The Washing-is-doable-Journal

Hello folks!

Yes, you've heard it correctly. This journal is here for the sole purpose of proving that washing a ranged attacker as a new player is doable without having to leech 1-150 or being donated hundreds of millions from friends.

Given that this challenge might be somewhat rough, I will be setting some rules beforehand. Given the fact that most of the rules won't apply until at least lvl 120, I would happily discuss whether or not these rules make it a realistic scenario for a new player.
Current ruleset: (Please feel free to comment about whether or not these are 'fair')

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1. Donations from friends/own characters are not allowed. This covers both raw meso and (int)gear.
2. Boss carries are allowed. (This does not apply to runs for zhelms, MoN, scar/tar helms, those will have to be bought with meso) I was somewhat on the fence about this rule, but I believe that any new player should be able to find a guild that will help them with carries, and I will allow myself the same luxury unless multiple people consider this excessive/cheating.
3. Self-leeching is not allowed, but normal leeching is. I don't want to encourage excessive leeching and I don't intend to be 'skipping' a large volume of levels, but I believe that a few levels here and there are feasible for anyone that can farm the meso and it doesn't have to harm gameplay. (I may very well decide partway through the journal that I can/want to do this journey without any leech, seeing how I would like to promote leechless gameplay)
4. Looting random items found in FM / near gachapon is not allowed. I think I'm shooting myself in the foot here, but I would like this rule to be in place to prevent any indirect/unintentional donations.

I will be using a spreadsheet to plan and document most of my journey, the current setup for this is provided below:

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Introductions:
Hi everyone! Meet "AllByMyself"



Goals for day 1:

• Get to level 10 and job advance.

 

Thank you for highlighting the ambiguity, I missed this.

What I mean by boss carries is daily rav/pap etc, purely boss runs for exp. Buying Zhelm and MoN will be done by relying on self-earned meso. (Also clarified this in main post)

 

I did make the character on an account that previously had ~100k NX laying around, but I will not be using that NX for this character. I'll make sure to keep a tight eye on my NX each entry and guarantee that I'm not spending more NX on this char 'than it deserves'.

 

We made it through day 1!
Admittedly this was the easiest part of a very lengthy journey ahead of us, but we pulled through! Achieving big things is done through small goals!

I'm excruciatingly slow at rushing through Maple Island, but here's how it ended up going today:

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Getting the job advancement to Bowman was mere minutes away, slowly picking up the pace!

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And finally, this is what our stats and financial situation are looking like right now:

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Goals for the next day:

• Improve my general knowledge of Bowmaster/Marksman gearing so that I can start to fill up my gearing sheet.
• Plan ahead in terms of which quests would be worth doing for the early levels. I'm emphasizing this more than I would normally do, because I want to start buying int-gear as soon as possible.
• Plan out my card-route for 10-30. I want to have Tier 1 completed by lvl 30. The slight boost in int/dex/str should make my AP spending a little more manageable.

Edit: I also had to provide my starting NX count. This means that all NX over this number will be reserved for my Marksman, yet I will never go below this number.


Edit 2: Topics that I'm still on the fence about:

• Am I allowed to use another account for owling? If need be, I can provide similar NX numbers to prove that I won't be going beyond what new players would have access to in terms of daily NX.

 

Day 2: Babysteps

Having sold most of the etcs/pots from Maple Island, I left off day 1 with the following inventory:

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Not a bad start, but we're going to be needing a heck of a lot more meso if we want to start gearing up with int gear early.

The initial approach for today:

• Get through the quests Athena Pierce so kindly lets us do.
• Do the random hair quest, hoping to look pretty at the end of it.
• Get to level 15
• Sell fame
• Spend more time figuring out the best ways to turn a profit early, so that int gear can be bought at a low level and have a larger impact.

The progress:
The highs:

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The lows:

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The resulting situation:

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I also made some changes to the gearing part of my sheet, thanks to Fishy and Ferlucio for double-checking my lacking BM/MM knowledge

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Future plans:

• Start card farming. This will probably done at a fairly laid-back pace (snails, blue snails, red snails, slimes, shrooms, stumps, orange mushroom and (ribbon) pigs)
• Owl for cheap bow 10%/60%s to bump up my lvl 10 bow a little. I'm probably going to stay virtually str-less until 54, so we're gonna need to use this baby until lvl 35, when we can hopefully get our hands on a (crappy) Maple Bow
• Look for other potentially helpful but cheap items. (Speed shoes?)

Update: Where has my money gone?
It's time to see if we can upgrade our weapon just slightly, hitting 1-25 does not seem to be the optimal way to go.

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oh my god
I just basically doubled my w.att.
New range, who dis?

 

Day 2 (Continued)
Sorry for the double-post, I would usually just add it as an edit to the previous post if there are 2 sessions on the same day, but this was a pretty eventful second session!

There is also a matter which I'd like you guys' opinion on, listed below New Highs. All in all I thought it would be better to have a separate post for this session.

New lows:

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Was not expecting to get hit for 300 dmg

It was freakin impossible to try to even get a shot in between all the snails, let alone kill mano with hits of 10-50 dmg.

Trying to safespot (Dark) Axe Stumps for 50 Firewood in order to do Thawee Fixing The Roof, ended up spending about 30 minutes there, got 28 firewood and decided to move on to something else temporarily.

New highs:

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I'm godawful at JQ's and this had my heart rate up around 200, but we made it! The screws from this quest are a godsent, because they allow you to complete Toon Fixing The Roof for an easy 15k exp.


Card hunting went pretty poorly, but we did get a gach!


Very lucky pull. I was thinking about what would happen to this journal if I pulled an item worth >50m, but I decided to exclude the profit from these because I don't believe it sketches a realistic scenario of the progress any new player would go through. As for this pull, at the time of writing this, I owled it for ~2.2m. I consider this a gach pull that falls within the realistic realm of expectations for a new player and I think I will keep the profit from it. However, once again, this is open to discussion. I would gladly continue without relying on a 2m gach pull

Where does this leave us?

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Completed quests: 67
Total cards: 14
Total sets: 1
Total playtime today: 3 hours and 45 minutes.

 

Day 3: Very small update



Didn't really have time to play today, so only a very small update.
I did like 20 minutes of card farming at Lith Harbor and came up quite lucky:

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Then I sold some fame to Jafel for funding my way to 200.

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Then I decided you guys were right. You do deserve something more aesthetic to look at than a failed attempt at the hulk with a receding hairline.
IMPORTANT: You guys and your thirst for cosmetics cost me 40k out of the 150k I had to spend today, expect significant delays in progress
Here's my new look! Not 100% happy with it, but it's better than what it was, just struggled to find a suitable weapon.

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Future plans:

• Get through KPQ for the shoes (hopefully with a mage/friend buddy to help carry me through, my damage is still quite limited)
• Complete as much of the monster book tier 1 as I can, probably after lvl 26-27 so I'll have some damage.
• Get to 30 so I can complete this quest for a shoe jump 30. The funding from that should hopefully help out with buying some gear, yet I'm not sure whether I should prioritize dex-related gear or instantly focus on ints.