second-job life.

Here I am, as lil baby dama (sporting some random equips that I had uselessly sitting in my cash shop inventory), getting harrassed by one of Cort’s islanders:



I was, after having been forced(!) by Cort to create this character, harassed by them, nonstop, from the training camp (where Cort had a camper) onwards, until I finally left the island for good…

But before then, we met up with strainer (drainer, xX17Xx, maebee) and chilled in Amherst:



Well, the harassment didn’t entirely stop upon leaving the island… Cort’s besinner-to-be (hopefully “to-be” soon, as long as the anniversary event comes with cake forks), Amygdala, had her fair share of telling me to CC PLS. And also of generally littering trash all over Kerning City:



And so I set off to bring dama up to KPQ level:







“YEET” goes the Steel Titans~

And although I did like dama’s cute lil noob look, I set out to come up with a look more permanent and more suitable (and with less event-bound equipment):



Again, with the trademark Metal Axe in hand (this particular axe also features further along in this diary entry…):



rusa hunting for dolls yet again

rusa is back at it again, still looking for a Ravana Helmet… just… a helmet. Please.

Unfortunately, my luck was not about to improve right away, as I joined the single worst Ravana run I’ve attended yet. The group sent out a smega in an attempt to recruit “attackers”, but upon entering Ravana’s lair, I found myself realising that there were going to be no such attackers. Instead, it was a party of me… and three (3) bishops, the highest-level of which was 136. So I got to see a whole lot (well over 30 minutes, in fact!) of Genesis being spammed on a single monster. Indeed, despite being just level 89 at this point (and STRless, to boot), I was forced to contribute what meagre DPS I did have:



I had very nearly run out of Honsters by the time that Ravana was slain, and having spent well over 30 minutes in this painful Ravana run, and having spent roughly a million mesos worth of potions, I got to see something that I’d never seen in a Ravana run before: Ravana dying, and dropping absolutely zero dolls whatsoever. By this point, I was just miffed enough that I figured it was time to take a bit of a break from MapleStory…

Fortunately, my luck turned around not too long after I took a break, as I was able to attend a second run, this time with some lovely friends who had helped me before with getting Ravana dolls <3 I turned in this doll and, lo and behold, my first real helmet!!! It only took 15 tries (that is, 15 dolls, not counting runs in which there were no dolls left for me to loot), but I finally got one! The first thing that I did was, of course, check the one stat that I really care about: the STR. And lo, it was the worst possible STR: 16!! Incredible. The search for more real helmets continues, I guess…

Polishing off rusa’s hit list

Crappy as my new helmet was, it was still a lot better than the level 10 hat that I had been using since, well, level 10. So, I took this as being just good enough to push forward and finish off rusa’s hit list, for the work-in-progress video.

Down went HH, SoR, Thanatos, Gatekeeper, Capt. Latanica:



And finally, after some grinding to get from level 89 to level 90 (expedited thanks to Jacquemus!) so that I could start the Snowman quest, rusa was able to tick the final boss off of her hit list:



Now I had all of the footage I needed for the video!! Now all that was left was to edit the damn thing…

capreolina tidies up some missed quests as well~

I wanted to do the same for my woodwoman, capreolina, as I did for cervid, so I tidied up the King Sage Cat and Tae Roon quests:





With thanks to Cortical, I was, thankfully, able to kill a Tae Roon and finish that quest! I did the King Sage Cat one first, which involved nearly two hours of busy-waiting (>.<) at the map where King Sage Cat spawns, including a point at which I lost internet connection for 2 minutes or so, and had to desperately hope that no one sniped my map during the time that I was gone…

In any case, I also had not done the Capt. Latanica quest on capre, and I had a bit of a go at soloing Capt. Latanica. That did not turn out so well, as I simply got one-shotted by the captain, wasting my White Essence and my Safety Charm.

Fortunately, however, JumpQuest (OmokTeacher, Slime) offered to help me out by duoing the captain with me! JumpQuest is a DK, so he was able to cast HB on me, which was more than enough to keep me alive. We made quick work of the captain!:



rusa rawr!!!!!!!!

Again thanks to Jacquemus, I was set up with a low-level (73 at the time) priest by the name of Phishem as a rawr + Heal combo at CDs, on my DEXgon knight, rusa~!

At first, I was worried about my damage, being STRless and all, and so I made sure to be very clear that my damage would be… relatively lacking. But Jacquemus and Phishem said they were OK with it, and so off we went:



And it really turned out much better than I had speculated! The simply huge range of rawr, and its ability to hit up to 15 monsters at once, made my ability to generate EXP extremely impressive, even if it took me a few extra rawrs to really kill the things dead. I think I measured something like 6.8M(!) EPH with an @epm 5~

I was there at CDs for quite a while, with varying party lineups (at times, with party sizes up to 4 or 5~!), and had a heck of a lot of fun Who knew that grinding in a big ol’ party is less sad than solo grinding at CDs…?

Cort scrolls a legendary artifact and then hits level 70

Cortical (GishGallop) scrolled a legendary artifact that we have (as odd jobbers) been speculating about for months, and that Tacgnol (Taima, Boymoder, Numidium, Yotsubachan) made an attempt at, after being so lucky as to find a Flamekeeper Cordon from a Firebrand. Unfortunately (very unfortunately), Tacgnol’s Flamekeeper Cordon had just one(!) pass out of the five 60% scrolls that she used on it. The issue here is not so much that it’s extremely difficult in general to pass some GFAs on a pair of gloves, but rather the issue is getting the Flamekeeper Cordons to begin with. They are rather rare, and the average of 8 MATK that they come with pushes their value up even further into the 40M~50M meso range, per-pair. But their potential is largely ignored: the combination of the 8 MATK with the 20 WACC makes it an amazing candidate for gish, gishlet, and even STR cleric/priest/bishop gloves.

Cort managed to find a pair for “only” 20M(!) mesos, and set out to prove the worth of these gloves once and for all. Thankfully, they had much better luck than Tacgnol, and was able to avenge her 2 WATK Flamekeeper Cordons:



8 WATK, 7 MATK, and 19 WACC on a pair of gloves… truly legendary.

And Cortical held their 3rd-job permabeginner party not too long after:



Congrats!!!

“rusa is a STRless warrior.”

At this point I had finally finished the editing process for rusa’s video! You can watch it on the Oddjobs YouTube channel!!:



This video compiles a series of many fights with boss monsters that rusa has soloed over her career, over the course of a 20~21 minute video!

Spoiler: Music

The music is “rusa’s Theme”, which I composed for the video, and have released under the CC BY-SA 4.0+. You can find the original MuseScore file (the piece was written in, and then rendered with the built-in MIDI sound(bank/font) of, MuseScore 3) at https://codeberg.org/deer/gists/raw/branch/master/rusa-s_Theme.mscz; you can also find the theme on bandcamp at https://capreolina.bandcamp.com/album/rusa-s-theme, if you wanna listen to it separately

Attending Eoka and xBowtjuhNL’s wedding

I attended the wedding of Eoka and xBowtjuhNL, both of whom are lovely people I met while MPQing on rusa!



The wedding was really cool, as I got to attend a premium wedding for the first time ever in my maple life. Pila Present skimped out on me a bit with the gift reward, awarding me just one (1) Elixir… but it was still cool

The couple went to China on honeymoon very shortly after the wedding, as they wanted to have a cow to exchange for the wedding, and unfortunately no GM was willing to comply with their request to !mob 9600006 at their wedding

Congrats on the wedding <333!

I am reminded why I rarely solo grind on cervid

My STR priest, cervid, is level 114 now, and at this point solo grinding is something that I do less and less often, for its lack of real EXP reward. But I got an Echo of Hero, and wanted to test my hand at it in the usual spot once again: Fancy Amps. Keep in mind that I did an @epm 5 with full damage gear equipped, and Echo of Hero, Cider, and Holy Symbol active the whole time:



With this as a benchmark, it would take an estimated 17+(!) hours of continuous sweatgrinding if I wanted to solo grind my way from the bottom of 114 (cervid is not actually at the bottom of 114, but just hypothetically) to 115. And this is with the luxuries of Teleport, Holy Symbol, etc.

I got bored of that pretty quickly, and spent the rest of the Echo doing something that psychologically felt more productive to me…:





capre hunts thousands, nay, millions of cards~! (…And hits level 112 in the process)

Speaking of card-hunting, it should be obvious to anyone who knows me or my diary that my excessive abundance of characters must be a serious barrier to getting higher-level Monster Book Rings. In an attempt to set some priorities, it seems that my woodwoman, capreolina, is somewhere near the top. Obviously, any character whatsoever can benefit from higher Monster Book Rings (unless they already have T10, of course). But for cervid, for example, higher tiers are somewhat of a micro-optimisation. cervid is already extremely tanky, so the extra MAXHP and MAXMP helps, but not as much as you would hope; and the STR/DEX/INT/LUK can help too, although being pure STR already does most of what I want AP-wise anyways. So you can see how Monster Book Rings end up being more of a micro-optimisation.

On the other hand, my I/L magelet cervine can benefit relatively more: being somewhat less tanky than cervid makes the MAXHP/MAXMP matter more, and the TMA from the INT is extremely vital for cervine’s playability (especially at such a high level). Add to that the fact that cervine will really need that MAXMP if she gets to fourth job (actually having enough MAXMP to cast Blizzard even once is a serious concern when you are INTless), and the bonus AVOID from the DEX and LUK, and farming rings for cervine is simply far more efficient than it is for cervid. Then there’s the really squishy characters: capreolina is my oldest and highest-level such character, being the unwashed archer that she is. Also included here are my swashbuckler hydropotina, being an unwashed slinger, and my besinner hashishi, being an unwashed permabeginner. Even rusa can benefit quite a bit, as the STR is very desirable as a STRless warrior, the DEX helps damage as well, and even the MAXHP can help, in the case that rusa ever manages to hit fourth job.

So I set off to card-hunt on capreolina (made smoother by Arrow Rain), and managed to muster a T2 ring and level 112 along the way~:

Spoiler: capre on the hunt~

YEET~

W H E W .

Scrolling “jobbed beginner” weapons

There are some jobbed (meaning, “not equippable by beginners”) weapons that, as far as I know, have existed in MapleStory since version 1. In particular, I have in mind jobbed weapons that are not oriented towards the intended playstyle nor skills of the jobs that can equip them. There are actually (perhaps unbeknownst to many, or most, MapleLegends players) very many of these in the game (and even more, if you count ones not acquirable in MapleLegends), and many can even be purchased at ordinary NPCs.

Because of my new brigand, dama, I got the chance to revisit some of these special weapons. I set out to scroll some of these, and this is what I came up with:

First is the Metal Axe, which costs 3k mesos when purchased from an NPC. This is a two-handed axe that can only be equipped by warriors, archers, and rogues. On average, these have 32 WATK clean, and that is what you will get if you buy one from an NPC. But I had one that I got from a monster drop, which was 35 WATK, and scrolled it to a nice purple glow~:



The last two slots were actually 100%ed, because the axe was supposed to be purple-glowing by the time it had 2 slots left; but Noam (OmokTeacher, Slime, JumpQuest) had apparently just been mistaken about how many excess stats above average you need to get a purple glow. So after a 100% scroll to see if a single extra stat was enough to do it, it was still blue-glowing. Only after the last slot landing a 100% scroll did I achieve the glow you see above.

And second was the Monkey Wrench, which costs 20k mesos when purchased from an NPC. This weapon is similar to the Metal Axe in that it can only be equipped by warriors, archers, and rogues, and also in that it is two-handed. But the Monkey Wrench is more powerful, being a level 25 weapon, and also it’s a blunt weapon, not an axe. After going through 22 10% scrolls, I finally managed to land one, and had quite good luck the rest of the way. It was already purple-glowing by the time that it had 1 slot left, but OmokTeacher convinced me to throw another 30% on it, which passed!!:



The Brigand Brigade sets forth upon the land

Now that I had some sweet weapons for dama to use, it was time for the Brigand Brigade to roll out! Also in the brigade is dendrite, Cortical’s brigand. And with both of us at level 22, it was KPQ time~:



Wrench power!! Fruity Bamboo power!!:



Here’s dama, showing off her STR sindit skillz at the boss fight:



After very many KPQs we were both level 29 and roughly 95% EXP. And dendrite insisted that we race each other at Shumi’s Lost Coin in lieu of hitting level 30, although I was reluctant (as usual) to do any JQing…

dendrite enticed me by promising me a gilded eggs pan (originally, the promise was for a “gild eggs pan”, meaning money for a guild expansion), if I were to emerge victorious in the JQ race. So off we went, and by throwing caution to the wind (and thus taking a truly immense quantity of lasers to the face), I actually managed to win the race!! dendrite challenged me to finish again before they could finish for the first time, offering me another gilded eggs pan… Again, I was reluctant, but dendrite insisted that their pride was on the line, and so… uhm… I did it again:



Considering that I really did not want to make dendrite cry, and also didn’t want to do any more JQing, I made no attempt to complete the JQ a third time…

Once dendrite did finish (and revealed the prank to be literal “egg pans” this entire time… which I did not accept), we were both level 30, and so it was time to advance to bandit!!!:



We still don’t have Steal yet, as it has level 5 Haste as a pre-requisite, but soon we will Steal ALL the things!!!!

 

(You can also read the original diary entry here, and/or read the diary entry on the Oddjobs forum.)

rangifer’s diary: pt. xli

R>1 nimble warrior for blue mushmom run

Readers of this diary may remember the “R>1 pog ranged for ______ run” series from diary parts xxiii, xxiv, and xxv. The content of that series is based on a mock model of level ≈100 odd jobbers, and focusses exclusively on theoretical single-target DPS figures. As a result, it can be somewhat informative, but also a bit goofy, and missing most of the picture when it comes to actually playing such odd jobs. That being said, it can be a lot of fun to work through, or look at, and yields sometimes quite unexpected results. So, in the spirit of carrying on with this series, and in order to not give the wrong impression about ranged DPS (as the previous series only considered odd jobs capable of dealing truly ranged damage), we are taking a look today at DEX warriors! I actually have a dex warrior of my own, named rusa, who is a level 95 DEXgon knight at the time of this writing

For a closer comparison and for ease of choice, both the crusader and the white knight have the Stonetooth Sword as their weapon of choice. For the sader, this is a pretty likely (albeit expensive) choice, as their axe options are much more limited (but definitely still exist) than their sword options. But it’s worth noting that for the white knight, another snazzy level 100 loadout is possible: the Duck Tube, combined with a nice shield! The DEXgon knight will be using a similarly expensive weapon: the Sky Ski.

With that said, let’s take a look at our models. As usual, they are all roughly level 100, and have pretty good gear:

The model DEXsader

• 95 STR (60 of which is from gear)
• 535 DEX (45 of which is from gear)
• 146 WATK (113 from sword + 20 from Cider + 3 from cape + 10 from gloves)

The model DEX white knight

• 95 STR (60 of which is from gear)
• 535 DEX (45 of which is from gear)
• 146 WATK (113 from sword + 20 from Cider + 3 from cape + 10 from gloves)

The model DEXgon knight

• 95 STR (60 of which is from gear)
• 535 DEX (45 of which is from gear)
• 139 WATK (106 from spear + 20 from Cider + 3 from cape + 10 from gloves)

Comparing single-target DPS
As usual, we assume that all player characters and monsters have the same level. And, as in the “R>1 pog ranged for…” series, we will use 600 WDEF to reasonably represent a low- or mid-level boss monster. Additionally, because of the DEX white knight, elemental interactions now matter, so we now assume by default that all monsters are neutral towards all elements; however, I will also list the non-neutral cases separately. The DEXsader is using Power Strike with maxed Combo Attack, the DEX white knight is using Power Strike with maxed charge (that is, whichever charge they are using, e.g. Fire Charge), and the DEXgon knight is using maxed Spear Crusher:

model	DPS
DEX WK (fire weak)	11856.8
DEXsader	10729.0
DEX WK (lightning weak)	9977.1
DEX WK (ice weak)	8097.5
DEX WK (fire neutral)	7470.9
DEX WK (lightning neutral)	6217.8
DEXgon knight	5054.7
DEX WK (ice neutral)	4964.7
DEX WK (fire strong)	3085.1
DEX WK (lightning strong)	2458.5
DEX WK (ice strong)	1832.0

So, in this comparison, it’s pretty clear that the DEXgon knight is firmly in last place in the vast majority of realistic situations. Poor rusa. But, on the other hand, DEXsaders and DEX WKs appear to be so ridiculously powerful that being beaten by them in terms of single-target DPS is hard to feel very bad about. The DEX WK using Fire Charge versus a fire-weak monster comes out on top here, and while that is a fairly specific situation, there are even some boss monsters that are fire-weak: Scarlion, Blue Mushmom, Male Boss, Pianus (both), Bigfoot, Blue King Goblin, Bodyguard A, The Boss, and even one of Vergamot’s bodies(‽). Otherwise, DEXsader is the most consistently high single-target DPS here, at a whopping 10.7k(!!) DPS.

I had actually speculated earlier (before I did any of these calculations) that DEXgon knights are generally the worst single-target DPS of the three main species (there are other species, like e.g. the DEX permawarrior) of DEX warrior; my intuition here was that DKs never gain access to pre-defence damage modifiers. Combo Attack and WK/pally charges grant damage multipliers that are applied directly to the raw damage range, even before WDEF is taken into account. This helps to surmount the defence difficulties that DEX warriors have due to their rather low (but quite stable) damage ranges. And, for better or worse, even in fourth job, the DK still has no access to these kinds of multipliers; Berserk is an after-modifier that applies even after attacking-skill/critical damage multipliers are taken into account (level 30 Berserk really does exactly what it says on the tin: it simply doubles your overall damage).

We also, of course, want to compare these figures to the figures calculated in the previous series. For that, I will first eliminate the particularly unlikely cases from above, namely the DEX WK using Ice Charge versus any monster that is not ice-weak, and the DEX WK using any charge versus any monster that is strong against the charge’s element. This gets rid of some of the needlessly low DPS figures for the DEX WK, who would presumably be smart enough to check the elemental weaknesses/strengths of their opponents on the library, and who is unlikely to be fighting a monster that is strong/immune against both lightning and fire, but also not strong/immune to ice.

model	DPS
STRmit (SM)	13807.5
DEX WK (fire weak)	11856.8
DEXsader	10729.0
DEX WK (lightning weak)	9977.1
DEX WK (ice weak)	8097.5
Permarogue	7658.0
DEX WK (fire neutral)	7470.9
Wood(wo)man (bow)	6725.3
Wood(wo)man (xbow)	6690.6
Permapirate	6669.1
Swashbuckler (yes Octo)	6598.6
DEX WK (lightning neutral)	6217.8
Swashbuckler (no Octo)	5614.4
Permarcher	5614.0
DEXgon knight	5054.7

As we can see here, the DEXsader, as well as the DEX WK when fighting any monster that is weak to their charge’s element, actually beat all of the ranged odd jobs in this comparison… With the exception of STRmit, of course, thanks to SM. This suggests that warriors are a very strong choice for odd-jobbers who want to be good at (at least, “good at” by odd job standards) bossing; warriors have useful skills in boss fights, lots of survivability, and some of them (DEX warriors, in this case) have some pretty darn good damage!

IMPORTANT REMINDERS BEFORE ANYONE GOES AROUND TOUTING THESE NUMERIC FIGURES: Keep in mind (and I cannot stress this enough) that this is a purely one-dimensional — and somewhat shoddy — analysis using dummy models, and that jobs cannot be reduced to raw single-target DPS numbers. The odd jobs that are listed above differ quite a bit in their playstyles and range of abilities (e.g. we did not even factor Threaten into the analysis). Furthermore, this only considers characters that are roughly level 100.

GM boofs for woosa~

A GM announced GM buffs while I was playing my DEXgon knight, rusa, so I headed to the FM to get the boofs on rusa, and on my woodwoman, capreolina. I’ve mostly just been card-hunting/questing on capreolina, but I told myself I’d grind CDs for an hour for EXP any time I had GM boofs to accompany me. So after getting the boofs, I stashed capre away in the cash shop, and headed to CDs with rusa:



I may have chewed up a lot of Honsters over the course of this @epm test, as I recorded this EPM entirely solo, but wow… 7.26M EPH! And the loot from the CDs can really make up for the Honsters spent :O

But after some solo training, a priest by the name of Madarin stumbled across my map and asked if I wanted to party. I of course said yes, eager to save myself some mesos, and Madarin was even able to cast Maple Warrior and Sharp Eyes on the both of us, via another one of their characters idling in the FM!:



You can see the effect of SE on my damage; there’s 3 critical hits in that image, I think. We had a jolly good time finishing up the GM boofs! Thanks for the party, Madarin!!

And I used the GM boofs on capreolina almost immediately afterwards, which got her 26% EXP or so out of just 60 minutes of grinding~ ^^

LPQ for hashishi~

I’ve been needing to LPQ more on my besinner, hashishi, so I can unstick her from LPQ and get her to level 50, to catch up with her DEXginner friend Gambolpuddy (Taima, Tacgnol, Boymoder, Numidium, Yotsubachan)! I have set a goal for myself to get two pairs of Broken Glasses on hashishi, as there is no other way to get LUK from eye accessories, so I want to (hopefully) land at least one 30% (which gives DEX, thus also contributing to her damage) on one of the pairs. This is, obviously, a bit of a micro-optimisation, considering that anything that isn’t a WATK increase is fairly minor, and considering that I can’t play hashishi super seriously anyways (just imagine card-hunting on a besinner… ouch). But I like LPQ, okay!?!

I was able to do a few LPQs with maebee (drainer, xX17Xx, strainer), a woodwoman of Oddjobs!:



And later, some LPQs with my pals in Pals!:



Our party was not too hot, though… I was by far the highest level (at 46), and everyone else was either washing or quite new to the game :X

So one Alishar fight didn’t turn out too well…:



Now, believe me when I say that I had all of my protective gear on, by which I mean my 71 MAXHP Newspaper Hat. But when you’re a besinner in a situation where the floor is so crowded with various Chronos species that you’re the only one really doing much damage (desperately and slowly finishing off Alishar), and Alishar deals enough damage to nearly (but not quite) one-shot you, and you’re just trying to get in the right spots so that your fake-ranged attacks hit the damn thing, it’s easy to make a slight HP-potion-using slip-up >.<

After that PQ, though, I decided that it was worth simply multi-clienting (considering that our party size dropped below 6) and bringing along my OPQ-mule-to-be, sets, to pick up the slack. After that, it was more arduous for me personally (as I am not the world’s foremost expert at multi-clienting and actually playing both characters), but the runs were a lot quicker and more painless overall. hashishi is now a healthy bit closer to that second pair of glasses, and I even EPQed a bit on sets afterward, with GishGallop (Cortical, dendrite, Cerebellum, MageFP, Medulla, WizetWizard), an I/L gish of Oddjobs. That was enough to get sets to 51, so now she can finally be a real OPQ mule… LOL

capreolina is still on the hunt

You know what time it is: card huntin’ time! My woodwoman, capreolina, has been my main focus for card-hunting these days, and so I headed to the Hidden Tower to start where I left off in the Eos Tower:

Spoiler: Cards. Cards. Cards.

I hunted for Block Golem and King Block Golem cards in the Hidden Tower, which is also the only map where Rombot spawns. There are only two spawn points in the entire giant map, and they only respawn every 20 minutes. The card drop rate is kind of well-known to be crappy, and I found that out for myself after grinding there for quite a while and still being 0/5 Rombot cards.

Cortical challenged me to finish the set, and I really wasn’t going to… except that I had terrible luck with the King Block Golem cards, so by the time I got 5/5 of those, I had already been 4/5 Rombot cards! So I set out to just finish the damn set… and it did take a while, I must say >.<

But I eventually did finish it! Take that!!:



Finally, I could leave that god forsaken block golem tower and finish up the Eos tower by doing the Tweeter card set:



And so off I was to the Ludibrium Clocktower to finish up the card sets from the terrace, toy factory, and time (but not deep Ludi) zones (I already had some of the card sets, like Brown Teddy and Toy Trojan):

















And then I went off to do the Helios Tower, which is pretty easy; it’s just one card set!:



And so I headed down the elevator towards KFT/Aqua Road:



(I found the Pinboom card just as I was mucking about in the area; I’ve yet to actually finish the set.)

Noam’s level 100 party!

OmokTeacher (Slime, JumpQuest, Slimu) planned an elaborate level 100 party for their STRginner! I was glad to be able to attend:



And to see the levelup itself!! Unfortunately, I had some technical issues duing the minigames that ensued, so I only got to attend part of the party. But congrats again on 100~!!!

capreolina is a legend of hometown

In planning to start card-hunting in KFT, I stumbled across a quest that I was previously unaware of: “Legends of Hometown”. This quest belongs to the same set of quests that I’m already fond of: the area boss quests, like that of Eliza, that of Snowman, that of Capt. Latanica, etc. For some reason, I just really like the setup of these quests: some pretty normal questing leading up to the climax of a boss fight, with a gob of EXP and fame at the end to serve as an actual reward (quite refreshing, as many quests in this game tend to lack a real reward…). Think of it as a solo PQ, maybe. I love PQs!

So, naturally enough, even though capre would be very overleveled (being level 112) for the quest at this point, I set out to do the quest anyways (and get some cards along the way):





Unfortunately, the gotcha of these quests is that area bosses tend to be virtually nonexistent in MapleLegends. Even just dropping a card is enough to make an area boss get hunted to extinction 24/7. So I was, pretty quickly, at the point that I dread: waiting, for up to three hours, for an Old Fox to actually show up. But, I figured I would hunt the Samiho cards in the meantime.

As I was waiting, I met Guitarmaster, a level 70 outlaw who was also looking to do the same quest! So we partied up and chatted while we got 5/5 Samiho cards each, and then simply waited for an Old Fox to show up on one of the channels. Guitarmaster was, thankfully, more dilligent with periodically channel-surfing to look for new spawns (I tend to just pick a channel and squat there, for fear of losing mapowner and losing any and all Old Foxes to someone who has all the timers), and eventually found one in another channel after an hour or two. And, conveniently, the one Old Fox that we killed dropped enough tails for both of us to complete the quest~!

 

(You can also read the original diary entry here, and/or read the diary entry on the Oddjobs forum.)

rangifer’s diary: pt. xlii

R>1 pog cleave for HH run

Continuing from where this series left off last entry, I want to throw in “the rest” of the odd, misshapen warrior jobs to our analysis. Although this list is, of course, not exhaustive, I will be using the list of odd jobs on the Oddjobs website as a reference when adding permawarrior, wand warrior, dagger warrior, and LUK warrior into the fray. We will be skipping over blood warriors, as we really only care about the blood warrior’s PG damage. We will also only consider crusader variants of the wand and dagger warriors; WKs lack the ability to use their charges, and DKs lack the ability to use their Crusher skills, Fury skills, and sadly also Dragon Roar for some reason. This leaves the crusader, who thankfully retains their ability to Shout and, importantly, to use Combo Attack.

Again, for a closer comparison and for ease of choice, the permawarrior will have the Stonetooth Sword as their weapon of choice. On the other hand, the rest of the jobs here cannot make use of this sword, either for weapon-restriction reasons (wand warriors can only use wands/staves, dagger warriors can only use daggers), or for stat-restriction reasons (LUK warriors would need at least 116 DEX from equipment to wield the Stonetooth Sword, which is technically doable, but much too steep). Both our wand warrior and dagger warrior, naturally enough, need a shield; both of these jobs have access to the same shields that ordinary warriors do, ranging from the Stolen Fence, to the Maple Shield, to jobbed ones like the Maple Warrior Shield, Gold Kalkan, and even the almighty Timeless Kite Shield(!). We will be giving our wand and dagger warriors a quite nice shield, with 13 WATK and 10 STR. Because we consider our models to be roughly level 100, our dagger warrior will be using a GDK (although it should be noted that they have the possibility of upgrading to a Dragon Kanzir at level 110+). Our wand warrior will be using their usual endgame weapon, the Heart Wand. Perhaps unfortunately, as far as I know, there is no way to obtain a Heart Wand with random stats, so the theoretical maximum WATK (barring the use of Chaos Scrolls!) for a Heart Wand is not 50, but just 45. It should also be noted that while the Heart Wand is far and away the best weapon for wand warriors (and some similar jobs like wandginner), there are other options: the misleadingly-named Heart Staff is a wand(!) offering the same benefits, although it has a pesky 43 LUK requirement, and the Streetlight would be a decent choice if it actually existed in MapleLegends; implementations without the “Heart” wands nor the Streetlight will have only the Metal Wand as their weapon of choice (similar to the magelander).

Our LUK warriors, as mentioned before, cannot use the Stonetooth Sword. Instead, our crusader and white knight variants will be using the Toy of 101, which is notable for being a viable endgame weapon for most sword-wielding odd jobs, including more beginner-like ones such as STRginner, STR mage, brigand, etc. As noted in the previous installation in this series, there are other good non-sword options for either crusaders or white knights, e.g. the Maple Demon Axe or level 100 Duck Tube, respectively. And I want to give a special shoutout to the Daiwa Sword for its importance to DEX and LUK (and HP) fighters/pages/crusaders/white-knights. Our LUK DK can, thankfully, use the same exact weapon as our DEX DK model.

With all that said, let’s take a look at our models. As usual, they are all roughly level 100, and have pretty good gear:

The model permawarrior

• 510 STR (45 of which is from gear)
• 120 DEX (60 of which is from gear)
• 146 WATK (113 from sword + 20 from Cider + 3 from cape + 10 from gloves)

The model wand warrior

• 550 STR (45 of which is from gear)
• 80 DEX (60 of which is from gear)
• 91 WATK (45 from wand + 13 from shield + 20 from Cider + 3 from cape + 10 from gloves)

The model dagger warrior

• 490 STR (45 of which is from gear)
• 140 DEX (60 of which is from gear)
• 153 WATK (107 from dagger + 13 from shield + 20 from Cider + 3 from cape + 10 from gloves)

The model LUKsader
The extra STR and DEX from gear here are due to the Toy of 101 granting 3 STR and 3 DEX on average, when clean.

• 98 STR (63 of which is from gear)
• 52 DEX (48 of which is from gear)
• 137 WATK (104 from sword + 20 from Cider + 3 from cape + 10 from gloves)

The model LUK white knight
The extra STR and DEX from gear here are due to the Toy of 101 granting 3 STR and 3 DEX on average, when clean.

• 98 STR (63 of which is from gear)
• 52 DEX (48 of which is from gear)
• 137 WATK (104 from sword + 20 from Cider + 3 from cape + 10 from gloves)

The model LUK dragon knight

• 95 STR (60 of which is from gear)
• 49 DEX (45 of which is from gear)
• 139 WATK (106 from spear + 20 from Cider + 3 from cape + 10 from gloves)

Comparing single-target DPS
As usual, we assume that all player characters and monsters have the same level. And, as in the “R>1 pog ranged for…” series, we will use 600 WDEF to reasonably represent a low- or mid-level boss monster. Additionally, because of the LUK white knight, elemental interactions now matter, so we now assume by default that all monsters are neutral towards all elements; however, I will also list the non-neutral cases separately. The permawarrior is using Power Strike, the wand warrior, dagger warrior, and LUKsader are using Power Strike with maxed Combo Attack, the LUK white knight is using Power Strike with maxed charge (that is, whichever charge they are using, e.g. Fire Charge), and the LUK dragon knight is using maxed Spear Crusher:

model	DPS
dagger warrior	14828.4
wand warrior	9446.7
permawarrior	5934.0
LUK WK (fire weak)	4353.5
LUKsader	3868.9
LUK WK (lightning weak)	3545.8
LUK WK (ice weak)	2738.0
LUK WK (fire neutral)	2468.8
LUK WK (lightning neutral)	1930.3
LUK DK	1350.2

So, I imagine that some of these results may be a bit surprising. As we can see from the dagger sader and the wand sader topping the chart here, Combo Attack is completely and utterly broken. While the wand warrior does clearly trail quite far behind the dagger warrior, they do have two advantages that the dagger warrior lacks: a higher PSM (primary stat multiplier; wands/staves always swing and thus get a PSM of 4.4, whereas daggers get a PSM of 4.0 regardless of the animation), and naturally higher STR. The higher STR is due to the Heart Wand lacking stat requirements, whereas daggers tend to have quite high DEX requirements, like the GDK used for our model here, which has a DEX requirement of 140.

As is perhaps expected after this point, the permawarrior comes in third place with a very strong DPS of 5934. Then we have our LUK warriors. The LUK WK using Fire Charge versus a fire-weak monster comes out on top here, and while that is a fairly specific situation, there are even some boss monsters that are fire-weak: Scarlion, Blue Mushmom, Male Boss, Pianus (both), Bigfoot, Blue King Goblin, Bodyguard A, The Boss, and even one of Vergamot’s bodies(‽). Otherwise, LUKsader is the most consistently high single-target DPS amongst the LUK warriors. Our poor, poor LUK DK gets left in the dust, with a measly (but still useful) DPS of 1350.2.

We also, of course, want to compare these figures to the figures calculated in the previous series, and in previous installations of this series. I’ve added some class-based (class as in: beginner, warrior, mage, archer, rogue, pirate) emojis to the “model” column to add some readability to this now quite lengthy table (N.B. some or none of these emojis may show up if you are viewing this on the MapleLegends forums, for some reason(‽)):

model	DPS
⚔️ dagger warrior	14828.4
STRmit (SM)	13807.5
⚔️ DEX WK (fire weak)	11856.8
⚔️ DEXsader	10729.0
⚔️ DEX WK (lightning weak)	9977.1
⚔️ wand warrior	9446.7
⚔️ DEX WK (ice weak)	8097.5
Permarogue	7658.0
⚔️ DEX WK (fire neutral)	7470.9
Wood(wo)man (bow)	6725.3
Wood(wo)man (xbow)	6690.6
‍☠️ Permapirate	6669.1
‍☠️ Swashbuckler (yes Octo)	6598.6
⚔️ DEX WK (lightning neutral)	6217.8
⚔️ permawarrior	5934.0
‍☠️ Swashbuckler (no Octo)	5614.4
Permarcher	5614.0
⚔️ DEXgon knight	5054.7
⚔️ LUK WK (fire weak)	4353.5
⚔️ LUKsader	3868.9
⚔️ LUK WK (lightning weak)	3545.8
⚔️ LUK WK (ice weak)	2738.0
⚔️ LUK WK (fire neutral)	2468.8
⚔️ LUK WK (lightning neutral)	1930.3
⚔️ LUK DK	1350.2

Wow. The dagger sader actually manages to beat out our SM-wielding STRmit!! That is some truly bonkers DPS for an odd job. Our wand sader competes well with the best DEX warriors, and the permawarrior squeezes out a good bit more DPS than our DEXgon knight. When it comes to LUK warriors, though, we can now see the immense power that DEX has for warriors, with all of our LUK warriors collectively taking last place in this ranking. We can now see a little more clearly how our ranged odd job models from the previous series (like permarogue, wood(wo)man, swashbuckler, etc.) occupy the mid-to-high positions overall, with only our SM-wielding STRmit and our dagger sader occupying the truly highest tiers of theoretical single-target DPS at this level.

I also want to note that I did a quick-and-dirty comparison of a fourth-job dagger hero with an equivalent DEX hero (both with maxed ACA), and found that the DEX hero tends to do quite a bit more DPS simply due to Brandish. Our odd-weaponed warriors (wand and dagger) excel partly due to sword(wo)men/fighters/crusaders relying so heavily on Power Strike and Slash Blast, combined with the fact that their killer skill in third job (CA) works with any melee weapon. Once we start getting into killer skills like Brandish (or Crusher, or Fire Charge, etc.) that are weapon-specific (as I believe Brandish is, although if Brandish actually is usable with daggers and/or wands, please do let me know), these odd-weaponed warriors start to fall behind a bit.

IMPORTANT REMINDERS BEFORE ANYONE GOES AROUND TOUTING THESE NUMERIC FIGURES: Keep in mind (and I cannot stress this enough) that this is a purely one-dimensional — and somewhat shoddy — analysis using dummy models, and that jobs cannot be reduced to raw single-target DPS numbers. The odd jobs that are listed above differ quite a bit in their playstyles and range of abilities. Furthermore, this only considers characters that are roughly level 100.

More adventures of the Brigand Brigade

My brigand, dama, and Cort’s (Cortical, GishGallop, Phoneme, WizetWizard, Medulla, Cerebellum) brigand, dendrite, collectively form the Brigand Brigade. And now that they were brigands for real (having taken second job advancement), it was time to finish up KPQ and start heading towards level 35, for great LPQ!

Here is dama, in her last-ever KPQ ;(



I hit level 31 just a bit before dendrite, so after dendrite completed their final KPQ without me, we headed off to wrap up some Victoria Island quests:

I hadn’t done the Mano quest yet, so we went to get a Rainbow-colored Snail Shell:



…And soloing Mano made me feel very stronk. Much stronker than I actually am. Next up was the ol’ MapleStory Basic Knowledge (for great shoe jump 30%!):



While we were farming Genins for their dolls, a bishop came along and started Genesising the map… It didn’t matter much to us, but we had been farming there the whole time, and I had mapowner, so we decided to try Cort’s little, uhm, “prank”, on someone for real:



But I guess being able to cast Genesis overrides mapowner, so we took up and left after no response.

Speaking of brigands, now that dendrite & I were second-jobbers, we had access to what is perhaps the brigand’s signature skill: Steal. Steal is somewhat unique to brigands, as ordinary bandits (and other odd-jobbed bandits, like blood bandits and DEXdits) generally have little reason to use Steal. Most people probably don’t even know what it looks like:



The answer is: it looks cool. The way that a shadow of yourself shoots out in the direction that you attack makes the skill look somewhat “ranged” (at least, more so than a basic attack). But actually, weapon-wise, Steal animates identically to a basic attack (and when used with a claw, can only punch), similarly to Disorder. So in addition to it being a fancier-looking basic attack, steal deals, at best (level 30 of the skill), the same damage as a basic attack, and at lower levels, deals less damage than a basic attack. Its upside is its unique ability to steal items/mesos from the monster affected by it. According to the skill’s description, each use of Steal has a probability of success, and once a success happens, it can never happen again on that individual monster. The description says “the monster’s items”, but so far the only thing we’ve seen drop from a successful Steal is a meso coin (see Pickpocket). We also found out that Steal seems to still work even if you “MISS” your target (similarly to MP Eater).

In any case, we went to finish up the 99-kill quests in Sleepywood that we had access to:



And we went to Perion’s Excavation Site to do Winston’s two good ETC-collecting quests:



Oh, right, cant forget the kill 99 Curse Eyes quest:



We also did the ETC-collecting quests at Nautilus Harbour, like Lazy Little Calico, For Kyrin, A Hole in the Nautilus, Cleaning the Nautilus 2 & 3, etc., which was made much easier by the ETCs that Cort had stashed away on their mules.

At this point, we were already nearing level 35 without having even stepped foot anywhere in Ariant! So we headed through the warp portal to Ludus Lake (specifically the Omega Sector thereof) and finished up the rest of the way to level 35 by doing an Omega Sector quest (unfortunately, Chief Stan’s Letter requires you to be level 35 to start it) and some Ludibrium quests around the Eos Tower:



Training w/ nangs420

I did a little bit of grinding on my DEXgon knight rusa, with someone who I OPQed with, and who has featured in a previous entry in this diary: nangs420. nangs sent out a smega asking if there were any DKs with whom she could party (being a priest herself), and I responded because I recognised her name and wanted to offer to grind if she didn’t mind my low damage. She recognised me as well, and said she wasn’t exactly counting damage numbers anyways, so off we went!:



The ol’ CDs, as usual. It should be noted that I have some four(!) characters (my woodwoman capreolina, my I/L magelet cervine, my swashbuckler hydropotina, and of course rusa) who are all, uhm, essentially “stuck” at CDs until level 120+. And that’s not even to mention my STR priest, cervid, who is there any time she’s on Healing duty!

In any case, we had a nice grind/farm session, and rusa got to level 96, which was just enough to put her MAXHP (with HB) into the quintuple digits!!:



Wowza, that’s the first time I’ve seen five whole digits down in my HP bar in my entire maple career…

Suboptimal <3 HH

OmokTeacher (Slime, JumpQuest, Slimu) set us (Suboptimal members from Flow and/or Oddjobs) up with some HH fights when he found one roaming around Forgotten Path (FP), which is notable for having a safe spot from which you can attack HH (as HH, unlike BF, is incapable of jumping). I went to join the fight on my swashbuckler, hydropotina, and OmokTeacher & I were joined also by Cort (playing Cortical, their STRginner), and in our second FP HH fight, Rort (also a STRginner of Flow)!:



hydro doesn’t have enough HP to tank HH’s hits, so I had to very carefully cower behind the safe spot, coming out only to place my Octopus, who was honestly probably doing like 30% of my DPS, thanks to bypassing WDEF calculations (HH was 12 levels above me). After the second fight, the EXP from HH’s second death was enough to level hydro up from 89 to 90! Yay for new bullets (and my ability to be a “pirate sign” for CWKPQ, I suppose…?)!!

Later, we went again, but this time at Hallowed Ground, so I took my DEXgon knight rusa so that I could HB/IW everyone and keep them alive. This time, it was me, OmokTeacher, Celim (a STRginner of Flow), and Ismezin (also a STRginner of Flow):



Bulgoki’s wedding

I also attended the wedding of Bulgoki, a chief bandit friend of mine who I met in OPQ and did one or two MPQs with:



Although he was just marrying one of his mules for the purpose of APQing, it was fun to have the whole (well ok, not exactly the whole, but a good portion of the) gang there <3

MOAR CARDZ

My woodwoman, capreolina, is on the hunt again. It was time to start cardhunting in KFT in earnest, and so I started hunting Moon Bunnies:



Once I finished the set, I got that lovely lightbulb and was called to Lith Harbour to upgrade to the tier 3 ring!!:



Wow~~ And back to KFT I went:

Spoiler: c a r d h u n t

Although nothing can be as annoying as Perfumes, the Blin’s transforming nature is quite annoying as well.



As I went on the ship from Orbis to Ellinia, I quickly cowered in the cabin as the plane took off, to avoid being slain by any Crimson Balrogs. But the other person who was on the flight with me, a DK by the name of Pinaka, slayed the Crimson Balrog for himself and was nice enough to let me loot the card!

Once I had finished the Morphed Blin card set, all that was left for me in KFT was the Scholar Ghost, the 9-tailed fox, and the King Goblins. I didn’t exactly feel like suffering through the process of going from 0/5 Scholar Ghost cards to 5/5, so I decided to skip that for now. And I never plan on getting the 9-tailed fox set, as that monster is necessary for a quest, and is on a respawn timer, so I don’t want to grief anyone doing the quest. But I do want to get the King Goblins’ card sets, so I have been saving up the USE items from the requisite quests. Said quests are repeatable every so many hours, so in the meantime, I have been card-hunting in the adjacent Aquarium region (Aqua Road):

capre hits level 113

GM boofs were announced, and so I decided to do some more grinding at CDs on capre. I was going to do some grinding there on hydropotina as well, but accidentally left some of her equipment on rusa, who is on the same account, so there was no way to transfer it after having already gotten the GM boofs.

In any case, I trioed in a party that was using one of their other characters to serve as an SE/MW mule, so we were all training with both of those buffs active. This, as is to be expected, really skyrocketed capre’s damage!:



And by the time everyone was done, I was roughly 90% EXP or so, so I decided to solo grind the rest of the way, so that I can be level 113 at our second Ravana run attempt very soon!:





hashishi is back at it again with the LPQs

I did some more LPQing on my besinner, hashishi!



I was partying with TimmyDC, who only needed 100(!) more LPQs to get that final 20th pair of LPQ glasses:



And also with the LPQ mule(?) SpankVictim, a perma-level-50 fighter:



…and so hashishi inches closer to that second pair of glasses, and to level 50!

 

(You can also read the original diary entry here, and/or read the diary entry on the Oddjobs forum.)

rangifer’s diary: pt. xliii

R>1 pogginner for Pap run

I think that this series is at the point now where we (and by “we”, I mean “I”) want to see representation from just about every odd job under the sun, or at least, the ones represented within the list of odd jobs on the Oddjobs website. In doing so, we will realise that some of the distinctions that are made in common parlance, and made within the aforementioned list, cannot be accurately represented in this kind of analysis. This should be unsurprising, given that the kind of analysis done in this series is extremely narrow and one-dimensional. We have already seen, in the previous installation of this series, the total exclusion of one of the most primordial and well-known odd jobs: the blood warrior. The previous installation was supposed to include all warrior odd jobs that weren’t already represented, but we skipped blood warriors because we really only care about their PG damage, which almost entirely depends on the WATK of their opponent.

In this installation, I want to do something similar, but with beginners (rather than warriors). One distinction made by our handy odd jobs list that we already have to discard, is that of location. “Islanders” in the broad sense are not really distinguishable from “permabeginners” in the broad sense, for the purpose of our analysis. Their only difference would be access to gear/items, but it doesn’t matter anyways, because we are only considering roughly-level-100 characters… something that doesn’t exist on the island. Similar comments apply to the camper, and also to the magelander (and other islander subspecies, e.g. perfectlander, STRlander, bloodlander, etc.). Furthermore, we will find ourselves collapsing a number of non-beginner jobs into these beginner jobs. While it is obviously true that STRginners, STR mages, brigands, wood(wo)men (in melee), and STRlords (in melee), have dramatically different playstyles and ranges of abilities, they look just about the same for the purpose of this analysis, so we collectively refer to them here as “generic STR whacker”. Likewise, DEXginner and DEX mage will be collectively referred to here as “generic DEX whacker”. Likewise, besinners, claw-wielding LUK warriors, claw-wielding magelets, and claw-wielding lucc buccs will be collectively referred to as “generic claw-wielding non-rogue” (bit of a mouthful, but whatever).

So, this leaves us with the following four:

• Wandginner
• Generic claw-wielding non-rogue
• Generic STR whacker
• Generic DEX whacker

Equipping our wandginner will look very similar to equipping the wand warrior in the previous installation, with the minor exception that I’ll be taking 3 STR off of the shield to reflect the disadvantage that the wandginner has due to only being able to equip shields that lack class requirements. Equipping the generic claw-wielding non-rogue will also be pretty simple, as we can just assume (like we did for the ranged permarogue) that they are throwing Ilbis.

This brings us to the generic STR and DEX whackers. Picking a weapon here is inevitably bound to be controversial, as there are various weapons considered to be “endgame-worthy” for STRginners and their ilk: the Crimson Arcglaive, the Purple Surfboard (PSB), the Fan, and even the Toy of 101. Which weapon(s) pans out to be “the best” is very sensitive to the circumstances and assumptions that surround the choice of weapon. That being said, I want to immediately throw the Crimson Arcglaive out due to its extremely steep STR requirement of 300, which renders it unusable for DEX whackers. It’s easier and a bit more fair of a comparison if we can use the same weapon for both our generic STR and DEX whackers. Our other options lack significant stat requirements, with the slight exception of the Fan, but it requires just ≥31 STR from equipment for DEX whackers, which is pretty doable. That being said, choosing the Fan means pairing it with a shield, so we are going to throw out the Fan to keep things simpler. This leaves just the PSB and the Toy of 101; the Toy of 101 has its advantages, but because of the methods used in this analysis, we can nearly guarantee that the PSB comes out ahead of the Toy of 101, so we will be optimistic and pick the PSB.

With all that said, let’s take a look at our models. As usual, they are all roughly level 100, and have pretty good gear:

The model wandginner

• 547 STR (42 of which is from gear)
• 80 DEX (60 of which is from gear)
• 91 WATK (45 from wand + 13 from shield + 20 from Cider + 3 from cape + 10 from gloves)

The model generic claw-wielding non-rogue

• 581 LUK (60 of which is from gear)
• 34 STR (30 of which is from gear)
• 34 DEX (30 of which is from gear)
• 70 WATK (10 from claw + 27 from stars + 20 from Cider + 3 from cape + 10 from gloves)

The model generic STR whacker

• 550 STR (45 of which is from gear)
• 80 DEX (60 of which is from gear)
• 144 WATK (111 from polearm + 20 from Cider + 3 from cape + 10 from gloves)

The model generic DEX whacker

• 566 DEX (45 of which is from gear)
• 64 STR (60 of which is from gear)
• 144 WATK (111 from polearm + 20 from Cider + 3 from cape + 10 from gloves)

Comparing single-target DPS
As usual, we assume that all player characters and monsters have the same level. And, as in the “R>1 pog ranged for…” series, we will use 600 WDEF to reasonably represent a low- or mid-level boss monster. All models are, of course, limited to only basic-attacking.

model	DPS
Generic STR whacker	2227.8
Wandginner	1308.7
Generic DEX whacker	966.0
Generic claw-wielding non-rogue	841.5

As expected, our generic STR whacker comes out on top here. What might come as somewhat of a surprise to some people is the fact that the wandginner compares very favourably to the other non-STR-based entries here, and the fact that the generic claw-wielding non-rogue is firmly in last place, despite being truly pure LUK (base stats of 4/4/4/x). While our wandginner obviously lacks WATK due to being restricted to wands/staves, they can still put as much AP into STR as they want (as long as they still have enough WACC to hit consistently), and benefit from the guaranteed PSM (primary stat multiplier, the primary stat being STR in this case) of 4.4 that wands/staves give. And while our generic claw-wielding non-rogue does have a metric shitton of LUK (even more than an ordinary rogue of the same level), they are extremely starved for WATK due to getting exactly 10 WATK from their weapon (no matter how good their gear is), and they are hurting in the PSM department: claws have a PSM of just 3.6.

We also, of course, want to compare these figures to the figures calculated in the previous series, and in previous installations of this series. I’ve added some class-based (class as in: beginner, warrior, mage, archer, rogue, pirate) emojis to the “model” column to add some readability to this now quite lengthy table (N.B. some or none of these emojis may show up if you are viewing this on the MapleLegends forums, for some reason(‽)):

model	DPS
⚔️ dagger warrior	14828.4
STRmit (SM)	13807.5
⚔️ DEX WK (fire weak)	11856.8
⚔️ DEXsader	10729.0
⚔️ DEX WK (lightning weak)	9977.1
⚔️ wand warrior	9446.7
⚔️ DEX WK (ice weak)	8097.5
Permarogue	7658.0
⚔️ DEX WK (fire neutral)	7470.9
Wood(wo)man (bow)	6725.3
Wood(wo)man (xbow)	6690.6
‍☠️ Permapirate	6669.1
‍☠️ Swashbuckler (yes Octo)	6598.6
⚔️ DEX WK (lightning neutral)	6217.8
⚔️ permawarrior	5934.0
‍☠️ Swashbuckler (no Octo)	5614.4
Permarcher	5614.0
⚔️ DEXgon knight	5054.7
⚔️ LUK WK (fire weak)	4353.5
⚔️ LUKsader	3868.9
⚔️ LUK WK (lightning weak)	3545.8
⚔️ LUK WK (ice weak)	2738.0
⚔️ LUK WK (fire neutral)	2468.8
Generic STR whacker	2227.8
⚔️ LUK WK (lightning neutral)	1930.3
⚔️ LUK DK	1350.2
Wandginner	1308.7
Generic DEX whacker	966.0
Generic claw-wielding non-rogue	841.5

As expected, our beginners and beginner-a-likes rank pretty low in the ranking that we have so far. But, the generic STR whacker is able to beat certain LUK warriors in certain situations.

IMPORTANT REMINDERS BEFORE ANYONE GOES AROUND TOUTING THESE NUMERIC FIGURES: Keep in mind (and I cannot stress this enough) that this is a purely one-dimensional — and somewhat shoddy — analysis using dummy models, and that jobs cannot be reduced to raw single-target DPS numbers. The odd jobs that are listed above differ quite a bit in their playstyles and range of abilities. Furthermore, this only considers characters that are roughly level 100.

Meet alces

Gather ‘round, y’all — it’s time for our regularly-scheduled “deer has an alt-itis crisis” moment. Meet alces, my undead daggerlord:



(The text in the above screenshot is supposed to read “i’m fucking dead!!!”, but it ended up being half-obscured by my wings…)

For those not familiar with daggerlords, they are perhaps better known as “ditsins”, because they are, in some sense, the opposite of a sindit. But daggerlords have a different concept at their core. While sindits opt for L7/KE throughout first job and the first half or so of second job, they do so opportunistically, to take advantage of L7 having a ridiculous damage formula; later on, they start to look much more like ordinary bandits. Daggerlords opt for Double Stab, while still taking job advancements to assassin/hermit/nightlord (the latter job name being the namesake of “daggerlord”), but could not possibly do so opportunistically; Double Stab does not have a ridiculous damage formula like L7 does… it’s a pretty modest skill with extremely short reach. Instead, rather than Double Stab being the choice skill of the daggerlord in the same way that L7 is the choice skill of the first/second job sindit, the dagger is the choice weapon of the daggerlord, for life. Sindits use claws early on in their life simply because L7 requires its user to wield a claw; daggerlords, on the other hand, swear a lifelong oath to never wield any weapon that is not a dagger. It is for this reason, and this reason alone, that daggerlords are essentially stuck with Double Stab as their only attack from first job onwards.



The joke here is that daggerlords can only make use of two of their second-job skills: Haste and Endure… the rest require their users to wield a claw ;( This makes daggerlords look a lot like permarogues with Haste who never use claws

After advancing to assassin, I was able to do some of my last KPQs with fellow odd-jobber attackattack (drainer, xX17Xx, maebee, strainer), a DEX warrior who will be going the page/WK/pally route!:



And then it was time for the saddest KPQ… my last:



I look forward to having to explain to other LPQers why I can do the thief portal, but cannot range despite being an assassin… >w<

On this episode of “Card-Hunting With capre”…

My woodwoman, capreolina, is still workin’ on them Monster Book Rings!!

Spoiler: capre on the hunt~

I finally accumulated enough of the USE items for summoning King Goblins (Roasted Pork, Rice Wine, and Buckwheat Paste) to finish the corresponding quest and finish the three card sets at the same time!:







Now that that was over with, I decided to skip the rest of the upper Aquarium region for now (I’ll come back to it later), and head over to the Mu Lung Gardens region (which includes Herb Town):

















It pains me deeply to massacre my own kind (R. tarandus is a species of the Capreolinae subfamily, from which capre gets her name), but I must do it! For the +1 allstat and 100 MAXHP~:

sorts fulfills her destiny for the first time~

As some readers of this diary may remember, sorts is my DEX brawler LPQ mule. When I was looking to join an LPQ party on my besinner, hashishi, the only folks I could find were a party that had a single slot left and needed a “sin”. Of course, what they really meant was that they needed someone who was capable of both ranged attacking, and doing the “thief” portal. But sorts, despite being a brawler (and thus neither a sin nor a sindit), is perfectly capable of those two things as well; maxed Double Shot ensures that sorts is truly ranged when wielding a gun, and Oak Barrel is essentially Dark Sight, with some minor differences. I didn’t want to be selfish and insist that I take both hashishi and sorts along (as that would have required at least one of their party members to leave), so I offered to just bring sorts with them so that they can LPQ successfully. It took a little bit of convincing that I really was effectively an assassin, but after that, it went swimmingly:





So, in some sense, this is sorts in her “true form” for the first time, not just me multiclienting with her as a “barrel mule”!

hashishi is freed from LPQ

My besinner, hashishi, has been a bit stuck at LPQ for a while, because I wanted to get her two pairs of LPQ glasses (Broken Glasses) before she graduates. This means being slightly careful, because that’s at least 70 LPQs in total, and I can’t lose experience by killing myself.

I did some more LPQing with SpankVictim, but as his hunter, LeafyIsHere:



And had a lot of fun with misosad, Asklepios, TimmyDC (as usual), RatatouiIIe (Ratatouiiie), and Cerni (R.I.P.):



And we were also joined by StealSonBun and Mulgokie, the latter of whom has appeared in previous diary entries as Bulgoki, the shadower:



And hashishi hit level 50 and 70 LPQ completions at just about the same time!! Before she moves on, I will of course want a zhelm, but for that I have been instructed to wait for Cortical (Phoneme, GishGallop, Cerebellum, Medulla, dendrite, MageFP, etc.) to get to level 50 so that we can trio the Zakum prequests with Gambolpuddy (Taima, Tacgnol, Boymoder, Numidium, Yotsubachan)~

A smol update on potpan and sets

Some may remember my characters potpan and sets, who are my MPQ and OPQ mules, respectively. Neither of them are odd-jobbed (indeed, my only non-odd characters), so I don’t usually include them in this diary unless they are already relevant.

But I have gotten sets to level 51+ (currently 56), so she is a fully-functional OPQ mule now! And she has a bit of a new look, perhaps as the heroine (or villain‽) of OPQ:



And potpan is nearly there (“there” being level 71, of course), as she is currently level 68, almost 69! And she has a new look as well:



I’ve done quite a few OPQs recently on these two, particularly with GishGallop and xX17Xx!

All-odd-jobbed Ravana run, attempt #2

We finally got around to scheduling another attempt at killing Ravana with an odd-jobs-only party! Our first attempt is documented in pt. xxxvi of this diary, so check that out if you haven’t already. Fortunately for our second attempt, I no longer have a graphics driver bug that causes VA-API to completely botch H.264 encoding(!), so I could actually produce some video evidence of our run this time. Our lineup for this attempt was:

• Me as capreolina, level 113 woodwoman of Oddjobs.
• OmokTeacher, level 100 STRginner of Flow.
• Cerebellum, level 41 blood fighter.
• Gumby, level 105 STRginner of Flow.
• Outside, level 95 STRginner of Flow.

You can watch a video of this attempt on the Oddjobs YouTube channel!

 

(You can also read the original diary entry here, and/or read the diary entry on the Oddjobs forum.)

rangifer’s diary: pt. xliv

R>1 mageoid for Crimson Balrog runs

Now that this series has already covered “all” permabeginners and permabeginner-a-likes (see the previous diary entry), as well as “all” odd warrior jobs (see pt. xli and pt. xlii of this diary), it’s time to tackle the next one on the list (this list is in ascending order of ID, as expressed internally by MapleStory itself):

• beginners (0)
• warriors (100)
• magicians (200)
• archers (300)
• rogues (400)
• pirates (500)

That’s right, it’s mage time. But not just any mages; only goofy-ass odd-jobbed mageoid freaks allowed here!:

• STR mages
• DEX mages
• Permamagicians
• Gishes
• Gishlets
• Magelets

We can actually eliminate the first two items on the above list; we included STR mages as “generic STR whackers” in the previous entry, and DEX mages as “generic DEX whackers”. The reason for this is that they are effectively indistinguishable from their permabeginner counterparts for the purpose of this analysis. While this does simplify things, the remaining four items leave things still quite complicated indeed.

Our most straightforward archetype is that of the permamagician. Permamagicians never take second job advancement, so we don’t have any complications due to the three distinct mage paths (F/P, I/L, cleric/priest/bishop) offered from second job onwards. Additionally, we will be assuming that our model permamagician is a “normal” (read: entirely or almost entirely INT) one, and is thus not hybridised with other odd mage jobs like e.g. STR mage. Like most mages around this level (roughly level 100), the choice weapon of our permamagician is an Elemental Wand of some kind, because we assume them to be pure INT. Exactly which level 70 Elemental Wand is chosen, doesn’t matter terribly, because the permamagician has no access to elemental spells, so we will just use the first one. Unfortunately, this means that we have to deal with TMA (total magic attack) gear for the first time, which functions quite a bit differently than gearing for physical attacks. And furthermore, in a server like MapleLegends, mages and washing gear are in such high demand, that a set of physical-attacking gear and TMA gear that are roughly the same level of quality, can differ wildly in market value. So, choosing TMA gear that is “equivalent” to the kind of gear that we have supplied our physical-attackers with, seems to be a troubling task. To make things easier, any time that we want purely TMA gear, I will just be using a lightly modified version of the actual equipment that I use on my own I/L magelet, cervine.

Speaking of magelets, our magelet models will be equipped very similarly to our permamagician model, with two caveats. One caveat is that the exact element of the magelet’s weapon matters, as we assume that none of our magelets are permamagicians, so they will all have access to elemental spells. The other caveat is that, because we assume all models to be “roughly level 100”, this brings Elemental Staves into consideration. Elemental Staves are only equippable by those on the higher end of “roughly level 100”, because they require the mage to be at least level 103. So, in order to get numbers somewhere in between using an Elemental Wand and an Elemental Staff, we will be giving the magelet a TMA advantage on their gear equal to half of the difference between a wand and a staff. Besides the gearing considerations, we will have three different magelet models: one for each of the third job mage classes (F/P, I/L, priest). Actually, the Heal skill somewhat complicates things here; Heal is the main weapon of the cleric/priest magelet, because its damage (although, not its healing) scales on LUK. In addition, Heal changes its per-target damage based on how many targets there are in total. This makes Heal a super weird case here, but we will, for completeness, include a single model that does use Heal; we will use the best possible case, where the monster is the only other target of Heal besides the magelet themselves (and also, obviously the monster will be undead, and therefore susceptible to Heal).

This brings us to the gishlets and the gishes. These two odd jobs are extraordinarily complex; they prove to be more difficult to plan, build, and equip than perhaps any other job (odd or not) in the entire game, and their two modes of attacking (melee and magic) make our analysis even hairier than it already is. So we are actually going to leave gish(let)s their entire own entry in this series.

With all of that said, let’s take a look at our models:

The model permamagician

• 613 INT (7 from wand, 6 from shield, 25 from hat/helmet, 3 from glasses, 5 from earrings, 10 from cape, 16 from overall, 7 from gloves, 5 from pendant, 3 from shoes, 5 from rings)
• 146 raw MATK (97 from wand, 9 from shield, 10 from earrings, 6 from cape, 4 from gloves, 20 from Wizard Elixir)

And, as you’d expect, our permamagician will only be attacking with Magic Claw.

The model magelet

• 112 INT (7 from wand/staff, 6 from shield, 25 from hat/helmet, 3 from glasses, 5 from earrings, 10 from cape, 16 from overall, 7 from gloves, 5 from pendant, 3 from shoes, 5 from rings)
• 535 LUK (30 of which is from gear)
• 163 raw MATK (114 from wand/staff, 9 from shield, 10 from earrings, 6 from cape, 4 from gloves, 20 from Meditation/Wizard Elixir)

For our F/P and I/L magelets, we assume that they are using an Elemental Wand/Staff that is appropriate for the spell being cast. We assume maxed Element Amplification, and at least level 11 Spell Booster. Because the F/P has three main attacking skills in third job (Poison Mist, Explosion, and Element Composition), whereas the I/L really only has two (Ice Strike and Element Composition), the F/P is in a bit of a tough position here. Thankfully, although Fire Arrow is 30 points of basic attack behind Element Composition, Fire Arrow does at least have a smaller attack period; we will include both spells (assuming that either one is maxed), to be fair to our F/P magelet.

For our priest magelet, we will have the aforementioned Heal case, as well as a case that uses Magic Claw (which will, at the same time, represent a magelet permamagician!), and two for SR (elementally neutral & weak).

For all elemental spells, we will be splitting into two cases, one for the monster being elementally neutral towards the spell, and one for it being elementally weak.

Comparing single-target DPS

As usual, we assume that all player characters and monsters have the same level. And, as in the “R>1 pog ranged for…” series, we will use 600 WDEF & 600 MDEF to reasonably represent a low- or mid-level boss monster.

model	DPS
Magelet (F/P Ele Comp; weak)	4520.7
Magelet (I/L Ele Comp; weak)	4192.2
Magelet (Fire Arrow; weak)	3976.9
Permamagician	3307.3
Magelet (F/P Ele Comp; neutral)	2877.8
Magelet (Heal; 1 non-self target)	2853.7
Magelet (I/L Ele Comp; neutral)	2658.8
Magelet (Fire Arrow; neutral)	2498.2
Magelet (SR; weak)	1206.1
Magelet (SR; neutral)	699.2
Magelet (priest/permamagician; Magic Claw)	234.4

So the first thing that we notice here is that the elemental magelets can outperform our permamagician in cases where the monster is elementally weak to their element(s). This perhaps comes as a surprise, considering that the permamagician is pure INT, whereas our magelets are INTless by definition. But in more neutral settings, our permamagician comes out on top.

With our priestlet, we can see extremely clearly the effects of the 600 MDEF; Magic Claw takes the biggest hit, because MDEF is (unlike WDEF) effectively applied to individual lines of damage, and Magic Claw has two of these! So MDEF counts against them twice, leaving the priestlet/permamagicianlet at a measly 234.4 DPS when using Magic Claw… And SR doesn’t fare very well either, because the priestlet has no pre-MDEF damage multipliers (besides elemental weakness, in that particular case), unlike the elemental magelets, who have both Element Amplification and an Elemental Wand/Staff.

We also, of course, want to compare these figures to the figures calculated in the previous series, and in previous installations of this series. I’ve added some class-based (class as in: beginner, warrior, mage, archer, rogue, pirate) emojis to the “model” column to add some readability to this now quite lengthy table (N.B. some or none of these emojis may show up if you are viewing this on the MapleLegends forums, for some reason(‽)):

model	DPS
⚔️ dagger warrior	14828.4
STRmit (SM)	13807.5
⚔️ DEX WK (fire weak)	11856.8
⚔️ DEXsader	10729.0
⚔️ DEX WK (lightning weak)	9977.1
⚔️ wand warrior	9446.7
⚔️ DEX WK (ice weak)	8097.5
Permarogue	7658.0
⚔️ DEX WK (fire neutral)	7470.9
Wood(wo)man (bow)	6725.3
Wood(wo)man (xbow)	6690.6
‍☠️ Permapirate	6669.1
‍☠️ Swashbuckler (yes Octo)	6598.6
⚔️ DEX WK (lightning neutral)	6217.8
⚔️ permawarrior	5934.0
‍☠️ Swashbuckler (no Octo)	5614.4
Permarcher	5614.0
⚔️ DEXgon knight	5054.7
Magelet (F/P Ele Comp; weak)	4520.7
⚔️ LUK WK (fire weak)	4353.5
Magelet (I/L Ele Comp; weak)	4192.2
Magelet (Fire Arrow; weak)	3976.9
⚔️ LUKsader	3868.9
⚔️ LUK WK (lightning weak)	3545.8
Permamagician	3307.3
Magelet (F/P Ele Comp; neutral)	2877.8
Magelet (Heal; 1 non-self target)	2853.7
⚔️ LUK WK (ice weak)	2738.0
Magelet (I/L Ele Comp; neutral)	2658.8
Magelet (Fire Arrow; neutral)	2498.2
⚔️ LUK WK (fire neutral)	2468.8
Generic STR whacker	2227.8
⚔️ LUK WK (lightning neutral)	1930.3
⚔️ LUK DK	1350.2
Wandginner	1308.7
Magelet (SR; weak)	1206.1
Generic DEX whacker	966.0
Generic claw-wielding non-rogue	841.5
Magelet (SR; neutral)	699.2
Magelet (priest/permamagician; Magic Claw)	234.4

Humourously enough, we now have two entries that can be beaten out by our “generic claw-wielding non-rogue”… But on the bright side for our odd mages considered in this entry, some of them compare quite favourably to the permabeginners and permabeginner-a-likes, as well as to LUK warriors! As usual, many of these comparisons are quite awkward; for example, priestlets and I/L magelets are built more for multi-target DPS, not single-target. And we don’t even consider any of the poison abilities of our F/P magelet!

IMPORTANT REMINDERS BEFORE ANYONE GOES AROUND TOUTING THESE NUMERIC FIGURES: Keep in mind (and I cannot stress this enough) that this is a purely one-dimensional — and somewhat shoddy — analysis using dummy models, and that jobs cannot be reduced to raw single-target DPS numbers. The odd jobs that are listed above differ quite a bit in their playstyles and range of abilities. Furthermore, this only considers characters that are roughly level 100.

Doing some SG/MY quests with the crew~

I hopped on my DEXgon knight, rusa, because I was invited by my friends to do two Capt. Lats, and I wanted to try to keep ducklings alive with HB+IW. When I got there, we found out that they had already done their two Capt. Lats for the day, and we had to wait 90 minutes or so for reset (as in 00:00:00 UTC) to happen.

So we went to do some SG/MY quests:



We managed to each complete the “Malek’s Joy of Music” questline, which I now have on my list of favourite quests, as it awards a total of a whopping 26 fame by the end of it (although the EXP and meso rewards are not so good…)!

And we did successfully kill two Capt. Lats, although unfortunately, we could not steer the magical attacks away from ducklings enough to keep her alive



rusa finally gets a good helm :O

I finally (after god knows how many dolls…) pulled a good Ravana Helmet for rusa!:



Although the DEX is just average (18), which makes it not quite as good as a perfect 20/20 helm, the 20 STR makes it a real contender that I will probably end up throwing helm DEX 60%s at in the future! I don’t know if I have the energy to keep farming dolls on rusa in hopes of another 20 STR helm :X Hopefully I have good scrolling luck…

cervid joins a Ravana run!

I met Bulgoki (a shadower who has featured in some previous diary entries) at the Golden Temple (the region where Ravana is) and found out that he was trying to put a pair of Ravana runs together. I wished him luck (and told him a little about our two failed all-odd-job attempts), but when he mentioned that he needed HS, I offered to bring my STR priest, cervid, along.

And so I did!:



I managed to get, uhm, very smol quantities of EXP due to the DPS that I contributed~! Being the lowest level in the party and being more than 5 levels below Ravana’s level really didn’t help EXP-wise, but I was satisfied with the amount of DPS that I was able to deal without triggering Ravana’s special attacks by getting too close to it. And it was a fun experience!

cervid goes questing

After finishing up with Ravana, I took cervid do to some questing. First, I wanted to do the KFT quests “Legends of Hometown” (which requires you to kill the nine-tailed fox) and “Goblin at Black Mountain” (which requires you to kill each of the King Goblins). The former would give a nifty EXP boost (almost 1% EXP at cervid’s level) and some fame, whereas I could get a Goblin Bat from the latter:





It may have taken me two hours of pointless waiting to do it, but I did find an Old Fox eventually, and killed it!:



And, after completing the Roasted Pork quest again, it was time to take out each one of the King Goblins in succession:



And I got my neato Goblin Bat! Although it’s not actually very useful to me at this point (if I want more TMA from my weapon, I can just use my fancy Black Umbrella), and is untradeable, the Goblin Bat is a very cute weapon, and I was very pleased to have good scrolling luck with it (passed a 30% and five 60%s)!:



I had the ETCs all ready for Freed from Darkness, so I wanted to do that as well, which meant also doing the half-dozen or so quests that lead up to it, like Sakura and the Teddy Bear, Doll in the Dark, and Soul in the Dark:





Oh, and while I was at it, I felt it more fun to fight some Crimson Balrogs on my flights, rather than sit in the cabin:



Introducing mae to Fancy Amps

xX17Xx (drainer, attackattack, maebee, strainer), who is a permarogue of Oddjobs, was considering farming Voodoos for EXP and mesos. I mentioned that while Voodoos are obviously very good for mesos (and xX17Xx would be quite fast at farming them, with L7), if she wants good EXP, she might try Fancy Amps; Fancy Amps have the extremely high EXP/HP ratios characteristic of Taipei 101, while being more suitable for single-target (and especially ranged single-target) attackers like xX17Xx, compared to something like CDs.

Of course, Fancy Amps (again, like other Taipei 101 monsters) hit like smol trucks, so I had to warm mae about the dangers, and there was an accidental death here or there. But after she tested solo EPM (experience per minute), I offered to come to Fancy Amps with cervid, to test out some duo EPM (with HS):



So we have learned that this is, as expected, an excellent grinding spot for xX17Xx. Of course, being level 114, the EPM isn’t all that great for cervid, but still better than me just HSing myself and getting solo EXP from these amps…

alces goes questing

Now that alces had officially graduated KPQ, it was time to work her way towards LPQ~

I had a fun time doing the same with dama, my brigand, without even going to Ariant, so I did something similar here. First up was getting that shoe JUMP 30%:



And then finishing up some roughly level 20 quests, like the 99 Green Mushroom kill quest and the 100 Green Mushroom kill quest:



The Mano quest (had to wait nearly an hour for Mano to spawn >w<):



Almost all the other Sleepywood 99-kill quests, including the ones for Horny Mushrooms, Zombie Mushrooms, Evil Eyes, and Jr. Boogies:



I got that sweet, sweet level 25 cape:



Oh yeah, almost forgot the Curse Eye 99-kill quest:



At this point, it was time to go off to Ludus Lake to finish off level 34. Of note were Cleaning Up Eos Tower:



And Spider’s Out At Eos Tower:



The latter two of which was just enough to bump me up to level 35!! LPQ time, hehe~

alces’s first LPQs

Believe it or not, I have yet to even find anyone who noticed that I’m an assassin. It helps to sometimes keep my NX weapon unequipped (revealing the kfan underneath), which is enough to make people assume that I’m a dit who just hasn’t got SB yet. And I always check to make sure that we have range in our party, since obviously I cannot fulfil that role; although I can do the “thief” portal quite well:



And so I found out, in my first Alishar fight, that being this squishy and this close-range really hurts:



Cue me chugging a hundred White Potions per fight…

Oh, and I got to LPQ once again with misosad, who featured in a previous diary entry from when I was LPQing on my besinner, hashishi:



misoded (R.I.P.)

hashishi starts working towards her Ellin ring

Getting an Ellin ring for my besinner, hashishi, is particularly important, as the +100 MAXHP represents a considerable increase in her poor unwashed-permabeginner HP pool. And the slightly higher damage from the +1 allstat is nice as well! I had already collected a batch or two of ETC items for the final part of the questline (Hardened Pieces of Steel, Lazy Buffy Marbles, Wild Kargo Eyes, etc.), so it was just up to hashishi to do the rest of the questline herself:



This is proving to be quite arduous, as besinners are somewhat lacking in the damage department:



I was hitting “1”s somewhat often, as pictured above, even with Cider + Echo of Hero + some pretty damn good gear. But I continued on for a bit more before stopping to OPQ on my MPQ mule, potpan:



…So we won’t see that ring until a future installment of this diary

More card-hunting for capre!

Oh, and we can’t forget my card-hunting fiend, capreolina (my woodwoman). I finished up two more card sets in the Mu Lung Gardens region:





And that was enough to get me to my T4 ring!:



And then back to Mu Lung Gardens it was, to finish up the region (not including quest & party quest bosses):

Spoiler: Razing Mu Lung Gardens

I’m actually only 3/5 on Master Dummy, but I will be finishing it up as I concurrently do some cards in China (which is conveniently a World Tour location, accessible through Spinel).

And so I decided to move on to the Shanghai region of China:

Spoiler: Visiting Shanghai

quack



I found a random BoMD (not a good one or anything, just 77 WATK) while questing/hunting here, so I tried it on for size. Why not:





You ever hit a centipede so hard with a fan that a card comes out?:









And I did finish the following set, as I’m very aware that it is a missable card set:



…And after waiting 90 minutes or so for a Giant Centipede to spawn in that quest-only map, I was able to successfully complete the questline!

<3

 

(You can also read the original diary entry here, and/or read the diary entry on the Oddjobs forum.)

rangifer’s diary: pt. xlv

R>1 mixed attacker for King Sage Cat run

In the previous installment of this series (which is part of the previous diary entry), we took a look at odd-jobbed mages:

• STR mages
• DEX mages
• Permamagicians
• Gishes
• Gishlets
• Magelets

And we were able to cover all of the above archetypes, with two exceptions: the gish and the gishlet. We skipped these two because they are the “mixed attackers” of the bunch; “mixed attacker” meaning one who attacks both with physical attacks and with magical spells. As mentioned in the previous installment, mixed attacker jobs are extraordinarily complex; they prove to be more difficult to plan, build, and equip than perhaps any other job (odd or not) in the entire game. This makes the treatment, in this context (and other contexts, for that matter…), of gishes and gishlets unusually difficult. To simplify things, we will only be looking at the melee damage output of these mixed attackers. The reason for this is that melee damage is inherently single-target for mages, whereas their magic damage is possibly multi-target. So for their melee to be useful, they will need to focus on making it their primary mode of dealing single-target DPS.

First, we will consider the gishlet (a.k.a. LUK gish). Right off the bat, we will assume a “normal” gishlet build, which is DEXless; gishlets are INTless by definition, but not necessarily DEXless. This still leaves the issue of how much AP is going into STR vs. going into LUK, and the issue of what equipment our gishlet is using. To solve these problems straightforwardly and simply, we will first assume that our gishlet model wants to be capable of successfully hitting a 35 AVOID monster 100% of the time, given that the monster is at or below their level. 35 AVOID is chosen because, while this is somewhat lower than the AVOID of some monsters that the gishlet may want to train on (for example, Latest Hits Compilations have 35 AVOID, but Greatest Oldies have 40, so they will “MISS” the Greatest Oldies sometimes), it’s a reasonable bar to set for the gishlet while still retaining solid melee damage. Mixed attackers are generally limited by their MACC rather than their WACC, so we will just look at how much INT & LUK the gishlet needs to achieve this MACC goal, and assume that they will end up with enough WACC along the way (remember that LUK contributes to both MACC and WACC):

Above, we have the formula for calculating effective MACC, due to Technolink’s post, which was probably posted around late 2007/early 2008, and reposted by Russt, then reposted on AyumiLove’s blog here. Technolink attributes this formula to Thikket and Nekonecat. The lowercase delta (“δ”) represents the difference in level between the monster and the player-character, to a minimum of zero. Because we assume the monster to be at or below the gishlet’s level, δ = 0, so we can simplify:

And we want an AVOID of 35, so:

And we will treat ⌊INT ÷ 10⌋ + ⌊LUK ÷ 10⌋ as its own quantity, called intluk:

And, Thikket & Nekonecat’s work defines the probability of hitting using a formula derived from quadratic regression:

Which unfortunately (or, fortunately, if you’re into it) means that we have to do some non-trivial algebra. Thankfully, the quadratic formula will be doing almost all of the work here:

At which point, we can plug this into the quadratic formula: a = −2.5795, b = 5.2343, c = −2.6749. Long story short, this does not produce any real solutions (b² - 4ac is a negative quantity), which would seem to imply that a 100% hit-rate is impossible. In fact, the best that we can do is a hit-rate of ≈98.045% or so, which is considerably lower than most of the magical hit-rates that we observe in practice (because in practice, we often can observe hit-rates that are either 100%, or at least extremely close to 100%). So it seems that our fancy-dancey quadratic regression result from 2007 is, at best, a vague approximation. This is not the place to discuss what the actual magical hit-rate formula is, and we are already much too far into the weeds, so we are going to just take what we can get from this formula, by aiming for a hit-rate of ≈98.045% instead of 100%. Because our discriminant is thus zero (and the square root of zero is zero), the quadratic formula simplifies considerably:

So the effectiveMacc value that we are shooting for is roughly ≈1.0145958519092848. So now we know how much intluk we want:

But intluk is always an integer, so we have to take the ceiling of this quantity to get intluk = 37. This means that if, for example, the total INT of the gishlet were 100 (which would mean 80 INT from gear, which is reasonable if the gishlet is in full magic mode), we would need a total LUK of at least 270. This would really chew into the gishlet’s damage, because this implies a base LUK that is quite high, and thus a base STR that suffers. Based on this total LUK figure of (very) roughly ≈270, I want to just be generous and set the base LUK at 200. Some of this ≈70 LUK gap is obviously made up by gear, but the rest of it can be lost, and the gishlet can just deal with a subpar (by normal mage standards) hit-rate with magic.

For our gish, we will make similar assumptions; in particular, we only care about their melee damage. Gishes are actually somewhat more complex, even compared to gishlets, but thankfully we already have a calculator dedicated to a problem like this: the Oddjobs Gish AP Calculator. This software is by no means beta-, or even alpha-, quality software, and in fact it uses the same shitty quadratically-regressed magical hit-rate formula exposited above, but it will just have to do. Ultimately, I’m just getting tired of all this wacky mixed-attacker stuff, and any model that we decide on will always have way more asterisks attached to it than any other model.

So we start our base stats at the minimum for a magician: 4/4/20/4. I asked GishGallop (Cortical, Phoneme, dendrite, WizetWizard, Medulla, Amygdala), an I/L gish who is our resident gish expert, about what gear that they use on their actual gish. GishGallop is not as high of a level as our models here (our models here being roughly level 100), but the equipment is still representative. Here are the raw, unbuffed stats granted by GishGallop’s gear:

• STR: 38
• DEX: 30
• INT: 24
• LUK: 57
• WACC: 59
• WATK: 120
• MATK: 88

And we assume the use of Sniper Pills, Ciders, and maxed Meditation, so the above WACC value becomes 69, the WATK becomes 140, and the MATK becomes 108. We have been assuming, for our other models, that each model has 517 base AP on top of the absolute minimum stats of 4/4/4/4. Because we are starting at 16 total stats higher than this, at 4/4/20/4, we will have 517 − 16 = 501 AP remaining. The weapon being used is a Black Umbrella, which is a speed 5 one-handed sword (also note that using a sword precludes the use of Spell Booster). And we are assuming maxed Ice Strike and Element Amplification. As usual, the monster has 600 WDEF and 600 MDEF, and as above, the monster has 35 AVOID. Then we only have to consider the “wDominanceFactor” (or “swagnitude”, as GishGallop likes to call it), which, simply put, determines roughly by what factor we want our single-target melee DPS to dominate our single-target magical DPS. We will leave this at the default value of 2.

For simplicity and some fairness, we will give the same weapon + shield combo to oour gishlet that we gave to our gish, so their total WATK, and attack speed values, and PSMs (primary stat multipliers), will be identical.

Please notice the truly incredible number of assumptions that are baked into our gish (and gishlet) models (including, for example, the assumption that the gish is an I/L). With that in mind, let’s take a look at our models:

The model gishlet

• 373 STR (60 of which is from gear)
• 49 DEX (45 of which is from gear)
• 200 + x LUK (x of which is from gear)
• 140 WATK

The model gish

• 369 STR (38 of which is from gear)
• 34 DEX (30 of which is from gear)
• 209 INT (24 of which is from gear)
• 70 LUK (57 of which is from gear)
• 140 WATK

Oops!
So, I’m only realising just now that these two separate models are unfair. And in any case, it just turns out that gish and gishlet are just about identical for the purposes of our analysis here, since we don’t even consider their magic-casting abilities (amongst other things). So I want to just use the gishlet model above and be done with it.

Comparing single-target DPS

As usual, we assume that all player characters and monsters have the same level. And, as in the “R>1 pog ranged for…” series, we will use 600 WDEF & 600 MDEF to reasonably represent a low- or mid-level boss monster.

model	DPS
Gish(let) (melee)	1238.3

So there’s nothing to compare yet, per se, as we ended up with just one (1) model after all of this effort. So we want to compare these figures to the figures calculated in the previous series, and in previous installations of this series. I’ve added some class-based (class as in: beginner, warrior, mage, archer, rogue, pirate) emojis to the “model” column to add some readability to this now quite lengthy table (N.B. some or none of these emojis may show up if you are viewing this on the MapleLegends forums, for some reason(‽)):

model	DPS
⚔️ dagger warrior	14828.4
STRmit (SM)	13807.5
⚔️ DEX WK (fire weak)	11856.8
⚔️ DEXsader	10729.0
⚔️ DEX WK (lightning weak)	9977.1
⚔️ wand warrior	9446.7
⚔️ DEX WK (ice weak)	8097.5
Permarogue	7658.0
⚔️ DEX WK (fire neutral)	7470.9
Wood(wo)man (bow)	6725.3
Wood(wo)man (xbow)	6690.6
‍☠️ Permapirate	6669.1
‍☠️ Swashbuckler (yes Octo)	6598.6
⚔️ DEX WK (lightning neutral)	6217.8
⚔️ permawarrior	5934.0
‍☠️ Swashbuckler (no Octo)	5614.4
Permarcher	5614.0
⚔️ DEXgon knight	5054.7
Magelet (F/P Ele Comp; weak)	4520.7
⚔️ LUK WK (fire weak)	4353.5
Magelet (I/L Ele Comp; weak)	4192.2
Magelet (Fire Arrow; weak)	3976.9
⚔️ LUKsader	3868.9
⚔️ LUK WK (lightning weak)	3545.8
Permamagician	3307.3
Magelet (F/P Ele Comp; neutral)	2877.8
Magelet (Heal; 1 non-self target)	2853.7
⚔️ LUK WK (ice weak)	2738.0
Magelet (I/L Ele Comp; neutral)	2658.8
Magelet (Fire Arrow; neutral)	2498.2
⚔️ LUK WK (fire neutral)	2468.8
Generic STR whacker	2227.8
⚔️ LUK WK (lightning neutral)	1930.3
⚔️ LUK DK	1350.2
Wandginner	1308.7
Gish(let) (melee)	1238.3
Magelet (SR; weak)	1206.1
Generic DEX whacker	966.0
Generic claw-wielding non-rogue	841.5
Magelet (SR; neutral)	699.2
Magelet (priest/permamagician; Magic Claw)	234.4

So, I realise that after all of this work, and confusion, it’s quite underwhelming to end up with a single dainty number. But hopefully, this goes to show a little bit of the incredible complexity of mixed-attacker jobs, and also goes to show just how limited the kind of analysis that we’re doing here is. As perhaps expected, the gish(let) deals more than half of the DPS of the generic STR whacker, but not too much more. This reflects the AP distribution shifting somewhat away from STR in favour of LUK & INT.

IMPORTANT REMINDERS BEFORE ANYONE GOES AROUND TOUTING THESE NUMERIC FIGURES: Keep in mind (and I cannot stress this enough) that this is a purely one-dimensional — and somewhat shoddy — analysis using dummy models, and that jobs cannot be reduced to raw single-target DPS numbers. The odd jobs that are listed above differ quite a bit in their playstyles and range of abilities. Furthermore, this only considers characters that are roughly level 100. Furthermore, gish(let)s are far too complex for their own good, and should be handled with extreme caution…

hashishi finishes up the Ellin Forest questline

I promised to finish up the quests to get my besinner, hashishi, her Ellin ring in the previous diary entry. And so, promptly, that was exactly what I (painstakingly) did:





Killing all of the Primitive Boars required for the quest proved to be quite the challenge, as they are quite fast (speed of −20) and I only very rarely knock them back (knockback of 500). So, being ranged-but-actually-not-ranged really bit me in the ass here:



But I was able to kill them, albeit slowly:



And finished the questline! Yay ring!!:



hashishi tries out OPQ for the first time

Redz (Permanovice, Hanger) needed some help getting an OPQ party together (in particular, he needed two more people), so I took my OPQ mule, sets, as well as one more of my characters. The only other character that I had in level range was hashishi, so I supposed that it was time for hashishi to try out OPQ~



And thankfully, I had quite enough HP for Papa Pixie to not be capable of one-shotting me (although he can two-shot me with ease):



And we found out that despite using a claw as her main weapon, and using it to throw stars, hashishi seems to lack Haste entirely! How strange…



Too bad Nimble Feet isn’t a party buff!

More LPQing with alces~

You may know alces, my undead daggerlord. Well, she has been back at it again with the LPQs. This time, with justbegin, a STRginner of Flow (and now of GangGang):



And I did a few LPQs with Gilachi and some other hispanophone party members; Gilachi is an assassin who only wields a claw, so when we went off to our first run, I assumed that she could serve as range for our party (as she didn’t specify otherwise). Unfortunately for us, it turned out that Gilachi was very heavily HP washing, and so when we did come to stage 7, she was hitting for two (2) damage per L7 (1 damage per line)…

We struggled with it for a while, but once I gave her some of my Ciders and Sniper Pills, as well as almost all of my equipment(!), she was able to hit for roughly 150~200 damage per L7! This was doable enough that we did finish our first LPQ, even if we lost one along the way (who left after seeing that Gilachi did no damage in stage 7):



Our following PQs featured Wamu, an LPQ mule who did more than enough to fill in the range gap in our party.

Oh, and I got to do a few LPQs with fellow Oddjobs member attackattack, the DEX page!:



<3

Getting ready to do some CWK crafting!

I’ve been thinking about doing some CWK (Crimson Wood Keep) crafting for a while now, particularly to start crafting myself some Crimson Arcglaives, but also for some other assorted reasons. The Arcglaive is particularly valuable for my STR priest, cervid, as I can even make use of the MATK that it provides, and it’s also a premier endgame weapon for not just cervid, but also my woodwoman capreolina, and even my brigand, dama.

capreolina had already done a number of the CWK quests before, mostly to get access to Mo’s shop, so my starting point was completing The Brewing Storm:



While you do only need to get 10 of their ETC items for this quest, Stormbreakers spawn so sparsely on the maps that they spawn on, and have such a low drop-rate for their badges, that this quest took me quite a while. But I was busy collecting Windraider Badges and, of course, Crimson Wood in the meantime, so it wasn’t too bad.

I also wanted to complete Storming the Castle, so I did most of the kills required for that quest over at tPoS (which is the other map that spawns Crimson Trees, aside from the more popular Lower Ascent):



And I even completed Mark of Heroism as well, which proved to be a lot more annoying than I expected, as I had never farmed for Typhon Feathers before. But being able to skip the JQ that leads to CWM (Crimson Wood Mountains) is very convenient, and saves me the trouble of dying in the JQ, using TP rocks, and/or dooring myself via cervid.

In order to do crafting, though, I also had to complete The Fallen Warriors. I had a smol number of Elder Ashes already on hand, but I was not about to farm the rest of the 50 myself, so I bought the rest on the FM

And by the end of all of this, I had just enough Windraider Badges to turn in for a raffle prize. So I turned them in and got…:



A very sad Black Mamba that is 3 WATK below average. Oh well. On the bright side, I had collected some 120(!) or so Crimson Woods ni my travels, so that’s all going towards my first Arcglaive craft!

M0AR card-hunting with capre

Yup yup. More card-hunting with capreolina, my woodwoman ranger!:

Spoiler: CARDS!

With the Rooster set finished, I was done with Shanghai, and so it was off to the Nihal Desert in search of even m0ar cardz:

And that was enough to get capre her T5 ring!!:



Yeyy~~

OK, back to work

Spoiler: MORE CARDS!

I did not finish the Homunscullo set, as I apparently don’t hate myself quite that much.



And with the Homun set finished, all that was left for me in the Nihal Desert was Homunscullo (yeah, no), Kimera (more respawn timers, also gross), Deo (Deo is on a respawn timer and is necessary for a quest, so I won’t grief any questers by trying to complete that set), D. Roy (more gross respawn timers), and Security Camera (you guessed it: even more nasty respawn timers). So it was time to move on to Singapore:









Yay for cute dark-coloured blobs~!

Going to Japan with Cortical

Cortical (GishGallop, Phoneme, WizetWizard, Medulla, dendrite, Amygdala) was trying to farm cards from some monsters in Japan. After finding out that Nightghost cards are far more difficult than the early 2/5 lead Cort to believe, they asked for my help, so I headed over there on my DEXgon knight, rusa:



Indeed, even with rusa’s incredible mobbing skills, the Nightghosts proved reluctant to drop even a single card. But eventually, after being joined by Copo (Celim, Fino, Sommer), a permapirate of Oddjobs, we managed to make the Nightghosts break:



I didn’t loot this card, of course, it made the fifth in Cortical’s collection. With that all done, and with a bunch of ETC items turned into Faito’s exchange quest (in exchange for a bunch of useless garbage), we hung around Japan a little more. I tried my hand at hunting some Male Bosses, mostly in a vain attempt to get Black Umbrellas and/or Japanese Maps, but ended up not getting anything other than cards. The drop rate was high enough, though, that I went from 0/5 to 5/5 very quickly!:



Nice~

More PPQing with allies

Me, mae (drainer, xX17Xx, attackattack, maebee, strainer), Celim (Copo, Fino, Sommer), and Cortical (GishGallop, Phoneme, WizetWizard, Medulla, dendrite, Amygdala) were all online at the same time, and we decided that we wanted to do something all together. After some deliberation, we decided that Celim really likes PPQ, and the rest of us… were at least willing to tolerate a few runs, so we headed over to Herb Town to do some PPQs together:



As you can see in the above image, it was:

• Me, as my swashbuckler, hydropotina.
• Cort, as their I/L gish, GishGallop.
• mae, as her permarogue, xX17Xx.
• Celo, as his STRginner, Celim.

And here we are, with me now in ranged-pew-pew mode, kicking the Lord Pirate’s ass:



And, by the end of is, Celim was inspired by seeing hydropotina in action enough that he set out to make his own swashbuckler (actually a kind of swashbuckler/punch slinger hybrid), Sommer!

capre hits level 114!!

Oh, and I did some sadgrinding at CDs because of GM boofs. In the process, I managed to get capreolina to level up to 114!!:



Wow~ Now cervid and capreolina are both 114! But I expect cervid to pull ahead a bit, now that I am focussing on doing more grinding as her.

cervine starts cleaning up her act

So, my I/L magelet cervine has felt somewhat neglected as of late, since I haven’t been playing her very often, and most recently I pretty much was just grinding as her. So, besides now being level 105, which is definitely too high-level for a magelet, I want to clean up her act. She is still lugging around that T0 ring, has a lot of quests that she needs to get under her belt, and I even want to use her to farm Crimson Wood, owing to her nice mobbing abilities and ability to Teleport.

So, first things first, it was time to get rid of that T0 ring once and for all:

Spoiler: cervine on her first concerted effort to hunt for cards~

Crimson Balrogs are no match for my Element Composition!! (I didn’t actually finish this set, just got 1/5 on the way back to Victoia Island.)











Pig cards are always frustrating, considering that their card drop rate seems to be some 4 or so times lower than that of the Ribbon Pig…



I (thankfully!) got quite lucky with the Jr. Necki cards here, and finished the set even before I finished the Octopus set.







Cortical’s baby dagger warrior, Medulla, came to harass — I mean, accompany, me on my quest:





I didn’t finish the Shade card set, I was just there killing Shades because Medulla told me to!!

And I got cervine her first Monster Book ring! Yey~:

 

(You can also read the original diary entry here, and/or read the diary entry on the Oddjobs forum.)

rangifer’s diary: pt. xlvi

R>1 toxophilite for ZMM run

In the previous installment of this series (which is part of the previous diary entry), we finished up looking at odd-jobbed mages. With that, we can now move on to the archers of the bunch! We’ve actually already covered most of the bases here. In particular, we already went over the following models:

• Permarcher
• Wood(wo)man (bow)
• Wood(wo)man (xbow)
• Generic STR whacker

The latter of which represents the wood(wo)man in melee. But this still leaves us with the following yet to be covered:

• Bow-whacker
• Bowginner

When it comes to equipping our models, they will look rather similar to the permarcher model; like the permarcher, bow-whackers and bowginners lack stat constraints, so they can wear basically any jobbed gear. Bowginners can only basic-attack with their bow, but are at least allowed to use arrows/quarrels, so the considerations that they have for weapon choice are basically the same as for the permarcher (in fact, the bowginner is just a restricted form of permarcher). As such, the bowginner model and permarcher model will have identical gear; in particular, we assume that they are using a crossbow. On the other hand, bow-whackers’ methods of combat are a bit more exotic, so it’s not immediately clear whether they should be using a bow, or a crossbow.

A simple look at the damage formula for PKB (the only attacking skill of bow-whackers) indicates that the PSM (primary stat multiplier) is the same regardless of what type of weapon you use. In particular, it’s 3.4, which is the ordinary PSM when using a bow (the PSM for crossbows is a more impressive 3.6). So it seems that this would give the advantage to bow-users, or at least make bow-users and crossbow-users break even. However, the particular weapons that we’re looking at (Dark Nisrock as a bow, Dark Neschere as a crossbow) are speed 6; with booster, that’s speed 4. Speed 4 just so happens to be the only speed at which bows and crossbows have identical attack periods for standard attacks; at any other speed category, crossbows are slower (larger period). So the Dark Neschere is actually just better, with 3 extra WATK on average, and a slightly lower STR requirement as well.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at our models:

The model bow-whacker

• 530 DEX (80 of which is from gear)
• 100 STR (25 of which is from gear)
• 143 WATK (110 from crossbow + 20 from Cider + 3 from cape + 10 from gloves)

The model bowginner

• 530 DEX (80 of which is from gear)
• 100 STR (25 of which is from gear)
• 148 WATK (110 from crossbow + 20 from Cider + 3 from cape + 10 from gloves + 5 from quarrels)

Comparing single-target DPS
As usual, we assume that all player characters and monsters have the same level. And, as in the “R>1 pog ranged for…” series, we will use 600 WDEF & 600 MDEF to reasonably represent a low- or mid-level boss monster. Our (x)bow-whacker is only using PKB, and our (x)bowginner is only basic-attacking from a distance.

model	DPS
Bow-whacker	2101.7
Bowginner	1559.2

So, these two archer odd jobs don’t put out super impressive damage numbers, but their damage is at least respectable. It’s worth noting that the bow-whacker is not quite what it seems here: their attack has a 90% probability (per attack) of knocking the opponent back, as long as the opponent isn’t a boss monster, and it also hits up to 6 monsters at once. So, if you can get the hang of constantly pushing your enemies away from you, while simultaneously needing your enemies to be as close as possible to you so that you can hit them, the bow-whacker’s mobbing abilities are fairly impressive.

As usual, we want to compare these figures to the figures calculated in the previous series, and in previous installations of this series. I’ve added some class-based (class as in: beginner, warrior, mage, archer, rogue, pirate) emojis to the “model” column to add some readability to this now quite lengthy table (N.B. some or none of these emojis may show up if you are viewing this on the MapleLegends forums, for some reason(‽)):

model	DPS
⚔️ Dagger warrior	14828.4
STRmit (SM)	13807.5
⚔️ DEX WK (fire weak)	11856.8
⚔️ DEXsader	10729.0
⚔️ DEX WK (lightning weak)	9977.1
⚔️ Wand warrior	9446.7
⚔️ DEX WK (ice weak)	8097.5
Permarogue	7658.0
⚔️ DEX WK (fire neutral)	7470.9
Wood(wo)man (bow)	6725.3
Wood(wo)man (xbow)	6690.6
‍☠️ Permapirate	6669.1
‍☠️ Swashbuckler (yes Octo)	6598.6
⚔️ DEX WK (lightning neutral)	6217.8
⚔️ Permawarrior	5934.0
‍☠️ Swashbuckler (no Octo)	5614.4
Permarcher	5614.0
⚔️ DEXgon knight	5054.7
Magelet (F/P Ele Comp; weak)	4520.7
⚔️ LUK WK (fire weak)	4353.5
Magelet (I/L Ele Comp; weak)	4192.2
Magelet (Fire Arrow; weak)	3976.9
⚔️ LUKsader	3868.9
⚔️ LUK WK (lightning weak)	3545.8
Permamagician	3307.3
Magelet (F/P Ele Comp; neutral)	2877.8
Magelet (Heal; 1 non-self target)	2853.7
⚔️ LUK WK (ice weak)	2738.0
Magelet (I/L Ele Comp; neutral)	2658.8
Magelet (Fire Arrow; neutral)	2498.2
⚔️ LUK WK (fire neutral)	2468.8
Generic STR whacker	2227.8
Bow-whacker	2101.7
⚔️ LUK WK (lightning neutral)	1930.3
Bowginner	1559.2
⚔️ LUK DK	1350.2
Wandginner	1308.7
Gish(let) (melee)	1238.3
Magelet (SR; weak)	1206.1
Generic DEX whacker	966.0
Generic claw-wielding non-rogue	841.5
Magelet (SR; neutral)	699.2
Magelet (priest/permamagician; Magic Claw)	234.4

Perhaps the most interesting thing here is to compare the bowginner to the generic STR whacker. The generic STR whacker represents a lot of different jobs, but its standard incarnation is as the STRginner, which is also the standard incarnation of permabeginners in general. If the bowginner answers the question “What would archery-focussed permabeginners look like, if beginners could equip (cross)bows?”, then it seems that they pay a DPS price in exchange for their far-reaching attacks. But this is to be expected; weapons of archery just have characteristically lower PSMs than typical STRginner weapons (polearms, swords, daggers, etc.), somewhat lower WATK on average, and don’t make up for it with their attack periods. Comparing to the generic claw-wielding non-rogue (whose standard incarnation is also a permabeginner: the besinner) is also tempting, although unfair to the generic claw-wielding non-rogue, as they cannot equip claws with a useful amount of WATK. A better comparison would be to the clawginner, but we haven’t got there yet!

IMPORTANT REMINDERS BEFORE ANYONE GOES AROUND TOUTING THESE NUMERIC FIGURES: Keep in mind (and I cannot stress this enough) that this is a purely one-dimensional — and somewhat shoddy — analysis using dummy models, and that jobs cannot be reduced to raw single-target DPS numbers. The odd jobs that are listed above differ quite a bit in their playstyles and range of abilities. Furthermore, this only considers characters that are roughly level 100.

More LPQ with alces

I did some more LPQing on my undead daggerlord, alces. I’ve been trying to avoid gaining too much EXP (too much EXP, to the point where I’m forced to repeatedly kermit sewer slide) while on my quest to complete the Alishar card set, and yet still get in 50 EPQs for the Glittering Altaire Earrings. I started LPQing at the bottom of level 35, but still, I was 3/5 Alishar cards at this point! I did get in a party with Easelbear, Souz, ConfuseTea, and WickedPriest, where we got in some good PQs, and made sure to get the GM boofs that were announced mid-PQ:



And I think I noticed that GM Haste gives a +21 JUMP buff…? I suppose it makes sense that it’s more powerful than the +20 JUMP of ordinary Haste, although one extra JUMP is still not enough to hit max JUMP of 123%, if the recipient has no JUMP from their equipment! In any case, I didn’t get any cards from these runs, although they were otherwise lovely runs.

Some days later, I was able to form a party soon after GM boofs were given out; I went to channel 1 of the 101st floor of the Eos Tower (the LPQ lobby) and was surprised to see exactly no one. I thought I must be in the wrong channel, as there wasn’t even a single AFKer! But, after just a bit of patience, some people filtered in, and brought along some friends with them. So I was able to lead a full party of six that, believe it or not, stayed as the same lineup throughout all of our LPQs, and then dissipated entirely after so many runs.

We had some good luck with the infamous stage 8 seemingly both times that TeslaCalls tried to leave the other five of us to complete the stage, so that he had a chance to pee. So, on a third time, having already relieved himself, he tried to trick Blue Balloon by claiming to take another bathroom break, unfortunately to no avail:



It seems that this only served to violate any trust Blue Balloon had in our party >w<

Heres the same crew, fighting Alishar for the umpteenth time, only for no cards to drop:



Our runs were actually totally dry; not a single card dropped, and furthermore, the only equipment/NX that I managed to get out of any of the bonus stages was a single RAC. But our runs were all very speedy — we even had a run that took us less than 10 minutes!!

Unfortunately, after all of these LPQs were said and done, I had a good bit more EXP (enough to get to level 46), but still was at 3/5 Alishar cards ;(

capre does a lil more card-hunting~

As usual, I did some more card-hunting on my woodswoman, capreolina; I didnt go quite as far as usual this time, as I already managed to catch up to and pass Cortical’s (GishGallop, Phoneme, dendrite, Cerebellum, Medulla, WizetWizard, Amygdala) card set count. Now that I proved my point, I’ve mostly left Cortical to do their card farming while I farm wood

But I did finish the main CBD and Ghost Ship region’s cards, and started on a few Orbis cards as well

Spoiler: A few more cardz 4 capre~

I was thankful to actually get a GS2 map to make the Slimy cards easier…:





And with the Selkie Jr. set completed, I was done with this subregion of Singapore (I had already finished the Mr. Anchor long ago)! So I went off to Orbis to start the Orbis cards that aren’t in the tower:

Helping out Gruzz with Deep Ludi farming

My friend Gruzz, an I/L mage who I met when doing MPQ on my DEXgon knight rusa, sent out a distress signal — he was trying to farm MDTs for their ETCs for use in the corresponding Vic(toria Island)/Ludi(brium) quests. But MDTs are, regrettably, strong versus both ice and lightning, which makes farming them particularly painful for an I/L like Gruzz.

I responded to their cry for help, heading to Deep Ludi as capreolina, my level 114 woodswoman ranger. As should, perhaps, be expected, I wasn’t quite as much help as I would have liked — I realistically did no more damage to the MDTs than Gruzz did — but having some company when farming is always nice



And once we had enough of those Binding Bridles, we headed to normal Death Teddies to farm, for related purposes, Sealed Teddy Bears. We were taking turns looting cards, and when I looted one of the Death Teddy ones, I was mildly surprised to see that that card brought me to 4/5 of the set. So Gruzz was kind enough to give me the next card that dropped after that, so that I could finish the set!:



<3

cervine is back at CDs again for another 60 minute grind

When GM boofs were announced, I took them away into the Cash Shop with my I/L magelet cervine, while in the meantime I was LPQing on alces. Once LPQing was all done, I headed back to playing cervine, taking a quick trip from KC to Taipei 101 so that I could use the GM boofs to grind for ≈60 minutes at my usual spot: CDs.



A fairly impressive 4.5M EPH (experience per hour)~! I managed to get some ≈29% or so EXP over the course of this one-hour grish sesh, which hopefully means that cervine will be leveling up from 105 to 106 soon~ ^^

EPQ with Timpossible and atsumoo

I met up with my friend CreepyTimmy (Timpossible, SillyTimmy) in the FM, and met his friend atsumoo, who was discussing card set completion of the EPQ boss, Poison Golem (a.k.a. Big Bad Rock Man, or BBRM). After some chatting (and waiting for poor atsumoo’s router to reboot itself), we decided to do a few EPQs ourselves, with me playing my undead daggerlord, alces, for the occasion:



And we got atsumoo her 5/5 BBRM card set! alces is still relatively strong enough at this point that I feel like a valuable contributor to my party — especially when everyone else is a cleric — and these PQs served as my first dip into the 50 completions that I’ll need for my earrings~

I’m not a huge fan of EPQ myself (I would rank it lower than all of KPQ, LPQ, OPQ, and MPQ), but it’s still a decent PQ that I much prefer to, say, PPQ… So while I usually try to avoid it, the +2 allstat from the Glittering Altaire Earrings is just too good for a daggerlord for me to pass up. STR and DEX contribute, relatively, a huge amount to my damage when compared even to ordinary bandits (who are already known for their affinity for allstat items), because daggerlords have 10% mastery for life; each point of LUK only contributes roughly ≈1.96 as much to my damage as each point of DEX (or each point of STR; STR & DEX are interchangeable in this particular context)! And if alces manages to get into the triple-digit levels, I will graduate from using DEXless daggers to using big girl daggers, at which point the stats (STR, DEX, and LUK) from equipment become basically interchangeable (up to a point); for example, a point of DEX from equipment just frees up my base stats to add more base LUK. So earrings that already have 6(!) total stats when clean is kind of a big deal. Hopefully I have good luck/LUK when I do eventually throw five 60%s on the damn thing!

My first Arcglaive

In my quest to upgrade my melee weaponry for my STR priest cervid, my woodswoman capreolina, and even possibly my brigand dama, I have boomed/ruined many a Toy of 101. In fact, at some point I just stopped recording my depressing results in this diary, because it became too embarrassing, and became like a pointless series of excercises in “deer booms yet another Toy of 101 on the first slot”. I wish I could say that I saw any hope, but I never really managed to pass any scrolls at all on the many Toys of 101 that I was very fortunate enough to get my hands on.

But, as discouraging as this may all be, I figure that there’s just no point in giving up. Sure, my current arsenal is nothing to sneeze at, but it’s also fairly mediocre in my eyes. Pretty much everyone else that I know has better weapons than I do, and for obvious reasons, I take weapons very seriously (perhaps the most serious) of all my equipment, as weapons even partly define my characters. This has lead me to turn to a different avenue: the Crimson Arcglaive.

One of the wonderful things about the Arcglaive, besides it being one of the main contenders for endgame weaponry for STR-based whacker jobs, is that it also comes with a healthy amount of MATK. This makes it perhaps the perfect endgame weapon for a STR priest like mine, as it contributes a lot to my Heal’s efficacy, in addition to being an amazing offensive weapon. So, with that in mind, I set out to gather up as many Crimson Woods as I could.

I farmed quite a few woods myself, got a very generous donation of some leftover woods due to OmokTeacher (Slime, Slimu)!, bought a number of woods for 40k mesos each, including a large amount from Cortical (GishGallop, Phoneme, dendrite, Cerebellum, Medulla, WizetWizard, Amygdala), who generously agreed to sell all of their woods to me, and lo — I had enough already to craft a glaive! I want to thank those who donated woods to me, and also those who sold woods to me, as I greatly appreciate the extra supply of this already-scarce ETC item!!

After a bit of ETC-buying from the free market, and a bit of being annoyed by Typhon Feather farming, I came to Fiona for the fateful craft:



And there it was: my first Crimson Arcglaive that I’ve ever crafted myself:



…Aaaand it’s kinda crappy. The WATK is somewhat poor (2 below average), and in fact, the only thing that isn’t below average is the MATK, which is just average. But I transfered the weapon over to cervid for the purpose of scrolling, and with Cortical as my witness, I failed the first slot (with a 30%), passed the second slot (again with a 30%)!, and boomed on the third slot, again with a 30%. It was nice to have at least some sign of hope (at least it seems possible for me to pass a 30% on Crimson Arcglaives, even if I can’t do the same with Toys of 101), but unfortunately I had to be a bit more greedy than just passing a single 30%. Having started with a crappy Arcglaive and then failed the first slot, one 30% pass was not going to cut it — my estimates put the target WATK at roughly 115~116 in order to simply match the DPS of my current highest-DPS weapon (a 111 WATK, 4 STR, PSB).

So, oh well. Who knows how many crafts and how many months it will take to make a weapon that is worth ever equipping, but for now, my woodswoman will be doing what woodswomen do best: felling trees.



The Grindening™

So, admittedly, most of what I’ve been doing now is, uh, grinding like mad. Historically, I’ve really never been all that good at grinding; aside from my somewhat poor character control, my main weakness is simply lack of willpower to mindlessly grind. But I have, over the months, done quite a bit of grinding on my STR priest, cervid. With her at level 114, the prospect of being a bona fide STR bishop seems so tantalisingly close. To be honest, getting to level 120 feels virtually like getting to level 200 by the standards of a somewhat low-powered odd job like STR priest.

Fortunately, with my DEXgon knight rusa being at the level where she has maxed rawr, I now have the opportunity to do an extra-specially-sad version of sadgrinding (something that I like to call “sadsadgrinding”): duo grinding at CDs with myself, by splitting my two characters across two machines. Now, I admit that I had a pretty rocky start with this technique, and I was very unsure whether it would be feasible or not; my character control when controlling a single character at a time is pretty poor, so controlling two simultaneously resulted in a lot of lost efficiency… and a lot of accidentally killing myself. But with the power of pet auto-HP (just to prevent deaths; Heal makes HP pots unnecessary most of the time), some in-game macros to make rebuffing easier, and a lot of patience, I managed to get to a functional state where my sadsadgrinding became worth the effort:



Woo hoo! rusa is a big girl noww~! But this would only escalate, as I became more proficient in sadsadgrinding, and started grinding for longer and more ungodly durations — don’t worry, I make sure to take breaks regularly With rusa getting a higher EPH than cervid, and with rusa starting at a much lower level, rusa levels up much more frequently. In fact, as of this writing, rusa is already level 111!! Even with my damage being probably three or four times worse than a more ordinary STRgon knight, rawr is just so ridiculously OP that rusa gets pretty insane (by my standards; it’s probably not all that impressive compared to ordinary third-jobbers at CDs) EPH anyways. So, somewhat ironically, lil baby rusa just might end up as my second character to hit level 120, heh…

To make my sadsadgrinding slightly less sad, I invited xX17Xx (drainer, attackattack, maebee, strainer), permarogue of Oddjobs, to come try CD grinding with me:



With xX17Xx on the top platform, and with me on the bottom platform (also hitting the middle platform with rawr’s AoE), we ground for a while, and found that xX17Xx got pretty sweet EPH from it! Unfortunately, while the EXP was still OK for cervid & rusa, a permarogue simply doesn’t have the arsenal (read: mobbing attack(s)) to reach the levels of CD-annihilation efficiency of something like rawr, so my EXP suffered a bit just from the lost efficiency. But it’s nice to have some company sometimes when grinding, and Cortical even stopped by to say hi as well ^^

Although, as mentioned before, rusa has been leveling up quite a bit as a result of this sadsadgrinding, my focus is of course on cervid. It’s a testament to just how much I’ve forced myself to — I mean, wanted to — grind, that cervid has now just hit level 118(!):





…When cervid was just 114 as of the previous diary entry! I’m at the point now where it takes me, uh, quite a bit of grinding just to get, say, 10% of a level. And with the EXP curve creeping up on me, I have had to attenuate my daily EXP percentage goals, so that I’m not forcing myself to grind for truly unreasonable hours. But, well, at level 118, that’s only two more levels, right?

Time will tell if I end up doing another diary entry before cervid’s level-120/fourth-job-advancement party Oh, that reminds me, I have to figure out how the heck fourth job advancement even works…

<333333333333

 

Hey y’all, just wanted to post this here — I already posted this in a few of the Discord servers that I’m in, but putting it here might be more visible to some folks who’d like to attend:

cervid’s level 120 party

When

2021-05-23 (Sunday), 05:00 UTC (UTC = ST = server time = GMT)

Where

We will be starting with the levelup to 120 in Tree Dungeon, Forest Up North IX (https://maplelegends.com/lib/map?id=101020010). You can get to this map via Ellinia → The Field Up North of Ellinia → The Tree That Grew I → The Forest North of Ellinia → Tree Dungeon, Forest Up North IX (highest portal). After this, I want to go to Leafre for fourth job advancement! This will mean killing Manon/Griffey, so hopefully we can find one of each (they each have 90-minute respawn timers)!

Who

Anyone! You can attend any bit of the party you’d like, or that you’re able to attend

 

(You can also read the original diary entry here, and/or read the diary entry on the Oddjobs forum.)

rangifer’s diary: pt. xlvii

Alright, this is bound to be a big fat ol’ entry. Hopefully I can keep it to a reasonable length…

R>1 vagrant for Old Fox run

In the previous installment of this series (which is part of the previous diary entry), we looked at the rest of the odd-jobbed archers. With that, we can now move on to the rogues of the bunch! We’ve already covered some of these previously. In particular, we already went over the following models:

• STRmit (SM)
• Permarogue
• Generic STR whacker
• Generic DEX whacker

Where the “generic STR whacker” represents the brigand and STRmit in melee, and the “generic DEX whacker” represents the DEXmit (or even pure DEX brigand) in melee. But actually, the first two models here have misleading names. Our “STRmit” model only uses Shadow Meso (SM), so this model actually equally represents any LUKless hermit, not just STRmits. And our “permarogue” model only uses Lucky Seven (L7), meaning that it only represents half of the permarogue’s arsenal (the other half being Double Stab). So, it is now time that we must rename these models, to “LUKless hermit (SM)” and “permarogue (L7)”, respectively.

Nevertheless, this still leaves us with the following yet to be covered:

• LUKless hermit (Avenger)
• Daggerlord
• Grim reaper
• Carpenter
• Claw-puncher
• LUKless dit
• Clawginner

We will be ignoring blood dits entirely, because at this level (roughly level 100), their only real tool for dealing damage is Meso Explosion. Our Double-Stab-using permarogue is represented by the daggerlord. And our claw-puncher model is a hermit.

You might wonder why we are adding a second model for the LUKless hermit — one that uses Avenger. After all, we are only studying single-target DPS here, and SM is obviously superior to Avenger in this respect. The reasons for adding an Avenger model are twofold:

1. LUKless hermits have extremely tight third-job SP requirements. Avenger, SM, and Shadow Partner all have a max level of 30, meaning that the LUKless hermit needs a whopping 90 third-job SP just to fill out their core arsenal; and that’s ignoring other very important skills like FJ, MU, etc. LUKless hermits can actually make efficient use of every single hermit skill (yes, even SW). As a result, only showing LUKless hermit damage under the assumption of max Shadow Partner and max SM could be somewhat misleading, depending on how exactly you interpret it.
2. Showing the LUKless hermit’s Avenger damage gives a more well-rounded picture of the STRmit. Avenger is unlike SM in that it takes into account LUK, WATK, STR, DEX, mastery, critical chance, and critical damage (all of which are ignored by SM). Furthermore, Avenger is the LUKless hermit’s only real mobbing skill, and thus their main skill when training.

With all that being said, we now have to equip our models.

Our LUKless hermit will be wearing LUK-focussed gear and using the most powerful claw available to LUKless rogues: the Maple Skanda. We don’t really care whether they are a STRmit, a DEXmit, or something in between, because STR and DEX contribute equally to Avenger’s damage.

Our grim reaper will, by definition, be using a Scythe (duh). It should be noted that this weapon is unavailable in MapleLegends, so in the context of ML, this model is purely theoretical. They will also need enough LUK (35 total) to equip the thing, but because our models are level 100 or so, we will assume that they can have a base LUK of roughly 4, and get roughly 31+ LUK from their gear. Otherwise, they are STR-focussed. Their shield will be similar to that of the one-handed-weapon-wielding warriors, but with 3 fewer STR: 13 WATK and 7 STR. Similar comments apply to the carpenter, which can only use the Saw (again, unavailable in MapleLegends), although the Saw is even simpler in that it lacks stat requirements.

Our daggerlord/permarogue (Double Stab) model will be using a GDK. Another reasonable option here would be the Fan, as it is a full speed category faster than the GDK, and has less strenuous stat requirements. For the shield, we will assume the use of a Khanjar or similar, which gives a +7 WATK and +1 LUK advantage on average (when compared to a more ordinary shield like the Pan Lid). Our one-handed-weapon-wielding warriors were given a shield with 13 WATK and 10 STR, so we will give our Khanjar 20 WATK, 7 STR, and 1 LUK. The Khanjar has significant stat requirements, but we don’t really care, because they are strictly less strenuous than the GDK’s anyways.

Our grim reaper will, by definition, be using a Scythe (duh). It should be noted that this weapon is unavailable in MapleLegends, so in the context of ML, this model is purely theoretical. They will also need enough LUK (35 total) to equip the thing, but because our models are level 100 or so, we will assume that they can have a base LUK of roughly 4, and get roughly 31+ LUK from their gear. Otherwise, they are STR-focussed. Thanks to the Khanjar lacking any LUK requirements, their shield will actually be identical to that of the daggerlord model. Similar comments apply to the carpenter, which can only use the Saw (again, unavailable in MapleLegends), although the Saw is even simpler in that it lacks stat requirements.

Choosing a weapon for our claw-puncher is slightly more complicated. The obvious choice seems to be the Red Craven (this is the same weapon wielded by our L7-using permarogue model); however, the issue with the Red Craven is its extremely steep LUK requirement of 290. While this is not an issue for ordinary hermits, claw-punchers actually avoid LUK in favour of STR+DEX. On average, each point of LUK only contributes ≈55% as much to the claw-puncher’s damage as each point of DEX (or of STR). This actually makes the Maple Skanda a strong competitor to the Red Craven for our level ≈100 claw-puncher, but some very rough calculations indicate to me that they are basically tied at this point anyways, and at higher levels, using claws with LUK requirements would seem to dominate — you gain AP, but still need the same amount of LUK to wield your claw, thus exaggerating the WATK difference. So our claw-puncher will use the same exact weapon as our L7-using permarogue model.

Our LUKless dit will be equipped almost identically to our daggerlord model, thanks to the GDK and Khanjar both lacking LUK requirements. Mostly the AP build differs, with our LUKless dit preferring to pour AP into DEX when possible, as opposed to our daggerlord prefering LUK.

And finally, our clawginner, being a special type of claw-wielding permarogue, will be equipped identically to our L7-using permarogue model.

With all of that in mind, let’s take a look at our models:

The model LUKless hermit (Avenger)

• 585 STR+DEX (60 of which is from gear)
• 64 LUK (60 of which is from gear)
• 105 WATK (45 from claw + 27 from stars + 20 from Cider + 3 from cape + 10 from gloves)

The model daggerlord/permarogue (Double Stab)
Note that this model gets somewhat juicier STR/DEX/LUK from its equipment, due to its access to jobbed clothing like e.g. the Dark Pirate Skirt.

• 459 LUK (40 of which is from gear)
• 70 STR (40 of which is from gear)
• 140 DEX (60 of which is from gear)
• 160 WATK (107 from dagger + 20 from shield + 20 from Cider + 3 from cape + 10 from gloves)

The model grim reaper

• 555 STR (50 of which is from gear)
• 80 DEX (55 of which is from gear)
• 35 LUK (31 of which is from gear)
• 97 WATK (44 from axe + 20 from shield + 20 from Cider + 3 from cape + 10 from gloves)

The model carpenter

• 555 STR (50 of which is from gear)
• 80 DEX (55 of which is from gear)
• 92 WATK (39 from sword + 20 from shield + 20 from Cider + 3 from cape + 10 from gloves)

The model claw-puncher (hermit)
Like our daggerlord model, this model gets somewhat juicier STR/DEX/LUK from its equipment, due to its access to jobbed clothing like e.g. the Dark Pirate Skirt. Note that this is because we went the Red Craven route rather than the LUKless (Maple Skanda) route.

• 335 DEX (60 of which is from gear)
• 44 STR (40 of which is from gear)
• 290 LUK (40 of which is from gear)
• 91 WATK (58 from claw + 20 from Cider + 3 from cape + 10 from gloves)

The model LUKless dit
This model, unlike our daggerlord model, does not get access to jobbed clothing.

• 515 DEX (30 of which is from gear)
• 70 STR (30 of which is from gear)
• 64 LUK (60 of which is from gear)
• 160 WATK (107 from dagger + 20 from shield + 20 from Cider + 3 from cape + 10 from gloves)

The model clawginner
This model, in terms of stats/equipment is basically identical to the permarogue (L7) model from way back when.

• 490 LUK (25 of which is from gear)
• 140 DEX (80 of which is from gear)
• 29 STR (25 of which is from gear)
• 118 WATK (58 from claw + 20 from Cider + 3 from cape + 10 from gloves + 27 from stars)

Comparing single-target DPS
As usual, we assume that all player characters and monsters have the same level. And, as in the “R>1 pog ranged for…” series, we will use 600 WDEF & 600 MDEF to reasonably represent a low- or mid-level boss monster. Our grim reaper, carpenter, and claw-puncher are basic-attacking, our LUKless dit is using maxed SB, and our clawginner is basic-attacking from a distance (with the power of KE!).

Oh, and speaking of attacking methods, our Avenger-using LUKless hermit needs to be mentioned here. Obviously, they will be using maxed Avenger with maxed Shadow Partner. But this raises a few issues about WDEF. One is a mistake that I made way back in diary pt. iv, where I confused Avenger with Assaulter, thus erroneously thinking that Avenger ignored defence any time the hermit’s level was at or above their target’s. And another is more subtle: is Shadow Partner’s damage multiplier (50% at max level, for any attack that isn’t a basic attack) a pre-defence multiplier, or a post-defence multiplier? Previously, I had assumed (noting that I had no way to prove one way or another) that it was pre-defence. However, I now suspect that the reason why Shadow Partner’s damage multiplier differs based on whether or not the hermit is basic-attacking (80% for basic attacks, 50% for anything else) is because the multiplier is post-defence for skills (as skills have their own damage multipliers), but pre-defence for basic attacks (as there is no damage multiplier per se, so the multipler is applied directly to the minimum and maximum of the raw damage range). This would put basic attacks at a disadvantage that is compensated by the higher Shadow Partner damage multiplier. Also note that this means our previous DPS figure for “STRmit (SM)” (now “LUKless hermit (SM)”) would be incorrect; the updated value (14096.3 DPS) will be reflected in the table below this one:

model	DPS
LUKless dit	5928.2
Daggerlord/permarogue (Double Stab)	5223.5
LUKless hermit (Avenger)	2575.5
Clawginner	1393.5
Grim reaper	1258.6
Carpenter	1210.7
Claw-puncher (hermit)	88.2

Oh my. I mean, I knew that claw-punchers were abyssmal, but 88.2 DPS just looks truly sad. To the claw-puncher’s credit, most of the DPS is eaten up by the 600 WDEF; if the target has 0 WDEF instead, that figure shoots up by a factor of more than 6, to 543.6 DPS. Unsurprisingly, the grim reaper and carpenter are very close, with grim reapers just barely taking the lead in terms of DPS.

One interesting thing to note is the LUKless dit outperforming (although not by a huge margin) the daggerlord/permarogue at single-target stabbing, which may come as a surprise for those expecting the daggerlord to have a considerable advantage due to their high base LUK. The main reason is really the lack of mastery; daggerlords have 10% mastery for life, which means that each point of LUK contributes considerably less to their damage than it does for a bandit/CB/shadower (who has 60% mastery with daggers).

As usual, we want to compare these figures to the figures calculated in the previous series, and in previous installations of this series. I’ve added some class-based (class as in: beginner, warrior, mage, archer, rogue, pirate) emojis to the “model” column to add some readability to this now quite lengthy table (N.B. some or none of these emojis may show up if you are viewing this on the MapleLegends forums, for some reason(‽)):

model	DPS
⚔️ Dagger warrior	14828.4
LUKless hermit (SM)	14096.3
⚔️ DEX WK (fire weak)	11856.8
⚔️ DEXsader	10729.0
⚔️ DEX WK (lightning weak)	9977.1
⚔️ Wand warrior	9446.7
⚔️ DEX WK (ice weak)	8097.5
Permarogue (L7)	7658.0
⚔️ DEX WK (fire neutral)	7470.9
Wood(wo)man (bow)	6725.3
Wood(wo)man (xbow)	6690.6
‍☠️ Permapirate	6669.1
‍☠️ Swashbuckler (yes Octo)	6598.6
⚔️ DEX WK (lightning neutral)	6217.8
⚔️ Permawarrior	5934.0
LUKless dit	5928.2
‍☠️ Swashbuckler (no Octo)	5614.4
Permarcher	5614.0
Daggerlord/permarogue (Double Stab)	5223.5
⚔️ DEXgon knight	5054.7
Magelet (F/P Ele Comp; weak)	4520.7
⚔️ LUK WK (fire weak)	4353.5
Magelet (I/L Ele Comp; weak)	4192.2
Magelet (Fire Arrow; weak)	3976.9
⚔️ LUKsader	3868.9
⚔️ LUK WK (lightning weak)	3545.8
Permamagician	3307.3
Magelet (F/P Ele Comp; neutral)	2877.8
Magelet (Heal; 1 non-self target)	2853.7
⚔️ LUK WK (ice weak)	2738.0
Magelet (I/L Ele Comp; neutral)	2658.8
LUKless hermit (Avenger)	2575.5
Magelet (Fire Arrow; neutral)	2498.2
⚔️ LUK WK (fire neutral)	2468.8
Generic STR whacker	2227.8
Bow-whacker	2101.7
⚔️ LUK WK (lightning neutral)	1930.3
Bowginner	1559.2
Clawginner	1393.5
⚔️ LUK DK	1350.2
Wandginner	1308.7
Grim reaper	1258.6
Gish(let) (melee)	1238.3
Carpenter	1210.7
Magelet (SR; weak)	1206.1
Generic DEX whacker	966.0
Generic claw-wielding non-rogue	841.5
Magelet (SR; neutral)	699.2
Magelet (priest/permamagician; Magic Claw)	234.4
Claw-puncher (hermit)	88.2

The LUKless hermit (Avenger) obviously doesn’t look all that impressive when compared to the SM-using version, but 2575.5 DPS is pretty considerable, putting the Avenger-using LUKless hermit more-or-less on par with, say, a woods(wo)man using Arrow Rain or Arrow Eruption. It is interesting to compare the clawginner with the bowginner and the generic claw-wielding non-rogue; it seems that the bowginner has the DPS advantage (although they cannot attack while in mid-air), and as expected, the besinner-based model is considerably worse than the clawginner (by a factor of roughly ≈1.66). Our daggerlord and LUKless dit models do quite well for themselves, ending up on the lower end of the highest-DPS bracket, comparable to the DEXgon knight, the permarcher, and the permawarrior.

IMPORTANT REMINDERS BEFORE ANYONE GOES AROUND TOUTING THESE NUMERIC FIGURES: Keep in mind (and I cannot stress this enough) that this is a purely one-dimensional — and somewhat shoddy — analysis using dummy models, and that jobs cannot be reduced to raw single-target DPS numbers. The odd jobs that are listed above differ considerably in their playstyles and range of abilities. Furthermore, this only considers characters that are roughly level 100.

The grindening continues…

Das rite, it’s time for more cervid (my STR priest) & rusa (my DEXgon knight) duoing~

I was joined by xX17Xx (drainer, attackattack, maebee, strainer) again!:



And I also trioed (duoed?) with a CB by the name of Outlaugh, who was very nice and talked to me about my pure STR priest build:



While grinding alone, I accidentally made some extra cash by answering two trivia questions that I happened to see on smega:



Oh, and speaking of rusa, I took the time to buy some 28(!) or so first job SP resets so that I could reset points out of Slash Blast/Power Strike into skills that were now more useful for me: Improved HP Recovery and Iron Body (IB, for the excess +20 WDEF over what I already get from IW).



Who needs chairs when you get 60 HP per tick while standing upright~?

Cort gets cervine some cards @ KFT

Cortical (GishGallop, Subcortical, Cerebellum, MageFP, dendrite, WizetWizard, Medulla) was doing some King Goblin killing in the KFT region, and was already done with the card sets, so they invited me to loot some. I decided to go there on my I/L magelet, cervine:



Once Cort had run out of USE items to summon King Goblins with, we decided to check real quick if there were any Old Foxes around. To our immense surprise, there was one in just about every channel! After some convincing (I don’t like to kill quest bosses unless I’m doing the corresponding quest, lest someone actually doing the quest miss out on the kill), we decided to kill just one, for fun. And it even dropped a card, wowie~



Oh, and Cort told me to take this screencap because we looked cool, or something, so here it is:



And we hunted down some Scholar Ghosts for the cards as well (Cort was already 5/5 on the set, but I was 0/5):



I think after sweeping all 8 channels, I ended up with 1 or 2 cards.

The tragic miracle of the Toys of 101

As anyone who knows me or has read my diary knows, I am the consummate expert of booming/ruining Toys of 101. I’ve only documented a smol number of the Toys that I’ve actually boomed/ruined, as it’s frankly too embarrassing to even bother with.

However, it was on this special day that I finally managed not to ruin one. It was actually not a great start, even; the Toy in question was one that Cortical bought on the FM (and kindly gifted to me <3), and that had 93 WATK clean. Now, that is above average (average is 92), but I needed it to turn out with at least 109 WATK just to be better than the Toy that I could get from SiriusPlaque/SmallMight once I finished their quest. And I would need at least 111 WATK to be better than OmokTeacher’s (Slime, Slimu) Toy, which I believe is currently Gumby’s main weapon. And that’s just comparing Toys to Toys; once we start comparing to PSBs and Crimson Arcglaives, the situation is even more dire for the Toy (at least, in terms of DPS; the Toy is easily superior in terms of per-hit damage).

But, to my immense surprise, I managed to pass three(!) 30%s and two 60%s on the thing, resulting in this beauty (114 WATK, 15 STR, 4 DEX, 3 WDEF, 0 slots):



Finally… after months of effort and countless Toys of 101 boomed on the first slot (lol), I had a truly powerful Toy of 101 that I scrolled myself! I was extremely excited to finally have a weapon that I coul be proud of.

And then, less than a day later, Cort took a look in Soblet’s shop and found two clean Toys of 101 with 96(!) WATK each. Cort encouraged me to buy one, and I was not impressed with the mathematics of the situation (pretty unlikely I would be able to get more than 114 WATK, even with an optimal scrolling strategy; I think the probability was around 6.5%), but decided to go with it anyways. Cort bought the other one, and had me do the scrolling on their behalf, since they were not high enough level to hold the thing yet (Toy of 101 is a level 85 weapon).

Much to my chagrin, Cort’s very first(!) shot at scrolling a Toy of 101 had immense success: it actually passed the same scrolls that my Toy did (although one of the 60%s was actually a 70%, they give the same stats on success anyways), and because that Toy started out with 3 extra WATK clean when compared to mine, it ended up at a whopping 117 WATK (and 15 STR, 4 DEX, 3 WDEF, and 0 slots)… To see the Toy that I had spent months of trial and error (95% of which were errors, to be clear) to make, beaten in my own hands by Cort’s Toy and Cort’s scrolls was quite an… interesting feeling.

And then it was time to scroll my 96 WATK clean Toy. It, of course, boomed on the first slot (as per usual).

Although there may be no justice in MapleStory, at least Cort has been nice enough to let me use their Toy in the meantime, while they are still below level 85…

alces does too many EPQs

So, as mentioned perviously, I decided that I do want to go for the Glittering Altaire Earrings for my undead daggerlord, alces. The +6 stats (+2 STR, +2 DEX, +2 LUK) when clean is just too good to pass up. So off I went to do 50(!) iterations of a PQ that I’m honestly not all that fond of (or at least, I prefer LPQ and OPQ to it)…



The EPQ boss (Poison Golem) can hit pretty hard on its third and final body; as an unwashed assassin, that meant possibly getting two-shot by the thing, all while I’m trying to get as close as possible so that I can reach it with my Double Stab. So, as a result, I actually died at the end of one run, and overall, many HP potions were consumed…:



Here I am, also at the boss, with rosiee and Drasisk (and PastryDish, again):



One party that I ran with was joined by PerryP, who was new to the server. And, to be honest, I kinda felt bad for the guy:



R.I.P. PerryP’s innocence, at the tender age of level 45…

Eventually, after a full 50 EPQs, I had finished the Poison Golem card set and gotten the 50 fragments necessary for my Glittering Altaire Earrings. I bought up five ear LUK 60%s on the FM, and went ahead and scrolled the thing. Much to my disappointment, only 1 of the 5 scrolls passed, leaving me with a completely useless pair of earrings in exchange for my 50 EPQ completions. Not gonna lie, I was pretty upset by this… In order to have another chance at beating my current (tradeable, I might add) earrings, I would need to do another full 50 EPQs (and this time, getting zero EXP and zero cards per run) to get another Glittering pair. Rather than torture myself in this way in order to (maybe!) get revenge on RNGsus (who apparently dislikes me quite a bit), I decided to just give up and outlevel EPQ (I was already just about level 56 anyways).

Hanging with Gruzz & xBowtjuhNL

Gruzz and xBowtjuhNL were going to kill themselves two Capt. Latanicas, and invited me to come along. With xBowtjuhNL at roughly 4k MAXHP clean, we weren’t sure if he would be able to tank magical attacks from the Captain. I offered to bring my DEXgon knight, rusa, for the HB, but xBowtjuhNL insisted that he wanted to try just using Sunblock instead. So I took my STR priest, cervid, for that sweet, sweet, HS

Oh, and I ran into Skateboard (Melokie, Alrightyo) on the way to Singapore



Here we are, taking down Capt. Lat! F5



And after we had successfully slain Capt. Lat twice (xBowtjuhNL thankfully survived both times!), we collectively decided to head to Masteria to find ourselves an HH to fight. Gruzz and xBowtjuhNL didn’t know their way around the Haunted House/CWK region very well, and hadn’t fought HH before, so I acted as their tour guide. Luckily we were, indeed, able to find one!:



And the Headless Horseman went down like a chump, in just 3 or 4 minutes! No head though, unfortunately…

Farming teefs for alces

I wanted to get alces a zhelm, which meant doing the Zakum prequests. One of the three quests, of course, requires 30 Zombie’s Lost Gold Teeth; rather than have alces Double Stab Miner Zombies to death, one by one, until I was fortunate enough to have 30 teeth drop, I decided to use this as a card-hunting opportunity for two of my other characters. First was my I/L magelet cervine:



Just a stray card I found on the way to El Nath x)





And once cervine had 5/5 cards for both Miner Zombies and Flyeyes, I switched over to my swashbuckler, hydropotina:





And while I was there, I went ahead and did the Snowman quest on hydro as well:



alces loves questing

As folks who know me and/or have read my diary already know, I tend to stick to PQs that I like (KPQ, LPQ, OPQ, MPQ) when I can. Because these PQs span the level range from 21 to 85 — except for the awkward 31~34 gap — I end up missing a lot of the juicy quests in the 35~85 level range, even if I do go back (after hitting level 86) and do some of the particularly relevant ones. With alces, I wanted to do something a little different, now that I had gotten what I wanted from LPQ/EPQ. So I set off to quest!

Spoiler: Questing with alces~

First up was actually the Zakum prequests, to make sure that I could buy a helm in the case that I found a seller



Free Ice Sentinel card along the way~



Thankfully, I’ve done the Zakum JQ enough times now that it doesn’t take me very long to complete the damned thing…

And with that out of the way, it was time to get that Ellin Ring! I already had enough ETCs left over to complete the very last part of the questline, so all that was left to do was the main bulk of the questline:











And just like that, a very juicy ring indeed, for a daggerlord:



After arranging a list of some quests that I wanted to tackle, I headed to Victoria Island to do the last two parts of the Strange Dish questline:







And I did The Old Tree (the Stumpy questline) there as well:



(The Axes from these Dark Axe Stumps would come in handy when I later did The Story Of Axes in KFT.)



And while I was in Victoria Island, I headed over to Lith Harbor and took the transport to Florina Beach to do Defeat King Clang! (the King Clang questline):







Oh yeah, Colorful Tubes drop from Torties



And with King Clang laid to rest, I headed back to Victoria Island, took the teleporter in Nautilus Harbour that leads to the Omega Sector, and started doing some quests there. First off was Chief Stan’s Letter, which I had already started back on Victoria Island. I then did the Eliminating Grays questline:



This questline also includes Eliminating Chief Gray, and The History of Zeta Leticulan; the latter of which has you collecting these weird cells:



I also did Eliminating Mateon and the first part of The Antidote concurrently.

I also did Fuel for MT-09:





And with that, I headed up the Eos Tower towards Ludibrium, to do some Ludi quests and finish up some of the Omega Sector ones as well.

First was Rightful Donation Culture, which is a kinda goofy quest where you just exchange a Sapphire for 15k EXP.

Then was Cleaning Up the Inner Parts of Eos Tower, which involves killing some Trixters and some Black Ratz:



And while I was in the upper half of the Eos Tower, I went ahead and did The Lost Guard. It actually took a while to get the requisite 30 fidget spinners — I mean, Propellers, because Hellys spawn so sparsely on the 92nd and 91st floors:





With The Lost Guard completed, I had three or four dozen Eos Rock Scrolls, and used two or three of them to get the Bloctopus Key Chain necessary to complete Bloctopus is an Alien? (which I did complete later on).

I also did the entire Toy Soldier’s Walnut questline, which includes the Dollhouse quest (in which I initially searched downwards, only to find that the real dollhouse was at the very top — the very last one I checked…) and Delivery to a Lost Time, which requires killing Tick-Tocks. Conveniently, the first part of The Alarm Clock questline also requires Tick-Tock ETCs:



And while I was there, I ran into a Timer (unfortunately, the Timer questline does not exist in MapleLegends):





And I even did both parts of the Mason the Collector questline:





And with that, I headed over to the adjacent KFT (at the bottom of the Helios Tower) to do some of the quests in that region.

I did The Kids That Became the Sun and the Moon and Tiger-Hunting:







As well as the entire Goblin at Black Mountain questline, which includes a web of prequests (e.g. Kong Ji’s Request, Brotherly Love, etc.):



…And got a nifty 5 STR cape~

I also did The Story of Axes, The Lost Seed questline, and The Tree-Cutter’s Test.

I then completed Mr. Shim’s Request and Cleaning Up Helios Tower concurrently:



…I actually finished this card set, thanks to Mr. Shim’s Request requiring over 300 Retz kills.

And then, I was off to the Mu Lung Gardens region, to do some quests there. This is currently where I’m at, quest-wise, and so far the only ones that I’ve actually completed are Making the Body and Physics Medicine, No Gong’s Teaching, and whichever quest it is that lets you craft things with Mr. Do:







…More Bear Feet to come…

Oh, and I did buy a zhelm; and it’s very nice!!:



alces @ OPQ

With alces having graduated EPQ, the time is ripe for some OPQ. I was invited on Discord to OPQ by slashmuslash, and we’ve done quite a few OPQs now. alces now has quite a few OPQ completions under her belt, along with 4/5 Papa Pixie cards!:



And here is alces, mid-OPQ, wearing a Blue Qi Pao that someone dropped on the floor of the Lounge stage:



F3

cervid’s 120 party!!!

After so much grinding, my STR priest cervid was level 119 and 99.99% EXP! I held a level 120 party, in which I leveled to 120, and job advanced to STR bishop!!!! This is a huge achievement for me, as I’ve been playing this character in one form or another for a long time now, and I’m extremely excited and honoured to become something as oddly… venerable(?) as STR bishop! I won’t say much more, and let the video that I made of the event speak for itself:

cervid’s 120 party (YouTube)

I feel like a sweaty MapleStory pro now, any time that I cast my MW1 :')

And of course, I had to continue the dumb joke that I started making when I job advanced to STR cleric:



Also, during my party, Gruzz, xBowtjuhNL, and Harlez (the latter of whom unfortunately did not make it to the party) presented me with an incredible gift: a Crimson Arcglaive! They combined their efforts to make one of these incredibly difficult-to-craft weapons — perhaps the perfect present for a STR bishop, as it gives solid MATK in addition to being an endgame-worthy melee DPS stick!! They were a little disappointed that it came out crappy (99 WATK clean, 3 lower than average, and just average MATK), but I scrolled it right then and there (with 60%s, as it really would be a shame to boom such an incredible present) to some pretty good results!:



And they even had the prudence to create a character with IGN Gratz4Deer to tag the item, so that it would forever be marked as a special present~!

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