[EMS] Monster Life - Level 40!

Sup guys! A few hours ago I've hit Level 40 on Monster Life, which is the maximum level in this mini-game!

Gotta love how Aya (the main NPC) responds with a "WOOOOOOOOoooooooo!" at your level up and then rejoices as she (well, technically it's Guwaru controlling Aya, so it's a he) finally can stop bothering you. The always-present sarcastic humor in Monster Life is just freaking excellent.

Anyway, Monster Life (or "ML" for short) is an interesting system by itself that is rare to see in MapleStory: it has little to do with your MapleStory stuff in-game at first. It's not like Star Planet where you control your own character to play mini-games, or some "player versus environment" content such as Commerci Voyages or Evolving System that is just a fancy (and often rewarding) way of pitting your main against hordes of enemies in an isolated gauntlet that is otherwise just normal MapleStory combat as it has always been. Monster Life starts your own farm where you can build stuff on it and keep monsters from the game as livestock. What? It sounds familiar? How the hell am I supposed to know? Pffft. I don't have social media so I don't know what on earth is happening on that side of the planet. *shrugs*

In my previous blogpost about Monster Life back in July I promised to go a bit more in-depth about whenever if Monster Life is actually worth your time. And I can be pretty straightforward with it before I would go more in-depth. The short answer is probably not. Why so? Because the average human doesn't want to spend time in something that gives little in return. Monster Life is just like bragging about your terrible Yut skills in Star Planet, kill stealing Elite Bosses in Arcane River, or sitting on an expensive chair all day in CH1 Henesys: you either like to do it or you don't.

So what are the actual gains in Monster Life and how does it work? To explain this, I'll probably have to make clear that there are several things in Monster Life that does (or, can) affect your MapleStory stuff.

There are two main things that makes Monster Life appealing:

• You can trade "Warus" (the coin currency that buildings generate for you) from Monster Life into "Monster Life coins" for you to spend outside Monster Life on your characters. We'll get back to this later.
• The monsters you have as livestock in Monster Life gives certain stat boosts to all of your characters outside Monster Life, that are linked to the account of this particular farm.

Before we go into the stat boosts to your account (cuz that is probably the main focus you want to know about), let's talk about the primary elephant in the room first: Monster Life is a huge time sink. Not per se a time sink where you have to spend lots of hours and be done with it. It's a time sink that will most likely require some daily effort in actually even getting to a modest level. And it took me close to a full year to get to Level 40, as my earliest mentions of Monster Life on this blog date back to the 13th of November, 2016. Most of you guys already have a lot of daily stuff in Maple - having another one of those on top of your daily bosses, Union system, Auction Housing, Meso Market-ing, weekly Mu Lung Dojo and (soon) six Arcane Symbol dailies might be a bit too much on your plate. You're going to need a bigger table and a lot more plates, that's for sure.

These boxes are so essential to reach any high level in Monster Life.

It doesn't take a full year worth of dailies to get from Level 1 to 40, but there is no "proper way" to grind levels other than to nurture C-ranked monsters three times each that you get from opening "Second-Hand Monster Boxes" (see image above) while having a Pharoah Yeti in your current possession and then releasing them to repeat this cycle until you level up. Yeah, it kinda sounds complicated if I write it like that now that I think of it. But that's also typically of MapleStory - nothing can be that easy. You gotta earn it by effort, patience and discipline! My point is, getting to Level 40 can be a bit too much for most people. Getting to Level 20 might already seem like a chore. And only the good stuff starts after Level 30+ once you've managed to settle a solid farm by working your way up the food chain. It really makes ML a hardcore and grindy system that is only for the most die hard players out there.

Anyway, enough talking about the "actual grind". Because I'm pretty sure most of you would want to know if ML is really worth your time. If you did, then I would probably point back at the fact that it's probably not. The bonus stats you gain from Monster Life are underwhelming at best - especially if you compare it to other systems such as the Crusader Codex, Monster Collection, Familiar system, Arcane symbols, Androids or the Union system.

Monster Life does come with a very useful bestiary where you can view all the monsters that are included! Convenient to see
what monsters and stats you can get. It also highlights the monsters you've already owned before and through which method
you can get your hands on them.

Every monster gives their own stats, and the type of stat and how much you get from it depends on their category. In example, a C-ranked Pig gives +50 HP. A B-ranked Pig gives +100. The highest rank, SS, gives +350. A C-ranked Bird gives +2 DEX, a SS-ranked Bird gives +14. You can only have the highest ranked effect to apply of each monster category. So you can't stack those stats, unfortunately.

Yeah, that doesn't sound much of a gain now does it? It probably would've... at least eight years ago. There are a significant amount of categories that give underwhelming boosts that would've been great before Big Bang or are only useful for your mules in general. There are some interesting and definitely useful types of stats out there, but none can really give enough that makes it feels like you're actually improving your main a lot. However, this does place Monster Life in a different spot from your typical upgrading systems in MapleStory: it's an excellent icing on the cake, and since it's a separate system, you wouldn't need to sacrifice certain equipment or Skill Link slots or Union Attackers and such. Because there is definitely some raw potential in Monster Life but it just doesn't get there yet. Although if we look at the Special category of monsters however, things do start to change...

If you look at the Special tab, you can see all kinds of actual useful boosts! Stuff such as 6% Buff Duration, 5% Critical Rate, 5% Boss Damage, 3% Total Damage, 4% chance to skip skill cooldowns, 3% Experience gain, +3 Maximum Movement Speed, but even certain boosts to help your Monster Life grow faster such as +5 additional Farm EXP when nurturing your own monsters (aka the gain from Pharoah Yeti). And that's not even all of the possible boosts! Of course, low ranked Specials are fairly underwhelming, so the higher ranked are often the more interesting to look at. What's even more interesting is that several types of stats (such as Critical Rate) is available from more than one Special monster. And yes, you can stack these because Special boosts are "named" to a particular monster, therefore, you can have "Lazuli's 5% Critical Rate" with "Pipsqueak Phantom's 4% Critical Rate" AND have another "Lovestruck King Slime 3% Critical Rate". That's 12% Critical Rate that applies to your entire account!

Unfortunately here's the thing that just kills the fun in Monster Life: it requires heavy maintenance to keep up these stats. It's not like the Union system where all the stat boosts you choose will stay like that until you pick something else. When you've obtained any monster fresh out of a box or from a combination, they'll last for a full month. Only a month! And some of these Special monsters that give these amazing stats require some heavy combination + luck from said combination or from a monster box as they are not guaranteed to happen.

It's worth to note that monsters in ML do not "expire" like your typical MapleStory items. They last forever until you release them, but when they have "expired", the monster still wanders around in your farm, but the stats (including "owning X monster of rank Y" related stuff for the Monster Life achievements) are deactivated until you use the "Extend Life" function. Normal monsters just require Warus to extend their life, starting at 500 Warus at C ranks, up to 130.000 Warus for A+ ranks (which is extremely affordable at Level 40 as you can generate millions of Warus each week), but any Special and non-Special rank S monsters require Gems to extend. You cannot extend SS monsters, which makes the situation even more dire. And Gems well, are a hard to obtain currency that you'll need to work hard for. Or you get it with NX - and this is something in particular that frustrates a lot of people. What's even worse is that extended monsters will only last for another 14 days instead of a month. Man, that's rough.

The Special Merchant

You don't need to purchase Gems to get yourself to Level 40. In fact, Gems virtually do nothing substantial for the level department. You can obtain one Gem every time after doing 10 daily missions (you get three new daily missions every 3 hours) and if you're lucky, you can find Gem Coupons from the Special Merchant (which appears every once in a while at random, see the image above). Gem Coupons in that shop doesn't happen too frequently though, but it's definitely one of the more important routes most players would like to take. Just be sure to check your farm often for Special Merchants to appear. And if you'd do daily missions at least every day when you log in, you should be able to afford the largest baseplate to build on (25x25 squares, but your own house will always require a 5x5 spot in the top corner) at the level when you can purchase it and a lot of capacity expansions (i.e. allowing to hold more monsters in your farm or in the bank).

Because all of the Gem-related buildings can be found from the Special Merchant as well, you can purchase Gem-buildings with Warus. Don't bother too much with Special Merchants until you can generate enough Warus as these Gem-buildings usually cost between 100k and 500k. You have to start from the bottom and collect those Gem-buildings one by one. Before you know it you'll be running a lot of Gem-buildings in your farm for an excellent Warus production!

So yeah, purchasing Gems with NX is really for the Special monsters. I wouldn't advise you to get Gems with NX.
I mean, we have the Meso Market for that nowadays. However, going down that road with many Specials in your farm does mean maintaining Monster Life also becomes a meso sink. That brings us back to that "icing on the cake" scenario where Monster Life only becomes a good investment once you've already done anything else on your main. And y'know, we can all name a lot of other meso sinks that should have higher priority than this little mini-game.

Before we get to the "verdict" part of my blogpost, I'd like to go back on the Monster Life coin system and explain a bit about this part. For each 2000 Warus, you can trade it for 1 Monster Life coin. Coins can be traded in on pretty much any character you have on the account that is linked to your farm. Unfortunately the shop isn't all too great. It has definitely some useful items (especially Mastery Books could save a lot of mesos if you get them through Monster Life), but all the prices are sooo steep. It costs six million Warus to get a pair of 20/30 Mastery Books. That's rough. The items that are being sold have definitely been improved over time, but it just stinks that the Level 100 equipment boxes are gone (which could generate an amazing amount of Superior Item Crystals to sell in Auction House). Note: never buy the Monster Life Farm Reset Scroll, because it literally does exactly what it says. You don't want to lose all of that effort you've put into it, now do you?

Anyway. With all of the above said, with Monster Life being a time sink to get to a high level farm, being maintenance heavy and also pricey to keep up, why did I bother with Monster Life? Because I'm part of the target group of Monster Life. I do enjoy playing Monster Life. I often like to face challenges and overcome them. Grinding sucks (which is ironic as the majority of the games I love to play are all such a grindfest), but if I want something to happen, I can put that negative "standing at the foot of a ginormous mountain" feeling aside, start with it and see where I eventually end up. It's clear to see that Monster Life is not quite there yet as it has a handful of glaring flaws and I can understand it just feels not rewarding enough for the amount of time you pour into it.

Running A+ monsters in your farm is pretty much the only way to keep up an affordable stat boosting, but that isn't safe from having an insane paycheck of Warus to keep them up every two weeks. Cuz y'know, despite running non-Gem monsters in your farm doesn't mean you're free from maintenance. Having ten A+ monsters would set you back 1.300.000 Warus twice a month so... Although one way or another you choose how heavy Monster Life will be on your plate, after all.

Does reaching Level 40 do anything good? Holy Plow Oxes from the Western Prairies I, II and III in Dong Fang Shen Zhou, it does! It unlocks the "Pipsqueak Lumi (Light) Box" in the Monster Life shop. For almost 600.000 Warus, you can get a Pipsqueak Luminous. The effect of this little pipsqueaky fellow gives all multi-target skills on all of my characters throughout my account an additional target to whack my weapons at! This definitely will aid in grinding a lot (minus a handful of skills that already hits 15 targets, as 15 is the cap), but it also plays a pivotal role in my build on Rayque itself. But that is an entirely separate blogpost by itself, which I'll get back to in a distant future.

So yes, you basically get an unlimited Special, without the need for gems. You only have to pay 600k every month, which is a laughable amount as I generate close to 200k Warus a day!

But that aside, there isn't anything else unlocked besides that box at Level 40. Yeah, that much effort for a Pipsqueak Luminous and I'm not even going for the other Specials. That's rough. Pipsqueak Lumi's arguably the easiest Special to get once you hit Level 40. Fortunately, Pharoah Yeti are also fairly easy to get, as you need to combine a Yeti & Pepe (Rank A, category Yeti & Pepe) with a Pharoah Mummy. The combination has like a 25% chance to get that Pharoah Yeti, but they are among the most important Specials to get, as it reduces the amount of time needed to hit higher levels because of the aforementioned farm experience increase. It's worth the effort if you're aiming for a high farm level, that's for sure.

The only problem is that Pharoah Mummies are fairly hard to find in other farms nowadays (at least in EMS they are), but at least let me return the favor by telling you a secret: because I'm not going to run Specials other than the Pipsqueak Luminous, I have more than enough space left to solve that Pharoah Mummy problem for you! I'm planning to get 10 Pharoah Mummies as soon as possible, and I will most likely stick with that in my farm for the remainder of time. I hated how frustrating it was to continuously go through multiple farms to find enough Pharoah Mummies to combine with, and most farms even stopped having them after a while. Despite I'll have ten of them in my farm soon, I won't pay for the 10x 130k Warus twice a month though (you can extend the life of monsters of other people's farms too, y'know). Edit: it seems I am too kind for my own good. I more or less extend the Pharoah Mummies myself to make sure people can keep maintaining their Pharoah Yeti's.

I think we can all agree that Monster Life has some potential to be good. There are just a lot of small things that prevent it from going from a chore to a fun experience, from little rewarding to greatly rewarding and such. I know that Monster Life has just recently got a revamp (although it was partially for the worse, especially with the Aesthetic system nerf that hit hard on the Special Merchants), but it still has some necessary work left. And it doesn't have to be much. Make Special Merchants more common so everyone can get their hands on gems much easier, make the boosts gained from non-Specials and lesser-useful-Specials more useful or raise those numbers, make the monster boosts last longer, perhaps make all Specials like the Pipsqueak Luminous box so that leveling becomes more rewarding while keeping the maintenance feasible, reduce some of the pricing on both the in-game Monster Life shop and the coin shop outside, allow players to hold multiples of certain monster boxes rather than only one for each specialized box type, fix the awful mouse registration that prevents you from clicking too fast through the menu and don't let your monster capacity suck up spaces on your baseplate. Cuz when you have 28 slots, you have to reserve almost all of these slots on your baseplate for those monsters. That means it's better not to ever get expansions and keep the capacity as small as possible... That sounds uhm, rather counter productive and ironic.

Basically: only play Monster Life when you find it fun. If you don't, then it's probably not meant for you. Because the further you get, the steeper everything becomes. Maple is a game that has a lot of diverse things to offer. That means even if you love the game as much as I do, it's okay not to like everything. It means you have an opinion, and that you care about something not appealing to you as a (loyal) player.

Anyway. I might have hit Level 40, but I'm literally just the fifth Level 40 farm in EMS - and that number doesn't say much as I took my sweet ass time to hit this. Not enough people play Monster Life, but that has its fair share of reasons. There are more Hard Lucid clears or people with four Level 15 Symbols in EMS than there are Level 40 farms, dammit!

What will I do with my farm now? Obviously the Pipsqueak Luminous is now in my possession to tick off another milestone in my build, but there are still a number of farm expansions I have left to obtain. But upgrading my farm aside, probably one of the first things I could do is getting mastery books for my mules. But before I do that, I'm going to take a nap. It's way past bed time, and I'm tired.

That's it for today - I'll see you guys again next post!