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. xlviii

R>1 privateer for Tae Roon 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 rogues. With that, we can now move on to the pirates of the bunch! We’ve already covered some of these previously. In particular, we already went over the following models:

• Permapirate
• Swashbuckler (yes Octo)
• Swashbuckler (no Octo)
• Generic DEX whacker

Where the “generic DEX whacker” represents the summoner in melee, sans summons, like a summoner version of the “swashbuckler (no Octo)” model. Technically, summoners are unconstrained in their AP build, so they could have more than 4 base STR, but this is suboptimal for summon DPS (which, notably, ignores WATK). But actually, the first three models here have misleading names. Our “permapirate” model only uses Double Shot (DS), meaning that it only represents one part of the permapirate’s arsenal (the other parts being Flash Fist (FF) and Somersault Kick (SSK)). Furthermore, this model also accurately represents the bullet bucc (assuming that their target is not stunned). And our “swashbuckler” models only use Burst Fire (BF), which ignores the swashbuckler’s SSK capabilities. So, it is now time that we must rename these models, to “permapirate/bullet bucc (DS)”, “swashbuckler (BF; yes Octo)”, and “swashbuckler (BF; no Octo)”, respectively. Note that Double Shot calls for a different AP build than Flash Fist and Somersault Kick, with DS being DEX-focussed, and the other two being STR-focussed. So our DS permapirate model will have a different AP build from the FF one below.

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

• Permapirate/punch slinger (FF)
• Swashbuckler (SSK; yes Octo)
• Swashbuckler/armed brawler/permapirate (SSK)
• LUK bucc (ED)
• LUK bucc (FF)
• DEX brawler (ED)
• DEX brawler (FF)
• DEX brawler (DS)
• Pugilist (ED)
• Pugilist (FF)
• Bombadier (no summons)
• Bombadier (yes summons)
• Pistol-whipper (HB)
• Punch slinger (FF; yes Octo)
• Summoner (yes summons)
• Begunner

We will, unfortunately, not have a basic-attacking nor a SSK-using pistol-whipper model, because I genuinely do not know how meleeing with a gun works (if anyone does, please tell me!). But even with those two models missing, we are still at a whopping 16 pirate models (not including the ones already covered, which would make it 19 or 20, depending on how you count). That’s… too many models. For better or worse, pirates really are just this complicated. So I want to split this out into at least two parts! In this first part, I will be considering the first ten models on the above list.

Our FF-using permapirate/punch slinger model will be using a King Cent, and will get a little extra STR & DEX from their gear due to their ability to wear jobbed clothing (e.g. the Red Belly Duke). They will otherwise have as much STR as possible, because we assume that the FF-using permapirate is well-tuned to knuckler use.

Our SSK-using swashbuckler model will be very similar to the old (BF-using) swashbuckler model, except that they will be wielding a Sky Ski, and will be a little more STR-focussed with their equips. The “swashbuckler/armed brawler/permapirate (SSK)” model will be identical stat-wise and equipment-wise, but without the DPS from Octopus.

Our LUK bucc and DEX brawler models unfortunately will not get to wear jobbed clothing, and their weapon choices are limited to just the Maple Golden Claw. The “DEX brawler (DS)” model is separate from our “permapirate/bullet bucc (DS)” model because it is restricted to having exactly 4 base STR.

Our pugilist, of course, uses no weapons at all, but they will be capable of wearing jobbed clothing.

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

The model permapirate/punch slinger (FF)

• 550 STR (45 of which is from gear)
• 100 DEX (80 of which is from gear)
• 119 WATK (86 from knuckler + 20 from Cider + 3 from cape + 10 from gloves)

The model swashbuckler/armed brawler/permapirate (SSK)

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

The model LUK bucc

• 69 STR (65 of which is from gear; 5 extra from the Maple Golden Claw)
• 65 DEX (45 of which is from gear)
• 530 LUK (25 of which is from gear)
• 105 WATK (72 from knuckler + 20 from Cider + 3 from cape + 10 from gloves)

The model DEX brawler

• 69 STR (65 of which is from gear; 5 extra from the Maple Golden Claw)
• 566 DEX (45 of which is from gear)
• 105 WATK (72 from knuckler + 20 from Cider + 3 from cape + 10 from gloves)

The model DEX brawler (DS)

• 29 STR (25 of which is from gear)
• 606 DEX (85 of which is from gear; 5 extra from the Maple Canon Shooter)
• 123 WATK (72 from gun + 20 from Cider + 3 from cape + 10 from gloves + 18 from bullets)

The model pugilist

• 550 STR (45 of which is from gear)
• 100 DEX (80 of which is from gear)
• 33 WATK (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 & 600 MDEF to reasonably represent a low- or mid-level boss monster. We split out the LUK bucc, DEX brawler, and pugilist models into FF vs. ED models because they are only capable of using ED when their Energy Charge is active (which is always <100% uptime), and because they might not have ED maxed out (i.e. level 20). Furthermore, there is a DS model for the DEX brawler, because they are so good with guns, as a result of being pure DEX.

model	DPS
Permapirate/punch slinger (FF)	7109.9
DEX brawler (DS)	6551.6
Swashbuckler (SSK; yes Octo)	5012.1
Pugilist (ED)	4141.3
Swashbuckler/armed brawler/permapirate (SSK)	4071.2
DEX brawler (ED)	3754.8
Pugilist (FF)	3106.0
DEX brawler (FF)	2815.9
LUK bucc (ED)	409.4
LUK bucc (FF)	307.1

Somewhat interestingly, out of these ten models, the highest single-target DPS is a melee model: the FF-using permapirate/punch slinger. In second place, ironically, is a melee-focussed build wielding a gun. It seems that the DEX brawler’s best bet — when they only care about single-target DPS — is actually wielding a gun! Our pugilist does a bit better damage than our DEX brawler when in melee (although not by much), and our SSK users stack up quite favourably. And then, of course, the LUK bucc… as expected, they do pretty poor damage; to be fair to them, most of their damage is eaten up by the 600 WDEF. If we instead assumed 0 WDEF, the DPS values for the ED and FF models would be 2371.0 and 1778.0, respectively.

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
‍☠️ Permapirate/punch slinger (FF)	7109.9
Wood(wo)man (bow)	6725.3
Wood(wo)man (xbow)	6690.6
‍☠️ Permapirate/bullet bucc (DS)	6669.1
‍☠️ Swashbuckler (BF; yes Octo)	6598.6
‍☠️ DEX brawler (DS)	6551.6
⚔️ DEX WK (lightning neutral)	6217.8
⚔️ Permawarrior	5934.0
LUKless dit	5928.2
‍☠️ Swashbuckler (BF; no Octo)	5614.4
Permarcher	5614.0
Daggerlord/permarogue (Double Stab)	5223.5
⚔️ DEXgon knight	5054.7
‍☠️ Swashbuckler (SSK; yes Octo)	5012.1
Magelet (F/P Ele Comp; weak)	4520.7
⚔️ LUK WK (fire weak)	4353.5
Magelet (I/L Ele Comp; weak)	4192.2
‍☠️ Pugilist (ED)	4141.3
‍☠️ Swashbuckler/armed brawler/permapirate (SSK)	4071.2
Magelet (Fire Arrow; weak)	3976.9
⚔️ LUKsader	3868.9
‍☠️ DEX brawler (ED)	3754.8
⚔️ LUK WK (lightning weak)	3545.8
Permamagician	3307.3
‍☠️ Pugilist (FF)	3106.0
Magelet (F/P Ele Comp; neutral)	2877.8
Magelet (Heal; 1 non-self target)	2853.7
‍☠️ DEX brawler (FF)	2815.9
⚔️ 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
‍☠️ LUK bucc (ED)	409.4
‍☠️ LUK bucc (FF)	307.1
Magelet (priest/permamagician; Magic Claw)	234.4
Claw-puncher (hermit)	88.2

So it looks like, for pirates, FF is as good as it gets for single-target DPS! And DS is a close second; the “permapirate/bullet bucc (DS)” model should probably be higher DPS, if I had just taken into account jobbed clothing, but whatever. Pugilists and SSK-users (and DEX brawlers, for that matter) are prized for their mobbing abilities. And LUK buccs are LUK buccs.

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.

Helping Cort out with some cards

Cortical (GishGallop, Phoneme, Subcortical, MageFP, Medulla, dendrite, WizetWizard) was card-hunting at Magatia and was getting a little stuck on some of the more difficult monsters. Some of the monsters in Magatia a big fat tubs of HP, so as a STRginner, Cort was having a hard time finishing those sets. So I promised to bring my woodswoman, capreolina, to help out! First off was finishing the Homunculus set:



We were also able to finish the Homun set in a reasonable time, which was a relief, since Cort had spent hours getting 1/5 cards when grinding alone.

Then we tackled Sites:



And after sweeping all eight channels twice, I was able to go from 2/5 Security Camera cards to 3/5:



And while we were at it, I hopped onto my DEXgon knight rusa, to help Cort get the Male Boss set right quick:



And while I was there, I got the set for capre as well :3

Bossing with Skateboard, pyxi, Pastasauce, and ToasTea

While I was looking for something to do on my STR bishop cervid, I ran into Skateboard (Melokie, Alrightyo), who was also looking for something to do. So we decided it was time for a Ravana run!:



I went, as cervid, with Skateboard, as well as pyxi (quakken) and ToasTea. None of us were super strong, but everyone else’s damage was thankfully enough to make up for my pitiful STR bishop DPS. They were rather impressed with my damage, though, as I was able to knock back Ravana (albeit not very consistently, thanks to my wildly unstable damage). I had on Cort’s Toy of 101, and was buffed with Cider, MW, and SE, so I was doing some pretty chunky damage by my own standards. And the others thought so as well, being somewhat surprised with how much damage a bishop is capable of doing in melee

Skateboard went to do some of the CWK quests so that she could host CWKPQ, and ran into a BF along the way. We decided to fight that guy as well, although I had to attend the fight on rusa, as cervid would not be able to survive (and even rusa nearly gets one-shot by BF). The HB was probably nice for everyone else, anyways:



This time Pastasauce came along, and later, we fought another BF as well; rusa actually got big fatty EXP for both of these kills, which was really nice. And, once Skateboard was at CWM for the quests, I had nothing else to do with rusa besides farm a few woods:



cervid does some fourth job quests!

Now that cervid is a (pure STR) bishop, it’s time for some 4th job skill questing!

Spoiler: cervid, 4th job questing~

The first order of business was the Resurrection skill questline. Before actually starting, I went ahead and collected the ETC items that I would need for the quest: 100 Ice Pieces, 50 Firebomb Flames, and 5 Charms of the Undead. I headed over to the Grim Phantom Watches map to kill some GPWs for myself:



As it turns out, these things are tanky as hell. With 60k HP and 850 WDEF each, it took me quite a while to whittle each one down, and desperately hope that it would drop an Ice Piece. After a few minutes of grinding and getting 4 Ice Pieces, though, I ran into CtrlNoble (xNoble, 1122Noble, 1122) on the same map, and asked if he had any spare Ice Pieces. He responded by dropping 346(!) Ice Pieces, so I thanked him graciously and, well, was off to do the next ETC hunt~



…In which I was joined by Taima (Tacgnol, Boymoder, Numidium, Gambolpuddy, Yotsubachan)! And so, 50 Firebomb Flames and 5 Charms of the Undead (I already had the charms) later, I was off to get Resurrection:



The JQ took me a while (indeed, two tries; the JQ has a 20 minute time limit) to complete successfully. The entire damn thing is completely dark; none of the platforms are visible, and to make things worse, there are Flyeyes flying around willy nilly! But I did eventually nail it, which was the last step that I needed to unlock this incredible skill. I plan on resurrecting many permabeginners (and other squishy odd-jobbers) in the future!!

Oh, and in the process, I fought some Thanatoses and managed to squeeze out a stray card:



The other skill questline that I could do on my own was the Bahamut questline. It just asks for 20 ETCs that can be obtained from any colour of Wyvern in Leafre. This one is actually repeatable; each repetition requires more Dragon Hearts than the last, and increases the skill level cap by 5. I only did the first one (20 Dragon Hearts), as Bahamut is essentially a “meme skill” for me (as I have little to no MACC nor TMA, due to my INTless & LUKless nature), so a maximum level of 10 is just fine. Plus, Wyverns are quite the formidable opponent:





With Cort’s Toy of 101, my own self-casted buffs (including MW1), Cider, and Echo of Hero, I was able to achieve a maximum range of over 5.1k!!:



And finally, after having collected all 20 Dragon Hearts, Bahamut was mine:



…But not actually, since I haven’t had the spare SP to spend on it yet

Attending the Bomberman event for the first time

GM Mirror hosted a Bomberman event, and since I was already in Ludibrium anyways, I decided I might as well attend, with Taima!:



Unfortunately, while we both went in (the event is limited to roughly 100 players, I think), Taima’s game crashed immediately upon entering, so I was in there all alone >.<

The event itself is pretty chaotic and random (the last round resulted in a tie, as the last two players standing were killed at the same time), and I died with urgency during every round, but it was still cool to see. Especially with the funky visual glitch (this was also seen by the other players at the event):



And by the end, even if I didn’t win any of the rounds, I still got a Scroll of Secrets! So I went off to hunt for the key to unlock it:



…Aaaand got a sweet topwear def 30% scroll. Can’t win ‘em all, I guess.

cervine grinds to level 106; capreolina grinds to level 115

It is time… for a grinding section! This time, featuring my I/L magelet, cervine! And joined again by Taima/Tacgnol:



Unfortunately, CDs punch well above their weight, and permabeginners are as lightweight as it gets… But never fear! Tacgnol is here to mistsplode the shit out of some CDs! We grinded as an I/L / F/P duo for a while, and in the process, I got cervine from level 105 to level 106 ^^

And here we are, burnt out from the grinding:



Later, I went to grind CDs on my woodswoman capreolina, to get her from level 114 to 115:



I was joined again by Taima, this time on her STRmit Boymoder:



And, when that proved to be a little too difficult for Boymoder, again she grinded as Tacgnol. And capreolina is, in fact, now level 115

Oh, and also, capre was my only character with zrings; fortunately, she only had two:



But that’s still a net loss of 200 HP… u_u R.I.P.

alces @ OPQ

And, as before, my undead daggerlord alces is on that OPQ grind:



I took a break from OPQing to test out my damage with Cort’s Fan (an extremely powerful 102 WATK Fan, 10 more WATK than my own):



Yowza! Not pictured here is alces dealing >6k damage in a single Double Stab at level 65… O.O



I also had the pleasure of doing an OPQ or two with lanlan, who remained almost completely silent for the entirety of every run, but who was nevertheless quite capable of silently disciplining her party members:



rusa+Tacgnol @ 5-6 F

Tacgnol needed a last-hitter at the Sutra Depository 5-6 F, so I brought along my DEXgon knight rusa! rusa has effectively infinite WACC, and very good mobbing skills, so she made a great last-hitter for this purpose. I even got a card or two along the way:



…One long grind session later, and this was enough to get Tacgnol to level 120, and rusa from 116 to 117!! Very nice~

Tacgnol advances to the honourable rank of archgishlet!!

Now that Tacgnol was level 120, I attended Tacgnol’s 4th job advancement party~! It was quite fun, starting off with the 4th job advancement itself (Tacgnol had already collected the Heroic Star and the Heroic Pentagon):



And we (Tacgnol, myself, and OmokTeacher) collectively went through the Meteor Shower questline, culminating in the very first ever Meteor Shower (yes, the first one ever… except maybe for some used by normal-jobbed characters, but surely that doesn’t count…):



:OOOOO

Congrats!!! <3

alces does a few more quests~

Spoiler: Moar questing 4 alces~

The first order of business was working on Protecting the Peach Farm (requires Peach Monke kills as well as their ETCs) and Making Mastery Medicine (requires various ETCs from around Mu Lung/Herb Town, some of which are rare-ish: Snake Leathers and Bear Feet):



While I was near the map where Reindeer and Peach Monke spawn, I killed some Book Ghosts to complete the [Advanced] bit of The Legendary Being’s Scroll questline:

Legendary Being’s Scroll [Advanced] get!

And I had to move on to Herb Town maps in order to gather the rest of my ETCs:







Once I completed the above-mentioned quests, I started on the Herb Town quests, particularly Eliminating the Escaped Pot:



…Although I was called to OPQ before I finished the last 100 or so kills!

Ravana w/ Gruzz, xBowtjuhNL, Eoka, and Harlez

I did more Ravana runs, this time with Gruzz, xBowtjuhNL, Eoka, and Harlez, all of whom I met while MPQing on my DEXgon knight rusa. It was also rusa who I took to Ravana, as well, so that xBowtjuhNL wouldn’t get one-shot by Ravana’s attacks. We were joined by I/L archmage Subjugate for our first run, which made things considerably smoother; for the second run, however, we were on our own:



Besides Harlez unfortunately dying to a pet auto HP potion failure, the run wasn’t too bad; xBowtjuhNL used an apple, I think, and I believe Gruzz used a few Ssiws Cheeses as well! :O So the run didn’t take that much longer. I ended up with some extra mesos from splits, yet another fake Ravana Helmet (which I immediately dropped on the ground), and some joocy EXPs~

alces advances to daggermit

After so many more OPQs, it was finally time… for alces to advance to daggermit! Third job stabby sin!! Proto-daggerlord!!!



The Dark Lord went down like a chump:



And so it was, hermit at last (although, unfortunately, no FJ until level 72…):



At the bottom there you can see NightDood congratulating me; NightDood is actually a fellow daggerlord! Good luck on your journey, NightDood~

alces graduates OPQ academy

Having advanced to the rank of hermit, I headed back to OPQ to OPQ with I/L gish and fellow Oddjobs member, GishGallop:



And we graduated OPQ at the exact same time, both leveling up to 71 on the same stage. Here we are, in our final OPQ:



Bye OPQ! See you again later And alces is off to more quests and some MPQ!!

 

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

rangifer’s diary: pt. xlix

R>1 seafaring ne’er-do-well for Capt. Latanica run

In the previous installment of this series (which is part of the previous diary entry), we looked at some odd-jobbed pirate models. But there were so many pirate models that we only covered roughly half of them (“them” being the models remaining after those covered in the original version of this series). In particular, we already went over the following models:

• Permapirate/punch slinger (FF)
• Swashbuckler (SSK; yes Octo)
• Swashbuckler/armed brawler/permapirate (SSK)
• LUK bucc (ED)
• LUK bucc (FF)
• DEX brawler (ED)
• DEX brawler (FF)
• DEX brawler (DS)
• Pugilist (ED)
• Pugilist (FF)

We can now move on to the rest of the bunch!:

• Bombadier (no summons)
• Bombadier (yes summons)
• Pistol-whipper (HB; no Octo)
• Pistol-whipper (HB; yes Octo)
• Punch slinger (FF; yes Octo)
• Summoner (yes summons)
• Begunner

(I’ve since split out the pistol-whipper model into two models: one with Octo, and one without.)

But, actually, I just realised that I have no clue what the “attack period” of the Grenade skill would even be, how such a period might be calculated, or what relation (if any??) it might have to the reality of trying to fight a boss monster using this skill. Grenade is a charged skill, and the level of charge determines the distance that the grenade is thrown. LazyBui’s “Attack Speed Reference” also gives up on this skill, saying:

So, unfortunately, I’m going to have to throw out both bombadier models. But that still leaves us with 5 more models to go.

Our pistol-whipper will be using the level 100 gun, and will get a little extra STR & DEX from their gear due to their ability to wear jobbed clothing (e.g. the Red Belly Duke). They will otherwise have as much DEX as possible, as the Homing Beacon skill can only be used when a gun is equipped. We further assume (in addition to other assumptions about how the skill’s damage is calculated) that the WATK from the outlaw’s bullets is not taken into account. The reasoning for this is that the Homing Beacon skill does not consume ammunition of any kind, and, indeed, the skill animation does not involve the outlaw’s gun at all (despite it requiring a gun to be equipped).

Our FF-using & Octo-using punch slinger model will be the same as the FF-using permapirate/punch slinger model from the previous entry. The only difference here is the use of Octopus.

Our summoner, due to the fact that outlaw summons scale primarily on DEX, will be very similar (AP-wise and equipment-wise) to the pistol-whipper model. And similar comments apply to the begunner, as well.

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

The model pistol-whipper

• 550 DEX (45 of which is from gear)
• 100 STR (80 of which is from gear)
• 119 WATK (86 from gun + 20 from Cider + 3 from cape + 10 from gloves)

The model punch slinger

• 550 STR (45 of which is from gear)
• 100 DEX (80 of which is from gear)
• 119 WATK (86 from knuckler + 20 from Cider + 3 from cape + 10 from gloves)

The model summoner

• 550 DEX (45 of which is from gear)
• 100 STR (80 of which is from gear)
• 137 WATK (86 from gun + 18 from ammunition + 20 from Cider + 3 from cape + 10 from gloves)

The model begunner
See “The model summoner”.

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.

The main difficulty here is the summons. Octopus is pretty straightforward, for the most part, and so we just assume that it has 100% uptime in cases where summons’ DPS is taken into account. Gaviota is where things get a little messy. Gaviota can be somewhat difficult to work with; it has a bit of a casting time that interrupts the summoner’s ability to use other active skills (like attacking skills) and basic attacks, but it only attacks one time before disappearing. It then has to be resummoned, over and over, waiting for the 5 second cooldown each time. So, some summon-using models only use Octopus; these are identified with “yes Octo”. Other summon-using models use both Octopus and Gaviota; these are identified with “yes summons”. Calculating the DPS of Gaviota itself is pretty simple: just divide the average per-hit damage by 5 (as it has a 5 second cooldown). But the impact on other sources of DPS is more difficult to estimate. The most simple estimation is just to be as optimistic as possible, and pretend that Gaviota does not impact other sources of DPS at all. I’ll be using this simplification here, so, the only way that we take into account Gaviota’s difficulty of use is in deciding which models use Gaviota, and which ones don’t. This is basically accurate for models that don’t use Gaviota, but overestimates the DPS of models that do use Gaviota. So keep that in mind here.

model	DPS
Pistol-whipper (HB; yes Octo)	9468.4
Punch slinger (FF; yes Octo)	8106.3
Pistol-whipper (HB; no Octo)	7810.2
Summoner (yes summons)	5546.6
Begunner	1647.3

So we’ve got some pretty heavy hitters here; besides the begunner, all of these models put up some pretty chunky DPS numbers. The pistol-whipper does startling quantities of DPS, owing to Homing Beacon’s incredible 380% damage multiplier. And the summoner does what is perhaps a startling quantity of DPS as well, although do note that roughly 49.5% of that DPS is just from the summoner basic-attacking with their gun.

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 crusader	14828.4
LUKless hermit (SM)	14096.3
⚔️ DEX WK (fire weak)	11856.8
⚔️ DEXsader	10729.0
⚔️ DEX WK (lightning weak)	9977.1
‍☠️ Pistol-whipper (HB; yes Octo)	9468.4
⚔️ Wand crusader	9446.7
‍☠️ Punch slinger (FF; yes Octo)	8106.3
⚔️ DEX WK (ice weak)	8097.5
‍☠️ Pistol-whipper (HB; no Octo)	7810.2
Permarogue (L7)	7658.0
⚔️ DEX WK (fire neutral)	7470.9
‍☠️ Permapirate/punch slinger (FF)	7109.9
Woods(wo)man (bow)	6725.3
Woods(wo)man (xbow)	6690.6
‍☠️ Permapirate/bullet bucc (DS)	6669.1
‍☠️ Swashbuckler (BF; yes Octo)	6598.6
‍☠️ DEX brawler (DS)	6551.6
⚔️ DEX WK (lightning neutral)	6217.8
⚔️ Permawarrior	5934.0
LUKless dit	5928.2
‍☠️ Swashbuckler (BF; no Octo)	5614.4
Permarcher	5614.0
‍☠️ Summoner (yes summons)	5546.6
Daggerlord/permarogue (Double Stab)	5223.5
⚔️ DEXgon knight	5054.7
‍☠️ Swashbuckler (SSK; yes Octo)	5012.1
Magelet (F/P Ele Comp; weak)	4520.7
⚔️ LUK WK (fire weak)	4353.5
Magelet (I/L Ele Comp; weak)	4192.2
‍☠️ Pugilist (ED)	4141.3
‍☠️ Swashbuckler/armed brawler/permapirate (SSK)	4071.2
Magelet (Fire Arrow; weak)	3976.9
⚔️ LUKsader	3868.9
‍☠️ DEX brawler (ED)	3754.8
⚔️ LUK WK (lightning weak)	3545.8
Permamagician	3307.3
‍☠️ Pugilist (FF)	3106.0
Magelet (F/P Ele Comp; neutral)	2877.8
Magelet (Heal; 1 non-self target)	2853.7
‍☠️ DEX brawler (FF)	2815.9
⚔️ 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
‍☠️ Begunner	1647.3
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
‍☠️ LUK bucc (ED)	409.4
‍☠️ LUK bucc (FF)	307.1
Magelet (priest/permamagician; Magic Claw)	234.4
Claw-puncher (hermit)	88.2

As expected, the punch slinger with Octo does roughly 1k more DPS than the punch slinger without. In the previous entry, I said: “it looks like, for pirates, FF is as good as it gets for single-target DPS!”. But it seems that I forgot that I wasn’t done with pirates yet. Turns out, the weirdly broken skill for odd-jobbed pirates is Homing Beacon!

Also worth noting is that the begunner ranks the highest in this table, out of all 3 (or 4, if you count besinners, represented here as “generic claw-wielding non-rogue”) ranged beginners. However, when compared to their bowginner and clawginner siblings, the begunner is the least “ranged” out of the 3. They have no access to the equivalent of The Eye of Amazon/Keen Eyes; this is because Double Shot (and later, other gunslinger/outlaw/corsair skills, although the begunner is a permapirate by definition anyways) has reach built into the skill. Higher levels of Double Shot have larger reach, and maxing it out brings Double Shot on par with maxed The Eye of Amazon or maxed Keen Eyes. Yet begunners can only attack with basic-attacks, by definition. So their reach is quite poor (compare: the besinner).

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.

A little sadsadgrinding to bring rusa near level 120, and cervid to 121!

I did some more sadsadgrinding, where I head to CDs and start duo grinding with myself, featuring my STR bishop cervid, and my DEXgon knight rusa. While I was grinding with myself and listening to sad music, Taima (Tacgnol, Boymoder, Inugami, Numidium, Gambolpuddy) came to cheer me up and grind alongside me:



And by the time that I was finished with cervid+rusa CD grinding, I had gotten cervid to level 121 (hooray for MW5!), and later I came back (after some questing) to get rusa to level 119 and 99.98%! :O

alces is an MPQ fiend

Now that my undead daggermit, alces, had graduated OPQ, she was in level range for MPQ! My initial instinct was to continue with the strategy I had when OPQing, which was to PQ when folks were around, and then opportunistically do questing whenever there weren’t any PQers.

But I decided to hold off on the questing, for EXP reasons. You see, once alces gets to level 86, there are no longer any PQs that really give decent EPH (and the situation only becomes more dire with higher levels); PQs like PPQ (at least until level 101), HPQ, etc., still remain options, but their EXP is pretty lacking at that point. Also, I don’t really like PPQ (lol). I may (or may not) end up PPQing, for cards/hats, but the EXP story for my post-MPQ characters is generally just: grind and quest. And grind. Very sad grinding. So my strategy is to save the quests that I would otherwise be doing at this point, for after I graduate MPQ (level 86+). When I was OPQing, the quests that I was doing were relatively lower level, and so are of lesser consequence to a hypothetical level 86+ alces. Questing at the same time as MPQing, however, means quests that are more in the 65~85 level range or so, which are the quests that I think it wise to save for later. This is a particular concern for alces, who has a limited capacity to grind, due to her complete lack of multi-target attacking skills (and lack of reach, for that matter).

So, anyways, I’ve been MPQing.

Spoiler: Been MPQing~

Here I am, duoing the final MPQ stage with slashmuslash, because one of our other party members crashed, and the other party member is me (my MPQ mule, potpan):



I made sure to summon Normal Fanky, and it was a great success! Later, I was joined by Boymoder, the STRmit!:



And I continued using potpan as a Teleport mule / fourth MPQ party member, so many more trio MPQs were had (thankfully, mostly successful):





And we were also joined by yet another Oddjobs member, GishGallop (Cortical, Phoneme, dendrite, Subcortical, Medulla, WizetWizard, MageFP) the I/L gish!:





R.I.P. GishGallop, 2021~2021. u_u

And here is a screenshot of the boss fight (vs. Angy Fanky) that we had during one of our all-Oddjobs trio MPQ runs:



And, later, we were able to complete this party when we were joined by a fourth Oddjobs member, xX17Xx the permarogue, who was fresh back from vacation! So we were able to run as a party of 4 and do proper guild runs of MPQ, the first of which, I filmed. You can watch the full run on the Oddjobs YouTube channel, if you’d like. I’m sure GishGallop would really appreciate it if you did watch, and then left lots of comments about how sexy they are.

Questing with rusa

I had some quests that I wanted to get done on my DEXgon knight, rusa, before she hit level 120. First of all, I decided a while ago that I wanted to skip getting rusa a MoN, and go straight for an HTP. My reasoning was basically that:

• Some calculations I did, suggested that an average egged HTP does way more for rusa’s DPS than even a 5 WATK MoN. This may seem counterintuitive, as the recieved wisdom is “HTP for mages, shads, and washing machines; MoN for everyone else”, but as usual, odd jobs throw a wrench in recieved wisdom. rusa already has plenty of WATK, so 5 extra (that is, assuming I get a perfect WATK one) is pretty nice, but not as good as increasing the quantity on the other side of the multiplication sign; STRless as she is, rusa is more starved for stats than she is for WATK. So even if I got a 5 WATK MoN, I would still pine for the considerable DPS boost that an HTP offers (once I hit level 120+).
• Because rusa was leveling ridiculously quickly, it seemed worthwhile to not bother with the MoN at level 110, and simply wait another 10 levels, using my Silver Deputy Star in the meantime. HTPs are preciously expensive to buy (even non-AFK), and so skipping out on paying for a MoN (of dubious quality — again, no guarantee at all that I’d get a 5 WATK one) goes towards paying for an HTP.

But, now that I was getting close to level 120, I had to start worrying about a very important question: how does one even buy an HTP? I still don’t understand any of the details (if someone could enlighten me, that’d be great), but I was able to gather via some internet searches that I would have to collect the ETCs for the Wars of the Dragons questline:







Who knew? Leafre mobs drop cards! Wow~



I was a little scared that farming up a Busted Dagger might take way too long (I’ve heard some people imply that they’re pretty rare), but in the end it probably didn’t even take me a full hour of grinding Cornians to get one:



Phewf! And with that, all I needed was that Manon’s Cry… But I’d be waiting until my job advancement quest to get that one. So I left to go to KFT, in search of more quests.

I basically did all of the KFT quests — except for Mr. Shim’s Request, which I’m not particularly fond of.

I fought enough Hodoris in the process of quests like The Kids That Became the Sun and the Moon and The Tree Cutter’s Test, that I got a card:



I fought the Old Fox to solve the mystery of the Legends of Hometown and return Chil Nam to his normal, chil(l) state:



On the way to the haunted house, I ran into some very scholarly apparitions:



And finally, at the haunted house at the top of black mountain, I fought to the death with the King Goblins who would curse this town and the Helios Library with eternal darkness:







Consider this Korean folk town saved!

A little light card-hunting, with alces

Although I didn’t want to do any questing on my undead daggermit, alces, I was OK getting a little EXP here and there via other means, since I wasn’t really MPQing for the pendant; the only thing I “needed” before graduating was a full set of Franken Lloyd cards. So I did some light card-hunting in the area around MPQ (Nihal Desert):

Spoiler: cardz~

sorts, reporting for duty!

Oh, and I played a bit of my DEX brawler LPQ mule, sorts, when I saw a distress smega seeking a “sin/dit” for LPQ. They were dismayed to see me show up with a gun in my hand, but I assured them that I was most capable of doing the thief portal, so off we went:



Mission success~

Questing with cervine

I decided to do a little questing on my I/L magelet, cervine, including doing the Capt. Latanica questline:





When I was farming the requisite Slimys at GS2, I found that I could actually hit both platforms with Ice Strike when standing on the top one:



And once I finished with the requisite 300 Mr. Anchors:



…It was time to fight the big ghost downstairs: Captain Latanica. I filmed the fight, and you can watch a brief extract of it on the Oddjobs YouTube channel~!

I then headed to KFT, to do something very similar to what I did as rusa:



Doing many of the same quests, like The Lost Seed:



Searching for a clue to the mystery of the Legends of Hometown:



Running into even more scholarly apparitions:



Fighting the Old Fox for great justice:



And casually Ice Striking the darkness away:



Consider this Korean folk town saved! Again!

Grinding my braincells away for GM boofs

With an announcement of GM boofs, it was time for me to force myself to grind for not one, but two hours… First on cervine, but then also on my swashbuckler, hydropotina:



Which was enough to take hydro from level 90 to level 91! Noice~ I’ll have to consult my local neurologist for an estimate on how many more CDs I have to kill before I destroy the last of my braincells!

rusa is a darksterity knight.

And finally… it was time to hold a mini-party for rusa’s level 120 and for her advancement to the honourable rank of darksterity knight!! I decided to do the levelup at Area C-3 of the Alcadno Research Institute’s lab, as MPQ was where rusa really felt finally mature to me (as opposed to, erm, being an HB mule…), and was where I had the most fun playing her <3

As I was travelling to Magatia for the mini-party, I was intercepted by Gruzz, xBowtjuhNL, and Harlez:



And you can watch the video that I made of the mini-party, on the Oddjobs YouTube channel~! I’m very proud to now have not one, but two fourth-job odd-jobbed characters! rusa has been a blast to play, and I look forward to playing her even more in the future (including those joocy fourth-job skill quests)!

 

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

rangifer’s diary: pt. l

Hooray for the 50th installment of rangifer’s diary

This 50th installment coincides with another one of MapleLegends’s infamous patch maintenances, so there won’t be anything in here about gameplay. Instead, I want to take this time to reflect on the diary itself, talk about a few MapleStory-related mini-projects that I work on or have worked on, and start a new expository series that will be replacing the “R>1 pog ___ for ___ run” series that I concluded in the previous entry.

A reflection on rangifer’s diary

Back when I very first started this diary, I had the itch to start a new character. For a little while, I held off from doing this — I already had, by this point, my STR priest cervid, my woodswoman capreolina, my I/L magelet cervine, and my swashbuckler hydropotina. I also technically had my besinner hashishi, although I hadn’t started playing her (yet). So I was hesitant to add another to this list, but eventually did it anyways (lol). I actually held a small online poll where people could vote for what character I made next: either a DEX spearwoman (who I would later end up making anyways, by the name of rusa), or a pugilist. And the pugilist won, and so rangifer was destined to be born.

At around this same time, I had started a forum specifically for the Oddjobs guild, and not too long afterwards, started the Odd Jobs Community Thread on the MapleLegends forums. So, at this point, both the Oddjobs forums and the Odd Jobs Community Thread were pretty barren. I was inspired by kuromii’s journal, which I found after getting to know kuromii in-game, and had the idea to try my hand at a diary of my own. And so, since almost everything that I was doing had to do with odd jobs anyways, I decided to start posting my experimental diary on the Oddjobs forums and on the Odd Jobs Community Thread.

Earlier entries in the diary are more clearly influenced by kuromii’s journal; rather than making use of colour variations within the text and the use of smilies/emotes to highlight parts of the text and add eye candy, I was able to do this in plain text through the use of emojis (particularly, only those approved as part of Unicode). Also, in these earlier entries, I tried to make the entries daily! So I aimed to make each entry after a day of mapling, and the entries were thus shorter, and made it easier for me to remember what I had done.

Eventually, these characteristics of the early diary entries were shed. The emojis were something that I was always a little iffy on; I quickly started to think that they might just be distracting and unnecessary. Furthermore, the MapleLegends forums (which are based on XenForo) do not accept Unicode codepoints that cannot be stored in a single UTF-16 code unit (so basically, no surrogate pairs), which thus excludes almost all emojis. So there was some nasty breakage when posting on the MapleLegends forums (although the Oddjobs forums and the Markdown renderings on Codeberg were just fine). And trying to post a single diary entry after each day of mapling grew too cumbersome, so I gradually became more and more lazy until my diary posts were simply sporadic. As a result, although this is a special edition of rangifer’s diary, there isn’t really a significance to it being the 50th entry. More of the entries are concentrated in the earlier days of the diary, with them being more sparse (but larger and more time-consuming) as time has gone on.

With these changes away from the original model of the diary, a few thigns have also happened:

• Each diary entry has become more elaborate, and more time-consuming to make. Sometimes I think that I spend too long on these things, but the benefit of being able to reflect back on my thoughts and adventures in the maple world is great, and I have continually been encouraged by those who do read my diary. I never expected my diary to have much of an audience at all, and if you’re a reader of this diary, I want to personally thank you very much for reading and supporting my mapleventures!! <3
• The narrative portions of the diary entries are much more image-directed. What I mean here is that I have to take screenshots of the stuff that I do. If I don’t, chances are that I will forget almost all of it, and the diary entries could not be nearly as detailed as they are now. Even now, I will inevitably forget to take screenshots sometimes, and so there are some things omitted from my diary entries that would be in there if I had just managed to snap a shot! And, as a result, my diary entries have become more dense with images, which can be a bad thing, although I suppose the extra eye candy is nice
• rangifer has, ironically, become my only real “failed” character so far. I’ve never really addressed it within the diary itself, because it’s normal for me to not play at least a few of my (approximately) 129078409236784 characters, in which case they simply don’t feature in the diary. But rangifer, in particular, has become somewhat of an abandoned project for me. She still exists, but for a whole host of reasons, I decided that I don’t enjoy playing her anymore. That being said, I did have an absolute blast playing her for the time that I did. Some have suggested (although, not before I thought of it myself) renaming the diary. The diary no longer focusses on rangifer, as it did in the earliest entries, and in fact, it doesn’t feature her anymore at all. So, seemingly, a better title would just be “deer’s diary”. But, rather than renaming the diary entirely, I want to retain its original title, as it is still correct — rangifer was the originator of the diary, and so it remains in her name, even post-mortem — and I also don’t want to break any URLs

And, just to wrap this section up real quick, I want to ask the question of where this diary is going in the future. The answer is, of course: nowhere, and anywhere! I plan to continue sporadically adding new entries, as usual, in the usual style. And the maple fates will guide me on my maple journey So thank you for reading!!!

Taxonomising odd jobs, pt. i: What even is an odd job, tho? §1

Preface

So, the next big expository series that I want for this diary is about taxonomising odd jobs. Lot of things are taxonomised: genres (of video games, music, comedy, film, literary works, etc.), stars, chemicals, computer architectures (and their instructions), formal languages / abstract machines, numbers, foods, and so on and so forth. It seems that the human capacity for taxonomisation (which we might also call typification, or categorisation) is unlimited. Taxonomies are perhaps born of human psychological necessity — so much so, that anthropologists often study humans in terms of their folk taxonomies (see also: ethnotaxonomy), which are deeply reflected by the humans’ use of natural language.

When it comes to the word “taxonomy” in particular, the most common use is in the context of biological taxonomy. Like all taxonomy, biological taxonomy is based on the use of mathematical sets. Certain individuals (in this case, individual biological organisms) may (or may not) be a member of a particular set, and it is this membership relation which defines where the individual lies within the taxonomy, and ultimately, defines what the structure of the taxonomy looks like. Some individuals may be members of more than one set, either because one set is a subset of the other, or simply because the sets have some nonempty intersection with one another. But the structure of modern biological taxonomy is special, in some ways. The sets that fundamentally make up biological taxonomy are called, appropriately, taxa (singular: taxon), and each taxa is generally assigned a particular rank; this makes biological taxonomy hierarchical. And, furthermore, the structure of biological taxonomy is phylogenetic; particularly, a given taxon is almost(!) always a proper clade, which includes a species (known as a “common ancestor”), in addition to all decendants of that species. This makes the structure of biological taxonomy somewhat more “objective” than a taxonomy that is built on the basis of, say, the practical use of its members, or on the basis of the common names used for its members. But this also imposes another relationship onto the taxonomy: that of decendancy. In order to have a “tidy” biological taxonomy, we have to properly define what decendancy even means, and we also have to figure out how we would, at least in principle, detect its presence.

But before we get into something as deep as decendancy, we have a more fundamental problem on our hands: defining the universe. No, not the universe in general, but the set-theoretic universe of our taxonomy. This means answering the question: “What even is an odd job, tho?”. You might think that this question is pretty straightforward for the biological taxonomy case; after all, only species of organisms that are made of biological cells (either prokaryotic or eukaryotic) are living biological organisms, right? But actually, acellular life is now generally recognised (although remains controversial), the most prominent example being viruses. The issue for us, however, is that deciding what is (and therefore, what is not) an “odd job” is probably even more difficult than in the biological case.

So, first things first, I need to give some disclaimers and some caveats:

• The views that I express in this series are my own. Obviously. As a result, you may reasonably disagree with what I have to say here.
• I may revise the views that I express in this series, over time. This is particularly true due to the next item on this list.
• I do not have the contents of this entire “Taxonomising odd jobs” series already written or planned out. This is in my diary (serialised as sections, with one section per diary entry) because of the informal, stream-of-consciousness nature of the series.

Primitive definitions
Oh, and also, unfortunately we have to do some basic definitions first. Normally, we use terms like “job”, “class”, “build”, etc. are used in a flimsy way that works well enough when we are imprecisely talking about MapleStory characters in a specialised context. Here, we want to talk about these things abstractly and precisely, so I’m going to be making some definitions (some of which may inevitably sound weird).

• Build: The way in which a MapleStory character is designed (intentionally, or unintentionally; planned in advance, or not), which encompasses all of (and only) the following:
  • What class progression the character takes.
  • How the character allocates their AP.
  • How the character allocates their SP.
  • What equipment the character uses (this can be in terms of general categories, like “bows”, “two-handed swords”, “overalls”, etc., and/or it can be in terms of individual items that have individual item IDs).
  • What skills the character does and does not use.
  • The location of the character (some characters are restricted, by their build alone, in their ability to enter certain maps).
• Class: The class of a character is in one-to-one correspondence with the label given by the game, to the character. From a first-person perspective, this is in the bottom-left corner of the screen, and from a third-person perspective, it can be viewed by double-clicking the character and inspecting the window that pops up. The class is also viewable in other ways, like guild listings, party listings, alliance listings, rankings on a given server’s website, etc.
  • Examples: Magician, beginner, F/P mage, F/P archmage, paladin, page, outlaw, hermit.
• Class progression: The chronological progression of classes taken by a character, expressed as a finite ordered list which contains no duplicates.
  • Examples: Beginner → magician → F/P wizard → F/P mage → F/P archmage, beginner → pirate → gunslinger → outlaw → corsair, beginner, beginner → rogue.
• Grade: The grade of a class is one less than the length of the shortest class progression that contains it.
  • Examples: Beginner is grade 0, magician is grade 1, gunslinger is grade 2, white knight is grade 3, bowmaster is grade 4.
• Throughclass: If the highest grade attainable in the game is g, then a throughclass is a set of classes, which consists of a class c that is of grade g, along with all other classes b s.t. a level ∞ character of class b who takes all class advancements available to them will necessarily be of class c.
  • Examples: {F/P wizard, F/P mage, F/P archmage}, {bowmaster, ranger, hunter}, {page, paladin, white knight}.
• Job: A job is a kind of build (all jobs are builds, but not all builds are jobs) that serves as the analogue of “species” for our purposes. A given job has an identifiable playstyle that differs significantly, simply, and meaningfully from other jobs, while also not being defined so narrowly as to exactly specify every aspect of what makes a build. Note that this definition is more nebulous than previous definitions; a lot of our taxonomising efforts will be focussed on this nebulousness.
  • Examples: “DEX-based archer/hunter/ranger/bowmaster” is a job, although we do not split it out into separate jobs on the basis of, say, whether they max Focus or Soul Arrow first. “DEX warrior/page/white knight/paladin” is a job, although we do not split it out into separate jobs on the basis of, say, whether they use blunt weapons or swords.
• Subjob: A subjob forms the analogue of “subspecies” for our purposes. Members of a subjob are sometimes practically distinguishable from other members of their job, and furthermore, their distinction from other members of their job can be defined simply, succinctly, and meaningfully.
  • Examples: Sword paladin, plumber brigand, STRmit, DEXless bandit/chief bandit/shadower.
• Hybrid: A build that is a hybridisation of two or more builds (usually, jobs and/or subjobs), that combines the builds by taking key aspects from each build and permanently combining them.
  • Examples: Blood dagger fighter, claw-punching besinner, gishlet.

A broad taxonomy for MapleStory builds in general
I first want to break down all MapleStory character builds into a few sets, the union of which is the set of all MapleStory character builds:

• Optimal builds.
• Suboptimal builds.
• Aesthetic builds.
• Odd jobs.

These sets are not pairwise disjoint; that is, the above four sets do not form a partition. Before we talk about which sets are subsets of others, and which sets are disjoint from which other sets, let’s define our terminology (and give a small number of examples) here:

• Optimal builds are not necessarily mainstream builds. I originally had sets for “mainstream builds” and “experimental builds”, but I realised that defining either one of these sets relies on a notion of “the mainstream”, which is just a popularity contest. The popularity contest aspect doesn’t reflect very well on the material reality of the build itself (i.e. how it actually works gameplay-wise), and furthermore, it has the issue of changing depending on the calendar date, what server you’re playing on, the phase of the moon, etc. So instead, we are defining certain builds as “optimal” (or trivially different from “optimal”). An optimal build is associated with a particular throughclass, because optimal builds always achieve — or at least, strive to achieve — the highest possible grade. Then, they are considered “optimal”, given the throughclass that they take. As a result, optimal builds almost always play the game as their throughclass design (as designed by the game developers) suggests, and tailor everything around the most powerful capabilities that their throughclass bestows upon them.
  • Examples: STR paladin, INT I/L archmage, STR buccaneer.
• Suboptimal builds are the complement of optimal builds.
• Aesthetic builds are builds that are based exclusively, or almost exclusively, on their aesthetic and archetypical appeal. Aesthetic builds, because they don’t focus quite as much on gameplay, tend to also be suboptimal builds, but are not necessarily suboptimal. Aesthetic builds have no particular relation to other sets of builds, and can intersect partially with just about any set.
  • Examples: Any build based around a fixed outfit (and little or no NX equipment to cover it up), any “NPC look-a-like” build.
• Odd jobs are what we’re trying to define here!
  • Examples: See https://oddjobs.codeberg.page/odd-jobs.html.

And I think that’s enough for this entry. See you in the next installment!

…And other things

I’d like to use this final section to just briefly mention some of the little side projects (mostly odd-job-related) I have

Damage calculator

This one isn’t new, but I have a pre-BB MapleStory damage calculator that is web-based (written in TypeScript) and specifically designed to be as flexible as possible, to handle all the weird (or odd, as the case may be…) edge-cases and combinations. I use this calculator a lot, for personal use, and also for when I was writing the “R>1 pog ___ for ___ run” series! You can check out the calculator itself here:

https://oddjobs.codeberg.page/dmg-calc/

And the source code is in the same repository as the rest of the Oddjobs website:

https://codeberg.org/oddjobs/pages/src/branch/master/dmg-calc

Odd jobs list

Readers of this diary already know about this list, as I link to it frequently in my diary entries, but I do actively maintain an informative (but of course, not exhaustive) list of odd jobs that can be found rendered on the Oddjobs website:

https://oddjobs.codeberg.page/odd-jobs.html

The associated Coderberg repository can be found here:

https://codeberg.org/oddjobs/odd_jobs

As you can see, the data is just stored in odd_jobs.json. I have an HTML renderer that is in the Oddjobs website repo, which is responsible for the version you see on the Oddjobs website, and also a simple renderer to Markdown, which is responsible for the rendered version that you can see within the odd_jobs repo itself.

The most recent addition to the list has been the armed brawler, due to the “General List of Experimental Classes” (which is actually from early 2010), which calls this job “non-knuckle brawler”. To avoid confusion with other brawlers who do not use knuckles (e.g. bullet bucc, pugilist), I invented the name “armed brawler”.

Also somewhat recently, I added a way to rename jobs (particularly, renaming what their primary name is) without breaking URLs that pointed to old versions of that job’s entry. This allowed me to rename:

• STR Assassin → LUKless Assassin.
• Permabeginner → STR Beginner.
• LUK Mage → Magelet.
• LUK Gish → Gishlet.

…All of which should help to avoid confusion!

And I continue to maintain this list actively; if you have a job that should be on here, but isn’t, or have corrections/additions/nitpicks about existing entries, just let me know! In particluar, anyone can file issues against the repo, as well as PRs. Or you can just personally let me know, and I’ll get around to it

The scroll strategist

I have a program that can completely optimise scrolling strategies, using dynamic programming techniques, to help scrollers make informed decisions about their scrolling. Currently, there is only one optimisation mode: this mode absolutely maximises (yes, really; all possible strategies are considered) the probability of meeting and/or exceeding a given array of desired stats. Success is defined as: each one of the item’s final stats (i.e. the stats when the item is reduced to 0 slots) is greater than or equal to the corresponding stat in the goal array. In the case of ties (more than one strategy maximises the probability of success), whichever strategy has the lowest expected cost (only considering the cost of scrolls) wins. I will be considering other kinds of goals in the future, but for now, you can check out this program here:

https://codeberg.org/deer/scroll_strategist

And, right now, there is only one actual application that makes use of the scroll_strategist library:

https://codeberg.org/deer/scroll_strategist_cli

scroll_strategist_cli is a small CLI app that can be used to interface with scroll_strategist. Currently, it supports interactively entering the relevant data (item stats, item slots, what scrolls are available, and the goal stats), and also supports (via -j/--json) entering the relevant data by reading it from a JSON file (see example.json for an example). The output can be given non-interactively (with -n/--noninteractive), in which case, only the following data is emmitted:

• Probability of success,
• Expected cost (scrolls only), and
• The next scroll to be used.

Or, if the -n/--noninteractive flag is not supplied, scroll_strategist_cli will interactively walk you through the scrolling process. It will ask you, for each scroll, whether it succeeds, fails (in the sense of: neither booming nor succeeding), or booms. You then get updated info about the probability of success and the expected scroll-only cost.

At some point, I may try to make a web-based (similar to the damage calculator) interface to this

The unofficial “odd-jobbed rankings”

I maintain an informal rankings for odd-jobbed, off-island, MapleLegends characters. You can find it here:

https://oddjobs.codeberg.page/rankings/

And the relevant repository is here:

https://codeberg.org/oddjobs/odd-jobbed_rankings

This goes along with all the caveats you can see on the rankings: the rankings are super unofficial, almost certainly contain errors and omissions, etc. New entries (and the removal of entries) has to be done manually, although there is a script for automatic updates (which just scrapes the HTML of the MapleLegends rankings):

https://codeberg.org/oddjobs/odd-jobbed_rankings/src/branch/master/update.py

And a script to verify that the guild listed for each character is correct (which works by a similar strategy):

https://codeberg.org/oddjobs/odd-jobbed_rankings/src/branch/master/guild_check.py

The original impetus for this rankings was to make organising runs easier; particularly, PQs and boss runs. It’s for this reason (and also for purposes of maintainability…) that the rankings only start at level 45+, and that all islanders and campers are excluded.

The odd-jobbed archive

I maintain an archive of MapleStory (both pre-BB and post-BB) odd-job-related content, which can be found on the Oddjobs website:

https://oddjobs.codeberg.page/archive/

And the relevant repository can be found here:

https://codeberg.org/oddjobs/odd-jobbed_archive

This one, as you can see, is rendered from a TOML file (entries.toml). Again, feel free to submit issues and PRs!

Gish AP calculator

I did some work to help make the gish AP calculator possible — the original code was written in MATLAB by @Cortical:

https://oddjobs.codeberg.page/gish-ap-calc/

This calculator allocates AP for you, and exists to try to “solve” — or rather, try to ameliorate — what we call “the gish problem”. Gishes are, as we know now, extremely complex, and creating an effective one (at least, to the standards of what we expect a gish to be) is nearly impossible. This program is designed to make AP allocation a little easier, although for any given run of AP allocations, it has to assume a certain set of gear, set of buffs, skill being used to magically attack, and target monster.

The relevant repository can be found here:

https://codeberg.org/oddjobs/project_gish

Odd job guides

I’ve written some guides on how to build/play certain odd jobs (so far, 4 such guides), which you can find here (all written in Markdown):

https://codeberg.org/oddjobs/odd_job_guides

Or, rendered as HTML on the Oddjobs website:

https://oddjobs.codeberg.page/guides/

Right now, 3 of these 4 guides can also be found in the “Guides” subforum of the MapleLegends forums. The other one, which cannot be found on the MapleLegends forums (at least, not yet), is “Guns To Scabbards, Swords To Holsters: The Swashbuckler”.

 

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

rangifer’s diary: pt. li

Anniversary event time~!

Taxonomising odd jobs, pt. i: What even is an odd job, tho? §2

So, in the previous diary entry (in §1 of this part), I talked about taxonomy in general, and biological taxonomy in particular (which we’ll get back to, in later parts of this series). I gave some primitive definitions, which I will be using throughout this series (some of which may be unusual definitions, so you may want to take a look at that if you haven’t already). And, as part of this process of defining, we of course naturally came across the most important — and elusive — definition: what is an “odd job”?

I’ll start off with a small list of some things that I want to say about my conception of what an “odd job” is, and then elaborate on those:

• Defining a particular odd job (e.g. permawarrior) is simple.
• Insofar as an odd job is “odd”, it is pure in its “odd” aspect.
• Each particular odd job satisfies some intuitive notion of natural.
• The name that we are choosing to use here, “odd job”, is simultaneously fortunate and unfortunate. The “simplicity”, “purity”, and “naturalness” of odd jobs (as listed previously) justifies the use of the word “job” in the phrase “odd job”.
• Odd jobs are, to the extent possible, atemporal. I’m leaving the use of this word intentionally vague, for now.

Now, this is some fairly abstract verbiage here, so I do want to get into some specifics when elaborating on these bullet points. Consider the concrete examples that I use, to be case studies. There are some important boundary cases, where it is less clear whether some build is (or is not) an “odd job”, and it is these liminal creatures which do the most to help us clearly define what an “odd job” is.

Defining a particular odd job is simple

Now, in using the term “simple” here, we of course have to acknowledge that “simple” is a relative — and in some cases, also subjective — term. That being said, odd jobs can generally be defined in terms of a single “hook” — to get an idea of what I mean, take a look at some examples:

• An HP warrior is a warrior who only adds AP into HP.
• A permamagician stays a magician forever.
• A woods(wo)man is a pure STR archer.
• A claw-puncher is a claw-user who doesn’t throw projectiles.
• A grim reaper is any character who exclusively uses the Scythe.
• A LUKless assassin is, well, a LUKless assassin. Duh.

Hopefully that gets the idea across. Each one of these definitions is a full and exact definition of the odd job in question — and yet, each one is a single, simple statement. The depth and complexity of odd jobs comes not from the difficulty and intricacy of how they are defined, but rather, this complexity is emergent from the mechanics of the game onto which these odd jobs are grafted. For example, LUKless assassins are the only job in the game that can really make good use of the Shadow Meso skill; this makes LUKless assassins unique and interesting, but cannot be found anywhere in the definition of what a LUKless assassin is.

A job that has a more baroque definition can still be odd (in our sense), but only insofar as it happens to be a restricted version of a particular, more primitive and fundamental, odd job. This more baroque job would be a subjob, in the sense defined previously, of one or more odd jobs. For example, a plumber brigand is defined in terms of a brigand — it is a bandit who fights like a permabeginner — but also restricts the weapon choices to an arbitrary set of particular melee weapons (e.g. Monkey Wrench, White Mop, etc.), based on their aesthetic conformance to the “plumber”/“janitor” aethetic.

Insofar as an odd job is “odd”, it is pure in its “odd” aspect

Any build (even an optimal one) has restrictions placed on it, even if they are not part of the definition of the build, and even if they are not necessarily desired by a player who is playing such a build. This is because the game itself imposes its own restrictions. For example:

• Restrictions on base stats: e.g. anyone who has taken first class advancement as a warrior necessarily has ≥35 base STR.
• Restrictions on equipment: e.g. bows that can be equipped by non-archers do not exist.
• Restrictions on class advancement: e.g. a character whose class is “archer” (grade 1) cannot class advance to “fighter” (grade 2).
• Restrictions on SP expenditure: Characters cannot spend SP on skills that they lack access to, and cannot spend SP that they don’t rightfully gain through levelup and/or class advancement.
• Restrictions on skill usage: Some skills can only be used when one of a particular set of weapons is equipped.
• Restrictions on location: e.g. any non-permabeginner must leave Maple Island, and can never return.

Optimal builds are only restricted by two things: which throughclass they are defined by, and what restrictions are imposed by the game itself (see the list above). On the other hand, odd jobs must necessarily have another category of restrictions: restrictions that define their odd job. Some examples of these kinds of restrictions are listed in the above “Defining a particular odd job is simple” section; for example, a woods(wo)man is a pure STR archer. This is a restriction on what the archer’s base stats can be, that is not imposed by the game itself.

Again, as expounded in the “Defining a particular odd job is simple” section, these restrictions are indeed simple and singular, and thus we have a single “odd” aspect for each primitive odd job. A corollary of this simplicity is purity; the odd aspect is taken to a logical extreme, so as to clearly define the job as odd. This should, and does, polarise the difference between odd jobs and non-odd jobs (especially optimal ones).

As a result of MapleStory being well-understood now, even characters who strictly adhere to a platonic ideal of some particular odd job (I’ll use dagger assassin as a toy example) can be highly optimised to the degree made possible by their strict restrictions. In the case of the dagger assassin, these restrictions include (and are limited to) being an exclusively dagger-wielding assassin(/hermit/nightlord). This exacerbates, in my opinion, the need for pure/strict restrictions on what an “odd job” is, so that odd jobs maintain their identity even in the case where all of the following are true:

• Many builds are highly- or completely-optimised (we defined these as, appropriately, “optimal builds”).
• Many odd-jobbed builds are, insofar as they can be, highly- or completely-optimised.
• Some builds (odd-jobbed or not) are not highly optimised, and thus occupy a grey area w.r.t. their raw “power” in exercising the skills that they possess.

And all of these things are true, so we keep our odd-jobbed restrictions as pure as possible. An example of violating this principle would be “archer with less than 50 base DEX”. This could be considered a simple definition, maybe, but the purity is not there; an archer with 49 base DEX is neither DEXless nor pure DEX.

…Aaaand that’s enough rambling for one entry, so let’s get to the joocy stoof~

capre is on that grind

With the bonus event EXP, and with anniversary coins dropping from monsters throughout the Maple World, my main goal for this event is to get my woodswoman capreolina to level 120(!) before the end of the event! This is, for better or worse, going to require a truly copious quantity of CDs to be killed. So it is.

Funny enough, during the very earliest bits of the event, I was able to gather enough of the cream puffs (which also drop from any monster, like anniversary coins) to be in the top 10 puff farmers:



And so far, I’ve already got a levelup! Level 116, woohoo!!:



My EPH is, unfortunately, not quite what it would be if I didnt have to go to the FM to recast HS on myself… But still very high!!

Moar odd MPQs

Oh yes, time for moaaar MPQ! I was able to do some MPQs with Boymoder (Taima, Tacgnol, Inugami, Numidium, Gambolpuddy, Hanyou) the STRmit. With MPQ awarding anniversary points on completion, and with the Horus’ Eye being so much more powerful now (yay!!!), I was expecting more people at MPQ. But it seems that PPQ is the choice location to farm PQ points at this level range, and so the MPQ lobby still remains pretty dusty. But we did find some folks to run with, Kurutak and FireHoe:



MPQ awards 15 anniversary points on completion, which I was pleased to see. At least, until I found out that LPQ awards 18 points on completion… It seems that whoever decided the point allocation has no experience with MPQ, otherwise they would have known that MPQ is far more difficult (and often, time-consuming) to clear than LPQ, and in addition, far more difficult to find a party for!

In any case, I was blessed enough to do some more Oddjobs-only runs, with GishGallop (Cortical, Subcortical, Medulla, Phoneme, MageFP, dendrite, WizetWizard, Amygdala) the I/L gish, and xX17Xx (drainer, attackattack, maebee, strainer) the permarogue:



And, once we were finished, I realised that I had enough marbles to do Yulete’s quests and get my Horus’ Eye!:





Wow… now that’s a pendant!!! Here’s hoping I can maybe have my other finished Horus’ Eyes (on characters who have already graduated MPQ) retroactively buffed…? Fingers crossed, although I’m not holding my breath.

Fighting bosses with xBowtjuhNL, Harlez, Eoka, and Gruzz

I took on a number of bosses with the crew I met when MPQing with my darksterity knight rusa! Here I am, booping Ravana with my newfound 4th job booping skill:



And an @dpm test that I did during a Ravana fight, which I was quite pleased with (this test was done with Ravana on the right-hand side, with me periodically Rushing, and also periodically hitting underwear goblins with my Crusher):



Oh, and we successfully fought Pink Bean… Okay, maybe not the real Pink Bean, but we did do PBPQ:



And we beat the poofs out of poof dad:



And I defeated Capt. Latanica twice with Gruzz and xBowtjuhNL, so later, when Eoka wanted to run, I hopped onto my STR bishop cervid to help fight the ghost downstairs:



And afterwards, we headed to the Phantom Forest to hunt a Bigfoot :O Eoka & Gruzz did an excellent job keeping Bigfoot more-or-less in-place using Thunderbolt, and xBowtjuhNL and I (with me playing as my woodswoman capreolina) spammed Strafe and prayed that Bigfoot would not make a run for us. It did, a few times, but luckily there we no deaths. In fact, I was surprised at how quickly we downed the thing (just around 25 minutes), thanks to xBowtjuhNL’s Strafe doing like half a dozen times more damage than mine…



Entering the money dragon’s lair for the first time

So, as mentioned in a previous diary entry, I planned on getting a Horntail Necklace (HTP) for my darksterity knight rusa. Besides the avoidability obviously being really nice (especially with rusa’s avoidability already being naturally high compared to a normal warrior, albeit less so than a LUK warrior), the sheer quantity of DEX and, particularly, STR, actually makes an egged HTP considerably better for rusa’s DPS than even a 5 WATK MoN!

SiriusPlaque/SmallMight, a friend of mine, helped me out with some very useful info about how buying an HTP actually goes down. I had never even been inside of Horntail’s cave before, so I was previously completely unaware of what to expect. In addition, he also pointed me to a friend who was selling HTPs in the near future, and vouched for them. And so I met the SKIZZY hosts on their Discord server! SKIZZY are Sedentarily (Sky) and Jubilation (also ClickityKlak; Izzy), along with members of the Nimbus guild, such as cIoudy and xiaolongbaoo.

There were some slight complications in preparing for the run; in particular, the anniversary event maintenance patch had changed a number of things that would significantly impact Horntail runners. Besides the smart buff system being disabled (which I do understand), I can’t say I know nearly enough about how Horntail works to say what these adverse changes were. Something to do with weapon cancel… seduce… In any case, the run was pushed 24 hours into the future. And here’s what Sky had to say in advance of the run:



And so, I prepared for war. I gathered up all the HP gear that I had, and scrolled some new cheap gear to supplement it. I gathered up roughtly 1.5k PEs, 600 ACPs, roughly 600 Honsters, roughly 400 Grilled Cheeses, and mentally braced myself for an experience that I had before only read about.

I showed up at the entrance to the cave of life roughly half an hour in advance, and cIoudy was kind enough to lead me inside of the cave, where we waited for everyone else to show up:

Spoiler: In the cave of the Horned Tail

Some obscured names here are Bruiserr, who is around the centre of the image; tinyboop, who is at the top of the image; and Jubilation, who is beneath tinyboop. As you can see, I have a Stolen Fence in hand, as that 90 HP fence combined with a 157 HP Emergency Rescue Tube was part of my HP outfit.

Once everyone was ready to go, we headed to meet, uhm, one of Horntail’s heads:



Almost instantly, disaster struck, as tinyboop suffered a crash/disconnect on entering the map. This was particularly unfortunate, as tinyboop was the only archer in the crew, so that meant absolutely no SE. This is, needless to say, a general drop in DPS, and quite a precipitous one for nightlords in particular! Things were pretty easy for me in these poking-head stages (the first two stages), as I could cower below the platform (as pictured) and take damage somewhat slowly.

After the first two stages were cleared, it was time to enter the heart of the cave, for real. In this part, the SKIZZY crew would have to combat Horntail in its entirety, with three heads, two arms, legs, and a rather dangerous tail. So, before actually summoning the beast, they set up what Izzy referred to as a “minigame for the buyer”:



The goal of this, erm, minigame, is that I try as hard as I can to stay between the meso coins — and in this case, the giant flashing stars — until, later, they would instruct me to move to the bottom-right corner of the map (where the now-deceased tail once was). I would somewhat periodically get knocked back (towards the left), and have to correct my position to get back into this region. Keep in mind that, throughout all of the fight, I would be anxiously watching both my HP and my buffs (as getting dispelled is somewhat common) in an effort to, you know not die.

Unfortunately, after the disconnecting of tinyboop at the very start of the run, things were not getting any better for the SKIZZY crew. They suffered not one, not two, but three more (for a total of four) unfortunate crashes. The struggle was very real, and after a full two hours of Horntail-fighting, Horntail was very close to total death… but not quite there. Because Horntail has a 2-hour time limit, this meant that the run was a failure, and we all got booted out of the lair. It seemed that, even with the smart buff system being disabled, and with Horntail being significantly harder than it was before the maintenance, the real enemy was not Horntail — it was the game itself, for all of its instability and its fatal bugs.

Needless to say, this was a bit demoralising for everyone, and I personally had just about ran out of potions. I had used nearly all(!) of my PEs and my Grilled Cheeses, although some of the potion loss was just due to sheer terror; I was a little greedy with the PE usage, on account of my “pls stay alive pls stay alive plsstayaliveplsstayaliveplsstayaliveplsstayaliveplsstayaliveplsstayalive” mindset. But the crew took a vote, and decided to continue on to do their second run anyways, as planned. After all, how likely was it to get that unlucky with the crashes again? Some of the crew members kindly supplied me with the extra potions I needed to survive another run, and so off we went!

And thankfully, the second run was indeed far better. As for myself, although I was somewhat fatigued by that point, I was less anxious, as I had already gone through the process before. There was a crash during the third stage, but they were able to pull through and finish within the 2-hour timer.

By this point, I had endured just about four(!) nearly continuous hours of Horntail, and I was pretty pooped. I was able to loot an egg, and some HTPs, and ended up going with the second one that I looted:



Wowza. I love having an equipment item that I will simply never take off; a permanent addition to my combat outfit. And with this, my DPS (and avoidability!) is looking quite a bit more impressive:



Thanks so much, again, to the SKIZZY crew, for enduring Horntail through such adverse conditions, and getting me a lovely Horntail Necklace. <333

 

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

rangifer’s diary: pt. lii

Taxonomising odd jobs, pt. i: What even is an odd job, tho? §3

So, in the previous diary entry (in §2 of this part), I came up with a list of some things that I wanted to say about my conception of what an “odd job” is:

And, I elaborated on the first two items of this list. I want to elaborate on the rest of the items now; but first, I want to point out some things and clarify some terminology.

A note on “power”

First, I want to make the simple observation that none of the items in the above list make statements about the overall “power” levels of odd jobs. Exactly what “power” even means in this case is dreadfully unclear. I want to mention that the list of odd jobs which I curate contains a kind of “power level” associated with each entry, which ranges from one apple (the lowest power) to three apples (the highest power), and is always an integer number of apples, so there are only three distinct possibilities. And, even with this rather loose and impressionistic rule of thumb (which I intended to help people get an idea for whether or not they might like playing a particular odd job), there are many cases in the list where I had a hard time picking how many apples the odd job should get. The overall “power” of a character — or worse yet, of a build — is complex and has many factors which are apparently unrelated to one another. So if a character is good at one thing but not at another, and another character is bad at the former but good at the latter, it can be difficult or impossible to judge which character is more “powerful”.

Someone who wants to include this notion of “power” in their definition of what an “odd job” is, is already frustrated by the inherent difficulty of defining one-dimensional “power”. That’s bad enough as it is, but to make matters worse, there is something intuitively less natural about such a definition. We like to think of the “power” (whatever that may be) of a character as being incidental to the way that their build is defined. For optimal builds, this is pretty straightforward: you just pick a throughclass, and the rest just kind of falls out of that choice (combined with the game mechanics). Each throughclass has its own skills, abilities, access to equipment, etc., and as a result, they are thus stronger or weaker in different ways. To give an odd-jobbed example, consider the dagger warrior and the daggerlord. These two odd jobs are defined very similarly: you take a nonempty set of throughclasses, and then add the restriction that they can only use daggers. In the case of dagger warriors, the set is {fighter/crusader/hero, page/WK/paladin, spear(wo)man/DrK/DK}, and in the case of daggerlord, the set is {assassin/hermit/nightlord}. And yet, these two odd jobs differ considerably in their “power” in different areas. We generally expect that a dagger sader does an incredible amount of DPS (for an odd job, at least), something like 2~3 times as much as the daggerlord of the same level. On the other hand, the daggerlord has their own tricks up their sleeve: Haste, Flash Jump, MU, Dark Sight, very high AVOID, more stable damage, etc. The complexity and nuance of the differences between these two odd jobs — including whatever their “power(s)” is/are — comes not from their definitions (as their definitions are both very simple, and both nearly identical), but rather are incidental.

To make things even slightly worse, odd jobs are apparently not very clustered together in terms of “power”, whatever that is. Consider the besinner, who lacks the ability to fight very well (no actual range, because no KE, but at the same time, in melee they can only claw-punch for roughly 1 damage per hit), lacks any serious single-target DPS (the rule of thumb that I often tout is “roughly ⅓ of the DPS of a STRginner of the same level”), and lacks any skills beyond 0th job. If we are to compare besinners to other odd — but apparently more robust — jobs like DEX warrior, our image of “what the power of ‘an odd-jobbed character’ is like”, must be blurry beyond comprehension.

All of that being said, we will come back to questions of “power” later on, and we will see how to resolve some of the ambiguity between a build which is “odd” versus a build which is “merely suboptimal”.

A smol clarification of terminology

In §1 of this part, we defined terms like build, job, and subjob. When I am making statements here like “defining a particular odd job is simple”, the use of the term “job” (as in “odd job”) is crucial. An odd job is the most abstract, and within it, there are zero or more possible subjobs that could possibly be defined. The statements that I make about odd jobs (e.g. that they are defined in a way that is simple) don’t necessarily apply to odd subjobs. And odd builds are neither jobs nor subjobs; they are, by definition (because they are odd builds), associated with (at least) one odd job, and also with zero or more subjobs. The idea of a build being “associated with” a job (or subjob) can be thought of as a set membership relation (a job/subjob being thought of as an effectively-infinite set of builds that share common traits, the traits being what define the job/subjob). To make this a little more concrete, I will use my undead daggermit alces as an example:

• IGN: alces.
• Level: 82.
• Build: whatever alces’s build is (this includes my skill build, AP build, my equipment, etc.).
• Job(s): stab sin.
• Subjob(s): DEXless stab sin, …
• Throughclass: {assassin, hermit, nightlord}.
• Class: hermit.
• Grade: 3.
• Class progression (so far): beginner → rogue → assassin → hermit.

The ellipsis at the end of the “Subjob(s)” entry indicates that we could, maybe (at least, in principle), concoct more subjobs that alces fits the definition for. This would be in addition to “DEXless stab sin”, which I think is a reasonably-defined subjob that alces does in fact qualify as (for now!). If I were to start adding base DEX, I would no longer be DEXless, and thus the set of subjobs that alces qualifies as would probably just be the empty set.

Also note that while all characters are associated with some class and some grade, a character whose grade is strictly less than 2 is not associated with any particular throughclass.

Each particular odd job satisfies some intuitive notion of natural

The first thing to note here is that this assertion is closely related to the assertion that “defining a particular odd job is simple”. Simplicity and naturalness are, in this case, related, although the addition of a “naturalness” requirement (on top of the simplicity requirement) does a little bit of cleanup, helping to further clarify exactly what sets of builds fit our platonic conception of an “odd job” (including separating out strictly-subjobs from proper jobs).

And, again like in the case of “simplicity”, “naturalness” is a nebulous term that is almost always relative — and in some cases, subjective. This time, I think some more examples are what we need:

• Grim reaper vs. janitor/plumber: As can be seen, in the list of odd jobs that I curate, the grim reaper gets its own entry. Janitors/plumbers are, at least superficially, pretty similar, right? Both are rogues who forfeit the usual armaments (claws, daggers) in favour of a deeply restricted set of melee weapons. But besides a possible simplicity argument (janitors/plumbers are restricted to an arbitrary set of individual weapon IDs, whereas grim reapers are just restricted to a single ID), the real reason why janitors/plumbers are restricted to merely a subjob (an odd subjob, at that) is because of the grim reaper’s naturalness. The very existence of the Scythe (well, it doesn’t exist in-game in MapleLegends, but it has been in MapleStory’s *.wz files for a very long time, likely since beta versions of the game, and thus exists in MapleLegends’s data) begs for the grim reaper as an odd job. The reason is that no build which is not a grim reaper would reasonably seriously use this weapon. It is a truly bizarre weapon: a one-handed axe that is, mysteriously, only equippable by rogues, and has stat requirements that one would expect of a rogue weapon of its level. It even requires a significant amount of LUK to wield (35). On the other hand, the restriction placed on plumbers/janitors is based on aesthetic reasoning, and includes the use of weapons that are common to many jobs.
• The brigand: One odd job that is universally accepted as an odd job in every sense (particularly because of its age) is the brigand. But, at the same time, the brigand is a job which might arguably fail the simplicity test. Brigands are characters of the bandit/CB/shadower throughclass who are LUKless. But that’s not all: brigands are also disallowed from using daggers. This separates brigands from their LUKless dit cousins (who are not required to use daggers per se, but do use daggers as their primary weapons), but also complicates the definition of “brigand” somewhat. This is a somewhat delicate and subtle issue, which we may or may not get back to later, but suffice it to say that there’s more than one way to solve this apparent conundrum:
  • Accept that “dit who is LUKless and doesn’t use daggers” is a definition of “brigand” that is simple enough.
  • Accept that “brigand” is not an odd job at all, but rather, is best thought of as a subjob of LUKless dit.
  • Define brigands in a different way: a “brigand” is a dit who fights like a permabeginner.
  • Lift the restriction that brigands must be LUKless.
  • Lift the restriction that brigands must be LUKless, and disallow them from using all “rogue-type” weapons (viz. claws & daggers), rather than just disallowing daggers.
  Even if we don’t necessarily pick one of these options (either because we pick something else entirely, or pick nothing at all), we want to think about why we have this issue in the first place. We generally accept that brigands are an odd job, and historically they have been one of the most primitive of all odd jobs — along with other “jobbed beginners” like STR mages and woods(wo)men. I want to argue that the reason for this is because of how “natural” brigands are, as a job. Anyone who has played MapleStory before knows how it works: you have stick in hand (or hands, as the case may be), you whack snail with stick, snail dies, you get EXP and loot. Rinse and repeat. In this process, the first stat that becomes most important is STR. More STR means more strength, more strength means harder whack, harder whack makes more snails die, more snails dying means more EXP and loot for you. Of course, as MapleStory veterans, we know that all four main stats (STR, DEX, INT, LUK) have their uses, and all can be extremely powerful, depending on your build and on what you’re doing. But in this pure and unadulterated state of snail-whacking, there is only basic-attacking. And the simple beauty of MapleStory in its most primaeval form is something that permeated the earliest stages of the game’s life, and something that continues to permeate our conception of so-called “odd jobs”. When I say that this “is something that permeated the earliest stages of the game’s life”, you should think of some of the weapons which have been with us since version 1 (or rather, since beta versions of MapleStory): think of the Metal Axe, the Wooden Mallet, the Monkey Wrench, the Fusion Mace, etc. The latter is the only weapon listed here that is not equippable by brigands, as it is restricted to only warriors and mages. But what these weapons have in common, is that they are restricted in what classes can use them, and yet these restrictions allow classes which cannot idiomatically make use of the weapons. Yes, rogues can use the Metal Axe, but why would they? It’s a two-handed axe, so the main stat for its damage is STR, and the only other stat that contributes to its damage at all is DEX. But rogues are LUK-focussed! It seems that such weapons (often referred to as “jobbed beginner weapons” or similar) were designed by Wizet/Nekksyn with exactly this use-case in mind: that of the jobbed beginner. And the brigand is the prime example of a rogue-based jobbed beginner (although we shouldn’t forget the related, but very distinct, LUKless assassin, which is also, of course, considered its own odd job).
• The pugilist: In a similar vein to the grim reaper example given above, the pugilist is another odd job that seems to be directly suggested by the game-world itself. Pirates were a relatively late addition to the game (arriving after the addition of third (and maybe also fourth??) job, if I remember correctly), but they completed the six-part categorisation of all classes (beginner, warrior, mage, archer, rogue, pirate) that would continue to categorise all classes, even after Big Bang and through the present day. One of the things that pirates brought to the game was very simple: pirates are the only characters with the distinct privilege of being able to fight with their birthday suit on. And thus, the pugilist was born. One thing to note here is that “pugilist” usually refers only to pugilists of the brawler/marauder/buccaneer throughclass, because this is the most “natural” incarnation due to unarmed fighting being treated similarly to knuckle-wielding in many (but certainly not all) ways. But it is perfectly coherent to imagine a pugilist punch slinger!
• The islander/camper: When it comes to location-based restrictions, the odd jobs that we have are some mixture of islanders and campers. These clearly meet the “simplicity” requirement; for example, campers are simply defined as “any build which never leaves the Training Camp”. But this simplicity brings us to ask about other location-based restrictions. There are a few of these that have been done before or have been floated around as ideas for character builds, but perhaps the most salient example is the so-called “Sleepywood-locked challenge”. Being Sleepywood-locked (or not being so) is a part of a given character’s build, as defined in §1. So it might be natural to ask: is a build “odd” simply by being Sleepywood-locked? The answer is, I think, pretty clearly “no”:
  • Maple Island and the Training Camp are both areas that can never be re-entered after they are exited. They are also areas that every character is essentially forced to go through, with the exception of Maple Island — Maple Island is optional, but only for campers! The same cannot be said of Sleepywood; Sleepywood would appear to just be a random area of the game which can be passed through for various reasons, or not, and can be entered and exited at will (and indeed, the Sleepywood-locked challenger has to briefly leave Sleepywood whenever they advance from grade 1 (or any higher grade) to the next). This is where the notion of “naturalness” comes in; both Maple Island and the Training Camp are natural, primitive choices for a location-based build restriction, and the same cannot really be said of any other areas in the game.
  • Because islanders and campers share the trait of never setting foot on Victoria Island, they are necessarily permabeginners. Because we already consider all permabeginners (in the most general sense) to be odd, this makes all islander and camper builds odd by necessity. The same cannot be said of Sleepywood-locked characters, who are not necessarily permabeginners, and are not necessarily perma-firsts (builds that are permanently grade 1, e.g. permawarrior), and therefore can be played as simply Sleepywood-locked versions of optimal builds. “Sleepywood-locked permawarrior” is certainly odd, but is not an odd job; it would be a subjob of permawarrior. Because permawarrior is an odd job, this would make Sleepywood-locked versions odd as well. But any Sleepywood-locked ordinary warrior is not odd at all.

Okay, okay, I didn’t get as far as I thought I would before this started getting too wordy (and taking way too damn long to write), so I’ll stop here for now

Some more odd MPQs~

Some guildmates and I (GishGallop/Cortical, xX17Xx, Boymoder) were back at it again with the MPQQQQQQQs~

It was our mission to get Cortical (the STRginner of the group) a brand spankin’ new Horus’ Eye, and to get Boymoder (the STRmit of the group) an even more brand spankin’ new Horus’ Eye — poor Boymoder completed (and indeed, perfected, passing all 3 slots) her Horus’ Eye just before the maintenance that would buff the Horus’ Eye tremendously. And in this, we were successful!

Here I am, messing around with my single solitary SP that I spent on Shadow Partner for vanity:



And here we are, absolutely laying waste to Angery Franky:



Now Franky truly knows the pain of being assailed by three odd-jobbed rogues at once!!

Welcome LawdHeComin to Oddjobs!

We actually stopped MPQing for a bit because we saw LawdHeComin item smega a STR mage/gish robe that he’d made. I was actually aware of LawdHeComin’s character, around when my STR bishop cervid was but a wee baby, someone (I forget who) told me that LawdHeComin was the highest-level STR mage on MapleLegends. But it appeared he was inactive, having reached level 120 and stopped there. So I was (and so were the rest) surprised to see him online, and I decided to head to the FM to say hi! I asked about his build, and later asked if he was interested in joining Oddjobs (as he was guildless at the time), and he said yes!



The first thing I asked LawdHeComin was whether he was a STR mage or not. He said yes, and so I said that I was as well. But we found out slightly later that LawdHeComin is actually an F/P gish, with some 200 or so base INT. This is a common point of confusion, as we often think of STR mages as being both INTless and LUKless (which is how I define them in the list of odd jobs that I curate), but historically, “STR mage” has been an umbrella term for any mage builds who add base STR. The development of more modern terms to distinguish different types of odd mage builds, like “mixed attacker”, “gish(let)”, etc., is a recent development (relatively speaking).

capre contends with rusa for the title of “ever-gaping maw into which all CDs must go”

It just isn’t another diary entry without some more ruthless and tireless CD annihilation. In my quest to ascend capreolina to the honourable rank of woodsmaster, I have once again deleted many a braincell in the pursuit of mass CDstruction.

I was joined by Tacgnol (Taima, Boymoder, Numidium, Hanyou, Gambolpuddy, Nyanners, Inugami, Yotsubachan), the F/P archgishlet! It was truly a strong CDs duo, with capreolina covering the top platform, and Tacgnol commanding the bottom two platforms with the almighty Meteor Shower:



I did a quick @epm test, with some very nice results:



And now capre is level 117!



Wait, no; not pictured is capre hitting level 118!! Getting closer~

PQing for pointz

With the anniversary event allowing us to purchase boxes full of random maple equipment goodies (and, in many cases, not-so-good-ies, but oh well), I have been spending every last point on the damned things. And as my thirst for maple equipment is unquenchable, so is my thirst for points. And a fun and efficient way to rack up the points is PQing! I did some OPQs with my pure LUK assassin OPQ mule, sets, and also got her her first Goddess Wristband. The wristband used to be awarded for 40 full OPQ completions, but was just tweaked to a much more reasonable number of 20 completions; and, its stats were buffed, including making every clean wristband give exactly 3 WATK! So there was a chance for me to turn this thing into a glove better than the 12 WATK Green Mittens that I usually share between my characters. Because the wristband is untradeable anyways, and because GFA60s are not terribly expensive, I tried my hand at passing every slot (to attain, ideally, a 13 WATK glove). And, uhm, somehow it worked:



Wow. If only I had this glove on, you know, a character I actually cared about (sorry, sets)! Even so, I was very pleased to make this amazing glove, and hopefully sets can make good use of it in the future. And, in any case, I did use it well in the OPQ runs I did for a couple points.

I have, as readers of this diary will know, an LPQ mule by the name of sorts; sorts is a pure DEX brawler who is very capable of fulfilling both the range and thief-portal duties of LPQ, just like a sin or sindit. So I did some LPQs~

Here I am, fighting nippled whale boss alongside pure STR cleric Numidium:



And later, I did some guild-only trio LPQ runs with the fine folks of Pals (in this case, jule and Pasta)! The first run, I made the grave mistake of doing what I usually do in stage 7: killing the three rats, and then coming down to help kill the Rombots (which, due to what I can only imagine is a typo, are internally referred to as “Rombads”). This left us rather, uhm, paralyzed, as my gun was not much use in a sea of bots, and I didn’t have a real knuckler to use, and jule and Pasta were washing just a little too hard to take care of it for me:



So, needless to say, we killed the Rombads individually in future runs. Oh, and we were also joined for 2 or 3 runs by Numidium!

Bossing with ducklings, Gruzz, xBowtjuhNL, Eoka

It is time for more bossing and anni event goodies with rusa’s MPQ gang~

First, I helped out xBowtjuhNL with forming a PBPQ party, and we slayed the Pink Bea(n)st together:



And then it was time for some Capt. Lat, with me playing my pure STR bishop cervid:



And later, we were joined by ducklings (joyce), STRginner of DuckNation, who has learned the art of staying alive in Capt. Lat by staying inside of the boss as often as possible:



The really deadly bit of Capt. Lat’s arsenal is not his touch attacks, but rather, his magic attacks (in which he sends a boat zooming towards the players). With each magic attack dealing roughly four thousand damage, even HB was not going to be enough to let ducklings take a magic hit. So, by constantly taking touch damage, the magic attacks can (ideally) be completely avoided. But, of course, this is not an infallible process… Luckily, cervid has the power to reverse death, and so I would be able to bring her back if she did die. Unfortunately, having never actually used the Resurrection skill yet, I had a bit of trouble figuring it out when I first had the chance to use it. As a result, rather than bringing ducklings back to life, I only managed to keep her company in the afterlife:



Oops.

While waiting for reset to come so that we could try again, I tried out the anniversary event JQ (the one with the gingerbread peoples walking around looking menacing). I was pitted against ducklings and Gruzz in a race to the finish, but with the knowledge that I just had to be patient, and with RNGsus on my side, I emerged victorious:



The JQ actually yields a very high points/hour ratio; each completion seems to take roughly 3~6 minutes if you’re patient, and a completion is worth 15 points. So I can see why the JQ is limited to 5 completions per week. That being said, I don’t really find it all that entertaining, so I think I’d rather just PQ anyways

And with that, reset had come, and we tried again; this time, ducklings did manage to survive, and get those joocy points:



Another day, I did a few PPQs with Gruzz and ducklings, playing my swashbuckler hydropotina:



And we later left PPQ to do some Ravana runs~! I had the idea of taking not just my darksterity knight rusa, who could provide HB and help control Ravana with Rush, but also cervid, who could provide the Resurrection necessary for ducklings in the event of an untimely death. This proved to be rather difficult, as I had some 10 or so buffs that I had to keep up, between my two characters combined, and in our first run, ducklings was AFK and forgot to turn on pet autopot, so I was forced to make use of my somewhat underwhelming STR bishop Heals. All this while attacking Ravana, and corraling Ravana with Rush…



This first run did not work. ducklings died, but so did cervid, thanks to a pet autopot failure (or maybe my inability to keep all of buffs up consistently; I’m not sure). And the deaths were mostly because I accidentally tapped my left arrow key before Rushing, and Rushed Ravana towards ducklings and cervid…

But the next run was much better! ducklings still died, but I was able to successfully Resurrect her mid-battle, and then she survived all the way to the end!:



And with that, ducklings was able to get a Ravana Helmet (although a fake one, at that), so we all had Ravana Helmets and could form SCARY GANG:



Terrifying to behold.

rusa does some more fourth job skill quests

I did some more fourth job skill quests on my darksterity knight rusa! First and foremost was to obtain Berserk, so that I could spend the last of my three job advancement SPs. So I headed to the bottom of the Helios Tower to meet with Wiz the Librarian:



Wiz told me of an ancient and most powerful warrior named Sayram. Sayram is said to have mastered all three paths of the warrior: hero, paladin, and dark knight. Although this is clearly a legendary figure, it is commonly believed that Sayram was indeed a real historical figure… Although Sayram’s historicity could be called into question just due to the lack of knowledge about them. So, this was my quest: to investigate the artefacts left behind (and hopefully, still intact in one form or another) by the near-mythical Sayram.

I was told to head to Leafre, where I was told by the chieftain that Griffey was Sayram’s favourite creature; a creature that, in fact, Sayram used to ride, and who permanently bore Sayram’s necklace. My task was to recover this necklace:



With the necklace successfully recovered, I went back to the chieftain. Wiz had mentioned to me a singing shield (apparently, the shield of Sayram), but the chieftain knew nothing of this shield — however, he knew someone who might.

So I headed into the deepest parts of Sleepywood:



To meet the Insignificant Being, who I think is perhaps a bit too hard on himself:



Luckily for me, the Insignificant Being had, in fact, some knowledge of this legendary shield. Apparently, if the shield were somewhere, it would be inside of a long-forgotten and abandoned shrine buried in the extremal reaches of Sleepywood’s sanctuary. This sounded just fine to me — but of course, there was a catch: the shrine is locked to outsiders. The only way to gain entry to the shrine is to obtain a special key… unfortunately for me, this special key is guarded by none other than the Jr. Balrog. Now, be it due to sheer juniority, or perhaps due to some other reasons, Jr. Balrog is kind of a chump. This balrog has a mere 50k HP, but, the real challenge is not killing one, but rather finding one to kill in the first place. So I headed to the sanctuary where Jr. Balrog resides:





And luckily, I was able to track one down after not too long:



And lo, there the key was!:



Armed with this strange-looking and cumbersome key, I was able to gain entry to The Forgotten Shrine:



I was rather shocked to discover a veritable swarm of Jr. Balrogs inside of this forgotten shrine, but after killing them (and realising that they do not, in fact, drop the shield), I headed through the next portal into the upper region of the shrine. And there was a shield — actually, multiple shields, it seemed — encased in a thick layer of blue rock characteristic of deep Sleepywood. With a couple of well-placed whacks, I freed the shield from its petrification:



And with the shield (and key) in hand, I headed back to the Helios tower (through the Nautilus → Omega warp portal, to quickly get me from Victoria Island to Ludus Lake):



And with this singing shield, a strange key to a long-forgotten shrine, and a necklace that once belonged to Sayram (or rather, to Griffey…), I reported back to Wiz. As a reward for my efforts, and because Wiz apparently judged me a mighty warrior (debatable), Wiz bestowed upon me the teachings of one of Sayram’s most fearsome moves: Berserk.



And, in parting, Wiz hoped that I would live up to the legend of Sayram (a bit of a high bar to set, but I’ll try my best), and that one day, he may be able to read of my adventures in the library…



With my single remaining SP now spent in Berserk, I went to try it out for the first time:





Wow… it may not be super usable yet (the zerk threshold for me, at this point, is roughly 3240 HP), and it may not give nearly as much extra damage at level 1 as it does at level 30, but that is still downright impressive. The damage boost is absolutely massive; at this rate, I almost feel like a normal warrior…

And with Berserk acquired, I went to unlock the Hex of the Beholder and Aura of the Beholder skills. This brought me to the underbelly of the Ludibrium Clocktower, where I was told by Mr. Bouffon (and likewise, by Flo) of the former evils of the Beholder. The Beholder who, I might remind you, is now my pet:



Apparently, blue is the colour of evil! And apparently, I just need some special scrolls with the right words to unlock the inner powers of the Beholder. These scrolls are dropped by Thanatos and Gatekeeper, so off I went:



Hooray for unlocking skills that I will never have enough SP to actually put points into! But that’s not all; by collecting hundreds of Binding Bridles from MDTs, and hundreds of Viking Sails from Spirit Vikings, I could increase the caps on the levels of these skills. Now, with these skills being effectively unattainable for me, the cap doesn’t actually matter, but I did start working on one of the quests, just to see if it gives some EXP as well:



Zzzzzzerk!

Behold, these tripartite knives forged in the image of the Shadowknights’ ancient recipe: the Balanced Fury

So, I’ve been collecting Black Crystal Ores for a long time now, in the hopes of crafting my own set of Balanced Fury. I get most of these ores, as you would expect, from CDs, although I’ve also got some from other monster drops, as well as from PQ rewards. With the sudden changes to throwing stars in the anniversary patch, Balanced Furies are considerably more expensive now, including the taos necessary to craft them. This was a bit unfortunate for me, but I was determined to follow through and finish the craft, so I refined the ores that I had:



And I hunted for 30(!) Typhon Feathers, which is really more annoying than could possibly be warranted. But I did get all 30 myself, and with a Tao of Shadows gifted to me from Noam (OmokTeacher, Slime), plus one of each of the other taos purchased on the FM, I forged the stars myself:



:O

Now, that being crafted, I must say that I don’t have any characters who can really use it yet, besides my I/L magelet cervine (who is now in possession of a Sweet Fork Cake, yay!!). The Balanced Fury has a minimum level requirement of 70, but I can nearly promise that I will be seriously using these stars in the future! And, in any case, these are stars worth sharing; both mae (as her permarogue, xX17Xx) and Kelsey (as her STRmit, Boymoder) can make very good use of these things already!

 

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

rangifer’s diary: pt. liii

Taxonomising odd jobs, pt. i: What even is an odd job, tho? §4

So, in a previous diary entry (in §2 of this part), I came up with a list of some things that I wanted to say about my conception of what an “odd job” is:

And, so far, I’ve elaborated on the first three of these five items. Here, I want to elaborate on the remaining two.

The name that we are choosing to use here, “odd job”, is simultaneously fortunate and unfortunate

On the one hand, the term “odd job” correctly emphasises that odd jobs are jobs in their own right. Odd jobs have their own restrictions — just like the jobs laid out by Wizet/Neckson place restrictions on what equipment you can wear, what your base stats are (e.g. warriors must have ≥35 base STR), etc. — they have their own playstyles, they have their own unique interactions with the game mechanics, and so on.

But, on the other hand, the use of the English word “odd” is perhaps unfortunate; “odd” is a pretty general word that can apply to just about anything that is perceived as being “off the beaten path” by any degree, slight or otherwise. From elaborating on the previous three points, it should be somewhat clear now that what we mean by “odd job” is quite a bit narrower than “any build which might be considered unusual”. I’ve received, over time, a number of (usually joking) applications to the Oddjobs guild that play on the nebulousness of the word “odd” — can I join if I’m a pure INT assassin? Or perhaps if I’m an INT mage, with >4 base LUK in order to wear jobbed equipment? Or perhaps if I’m a paladin? You know, just a STR paladin, nothing like a blood paladin or DEXadin, or anything like that.

What I want to emphasise is that the perceived “oddness” of odd jobs is, in many ways, incidental. An odd job arises when a simple and natural approach to building/playing a character is taken to its logical conclusion, and that approach just so happens to be clearly suboptimal in one way or another. This suboptimality is not a defining feature of the odd job; as discussed in §3, it is essentially impossible to define oddness in terms of “power”/“optimality”/whatever. Rather, the reason that I mention this perceived suboptimality is because it inevitably leads to the job becoming “odd” in the general sense of the word — odd, because the vast majority of players just don’t play it, because it’s “bad”. Usually, it takes a special kind of player (or in some cases, a special series of happy accidents) to actually play these jobs, rather than just playing something that is “better at the game” and “actually how the game was designed to be played”. As a result, they become oddities.

Odd jobs are, to the extent possible, atemporal

As mentioned in the original list, I left this point intentionally vague (as it’s not clear what “atemporal” might mean). The reason for this is that I want to unpack two different timelines here:

1. The timeline of a character’s life, from level 1 onwards.
2. The timeline of MapleStory’s history, from the KMS beta onwards.

With respect to (1.), it’s already clear that we can scarcely call character builds “odd” across their entire lifespans. In particular, we would usually consider level 8 to be the earliest point at which a character’s build can reasonably be considered properly odd; STR mages (along with some other odd-jobbed mage builds) are already odd as soon as they take first class advancement, and they can take this advancement as early as level 8. Arguably, statless builds could (at least, in principle) be odd as early as level 1. For example, character whose base stats are 4/4/4/4 from level 1 onwards would seem to be deeply stat-restricted already, even from level 1. But even our most timeless and classic odd jobs, like STR mages, STRginners, blood warriors, islanders, etc., tend to only become truly odd at the early grade 1 levels (regardless of whether or not they actually take first class advancement), at the earliest.

So, if virtually any odd build takes some time to actually “become odd”, so to speak, then what exactly does “atemporal” mean in this (1.) sense? To answer this question, I want to appeal to (2.), as well as to a separate notion: that of a character’s “maturity”, and of “endgame”. By appealing to MapleStory’s history, we can say that the latest a build can reasonably become odd in general (including versions of the game from before grade 3 classes — that is, “third job” — existed) would be during the early grade 2 levels. Because we cannot assume the existence of grades beyond the second, any character who has taken second class advancement has already completed their class progression, so any oddity beyond the earliest levels of this class must just be a simple quirk of grade 2 SP allocation.

This threshold — “early grade 2 levels” — coincides rather conveniently with the kind of threshold we might arrive at by appealing to the aforementioned notion of “maturity” & “endgame”. In MapleLegends, for example, a character who is playing in a mainstream way (which includes, among other things, playing an optimal or nearly-optimal build) is usually considered to have reached “maturity” somewhere around the 150~160 level range. Somewhere around this point, the character has attained enough SP in the highest attainable grade (grade 4) that they have maxed out (or at least gotten to critical thresholds) their important grade 4 skills, and they are high-level enough to effectively fight (and gain EXP from) most or all of the bosses/PQs/etc. that are considered “relevant” at the highest levels of the game (“endgame”). This is not a hard cap on the character’s progression; it is possible to attain levels as high as 200. On the other hand, as you can expect from the general suboptimality of odd builds, odd-jobbed characters cannot reasonably be expected to “mature” at such a high level as 150~160. Instead, odd jobs have wildly varying levels of ability to progress through the game (read: level up) — this is a reflection of the fact that “power”/“optimality” is not a unifying aspect of odd jobs. That being said, even the odd jobs that have — relative to other odd jobs — a quite good ability to level up cannot be expected to mature as late as characters with (near-)optimal builds. This soft upper bound is, in at least some sense, a unifying theme of odd builds, even if quite obviously pessimal odd jobs (camper, claw-puncher, you name it) are not expected to actually get close to this soft upper bound. And it seems to me, again speaking particularly about MapleLegends or similar, that the place where off-island odd-jobbed characters tend to mature is around when grade 3 classes tend to mature. Again, obviously not all odd jobs are capable of attaining grade 3 (as many are permenently grade 0, or permanently grade 1), but I just mean the level range where this grade-3-maturity usually occurs. This level range is probably something like level 80~90, although obviously the exact range in question is slightly nebulous. Another way of phrasing this would be “the first half of grade 3 / early grade 3 levels”, and this phrasing should remind you of the “early grade 2 levels” threshold mentioned in the previous paragraph. A build that only becomes “odd” starting circa the early grade 3 levels only becomes “odd” after almost all of its hypothetical lifespan has already elapsed. Again, obviously “maturity” is a soft cap; even odd-jobbed characters observe the same hard level-200 limit that non-odd characters do. But in this (“odd”) case, the possibility of attaining level 200 really is merely hypothetical — odd-jobbed characters just don’t have the power necessary to achieve levels nearly as high as 200 in anything resembling a human (or cervine, as the case may be) timescale.

All of this ends up excluding certain builds which are certainly suboptimal, but retain optimality or near-optimality for so long that we cannot reasonably call them “odd (sub)jobs”. This excludes, for example, perma-2nds (permanently grade 2 builds), perma-3rds (permanently grade 3 builds), sindits (particularly, sindits who retain their sindit nature even beyond grade 2), etc. All of these are very worthwhile and interesting builds, which are — at least, in the context of a MapleStory version that has grade 4 — suboptimal and often experimental in nature, but fail to fit the conception of oddness that I want to put forward here.

Attending a rave

I was invited by mae (xX17Xx, drainer, attackattack, strainer, maebee) to a virtual rave taking place in MapleLegends. mae (better known as technopagan, in this context) was starring as a DJ in the lineup for this rave (“PartyQuest”), hosted by IGN zkgui (who you can see — although mostly obscured so that only the nametag is really visible — in the image below) on datafruits.fm. datafruits.fm (which I saw referred to multiple times as simply “df”) is an online radio station (or perhaps more broadly, multimedia art collective), including audio (“radio”) streaming and video streaming (all based in FLOSS), and also serves as a small label/imprint for some electronic music releases.

The rave was planned well in advance, but with it being pushed back half an hour for scheduling reasons, many attendees not being MapleLegends players (and thus having to download and figure out how to play the game, at least far enough to get to the FM), and with some technical issues here and there, the rave started some 60 minutes or so after the originally planned time. But it most definitely got going:



I attended as my daggermit alces, and I was in a party with the host so that I could Haste them the entire time. The folks raving seemed to be having quite a lot of fun, and it was interesting to me, as I’d honestly never attended the virtual equivalent of a live event before. There was some weird drama in the middle of the rave, as it took place in 4-20 (channel 4, FM room 20), where there were already shops set up, and a guild had claimed the room as their “guild HQ”. They were already trying to fend off non-guildies who were setting up shop in 4-20, and this drama ended up seeping into the party, as some of the guild members came in to set up shops on top of where we were partying.

I admit the music style wasn’t really adjacent to my own tastes, but I listened through much of it (particularly technopagan’s set), and I admired the clever mashups and commitment (in the music and the party as a whole) to evoking nostalgia for the 2000s.

Questin’ wif woosa

I did some more fourth job skill quests, and the Papulatus prequests, on my darksterity knight rusa~

Spoiler: Questin’ wif woosa

First off, I finished up the first quest to upgrade the master level of Aura of the Beholder, which required farming for 200 Binding Bridles from MDTs:



The next and final upgrade requires 500 of these ETCs, and upgrading the master level on the Hex of the Beholder requires 700 Viking Sails instead (200 at first, and 500 more later), so I decided to skip out on finishing these quests up for now

Another fourth job skill quest (for Stance) brought me to Leafre, so while I was there, I took the chance to turn in a quest that I forgot to turn in before. There is a quest in Leafre that just asks you to slay the Horned Tail, and it just so happens that when I bought an HTP for her, she got credit for a Horntail kill



“Have you really defeated the Horntail?” Well, no. The SKIZZY crew did that for me! But I did cower in the corner, quivering in fear, so I will graciously accept these 240k EXP (displayed as 80k in the above screenshot, but MapleLegends multiplies quest EXP rewards by three). Which, by the way, is 0.8% EXP at level 120… I’ll take the free EXP, but I can’t imagine actually completing this quest myself at an appropriate level (155+) and getting such a sad EXP reward (more like 0.1% EXP at level 155). But I suppose the real prize is the EXP from HT itself, and of course, the lootz.

Back to the Stance quest: Harmonia told me that my mission was to protect Tylus!:



Now, I read the NPC dialogue, and I’m still not entirely sure why Tylus needs protecting so badly — after all, we’re talking about the guy who taught me so many incredibly powerful third job skills. Surely, Tylus is capable of defending himself from a couple of chumps come down from the perilous peaks of the El Nath mountains…



And so I arrived at El Nath. As a side note (I’m not sure where else to put this lol), the MapleStory toponym El Nath is Arabic in origin. Because the name is romanised (transliterated into a writing system based on the Latin alphabet, from its native Arabic script) as “El Nath”, some MapleStory players have confused the “el” with the Spanish word el, which is — seemingly appropriately — a singular definite article. I’ve been asked if “nath” means anything in Spanish — it doesn’t. The spelling isn’t even orthographically valid in Spanish, although it could be phonotactically valid, depending on how you choose to pronounce it. Some multilingual hispanophones even render the toponym, when speaking entirely or mostly in English, as “the Nath”. This is not entirely incorrect, although it is confused.

El Nath (the location in MapleStory) is named after β Tauri, which is the second-brightest star in the widely-recognised constellation of Taurus. This name may(??) have been chosen because Taurus is part of the Northern celestial hemisphere, which is most visible from higher-latitude regions of the Northern hemisphere; such mid-to-high-latitude regions are home to some snowy mountain climates that El Nath is likely based off of. Or they just picked it because it sounded cool or some shit, idk. You may recognise the name Taurus as descending from the Ancient Greek ταῦρος, meaning “bull, ox” — the constellation is named for its supposed resemblance to a male cow. (Side note within a side note lmfao: the MapleStory toponym Ellinia probably comes from the Greek word for, uhm, Greek: Ελληνικά. Ellinia was the first MapleStory location to feature their barely-even-transliteration substitution-cipher-based writing of English words into the Modern Greek alphabet, with the later addition of Ossyria featuring a locale with all of its text written this way: Orbis.) So, with β Tauri located on the “head” region of this supposed bull, the star became known in Arabic as النطح, meaning “butting, headbutting”, from the notion of being the crux of the bull’s horns.

This Arabic name is usually transliterated as “Elnath”, “El Nath”, or “Alnath”. The “el-”/“al-” portion of this phrase is indeed the definite article in Arabic, much like el is one of the definite articles in Spanish. It should be noted that in Arabic, the definite article is not really its own word; it only appears as a particle attached to the prefix of nouns that are definite. This is why a transliteration like “Al Nath” is often, instead, “Alnath” or “al-Nath”. Because of the historical Muslim rule of Iberia, you might think that this is a case of Arabic influencing Spanish, but you would be wrong. Consulting a Spanish etymological dictionary (this entry is actually for the word él, but it has the same etymology as el anyways) reveals that the el article in Spanish is, as you would otherwise expect, indeed of PIE origin, ultimately from the PIE root *h₂el- (more directly, from the Latin ille). Arabic is, of course, unrelated, being itself an Afroasiatic language (ultimately descending instead from PAA).

SO ANYWAYS (dear lord), I arrived at El Nath. And I tried my hand at the so-called El Nath PQ (ENPQ):



y i k e s .

Okay, maybe I see why Tylus needed some help. That being said, Tylus did not move a single inch throughout the entire PQ, which is less self-defence than I expected from none other than the third job warrior instructor. And it seems I was not enough help either:



But that’s okay, because I was secretly not even there to protect Tylus at all. I know, I know, kinda rude. But the special thing about ENPQ is that the monsters that spawn in it (indeed, the only moving parts of the PQ; you just sit there for a few minutes and kill stuff) drop special skillbooks that you cannot get anywhere else. So, rather than succeeding at the PQ and getting access to Stance — a skill I’m not sure I can even get high enough level to actually spend SP on — I failed multiple (many multiple) times in the pursuit of a single Infinity skillbook. Of course, skillbooks are always untradeable, so fourth-jobbers who want access to these special skills (which also include Taunt and Dragon’s Breath) rely on being able to ENPQ, which means partying with a stanceless fourth-job warrior like rusa.

And eventually, I did get cervid (my pure STR bishop) an Infinity skillbook!:



And with that, I headed to deep loodi to do the Papu prequests:





MDTs drop cards?? Shocking!

And here is rusa, on the last quest in the prequest chain, fighting some GPWs to get some pieces of crack. “GPW” stands for “Grim Phantom Watch”, but I prefer to think of it as “Goofy Pocket Watch”, to make them less intimidating:



And, now that I had goofed on the pocket watches hard enough to get the crack pieces A, B, and C, I was ready to fight Papu~!

capreolina approaches the big 120

My woodswoman, capreolina, is on the journey to become woodsmaster~

As I was sadgrinding at CDs, I bumped into Level1Crook, yumfinite, and BustyBreast, who were taking a break from PPQing to try out some CD grinding. So I joined them in a chaotic party of haphazard compact disc murder:



And, during that session, capre hit level 119!!:



On another day, I ran into a paladin by the name of Ale8, who asked to party with me — between partying with Ale8, and some solo grinding I did as well, I got just about ⅔ of an entire level that day :OOO





Thanks for the party, Ale8!

Goofin’ wif cervine

Spoiler: Goofin’

When yumfinite and BustyBreast left the CDs party, it was not too long before I hit the 250 anniversary points cap placed on grinding points, and so I switched over to my I/L magelet cervine to continue grinding with Level1Crook:



And while we were grinding, Poof Dad filled up, so we headed to the event map to stab/eat/slay/serve the Poof Dad himself. But not before Poof Dad would do some slaying of his own:



Speaking of Poof Dad, now that cervine has a claw of her very own, I set out to test the damage:



Here are some of the joocy deets:

Base stats: 4/4/20/527.

• Claw: 10 WATK.
• Stars: 30 WATK.
• Gloves: 12 WATK.
• Cape: 4 WATK, 6 DEX.
• Armour: 19 LUK.
• Shoe: 5 STR, 6 DEX, 5 LUK.
• Pendant: 5 STR, 5 DEX, 5 LUK.
• Earring: 9 LUK.
• Glasses: 1 STR, 1 DEX, 1 LUK.
• Face: 1 WATK.
• Hat: 17 STR, 18 DEX, 17 LUK.
• Ring of Passion: 3 STR, 3 DEX, 3 LUK.
• T1 ring: 1 STR, 1 DEX, 1 LUK.
• Ellin ring: 1 STR, 1 DEX, 1 LUK.

Clean range: 155~1253.

MW5 range: 158~1284.

Cider range: 209~1693.

MW5 + Cider range: 213~1734.

Pap prequests wif cervid

Spoiler: Papu preqs wiff cervidddd

Now that I had done the Papu pre-Q’s on rusa, I wanted to also do the same on my STR bishop cervid:



Naturally, this was a good bit more painstaking than it was on rusa, who does a good deal more DPS (and has mobbing attacks lol):



And this was even more apparent when it came to fighting the Goofy Pocket Watches:



It took me quite a while of standing on the same platform and whacking GPWs to death, one gentle (really, nearly unnoticable) slap after another, over the course of two sessions, before they finally coughed up all three pieces of crack:



P H E W F .

sorts does the Ellin ring questline

With my DEX brawler LPQ mule, sorts, reaching her final level (50), it was time to do the Ellin ring questline for her! This was my first time seeing the new Ellin forest redesign

Spoiler: sorts explores the new Ellin forest~

Well, first things first: I needed to farm the ETCs that I didn’t already have for the final quest in the chain.



And I witnessed not one, but two, of the fabled Wild Kargo cards!:



Eventually, I had 75 eyes, so it was time to head to the sauna:



100 or so Firebomb Flames (and, a lot of pesky and useless Red Slimes) cleared out of the way…) later, I had stocked up everything I needed. So I headed to Ellin forest for realz:



Unfortuntately, there are still a few hiccups to be worked out with the Ellin forest overhaul; none of it made the questline impossible or anything like that, but one part in particular is now a lot harder. There is no good map for farming Tree Rods (correct me if I’m wrong here), so killing 150 Tree Rods (and collecting 100 of their ETCs, which is optional, but I like to do it anyways) proved to be a little more painstaking. But the map I chose had Stone Buggoes as well, so at least that gave me somewhat of a head start on the Rubbles that I would need later:





And I gave the oversized prehistoric mushrooms a taste of my new Maple Storm Pistol:



When I went to do the Primitive-Boar-killing quest, I noticed that this map was not just larger than before (like many of the other maps), but also had a very pretty backdrop terminating with a mountainside cave:



With the portal into the cave staring me in the face, I decided to check it out. And died immediately, having taken some >6k damage in one hit. What? Medulla (Cerebellum, Cortical, GishGallop, Subcortical, WizetWizard) came to check it out as well, when I mentioned it in alliance chat:



It seemed to me that these boars (who look identical to the harmless ones outside) might be invincible monsters guarding the portal at the other end of the map. When I had attacked one on my first entry, I only missed, and sorts obviously has extremely high WACC for her level (being a DEX brawler and all that). Using Oak Barrel, I was able to sneak my way to the portal on the other side of the map, which unfortunately did not react in any way when I attempted to enter it.

Medulla took their blood fighter, Cerebellum, to this map, to see if they could kill these beasts:



Turns out PG did the trick, and Cerebellum managed to slay one of these Violent Primitive Boars. We were curious if these boars really were intended to be invincible, or if maybe sorts was just not powerful enough to damage them. So I went there on my darksterity knight rusa:



Okay, ya, they are definitely not invincible at all. Turns out, they are just level 99 (with 126k HP each)! They actually have the same stats (level, HP, EXP, WDEF, MDEF, SPEED, etc.) as their normal (not Violent) Primitive Boar counterparts… in the version of MapleStory that they are from. Because these monsters (and this Rocky Mountain Cave map in general) are plucked from a far future post-BB version of MapleStory, they are very overpowered when retrofitted onto version 62 of GMS. Apparently, if this map were to function identically to the same map in the version it’s plucked from, the portal at the end would lead to the lair of Chao, a level 100 boss with 4.25M HP. Sounds fun (comparable to HH, maybe), but alas no.

In any case, I went back to finish up the Primitive Boar kill quest:



And sorts now has her Ellin ring ^^

Assorted bosses & PQs~

This section is the dumping ground for PQ/boss runs that didn’t fit in the other sections! Wow~!

Spoiler: Assorted bosses & PQs~

I did another Bigfoot hunt with Gruzz and xBowtjuhNL! This time, xBowtjuhNL was kind enough to donate an entire apple(!) to me for the purpose of the fight; once both of our apples had elapsed, we had already taken down some ⅔ or so of BF’s HP And then the rest was a lil slower, with Ciders…



Skateboard (Melokie, Alrightyo) invited me to do a Ravana duo with her, after we did some HPQs with Pasta. Of course, I was happy to, and we had two pretty smooth runs, with Skateboard’s stronk Hurricane keeping Ravana largely pinned to the left, and with me feebly Rushing as needed and trying my damnedest to contribute DPS with Crusher!:



I also did some Capt. Lat runs on my STR bishop with STRginners Cortical (Medulla, GishGallop, Subcortical, MageFP, dendrite, WizetWizard, Amygdala) and OmokTeacher (Slime, JumpQuest, Slimu). As you can see, OmokTeacher had JumpQuest parked in the corner of the map to keep up HB on the ‘ginners; there was one death between the two runs that we did, where Cortical went down, but I was able to successfully resurrect them and so we finished the run completely intact!:



Also with OmokTeacher, and this time joined by fellow STRginner justbegin (Stayinghere, Kalezus), we did three HPQs. At the end of the last one, I realised that I could use Doom to great effect:



And finally, here is my DEX brawler LPQ mule sorts testing out her new Maple Storm Pistol on Alishar for the first time!:



Pewpewpewpew~!

Makin’ items & bein’ sad about it

I snagged a cheap Raven’s Claw off of the FM, and set out to craft my very own Night Raven’s Claw (NRC) with it, using materials that I collected myself.

Besides the need for this Raven’s Claw to start out with (which is a random exchange prize that you can get from one of the exchanges, I’m not sure which), crafting the NRC requires 30 Black Crystals, 10 DEX Crystals, and a Tao of Shadows. I actually already had a Tao of Shadows, which OmokTeacher kindly donated to me when my STR priest cervid advanced to STR bishop. And I hoard a lot of dumb shit for some reason, including way more than 10 DEX crystals — so I was already set there, as well. I would have had the Black Crystals ready as well, except that I used 100 of mine to make a set of Balanced Fury (see the previous diary entry). So I still had some left over, but I needed to farm more to get 30 for this NRC craft.

After lots more CD killing in lieu of getting my woodswoman capreolina some EXP, I had farmed enough extra Black Crystal Ores to do the craft:



It turned out below average, unfortunately, although at least it wasn’t that below average; 39 WATK and 3 LUK clean, which is one below average for WATK, and 1 ABOVE average for LUK. I won’t be scrolling this thing yet; I want to wait until after the event ends, so that I know how my Maple Skanda situation is looking

You might wonder why I bothered crafting an NRC; after all, no one really uses these things, since higher-level claws are pretty much always better for nightlords. The reason is that the NRC is perhaps the best endgame weapon for L7-using permarogues. The NRC is the most powerful speed 3 claw in the game; this doesn’t matter at all for assassins/hermits/nightlords, because they have Claw Booster anyways, so all claws in the game end up being the same speed (viz. 2) for them (with the exception of the Garnier). But permarogues, of course, do not have access to Claw Booster. Furthermore, permarogues simply have less capacity to level up when compared to ordinary non-odd rogues, which means that staying DEXless for life makes a lot more sense, and the NRC also happens to be the most powerful DEXless claw in the game. When it comes to dagger-using, it should be noted that the most powerful speed 3 dagger in the game is also, like the NRC, lacking in real stat requirements (35 STR is not a big deal): the Fan. All of this, in combination, means that the standard route for permarogues is to stay STRless & DEXless, and make use of weapons like the Fan, NRC, Maple Skanda, and Maple Dark Mate (all of these weapons are speed 3 clean).

I also crafted some Maple Storm Pistols and Maple Storm Fingers for my DEX brawler LPQ mule sorts, and after booming a few here and there, I managed to make one of each that is purple glowing (62 and 61 WATK, respectively, iirc)!

And, most of all, I have been feverishly crafting Maple Kandiva Bows to try to upgrade the bow that my woodswoman capreolina has been using as her only ranged weapon since level 64. Being DEXless, the Maple Kandiva Bow is actually the best possible ranged weapon that I’m even capable of equipping; in second place would be the Bow of Magical Destruction (BoMD), but unfortunately the BoMD is an entire speed category slower (6 > 5), and furthermore, means losing out on an entire 100 HP on average. I have been using a 93 WATK Kandiva that I bought pre-scrolled back when capreolina was probably level 62 or so… It has served me very well, but with the anniversary event, I thought it may behoove me to upgrade while the time is ripe. It is, after all, my endgame ranged weapon. Unfortunately, so far it has just been a flurry of very poor crafts (under-average clean Kandivas that I now have very little to do with), and booming bows after spending a whopping three-or-so million mesos per scroll >.<

hashishi, Gambolpuddy, & Medulla do the Zakum prequests

After having planned this… months ago, I think, we finally got a trio of odd-jobbers together to do the Zakum prequests — for great zhelm buying!! It was me as hashishi, my besinner, Kels (Taima, Tacgnol, Boymoder, Numidium, Nyanners, Hanyou, Inugami, Yotsubachan) as Gambolpuddy the DEXginner, and Cort as Medulla!

Spoiler: Oddjobs trio @ Zak pre-Q’s~!

We may or may not have spent an hour just doing this little JQ in El Nath:



Great practice for the second Zakum prequest, maybe… There are actually essentially three routes here; the rightmost one is the easiest, and it gets considerably harder as you go to the middle one, and then to the leftmost and most difficult route. All three of us were able to conquer the easy route. After some difficulty, Gambolpuddy and I were able to do the middle route as well. Poor Medulla was only ever able to do the easy route, but, Gambolpuddy was the only one of the three of us who managed the hard route:



All three routes. Wow. Surely, the El Nath job instructors will finally find Gambolpuddy worth of job advancement…

Speaking of job advancement, as a LUK-based claw-wielding beginner, I wanted to advance to my rightful title and position of rogue. Or assassin, or whatever. Nightlord would be great. So I talked to the thief job instructor in El Nath: Arec. He give me the blessing to complete the Zakum prequests:



Although I’m still a beginner, it seems. :X

Maybe if I get a zhelm and come back, Arec might find me worthy? We shall see…

We speedran the first prequest:



And raced in the second prequest: the dreaded Zakum JQ.



I was worried that I might take too long on the JQ, and Gambolpuddy would have to go to sleep before I could finish. But with some slow and steady patience, I actually finished (sort of) in second place! Really, I would have been last, except that Gambolpuddy accidentally died to the lava and had to get doored back:



Yay~! I can’t wait to see hashishi with the extra DPS and defences from a sweet zhelm~

Getting the T6 ring for capre

I haven’t been card-hunting on my woodswoman capreolina in a while, as I’ve been focussing on getting EXP, and on working on other characters. But the time is now, to upgrade that ring one more time before I advance to the rank of woodsmaster!

Spoiler: Carrrd huntin’~

All of the sets I worked on here were in Orbis. First things first, to finish off the last smol cat set that I hadn’t finished already:



And then, it was time to hunt the pixies:







And then it was time to farm these pesky immobile-but-extremely-aggressive plants:





Those with eagle eyes might notice, in some of these screenshots, that the background is all shitty because I have the graphics level turned down to the lowest setting. For some reason, Orbis maps just absolutely loathe my CPU, and it sometimes becomes an issue when OPQing, particularly when multiclienting. The only other region of the game that does this (that I can think of off the top of my head) is the Fantasy Theme Park region of Malaysia o_0

Next up was the big cats (starting with Cellions), but while I was there, I thought I might check for any Elizas. Now, I had already done the Eliza quest on capreolina, and I have long since vowed to never kill area bosses that are necessary for quests — unless I actually need them for a quest. Getting area boss card sets is nice, but I believe it not to be worth stealing these area bosses from players who actually need them for a quest. However, there was something that I could do with Eliza that did not involve killing her: getting the Jr. Lucida card set! Sources that I found online, and people who have told me about this personally, claim that one simply needs to bring Eliza to ≤50% HP, and keep her there without killing her, and she will spawn Jr. Lucidas indefinitely.

It seems that this is somewhat mistaken, or perhaps Eliza’s behaviour has been changed by MapleLegends at some point. I found that Eliza’s HP need not be ≤50% in order to start spawning Jr. Lucidas; in fact, she seemed to start spawning them somewhere around the 85% HP mark. And furthermore, she does not seem to spawn the Jr. Lucidas indefinitely, even if held well below the 50% HP mark for prolonged periods of time. So, in the end, I actually had to find three separate Elizas in order to get the Jr. Lucidas that I needed to complete this set. The card drop rate wasn’t all that great, after all, especially considering the kind of manipulation necessary to even fight these monsters in bulk…



But I did finish the set! And so I went off to get the Cellion set:



And that was enough to take me to 180 sets overall…

Yay~!! T6 acquired!!!

 

Short notice (sry), but just in case anyone wants to attend, or say hi, and hasn't seen this already:

————————

capreolina’s 120 party~

When: 2021-07-04, 01:00 UTC

Where: The Road to the Dungeon (map ID 106010000, https://maplelegends.com/lib/map?id=106010000), channel 1. This map can be accessed by taking the top-right portal in Henesys proper. Watch out for the Iron Hogs

What: I will be grinding on the monsters at The Road to the Dungeon until I get the 0.02% EXP necessary to level up from level 119 to level 120. Then, I will be Teleport Rocking to El Nath to briefly talk to my 3rd job instructor Rene, and then Teleport Rocking again to Leafre to complete the 4th job advancement quest, to advance to the honourable rank of woodsmaster. As usual, you can go straight from The Road to the Dungeon straight to Leafre (Henesys → Ellinia → Leafre, or if you don’t have any Magic Seeds, you can take the boat Ellinia → Orbis, and then the boat Orbis → Leafre), as I will only be in El Nath for a minute or so. Or you can Teleport Rock to El Nath with me if you so desire

Who: All y’all’re invited! Or just drop by to say hi!

 

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

rangifer’s diary: pt. liv

Taxonomising odd jobs, pt. i: What even is an odd job, tho? §5

A note on atemporality

In the previous section of this part (§4), I elaborated on the statement from §2 that “[o]dd jobs are, to the extent possible, atemporal”. I was asked by Gruzz about what I thought of pirates w.r.t. this part of my conception of “odd jobs”. After all, pirates were added relatively late in MapleStory’s life; I don’t remember exactly when, but I’m pretty sure they were added after the addition of the 3rd grade (“3rd job”), and probably after the addition of 4th grade as well. This stands in contrast with the other four (or five, if you count beginners) archetypes that contain the original classes of the game. The original classes of the game (pre-Cygnus) are now collectively referred to as “Explorers” (although, see below for an exception to the confusing “Explorer” terminology), although it should be noted that even in the latest versions of MapleStory, every class (including any non-Explorer class) is still singularly associated with one of these five pre-BB archetypes: warrior, mage, archer, rogue, pirate.

Because pirates were added so late, it seems reasonable to suppose that any pirate-based odd job is inherently “less atemporal” than other odd jobs, e.g. a warrior-based odd job like blood warrior. In some sense, this is obviously true, but I want to clarify that this is not the kind of “atemporality” that I’m concerned with here.

In particular, I only care about atemporality with respect to the aspects of a build that make it “odd”. I will use the swashbuckler as a toy example of a pirate-based odd job here, but this obviously applies to any pirate-based odd job. The swashbuckler is, by definition, associated with the {gunslinger, outlaw, corsair} throughclass. Given this throughclass, what makes the swashbuckler odd is simply that they are defined as being DEXless (base DEX of exactly 20). This is very similar to (and indeed, defined by analogy with) the older odd job of woods(wo)man. The woods(wo)man is not odd simply because the are an archer (although they are archers by definition), but because they are a DEXless archer. I have emphasised the word “DEXless” here for obvious reasons — this is the key term that makes our definition of “woods(wo)man” odd. By analogy, the same applies to the swashbuckler, and this DEXless nature of the swashbuckler does not require any relation to time (temporality), but rather, is odd simply because it is paired with our throughclass of choice ({gunslinger, outlaw, corsair}).

One of the tacit assumptions that we have made (or rather, that I have made) about odd jobs so far is that any given class (beginner, rogue, gunslinger, white knight, bishop; you name it) has at least one way — often many ways — in which it can be built to make it represent an authentic odd job (i.e. to make it an odd build). The same thing can be said, then, about any given throughclass, as well. Just like this applies to the throughclasses that have been with us since version 1 of the game (all warrior, mage, archer, and rogue throughclasses that are considered “Explorers”, with the exception of dual blade and other so-called “special” Explorers (lmfao? Necksawn why??)), we would expect this to also apply to pirate-based odd jobs. It is perfectly conceivable to apply everything that we understand about these “original” odd jobs to pirate-based odd jobs, by simple analogy. The above example of a swashbuckler is one example, but a more to-the-point example would be the permapirate, who is defined by analogy with the original perma-firsts, e.g. permawarrior or permamagician. It is very conceivable, in fact, to imagine permapirates being odd-jobbers in version 1 of MapleStory — all we need to suppose is that pirates were added this early in the game, and that they were thus limited to the 2nd grade (gunslinger and brawler thus being the highest possible grade of pirates in the game). With the 2nd-grade pirate classes (gunslinger and brawler) being designed very closely to their warrior/mage/archer/rogue counterparts, this hypothetical is not difficult to imagine. On the other hand, it is much more difficult to imagine the 3rd and 4th grades (in general, not just of pirates) having existed since version 1 of the game. There was simply not enough power (player-character-wise, and also in terms of what areas/items existed in-game) within the MapleStory community combined to justify far-flung “job advancements” (and their respective areas & monsters of the game). Furthermore, 2nd-grade classes (in general, again including pirates alongside warriors, mages, etc.) are, in a deep sense, functionally complete; 2nd grade is the first grade at which classes have completely specialised what weapon type they use. For example, advancing from rogue → assassin fully specialises the character’s skills in claw-using; mages specialise their elements, rather than their weapon type, but the process is analogous there.

Oh, and just to — hopefully — avoid confusion, I should remind the reader that the “atemporality” in question here is not just w.r.t. MapleStory’s life (the history of the game), but also w.r.t. the character’s/build’s own life.

A non-note on terminology, and the fragile concepts associated with said terms

I realise that the terminology that I’m using in this series is likely to lead to some confusion and misconceptions, among those who actually bother to read this shit (hi! I love you!!). In particular, I expect this to be for two reasons:

1. Many of the terms that I use here are somewhat exotic, or far-removed from the way that we normally talk about the game.
2. Perhaps more importantly, much of the terminology that I’m throwing around here refers to some very technical and precisely-defined concepts that can be difficult to keep separate within one’s mind. This is often the case with technical writing, and the fact that we don’t normally think about MapleStory builds/jobs/classes/whatever in this much detail is, again, not a boon.

The fact of (1.) is that I have had to invent and/or enforce some terminology (an obvious example being “throughclass”, a word that I made up for the specific purpose of writing this series) in order to have a way to talk about this stuff. Exotic names are perhaps unfortunate, but if you can get used to them, they should hopefully keep things as clear and unambiguous as possible.

The fact of (2.) is very similar; if we want to talk about this stuff, we have to face the fact that there are some delicate concepts at play. But these delicate and subtle concepts are, I hope, what underlie the concept of “odd job” that is (mostly) shared among those of us who care about such things.

So, in the future, I will likely not bother writing more notes and asides in the (perhaps vain) hope of clarifying things further. Hopefully, terminology that I define will be reasonably clear and unambiguous from initial definition onwards (and hopefully I am not too sloppy in my usage of these terms!).

Summarising pt. i

So, once again, in §2 of this part, I came up with a list of some things that I wanted to say about my conception of what an “odd job” is:

And by now, I’ve elaborated on all five of these items. As usual, there are a lot of subtleties here, so I recommend drudging through the actual past four sections. But, for those who have already read them, or those who want an executive summary, I will (hopefully…) conclude this first part with a little recap:

• Defining a particular odd job is simple. In general, there is a single “hook” that defines a given odd job. For example, a woods(wo)man is a pure STR archer. A particular odd build might be more elaborate, but that build inherits its oddness from its base odd job. For example, a plumber brigand is defined in terms of a brigand — but also restricts the weapon choices to an arbitrary set of particular melee weapons, based on those weapons’ aesthetic conformance to the “plumber”/“janitor” aethetic.
• Insofar as an odd job is “odd”, it is pure in its “odd” aspect. All builds (even optimal ones) have some restrictions placed on them; some of these are imposed directly by the game, and others are imposed by the players in one way or another. But when it comes to defining an odd job, we expect any defining restriction to be pure; that is, taken to a logical conclusion. For example, an archer who is mostly DEXless (say, <50 base DEX by definition) is not really a woods(wo)man. And an assassin who mostly (but perhaps not always) attacks using daggers is not really a stab sin.
• Each particular odd job satisfies some intuitive notion of natural. We expect that the definition of a given odd job is, somehow, suggested to us by the game itself. For example, pirate classes are the only classes that are capable of attacking while in the nude. Hence, the pugilist.
• The name that we are choosing to use here, “odd job”, is simultaneously fortunate and unfortunate. The “simplicity”, “purity”, and “naturalness” of odd jobs (as listed previously) justifies the use of the word “job” in the phrase “odd job”; the term “odd job” correctly emphasises that odd jobs are jobs in their own right. On the other hand, the use of the English word “odd” is perhaps unfortunate; “odd” is a pretty general word that can apply to just about anything that is perceived as being “off the beaten path” by any degree, slight or otherwise. From the previous three points, it should be somewhat clear that what we mean by “odd job” is quite a bit narrower than “any build which might be considered unusual”. The perceived “oddness” of odd jobs is, in many ways, incidental. An odd job arises when a simple and natural approach to building/playing a character is taken to its logical conclusion, and that approach just so happens to be clearly suboptimal in one way or another. This suboptimality is not a defining feature of the odd job, but incidentally leads to it becoming odd, simply because it causes less players to choose to play it.
• Odd jobs are, to the extent possible, atemporal. Really, when we say this, we mean that the aspects of a build that make it “odd” are, to the extent possible, atemporal. The temporalities that we have in mind here are basically two: the timeline of a character’s life, from level 1 onwards; and the timeline of MapleStory’s history, from the KMS beta onwards. Because odd-jobbed characters tend to reach the beginning of some kind of “endgame region” (at least, their version of it) around the turn of the 3rd grade (early 3rd-grade levels, regardless of whether or not the odd job actually takes 3rd grade advancement), and because the 2nd grade was the highest possible grade in the original version of the game, we have a shared liminal point after which we consider an odd job to be completely “mature”. We thus want to exclude jobs that are only really “““odd””” starting at this point (or after it), from being truly “odd jobs” in our sense. Builds that are excluded by this principle can still definitely be suboptimal, but suboptimal is not the same as our notion of odd.

Points. Points. Points.
The theme of this diary entry is “points.”. Not just any points; anniversary points. For the first 2 weeks (actually a bit more than 2 weeks) of the anniversary event, I decided that I only wanted to spend my points on two things: maple equipment boxes (a raffle for maple weapons, maple bandanas, maple throwing stars, maple shields of all kinds, and maple washing flags), and Magic Crystals (for upgrading maple weapons). The reason for this is that there were a lot of maple weapons that I wanted (including some just to have for the guild, as odd-jobbed characters have a special need for many maple weapons, even at “endgame”), as well as mesos to be had. I was not going to try my hand at any of the other raffles, and I didn’t want some OP equipments that would just scam me when they expired and made all my characters weak again!

But, well, a few things made me change my mind. Mostly, I just got a lot of the weapons that I wanted, including the pirate ones that I crafted and scrolled (with some success) for my DEX brawler LPQ mule sorts. Or something like that; see the next section. Once I had crossed off much of what I wanted, the main thing that I was looking for was Maple Claws; but entering this 50-point raffle that gives any one of a zillion items — only one of which is a Maple Claw — seemed less appealing. Oh, and did I mention the event equipment is OP?

And so, my focus is shifted away from the maple raffle, and towards the expiring equipment with scrolls that supposedly succeed 90% of the time. And a little late, I might add. There is just no way for me to generate the kind of points that I need to outfit all 137,666,808 of my peepee poopoo garbo odd-jobbed characters with full event gear. But, uhm, better late than never.

As a testament to how many braincells I am losing as a result of my poor decision-making, here is my daggermit alces, having somehow completed the anniversary WQ (wait quest) five times in one session:



That was the only time that I’ve been able to complete the WQ more than one or two times. This diary entry does not include a heated, multi-paragraph rant about how much I hate the anniversary WQ, but suffice it to say that this diary entry very well could include such a thing.

The Kandivaning

Welcome back to another episode of “Cort casually tries one time at scrolling a weapon and instantly outclasses all of the garbage that I boomed through protracted effort and resource-expenditure in an attempt to make something that’s not even as good as what they just made”. I know, it’s a bit of a long title, but we’re only on episode 2 so far, so I’m still ironing out the kinks here.

Readers of this diary may remember pt. xlvii, in which Cort crushed my very-long-awaited and painfully-won triumph, by making a Toy of 101 that was considerably better than the one that I had finally made less than 24 hours prior. Well, it happened again. With countless pricey bow 30%s and (usually below-average; I didn’t even bother scrolling the abysmal ones) Kandivas wasted, I had nothing to show for it at this point; all I wanted to do was beat the 93 WATK Kandiva that my woodswoman capreolina has been using since level 64. Cort (Cortical, GishGallop, Bowerstrike, Amygdala, WizetWizard, Medulla, Subcortical) had two spare Maple Bows on hand that they had raffled, so they decided to give a shot at crafting these bows into Kandivas for the purpose of scrolling. And, as you would expect by now, this happened:



So… yep. :]

This is, of course, not my bow. Cort creating this bow led directly to the development of their bow-whacker Bowerstrike (who we will see later in this entry). But Cort said I could borrow it, at least until Bowerstrike gets to level 64+; or maybe, since the bow is more important for capreolina, Bowerstrike could just use capreolina’s old Kandiva (it is, after all, quite good still). So, this has killed my motivation to waste even more resources on the creation of my own Kandiva… I had been thinking that shooting for 96+ WATK might be too greedy…

Empy queue

I did some more MPQing with the gang (including mae; xX17Xx, drainer, maebee, strainer), on my daggermit alces! Here I am, leveling up during the first stage of MPQ:



And I even got to do some MPQs with Bipp, the chief bandit (not odd-jobbed) of Celim (Copo, Sommer, Fino):



MUAHAHAHA~

Elpy queue

And I also got to do some LPQs with LoneWolf1600’s besinner, L0neW0lf16OO!:



And now, sorts, my DEX brawler LPQ mule, has reached the highest level in the (LPQ) game: 50!! With dep star on chest, and Ellin ring on finger, I just need to get her a PAC (a bit pricey these days, unfortunately) and a zhelm to complete her equipment!

capre does the Papu pre-Q’s

Now that I had done the Papu prequests on my STR bishop cervid and my darksterity knight rusa, it was time to also complete them on my woodswoman capreolina:

Spoiler: capreolina @ Papu pre-Q’s

I got a few nifty cards along the way:





Fought some MDTs for their mysterious golden powders:



I found out that Goofy Pocket Watches do, in fact, drop cards:



And in just about no time flat, was done getting those pieces of crack!:



Speedy~ Maybe we will see capreolina in an all-odd-jobbed Papu run in the future…?

Gruzz & Harlez’s level 100 party!!

I was honoured to attend the level 100 party of chief bandit Harlez and I/L mage Gruzz, both of whom I met while MPQing on my darksterity knight rusa!

The plan was for the two of them to level up to 100 by killing a crog on the ship from Ellinia to Orbis. Also attending were ducklings and Suppress, and we took many a ship in the hopes of catching a crog or two. But, alas, the crogs were either too shy, or, when they weren’t, we had technical issues that caused part of our party to disconnect. It took so long that Suppress had to leave, but we did eventually get there:



Unfortunately, ducklings, being fragile as permabeginners are, had to spectate from the grave. But congrats to Harlez & Gruzz again on the big triple digits!!

4-man Big Puff Daddy

Some people may know that I do a lot of hanging around in channel 8. Channel 8 is where I put my shop. It is commonly understood (just trust me) that channel 8 is the coolest channel, because it is the last channel; there is no channel 9, but there is a channel 8.

So, one time when Big Puff Daddy (sometimes also known as Sizable Strudel Sire, Colossal Confection Custodian, Broad-shouldered Papa Cobbler, Prodigious Patisserie Pappy, or simply P. Diddy) was summoned, I headed over to Cake Town on my I/L magelet cervine to participate in the fight for cake justice. I was already on channel 8 (of course), so I ended up going into the channel 8 fight.

Unfortunately, there was a bit of a complication: there were only four of us, myself included. Now, four people might sound like a party, but rest assured that this large pastry father is much too large for such a wee band of adventurers. There is a 45-minute time limit on the fight, and usually Rotund Frosting Father fights do not get anywhere close to taking this long. But for us, it was going to be a challenge to even finish in time. But we did it anyways. For great cake justice, and the sake of channel 8 as a whole:



It took us right around 40 minutes from start to finish. Somewhat disappointingly, we got the same 15-point reward that anyone gets for fighting this copious cake creator. But we got way more points than that… in my heart.

Trying out Papu for the first time~

Having never actually fought the Papulatus myself in my entire Maple career, and with the intent to plan an all-odd-jobbed Papu run sometime in the future, I have been somewhat anxious to finally fight the big bad clock man myself. And the opportunity presented itself earlier than I expected, as Jule (pyxi, jinkx, quakken) and Pasta (Pastasauce, HolyWafer, KingCrab) invited me to do a Papu with them. Pasta kindly introduced me to how the fight works, and off we went:



The fights (we ran twice) went quite well, and I was pleased to see that Papu didn’t seem much more “difficult” in any particular way, when compared to Ravana — other than being more annoying… It was a really cool experience to fight a boss that I had always envisioned as one of the biggest bad guys of MapleStory — the biggest bad guy in all of Ludus Lake. Squirmy blue clock robot guy.

And with that, I was able to complete the Papulatus questline for 30 fame and a sweet cape:



And it seems that Papu drops these Dark Tachyons; they are just ordinary ETC items (tradeable, not OoaK). But, interestingly, their description instructs the reader to throw them into the lava in the deepest part of El Nath. As it turns out, there is a quest that involves doing just this. If you fall into a certain part of the lava in The Cave of Trial II, you end up in a hidden map called Cave Within the Cave that contains an NPC by the name of Suspicious Lava:



Woah, nice. You know, I think I remember something in the NPC dialogue for 4th job advancement that talks about the connection between the depths of El Nath and the depths of the Ludibrium Clocktower…

Assorted bossing (Yeah, points! Woooow~)

Spoiler: Cool bossing wow~

I did some Capt. Lats, including some very special ones, like these runs that I did with STRginner Taima (Tacgnol, Boymoder, Hanyou, Nyanners, Numidium, Gambolpuddy, Inugami, Yotsubachan), STRginner OmokTeacher (Slime, Slimu, JumpQuest), and STRginner LoneW0lf1600 (LoneWolf1600), while on my STR bishop cervid!:







And we did some more odd-jobbed runs as well, like this one with STRginner Celim, permarogue xX17Xx, STRginner Cortical, and OmokTeacher:



In the first one of these runs, I was able to successfully resurrect xX17Xx, although this unfortunately proved fatal for Celim, as my Resurrection has a 57-minute cooldown, and we found out later that Celim is just shy of the HP (with HB provided by JumpQuest) necessary to not get one-shot by Capt. Lat’s magical attacks.

And I got to do plenty of Ravanas! Here I am on my darksterity knight rusa with Harlez, Gruzz, and xBowtjuhNL of the MPQ gang:



And again, with Jule and Pasta, as well as Kim (Skateboard, Melokie)! This time I was running cervid, and with SE, MW20, Echo of Hero, and a Cider, I was doing some pretty insane DPS (for a STR bishop, at least):



I even got to see myself crit for a >10k line on a red diaper goblin!!

And here is one of the two Rav runs that I did with just Jule and Pasta, before we went to Papu:



And finally for Ravana, a pair of trio Rav runs that I was able to squeeze in just before reset with xBowtjuhNL and Harlez!:



Thanks to Bow being so willing to pop the apples that he gets from APQ, we were able to tidy up Ravana quite swiftly, even as a party of 3 :O

And, again with Bow, and joined by Gruzz and the hermit Poffy (who I had not met before, but whom Bow had MPQ’d with some levels ago), I hunted some BFs:



We fought two, actually; the first was at FP, which was the usual easy location to fight BF. But the above fight is just at one of the Twisted Paths maps, which is simply flat and full of Jr. Wraiths. It was tougher, and took longer, but with some perseverance, some use of Rush, and one or two deaths (R.I.P.), we were able to take this one down as well.

And, after I tried Papu for the first time, I went with Gruzz & xBowtjuhNL to their first time trying Papu:



And again, it went well; I was the only one actually close to the dumb thing, so I took all of the dispels and all of the 1/1s…

And I did a number of solo Capt. Lats on rusa, for the pointz. And at this point, she is actually 4/5 on Capt. Lat cards :O



Also, Bowerstrike died to Pink Bean.



R.I.P. Bowerstrike, 2021~2021.

cervine is an INTless I/L mage.

I did some points farming on my I/L magelet cervine, as well~ And hit level 107!!



And at one point, I even soloed Capt. Lat for a not-so-quick 10 points…:



As you can see, cervine is wearing something a little different these days. I have too many accounts, clearly, and this one was NX-starved enough that I just kinda threw on whatever I had lying around in my Cash Shop inventory once her normal NX clothing expired.

Farming teefs w/ rusa

I took rusa to the Dead Mine to farm some teefs, as there are still some zhelms in order for some of my characters. This was a good excuse to farm to 5/5 Flyeye cards, and 5/5 Miner Zombie cards. But first… I ran into Riche. When I had ran into this spooky scary skeleton before, I never understood what it was there for, but this time, I thought I remembered that an ETC item needed to be dropped on the tombstone to weaken Riche. This allows killing the Riche, and there is a smol chance that it can even drop a card! So I killed like 20 of them:



…And that was enough to take me from 0/5 Riche cards to 2/5 Riche cards! I guess I’ll have to come back later, as I couldn’t find any more Riches after that.

But, by contrast, getting from 0/5 to 5/5 on Flyeye and Miner Zombie cards was no problem:





And I got 24 or so teefs~!

woosa got some noo gear!

And finally, a section where I can show off some of my gear that actually turned out well (or at least, decent). I have been using this hat for a while now on rusa, but only recently have I actually scrolled the thing:



Pretty good! Ill take 5/7 any day!! Just don't make me waste all my helm DEX 60%s ever again!!! Please & thank you!!!!

And, after some careful consideration, I came to the conclusion that the Crimsonheart Cloak is actually the best possible cape for rusa. Similar to the HTP being superior to even a 5 WATK MoN for rusa, the sheer number of stats — particularly STR — that I can get on this bad boy makes it better than my current 4 WATK 6 DEX PGC. And even better than a similar (probably more like 3 WATK) PGC scrolled for STR! I did in fact work out the mathematics here, but all of the heavy lifting was done by my damage calculator, so it didn’t take too long to figure out.

And so I bought one of these things and threw some 60%s/70%s at it!:



Very nice! Fancy cloak swag~